By Rieva Lesonsky
As small business owners, many of us fear failure. In the past few years, with the economy struggling, you may have come closer to failure than you ever have before. Perhaps you had to close a location, lay off employees or cut your own salary. The changes probably struck cold fear into your heart as you worried about the ultimate failure—losing your business.
It’s natural to fear failure—but for an entrepreneur, it’s not always smart. I’m not saying you should embrace failure or be cavalier about warning signs like slumping sales or dissatisfied customers. What I am saying is that being open and accepting to the possibility of failure can take your business to new heights of success.
If you fear failure, you’ll never take a risk—after all, risks can lead to failure, right? But if you never take risks, your business won’t grow. And in today’s marketplace, taking risks is essential to keeping your business vibrant and relevant.
So how do you get comfortable with failure? It starts on a personal level. Try something you’ve always wanted to do, but were too scared to try. It doesn’t have to be business-related—in fact, it’s better if it’s not. Maybe you want to try learning a language, playing a new sport or joining an organization that intimidates you.
Once you try the fearful activity and get comfortable with it, move on to your business. Start by encouraging new ideas—your own, your staff’s, your suppliers’. Test out some of the new ideas on a small scale, where failure won’t have big consequences. Gradually take them bigger.
Ask customers what they think of the experiments and use their real-time feedback to modify what you’re doing. An idea fails? No big deal. Explain to your customers, employees and others why the idea didn’t work and what you learned from it.
You see, learning is the key to creating success out of failure. Not all of your new ideas will pan out—and that’s OK, as long as you learn from the experience of failure. In fact, I’m pretty sure you learn more from mistakes than you would from always “getting it right.”
Learning from failure is par for the course in the high-tech world. Companies release products that aren’t perfect—they’re full of bugs, but the companies learn from the mistakes and the response and adjust the product. It’s also common for tech entrepreneurs to start multiple ventures. Some take off to become the next Google or Facebook, some fail spectacularly and some are just … average. Entrepreneurs who don’t get the results they want cut their losses and move on to something new, using the lessons of failure as growth opportunities.
So the next time an idea doesn’t work, sit down and assess the reasons why. Then figure out what you could change to make it work better—or whether it’s simply not worth pursuing. As you make more mistakes, and fine-tune your concepts, you’ll find you learn faster and eventually “fail your way to success.”
Image by Flickr user Steve Hodgson (Creative Commons)
