My name is Casey Dawes and I am a serial entrepreneur. I’ve had good businesses, bad businesses and businesses in between. My current business has been all of the above over time. But quitting isn’t an option. Falling down flat on my face is not pretty, but sometimes it happens. As the old song goes, though, I “pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again.”
According to Jeretta Horn Nord, educator and author of a new book, A Cup of Cappuccino for the Entrepreneur’s Spirit Volume II
We have a hard time letting go, sometimes. We don’t live in a society that has much care for failure, implying that there is a moral failure whenever a business fails to thrive. The key to being able to let go of a business, as it is with anything, is within yourself. It means allowing yourself not to be perfect, to expect to fall down once in a while. Many of us watched our toddlers fall down and we encouraged them to get up and try again. We didn’t berate them for falling down. We need to do the same with ourselves.
The tragedy isn’t that we fail and try again. The tragedy is when we don’t make any changes between the first attempt and the second. If we see our business in trouble because of the current economic crisis, what can we do to save it? Should we save it? Or perhaps it’s time to find some trusted business friends and see what you have learned from running your business in these economic times. Were your reserves high enough? Did you depend on a market that was vulnerable to economic extremes? Are you nimble enough to adapt to changing realities?
Has your business ever failed? What did you learn? Comment below.
