What I Learned From Failing Four Businesses in 2020
2020 has been a tough year for everybody and I know you are getting tired of hearing everyone’s problems this year, so I’m not here to rant about how bad 2020 has been for me.
Instead, I want to take this opportunity to tell you what I have learned and why it’s important to know what I’ve learned this year. I’m going to keep it short and sweet because apparently, attention spans are at an all-time low these days. So here it is kids:
- There is no winning when you start your own business. You are constantly losing and it is frustrating and demoralizing and it feels like a complete waste of time. And as time goes, the weirder the problems and issues get and you realize at some point that everything is a tiny problem that needs to get solved. The beautiful thing about this constant struggle with problem-solving is that it makes you a master troubleshooter. This is why I love entrepreneurship. You get to choose what kind of shit you deal with and you really deal with that shit.
- People don’t want to spend their money. You can’t ask people nicely to give you their money. Now, I’m not saying you need to hold a knife to people’s neck and sell them your Etsy bracelet. I want you to appeal to something different when it comes to selling your product or services. Every financial decision a person makes is an emotional one at the beginning which later gets justified by logic. So if you want to sell something, don’t try to be logical. Actually, be illogical and be emotional and appeal to what people desire.
- The concept of work-life balance is only possible if you are an employee. As an entrepreneur, there is either only work and then at some point, there is no work and it’s just life. Please, let that sync in. When you run a business, nobody is assigning you deadlines and projects except yourself. And to hold that level of accountability, I’ll be honest, there is no work-life balance. Everything is mixed together. There is no 9–5. There is everything all at once spread out through hours of your weeks and months.
- When it comes to business, people are not nice. Seriously, they are not nice. They go through extents that you cannot imagine in order to save a few bucks. So if you are going to offer services or products, they have to be worth the price for the client to buy. By the way, try to take negotiations out of it and focus on automating processes to the extent where there are fewer questions to be asked and less trouble to be dealt with.
That’s my two-cents on the subject of failure in entrepreneurship. 2020 has been the year where I started and failed 4 businesses but I’m absolutely happy that I have been finally trying what I always wanted.
If you need to hear it from someone else, do what you always wanted to do. There is no better time than now.
