When you’re running your own business, chances are you’ll experience failure more often than you’d like. It’s just the cost of doing business. Those business fails teach you so much and eventually you learn to fail better.
But that doesn’t meant that it’s not absolutely devastating. If you get stuck in that devastation, you are dead in the water. So the whole goal is to keep moving and figure it out.
How do you do that though?
Reach out
Failure has a mental toll. And if you don’t address that first, it will take you down completely.
Of course, everyone has their own way of dealing with mental health issues. But in this case, I just find nothing better than speaking what happened out loud to people you respect. Speaking it out loud makes it real. There is always a bit of disbelief when it comes to failure, so making it real is essential. And doing that in the presence of someone who gets it and can give real advice is the most effective way of moving forward.
This is one of the reasons why I always make sure I’m surrounded by people who fit this bill. Yes, they can also help me move forward with my knowledge, but they can also drag me out of a hole when I can’t get out myself. It gives you a softer landing when you are experiencing failure and give you a path forward when you don’t know what that looks like. In other words, these people are priceless because they can keep your business afloat when you’re not sure how.
The last time I failed, someone from this group said the one thing that got me back up: “I admire how whenever you lose a client, you replace them immediately.” I was so wrapped up in what had happened that I hadn’t realized that was exactly what happened every time I lost a client. So I picked myself up and was able to get back to work, knowing that it would be okay. Because it always has been.
Always budget for failure
There’s nothing that will get in the way of getting back on your feet more than money trouble. If you’re constantly worried about where the next dollar is going to come from, then you can’t concentrate on how to get that next dollar. So always having enough money in the bank to get you through failure is absolutely vital.
How much? Personally, I think enough to get you through six months at a minimum. For me, some clients take that less than a month to sign, but it’s more likely they will take longer. So making sure to have enough to get you through a time period where you find a new client and get them to signing is very important. And now that the economy isn’t as great for those of us in marketing an PR, you might want to get enough in the bank for a year or more.
That is absolutely daunting, I know. But you will be glad you did it when you go through a failure.
Make a plan
I have an established plan in the event things go wrong. It’s just like any crisis plan I might create for a client. The perks of having this is that I don’t have to come up with anything by myself when my brain is not working at its best. Instead, I just go through my plan step by step until I get back to myself again.
You don’t want this to be too loose of a plan, simply because you don’t know how badly failure will hit you or big it will be. Keep it as scripted as possibly. The key here is to make sure you don’t have to think as much as possible. You can simply do until thinking becomes possible again.
When do you know it’s time to go off of your plan? When you start feeling like doing more. It doesn’t have to be all at once. It can be tiny baby steps taken over weeks. But eventually you’ll feel like you’re back to yourself and can do things again. And that’s when it’s time to really innovate and try again.
How do you get over a failure? What steps have really helped you?