Failing Forward Successfully

Can Mistakes Be Good For Your Business?

Hopefully you make a mistake now and again, because failure can actually be good for you and your business. If you haven’t made any mistakes for a while, you may be playing it too close to your comfort zone and not stretching yourself far or fast enough to achieve high level goals. To aim high, you must accept some of risks that go along with learning something new.

Risks come with acceptance that you will make some mistakes along your journey, but you will want to avoid making costly mistakes or making same mistake over and over again. Use good common business sense. Every business and every career has its share of challenges. You will constantly be tested in business as new challenges arise or as your business grows and expands.

You will always be challenged with new areas of your business that stretch you past your current abilities and expertise. It may be a big sale, start of a new business, a new opportunity or an extremely difficult challenge. Yet all failures will help you learn more about your business and help you build your self-esteem at same time.

Learn from your mistakes and move On. (Actually I don’t even like word mistake; I believe that mistakes are simply challenges in disguise.) Realistically most of us don’t get it right first time around.

Successful People:

·Make mistakes all time, but only difference is that most of failures go unnoticed because they don’t give up. They keep on going.

·Make it look easy. Although it’s easy looking in from outside, many don’t often notice or acknowledge their failures.

·Evaluate their failures, come up with new solutions to challenge and try again – this time more educated than first.

·Don’t allow fear of failure to stop them from achieving their goals.

A study of failure and challenges of business shows ultimate success secrets of any enterprise. These are key lessons an organization learns as they grow, expand and compete in a changing marketplace.

If you want to create shamelessly fabulous success, study all failures. Most highly successful people were not successful from beginning, they had to struggle a little or a lot to reach their peak potential. Walt Disney was actually fired from his first job because he was told that he was not creative enough. Not creative enough? Luckily, he didn’t listen to his clueless boss and trusted his own innovative ideas.

We all have a tendency to focus on success and fear failure when things don’t go as planned. So don’t be too hard on yourself if you feel that you are making too many mistakes to make it to top. Hang in there and be patient. Once you overcome challenge, you won’t have to do it again and you will be failing forward faster.

Companies like Hi-Rel Corporation have utilized this delineation recently by leasing E-Z MRP system for manufacturers with more than 500 parts. According to Jerry Stouffer, “It made sense given our cash flow and I would recommend E-Z-MRP to other small manufacturers because support is excellent and product is easy to work with.”

Stouffer did suggest that manufacturers looking for a customer relations management module should look at something else. However he was impressed with, “…How fast it (E-Z-MRP) calculates our requirements. I have 800 items in database and it only takes 20 seconds.”