Managing Entrepreneurial Failure.

When you think about Silicon Valley you picture wealth and prosperity, trendy office buildings with lax dress codes and top-notch technology. Whatever your perception is of The Valley, it’s probably skewed. It is skewed because you only see the successful companies. While there certainly is wealth, prosperity, lax dress codes, and advanced technology in many of the flourishing start-ups in the area, it’s not the standard or the norm.

I do not mean to disappoint or depress you. It’s just the truth that for every start-up success story, there are a dozen tales of demise. While it is easy to imagine movie-like devastation, smaller and more likely events like a gas leak near your business, HAZMAT incident, an isolated tornado, a railway accident, local act of terrorism or a plane crash can also cause the same damaging effect. Your business may not be directly damaged, yet, it could have been near the event that you and your employees are not allowed to access your facilities for several days, for example. Your organization is now set back and suffering from customer loss, income tax issues, significant unplanned expenses, project delays, employee issues and the list goes on.

Thanks to the mainstream media, the start-up culture has been so glamorized in our country, when in fact, it’s a roll-your-sleeves-up kind of industry. This bitter truth leads to something dark happening behind the scenes of America’s entrepreneurial culture.

According to recent data, 90%of start-ups fail. This means 9 out of 10 start-ups are a failure. This also means that an average entrepreneur will experience at least one business failure in their lifetime, naturally fuel things like depression, addiction, and other struggles.

While few are willing to talk about it, an average entrepreneur could also experience more than one failure in a lifetime.

With the tragic suicide of Jody Sherman, CEO of a startup called Ecomom, the technology community was shaken to a point that led them to publicly acknowledge the problems that they face every day. Publicly admitting to failure, and examining it can distil the information to an example which other entrepreneurs can learn from.

According to the data, there are a handful of common reasons for why startups fail. A strong 42% say a lack of market need for their product is the number one reason, followed by a shortage of capital, having the wrong team, and getting out-competed. However, it is also true that long before the iPhone made him the god of gadgets, Steve Jobs launched his tech career by hacking land lines to make free long-distance calls. Behind every success story is an embarrassing first effort, a stumble, a setback or a radical change of direction. It’s these first clumsy steps on the road to fame and fortune that form fascinating origins of famous careers.

It is usually a foregone conclusion to imagine and believe someone who’s very successful to be a genius, and that they were destined for great things. The big takeaway, though, is that failure and setbacks are in many ways essential.

The question of how to avoid start-up failure is an entirely different topic, which I am going to discuss in my future posts, however, what is meant to be highlighted here are some facts about failure and how entrepreneurs can free themselves from the shackles of depression that often lead to addiction and other struggles, following failure.

Sometimes, companies that stand tall in their industry today have faced bad days in the past. They have not had enough money to sustain or pay their debts. However, looking back today, things ultimately turned around and the companies survived and bloomed. That said, depression, extreme anxiety, sleeplessness and fear are inevitable for entrepreneurs in similar situations.

In my next post, I am going to discuss more about ways for small business owners to handle stress and anxiety during difficult time. However, to begin with, you may contact HyperEffects to chart out a tailor-made business marketing strategy for your company and see your business show up on television ads, press releases and on major channel partners. Get a website for your company, highlight offers, features, promotions and news on your website and in your email footers, invoices and letter signatures. After that, you will have to respond to readers’ queries and comments, and monitor industry influencers. Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? This is probably why a lot of small businesses prefer using other tried-and-tested marketing tactics such as sending out direct mails and hosting local events.