Today, Eric explores the role of failure on the road to success.
Stay tuned as he clarifies why failure is part of the entrepreneurial journey, what you can learn if something goes wrong, and how you can keep moving forward.
Failure
When you build a business and take risks, things do not always work as planned. Failing is the price all entrepreneurs must pay to embark on their journey toward success.
Failing Does Not Make You a Failure
If your business fails, it does not make you a failure. When something goes wrong, you need to separate what happened in your business from your personal identity, and focus instead on what you can learn from it.
Learning
It’s essential to learn from every mistake you make. There is always something valuable to learn from costly mistakes that can help you prevent an even bigger one in the future.
Grit
Having grit does not mean you must keep going with something that is not working. You must always stay committed to your goal, but you might need to change the route you take to reach it.
When to Give Up
At times, you might have to give up on a bad product, a bad strategy, a toxic employee, or a market that does not want what you are selling. One failed approach, however, does not mean you should give up on your bigger mission.
Timelines
You can start a business at any age. Your timeline is your own, so there is no reason to measure your progress against anyone else’s.
Social Media
Social media tends to show the exits and successes—not the struggles that came before them. When you compare your behind-the-scenes with somebody else’s press release, you get a distorted picture of entrepreneurship. Struggling does not mean you are doing something wrong. It is simply part of building a business.
Learn From What Went Wrong
When things do not go as planned, you need to focus on the facts. Look at what happened, what was within your control, which assumptions turned out to be wrong, what you would do differently next time, and what system needs to change to prevent the same problem from happening again.
Unexpected Outcomes
Your failure could lead to an outcome you may not have anticipated. Some of Eric’s own difficult business experiences ultimately led him to make better decisions and find new opportunities.
Progress
To progress, you need ambition, learning, grit, and failure. Without learning, you will most likely repeat your mistakes, and without grit, you may even quit before allowing your attempt enough time to work properly.
Getting Back Up
You cannot avoid setbacks when building a business. What really matters is getting back up and becoming a little smarter each time.
Connect with Eric Rozenberg
Listen to The Business of Meetings podcast
Subscribe to The Business of Meetings newsletter
Listen on: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
“Entrepreneurship is not about avoiding getting knocked down. It’s about becoming very, very good at getting back up, and a little smarter every time.”
Eric Rozenberg
Full transcript of episode 336 of The Business of Meetings podcast, a solo episode with Eric Rozenberg. Lightly edited for readability.
Hello and welcome to a new episode of The Business of Meetings podcast. Today I want to talk about failure and the road to success, because I do believe that the road to success is actually paved with failure.
The problem is that we’re always talking about entrepreneurship, about the success, about the story of everything after it worked. We see the exit, we see the success, we see the bestseller, we see the million or billion-dollar company, or the standing ovation. What we don’t see, and what we don’t talk about, is the years when nobody cared. The bad decisions, the rejections, the cash flow scares, the product that failed, or the moments when the entrepreneur wondered, what the hell am I doing? Failure, to me, is not the opposite of entrepreneurial success. It’s actually part of it. It’s part of the journey. It’s part of the price of admission.
The thing is, I’ve never heard of any entrepreneur being introduced by someone saying: they nearly ran out of money three times, hired the wrong people, launched something nobody wanted, lost a major client, questioned every decision they made, and eventually figured it out. Yet that is often closer to the reality. And we confuse the result with the journey. Once someone becomes successful, we rewrite their history, or they even rewrite their history themselves. Every decision suddenly looks strategic. Every setback becomes part of the journey. Every risk looks calculated. Absolutely not. You know, it’s like if you bought a house in South Florida in 2021, and suddenly you find that your house has doubled two or three years later. You can always say, “Yeah, I timed the market.” And I would call it BS. You were just lucky. When you are actually living the risk, when you’re actually living the journey, when you are an entrepreneur, you don’t know how the story is going to end. And that’s the difference.
And there are many examples that we know of. We know about Michael Jordan, who was rejected from a high school team, and we know what he became afterward, and he always says, “I was successful because I failed and failed and failed.” You have Steve Jobs, who was pushed out of Apple, the company that he co-founded, in 1985. Can you imagine, psychologically speaking? It’s your baby, you’re really attached, your personality is attached to the company, it’s your identity, and then somebody one day says, “We don’t want you anymore.” He described that moment, saying it was devastating for him, but also it led him to build NeXT and Pixar. And eventually Apple bought NeXT, and Jobs returned to Apple, and we know the story. And so the interesting lesson is not “get fired and you’ll eventually become a billionaire,” but rather: your biggest professional failure may not be the end of the story. You simply cannot see the next chapter yet. And I love this philosophy of thinking: bad thing, good thing, you never know. Keep going. Keep working. Keep focusing on your dream. And it’s at the end of the road where the success lies.
But failure itself doesn’t make you a failure. And I think it’s very important to differentiate between “my business failed” and “I am a failure.” Those are two completely different statements. Entrepreneurs often merge the two, because our identity becomes wrapped up in our company. Revenue drops: I’m failing. A client leaves: I’m failing. An employee quits: I’m failing. A competitor beats us: I’m failing. No, absolutely not. Something happened. Now you have the information. What are you going to do about it? So the question is not “am I a failure?” The question becomes: what are you going to do with the data? What are you going to do with the information you have?
And quite frankly, we can talk about many different examples of something that didn’t go as planned, but the entrepreneur learned from it and actually made it a big success. One of my favorite examples is Elon Musk and SpaceX. SpaceX went from three consecutive rocket explosions and near bankruptcy in 2008, I believe, to the biggest IPO in history. So imagine: you have your project, and the first rocket explodes. You’re not from the space industry; I’m sure a lot of people are laughing at you. And then the second one explodes, and then you have the third one, and it explodes again. I mean, this story is just amazing: every time, what Elon Musk and his team learned, and what type of success they’ve made of SpaceX today.
So you can see the cost of failure as probably something like a tuition. When you lose $20,000 on something that didn’t work, you can look at it and say, I lost $20,000. Maybe. Or you could say, you know what? That taught me something that prevents me, maybe, from making a half-a-million-dollar mistake later on. So, was that really a loss, or was it tuition to learn? I’ve paid both. I’ve paid the cheap tuition and the expensive tuition. And every entrepreneur has. And the goal is not to eliminate mistakes. That’s how you learn, and quite frankly, it’s impossible to eliminate all the mistakes. The goal is to stop paying the tuition for the same class twice. In other words, you can make a mistake, but don’t make the same mistake twice.
And recently, losing money with a company that was pretending to help me get leads, and train setters and closers: I wasted six months with them. And they have an amazing process, and a lot of testimonials, and blah, blah, blah. With the result of zero leads. Well, I’m extremely frustrated, and trust me, if you want to know more, let me know. I’m not going to advertise for them, on the contrary. But that also taught me a lesson, where I thought, you know what? I am not going to outsource that. And I hired Paula, a new head of marketing, because that’s the lesson I learned from losing a substantial amount of money with people that pretend a lot of things but don’t deliver anything. Again, you’re learning. Bad thing, good thing, you never know.
And I can go on with many stories. For those who know James Dyson: he famously went through 5,000, if not more, prototypes developing his bagless vacuum. Think about the number of prototypes. It’s even worse than Edison when he invented the light bulb. So, the point is not persevering for the sake of it, okay? Because quite frankly, people would say perseverance at some stage could then become stupidity. And that’s one of the hardest questions when it comes to entrepreneurs: when do you stop? But grit is not blindly repeating the same thing. Grit is staying committed. Staying committed to your goal, staying committed to what you want to achieve. And in the meantime, instead of going the straight route, maybe you take a detour, turn left, turn right, go back to the main road. You keep the destination, but in the meantime, you know that it’s not a straight line. And that’s very important to remember.
To me, you know, when people say “never give up,” I think it’s horrible business advice. Sometimes you should absolutely give up. Give up on a bad product. Give up on a bad strategy. Give up on a toxic employee, who might be bringing you a lot of sales but is creating a terrible culture. Give up on a market that does not want what you’re selling. Give up on the assumptions that have been proven wrong. But don’t automatically give up on the bigger mission because one approach failed. So, having grit is not being stubborn. It’s also analyzing the facts and making decisions. Stubbornness would tell you: this must work. Grit will tell you: I will figure out what works. And that’s a huge difference.
And you have so many examples of failure, and people who learn. I’m not going to talk about Walt Disney; everybody knows the story of Walt Disney, but that’s another example. But it’s also what you think about your business, and when you want to start. Coming from a country and a culture where entrepreneurs are seen extremely badly, are seen as crooks, people exploiting others, being here in America is just amazing. You can start anything at any age. In other words, your timeline is really your timeline, and nobody else’s timeline. Think about Colonel Sanders, who started Kentucky Fried Chicken when, I believe, he was in his 60s. That’s something very inspiring.
But the problem today, more than ever, is the way that social media is describing entrepreneurship. If you look on LinkedIn or Instagram, you see posts like, “I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve sold my business,” blah, blah, blah. Usually people don’t post, “I’m thrilled to announce that we missed payroll projections, that our biggest salesperson resigned, that the product launch bombed, and I spent the last three nights wondering whether I completely screwed this thing up.” That’s not the type of post you see on social media. And so, we’re comparing our behind-the-scenes to somebody else’s press release, and that’s insanity for me. Don’t ever look at what the others are saying about their success or not, because you never know what’s happening, and how they got there, more importantly. And that, to me, is extremely dangerous, especially for younger entrepreneurs, because it creates some sort of expectation that struggle means that you’re actually doing something wrong. Absolutely not. Struggle is part of the journey. It simply means that you are building a business. So, don’t pay too much attention to social media. Focus on what you are doing, and learn about what is important in the analysis of what you’re doing. And the cycle should be: you fail, you analyze, you learn, you adjust, you try again. And not: you fail, you complain, you repeat, and you fail.
So, there are five important questions that one should be asking themselves if things are not going the way they would hope for. The first one: what actually happened? And don’t become emotional or find excuses. It’s just the facts. What actually happened? The second question: what was within my control? It’s your business, it’s your decision. You own the story, you own the decisions, you own the process. The third one: what did I believe that turned out to be wrong? It’s the assumptions. Adapt those assumptions and correct them. Understand what you would have done differently, so that the fourth question is: what will I do differently the next time? That’s the learning part. And then finally, and most importantly: what system needs to change so this doesn’t repeat? That’s how you scale your business.
And so, I just want to share with you three personal failures, and what I learned from them.
The first one: I sold my business for the first time in 2009. I was extremely happy. I was breaking the solitude of the entrepreneur. I was joining a holding company that was invested in a completely different industry. They were going to grow that industry by buying other businesses in that industry, and I was going to grow by buying one agency per country and build a European agency. That was great. That was the belief. Besides the financial aspect, which was great, it was a group of friends. Again, I was breaking the solitude of the entrepreneur. And actually, what happened two years later is that the other company, from the other industry, which was already existing when they bought me, actually went belly up. The inventory was extremely badly calculated, and I believe as well the seller of that business was absolutely a crook. The inventory had not been evaluated the right way. Long story short, I had to buy myself back, because I was the only business which was profitable in this group. So, was that a failure? The project in itself, yes. But it taught me a lot about trust. It taught me a lot about not necessarily believing people because they had a past success, because you never know. But at the end of the day, I never regretted it, because I learned, and I found, thanks to that, and without going into too many details, my new business partner, with whom I developed my corporate event agency, which was a blessing in itself. So, again: bad thing, good thing, you never know.
The second example is the moment that I really, really doubted myself. We’re back in 1998, two years after I started my first business, and I have a client asking me to provide him with a full program and 30 tickets to the semi-final and the final of the largest soccer tournament in the world, in Paris. And I trusted a woman, who was also a director of a very well-known professional association, who pretended she had the tickets. I trusted her. We wired an outrageous amount of money. I had the feeling afterwards that she didn’t have the tickets. And for a month, I was doubting myself: that I had trusted that person, that my business was two years young, and I was going to go belly up. And, again, a story for another time, but we were one of the two agencies in Belgium that actually delivered all the tickets to the client. And we ended up with a magnificent program, with the semi-final, with the final, with a police escort in Paris on the day of the final, and on the Friday, two days before the final, the concert of the Three Tenors under the Eiffel Tower. I can tell you, that’s the end, and it’s a beautiful end. But for six weeks, I couldn’t sleep. I went to see every single person I could in Belgium and France. I had all my energy spent on that, and I was really doubting myself, and said, maybe this is not going to work. But I never stopped until I found a solution, and we had an amazing outcome.
And the third example, that I shared earlier on in this podcast, is when I hired this company that pretends to bring you a lot of leads, that has a lot of testimonials on their website, that has an amazing selling process, into which I fell. Quite frankly, the result, months later, was actually zero leads. Waste of time, changing CRM. I mean, long story short: really, really, really wasted my time, wasted my money. But afterwards, I decided I was going to hire someone internally. So, again: bad thing, good thing, you never know. I’m not going to thank them, but the outcome was great, if you want, with the decision I took, and it taught me a very valuable lesson.
So, as we’re getting close to the end of this episode, I just want to share with you what I think is the real equation for success, for progress. And it’s based on four elements. You need ambition. You need failure. You need learning. And you need grit. Take the ambition away, and you’re simply surviving. Take the failure away, and you’re probably not taking enough risk. Take the learning away, and you’re just repeating mistakes. And take the grit away, and you quit before compounding has time to work. So, you need all four: ambition, failure, learning, and grit.
And so, the thing is not that if you’re building a business, it is going to be easy. I can tell you, if you’re building a business, you might have success, but no one can promise you success. What anyone can certainly promise you is that you will fail. Something will not work. Something will disappoint you. Some of the decisions that you make, you will regret. You will lose a client you thought you couldn’t afford to lose. You will launch things that nobody buys. And there will probably be days when, quite frankly, you wonder: why did I ever decide to start a business? Why did I decide to become an entrepreneur? And I had the same with the last venture that I have been building, this coaching business, helping people in the meetings and events industry, including Eric AI. I love it, and I always said that I would never start a business from scratch, and here I am again. So, that’s the journey that you need to enjoy.
And so, the question is not whether those moments of doubt will come. They will come. The question, when you’re faced with those moments, is how you are going to react. Because at the end of the day, entrepreneurship is not about avoiding getting knocked down. It’s about becoming very, very good at getting back up, and a little smarter every time. That’s grit. And that is the real road to success. And this is my wish for you.
If we can help you in any way at Event Business Formula, of course, feel free to let us know. But I can tell you, being an entrepreneur is the greatest thing that you can do in business. It’s not for everyone. And if you want to be an entrepreneur, there is no better country than the United States of America to do that. We’ll see you at the next industry conference, and in the meantime, I’ll see you next week for the next episode of The Business of Meetings podcast. Thank you.
Thank you for tuning in to The Business of Meetings podcast. I hope you found today’s episode valuable. If you enjoyed the show, the most important thing you can do is leave a review and share it with your colleagues. It really helps spread the word. I truly appreciate your support. And if you’re ready to take your business to the next level, don’t forget to visit eventbusinessformula.com to learn more about how we are helping event business owners like you. Thanks again for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
