There are few things more painful in business – and, let us be honest, in life too – than losing something you really wanted. It might be a major contract, an important customer, an investment opportunity or a business you have poured years of your life into. When it happens, the natural reaction is to focus on what has gone. However, the flipside of this is what that painful experience can teach you.
I know how difficult that can be because I have experienced failure on a pretty serious scale. More than 20 years ago, I lost a business, built up more than £100,000 of personal debt and found myself sitting on a beach in Weston-Super-Mare wondering how I was going to start again. It was one of the lowest points of my life, but it eventually became the catalyst for building the businesses I have today.
The first thing I learned was to separate the failure from your identity. A deal that did not happen does not make you a bad entrepreneur. Losing a customer does not mean you are rotten at business. Even a business failure does not mean you are a failure. It is just a stark indicator that something was not working.
That distinction matters because if you make the failure personal, it becomes much harder to think clearly about what happened. You stop analysing the decision and start turning inward. The latter really is not useful at all, because that kind of thinking will inhibit you next time you face a business challenge.
The next step is to work out exactly why you lost. Be brutally honest with yourself, without turning that honesty into self-punishment. Was the opportunity wrong for your business? Did you misread the customer? Was your proposition strong enough? Did you leave something too late? Were you relying on assumptions rather than facts?
And do not just ask what went wrong. Look at what you could have done differently while you still had the chance to influence the outcome. That is where the useful lessons tend to be found. A setback gives you an opportunity to identify weaknesses that success can sometimes hide.
During my days in the wilderness I also learned that you must keep moving. When my own business collapsed, I could have spent years dwelling on what had happened. Instead, I went back to what I knew I was good at: helping businesses grow. That eventually led to Purplex and then Insight Data.
Starting again did not mean pretending the failure had not happened. Instead I used it as a learning experience, and that is an important distinction. You do not have to forget a bad move to move beyond it. You need to understand it well enough that it can inform your next decision rather than control it.
There is another important lesson here: do not make your next decision simply to undo your last one. When something goes badly, there is a temptation to chase another big deal, launch another product or make a dramatic change just to prove that you can recover. Resist that urge. Take a breath, look at the facts and decide what the business actually needs next, because there is no prize for stubbornly repeating the same approach to prove yourself right.
Finally, remember that setbacks can change your direction in ways you cannot see at the time. As they say, the future is unwritten, and some of the opportunities that have mattered most in my career came after things had gone badly wrong. Then, I could not see where they would lead. I simply knew I had to get back up and start putting one foot in front of the other.
So if you have just lost something that mattered, allow yourself to be disappointed. Just look at it properly, take the lessons and use them. The opportunities that followed my own lowest point could never have happened without it. At the time, I would never have chosen that route. Looking back, I would not change where it is still taking me.
Key takeaways
- Setbacks can redirect your career in ways you cannot see at the time. Some of the most significant opportunities come after things have gone badly wrong. The key is to get back up and keep moving forward.
- Separate the failure from your identity – a lost deal, a lost client or even a lost business does not make you a failure as an entrepreneur. It is a signal that something was not working, not a verdict on who you are.
- Conduct a brutally honest post-mortem: ask not just what went wrong, but what you could have done differently while you still had the chance to influence the outcome. That is where the useful lessons are found.
- Keep moving. Dwelling on what happened is not the same as learning from it. Go back to what you know you are good at and start rebuilding from there, rather than waiting until you feel ready.
- Do not make your next decision simply to undo your last one. Resist the urge to chase a dramatic recovery move to prove yourself. Take a breath, look at the facts and decide what the business actually needs next.
