What to do When Things Go Wrong in Business!

When we talk about things not working out, what do we mean? When I talk about it, I mean not getting the project that you want, losing a client or things just don't go as expected. You might have really wanted something and were working hard to get it, but you just didn't get the gig. Sometimes, things don’t end the way we want them to. In business, that can feel really hard.

Unfortunately, we might experience these kinds of things regularly and we have to become resilient to them. We have to learn about building that resilience and being able to manage it and move on from it. It’s easier said than done because our initial reaction is a natural reaction of disappointment and upset, what did I do wrong? It doesn’t take much to spiral into a negative mindset cycle of “I'm not good enough”. “Should I have even started this business”? “Am I even good enough to do this”? “Why did I bother”?

It's really hard to see any other perspective because you're so emotionally involved and connected to your business, and you can't help but take it personally when something happens. I understand that but a big part of the process when things do go wrong is acceptance and resilience around it and adapting. It's okay to feel shit. It's okay to feel sad. It's okay to feel disappointed. It's okay to feel all of those things. But what's not okay is to lose yourself down that rabbit hole of wallowing and blaming yourself and feeling sorry for yourself even if it has had a big impact on your business.

I want you to feel those emotions, process them and allow yourself to accept them, you need to do this to be able to recover from them. In business, the quicker we allow ourselves to recover, the more resilient we are. The more adaptable we are, the more our business moves forward, because what we don't want to do is allow something to define you or your business. So if you've worked really hard on getting a massive project or a huge client that you've been wanting to work for, for ages, you put a lot of time a lot of effort, a lot of resources into it and it doesn't work out, we need to know what to do next.

Thinking about all the reasons it went wrong stops the progression of our business. There might be lessons you can learn and there might be opportunities to develop, but don’t allow it to eat you up. You have to chalk things up experience. Perhaps you were not the best person in the room for that job. You might not have been as qualified in a certain area as the next person.

Another business might have been more aligned to the organization and their values. It might just be that they got on better. It might not necessarily be personal, the client might leave because the goal is to go and work somewhere else. Don't make it really personal. It's okay for things not to work out.

It's okay to learn from these things. It's okay to grow from these things.

What I really want you to realize is it's not okay to allow these things to define you. You shouldn’t stop progressing in the area that you want to. There are two kinds of implications that I want to talk about today. Let's start with you because without you there is no business right? Your mindset and how you behave and react fundamentally, is what impacts your business and your business's growth and how you move on from these kinds of things.

When things don’t go your way, I want you to firstly be grateful to yourself that you were either brave enough to put yourself forward or successful enough to win the client in the first place. Just look for the gratitude. You will soon realise that it's not all negative. We need to look for the positives within the situation.

Don’t fall into the I'm not good enough cycle. it just wasn't the right time for you. The biggest takeaway for you is learning. What have you learned personally from this? Take time and acknowledge that if you reflect on something immediately after the event, you are reflecting on the wound, not the scar.

Check back in, and touch base with how you're feeling after a week or after a month. How are things progressing? What are your reflections? When I talk about the reflections I mean how did you manage situations? How did you present yourself How could you do things differently to help in the future and, I don't necessarily mean the practical learnings of how can I improve my service to get the gig next time or how can I put a better proposal together to ensure I get chosen? I mean how did you manage your work-life balance throughout the process? How did you work with the clients? How did you show up and what was your energy like? What are your personal reflections?

That's not necessarily a reflection to think of how what did I do wrong? Or I need to do things differently. It could be a reflection of you were incredibly happy and it just didn't work out in the end and we need to accept that this is okay because these things are out of our control. We can’t choose what happens to us, but we can choose the reaction we give it. Reflecting on these situations can sometimes bring awareness to ourselves and uncover potentially limiting beliefs or biases that we didn't know we had.

Ask For Feedback

This is one where I would say approach with caution. If something didn't end well, you might be opening a whole can of worms asking for feedback. But depending on the situation, if you didn't get the gig or if a client left, the only way you could grow the business from this is by asking for feedback. As a leader of the business, it's your responsibility to do this and ask specific questions about what happened or why did the client leave? Why did you choose somebody else over my business? Get really clear and be grateful that people are giving you that feedback, be appreciative.

Remember, feedback is somebody else's perspective. So if it's going to be constructive and add value to your business, brilliant, if it's going to be negative and not add value, you need to decide what you want to take away from that. At some point, you might want to redo this with a different outcome or you might want to attract these kinds of clients again, with a different outcome. So you need to really learn and be brave and ask for feedback. Unless you're brave enough to ask for this, you're never going to develop and learn from it and you're never going to grow and be able to achieve those things next time around.

There is no point in having a knee-jerk reaction. We want to respond in an intentional, thoughtful way that will give the best reaction from ourselves and our business. Be kind to yourself, give yourself some space and, allow yourself that time to get a clearer perspective of it.

What is the impact when things go wrong?

When things go wrong there might not be anything immediate that you need to do. However, you might need to think about things like was this in your budget? Was this in your plan? Had you planned resources for this? How does the business move forward from this? You might not need to think about things that need to happen immediately. But if this was part of your growth plan for your business, it's no longer there. What then replaces it, how are you going to grow your business? What does this mean for the longevity of your business? So think to yourself, what needs to happen next?

It might be that you need to take action straight away. It might be that actually, we were working with a client, who was quite a key client, we reserved a lot of time for them. They've now chosen to leave our services, what needs to happen next? Who do you need to speak to? You might need to go out and find some more clients to replace the one you lost immediately. Whatever it is, ask yourself; what are the practical steps that you can take to recovery?

If you're stuck in this why did this happen cycle, that's not going to lead to the right decisions or help your business to recover. So we need to recalibrate within the business. We need to understand the impact and we need to know what action needs to be taken. We need to get a plan in place to move forward.

When something goes wrong, don't allow it to stop you from growing. Don't allow it to stop your business from progressing. It does not define you.

It's a learning opportunity and an opportunity for growth in your business journey. I want you to acknowledge and recognizing that otherwise, it's going to prevent you from achieving what you really want to achieve in your business because of this one thing that happened and yes, we can learn from it. Yes, we can adapt yes we can grow.

Work on yourself, work on your business and continue to grow.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you soon!

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