When Other Entrepreneurs Would’ve Given Up, These Women Capitalized On Their Failures And Scaled To 7 Figures. Here’s How They Turned Things Around.
The U.S. Small Business Administration reports that about fifty percent of small businesses fail within the first five years. And because most founders have been reminded of a stat like this several (hundred) times since the inception of their idea, anything perceived as a “failure” while building risks being a reason to confirm the narrative and throw in the towel. As a therapist and executive coach, one of the main reasons I started The Failure Factor Podcast was because I wanted to normalize challenges in the entrepreneurial journey–and help listeners welcome failures on their journeys (versus feeling paralyzed by the shame they stand to evoke, and ultimately giving up).
Whether we end up in that fifty percent often depends on our ability to reframe failure. So I asked four women leaders of seven-figure ventures to share their disaster stories—and the lessons they learned about capitalizing on failure.
1. Incorporate “failure goals” into your quarterly planning process.
When Rachel Rofe, founder of CustomHappy, started her business that dropships one-of-a-kind products all around the world, she attempted to keep up with demand by growing her employee base too rapidly. Her hiring horror stories include workers who arrived drunk, overdosed in bathrooms, and stole from other employees. To compensate for incompetent and unreliable employees, Rofe had to work 36-hour shifts during the holiday season. It was through this intense, failed hiring process that Rofe realized she had to standardize her operations.
More importantly, she retrospectively reframed the disaster as a sign she was doing something new and challenging. She decided to intentionally build in room for failure as a part of her processes and reassurance she’s stepping out of her comfort zone. She recommends setting a target for how many times you should fail each quarter. Rofe says, “If you’re failing it means you’re trying, which is never something that you’ll regret.”
2. Use failure as an opportunity to build trust with your audience.
Vanessa Jeswani is the co-chief executive of Nomad Lane, a brand of elevated bags for professionals on the go. When the company launched its first travel bag after a successful crowdfunding launch, it had over 10,000 orders to fulfill. When supply chain issues threatened those orders, Jeswani had no choice but to move to Asia to solve them and keep her business afloat. After flailing through this experience, she was surprised to realize a “good comeback story” can strengthen trust in a brand. “If you can share how you’ve grown as a company with full transparency, your customers will be willing to forgive you,” Jeswani explained. “We now have an entire section on our site that shows how we test products and materials.”
3. Start a “failure playbook” so everyone knows what not to do moving forward.
When we screw up, it’s natural to feel shame and want to avoid reflecting on where we’re accountable (the extreme version of this shows up as narcissism). However, Anouck Gotlib, founder of sweet treat company Belgian Boys, recommends keeping track of business mistakes in a “failure playbook.” The idea came to her after the company rolled out its products in a mass grocery retailer and placed them in the wrong aisle, confusing buyers. Belgian Boys’ products succeeded in only 400 of 2,000 stores and were discontinued from the retailer.
Gotlib advises using failures—or what not to do—to help develop and improve processes. Maintaining a failure playbook has given the Belgian Boys team a clear set of guidelines for future launches. They have recalibrated their retail strategy to focus on geographic brand awareness, product-market fit, and a smaller set of stores, ultimately transforming their failure into a seven-figure success.“Add the learnings to your failure playbook for the next time around,” Gotlib suggests.
4. Use the discomfort of failure to further fuel your mission.
Prior to co-founding Known Holdings, a finance and asset management firm specializing in structuring and deploying capital through an impact lens, Nathalie Molina Niño was working on a deal to buy and redistribute assets to Harvey Weinstein’s victims. Devastatingly, the deal fell through, leaving Molina Niño and her team sickened and heartbroken. In response to such an injustice, it wasn’t helpful for them to look to the bright side right away. So instead of immediately searching for the lesson in this failure, they focused on processing the anger and grief that’s an inevitable component to their work.
“People often say that every failure is a lesson, but that’s an easy platitude to dust off when convenient,” Molina Niño says. However, the pain she and her team experienced in response to the deal’s dissolution reminded them of the importance of advocacy as part of finance. “If we felt the way we did, I can’t imagine what his victims felt. It solidified for me the ‘why’ behind what I do and gave me the fuel to keep fighting for my community and ultimately to co-found Known.”
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to scaling a small business to greater heights, but failure is an essential theme in every new venture. Making failure your Plan A—instead of trying to side-step the inevitable—is one key way to avoid feeling defeated by shame, bounce back quickly, and grow your business to seven figures and beyond.
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