Category: Entrepreneurship

I can hardly count the number of times I’ve had to address and move past a personal failure or shortcoming in business. In my journey as an entrepreneur (a term I use lightly, though I am my own boss!), I’ve encountered everything from tricky projects and customer dissatisfaction to accounting errors and financial obstacles, all of which at one time or another have seemed poised to derail me professionally.

I’ve spent enough time speaking to other people with entrepreneurial interests or their own businesses to know that these concerns aren’t unique to me. Being your own boss and/or running a business is hard, not just because the work itself is demanding but because at the end of the day you’re responsible for holding yourself accountable. This means that when you mess up, there’s no one to say, “here’s what you did wrong, here’s how you fix it.” That part’s on you, too.

Over time, I’ve had enough experience in this regard to figure out a few strategies for addressing one’s own failures in business, and I’ve also done my research on what turned out to be a pretty popular topic of discussion in entrepreneurial circles. So here are four tips for handling your own failures in business.

Tip #1 – Take Some Deep Breaths

Or, more specifically, press pause. This is a tip I’m borrowing from a post on how to survive a breakup as a business owner, because it absolutely applies to more ordinary business obstacles as well. In fact, forget about both businesses and breakups for a moment and consider this: a lot of us, and I’d argue particularly those of us who are personally driven and goal-oriented, have a tendency to act quickly to cover up failure. In my experience, the tendency is spawned by some sort of internal embarrassment. I don’t screw up, we think, I’d better fix that before I have to actually confront it.

It’s an understandable emotion, but it also leads to rash behavior and questionable decisions as often as not. Do yourself and whatever business you may be running a favor, and when you do mess up (trust me, it’s going to happen), take some deep breaths. Analyze the situation calmly and rationally.

Tip #2 – Don’t Sugarcoat It

In addition to taking the time to really acknowledge a failure or shortcoming, it’s also important not to sugarcoat or rationalize it. Personally, I think I’ve always understood this on some level, but I’ve never seen it articulated as well as by the woman behind Menlo Coaching, an MBA application coaching platform I’ve referred back to on numerous occasions (despite the fact that I’m far beyond applying to business school).

Through advice given to clients and a particularly insightful blog post about how to write about personal failures, the Menlo platform communicates the simple but crucial importance of being open and honest with oneself about things that might not have gone so well. We all want to succeed, and because of that there’s a natural inclination to sugarcoat shortcomings; yeah, I messed up, but then I fixed the problem and moved past it, so no harm done. Sometimes this is really how it happens, but thinking that way won’t make you any more likely to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Being open about problems with yourself and any others who may be involved is a better way to assess how and why you messed up to begin with.

Tip #3 – Use Failure To Uncover Instinct

Providing advice on lessons learned through failure for an article in The Huffington Post, one CEO stated wisely, “the failures that you beat yourself up over are the ones where you experienced warning signs….” Basically, she means that if you screw up in a way that you could have seen (or maybe even did see) coming, it’s a lot more frustrating than if something bad simply happens to you. Here’s a clear example: if your computer system crashes due to a bad storm, you might be frustrated, annoyed, and set back to some extent. If it happens again a month later and you lose all your data because you neglected to back it up, your frustration will be amplified not because of misfortune, but because you had a warning and you failed to act on it.

Through recognizing scenarios like this, you can actually start to use failures to uncover and better act on your own instincts. If once or twice you realize that you knew a problem was coming all along, you’ll be better prepared mentally to trust your own feelings the next time you sense something wrong.

Tip #4 – View It As A Sign Of Progress

I know, I know, this sounds a little bit buttered up. Failure is failure to a lot of entrepreneurs, and in a way that’s not the worst attitude to have. Again, it’s important to be honest about shortcomings, and that means recognizing them for what they are. But in the greater scheme, it’s also helpful and beneficial to try to treat failures as signs of progress toward overall success.

“Each failure gets progressively easier,” argued a post at Entrepreneur, and maybe that’s the simplest way to put it. As you act on the other pieces of advice in this post, you can make it easier with each new issue that arises. In doing so, you can begin to see how conquering every new problem ultimately improves your efficiency and perfects your business.

And there you have it. If you’re running your own business and find yourself frustrated when things aren’t going your way, try to keep some of these tips in mind. It can seem counterintuitive, but failure really is part of the process toward making things work.

While social media can be a powerful way for businesses to interact with audiences, there are many costly mistakes that can be made in this area. Hardly a week goes by without hearing about a scandal or faux pas made by a company on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Many mistakes, of course, never reach the media but they can still harm the bottom line of your business. To help you avoid this, take a look at the five biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs often make on social media.

Not Responding Appropriately to Criticism

If you’re on social media, sooner or later you will be attacked. Attacks may be reasonable and factual or they may be obnoxious trolling. Either way, you need to think before you respond. You should never get caught up in back-and-forth arguments on social media. If someone is making a legitimate complaint, respond in a reasonable manner. If it’s a personal issue, try to resolve it by offering the customer a refund or credit, if appropriate. If people are spamming or trolling, on the other hand, you should delete the comments and block the user. It’s never in your best interest to get caught up in social media flame wars.

Not Making the Most of Your Content

You can get a surprising amount of leverage from good content. It’s possible to take a blog post and turn it into a slide show, infographic and video, for example. A video can be placed on your own website and also shared on sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo as well as many others. There are also more creative ways to get more mileage out of content. If you translate website content into other languages, you can reach many more readers. Similarly, you can have videos translated or use subtitles in other languages. 80 percent of youtube users come from outside the U.S., many of these from non-English speaking countries.

Not Targeting the Right Audience

Many entrepreneurs and businesses have topics that are too broad. For example, if you upload content having to do with very broad areas such as fitness, self-help or online marketing, you might be better off narrowing your focus. Rather than trying to reach everyone who’s interested in fitness, you might target people who want to learn effective strength training exercises. You can then target specific topics and keywords that will be of interest to this audience. You can more easily achieve market penetration when you target a select audience.

Offending Your Audience

This is the type of social media mistake you’re most likely to hear about in the media or on the internet. It’s very easy nowadays to let inappropriate content slip through. Avoid publishing content that is likely to be offensive to people, including controversial humor and anything to do with politics or religion. It’s important to have a firm social media policy that everyone on your team follows to the letter. It’s also helpful to insist that people who work for you maintain separate personal and business social media accounts.

Not Having a Clearly Defined Strategy

One of the challenges of social media is knowing how to measure your results. 46 percent of B2B marketers aren’t even sure whether or not social media has generated revenue for their business. This points to the need for having a clear-cut strategy, whether it’s building website traffic, building a mailing list or selling products directly from your website. You should then employ analytics tools to measure your results on social media.

By having a well defined social media strategy and avoiding common mistakes, you can get more leverage from your efforts. The above mistakes can result in losing customers and damaging your reputation. That’s why it’s crucial to carefully plan every aspect of your campaigns before moving forward.

Article Contributed by Chris Smith

We all dream of retiring from the rat race and starting up our own business; having our spheres of influence completely overlap our working lives.

For most of us, the closest we’ll get to this is writing on blogs and social media where our underappreciated ideas can be properly expressed to a few bored souls.

However, a brave few do venture forth and embark upon the road to self-sufficiency. They are lauded as daring and adventurous, and perhaps rightly so, but is it really wise? Are these individuals really making a sound move? I would suggest no.

If they earn lots of money, then sure, but research suggests this just isn’t the case for most. But let’s ignore money for just now (and you really shouldn’t ever be doing this); there are some seriously worrying indications that starting a business can have some very severe and detrimental effects on your [mental] health.

The extra pressure that comes with founding a business, even a small one, can have quite a significant knock on effect on mental wellbeing, and the internet is chock full of anecdotal evidence as even a simple Google search will reveal.

As a business owner, you’re not only responsible for your own finical position (a position very few of us have ever been in but are single-mindedly convinced we could overcome with the same tenacity that saw us, yes that means each of us individually, win two world wars and create the greatest nation on the globe), but the finical wellbeing of others (family and employees) – in essence, their lives in a non-literal sense rest in your hands.

Suicides among small business owners are often noted and rarely exaggerated. For all the gain that can potentially come with starting a business, the non-financial costs are too often overlooked. And that’s in no way suggesting that the financial costs should be played down either. Restaurants are the most commonly opened business in the UK, but in Edinburgh as an example (albeit one chosen to illustrate a point), nine out of ten close within their first year of opening. That’s fairly staggering – you put everything on the line, finance, health, relationship status, for only a 10% shot at remaining afloat. That’s a hell of a roll of the dice.

It might seem like I’m just streaming vitriol in the direction of those that would willingly subject themselves (and their dependants) to these huge risks, and to a degree I am. Having worked with quite a number of tech start-ups, I can assure you that it isn’t something to enter into lightly.

And that, I suppose, is the point I’m attempting to come round to – too many people enter blindly into starting a small business without properly considering not only if they will succeed or not (let’s be kind and assume they have done the requisite research to truly have an idea how their business would be positioned within the market), but how it will take a toll on them emotionally.

Of course, if you have your heart set and believe you can beat the odds (“hey, someone’s got to, right?”), then Britain is a fantastic place to have that shot and there are few places the globe over that offer quite the same levels of support (including Boston and CA). You can get help and advice from a number of sources, from: government grants and start-up incubators to small business tools and inspirational stories.

If you’re smart, well-funded (and God do you need to be funded!), dedicated etc., you undoubtedly have the potential to succeed. But, I’d be pretty damn sure you will before you put yourself through it.

About the Author

I’m Chris and I write about sport, finance, business and everything in between over at Spend It Like Beckham. You can also find me on Twitter and on Facebook. Feel free to say hi!

We all daydream. It’s an innate habit. The dream to be wildly successful, the dream to be known as iconic, the dream to have your own business, the dream to live your life instead of letting your life live you. But the pressures and anxieties often persuade us not to go down this path with a lot of students forgoing their dreams in fear of failure and under the society’s influence. But beginning your own business, perhaps by getting a personal loan, is a reality and it has been umpteen times over and when it is done by students who have no prior experience or just a little bit of it makes it even more a tantalizing prospect to follow as it guarantees you the things that others just keep dreaming of. The dream is always calling us in its direction, but it’s us who need to take decision to take that leap of faith.

Most of us our fear comes from the fear of the unknown and not knowing what path to take when following our dreams but nothing is impossible. There is procedure to this madness and it has examples in recent history. We will provide you the path many have taken to make themselves true successes and it is not too difficult to follow. Follow our lead and see what we have in store for you and your dreams.

The Idea:

We daydream of being successful, famous and a lot of other stuff but if we look closely, day dreaming often exposes us to the greatest of ideas that are the basis of any successful business venture more than anything. We often restrain our thoughts and pass on some great idea that just came to us by thinking that “Oh that’s impossible” and in that fleeting moment our destiny gets a thumbs down.

Latch on to any ideas that come into your mind and work on them. The best ideas are solutions to problems that not many people think exist. Ideas are the most wonderful thing there is. Pursue your ideas to any length if you believe that they are the ultimate solution to a certain problem and always follow your gut feeling on how great the idea is. It’s your brain who got you this idea and it is the same thing which is the best judge. Facebook was created out of an ingenious idea of Zuckerberg – Creator of Facebook, to connect everyone in the world. At that time, he didn’t know how will he do it or how much finance is required or to what extent this idea can be viable. He just had an idea and he took initiative to take it forward, everything just started falling in place there onwards.

Find yourself a Mentor:

You always listen to your inner voice, don’t you? Well there are some voices in the world who act as inner voices. They can go so deep inside you by their words that they are able to inculcate that belief you need to make it big. Mentors in this case are often those people who are dreamers themselves and have gone through a lot already. They can guide you to no end on a lot of issues from finding that all important self-belief to handling business operations.

More importantly mentors are that special kind of people who are called connectors. They are excellent networkers and can expose you to a wide range of people who definitely will come in handy once you start of your gig. Sometimes they can also take up a cloak and act as angel investors to get you that all important finance you require to set up your business.

Remain Unconventional:

People with great ideas and the passion to pursue them are mostly unconventional to begin with. Being considered eccentric will only add to your appeal. Being unconventional means not following the due course of operation as per the norm. Learning, un-learning, re- learning, reengineering are things which few do with vigor as it requires offbeat thinking and remember that first Ones mostly end up in failures. First ideas don’t work out well and this is where most people lose steam and give up. You don’t need to do that. Bill Gates, the now ultra- rich founder of Microsoft was failure at first. Before starting out his claim to fame company, Microsoft, Bill Gates’s first venture was traf-o- data, a venture which was devised to aid traffic engineers by processing raw data from traffic counters. It wasn’t a success but it was a seminal point in the making of Microsoft because after working with traf-o-data, they came to know how microprocessors actually function in tandem with DEC computers. That made them come a long way in building the arguably the world’s most iconic computing company.

The Self:

The entrepreneur’s way of believing and living has to be different from the whole lot. It has to have a mind that is free from all kinds of distractions plaguing a wandering soul to keep him/her keep experimenting, building and living out the ideas.

Everyone has worries, but they have to be taken care of if one wants to dilute the attention on the task that lies ahead. Students with entrepreneurial aspirations normally drop out of college to pursue the business they plan to open or if they prefer to stay in and complete their college, the debt burden is often a pressure and because of it a lot of students go into jobs to pay off the student loan they took initially. In such a scenario, a student must get a plan to minimize the amount of obligation it has.

Keep going ahead and don’t get yourself tangled in the opinion of others every now and then. Do listen to pieces of advice from everyone, advice is never bad. You never know which one has the ability to further your cause. Make yourself available to experiences other than business, indulge in your life and live it to the fullest. Network as much as you can and if you can, find yourself a partner in your dreams, one who shares the same passions and is on the same expertise as you. Bill Gates had Paul Allen by his side. Nothing great can be built alone and if you want to be great, take the lot ahead with you. You are passionate, it’s infectious, rub it off, you don’t know how many stories you can help while building your very own.