Embrace Your Inner Loser?
Sounds like the sort of message you’d see in a cheap self-help book doesn’t it. But I’m sick and tired of the wilting flower brigade out there who think that failure is finite; that it is a place from which none can return; an embarrassment, and something so horrific that it’s not worth taking risks for fear of becoming a victim of it. Don’t shy away from failure, embrace it, learn from it and come back all the stronger. The private equity investors that you’ll face when seeking finance for your next venture will respect come-back kings at least as much as someone who has never failed, and certainly far more than anyone who has never even tried.
Fear of failure is a paralysing trait with the power to hold us all back. From an early age we are taught to win, to be top of the class, to pass exams and to conform to a social stereotype, which in Britain is one of a reserved, polite and well educated winner. Of course those who strive to become stereotypes like these can just as easily end up as cleaners or janitors in later life, just like school drop-outs can become millionaires and captains of industry.
Pop quiz (as I’ve already shown respect to the Americans let’s use one of their phrases as well), would private equity investors have been clambering over one another to help Henry Ford with funding when he started out? What about Walt Disney or Henry John Heinz? All built companies that have today grown to become multi-billion pound international businesses that are leaders in their fields. But it wasn’t always that way for them. Each of them suffered major business catastrophes, their ventures failed and they were declared bankrupt before they bounced back even stronger than before.
- Henry Ford – With the financial assistance of three prominent politicians of the time, who acted as private equity investors, Ford set up the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899. But production was so slow that just two years later the company was bankrupt. Later that very same year he set up another company which he left after a few years to set up the Ford Motor Company, and the rest is history.
- Walt Disney – It’s difficult to imagine the film world without Disney’s influence, but he almost didn’t make it. He would have seriously benefited from the sort of assistance private equity investors could have offered him when, after being cheated by a distributer, his first company – Laugh-o-gram – went under due to lack of capital after just a year. Five years later he was back with Mickey Mouse, and that was the start of the rise and rise of Walt Disney.
- H J Heinz – At age eight he was selling vegetables door to door, by nine he was growing, bottling and selling his own horseradish sauce. After business school he and a friend set up a company to sell his sauce, but six years later this company went bankrupt. One year after this he founded another company with his brother and a cousin and this went on to become the H J Heinz Company that we know today.
Private equity investors pride themselves in looking past the veil and seeing the real story. You see private equity investors have often succeeded against the odds, and to reach their dizzy corporate heights they have had to learn a thing or two about reading people. They are used to presentations of the stereotypical ideal pitch, and they are adept at seeking out the truth in order to know who to back and who to avoid. Private equity investors know that attitude and passion trump perfection on paper only every time. So don’t hold back your failures, explain how they have made you stronger, more determined and more able to achieve your goals this time around.
The Americans, and this is something you won’t hear from me very often, have it absolutely right. Yes, to generalise, they can be loud and brash with no sense of reserve, but, among other things, that’s what you need in business. If you are not going to shout about your achievements who else will? If you do not shake every hand vigorously and put on your winning smile and bounce back from every knock then you’re doomed to a life of mediocrity and this is something that private equity investors run a mile from for fear of it being contagious.
Fear of failure goes hand in hand with apathy. One tells you that you may not be good enough to succeed, the other revels in the opportunity to never even try. Everyone has these evil little voices in their heads (by the way if you’re actually hearing evil little voices then walk slowly away from the computer screen and call a professional) telling them that risk is bad. But a strong few learn to ignore these doomsayers of their own making and follow their entrepreneurial aspirations. Almost all private equity investors out there have themselves been faced with that very same choice, to stick with their mediocre lives as someone else’s employee or to strike out on their own and face success or failure with the same steely determination.
To truly become masters of your own entrepreneurial destiny you too must fight the fear and embrace your failures.
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