The Daily Grind – Better Learn To Deal With Failure, Overtime and Lost Money

By my estimates I have been a party to approximately 71 different business deals that had an actual, quantifiable result (good or bad). There are many more that never made it through all of the stages to qualify as “quantifiable”, so I excluded those. Of the 71 deals that I did count, 53 of them have resulted in 1 – 3 above. This equates to just shy of 75% of all the deals I have been associated with either don’t work out, don’t make any money or cost me money. So, what is the point of this little analysis?  Don’t do a deal with me. 75% of the time they have a less then ideal result.That is certainly one way to read these results. Many people would never make it past the first 3 or 4 “failures” that they encountered. Some would, but what if those 3 or 4 failures happened in a row? Most would stop there. Gratefully, I am not one of those people. Believe it or not, the 25% of my deals that end up working out more then make up for he 75% that don’t in terms of financial gain. The 75% that didn’t work have provided me with a tremendous amount of learning as well. We all need money to live (and I have no one to fall back on if I fail financially), so I am not going to go so far as to say this 75% has been more valuable to me because I couldn’t eat or own a home without the other 25%….but they have been extremely important to my growth and progression as an entrepreneur.

If you think being an entrepreneur is your career of choice, then plan to fail some. Don’t ever get comfortable with it – abhor it – but understand that you will experience it. The key is to continue pressing forward in spite of it. This is something that lot’s of entrepreneurs talk about but few have the intestinal fortitude to withstand. Some entrepreneurs don’t truly experience it (rich parents, first business launched made them wealthy, etc.) – so if you are learning from one of those keep in mind that their advice is tainted…only those who have crawled through the trenches can draw you an accurate map on how to get out. In my previous blogs I have written about many of the factors that have to be present for an entrepreneur to be successful (including, but not limited to, passion, brains, hard work, a great spouse, etc.). Assuming you have the personality, passion, skills and support to make a go of entrepreneurship, you are only about 1/2 of the way there. Fully 50% of the makeup of a great entrepreneur is their “junkyard dog” mentality (which doesn’t always have to exhibit itself on the exterior). You would have to kill them to get them to stop. Better get a bat to beat them off because there are no external forces strong enough to stop a successful boot strapping entrepreneur from finding their 25% of success.