Episode 7: Dealing with Business Failure

When you run your own business you should always be prepared because, one day, something may go wrong because of a mistake made by you or one of your employees. So how to overcome failure in business? This will be the theme discussed in this week’s Boagworld Web Show with Dan James from Silver Orange.

Dan was one of the founders of Silverorange, which is a pretty well known agency in Canada. They’ve been doing Design and Development work for the last sixteen years for everyone from Mozilla to small companies of whom you’ve probably never even heard. You’ll get to know many more interesting and even surprising details about Silverorange just by listening to this podcast.

Dan shares not only Silverorange successes, but its failures as well. The company is extremely open. For instance, you’ll get to know what to do when clients go away, how to engage customers in conversation if you want to compel them to work with you a lot more, and transfer more money to your bank account.

Then Dan, Paul and Marcus start answering the embarrassing questions about the vivid examples of their failures and lessons learnt from them. Dan shares his categorization of failures and tells how to analyze them. He also expands on the definitions of failure and success and explains how to monitor both of them.

In fact, everybody knows that the saying ‘If you don’t fall over then you are not trying hard enough’ is absolutely true. Taking risks in your business ventures is normal practice, because, if you don’t take any risks or try anything new, then your chances of succeeding are also poor. So, occasionally, you need to try risky stuff, which might involve dealing with business failure, to arrive at a better place in the end. Of course the degree of how much you can risk should be identified first.

In fact, when a person says that failure is a good thing, that comment might be coming from someone who has then gone on to some level of success. There have been a lot of people who have failed and now they are working to support their families spending their days doing jobs they hate. The reason for such an outcome may be hidden in a person’s past inability to get over the repeated failures, or massive failures, that they have experienced in the past.

We don’t want our readers to become those kinds of losers. You can learn how to deal with your failures, overcome difficulties and just turn them into positive steps leading to prosperity. Hopefully, this podcast will teach you not to succumb to despair but achieve your goals, no matter what.