Failure is a part of life, that is why pencils have erasers! It’s going to be a difficult thing to face up to if you’ve had a business fold on you. It can make you feel like a failure on so many levels, but as an entrepreneur, you need to recognize that this is part and parcel of the business world. The risk is a huge part of what can make your business soar or fall flat on its face, and with every risk, there can be a great reward. It’s important to get back on the horse, but it is also important to understand why your business failed. If this hasn’t been your first business failure, you can face a crisis of confidence, but here are a few things to think about before starting again.
Look At Why The Business Failed
The best way to do this is to put a line down the middle of a blank page and write down on one side everything that succeeded and, on the other side, everything that did not. From this point, think about what you would do next time when faced with a similar type of situation. Many businesses face the common issues time and time again, from cutting costs to firing staff, and these will always be bumps in the road that you will encounter at some point, so learn from those mistakes in the past.
Don’t Confuse Yourself With Your Business
It’s always very easy to think of it as you failing as opposed to the business. However this is not a healthy attitude to take, and you need to differentiate the two. Doing this will help you improve your resilience and entrepreneurial spirit, and effectively bounce back after any misfire that you will have experienced in the past, and are likely to experience in the future. Confidence can be knocked easily when the fruits of your labors don’t grow, but it’s important to realize that a failed business means you are a failure in this business, not a failure as a person. Dust yourself off and start over.
Starting Again…
Once you feel you have given yourself adequate time to reflect on the situation and you’re ready to start again, look at what it is you are passionate about that can fill a gap in the market. Once you have hit upon the ideal products, do your research and start to develop the business plan. And from there, you can begin to set yourself apart from your contemporaries, and as you have likely experienced setbacks before in various amounts, you will know how to tackle them better this time around at the inception period.
Crunching The Numbers
The importance of business expenses and figures could very well have been a reason for a failed business in the past. That’s not to say you are doomed to repeat yourself. The key to success is about being able to estimate business expenses accurately and project the income. The importance of understanding the business laws and tax laws with professional help can be a life saver also. With every entrepreneur that wants to start again, it is likely they will try something new such as moving a business abroad, but when it comes to getting help with starting the transition to do business in a foreign country, it’s important to get a handle on the salient points of business law. Even in our own native countries, we could struggle to understand the finite details of compliance and trading properly within the confines of the law. And by having a suitable grounding in the small print, it gives you a more comfortable position in which to do business.
Forming The Right Team
As the cliche goes, it’s the people that make the job, but it is the right people that could help your business take off when it couldn’t before. It’s all about finding the people who are understanding enough to make your vision theirs. Every business starts out small, so it’s important to take baby steps and find the right person. If you can find the right personalities with the appropriate work ethic, it will help you to realize your business vision. You need to find people that have strengths in areas you know you will need help with, such as marketing, social media, sales, etc. But one right person who will stick with the company is far better than 20 people who are wrong for the business.
Getting back up on the horse is always going to be a daunting task, but this is part of the entrepreneurial game. It’s important to keep pushing on and to never give up. All this hard effort you’ve put in over the years pays off in one way or another in the end. And remember, we will learn far more from our mistakes than we ever will from our successes.
Image Source – Pixabay
