3 Principles To Bounce Back From Any Business Setback

Published in

Ascent Publication

9 min readMar 20, 2020

I n 2008 after some deep thinking and soul-searching, I decided to do something crazy. I left a highly lucrative medical executive role to get into teaching.

I finished up my state teaching license and quickly found myself in front of at-risk college and high school students. My focus was in business and writing.

To my surprise, my first year had very few wins. I quickly realized that I was a massive failure in teaching. I was so bad, I began to think about going back to medicine. This cold reality was quite a devastating blow because I was such a huge success in business.

In truth, this was one of the hardest jobs I ever had. But apparently I wasn’t alone. New research shows that 1 in 6 teachers leave within the first year, and 1 in 3 leave within the first three years of teaching. Clearly, educating the world is stressful work.

While I would have loved to talk about literature and business all day, I didn’t really get to do that in the beginning. You see, not only was the profession difficult, the types of students I taught were challenging.

I taught at-risk students who hated most forms of learning, and I think they even hated me! This was not the situation I thought I’d be in. Every lesson I taught was one failure after the next, and this went on for months.

No one paid attention.

I stayed up every night trying to figure out what would hook my students into the lessons. Nothing changed during this phase, and I decided that it might not be the material that needed to be better. It was me who needed to be better.

If I was going to stay in this profession, I had to quickly bounce back from this failure and change myself. But what was the first step?

Start With Mindset

“Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.” — Reid Hoffman, founder of Linkedin

It was through teaching that I realized something that changed the way I looked at people, business, and life.

All behavioral change and personal transformation starts in the mind.

It’s cliche now, but mindset is everything. It doesn’t matter if you adopt the growth/fixed, the abundance/scarcity, or the optimist/pessimist mindset model. They all work. All the research will tell you to model the most successful mindsets from people who have already done what you’re trying to do. If you want to play golf well, learning about Tiger Wood’s swing will only get you so far.

In Dr. Denis Waitley’s book The Psychology of Winning, he talks about a group of athletes who spent a good amount of time using positive visualization. In nearly every case, those who visualized winning and executing the right actions in their head performed better. When they dove-tailed visualization with hard practice, many of these athletes went on to become world champions.

There is a saying that in business you should use Pareto’s Principle with everything. In this case it means that 80% of your success lies in your mindset, and 20% from everything else. Maybe there’s something to that.

I failed my first business because, much like in the classroom, no one paid attention to what I had to offer. Humiliation ensued and lots of money went down the drain. After this setback, the first person I talked to was an older friend who turned into my mentor. I knew she had most of the answers, but what I really wanted to do is get into a successful person’s mind. I picked her brain on all things business, of course. But mostly, I talked to her about how she saw herself and the challenges she faced. There was a pattern.

You can always figure things out.

That lightens your stress load instantly, and it’s a great mindset as you venture into the unpredictable world of business. In fact, when I advise young startup founders I always talk about this. If the average entrepreneur goes through a few business failures before they hit it big, why not knock your first few out while you’re young? That’s some of the best real business education you can get, and it’s during a time when the stakes are low in your life.

My mentor also thought that the real secret to business was having the right team to form an unstoppable mastermind. I quickly adopted that mindset too. Many minds are better than one. If I met enough of the right people to work on the problem I wanted to solve, I would succeed. My mentor was right.

In my next venture, I was introduced to someone who became my co-founder. Together we were the yin and yang of our enterprise: it was an easy and lucrative relationship. We partnered with the right players in the industry and did just fine. I kept talking to my mentor, and building my new company felt like a dream. Though I was mostly the same person, my outlook on problem-solving and collaboration dramatically changed. I was open to ideas and asking for help. Mistakes would never hold me back. I would figure things out with my people. A positive mindset got me through it all.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from all of this was that to change your mindset, you have to ditch your ego.

There simply isn’t room to learn, adapt, or change if a stubborn ego is fighting you all the way. A negative mindset will lead you to blame others or to tell yourself that you’re good enough. No one is perfect in business and life. Everybody drops the ball because that’s a natural consequence of risk-taking. The point is, how quickly can you take risks and get back up so you can learn and improve? And who’s in your corner when you do?

Select A Proven Strategy

“I believe that people make their own luck by great preparation and good strategy.” — Jack Canfield

These days, there are no shortages of proven strategies, frameworks, and models. The sooner you can evaluate and choose a good one, the better. I once lost $50,000 in one of my businesses. I can go on in excruciating detail, but most of you can imagine what it might feel like to lose this kind of money.

I got there from making a bad decision based on a bad strategy. In hindsight, I didn’t really have a strategy at all. Today, I always consider a few strategies with my team before making a move. If we have time and it’s a big decision, we even run a Design Sprint to get the best solution.

Deep down, I don’t think there is a perfect strategy. I think there are several good ones to work with, it’s just a matter of picking the right one for you and testing it. As someone who’s been immersed in the startup community for over a decade, I see this all the time.

People toil in the pros and cons of which strategy to deploy. This is a form of analysis paralysis and it will get you nowhere. I don’t know if you’ve ever lost $50,000 but one thing is for sure: you won’t make that same mistake again. No, you think of that post-mortem and how to prevent it. This might lead you to study other post-mortems like I did. (Yes, I studied all the success stories too, but those are everywhere. Those stories always get the most traction, so they’re hard to miss.) I looked at the greats like SaaS genius Dan Martell, MIT’s Bill Aulet, and INSEAD’s Nathan Furr.

What a lot of the research points to is timing and market need.

Is it the right time to enter this market? (That is, is the industry ready for disruption or a new entrant with your value proposition?)
Is there a legitimate market need or pain your ideal client needs solved?

To bounce back from setbacks, take a look at the strategy you used. Study the patterns in business post-mortems and success stories. Looking at both sides will help you diagnose what you’re doing wrong and then you can adjust to get back on track.

Execute Relentlessly

“Ideas are only as good as the execution.” — Gary Vaynerchuk

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Part of my failures in business comes from simply not doing anything. I’d think of ideas and then a year or two later, I’d see someone flourishing with “my” product.

The reality is, even the most mediocre ideas can be million-dollar businesses. Right now I’m thinking of The Snuggy or the Pet Rock. Wow. Really burning the midnight oil on those product ideas! But lots of these half-baked ideas have made people millions. (Subsequently, if I invented either of those products, I’d literally be laughing all the way to the bank because the ideas are so silly.)

Here’s another thing about execution.

Whatever you want to make won’t be perfect. However, by testing ideas out in the “lab” and then with real customers, you will eventually get enough insight to make the best version of your idea. These are happy accidents.

For startups, pivot is the new failure.

That is, you can make big changes in your business because you got it wrong and in doing so you live to sell another day. Pivoting is an old term, but it still works. The idea is that you might change directions altogether, but at least now you’re going in the right direction.

Pivots — and its less-substantial counterpart, “iterations” — can only be discovered by execution. For example, you target middle-aged men with your stores, and then figure out that middle-aged women are your real audience: that’s your pivot. (By the way, this was the pivot Dick’s Sporting Goods figured out.)

Until you run out of money, many startup advisors will actually tell you to iterate and pivot until you find product-market fit. You keep bouncing back from failure and improving each time. And if or when you do finally get it right, that’s when you can ask for more money to keep the execution train rolling.

Conclusion

I’m grateful I stumbled upon the mindset, strategy, and execution triad when I started teaching and when I failed my first company. Since then, it has been all I needed: Everything else just falls into place because it all encourages failing, learning, and bouncing back stronger.

But to understand it, you have to apply and live it. Whether you’re in a classroom or a boardroom, a lot can be learned by using these three principles in the field. And despite the challenges you face, even when you’re down, you can count on them 100%.

When you’re preparing to jump back into the thick of things, I have a mantra you can memorize that pretty much sums everything up:

People who won’t settle until they’ve made it [mindset], always create a good plan [strategy], and execute on it until they get their desired result [execution].