Jasmine Star (00:00:01) - Welcome back to The Jasmine Star Show, a place where we discuss business, marketing and today, failures which are not only inevitable in business. But I'm going to go on a limb here, y'all. I'm going to say failures are necessary. And, you know, I truly believe this, that failures aren't failures. I have stopped calling my failures failures, and it's had a profound effect on me. I believe that failures are lessons. And yes, I know that it sounds like a positive, affirming Pinterest quote or a hallmark card, but I actually really believe it. So if you're not failing and or you're not learning the lessons you need, you're probably not taking enough action or risks in your business. So when we talk about perceived failures my whole life, that is what I called them. I didn't know them as anything else. I should probably back up a little bit and talk about, still, as an adult, this irrational fear of standardized tests probably harkens back to the fact that I was homeschooled.

Jasmine Star (00:01:15) - And every year in the state of California, you had to be tested in some way, shape or form, even if you were homeschooled. So my mom would get together in these testing centers with other random homeschooling families to do standardized tests to see where we were. And let me just tell you, year after year, I was always behind the curve. Like my reading comprehension was very low. My math was disastrous. I was just what you might call a special kid. And through it all, my mom had never blinked an eye. She's just like standardized tests don't really matter to me. She's like, you're a great kid and you're learning what a profound gift my mom gave me. However, as a kid, I started logging in the results of these standardized tests. I was bonafide behind the curve, but a crazy thing happened. I went into a public high school when I was 14 years old, and I took the SAT going into my senior year, and I didn't break 1000, I didn't break 900, and I graduated at the top of my class my junior year.

Jasmine Star (00:02:20) - When I took the SAT, I had a 4.5 GPA. That meant I was taking all honors in AP classes, getting A's in them, and yet I couldn't break 900 on the SAT. So, you know, flash forward five years and it's time for me to take the Lsat or otherwise known as Lsat. I wanted to go to law school, and this time I said, I'm going to do it different. I'm going to invest in a training in a course. Oh yeah, dropped a few thousand dollars on tutors because I said, I'm going to get in because I'm going to prove that I can take, for the first time in my life, a standardized test. And for all intents and purposes, I have to tell you, I felt like a total failure because at other points in my life I could say, oh, I took a standardized test and I was home schooled, so it really wasn't prepared for it. And then I could say, oh, well, you know, it didn't break 900 for the SAT.

Jasmine Star (00:03:16) - But, you know, I didn't study for it. And here I was for the Lsat and I studied for it. I paid a lot of money. I spent hours with every Lsat prep book, and it felt like a total failure. And so I knew that if I stood any chance of getting into law school, I actually had to explain who I was outside of standardized tests. So when I was applying for law school, I wrote an entire essay about how tests are a standard indicator of success, but not my success. I look back at that essay and I am telling you right now, I believe that I made a such a strong case for myself that it impacted my success rate. It impacted my acceptance rate. I got accepted to three of the top ten law schools, amongst other law schools, simply by showing people that my failures have very little to do with my future success. Now, remember at the time, I was still calling them a failure, like my Lsat was a complete and total failure.

Jasmine Star (00:04:21) - But I just said, hey, there are some facts here. I grew up terrible at standardized tests. I did terrible for my SAT, but I graduated with a 4.0. So I literally made a case going into law school. It was like kind of like my first flex. Let me lay out a case to see if I convince you. And it worked. And beyond that, I got accepted to three of the top ten law schools with a terrible Lsat score, and I still got scholarships. So if you have ever felt discouraged by a setback or what you might call a failure, or maybe you're just hesitant to take the next big step, this episode is for you. I want you to look at everything that has ever happened in your life that you would consider a failure. And I want you to make a case for your future success. I want you to say that whatever happened in the past has no indication of what's going to happen in the future, and I want to start with why failures are necessary for business growth.

Jasmine Star (00:05:23) - Now you're going to hear me flip between lessons and failures. And so oftentimes, at least for me, when somebody would say, Jasmine, there's no such thing as failure, you just learn. I would literally scoff and roll my eyes. And I'm like, you have no, like, sorry, lots of failures in my life. And I would say, like, failures make me stronger, like failures put a chip on my shoulder. And while I still agree with that, what I have learned is just by the nuance change of me calling it a lesson, I felt empowered, but it took me a long time to get there. And so if you're still in the state of Jasmine, I will never call a failure a lesson. A failure is a failure. Period. No problem, I got you, I was there, so I'm going to flip between the two. But I want you to know that even though failures or and or lessons still suck the living daylights out of me and punch me in the gut, I am still choosing to call them a lesson, because every single time I look back, I learned something so powerful.

Jasmine Star (00:06:18) - So this is me admitting that I'm going to flip between the two because I don't know where you're at on your journey, but I have whole handedly raised my hand and said it's not failure anymore, it's lessons. Now, there are four main reasons that come to mind, and I'm going to name each one why I think, hey, your failures, they're necessary for your business growth. And at this point in the conversation, if you want to bypass this podcast, go right ahead. I, like you, didn't want to talk about the failures that were coming in my future. I really, for the large part of my life, I love living that ostrich life. Let me just stick my head in the ground and let me just say, if I don't say it, it doesn't exist. No, no, no, it is his eyes wide open. Now, I am not an ostrich. I'm a giraffe. I want to see what's coming. Why? Because then you normalize it, you accept it, and then you set the terms.

Jasmine Star (00:07:06) - I see what's coming. Am I okay with it? Because if you see what's coming and you're okay with it. Not because you want failure, not because you want to learn lessons, but because you want the future, the goal, the benefit of whatever that is. Boom. Now you're playing a different game. So let's just even before we talk about business, I have struggled wildly for the vast majority of my life. My weight fluctuates dramatically. It is up and down quite often. And so probably in the last couple of years, there's just been a real kind of renaissance of me having a conversation. What is my goal? What is the benefit? Why am I making these lifestyle changes? And I have clearly identified what the goal is. But then I've also said, what's going to come up for me? What's going to come up for me is going out to dinner with friends. Do I choose dessert? Do I choose a glass of wine? Like the pitfalls, the lessons, the purported failures? I get to know, hey, that's coming.

Jasmine Star (00:08:09) - And occasionally, if you do decide to make a decision that impacts your future, no problem. But you knew what was coming, and then you got to make that decision, and then you could decide, am I going to get back on and pursue it again, or am I not? So this whole conversation is not me predicting what your failures or lessons will be. It is simply saying they're coming, but they're necessary. Because, number one, I believe that these lessons are going to help you build resilience, and this is going to help you overcome tough times. And you're going to continue to learn from these setbacks like you're building a muscle. If you ever want a six pack, you're going to flex like a tricep. You got to build through it. And how do you do that? You do the reps. Your lessons are your reps. Number two, these failures are going to help improve innovation in your creativity. Number three, failures help improve self awareness, which will help you understand yourself and improve your relationships with others.

Jasmine Star (00:09:02) - Like I have to tell you, I value self-awareness so much and I look at somebody who is extraordinarily self aware and there's a really good chance that they had life chopped up, handed to them, like a plate of liver and sardines and some fresh onions. As said, eat it up. It's the people who constantly consume the hardest stuff that have a deep sense of self awareness. They've gone through enough lessons and process them and got better over time. And lastly, why I think failures are necessary for business growth is they're going to help you improve your decision making skills. So let's get into the first reason failures are necessary for business growth. They help you build resilience. When we face failure, we're forced to either number one quit or number two, develop resilience. What is resilience. The ability to get back up. It's grit. It's hustle. It's cajones. You know, like failures teach us how to bounce back, how to adapt, how to persevere when things get tough, which when we're talking about business, things will get tough.

Jasmine Star (00:10:11) - It's not a matter of if, it's when. So if you know it's going to get tough, then you're going to go through it and you're going to say, I am supposed to learn something. What am I supposed to learn through this? When you get familiar with failure and you become resilient, you start to trust yourself and your abilities, which gives you the strength and confidence to handle change and uncertainty. So when I created my first ever online course, it was called Insta 180. And the premise of this course, and I've talked about this before in the podcast, I'm not going to get into how we started here, and it was completely unexpected and it was super scrappy and I didn't know what I was doing, and I just went through the process. Right. And so when I talk about that story about how I launched my very first digital course, it sounds great because, yeah, I made over $1 million in less than a year, right? Like, well, nobody knows all the back end, all the lessons that we learned to get to that point.

Jasmine Star (00:11:01) - But then we wanted to offer it evergreen. So that means that, like, people can buy the course whenever they wanted, like we used to have just open and closed periods. And I paid a lot of money to learn how to set it up with evergreen. And then I invested in new software for the evergreen, and then I made new ads for the evergreen, and then I recorded multiple new webinars for the evergreen. And I am telling you, no matter what we did, it just didn't work. It wasn't working. And I am telling you, I can get into the details and maybe I will. So it's like we all learn from these lessons, but we tried everything to improve it, but it just did not convert the way that it did. When I launched into 180 live. When I launched it live, we had massive success. And when I tried evergreen, no matter what we did, y'all. And when I finally decided to pull the plug, I felt like I wasted so much time and money.

Jasmine Star (00:11:58) - And I could sit here and tell you how I beat myself up like you failed. What a failure. This was a failure. But now, when I look back and say, that was a series of lessons that taught you what? What were you supposed to learn? And so I have to tell you, you know, since that time, I made a list of everything I learned and the new things I could try and new ways to test an evergreen offer. So at the time of this recording, we're currently in the process of trying our hand at evergreen again. I just want to try it based on the lessons that I had learned, I feel really good. We're going to set up an evergreen webinar for Social Curator. I want to educate people around what this is outside of live launching, and I hired a consultant who was teaching us how to get better, because I'm not going to let past experiences and past lessons dictate what I'm going to do in the future. I never want to let failure prevent me from trying the same things again.

Jasmine Star (00:12:53) - But I'm smarter. I'm better. I'm more prepared. Now. Why those lessons prepared me for it. And this is very good because the entrepreneurial journey is inherently uncertain, like, and it will always be inherently uncertain, but it's the failures that help us overcome things. And then we become comfortable with change, and eventually the changes and the challenges become just an everyday, expected part of building a business. Hot dang, that makes us stronger. Period. The end. The second reason failures are necessary for business growth is because they improve innovation and creativity. Now you might hear those two words and be like, I'm checking out here, no problem. But I have to tell you that innovation existed in my business far before we ever had our own tech stack, before I had a development team, before I hired a CTO. Basically, innovation is a Silicon Valley. Rich people venture back. Capital is way of saying get scrappy and try new things. That's it. So facing failures, more often than not, it's going to lead to creative problem solving.

Jasmine Star (00:13:58) - When we are met with setbacks, we're forced to think outside of the box and come up with innovative solutions. Y'all, this is where we get scrappy. I think somebody it's a famous quote that said, like necessity is the mother of innovation. Basically, when you're out here like a squirrel trying to get a nut, trying to make a dollar out of $0.15, and you're like, I need this thing to work in Silicon Valley. They said, oh, that person is so innovative. And out here, like in, you know, East LA is like doing what you need to do to survive. Cool. You're innovative. Bravo. And the truth is, as our businesses grow and the setbacks and the issues that we face, they're going to become more severe. Like, you might have heard me say that new levels bring new devils. Ooh, it's facts. So honing in on these problems solving skills now not only benefits your current state of business, but it prepares you for your future success and your growth.

Jasmine Star (00:14:47) - So the third reason why I believe firmly failures are necessary is they improve your self-awareness. Embracing failures makes us more self-aware by making us think about our strengths and weaknesses and how we can improve. It also helps us stay very humble and understand ourselves better, which leads to self-improvement. At the time of this recording, I'm going to be headed to Arizona for an in-person mastermind retreat with other tech founders. I don't know anybody who's going on this retreat. I simply sign up. Why? I've realized that when I watch other people and I hear stories of how they have overcome their purported failures, what they've done, it helps and empowers me. But in order for me to get the most out of this event or any event, I need to be so self aware of my limitations of the stories I tell myself I need to be okay being vulnerable, letting people know that I don't have it together. There is always been a struggle and perpetually, if you're in business, there will always be a struggle. Like, I'm going in with this intention and they made us fill out a form that says, what are the three things you're going to be focusing on? And while I think people might list like networking and brand development, things like that I listed and maybe I sound super woowoo, but it is really my intention.

Jasmine Star (00:16:06) - The things I'm going to be focusing on at this retreat presents humility and openness. I think if I embody those three things, I'm going to get exactly what I need from this event. But that's on the back of self awareness, of knowing that I don't need to network at this point in time. It's going to be important, but what am I trying to network toward? It sounds great, like brand development. It sounds great and we could always be doing it. But at this point in my life, in my career, I'm not looking for that. I am looking at finding who I am in this moment to grow as an entrepreneur. But that only comes off the back of self awareness and self-awareness. The more lessons you have, you know more failures you have, the more self-aware you become. As long as you're taking what happened and you're learning from it now. One of the biggest lessons I learned about my self awareness was that for so long, I associated my self-worth with the outcome of a launch or promotion, and I.

Jasmine Star (00:16:58) - I know it sounds really weird to admit, but it's true. Like the better the launch went, the better I felt about my skills as an entrepreneur and I literally felt like, oh, it went well. Now I'm worthy of running a business. But if the promotion was mediocre and we didn't get the results we wanted, I associated the results with my worth as a human. That is so sad. Like when it didn't go well, I would ask myself, what does this mean about me? What is wrong with my skill set that I can get the same results as that person or that person? And it wasn't until I started really assessing the strengths and weaknesses of my approach, and not of me. When I stood outside of myself in, I assessed the approach, not who I am as a human. I was then finally able to grow as an entrepreneur because I could assess the situation for improvement and not bash myself for being too dumb or slow or stupid friends. That is what happens when you are aware that the lesson can and should be teaching you.

Jasmine Star (00:17:59) - That overall improves your self-awareness, which then makes you a better entrepreneur. The fourth reason why failures are necessary is because they improve your decision making skills. Okay, when we analyze our failures. And here's the thing if we're going and we're and we're learning a lot of lessons, right, we feel like, hey, Jasmine, it's been a long line of failures. The failures in and of themselves don't teach you anything, right? The failures happen, and then you have to extrapolate what you're supposed to learn from it. That's the linchpin. If you really want to elevate, you really want to grow, you really want to change, and you're looking back at things don't happen for you. Well, all of those things were trying to teach you something. And if you don't learn what you're supposed to learn in that moment, you're going to have to go through the same lesson again and again. I sat recently with my therapist and I said, you know, I've been working with you now a year, and I feel like I make progress in so many parts of my life.

Jasmine Star (00:18:55) - But this one thing I can't let go of. And so I continuously go through these lessons and I'm asking myself, what am I supposed to learn? But if I continue getting the same lesson, I haven't learned it. So what do I need to do to be more aware of learning when these lessons are occurring? Analyzing. When we analyze our failures and we make adjustments, we learn to approach our decisions with a new thought process and insight. Now it's the process. Like this process. It's going to help us make informed choices, consider risks, and it's going to lead us to be more effective and strategic in our decision making in the future when we are very aware. Oh, here is the lesson again. And then we ask ourselves, what am I supposed to learn from this? We're going to go through the lesson, and if we're aware of what we should learn, we shouldn't face that lesson again. If we come up and we have to face that same dang lesson again, we didn't learn what we were supposed to learn.

Jasmine Star (00:19:50) - No problem. We're better for learning it. But it's the cognizance of saying, oh, all of these tiny building blocks are going to help me build a bridge to get over this particular issue. Now, before we get into the necessary types of failures that we experience as business owners, I'm going to name each one and then I'll break it down like you all know, like, have you been with me on the podcast? And we do these like kind of like deep dive frameworks. I give you a high level and then we dive in each one by one. So the types of failures number one a product or service failure. Number two, marketing or messaging failures, number three operational failures. And number four, the leadership and decision making failures. I've experienced all of these. You know here we go. We're going to get into the reels. We're going get into the goods. And then we're going to get into stories. We're going to get into the lessons. Because at the end of this podcast, I want you to, number one, understand that failure is coming.

Jasmine Star (00:20:40) - Number two, do you accept the terms of the failure? Number three, failure is normal and we go through it all. And number four, when you know what types of failure you're working with in the moment, you know how to work through it faster. So let's dive in. The first type of failure is product or service failures. Now this is a very common type of failure. And it happens a lot when an offer kind of misses the mark. It falls short of meeting the needs or the expectations of your ideal customer. Now this could happen because of lack of market research. Maybe it's not you know, it's not product market fit. Maybe there's misalignment with customer preferences or maybe even unexpected changes in consumer behavior. Okay, this type of failure is important because it shows where improvements are needed. But then when you know that the improvement is needed, well, it should be encouraging because now you get to reevaluate and innovate. A failure or misalignment doesn't mean you can't start over or fix it.

Jasmine Star (00:21:37) - It never does. So let's get into an example. A finance coach, let's call her Amy, launches a premium online course about advanced investment strategies. Now she assumes her audience could be interested in high risk, high return investments. However, after the course was released, she received feedback that her ideal clients were actually needing support with paying off debt, increasing cash flow, and saving strategies for security and stability, the course falls short of meeting her current client needs now. This failure helps her reevaluate her content, and it helps her reevaluate her offers to better align with where her ideal clients are at that moment. This morning, JD and I, we took a meeting and the meeting started at 630 in the morning. You know, like, bless our hearts, y'all. Bless our hearts. So there we are, 630 in the morning. And what we do in this small group of people is we just ideate business ideas. We love to poke holes. We love to slash the ideas. We'd like to talk about industry trends.

Jasmine Star (00:22:34) - We like to be predictive and what it is we're talking about. Think about this, you know, have you ever been to a cafe and you see, like a group of old guys with their newspapers out cup of coffee and like a shared plate of bacon and eggs in front of them, and you look at them and you're like, what did you do with your life? Like, I like what it is that you're doing. JD and I decided that we wanted to be the old, that old group of people right now. And so we're just gathering ourselves around people, and we're just having those early morning chats about business and where the industry is going. And possibly, maybe if we come up with an idea together, can we create it? And so what was happening today was we're having a conversation. And I decided to be very, very quiet. I needed to hear what people were saying. And then the thing I realized was we had hypothesis around a need in an industry, but it was just an hypothesis.

Jasmine Star (00:23:26) - And so I think that if you are trying to build a business or make an offer on the hypothesis, it's going to be really hard. You're going to go through a ton of lessons before you find what actually is working. So you could say, oh, it was a failure. Was it a failure? Or did you not just know enough of the problem you were solving in the industry, you were solving it? The less assumptions you make about a particular offer or service, the less assumptions it's going to be more successful. Because when you say a small group of people have been asking me for this type of thing, you're going to have a much more successful offer. It's not an assumption. We're dealing with facts and requests. So when we look at Amy's example, she kind of did what was happening today on the call we made. She was making a lot of. Assumptions around what her customers wanted, and it wasn't until she offered it that they said, oh, this is really great for you, Amy, but what I really need is help paying off debt.

Jasmine Star (00:24:21) - I really need to increase my cash flow. I'm really not interested in investments right now. I got to do first things first, huh? Cool. The second type of failure is marketing and messaging. Failures in marketing and messaging. Failures happen when a product or service isn't presented or marketed to effectively communicate its value. And this you know, this happens. What I see a lot is happening is unclear messaging, ineffective advertising strategies, or failure to resonate with the ideal client. So what comes to mind here is Pepsi's ad during the Super Bowl game. It was 2017. Now, do you know that this ad, if you remember it, was Kendall Jenner and she joined a protest and then she walked over to a police officer to hand him a Pepsi? It was weird. If you don't know what I'm talking about, like go to YouTube and just put in Super Bowl 2017. Kendall Jenner, Pepsi. Okay, this did not work for a few reasons. Number one, it tried to address serious social issues way too simplistically and far too sincerely.

Jasmine Star (00:25:27) - And two, it suggested that giving a police officer a can of Pepsi could solve complex problems. You know, like, I'm watching this. I was like, wow, this is tone deaf and exploitive in a way. Like it was truly one of those things. And I have not I don't normally watch TV. I know, I know, I'm a little bit rare, but I definitely watch a Super Bowl. I don't watch any football game. By and large. I mean Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift at the time of this recording. I watch now Chiefs games because I just love those cameos. But other than that, I don't watch football. I absolutely never miss a Super Bowl. It is like a thing you would think. But the way that I host a Super Bowl party, you would think that I am like diehard NFL fan. You would think I'm like the next NFL commissioner. The way I host these parties, I watch this solely for the commercials. I live for good marketing. So when I saw the ad, I was gobsmacked.

Jasmine Star (00:26:20) - I couldn't even get to the other ads because I was like, what just happened? So number one, it tried to address a social issue way too simplistically, like, oh, number two, like, let me give you a can of Pepsi and it's going to solve this complex problem. But the third reason why I don't think it worked is using a very famous celebrity in this context. It really made it unrelatable. And the commercial received a ton of backlash and it received a ton of criticism. So the bottom line is the audience simply didn't resonate. That is a marketing or messaging failure. So recognizing and correcting these failures empowers businesses to refine their marketing strategies and ensure that their offerings are presented in a way that genuinely connects with their audience. And you want to know what the backlash and negativity that that ad received was palpable. I mean, Kendall Jenner got hung out to dry, and you want to know what, you could still walk down store aisle and buy Pepsi. You want to know what? Kendall Jenner is still booking the largest endorsement contracts.

Jasmine Star (00:27:15) - It didn't kill them. And it want us to walk away from that. Learning that, I should say, walk away from this, learning that, you know, government or governmental, oh my God, it's funny. Proper grammar. I'm making up words and see, this is why I don't do well in standardized tests, y'all. But you want to know what? We just make up words and then we own it. What I'm trying to say is they bounce back. So can you. So I want to go back and let's extend this a little bit. I want to walk through an example of a marketing and messaging failure using Amy. Remember she's our finance coach. So let's say that Amy launched a new course right. So she takes the feedback and she's like great, I'm going to launch a new course about paying off debt. And she believes this is going to be so much more in alignment with her ideal clients. However, in her marketing materials, she focuses way too heavily on technical jargon in industry language.

Jasmine Star (00:28:03) - Right? Because she's like, I'm just going to assume that it's going to show my audience I'm so legit. I'm well versed, I'm knowledgeable in the finance industry, and this approach makes her audience who they've already told her, we know that you can create this. So her course is about paying off debt. So she's like, great. But then she tries to go in and talk way too high level. And these people are seeking straightforward and practical financial advice. So they feel like, number one, they're not ready for her program. Number two, they don't relate with her as the mentor. They they know her as. And number three, they're just straight up confused about how she can help them. Her messaging just doesn't land. And so it leads to a lack of interest and signups. And so, Amy, she recognizes this marketing failure and reevaluate her communication strategy. She shifts her messaging to emphasize simplified, actionable financial tips and benefits of her service. This adjustment leads to clear communication and a more engaged client base.

Jasmine Star (00:29:00) - So you know the podcast team and I, we want to use this example as, as a thread to show how often these failures exist. And guess what? If Amy remains undaunted and continues to fix the product, fix the messaging, she can now move on to the other things. Like you guys were paying rent. All of these quote unquote failures are simply us paying rent, and we're going to normalize the conversation. So the third type of business failure that are actually good are operational failures. So operational failures are when the internal process or system, like, you know, the inner workings of your business are not running as efficiently as they should. Now, I should say that you're not really focusing on your operational failures until you pass the million dollar mark. I have a firm belief, and it's just me. This is my perspective, is that you can muscle your way to $1 million. Like you could put that business on your back, bring it to $1 million. You can have like 1 or 2 part time assistance and you can get there.

Jasmine Star (00:29:54) - It is absolutely impossible. But what happens is when you start building out full time team members or when other people are start doing what you've always done, they're going to be like, what happened here? How do I know how to do this? And everything exists in your head. As the founder and operator, this is where we start seeing a lot of this happen. So what I've seen operational issues, it could be like workflow design, resource allocation. Maybe you're not properly training your new team members. So what do we do here? Well, we have to recognize and address operational failures because they are crucial for ensuring that your business and all of your resources are utilized in the best way possible. So here's an example of an operational failure. Using Amy, our finance coach, let's say Amy hires a new part time employee to help with client consultations and admin tasks. Okay, so you know, Amy has a massive launch. You know, side note must have been her new refined offer and marketing messaging.

Jasmine Star (00:30:47) - Hey, so all of a sudden she has this great launch, massive launch, and several new clients are joining. And this new part time employees working 40 hours a week over 40 hours a week, which as we know, is definitely full time. So as a result, the new employee is frustrated and struggling to meet the expectations of the rule. This operational failure saying, I'm hiring you as part time and this person is now working over 40 hours a week. It's leading to new clients feeling prioritized and dissatisfied. Now, realizing the importance of clear communication and expectations, Amy tries to resolve this first by offering to revise the employee's role to better align with the demands of the job and include full time benefits. Now, if this person declines, she posts a job for another part time employee to reduce the workload and responsibilities. Do you see how Amy. New levels, new devils. Amy finally got the very thing she wanted, and then a whole new set of quote unquote failures had happened. But Amy's working through it.

Jasmine Star (00:31:48) - The fourth type of failure, or AKA lessons is leadership and decision making. This happens when leaders in an organization make choices that don't lead to the best outcomes. Now, I don't want to share this story, but I think it's important that we normalize failures, our lessons as part of business. In October of 2022, social curator hosted a week long social media challenge. Now, we had hosted very successful challenges in the past, but this time our tech was intended to facilitate a new way of doing the challenge directly on our platform. So in the past, we would do the kind of these ad hoc challenges where we would have a pop up community group, and then we would send emails and then we would say, now log into social curator. There was a lot of steps. And so we wanted to do we're like, hey, everything in tech is going to start and end here on the platform. Great idea. We were over the moon, thrilled with the idea, and I was like, I'm chomping at the bit.

Jasmine Star (00:32:48) - I'm biting my nails. I can't wait to launch this thing we'd spent so much time building out, but that was the wrong decision. Actually, I should back up. Let me just state this very clearly. I made the wrong decision. As CEO of Social curator. Everything that happens is my fault. If I was unhappy about a decision, well, I hired the key leader. Every person who has ever been employed at social curator has gone through a personal interview process with me. I knew who is joining the team. I knew who I hired, I knew the factors, I knew the risks. That decision will always come back on the CEO. I am the leader, so I want to be very clear here and say I made the wrong decision. I should have known that we had to test the challenge before making it public. If I had made that decision, we would have learned early on that we needed to fix onboarding and messaging and enhanced activation for the challenge. Because the challenge, a lot of people who are joining it had no idea what social character was.

Jasmine Star (00:33:49) - And so they landed on a platform where there was no education about what it was, and it was confusing. But I only saw that after we freaking launched it. So I made the difficult decision to close the challenge within the first few days. Okay, so just imagine we spent months building into this thing, this team is like hype to get it out there, and we knew within 48 to 72 hours it was just not going. It was not going to be beneficial. I was so hurt, I was embarrassed. I was upset at myself because I had rushed to make it public. And I don't know if you can hear it right now. I like talking about it like I can still get upset about launching it without testing it. But looking back, I learned so much about what not to do. I learned so much about onboarding and activating like it was an expensive lesson to learn. But dang it, I am so much stronger now. I learned more in that 72 hours about onboarding and activation.

Jasmine Star (00:34:56) - There's this thing called Hotjar where you could see where people are clicking on your site in the path in which they do it. And I am watching a recording of what's happening, and I'm screaming at the screen and I'm like, no, don't do that. Wait, wait, wait, why are they clicking here? What's going on? And I realized. That was 100% a platform problem. I should have made the call to pause it all and had paid testing of this thing. Now, failures like this can have an effect on an entire organization. It could totally impact morale, productivity, reputation. It can affect the bottom line. Most of the time it does so. Recognizing and addressing these failures is really important for making cohesive and effective leadership structures and then decisions. It allows for a more thoughtful and informed approach, taking time. And when you take your time to make these big decisions, it leads to better outcomes. So here's an example of a leadership failure using Amy. Amy hires a new mentor who is adamant that she basically needs to double her prices.

Jasmine Star (00:35:58) - The mentor says this is too cheap. Your profitability margins aren't there. It's time to double your prices. And without careful consideration, Amy raises them. She trusts her mentor. Now, this decision without testing or market research leads to confusion, since her ideal clients pain points are still at a level. Remember they're paying off debt. They're saving for an emergency fund. Recognizing the need for more careful decision making, Amy takes the steps to weigh all of her options research, and then test decisions. The next time she raises her prices so drastically, she will add on a new offer for somebody who is coming in at a higher level with their financial situation. Like, maybe this is where she makes an offer for investing. You know, people will pay more when they're at different stages of their life. Okay, so to recap, before we dive into turning them into lessons, the types of failures we usually experience in business are number one product or service failure. Number two, marketing or messaging failures, number three, operational failures.

Jasmine Star (00:36:55) - Number four, leadership and decision making failures. So now what I want to do we're going to close this out. And I want to get into a simple four part framework for turning failures into lessons. But I want to go over each step. Number one, reflect on what happened first, to acknowledge that a mistake or failure has occurred. You actually have to pause and take ownership of it. It's important to do your best to avoid denial or blame. You know, sometimes people blame like, oh, well, I was launching during an election or the industry changed. They changed the iOS update. Or do not blame other people. Like, well, if that person had just done this, placing blame will make the situation worse and it will slow down the process of turning the failure into a lesson. If you would like to fight for your limitations and not accept responsibility, no problem. It's gonna take you a long time to sit in that place. So after you acknowledge and accept the failure, reflect on what went wrong.

Jasmine Star (00:37:50) - Ask yourself questions like what contributed to this outcome? What would I do differently next time? That is where you start diving in on the lessons, and this is where you start expediting your self-awareness. And then you need to take responsibility. And I think this is like the third time I've said it, but this is something I see powerfully as people grow in businesses much faster. Take responsibility for your role in the failure. Focus on what your own actions and decisions did within that situation, and then you're going to give yourself grace, remembering that you did the best with what you had, and you know now you would not make that same decision and you will not go through this lesson or failure again. Step number two is to assess the lessons, analyze a failure, and then find the lessons and the insights. What did you learn from the experience? Try to understand the underlying factors that contributed to the outcome. So by dissecting the lesson you gain a clear perspective on how to approach you know, if this happens again in the future, what are you going to do when you plan for this? You learn how to create better decision making in the future.

Jasmine Star (00:38:51) - And when you pause to do this, it also helps you look for patterns that may have contributed to the failure. And then you say, oh, I see this pattern coming up. If I break the pattern when I know I'm in the pattern, I won't have to face this lesson again. So step number one is to reflect on what happened. Step number two was to assess the lessons. Now step three is to apply the lessons. In this step you're going to start the transformation from a failure to a lesson. This is where you put what you've learned into action by adjusting your strategies based on the knowledge that you've gained. And then you're going to set clear objectives aligned with your goals. Now this is exactly where the magic happens. This step turns your failures into steps towards future success. This is going to show your dedication to improvement. And guess what? Your team sees this. Now. Step number four is to commit to continuous improvement by measuring progress. Now, I didn't say continuous improvement period.

Jasmine Star (00:39:43) - Right. Because then we're like, but what are we actually measuring? Progress. As long as you're making progress, even if it's like 0.5% difference in the outcome, that's progress. Commit to continuous improvement. This includes implementing changes in your actions and strategies based on your lessons is really important. Like I can now tell the team, if I ever decided to do a challenge, I would absolutely talk and dissect why the last challenge didn't work. The lessons that we learned in a new high. This is about what we're doing. I can't ask the team to do the same thing over again without acknowledging we know what went wrong, and this attempt is our attempt at fixing it. We want to stay open to further adjustments, like in the future, because you're going to gain more experience. And when you gain more experience, you gain more growth. And as you gain more growth, you're going to learn how to do things in new ways. This is all a measurement of progress. Now I know we have covered a lot of information okay, okay.

Jasmine Star (00:40:39) - So in order for us to go out and actually take action, and it's not just me having a singular conversation with you, I want to give a recap because this podcast is only about taking action. These podcast episodes are a labor of love. The podcast team and I pour our guts into these things because we believe that these frameworks, based on lessons we learned, are going to empower you not to have to go through the same thing. So let's go over what we talked about. We're going to start with why failures are necessary for business growth. Number one, they help you build resilience and embrace uncertainty. Number two, they help improve innovation and creativity. Number three, they help you improve self-awareness. And number four, they help improve your decision making skills. Mm. Heck yes. We talked about some of the different types of failures that we experience as business owners product or service failures, marketing and messaging failures, operational failures and leadership and decision making failures. And then we went over a simple four part framework for turning failures into lessons.

Jasmine Star (00:41:37) - Step number one is to reflect on what happened. Step number two is to assess the lessons. Step number three is to apply the lessons. That's the magic one. And number four is committing to continuous improvement by measuring progress. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you would be so kind to leave a review. I know I actually should start these podcast episodes of being like like you know that monopoly part like do not pass go, do not proceed past this point. Like if you do, you know you cannot collect $200. No, no, no y'all, the podcast reviews are total game changers. I promise you 30s of your time. If you have listened to more than one podcast, if you've got one tiny nugget, if you can avoid a failure based on the failures that I shared. So now you're like, wiser, brighter, and more ready, a 32nd podcast review would mean the world to me. It makes such a difference. I say it all the time because it is that important.

Jasmine Star (00:42:31) - You know that song? I think it's by Salt-N-Pepa. I ain't too proud to beg. That's me right now. I ain't too proud to beg y'all a podcast review. Let's go. Thank you for listening to The Jasmine Starr Show. If you would like to send me a personal message, I answer my DMs on Instagram at Jasmine Star. Much love, much gratitude and many blessings. Take care y'all. Lucky.