Latest / The Confident Entrepreneur With Jennifer Ann Johnson / Fail Smarter: Turning Business Setbacks into Success With Jennifer Ann Johnson
Transcript
- 0:37Jennifer Johnson: Today, we're talking about something that no entrepreneur wants to experience, but every successful entrepreneur eventually learns from.
- 0:45Jennifer Johnson: The irreplaceable lessons that only failure can teach you.
- 0:49Jennifer Johnson: I want to start with a story about one of my biggest failures.
- 0:54Jennifer Johnson: One time that I felt that it was so devastating, something was so devastating that it happened, but ultimately became the foundation for everything I knew about running a successful business.
- 1:05Jennifer Johnson: Several years ago, I launched something that I thought was going to be a breakthrough product.
- 1:09Jennifer Johnson: I thought it was going to be absolutely amazing.
- 1:12Jennifer Johnson: I spent a lot of time developing it.
- 1:14Jennifer Johnson: I invested a lot of money in it and was absolutely convinced it was going to revolutionize how my industry approached a common problem.
- 1:21Jennifer Johnson: And it was all a complete disaster.
- 1:24Jennifer Johnson: Nobody purchased them.
- 1:25Jennifer Johnson: Feedback was harsh.
- 1:27Jennifer Johnson: I fundamentally misunderstood what my market actually wanted.
- 1:31Jennifer Johnson: And I'd built something that solved a problem that no one cared about.
- 1:35Jennifer Johnson: And within three months, I figured, you know, what is the point?
- 1:38Jennifer Johnson: I'm not going to do this anymore.
- 1:39Jennifer Johnson: And what the item was was I thought, as you're cleaning out your closets, wouldn't it be great to have these little tabs on the top of your hanger that said what month you wore that item?
- 1:51Jennifer Johnson: So that if you didn't wear it in six months or five months, whatever it was for you, you would get rid of it.
- 1:57Jennifer Johnson: You would consign it.
- 1:59Jennifer Johnson: Well, it it worked for me in my closet, but nobody else really picked up on the idea.
- 2:05Jennifer Johnson: But here's what I learned that I could never have learned if I didn't actually try it.
- 2:10Jennifer Johnson: I learned how to truly listen to my market instead of just assuming.
- 2:20Jennifer Johnson: I learned the importance of validating ideas before investing in them, and I learned that my assumptions about customer behavior were often wrong.
- 2:28Jennifer Johnson: I learned how to bounce back from that disappointment and keep moving forward, but most importantly, I learned that failure wasn't the end of the story.
- 2:36Jennifer Johnson: It was a chapter that made the rest of the story possible.
- 2:40Jennifer Johnson: Those lessons didn't just help me avoid similar mistakes.
- 2:43Jennifer Johnson: They fundamentally changed how I approached building the business and taking risks and making risk assessments.
- 2:52Jennifer Johnson: They made me a better entrepreneur in ways that no amount of success that you could achieve would.
- 3:00Jennifer Johnson: So today, let's chat about unique and irreplaceable lessons that only failure can teach you and why these lessons are so valuable and how to extract the maximum learning from inevitable failures that come with entrepreneurship.
- 3:16Jennifer Johnson: So, like I said, failures teach lessons that success simply cannot provide.
- 3:21Jennifer Johnson: Success can create illusions about why things work and when you're successful.
- 3:25Jennifer Johnson: It's easy to attribute that success to your strategy or your hard work or even luck.
- 3:32Jennifer Johnson: Timing sometimes.
- 3:33Jennifer Johnson: Success allows you to maintain comfortable assumptions without really any of that cause and effect.
- 3:40Jennifer Johnson: When things are going well, there's little motivation to examine your methods or question things.
- 3:47Jennifer Johnson: You know, you have that whole idea of when if it's don't if it's not broken, don't fix it.
- 3:52Jennifer Johnson: And that helps you prevent it, actually doesn't help you, but it prevents you from learning how to improve on things and learning deeply and leaning deeply into things.
- 4:03Jennifer Johnson: You don't know how resilient you are until resilience is actually required.
- 4:07Jennifer Johnson: You don't know how to handle pressure until you've actually been under real pressure.
- 4:12Jennifer Johnson: And you don't know what you're made of until you're actually tested by genuine adversity.
- 4:18Jennifer Johnson: Success can be brittle confidence, and that depends on continuous validation and positive outcomes.
- 4:25Jennifer Johnson: The kind of confidence that crumbles when things go wrong because it's based on avoiding failure rather than actually handling it.
- 4:33Jennifer Johnson: Some of the most valuable failures teach us what some of the most valuable failures teach us about are reality, how customers actually behave versus how you think they should behave.
- 4:44Jennifer Johnson: Failure often teaches you that customers don't always make decisions based on logical analysis of features and benefits.
- 4:51Jennifer Johnson: They make decisions based on emotions and convenience and relationship and factors that you may not have thought about.
- 5:01Jennifer Johnson: And timing really matters more than you think.
- 5:03Jennifer Johnson: Success can mask the importance of timing because when timing is right, many things work, even if they're not perfect.
- 5:11Jennifer Johnson: Failure often reveals how crucial timing is in business success.
- 5:16Jennifer Johnson: And you can't force customer behavior.
- 5:18Jennifer Johnson: Failure teaches you the limits of your ability to influence your customers and their behavior.
- 5:23Jennifer Johnson: You can't make people want something that they don't want.
- 5:26Jennifer Johnson: You can't make them buy something they don't need, or you can't make them change habits that they're comfortable with, no matter how compelling your arguments are.
- 5:34Jennifer Johnson: And market research does have its limitation.
- 5:37Jennifer Johnson: Some failures teach you that market research and surveys and focus groups have limitations.
- 5:43Jennifer Johnson: And people often say they want things that they don't actually want, or they want things in theory, but they're not going to pay the price for it when they actually need to put it into practice.
- 5:54Jennifer Johnson: Failure really provides unique insights into your own capabilities and your blind spots and the areas that you need to develop that success doesn't really reveal.
- 6:05Jennifer Johnson: As the old saying goes, you just don't know what you don't know.
- 6:08Jennifer Johnson: And success can create the illusion of competence in areas where you're actually just lucky or operating in favorable conditions, whereas failure reveals the gaps in your knowledge and capabilities with uncomfortable clarity.
- 6:23Jennifer Johnson: Your strengths can become weaknesses.
- 6:25Jennifer Johnson: And failure often teaches you that your greatest strengths can become your weaknesses when you overuse them or apply them inappropriately.
- 6:33Jennifer Johnson: And the same qualities that drive success in one situation can certainly cause failure in another.
- 6:39Jennifer Johnson: One of the most valuable lessons failure teaches you about is your own resilience and capacity to handle adversity.
- 9:13Jennifer Johnson: Before you experience significant failure, you might worry that it could destroy your confidence or end your journey as an entrepreneur.
- 9:23Jennifer Johnson: Now, failure teaches you about the importance of emotional regulation and business decision making.
- 9:29Jennifer Johnson: When things are going great, it's easy to make rational decisions.
- 9:32Jennifer Johnson: But when things are failing and falling apart, you can use your emotions to cloud your judgment, which leads you to making reactive decisions that only make your problem a lot worse.
- 9:45Jennifer Johnson: Failure provides irreplaceable education about risk assessment, decision making, under uncertainty, and the relationship risk between risk and reward.
- 9:55Jennifer Johnson: Risk is really inevitable.
- 9:57Jennifer Johnson: It's not optional.
- 9:58Jennifer Johnson: Success can create the illusion that you can eliminate risk through planning and smart strategy, but failure teaches you that risk is inherent in entrepreneurship and that the goal isn't to eliminate it, but to manage it intelligently.
- 10:14Jennifer Johnson: And no amount of planning, research, or preparation can guarantee success.
- 10:19Jennifer Johnson: Failure teaches you that at some point you have to act with incomplete information and accept uncertainty about outcomes.
- 10:26Jennifer Johnson: Failure teaches you that the value of failing small and early rather than failing big and late is pretty important.
- 10:33Jennifer Johnson: When you experience the pain of investing too much into an unvalidated idea, you learn to test concepts with minimal investment before scaling up.
- 10:43Jennifer Johnson: And it also teaches you about the role of intuition in business and decision making, which is a really important part as well, because a lot of times we ignore our gut.
- 10:54Jennifer Johnson: And when you ignore your gut, bad things can happen.
- 10:58Jennifer Johnson: We have to learn to trust our gut.
- 11:00Jennifer Johnson: And many business failures can be traced back to communication issues, misunderstandings with customers and unclear expectations with team members, or really poor communication with the value proposition of your business.
- 11:15Jennifer Johnson: When things go wrong, you learn quickly that trust can be lost and how difficult that is to actually be rebuild that.
- 11:23Jennifer Johnson: You'll also learn what relationships are strong enough to survive challenges and which are really those good weathered relationships only.
- 11:31Jennifer Johnson: Failure also teaches you the cost of avoiding difficult conversations.
- 11:35Jennifer Johnson: Problems that could have been addressed early on with honest communication become crises when they're left unaddressed.
- 11:42Jennifer Johnson: This is also when you discover who is in your network that will actually help you versus who's just going to offer sympathy.
- 11:49Jennifer Johnson: You learn the difference between transactional relationships and genuine support systems.
- 11:55Jennifer Johnson: Operation failures provide unique insights into systems as well, and to thinking and design and business infrastructure that when you're running smoothly and things aren't having a hiccup moment, you don't even see.
- 12:10Jennifer Johnson: The important part of all of this is actually once you have something that didn't go as planned, to make sure that you document that.
- 12:18Jennifer Johnson: What worked for you, what didn't work for you.
- 12:21Jennifer Johnson: Because that's something that's going to allow you to be able to propel your business forward and help you when you document these things, you can look back if you have one location, two locations, or five, and it will help you scale that on a larger basis.
- 12:38Jennifer Johnson: A lot of businesses fail because they have cash flow problems.
- 12:41Jennifer Johnson: And the lesson is often learned through painful experiences when you have money on paper, but you can't pay the bills or you can't make payroll.
- 12:48Jennifer Johnson: And that kind of lends itself in with rapid growth, where rapid growth can create cash flow problems and operational challenges and quality issues and all of those things because you grew your business just a bit too fast.
- 13:03Jennifer Johnson: When unexpected expenses or revenues fall short, you can learn the critical importance of maintaining reserves.
- 13:10Jennifer Johnson: These are all lessons that you can learn in your business.
- 13:15Jennifer Johnson: And then looking for patterns.
- 13:17Jennifer Johnson: If you can develop a process for analyzing the things that didn't go right and not just identifying what went wrong, but looking at the root cause of the contributing factors.
- 13:28Jennifer Johnson: Were there any warning signs going into this that you maybe shouldn't have done this?
- 13:33Jennifer Johnson: And then recognizing your patterns over time, if you've had repeated things that didn't go right, what was the one thing that was always at the forefront?
- 13:47Jennifer Johnson: And then the other thing is, is it's kind of like keeping a failure resume, is to be able to look back at all of that again and see how that contributed not just to lessons that you've learned, but that contributed to your development and where you're at right now and where you're going in the future.
- 14:07Jennifer Johnson: Another thing that failure really brings to the forefront is one of the best ways to solidify learning from failure is to share that experience and teach it.
- 14:17Jennifer Johnson: Tell other people what happened.
- 14:19Jennifer Johnson: Because sometimes when you do that, there's definitely learning that happens in there.
- 14:24Jennifer Johnson: So as we wrap up today's episode, I want to remind you that failure isn't the opposite of success.
- 14:29Jennifer Johnson: It's a requirement for success.
- 14:32Jennifer Johnson: Every successful entrepreneur has a collection of failures that have taught them lessons that they couldn't have learned any other way.
- 14:38Jennifer Johnson: And the entrepreneurs who build the most successful businesses aren't those who avoid failure.
- 14:43Jennifer Johnson: They're those who fail intelligently, learn systematically, and apply those lessons to build a better business.
- 14:49Jennifer Johnson: They understand that failure is the tuition in the university of entrepreneurship.
- 14:54Jennifer Johnson: And they make sure that they get the full value of what they pay for.
- 14:59Jennifer Johnson: Your failures don't divine you as an entrepreneur, they develop you as an entrepreneur.
- 15:03Jennifer Johnson: If your failure is an opportunity to become more capable, more resilient, and successful.
- 15:09Jennifer Johnson: The question isn't whether you'll fail, because you will.
- 15:13Jennifer Johnson: The question is whether you'll learn from those failures in a way that makes you stronger.
- 15:18Jennifer Johnson: But don't waste your failures by surviving them.
- 15:21Jennifer Johnson: Extract every lesson, recognize every insight, and apply every piece of learning to build a better business and become a better entrepreneur.
- 15:30Jennifer Johnson: Your failures are some of your most valuable assets if you treat them as learning opportunities rather than just painful experiences.