Dealing with Failure

Have you started a business and had a few let downs on the way? Don’t let them get to you because I am going let you in on a little secret – Success is a series of failures.

The man who invented the light bulb “Thomas Edison” once said:
“I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.” That was quoted in 1921 and it is still good advice today.

If you have had a few of your own failures, here are 4 tips to get you on the right track again.

Find out why it happened

One of your failures may have been some advertising that you paid for bur resulted in no calls. It happens to all of us.
Now, you just need to find out why it didn’t work. Perhaps it was targeting the wrong market? Perhaps the distribution of the publication wasn’t large enough? Perhaps your ad was hard to read? Put yourself in your clients shoes and analyse your advertising. If you cant figure it out yourself, ask someone in the target market to review your materials for you. Ask them what they think of your products, does your advertising jump out at them and ask them if they have any suggestions.

Sometimes the cause of the failure can be something really simple such as people being unable to stop and write down your phone number. I believe most computer technicians will agree with me when I say that big billboard advertising (the ones you drive by at 100kph on the freeway) doesn’t work well for computer repair businesses.

How often do you remember the phone number on a billboard you passed while going 100kph on the freeway? I never do, and this is why it doesn’t work very well for businesses like us. Billboards are better used for branding for companies like Coke, Pepsi or McDonalds. I know from personal experience that there have been times where I have seen a Big Mac ad on a billboard and immediately thought to myself “damn.. I feel like a Big Mac now”. I knew exactly where to get one, it put the product back into the front of my mind and so the advertising worked for McDonalds.

Learn from your errors and try again

So if you have figured out why your advertising failed, fix it and try it again. Every business goes through this process to find out what works for them. Anyone who gets it right the first time is very lucky.

A great example of the “fix it until you get it right” philosophy is back in the 1950’s the Jacuzzi brothers invented a bubbling bath to treat people with arthritis. Although the product did what it was supposed to, it flopped. There were very few people in the target market with arthritis that could actually afford the bubbling bath. So, some time later they decided to advertise the same product for a different market. They advertised it as a luxury item for the rich and it ended up becoming a big success, even though the product was exactly the same as before. They tweaked their advertising until they got it right.

Look for the silver lining

Many failures can really be blessings in disguise. Even big businesses like Microsoft had huge failures which turned out to be huge successes later on. Microsoft ended up wasting years working on the database called “Omega” which ended up failing. However, most of the code from this product ended up becoming the most popular desktop database “Microsoft Access”.

I myself had a failure which turned into something great. Back in 2002, I partnered with another web developer to create an anime forum. I had the technical know-how and he had the visitors from one of his own anime sites. I brought a domain name, set up the hosting account and installed some forum software. Then, for some reason the other person bailed on the project and I was stuck with the domain name and the hosting account. I decided to let it continue on anyway and see how it goes. The forum became the now famous (in the anime world anyway) Anime-Forums.com and currently has over 45,000 members and over 1,864,000 posts.

Persistence is the key

Never give up. Keep on trying until you find something that works. Its worked for me and it will work for you.