How do you survive failures?
Gurus are telling us it’s part of success, but how do you continue?
I was recently in a party in our neighborhood. To start a conversation with an old lady named Susan, I asked her how long have she lived in the subdivision. Then our conversation turns to a house next to where the party is.
It turns out, Susan is part of the board in our subdivision and he told me, that the house next to us was in pre-forclosure.
I can’t believe it!
I know the guy living in that house and we have conversations about business and his son and my son plays at the same soccer team in school.
He even told me two years ago, that he was starting a business in retail, selling African goods.
I don’t have the details, but one thing that struck me was that if I am going to business, I won’t go to retail, yet. Michael Materson, in his book “Ready, Fire, Aim..”, he advocates to stay away from retail if you are new to business. Materson says that the retail space requires a lot of time, money and resources that it is an exhausting endeavor.
So here’s my first rule in business: Research your niche first.
In the same book that I was reading, Materson advised to stay with information products to have your inventories low. With information products, the cost to fulfill is nothing.
Unlike retail, a brick and mortar store, information products don’t require you to have a building or space to rent. The cost of the product to fulfill (or send) is nothing. You can send it through email.
And the best part about information products, you don’t have inventories to fill in the warehouse. Once you made your product, it will be in your hard drive forever.
This was my mistake with Amazon Private Labeling (PL). I jumped to the idea of outsourcing products from China, branding it as my own and selling it through the Amazon platform.
There are people who are successful in PL business model, but what I learned is that it has a very long runway to take off. In the end, as my mentor emphasized, you have to be patient when you are starting. Runways can be very long.
So how do you answer the question in the beginning of this article, the question on how do you survive failures?
To me, you survive a series of small failures.
In life this is very true, and in business particularly, you survive failures by testing the market first with little amount of money.
I remember Trey Lewellen, a guy who’s very successful in the e-commerce space. His strategy was testing the market by putting up sales funnel on a product and then driving traffic to the sales funnel.
Remember, he doesn’t have a product, he has ideas of a product. What he have is a website selling the product without the product in his warehouse, and then driving traffic to the website.
If it fails, then there’s no money involved (only paid ads and hosting the website).
Then he continues with a different product. For example, he is selling tape dispenser, and if this time it takes off, and people are buying, what he will do is fulfill (or send) the product by buying tape dispenser from Walmart and send it to the customer.
Of course, in this way you don’t have profit yet, but once he knows that the tape dispenser is a hot market and people are buying, he then buy in bulk through Alibaba and get it cheaper from China.
So the series of failures will land him with a product that sells.
This is what I learn from him:
If you want to continue, start with small series of failures….
In life, failures are necessary, but I’ll tell you to start with small failures, and if you are in business, that means failures that will not break the bank.
Failures should not define you or cripple you, it should move you closer to success, but start with small failures.
