Business Built With Strategy

Learn, Pivot, Succeed: Embracing Failure in Your Business Journey

• With Victoria E Strange • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Failure in business isn't the opposite of success but rather the strategy you didn't know you were running. Every entrepreneur faces failure at some point, but what separates successful ones is their ability to learn from mistakes by analyzing data and adjusting strategy rather than taking failure personally.

• Failure equals feedback, showing what doesn't work so you can get closer to what does
• Without failure, you're just guessing—failure provides concrete evidence for improvement
• Early mistakes with Facebook advertising taught valuable lessons through analysis
• Emotional reactions to failure prevent strategic thinking and progress
• Consistency is crucial but often overlooked by entrepreneurs
• Four-step strategy: diagnose what went wrong, detach and remove ego, decide what to do differently, deploy with lessons integrated
• Successful businesses all experience repeated failure behind their highlight reels
• Take the shame out of failure and transform it into strategic action
• Failure becomes the beginning of your next strategy when handled correctly

Coming soon: A free resource with four steps to turn your idea into a foundation plan you can follow. Sign up in the show notes to stay updated on all upcoming offers.


Speaker 1:

Hello everyone. It's Victoria here, and welcome back to another episode of Business Built with Strategy. So this week we are talking about failure failure in business. Now, what a lot of people don't realise is failure is not the opposite of success. It's actually the strategy that you didn't know you were running. Now, every entrepreneur I don't care who it is every entrepreneur at some point faces failure. But the difference is is not everyone learns from it.

Speaker 1:

And this is something that is so important, because if you make a mistake okay, if you don't look at that mistake, look back on your strategy, look at your data you are not going to know where you go wrong. And what happens with a lot of people? They make the mistake, they're like oh I failed, what am I going to do now? But they actually don't look back at what they've done. They just continue to move forward. Now, don't get me wrong, you've got to move forward because you don't want to just stop, stand still and not do anything. But before you continue to move forward after that mistake that you've made, you just need to go back and look at where you have gone wrong. It's like you know if you're on a journey, you go in the wrong direction. Well, hang on, hang on a minute. You have to look back to say, oh yeah, should have gone up there, should have gone in that direction and not the other. Should have gone left but went right, or vice versa. So today we're going to unpack how to treat failure as data and turn it into your next win.

Speaker 1:

I'm a massive, massive believer that most things you can turn around. You know you make a mistake. You feel like you failed. The majority of the time, though, you can actually change it. You can flip it on its head and change it. So most people take it personally. When they make a mistake, they harden themselves. They're like, oh, I can't believe I've done this, but actually it really is a better decision to to actually look at it strategically. Don't take it personally, just just look at it strategically. It's emotional reaction versus business reality. That is literally all it comes down to, and you know there's definitely been times when I have failed. You know, maybe a failed launch, no sales, wasted money on ads you know I've spent a huge amount of money on ads.

Speaker 1:

Now I have definitely had an amazing return on my ads, but in the earlier days I felt like I was just pouring money down the drain because I wasn't getting the return and I thought that I was failing, but actually what I was doing is just not setting the ad up properly. So I was effectively setting myself up for failure. And this was when I started using ads around. I don't know, maybe 15, 16 years ago, and I was a little bit like a bull in the china shop and I was like yep, know what I'm doing, you know this is going to be brilliant, and of course it until I learned exactly what I was doing and until I had failed on them and then looked back and thought, oh god, no, this is completely wrong. Um, then I started to have the opposite of failure and, you know, I started to succeed, which was fantastic, but all I really had to do was start learning the process of how to set up a Facebook ad. So you, I wouldn't have probably known that if I hadn't have gone back and had a look at exactly what you know I was doing.

Speaker 1:

So failure equals feedback. I gave myself feedback and the feedback that I gave myself was was correct, and then I was able to move forward. And it's showing yourself what doesn't work so you can actually get closer to what does. It is, it's process of elimination. It is actually process of elimination. It is actually a process of elimination without failure. You're guessing, you know. Sometimes you have to fail to move forward and I can 100% tell you that has happened to me many times and it would have also happened to other entrepreneurs. Sometimes you just need to fail to go. Ah yeah, that's the way that I have to go, and without failure. As I said, you are guessing, but the failure gives you proof of actually what you are doing wrong and there's another way to do it and there's another way to do it. So the strategy of learning from failure.

Speaker 1:

Step one diagnose what actually went wrong. Author, price, audience, channel, consistency. I cannot tell you how important it is to be consistent consistency. I cannot tell you how important it is to be consistent. Um, at the moment I'm not being consistent with everything that I'm doing, but there's a reason. So I'm not saying to myself oh yeah, I'm being consistent, when actually I'm not, but I'm. I know that I'm not being consistent at the moment, but what happens? A lot of a lot of people don't realize and their consistency falls back. Or they're consistent for a month, a week, maybe, maybe a few months and then it completely drops off. But consistency has got to be consistent. It has to just keep going.

Speaker 1:

Step two detach, remove ego. Look at the numbers, look at the data, stop, say, oh, it's me, it's me, it's me, no, you stop. You look at your data, look at your numbers, look at everything that you have and then you make a decision. Step three decide what will you do differently next time? And when you do look at your data and you look at your numbers and you look at the whole bigger picture, you will find it a lot, lot more easier to make those decisions because they'll just roll out a lot easier than not looking at them. And step four deploy. Build the next move with the lesson baked in, so that lesson that you've learned, bake it into your next decision and then deploy it. And that you've learned, bake it into your next decision and then deploy it.

Speaker 1:

So every successful business has failed repeatedly, as I've said, every successful business. I know that it's so easy to look at someone's highlight reel and go, oh, they've got it together. They've always been like that, but they haven't. But I think because we it's like shiny object syndrome, isn't it? We look at it and go, oh, I want that. But we actually don't look at behind the scenes, because not a lot of people show behind the scenes. I love it when they do. I really really do, I do. I definitely don't put out there everything shiny. I show you the real raw situations that are going on behind the business, because I think that's what people want to see.

Speaker 1:

And the difference is, when people fail, they used failure as a strategy, not shame, and I have said that in different ways throughout this ep, haven't? I have to take the ego out of it. You have to take the shame out of it and put what you feel back into. A strategy works far better, much better, and failures often lead to breakthroughs when, when they're handled correctly. So failure is not the end, it's actually the beginning of your next strategy.

Speaker 1:

If you fail at something unless you decide, oh okay, I'm just going to stop right here, then unfortunately, yes, you are stuck. But if you're strategic about it and think, oh, you know what, I'm going to go back, look at everything, look at my data, look at my numbers, look at my strategy, everything that you possibly have, then failure is not your end, it's actually the beginning. It's the beginning of your next strategy and the next part of your business journey. So if you're stuck circling in failure and you want to turn it into a real plan, I have something coming really soon. I'm so excited about it. It's going to be free and it gives you the four steps to turn your idea into a foundation plan that you can actually follow.

Speaker 1:

Now you know that I bang on about strategy. It is so important. You need a strategy, and it's very cliche, but I'm going to say it. If you have no plan, you plan to fail, because how can you measure where you're at? How do you know where you've got to be? How do you know the steps to take you there? And then I have something extra that I'm bringing out very, very soon, and again, it's something that isn't really out there and people need. So I will keep you posted in the show notes. You can sign up and keep up to date with every offer that I have coming out, and I will speak to you soon. Have a fantastic week, everyone. Take care.