Dealing with Setbacks

It’s been an interesting week for me with some of the start-ups that I do consulting for-we are encountering the setbacks.

There is no better feeling as an entrepreneur that when you are about to launch your company for the first time. It is euphoric. You can taste the money about the start coming in. Rather than having a bunch of expenses, you are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel when the world is going to embrace what you have worked on for so long. All the late nights with the graphic designers, the long phone calls and negotiations with the supply chain, making sure the marketing was perfect for the launch, it is all coming to fruition. But…no one talked to you about being prepared for the setbacks.

Early in my career one of my mentors said something that I will never forget. He told me that everything goes right until you make your first sale. During the start-up phase of a business, we are constantly working for that first sale. When that first sale happens, we are then bombarded with a whole new set of problems. Maybe your manufacturer missed their delivery date so your product is out of stock. Or perhaps your designers built all your artwork files in the wrong format and the printer wont honor the quoted price. Talk about immediate and swift deflation of your excitement for launching.

Don’t worry! Take a deep breath, step back, and remember that at least all the hurdles are happening on the first sale. It gives you a chance to correct problems that would’ve crippled your business at scale. Your first customer will likely be disappointed, but hopefully you did a great job of setting expectations accordingly so they are sympathetic to your launch. You can ALWAYS make it right with the customer when there is a hurdle with the first sale, whether offering free product, maybe giving a small discount for their next order, and, in turn, you will also figure out how to effectively handle setbacks as you grow.

Twice this week I took calls about hurdles at launch that my entrepreneurs felt like was the end of the world. I could hear the emotion in their voice, the frustration, the feeling that everything they had done was for not. By the end of the week, we had everything corrected and functioning better than it was initially designed. Mike Tyson famously said it best that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Part of being a successful entrepreneur was preparing for those punches, but the minute that one of them is thrown with a southpaw that wasn’t in the plan, everything seemingly falls apart. I am not recommending that you develop your business with no plan in place and that you should wait for the punches to come before figuring it out, not at all. I am advocating that you prepare yourself mentally for upsets.

We launched a company in a major venue over Thanksgiving and the entrepreneur and I worked through “liabilities” for launch. Amidst the concerns was that payment processing wouldn’t occur properly, or customers wouldn’t know how to use the machines and we underestimated the teaching that would be required. The last liability that I added to the list was “What if we don’t sell anything?” My entrepreneur enthusiastically exclaimed, “Jeff, we’re going to sell something, how could we not sell something?” At that point I had a discussion with her about how the market works, how it takes people time to learn and trust a product, that we may have to A-B test and figure out the right message to the consumer that converts sales. Without any data or analytics, we are using market knowledge to launch how we thought was right, and if we didn’t make a sale, it just meant that we had to try plan B the next week. Maybe plan B wouldn’t work either, it might get all the way to plan Z before we got it right, but, we would make sure we got it right!

Well, as you probably inferred, the first day there wasn’t a sale, the second day-no sale, end of week one-no sales. She was deflated! She started questioning everything she had done in the business to that point. She was ready to close the doors and try something new.

I snapped into action and said, “Beth, remember when we had the conversation about not making a sale? It happened, and it’s okay! We just need to build a better mouse trap for next week.” What she had forgotten too easily was that it was also the ONLY liability that went wrong in our list of concerns. So it was actually a win!

By the end of week two, with a different set of marketing and creative, we had sold through 30% of her stock and the deflation turned to jubilee. “Jeff-This is going to be amazing, I am going to sell millions of these!”

This is why as entrepreneurs we can’t let setbacks cripple us. They are part of the learning curve to develop a successful business. One that has staying power. One that can stand the test of time. There is ALWAYS a silver lining to every setback, you just need to brush yourself off, pull up your bootstraps, and get back in the game. Setbacks are the reason that only 3% of entrepreneurs succeed and the other 97% go back to working for someone else. Use your setbacks as a learning exercise!