Every successful founder you look up to is faking it more than they'll admit and the woman who said it has built something most people can't explain.Frankie James is the co-founder of Ideas Fest: part business festival, part awards programme, part the kind of room where founders actually drop the act. In this episode she breaks down how it started, why it nearly didn't survive and what running it has taught her about the people who build real businesses.She came out of the pandemic doing what every event company did, webinars and white papers and hated every minute of it. So she walked away from the safe version and put on a live festival instead, with no guarantee anyone would turn up. They did. She talks through the moment she sat on a hill watching one car become ten become hundreds, in the pouring rain, not knowing whether the whole thing was about to collapse.There's a harder story underneath it. After the world went back to normal, almost her entire team left and the business nearly folded. Instead of hiding it, she picked up the phone to ten people more successful than her, then told the people who'd already bought tickets the honest truth about where things stood. What happened next is the part most founders get wrong.The thread running through all of it is people. How she landed serious speakers when nobody knew who she was. Why she thinks networking is the most underrated skill in business and costs you nothing. Why trust has no shortcut, no matter how many people try to sell you one. And why the most successful founders she meets are almost always the ones still fumbling their way through and admitting they don't have it figured out.If you're building something and quietly wondering whether everyone else knows something you don't, this one's for you. They don't. They're working it out as they go, same as you. The difference is whether you'll put yourself in the rooms where that becomes obvious.