Hawaiʻi CEOs Christine Camp and Micah Kāne turn missteps into milestones

Most CEOs can recall their early business failures — and the lessons that helped shape their later success. For Christine Camp, president and CEO of Avalon Group, it started the summer before high school.

After making the cheer pep squad, Camp faced a setback: her family couldn’t afford the uniform.

To raise funds, she and her teammates sold pans of King’s Hawaiian sweet bread door-to-door in Pearl City.

Their coach encouraged them to say whatever it took to close a sale. Camp quickly learned rejection was part of the process — she heard four to seven no’s for every yes.

By summer’s end, she realized it took about 10 tries to sell just two pans. The lesson: every no brought her closer to a yes.

That lesson stuck. The reminder, “every time you don’t try, you already lost” now defines her approach to business, she told attendees at Hawaii Business Magazine’s 12th Leadership Conference in Honolulu.

Since founding Avalon in 1999, Camp has overseen a $300 million portfolio of statewide properties and raised close to $3 billion in capital to develop its projects. Even as Hawaii Business Magazine’s 2024 CEO of the year, she says failure hasn’t disappeared — it’s just become more consequential.

But for Camp, failure isn’t final. It’s a signal to pivot. Decades into her career, she’s still failing — and still pivoting.

Accompanying her on a panel entitled CEO Chronicles was Micah Kāne, CEO and president of Hawai‘i Community Foundation and incoming CEO of Parker Ranch. In a discussion led by moderator Yunji de Nies, journalist at Hawaii News Now and PBS Hawaii, the duo shared how they embrace failures to succeed.  

Yunji addressed a critical question for visionary leaders: When plan A through D fall apart and there’s no room left to pivot, then what?  

According to Kāne, rising after failure requires attention to your inner strength, your support system and the team you move forward with.

Under his leadership, Hawaii Community Foundation has grown from $500 million to $1.2 billion, carrying lives through challenging times, including natural disasters and the Covid-19 pandemic. Hawaii Business Magazine’s 2020 CEO of the year, Micah Kāne said he works on improving himself every day through a three-minute mindfulness practice.

“Think about the things you have, the mistakes you made the day before and commit to yourself to try not to make those mistakes again,” Kāne said. “Since 2012, I may have missed five days where I don’t take that time in the morning, and I can tell you, it’s been the best advice. Whether you’re a manager, an employee or you’re trying to strive to be a leader, the thicker and stronger that inner pole is, the easier you will get through.”

Beyond restoring confidence, Kāne continues to lose with dignity and win graciously, he said, grounded by the relationships that remain steadfast in his triumph and loss.

Camp echoed his perspective, knowing her success wouldn’t be possible without the people who believed in her before her goals were a reality.

“What I learned again was the people who would come out to help introduce you to the others who could lend you money, to refine my pitch and learn what I should and shouldn’t do,” Camp said. “I made my company better, and I brought people who believed in me. I really had a slew of cheerleaders who truly trusted my vision to actualize their investment goals.”

For Kāne and Camp, creating an environment that encourages colleagues and employees to take risks is vital to their momentum and success.

“I want my employees making decisions just outside their authority,” Kāne said. “I want them to be ethical decisions, I want them to be well thought-out decisions and to be legal decisions, but after that, you go for it, and I’ve got your back.”

By reframing failure as fuel, these local leaders in business are not just bouncing back, they’re building forward.

“If you’re going to fail – and I recommend you do in fact – fail forward,” Camp said. “Maybe you learn something from it. You are going to fail, so fail fast, because you have to pivot. There are a lot of people depending on you.”