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Failure happens to everyone. No matter how successful a person could be, they have experienced failure at some point in their lives. A small business owner has a higher risk of failing. If you are one then you need to learn how to respond to it more quickly and make adjustments to correct the problem.
People respond to failure differently. Some people might react in anger. You might be familiar with these people. They’re the people who storm out of the office while slamming the door. These are people who could lose their temper by focusing on what didn’t work.
Meanwhile, others might respond in fear. These people may either waste their time and energy on making themselves busy but not focusing on their work. They might quickly come up with a numerous amount of new ideas but not act on it. .
Responding in anger and fear is risky, especially for small business owners. It could stop them from acting, pivoting, creating, and founding, but it’s not surprising to feel that way when faced with failure.
Failure can be terrifying and embarrassing, but instead of avoiding or fighting it, you can respond in a way where it can benefit you and your business, here are a few simple strategies you can use.
1. Accept Responsibility
Many times, it’s easy to point the finger at other factors for our failures, but nothing good comes to turning to others for your own mistakes. It takes courage to accept your contribution to the situation.
There are business owners who would try to make excuses such as “My company is failing because YOU did something wrong,” “I don’t have the time,” “The odds are too high” or “People just don’t like the content I make” instead of taking any responsibility.
When trouble arises, instead of pointing at a scapegoat, accept the part you played when setbacks occur. Taking responsibility means you recognise that you have the power to deal with it and you can start moving on.
2. Don’t let failure define you
Making a mistake comes with being a human and it doesn’t make you a failure. Several failures don’t mean never finding success, and as challenging as it might be at times you shouldn’t let yourself get caught up in it. Taking it personally and letting it get to your head could have a negative effect on your confidence, self-esteem, and eventually, your work performance.
The current VP of Bionic Solution, Christina Wallace previously co-founded the company Quincy Apparel which started wonderfully. But despite all their efforts to make a name in the industry and campaigns to attract market share,the company eventually closed its doors one year and eight months later.
It became a tough time for her as she told Fast Company, “I spent three weeks straight in bed. Then after 21 days of sleeping, crying, I put on my big girl pants and rejoined the world.”
Like Wallace, understand that no good comes from moping and beating yourself up about it. Whether you or some uncontrollable forces caused your failure, it doesn’t matter. You can’t change the past, but you can affect the future. It’s up to you whether you’ll let yourself get caught in this downward spiral or do something about it.
3. Get back on the horse
Most small business owners who experience failure have two options. They can either quit or get right back up and try again.
Wallowing in self-pity and obsessing over your failure won’t make the situation any better. It will only prolong bad feelings, increase the possibility of losing your nerve, and eventually give up. While quitting would mean never experiencing failure ever again, it also means the end of the road.
Take Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX for example. Musk is no stranger when it comes to failure, just take the first three rocket launches by SpaceX which ended up nearly bankrupting both companies. He should’ve just given up there, but he kept on going.
On top of this, in 2014, he also had to deal with three of Tesla’s Model S cars which self-combusted in six weeks due to a fault with the battery.
Throughout his career, Musk has had to go through a lot of up and downs that might have made anyone else give up. But in a 2005 interview, he said, “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
Trying again might be risky. It requires resilience and mental strength. There’s the possibility of feeling the pain of failure once again, but in the end, not letting fear hold you back could set your business up for greater success in the future.
4. Learn from your mistakes
Failures can be a learning opportunity. No matter the failure, there’s always something to learn from the experience. So, instead of beating yourself up on your error,take the time to recognise where you went wrong and evaluate the situation objectively.
Everything that took place leading up to your failure could be a lesson which you can learn from. Think about what went wrong and list all the possible contributing factors on your fault whether it’s something that may have been able to control or was it something that may have been out of your control such as natural disasters. From there, you can create a plan to fix your mistakes and get things back on track, while considering solutions to avoid these factors.
Before Hiten Shah co-founded KISSmetrics, he co-founded another web hosting company and spent millions on it without the company ever launching. According to him, they didn’t understand what their customers cared about or what problems they needed to solve.
In a podcast, he said, “Because you’ve failed so much you have this inherent understanding of what you did wrong, but there’s usually a pattern and the pattern is actually you didn’t do the right thing at the right time.” From that mistake, he learned to spend smart, optimise for learning and focus on customer delight.
Since then, Hiten co-founded two wildly successful analytics companies with KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg.
There’s a lesson to take away in every failure. Once you’ve determined your mistakes, try to figure out what preventive measures you could’ve done and implement them to your operations to turn your failures into success and preventing them from happening again.
Conclusion:
Remember that even when you make the right decisions, manage your business perfectly well and still fail, it’s okay. Failure might hurt, especially when you’re putting your heart and soul into your work, but small business owners should understand that there is no success without it.
That’s why small business owners should stop treating failure like a dead-end. It’s possible to work around failure if you keep on trying and with that experience, you will also become stronger and wiser.
“The opinions expressed by BizWitty Contributors are their own, not those of BizCover and should not be relied upon in place of appropriate professional advice. Please read our full disclaimer."
