As every entrepreneur knows, failure is a very important step on the journey to success. Even though it sucks at the time – and trust us, girl, we know how it feels! – one day, you’ll be able to look back and see that everything turned out okay. It’s important to build resilience as a girlboss, because the challenges and hard times are sure to come. After all, there’s a reason why everyone describes the entrepreneurial journey as a rollercoaster. More important than avoiding failures is learning to see them as learning experiences, which explains the optimistic title of this article. Below, we’ll try and change your mind to show how failures in business are actually things to be grateful for, and something that every entrepreneur needs to experience at some point.
1. They help you think outside the box
When everything is going well in your business, it’s easy to get a little comfortable with things the way they are. It’s always nice to enjoy moments of relative calm when you’re an entrepreneur, but the downside is that you can get a little stuck in your ways, and your creativity can suffer. One amazing benefit of things not going to plan is that you’re put in a situation where you’re forced to think on your feet. When you’ve got a week to save your business from financial ruin, or are at risk of losing a super important client if you don’t fix a tricky situation, you’re often at your most creative. Pressure isn’t always a great thing, but it can sometimes mean that since your brain is in panic-mode trying to fix your business issue, amazing new ideas surface that help you transform your company for the better.
2. They help you end up with a better product
It’s a common tale that entrepreneurs tell – they thought they had an amazing product that they and all their friends would buy, but after spending money having the product manufactured, they realised that there wasn’t any market interest. Failure in the form of bad sales or orders can force you to go back to the ideas room and consult your target market, meaning you end up with a product that’s exactly what the market actually wants, rather than what you think it wants. Remember, those are two very different things!
3. You learn lessons for the future
As an entrepreneur or freelancer, you’re usually left to figure out everything for yourself, without a more senior boss or manager to resort to, as would be the case in an office. This means that failures are an awesome opportunity for you to learn what works well and what doesn’t in your business – and more importantly, how to avoid the same mistakes in the future. We can guarantee that if you experience a failure that makes you want to crawl into bed and never ever emerge, you won’t be making the same mistake in a hurry… which is a great thing!
4. They remind you to stay humble
At the end of the day, entrepreneurship is one long journey of experimentation, which means that failure is an inevitable part of it. No matter how experienced you are, or how many million dollar companies you’ve started, entrepreneurship involves taking risks, and risks mean that sometimes, you will experience failure. When something going very wrong in your business, it’s a reminder to stay humble, and remember that it’s just a painful but necessary part of the journey, and something that binds all ambitious people together. So don’t sweat it, girl, we know you’ll bounce back in no time!