7 Business Leaders Who Failed Before They Succeeded
You can beat the statistics but if you stumble along your journey, brush yourself off and keep moving. Success will come.
There’s a saying by the great businessman and inventor, Thomas Edison. He famously declared that success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.
While it’s one thing to be an entrepreneur and come up with an idea, get funding and start a small business, it’s another to achieve success with it. The statistics paint a challenging picture to do so as approximately 30 percent of new companies don’t last longer than two years and almost 50 percent only last for five years.
That’s the hard part of starting new business: finding lasting success. Unfortunately we typically only hear the success stories of famous business leaders rather than those who also dealt with failure before finding success. They almost make it sound easy but after a closer look, the following familiar businessmen faced their own bumps on the road and persevered.
Take a look and feel inspired to keep trying with your small business.
Mark Cuban: Prior to selling his business to Yahoo and making billions of dollars, Cuban first failed at numerous jobs including carpenter, cook, and waiter (he supposedly was even challenged to pop open a bottle of wine).
Cuban has said of his numerous failures via openforum.com, “I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how many times you failed. You only have to be right once. I tried to sell powdered milk. I was an idiot lots of times, and I learned from them all.”
Today, Cuban is worth $2.5 billion and is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Recently, he offered some interesting words of wisdom to aspiring entrepreneurs about funding in this story.
Henry Ford: With his first two car companies failing, Ford found himself broke but not deterred. He then founded Ford Motor Company and become the first automaker to utilize the assembly line to manufacture cars. He got the idea from the meat packing industry.
Ford became one of the most famous and richest men in his day and today, the company he created is still producing cars around the world.
Bill Gates: Before building his Microsoft empire, Gates began a business called Traf-O-Data that didn’t end up doing anything. He also left Harvard without graduating but his passion for computers remained. His vision for various opportunities led him to start Microsoft.
Today’s it’s one of the world’s largest software companies and Gates is one of the wealthiest men in the world with his $72 billion net worth.
He has said of failure, “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
J.K.Rowling: Rowling wrote her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, as a single mother who was on welfare. She received 12 publisher rejections but finally sold the book for the equivalent of $4,000.
This didn’t stop her; she kept writing and the Harry Potter series grew along with its sales numbers, ultimately breaking records. A popular series of films and a following across the world for fans of all ages came out of the books.
Rowling has said of failure, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.”
Today, Rowling’s net worth has been estimated at $1 billion and she’s still writing.
Colonel Sanders: The famous Colonel Sanders secret recipe for chicken went through more than 1,000 rejections before a restaurant finally accepted it. When he founded his famous KFC restaurant, Colonel Sanders was 65-years-old. Seven years later after finding great success, he sold his business for $15 million.
Fred Smith: As a Yale University student, Smith presented a business idea in a business management class but didn’t get a positive response from his teacher: he almost got a failing grade on it.
What was this “bad” idea? He wanted to open a parcel service that would deliver overnight packages.
Smith went ahead anyway and started FedEx. He struggled in the early days and at one point when the company only had $5,000, Smith flew to Las Vegas for the weekend to win funds. Fortunately he played blackjack well and came home with $27,000 to keep the company afloat on that Monday.
Evan Williams: Prior to being a Twitter cofounder, Williams first founded the podcasting platform company, Odeo. Not long after he did so, Apple announced that its iTunes store would include a podcasting platform, making Odeo obsolete.
This was only one of the challenges faced by the company and Williams has said he learned a lot from the experience.
Williams stepped down from his Twitter CEO role in 2010 and has started a new venture. But as Twitter’s largest shareholder at 12 percent, when the company recently went public, Williams expanded his already billionaire standing on paper.
You can beat the statistics but if you stumble along your journey, brush yourself off and keep moving. Success will come.
TrustLeaf helps early stage entrepreneurs get loans from friends and family.
