Failure

Listen to the full podcast episode here: https://marketinghappyhourpodcast.buzzsprout.com/

Everyone fails. It’s a fact of life. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a student, or anything else, you are going to experience failure. Dr. Boss once said, “Failure is not a permanent state.” This is true, we all experience failure but what sets you apart is how you choose to deal with it. It’s so easy to fail and call it quits after. But others choose to learn from fa

ilure and use the experience for their advantage. This is ultimately what you should try to do. Take Albert Einstein for example, he failed so many times before he achieved his goal. He didn’t let his failure define him and chose to move on and try again.

Shelby tells a story of her own failure on this podcast episode. A few years ago she hired her first team of people to start expanding her business beyond herself. Shelby aspired to change her agency and expand to compete better in the market. She strived to be in line with her competitors and mimic what her competitors were doing because that’s what she saw as successful. She took a system that she thought was a successful one and applied it to her agency with no plan or vision of what it should really be.

Shelby hired 4-5 people to add to her team, gave them certain jobs, but had no process in place to organize her team and help them be successful. No management style was established, no follow-up system, nothing. With her first assistant, Shelby tended to be a micromanager and ended up really doing her job for her instead of allowing her to do it herself. Shelby elements that she wasn’t a great leader at this point in her life.

Shelby saw this endeavor as a failure because she failed to plan and have a model for how expanding her team should go. Shelby looks back and realizes how much time and money she lost through this. From payroll, to not pricing her services accurately, etc.

But Shelby didn’t give up. She realized her approach was not well thought out, so she started back from scratch. She let her employees go and went back to square one. She started at the foundation of her business. Shelby went back to doing everything herself after realizing that she couldn’t financially have a team at that time. She did choose to keep one team member, and made a plan to be able to pay her accordingly and not go under. Looking back, Shelby realized that her approach negatively affected her business and that customers had started to notice.

But now, Shelby has made extra efforts to have a clear vision. She knows where she wants her business to be a year from now. She has started over and eventually decided how to expand her team and come out on top. Shelby took her experience with this type of failure and learned how to do better the next time.

Failure is hardly avoidable, but your reaction to it is entirely your choice. This is just one example of failure and how it is possible to overcome it. This is your wake up call: don’t take failure as a sign to give up, take it as a call to action to do better. Remember, failure is not permanent.