The True Value of Failure (Turning Setbacks into Success) Ep. 017

What if failure was the key to unlocking your entrepreneurial potential? Join me, Joey Young, as I share how my own stumble with a failed subscription model became a catalyst for growth and innovation. In this episode, I unravel the misconception of failure as a dead end and reframe it as an invaluable stepping stone towards success. Listen to how mature companies harness setbacks as a treasure trove of learning and discovery, using them to refine strategies rather than hastily dropping projects. By embracing and expecting failure, we can build businesses that are not only resilient but thrive on constant improvement.

Whether you're just starting out or are a seasoned entrepreneur, the strategies discussed offer a roadmap to turning failures into triumphs and building lasting connections with your audience.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Learning From Failure in Business
• 10:11 Business Growth Through Audience Engagement

Transcript

Joey Young: 0:00

Welcome to Bright Side Business, where we talk to online entrepreneurs like yourself about how to grow to seven figures and beyond. My name is Joey Young. I helped grow my family's professional services business to seven figures in under two years and I learned a lot of lessons along the way. One of them is about failure. You see, several years ago, when I was starting my coaching practice, I was brand new to this whole world of entrepreneurship. Very bright eyed and bushy tailed, I got completely sold in this idea of a reoccurring revenue model and I wanted my whole business to be completely wrapped up in and based on this idea of subscriptions. Because I thought, oh wow, you know, if I could just get a ton of people on my subscription program, like I could do a little bit of work, provide a little bit of value to a ton of people and make really high margins, and it'd be a great system to set my whole business up on. So the idea was was there, but um, the execution unfortunately did not go as planned. I'd set up my monthly subscription program. It was called monthly pro. It was productivity stuff, an hour webcast each month with some follow-up homework. I, you know, got on the calls. I delivered value for six months and the average attendance was like two people per webcast. It was a complete financial failure and, of course, a huge hit to my ego because I was like you know. I thought this would work. You know I'd put all my heart and soul into this, yada, yada. You know all the new business, entrepreneur stuff, right. But very soon after I finished that subscription program debacle, I learned a valuable lesson. I learned about the value ladder in business. It's the idea that a business can offer different tiers of products. You got your low ticket, your mid ticket, your high ticket and, of course, as an early business, I learned that it's better to focus on high ticket because you can make higher margins on those high ticket programs and you have to do less marketing to get three clients than you do to get 30 clients for your low ticket. So it actually makes sense financially and for your time to start out if you don't have an audience with a higher ticket program. But that's neither here nor there. Anyway, the point is I learned a huge lesson and now here we are today, years later, I'm still creating content, still coaching. That was a huge breakthrough for me and I'd say that that was a pretty normal experience for a new business owner.

Joey Young: 2:20

We start out bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and we get to a point where there's a failure and we learn something cool and we carry on with a new product line or new service, or we just change our approach or whatever and we keep going. But the problem is we still feel fear about failing. We have this lived experience of failure as not a big deal, but we don't believe that in our hearts we still have this innate fear like failure is something that we should hide from other people because it's like shameful, or failure is something we should avoid at all costs. Because we heard the quote failure is not an option from some space movie, I think, and so we can't fail, you know. And it just doesn't help when it comes to business, because the reality is in business, failure should not just be accepted, it should be expected, and I'll tell you why in a second here. But we need to change our philosophy from failure is an end game to failure is a stepping stone.

Joey Young: 3:22

Because listen to this there's one approach a company could take to a new product or a new initiative. It could be a new product line or just a project they're working on. It goes like this. You've got a new vision. So you're really excited. You make progress really quickly. You take three steps forward. Everything's hunky-dory and then, during this product development process, this product launch, this project, whatever it is you meet some challenges pretty quickly. So you realize, as you're making progress, as you take one step forward, you're also taking a step back in some areas, and so there starts to be a little bit less momentum, a little more confusion. These challenges start to pop up you didn't anticipate. And then One of those challenges is great enough to the degree that the person heading up the project maybe it's you as the business owner, maybe it's a team lead they decide that this product or project is a failure. It's completely unsalvageable, it's embarrassing, we have too much sunk costs, we need to focus on something else. So they shut the whole thing down and all that money is basically drained down the toilet, and a lot of solopreneurs do this in cycles.

Joey Young: 4:30

So they'll have a new initiative, new marketing strategy. They'll make some early progress because it's fun and new, it's exciting, has a lot of potential. We reach some challenges and eventually we reach a challenge that we designate a failure and then we give up and try something new. We completely deviate from that line of thinking and we start on a new project or new initiative somewhere else. Now here's what mature companies do. They don't view failure as the end game. It's simply a stepping stone on the way to the desired result. So these companies will begin a project and create some momentum early on. They'll face challenges, just like any other business will, but the difference is how they react to them.

Joey Young: 5:12

When they do reach a point where they have a perceived failure, where they had a really big hypothesis that didn't end up being what they thought it would be, or they had a beta test that flopped, where they could conceivably call the whole thing a failure, they don't throw in the towel at that point. They sit down and they look at the data. They look at the results of the previous tests. They look at what happened, so, like if it was a new product launch, they looked at the comments on this product to see, okay, what were people actually not liking about this product that caused them not to buy? What were the, the specific feedback they had about X, y, z, feature, you know what? What was the response to this copy versus that copy? And so they capture the data. They try to ingest all the information and really soak up, okay, what happened here, so that they can move on to the next step, which is changing their approach. They're like okay, so, based on this failure, we can see that one, two, three things need to be twisted by a little bit, and we need to stop doing that thing. We need to put this piece in and we're going to try this again. Okay, now we're launching again with a specifically better strategy than what we had previously, because we took the time to not get all emotional about the failure or think we should give up because it got hard, but instead we just looked at what happened, we changed our approach and then we tried again and then, ultimately, that leads to the desired result, because we are focused on the approach instead of focusing on getting the early results.

Joey Young: 6:49

So how does that translate to you? How can you and I leverage the failure of that is a stepping stone and grow our business? Well, first of all, we need to marry the goal and date the approach. That's the number one thing to take away from this whole process. If you want to view failure as a stepping stone and not an end game. Remember that your goal is your North Star. You have a target, you have a vision, you have something in the future you want to get towards in six months, 12 months, whatever. That is what you should stick with. What's flexible is the approach you take and you should not be fully emotionally bought into any specific approach. Sometimes, with egos, you can get in businesses where someone tries to, you know, get emotionally attached to their idea and so they try to push it forward on the team and if it doesn't work out, you know it ends up being this huge disaster because they had their ego all tied up with a specific approach. Well, just completely de-attach all emotion from the approach and just keep trying things while keeping the goal, the North Star.

Joey Young: 7:49

The second thing is to actually learn from your failures. Not too many people actually take time out of their week to sit down and to look at the last week of journaling they did, or the notes from meetings, or even the marketing efforts they put forward or the fulfillment efforts they put forward, and try to pull some lessons from the last week. Now, this is really powerful because if you take a look at, let's say, a sales call that went south in the last week, there was probably not a lot of lessons. You learned that the moment after you got off the call because you were all filled with emotion and adrenaline from the call. But if you look at it a few days later and you say, okay, what, what actually led to that sales call flopping? And you, you know, review some notes or maybe a recording, you're going to get a lot more good lessons from that failure than if you just rely on whatever you thought the lesson was in the moment. So taking time to sit down and actually learn from your failures, that's going to give you a lot of leverage when you actually fail.

Joey Young: 8:51

And then sharing your failures with your team or with your people. If you don't have a team yet in your business, this is so powerful. You want to not just have failures accepted in your, in your organization as a culture, whether it's you or a huge team like you want failures to be expected in your business. You want people to try things and and fail, to attempt different ideas to see what works better. You don't want a lackadaisical approach in your business. So the way you do that is you lead the way and you share like hey, I tried this thing, it flopped. I tried this thing it flopped. I tried this thing it half flopped. I tried this thing wow, look at that, 80% worked. If you share those things in team meetings or if you just kind of think about them, you know in terms of if it's just you and your business, you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck in terms of your time and you're going to get a lot more ROI in your failures, because now it's not some awkward thing to be hidden, to be ashamed of, to be avoided.

Joey Young: 9:48

Failure is a normal part of the business development process. It's a normal part of launching a marketing strategy. It's a normal part of having a product being sold to a new market and figuring out how to do that, or try to figure out team or HR or any other aspect of business. So share it a lot. Hey, I hope this lesson on failure has been helpful for you today.

Joey Young: 10:11

If you have a question for the show, I would love to hear it. Shoot me an email, joey, at joeyhyoungcom, or a DM on Instagram at joeyhyoung on Instagram, and I'd love to hear your question so I can talk about it here in the show. I can attack it here and maybe you'll get some breakthrough you've been looking for in the area of business that you are looking for breakthrough on. And hey, like and subscribe if you're this far in the video. I'm sure it helped you at least a little bit. But I'd appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button or the five-star review button if you're on a podcast or whatever. All those things really help out the algorithm to spread the show around. So appreciate you doing that and until next time, my friends, happy scaling.