Transcript

Hi, I’m Carmen Sognonvi. When something in your business goes wrong, it’s hard not to feel down about it.

But in this video, I’m going to show you how failure can actually be good for your business!

I’m going to share with you three of my favorite quotes about failure.

I hope they will help you redefine what failure means for your business.

Make sure to watch till the end because I’m going to share a bonus quote that has one extra tip for you!

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
~ Thomas Edison, inventor and entrepreneur

If you try something and it doesn’t work, you can learn a lot from your failures.

Here’s a story about that.

The first year we tried to launch a summer camp at Urban Martial Arts, it failed miserably.

People complained that it was too expensive, and only one person signed up.

The following year we tried again but this time, we changed the pricing structure.

Instead of listing only the per-week cost, we offered 3-week, 5-week, and 7-week packages.

We signed up 16 campers and many of them had such a great time that they added on more camp weeks than they had originally signed up for!

The funny thing is, we hadn’t lowered the price. We had just changed the way it was structured.

So sometimes the difference between success and failure is a small tweak of the details.

But you won’t know which details to tweak until you get out there, try something, and fail at it.

“Failure is just another cell on my Excel spreadsheet”
~ Steve from MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, blogger and entrepreneur

There’s a great book by Barry Moltz called Bounce: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success.

In the book, Moltz says that people like to think that we can always learn from our failures.

But sometimes, there are no lessons to learn.

You failed, and that’s all there is to it.

What you need to understand is that there are always going to be ups and downs in business.

There’s no getting away from that.

But the quicker you can pick yourself up and move onto the next thing, the better an entrepreneur you’ll become.

“Success is sweeter after failure”
~Vidya Malvade, Bollywood star

How many times have you heard about someone who came into a large sum of cash very suddenly, and was broke again in a matter of months?

There’s a reason that this happens so often.

If you get success too easily or too quickly, on some subconscious level you’re going to wonder if you really deserve it.

And if you think you don’t deserve it, you’re going to start sabotaging your own success.

So failing at something a few times before you succeed at it actually helps you appreciate your success and work to keep it.

Now as promised, I’ve got one more bonus quote for you.

But before I get to that, I’d like to encourage you to sign up to get free email updates from me!

You’ll get more great tips on how to run a successful local business, along with occasional special offers from me.

If you’re already on my blog, just fill out the form below.

Or if you’re watching this video elsewhere, go to www.carmensognonvi.com/newsletter and sign up there.

People often look at successful entrepreneurs and write them off as simply being “lucky.”

I once read a great blog post about this written by the billionaire Mark Cuban.

He wrote that when he sold his company, people said he was “lucky” to sell at the right time.

When he invested successfully in tech start-ups, people again said he was “lucky” to know about technology.

In reality, Mark Cuban had experienced a lot of failures along the way.

He spent years working dead-end jobs and starting failed businesses, all the while spending nights and weekends educating himself about technology and figuring out what would and wouldn’t work.

Now, no one says he was “lucky” to have gone through those rough times because all they see is the end result, not the process of how he got there.

So keep in mind that when you experience failure, it’s simply a natural part of the journey to success.

With that in mind, here’s the bonus quote for you from Cuban himself:

“It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. All that matters in business is that you get it right once.”
~Mark Cuban

Thanks for watching. How do you handle failures in your business? I’d love to hear your tips.

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