The importance of resilience as an entrepreneur

It’s a well known fact that what goes up, must come down. Although the aim in business is generally to keep on growing and expanding, sometimes things don’t go to plan; share prices fall, creditors run out of patience and assets end up being sold off. It’s really frustrating to watch what you’ve worked so hard to build stripped away, but ultimately there’s no reason why you can’t start building it up again.

Taking it in your stride

Business failures can easily come to feel like personal failures, so it’s important to get a bit of distance and recover your perspective. This isn’t the whole of life, what’s more, it’s something that almost every successful entrepreneur has been through at one time or another. The big difference between average people and those who get to the top is simply that the latter group don’t stop trying. If you can learn to take the bad times in your stride and keep on working to make things good again, you’ll have gained the most important trait any business person can have – resilience.

The art of recovery

This may seem easier said than done, but there are practical points you can focus on as you try to get back on your feet. One is to cut down the number of tasks you’re trying to deal with. Many people struggle in business because they overextend themselves at a personal level, trying to keep too many things on the go at once. Simplifying life, and simplifying work procedures, makes it easier to focus effectively on what really matters. For similar reasons, if there are personal disputes getting in the way of things running effectively, it can be best to cut your losses and split.

Focusing on the little things that your business does well can be a great help in getting things to run more efficiently. It can also help you to break down the challenges ahead into small, manageable sections rather than getting overwhelmed.

Recovery success stories

If getting back up still seems impossible, give some thought to those who have achieved it before you:

  • Christopher King – the founder of multi-million dollar business empire Cruzach Inc. saw his early landscaping business fail, and went on to lose everything in the 2008 crash before getting into the medical sector helped him shoot to the top.
  • Robert Bonnier – Freepages had been mired in legal battles and struggling to get by for five years before Robert Bonnier took over in 1996. He renamed it Scoot and used aggressive marketing, together with a new European partnership, to revive it; it went on to make millions.
  • Kathryn Minshew – the founder of failed women’s networking site Pretty Young Professionals learned key lessons about advertising and went on to launch The Muse, which now attracts nearly two million users per month.
  • Ben Huh – after losing software analytics firm Raydium to the dotcom crash, Huh recovered his courage and bought the website I Can Haz Cheezburger, which now has page views of half a billion per month.

These stories show that bouncing back is far from impossible – and if these people did it, you can, too!