How to Never Fail as a Founder

You could say I was born and raised to be an entrepreneur. My parents started a company on the same year I was born, and by the time I crossed my first million in revenue 25 years later they retired at 50 after a successful exit.

I have always been surrounded by successful entrepreneurs. My parents friends, my grandma and grandpa, my aunt, my uncle, and my sister. I’ve picked up a few things along the way, most importantly, what it means to succeed and fail.

If you never want to fail as a founder, there are four questions you should be asking. How do you value your company? How do you measure progress? How seriously do you take your problems? And of course, how do you define failure?

How do you value your company?

People and Impact

Very few founder’s sole ambition is to make money. Value your company by people and impact, not just dollars. I am proud of the $5 million in revenue we earned at my first company. I’m far more proud of the 1,000+ customers who, combined, still save hundreds of thousands of dollars each month, or the environmental impact equivalent to planting 400,000 trees, and employing 30 people.

More important than the numbers are the people. After 25 years of business and a very strong exit, if you ask my dad what he’s most proud of he’ll pull a manilla folder out of a drawer in his office full of letters from his employees over the years. They say things like “You believed in me when no one else did”, “You never gave up on me”, and “You saved my life”.

You’ll need to demonstrate your value financially to the rest of the world. But for yourself, value your company by people and impact. The way you’ve helped people and the good you’ve done will matter much more than the number of dollars that went into your bank account.

How do you measure progress?

Milestones and Moments

Being a founder is an adventure with moments of pure exhilaration and sheer terror, often in the same day. Some of those moments will stand out along the way. When I look at the work we’ve done with Open Labs, the Open Summit, where we brought together 40 people living with bipolar and their supporters, stands out as a major milestone. For most of the attendees it was the first time they’d met more than one or two other people living successfully with the condition.

More important than milestones are moments. At the end of the summit we stood in a circle, pointed to someone we were grateful for, and threw a giant ball of yarn across to them. The yarn was flying back and forth until it eventually came to the woman standing next to me. Instead of throwing it back across she turned with tears in her eyes and handed it to me. She thanked me for a letter I sent to the loved ones of a friend who completed suicide and the comfort, however small, it gave them.

I will never forget that. Some moments stand out amongst the rest. When they do, be in the moment, catalog it, and when you look back on your journey let those moments define the story of your adventure.

How seriously do you take your problems?

Comedic Timing

Some problems are not a laughing matter. When I got a call from the pastor at a church where we’d just finished a lighting installation telling me one of the fixtures was smoking, that was not funny. When I asked if he had called the fire department and he said he thought he’d call us first, that was not funny. Nearly burning down the house of god… In retrospect, it’s hilarious.

I grew up on stories like this. The time they filled a Porsche 911 with expanding fire proofing foam. The time they drilled a hole too deep and spent half an hour blowing insulation all over the neighbor’s living room. They are some of the worst experiences of being a founder, but once they are dealt with they become a great collection of funny mishaps.

Try to get from crisis to mishap as quickly as possible.

How do you define failure?

The best of either world

Sometimes we see social lives and downtime as the necessary sacrifices for a founder. If you want to be successful you need to stay laser focused, ignore the bad stuff, and power through. That’s simply not true. Ask anyone who’s been a founder for more than a week, there are parts of the job that suck. That’s a really important thing to remember.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have your evenings and weekends back? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a stable paycheck? Probably a larger, stable paycheck. Wouldn’t it be nice if the biggest decision you made for awhile was where to take your next vacation?

If your answer is yes, but I would sacrifice it all for the good of my company, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. For the good of your company, let yourself imagine how nice it would feel not to make those sacrifices. Let yourself imagine the benefits of not having your company. It won’t lull you into complacency, it will give you confidence in your future. I guarantee you will make much better decisions without the fear of failure looming out of sight.

Failure is a feeling

I may have been born and raised to be an entrepreneur, but my experience with a bipolar disorder has given me a doctoral equivalent in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. I’ve learned a lot about the true nature of failure in the process.

When I was in the Menninger Clinic sitting in a circle and talking about symptoms with a group of patients while my friends were preparing for summer internships. That felt like failure. When I closed my first business seven years later, that felt like failure. As did my inability to get treatment as a caretaker for two of the people closest to me. And moving into my sister’s house at 30 after a relapse… definitely felt like failure.

The entrepreneur in me says those weren’t failures, they were life lessons in disguise. They helped people and made a difference, I learned a lot, etc… etc… But my adventure with bipolar has taught me failure is just a feeling.

Failure is a fear of losing what we have, what we’ve accomplished, and our value as founders and people. The problem is, when we fear failure, we fail. When we ignore failure, we fail. If you want to never fail as a founder, value people and impact, write your own adventure, and be quick to laughter.

Remember, a rich and fulfilling life leads down many paths and has many milestones, but very rarely a destination.

The truth is, as long as you are in the world living your own adventure, you can never fail.

If you’re interested in the intersection of founders and brain/mental health, I highly encourage you to take part in Open Weekend a biannual event that brings together tech and startup employees living with brain conditions (mental illnesses), companies making a difference in brain health, and community leaders who speak about what it means to live, work, and thrive with a brain condition.

Lance Powers in a co-founder of Open Labs, a member-led community bringing together people with brain conditions to create actionable programming and meaningful conversations on mental health — at work and in life.

Together, along with community allies here in Colorado, we can create a more hopeful, open world. For more information please visit openlabs.world or reach out at contact@openlabs.world.