Angels Den Blog

It’s the reason why many a business idea never sees the light of day, its tendrils of deceit can hold your business idea back from true greatness and it has the ability to kill your confidence in your business idea dead if you allow it to.

All too many new business owners allow fear of failure to destroy their entrepreneurial spirit. First, to even get off the starting blocks with your venture you must either ignore or dispel this fear or your business idea will be relegated to the backwaters of your “things I wish I’d done in my life” mental filing cabinet. Once up and running the sad fact remains that a very high percentage of business ideas will not survive their first few years. However, what separates the successful entrepreneur from his or her peers is that they are the ones who pick themselves back up again, dust themselves down and move on, undaunted, to their next challenge. The majority will be left behind, crushed by their failure, never to venture into the entrepreneurial mindset again.

It is all too easy to look at failure as a celestial sign that you should not be running your own business, and if you think like that then you probably shouldn’t be, but many of the most successful business people in the world have suffered catastrophic failure at some point in their lives and still gone on to bigger and better things. True entrepreneurs embrace failure, learn from the experience and become all the stronger because of it.

Probably the most well-known and iconic entrepreneur that we have in the UK is Richard Branson – famous for his Virgin brand and world-record-breaking attempts. A regular in the Sunday Times Rich List and worth several £billion now, his business ideas have not always been blessed with such success. Less than a year after he had launched his first Virgin store in Oxford Street, he was arrested for selling records that had been declared as export stock. He could have taken this as a warning and disappeared from sight by accepting a nice safe office job, but not Branson. He went on to launch his record label which he eventually sold to EMI in 1992 for $1bn. Not bad for a dyslexic school kid who left school aged 15, and had to ask his mother for help to pay back Customs & Excise when he settled out of court.

Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Trains, Virgin Records, Virgin Megastores, Virgin Media, Virgin Comics and so many more. Branson has certainly had his fingers in a lot of pies in his life. However, not all of them have been successful. Virgin Cola was launched by Branson in the early 1990s and heralded as a major competitor to the global duopoly of Coca Cola and Pepsi, but it suffered a very quick ousting from the US market shortly after its launch. Virgin Vodka is another venture that was less than successful and I believe is now is only available on Virgin Airways flights.

His tenacity to push on in the face of adversity is legendary in his record-breaking attempts. When he first tried to break the world record for the fastest Atlantic Ocean crossing by boat in 1985, he capsized in British waters to great media amusement, but in 1986 he beat the world record by two hours in his second attempt. Between 1995 and 1998 Branson attempted to circumnavigate the globe by hot air balloon only to once again fail dramatically and very publically, and then to be beaten by another team attempting the same adventure. None of this seems to have made a dent in his determination to attempt new business and personal challenges.

If you have a business idea that you are convinced will make the world sit up and take notice then stick with it, believe that you can achieve great things no matter what others say, and embrace your failures as merely stepping stones on your road to success.

Author: Bill Morrow, co-founder of Angels Den – the nebula of entrepreneurial spirit where new business stars are born every day formed by the joining of innovative business ideas with Angel investors to build bright futures for everyone concerned.

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