On the pages of any business blog, magazine or tutorship manual, the benefits of an entrepreneurial spirit are communicated effectively. In the spirit of motivation and to help you engage with the content these business resources will continually tell you that success is only around the corner as long as you adhere to the principles laid out in whatever guide you’re following at that moment in time.
However, this doesn’t give you the full picture. The term ‘entrepreneur’ evokes success, that is true, but also a potential risk. The most successful entrepreneurs today have a history of failure behind them created as they were finding their feet and figuring out how to best define themselves in the business world. In fact, the shocking truth is that a majority of the successful business people you see today have failed at some point in the past. That is a significant proportion of the reason why they succeed today.
These necessary up-and-down tribulations are difficult to communicate to someone looking to tutor themselves about the inner workings of business – because you don’t want to kill off their ambition and drive straight off. The reality and truth of the matter lie in its opposite though. The more you prepare for failure, the better you are to stay equipped for it.
The following five steps can help anyone recuperate from a business or entrepreneurial endeavour that has taken a turn for the unfortunate.
Salvage What You Have
After the business has failed, it’s a rough time for you and everyone who tried to make it a success. That doesn’t mean you should completely push yourself back to square one. Salvaging what you do have from the effort, from maintaining positive supplier relationships to staying on good terms with your customers gathered thus far will allow you to pack up with operation salvaging some form of an asset from it wherever that comes. Sometimes the only asset you can hope for is the goodwill of those you’ve worked with so far. That is more than some entrepreneurs can say after a failure.
Don’t Burn Bridges
If you have employees or partners and the pursuit fails it’s easy to play the blame game and struggle to maintain your standard jovial relationship with those around you. They’re likely to be annoyed themselves, and that might be misdirected towards you. Don’t burn bridges. You never know when you might need to call on a favor, or how it could affect your reputation in the future.
Assets
Sell the assets you don’t need. If you’ve gathered debt (likely) as a result of your failed pursuits, then you need to gather the money from any place you can to pay those off. You can always buy more assets, but you’ll find it difficult to reset after being laden with debt interest terms. Another way to deal with this is:
Debt Consolidation
Debt consolidation is a handy tool that allows you to reduce the interest rate from some loans provided you do it through a reputable service. This can help you avoid costly bank debt loans that only serve to get you more in trouble. Check out www.debtconsolidationusa.com/creditcarddebt/bank-of-america-debt-consolidation.html to educate yourself further on this topic, because it’s important you understand how this works before you proceed.
Learn
This could be considered a ‘salvageable’’ item, but it’s too important not to have a category of its own. When something fails, you must learn from it. If you learn from it, the whole failure has been justified and redeemed. Take steps to ensure you don’t make that mistake again and that you’re stronger for the whole pursuit.
Keep these tips in mind, and you’ll be mature, wise, and dignified in the face of business defeat.
Image Source – Flickr
