Success is About Failing BETTER!

Painful though it is, failure is really a business owner’s best teacher if you frame your failures in a way that allows you to fail forward. 

In this episode I talk about six ways you can reframe failure and use failure as a springboard to success.

Not saying that you'll ever enjoy failing. You're human. But at least you'll learn to think of failure more as a useful teacher that helps you succeed with more wisdom.

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Transcript

 Hi everybody, this is Judy Murdoch and this is The Marketing Root Work Podcast. And today I am going to be talking about how success is about failing better.

So when I was getting my MBA at the University of Michigan. M Most of the students, myself included, were focused on management track careers. There was, however, an oddball group that were focused on starting businesses, and one of the classes that was popular with aspiring entrepreneurs was titled Failure 1 0 1.

No, I'm not making this up. It was an audacious name for a class, but you had to be a little audacious. To want such an outlier career path. Now, for most of us who ended up working in corporate, really anybody who ended up working for a large established organization, you learn very quickly that nobody encourages you to fail.

If anything, you become extremely phobic about making mistakes because you get punished during performance reviews. So fast forward to starting my coaching practice, and I was lucky to realize something very quickly. When you own a business, especially when you're creating something very personal and creative, you are going to fail a lot.

Now, I'm not talking about catastrophic failure like bankruptcy. We're finding out that an employee embezzled most of your profits, what I'm talking about are the small, painful failures we make on a weekly, sometimes daily basis failures, such as no one signs up for the new course you're offering, or a longtime client decides to move on.

Or you spend a chunk of change on a contractor who doesn't deliver, or your podcast audience isn't growing the way you expected. I often feel these failures, usually honest errors can be like death by a thousand paper cuts. One or two aren't fatal, but they hurt like fuck. And they can seriously erode your self-esteem As a business owner, a lot of people quit entrepreneurship because they simply get worn down by the relentless grind, and there's no shame in deciding not to pursue business ownership.

As I said, owning a small business is a hero's journey. Painful, though it is. Failure really is. A business owner's best teacher, if you frame your failures in a way that allow you to fail forward. So here are some ways in which you can make the most a out of your failures, perhaps reframe failure in a more positive light.

So number one, failing doesn't make you. A failure. I like to think about failing this way. Failing means you didn't get the results you wanted, period. And please, please, if you remember only one thing, remember that just your willingness to do something unpredictable is courageous. You may not feel heroic.

That's okay. Most heroes don't feel heroic. Number two, never fail the same way twice. In the best case, we can learn objectively from what went wrong and the next time we get slightly better results, or maybe we fail again, but we fail in a different way. Sorry if this makes you cringe a little, but this is simply.

The reality of business ownership Number three, be clear about the risk you're taking. One of the best lessons I've learned as a business owner is that any initiative should be done in small steps. For example, you create the simplest possible offer and ask for interest via a waiting list. In engineering, the simplest possible.

Step is sometimes referred to as a minimal viable product. You prototype your ideas. You ask for advice, you gauge interest. You do a soft launch. What you do not want to do is to slave over creating the perfect program with the perfect offer. And when everything is perfect, you do a big launch. This is how your heart gets broken.

Number four, be creative. I'm now talking about creativity in the artistic sense. I'm talking about creativity from a maker perspective. There has never been a time in history when so much information is freely available to so many of us. If you have an internet connection, you have access to an extraordinary amount of learning.

However, you. We also live in a time when it's very tempting to look at what other people are doing and simply copy them. While there's nothing long wrong with learning from what other people are doing, you aren't adding much value if you're simply filling out a template. If you are offering a highly personalized service, you aren't getting hired because you look like everyone else.

You are getting hired because of your unique approach to your work. Your client outreach needs to reflect what is unique and special about your business. Number five, take care of yourself. The Japanese proverb, fall down seven times. Stand up eight times does not mean you shouldn't be taking breaks. I know that if I don't take time off from my business, I'll end up being a burned out crispy critter.

There is no business without me, and my first responsibility is to attend to my physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. And finally, number six, don't go it alone. I'm a huge believer that every successful business has a community of supporters behind it. Owning a business can be a lonely experience, and there's nothing more painful than feeling like.

You're the only one messing up. That's bullshit. Anyone who is truly crushing it is doing so, only because they failed many times and used what they learned to develop that successful approach. And they had people in their corner saying, you're so close. Don't give up now.

So for 2026. I am framing my initiatives as experiments, and one of my objectives is to always learn from every experience. To be clear, this doesn't mean I have to, like when things don't work out, I'm human. I don't enjoy it when things don't work out the way I want them to. But I do find that framing projects as experiments helps me.

Staying more open and curious about the results, and I see projects as works in progress rather than something that will make or break my business. I appreciate you, Judy Murdoch. Word of mouth marketing coach, writer and artist.