Business Failure: 26-1-3 record in the ring.
That’s my record in the heavyweight division of business. Three losses. One tie. Twenty-six wins.
What is interesting is that the order matters more than the numbers. The three losses came first. The tie came second. The 26 wins came last. If you know anything about boxing, you know that’s backwards.
Fighters Lose at the End. Owners Lose at the Start.
Look at the careers of the legends. Most of their losses pile up at the end. The reflexes slow. The chin gets softer. Years of punishment, even the punishment they took while winning, finally sent the bill. For a prize fighter, decline isn’t a risk. It’s a schedule.
Business runs the other direction.
In business, the early losses are the ones that knock people out. Roughly half of new businesses are gone by year five. Two out of three never see a tenth birthday. Those aren’t companies that got old and tired. Most of them got hit early and never got back up.
I’ve seen what an early loss does to the person behind the business. Someone walks into the ring bright-eyed and optimistic. They take a beating, or a long grinding stretch that feels like one. And they decide the beating was a verdict. On their ability. On their judgment. On who they are.
That’s the real knockout. Not the loss. The story they tell themselves about the loss.
My Three Losses Had a Legal Name
Bankruptcy.
I’m not telling you that for sympathy. I’m telling you because those three bankruptcies were the greatest gifts of my career. Every one of them taught me something I could not have learned any other way, and I paid full tuition for each lesson.
The tie was my first exit. I sold the company, and the buyer kicked my proverbial ass. It took three years to collect. I got half of what I should have gotten. And three separate times I had to jump back into a business I had already sold, just to keep it alive long enough to get paid.
Technically, that’s a sale. It sure didn’t feel like a win.
Had I been a sane person, or had any other option for creating freedom for my family, I would have quit somewhere in there. Most people would have. I didn’t.
Not because I’m tougher than you. Because I have the same condition you have.
The Creator Gene after Failure
Nobody gets it right out of the gate. Nobody. Not me, not the owners I’ve helped exit, not the names you see on magazine covers. Failure is part of being a business owner, whether it happens a few times, or more times than you can count!
An early loss or a long struggle doesn’t prove you’re bad at this. It proves you tried to build something from nothing, which most people will never attempt. That’s the creator gene. The entrepreneurial gene. If you’re reading this, I’d bet you’re stricken with it too.
Here’s the part a prize fighter never gets: A fighter’s beatings add up against him. A business owner who understands what I’m about to tell you gets stronger, smarter, more efficient, better resourced, and lasts longer because of the beatings.
Advantage in business isn’t luck. It isn’t location. It’s the discovery that every failure carries a code. Crack it, and the failure pays you back.
Three Things That Crack the Code
The code doesn’t reveal itself to everyone. Three things have to be present.
- Stay teachable. The moment you know it all, you’ve started down the road to stupid. Smart operators stall out all the time because nobody can tell them anything. Your last loss is only useful if you’re willing to be taught by it.
- Fall in love with other people’s outcomes. Your clients’ outcomes. Your employees’ outcomes. When the business is all about you, the door to longevity slams shut. The owners who last are the ones obsessed with whether the people around them are winning.
- Build a system that fails small, on purpose. This is the master step. The masters of business know momentum only goes two directions: up or down. You’re always headed one way or the other. Flat is down. So you build a system that produces small, measurable failures constantly, and has a way to repair itself after each one. A hundred cheap lessons a year beats one expensive lesson every five years. Constant micro-failure is the most reliable path up I know.
Notice what that third one does. It takes the kind of beating and/or failure that crushes people in their first business and shrinks it down to something you can survive every week, learn from, and fix before it compounds.
That’s how you age in this sport and get better instead of worse.
Champion or Prize Fighter? Pick One.
If you want to be a prize fighter, quit while you’re ahead. For the uncoachable, there’s nothing ahead but more pain and misery.
If you want to be a champion business owner, the kind who controls and dictates the ultimate outcome, it comes down to two things.
First, be clear on what that outcome is. Not “freedom.” Freedom is a word, not a target. I mean a number, a set of conditions, and a date. If you can’t measure your progress toward it, you don’t have an outcome. You have a wish.
Second, get stronger as you age through failures that are targeted, measured, and architected. Don’t wait for the market to hand you a beating. Design small ones you can learn from.
Still in the Ring-
I’m still in the ring. Fighting giants is something I hope to do for the rest of my life, because there’s no such thing as an ex-entrepreneur. There’s only a lost soul or a redirected mission. Selling a company doesn’t retire the gene. It just tells you where to aim it next.
If you’re building toward an exit, start by seeing your business the way a buyer will, before they ever throw the first punch. Download the free Exit Code Blueprint at exitcodeblueprint.com and find out what’s quietly keeping your number lower than it should be.