Over the years I have made small, increasingly informed risks until I learned enough to grab much larger opportunities without worrying that it might not work out.
To illustrate my point further, I encourage you to read my article on fixed and growth mindsets, if you haven’t already done so. If, as I have done, you move forward with a growth mindset you will soon learn that sometimes failure can often actually mitigate other potential risks and provide more desired outcomes, in the end.
Taking on a trial and error approach isn’t easy, especially if you are wired to a permanent safety net that is your comfort zone. I am by very nature a risk taker but I also acknowledge that not everyone is the same and not every is or has to be like me.
What risks, trials and errors have I made and how have I learned from what I like to call ‘beneficial failure’?
Firstly, I don’t play poker and I don’t do the lottery! However, here is my own example of what I failed to do in the early stages of my entrepreneurship:
When I bought my first franchise, some 30 years ago, I didn’t have any kind of recruitment strategy in place. Yes, I wanted to thrive but I also wanted to run before I could walk and disprove any bad ideas that might come my way. Therefore, because of my hastiness I made poor recruitment decisions.
The outcome very quickly secured me with a palpable feeling of failure as the wind well and truly started to depart from my sails. However, I’d spent a lot of money setting my up first franchise and the investment was not just financial, it was emotional.
By employing the wrong people, it made me realise that there had to be a an effective method; a comprehensive and intelligent strategy to secure the right people. Therefore, I did my research. I networked and engaged with other franchisees and business owners to glean all I could about effective recruitment.
The outcome was exactly this:
Employing the wrong people in the wrong way led me to employing the right people in the right way. It really was that simple, I just had to change my mindset and my perspective of ‘failure’.
I began taking a 360 approach; I learned about profiling methods such as Thomas Profiling (of which I still use today) and I completely refined my interview process.
As the business was in its infancy stage, I also focused on creating a positive and dynamic company culture to attract like-minded people and with that I built an ultimate onboarding checklist and stuck to it. I orientated candidates, externally and internally and in doing so the wind began to change and I was starting to employ great minds that really did think alike.
Fast forward to 2023 and I’m in my 30th year of running more than one successful business. I employ two director shareholders and I did this by following the strategy that I had developed all those years ago. All because I had initially ‘failed’.
Within my Business Growth Accelerator Programme I focus on what I like to call ‘Who is on the bus?’. However, some general advice to anyone feeling the pinch of failure right now and are at a crossroads with how to deal with it, I’d recommend the following:
Scale your risks. Start small and build your confidence gradually. Don’t be hasty and place and big or unrealistic bets straight away, especially if you are a new startup.
Be transient; let the risks (or trials) come and go. Let the errors come and so their thing bug don’t take them to bed on a night. Own them.
Build a need for speed! The quicker you fail, the quicker you will find the right answer(s). Or if there isn’t an obvious answer, then you know that you need to be on a much different path and there is every advantage in changing course.
Don’t focus on just one thing. Learn to juggle and trial a few different things simultaneously. By adopting this approach and mindset, you will learn to observe very quickly when something is accurate and working with minimal effort involved in doing so.
See your end goal but remember that goals and targets are two different things. You need to attempt a lot of goals to eventually hit your target so enjoy the penalty shootout and do dwell on the miss hits because of your ego.
Learn more about how I can help you become more confident in failing and drop me a message or email me: graham@grahamprecious.co.uk
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