December 28, 2022 - Entry 1008: Learning From Your Mistakes
When you own your own business, you’re going to make mistakes. Don’t worry, this is completely normal. As a business owner, you’re going to wear lots of hats and do lots of things you’re not even remotely qualified to do. You will make mistakes – everybody does it when they’re starting out.
What separates average business owners from successful business owners is the ability to learn from these mistakes and adapt their business practices in response. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’re doomed to keep repeating them until you do. A useful practice is to conduct an autopsy of your mistake - review everything that led to it and develop a plan to prevent it from happening again.
A Useful Example
I recently started this blog full of high hopes and aspirations thinking it would be easy to create content, develop the website’s SEO, and find a way to monetize my writing. I managed to consistently publish several blog posts over the course of a few weeks before running out of steam. Once I stopped consistently writing it was difficult to get started again.
I didn’t want to let everything I’d invested so far go to waste, so I took a step back and tried to look at things from a different perspective. I conducted an autopsy on what I’d been doing so far and tried to figure out what was wrong with the situation. I’ve decided to share the results of the autopsy as an example so you can do the same in your business.
Initial Analysis
First, I took a step back and analyzed the situation. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to identify the problem. I started a blog and then stopped writing blog posts. Also, nobody was reading what I was writing.
Once I identified these problems, I needed to determine their causes so I could develop a solution. After reviewing everything that I had done, I identified two key shortcomings: 1) a lack of content planning; and 2) a lack of marketing. I reasoned that these two shortcomings could explain why I wasn’t generating content and why nobody was reading what I had previously written. I believed that by addressing the cause of my problems I could correct the trajectory of the blog and put me back on the right track.
A Failure to Plan…
A failure to plan is a plan to fail goes the old adage. In this case, I didn’t plan what I was going to write in any meaningful way. The inspiration for my first article came from a project I was working on, and my “plan” was to write about issues I came across at work and I set a goal of publishing once a week. Because I didn’t have a real plan to develop content, it seems obvious in hindsight that some week in the future I wouldn’t have an article ready to publish.
To prevent this from happening going forward, I’ve implemented two major changes. First, I developed a plan for content creation. In November, I published the first article in a 15-part series called “How to Start a Business in 14 Steps.” Instead of waiting for the universe to send ideas for articles through the ether, I now have my next 14 articles planned out.
Second, I’ve decided to reduce the frequency of the articles from once a week to once or twice a month. I was underemployed when I started this blog and writing once a week seemed more manageable then. Publishing a couple of times per month is much more realistic under my current circumstances and will allow me to put more time and effort into each article. Knowing what resources are available for your business and having a plan to effectively utilize them is crucial for any business owner.
If a Tree Falls…
For somebody writing a blog that people are presumably meant to read, I have been extremely quiet about it. I’ve mentioned it offhand to a few people and I’ve made two social media posts on my personal LinkedIn and Facebook accounts announcing the launch of the blog and website but beyond that I haven’t done anything to publicize it further. This would be fine if I was keeping a diary, but for a blog it’s a critical failure.
This blog is meant to help entrepreneurs and small businesses owners build and expand their businesses. If I fail to market the website and nobody ever reads it, then I’ve failed at what I’m trying to achieve. Even worse, if nobody reads the blog, there is pretty much zero chance of monetizing it.
To address this issue, I’ve developed a plan to start marketing the blog, mostly through social media. I’ve created social media accounts for The Startup Guidebook and plan to start posting and interacting with others on various social media platforms. I’m also looking for marketing professionals to partner with and build a mutually beneficial relationship to obtain professional marketing services at low or no cost (contact me if you’re interested!).
Conclusion
When you start a business, you’re going to fail. In fact, you’re going to fail a lot and you’re going to keep failing until you learn from your mistakes and change the way you operate your business. The key is to not overreact, calmly review the situation, and develop a plan to change.
In this article, I’ve shown you how I identified problems and developed a plan to change the way I operate this blog as an example of how you can analyze and address your mistakes. You may decide to do this another way, but the point is that you take a good hard look at what went wrong and create a plan to fix it. Once you’ve implemented your plan, you need to evaluate its efficacy and adjust your plan until the problem is resolved. All you need to do is to stay committed to working on the problem until you develop and implement an appropriate solution.
