Startup Sunday
There are plenty of blogs and articles written about startup success and making your first million. Harder to find: advice on overcoming a small business failure.
That's one reason I've become hooked on Kell on Earth, a new Bravo reality television show about Kelly Cutrone, the founder and owner of People's Revolution, a public relations firm for the fashion industry, and a single mom of a 7-year old daughter. Kell on Earth displays the good, bad and ugly of running your own small business. But often it's the ugly that fills the screen: demanding clients, overwrought employees, trouble getting paid and the inevitable small business failure.
In a recent episode, Kelly Cutrone and her team knock themselves out to produce a fashion show on a tight budget, but the client ends up disappointed and decides to fire People's Revolution. It just so happened that the week this episode aired, I was struggling with my first big setback in my own business. It was so cathartic to watch Kelly take the phone call in which she was fired, visibly swallow her disappointment, and move on to the next task at hand. Sure, it took me about 10 days to digest my own sense of failure and upset emotions, but hopefully the next setback will go down easier, until I can turn on a dime when things don't go my way.
Because inevitably, you'll experience a small business failure. Maybe you lose a big customer you were counting on. Or a vital employee decides to leave your company. We've all seen how the economic cycle can wreak havoc with the best-laid business plan.
So it's important to have role models who encounter bumps and overcome bumps in the road. The key is to learn lessons from your failures so that you don't repeat your mistakes. And to remember that no matter how well things are going, anything can happen tomorrow. As long as you're flexible and resilient, you can persevere.
What challenges have you faced in building your small business? And what keeps you going when times are tough?
Photo courtesy of Bravo
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