039: Tactic Tuesdays: Failing without it being Fatal

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Welcome everyone to the Brand Fortress HQ podcast.

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Today we have another Tactics Tuesday episode, and what we're gonna talk about is how to fail without it being fatal, and I think this is something that you know, all three of us have a lot of experience with and I think is really important as entrepreneurs in brand building, in e-commerce and, quite frankly, in any other endeavor, which is, you know how do you fail at something and fail, often without it, you know, crushing your business, causing huge problems or having, you know, significant long-term impact.

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So with that, I'm actually going to turn it over to well, I guess I'll ask you guys do you guys have maybe a good example in mind that kind of exemplifies this concept?

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I would say that if you're an entrepreneur that's making any money at all, then if you don't have an example of a failure, then you are certainly in the minority, right?

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I think you know I've been in e-commerce almost 30 years and I've had plenty of successes but there were, you know, but but plenty of failures too, like when I so I've had two primary businesses in e-commerce and then I've had some kind of ancillary businesses.

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Like really early on I was selling for another company and I had put up my own website and it was e-commerce, but it was really much more of an affiliate kind of arrangement.

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It was technically multi-level marketing, but essentially multi-level marketing is very much affiliate marketing, and so that was my business model for quite a long time.

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I had my website, everything funneled to the corporate site and people would place their orders to the corporate site and you know people you know would place their orders, and so in that model there's a lot less to go wrong.

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So you know you don't control as many of the moving parts, but at the same time, like even that setup, like maybe that's a good, a good starting point is that you know, when you're not in business really completely for yourself, like you're an affiliate, let's say right.

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Being an affiliate, let's say right, being an affiliate for a single company is in and of itself probably a bad plan, because if that company screws things up and goes out of business, you've got all your eggs in that basket.

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So I think that would be my first recommendation is just to be very careful about you know as much as you want to have your primary root business and you don't want to be focused on 12 different things.

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There is a certain amount of you know practicality to not having all of your eggs in that basket to the degree that if it fails, you lose all your eggs, and I think leverage for me, is normally the key to that.

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I feel like a lot of businesses over-leverage themselves on either a particular business plan or a particular strategy or tactic that they wanna implement that they think is gonna be a success, and they just put too much into it.

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I'm okay with failing because I know that anytime I've got a strategy or a tactic that, I'm okay with failing because I know that anytime I've got a strategy or a tactic that I'm going to employ, I've already thought through how much can I afford to lose on that and I'm not going to spend any more than what I can afford to lose If I, you know, in that way, if it goes sour and I have to assume that it might, you know I'll be okay.

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Yeah, I think that that's an appointment point there is anytime.

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You talk about, you know, not being afraid of failure.

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It's, and you know, it's a lot easier when you have that, that backup plan, and in some cases that could be, you know, like you said, not having your all your eggs in one basket, but in other cases that could be, you know, because it's one of those things where you might have an amazing opportunity or amazing brand that you want to scale really quickly and you're really seeing things move in the right direction.

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You know, one of the other ways that I've kind of, you know, capped that downside or, you know, made sure that it's not fatal, was essentially by keeping, you know, money in the bank that I don't touch.

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It's essentially my emergency savings.

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So that way, you know, if everything was to go to zero, I've got a certain amount of time to where I can figure things out.

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You know, for me that's, you know, at least six months to a year.

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So then I feel a lot more comfortable where, if I've got something that's really moving in the right direction, I don't have to, you know, I don't have to worry about something going sideways or that failing and then I'm stuck with nothing and, like you said, you know just being over leveraged, where I don't have time to figure out what's next.

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If I have that backup, whether it's in the form of cash or another business, you've got time in order to figure out what's next without having to scramble.

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So I think that's really helpful too when you think about this concept of what is failing without it being fatal, look like without it being fatal, look like.

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What are your thoughts, matt, on the leverage side of things?

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I think it's really kind of an important conversation, because a lot of entrepreneurs that you talk to and it depends a little bit on, let's say, the category vertical that they're in in terms of what type of entrepreneurship they're operating in that there are a lot of individuals who are, in many respects, heavily leveraged and they use that essentially as part of their business plan, and then there are a lot of entrepreneurs who choose not to be very leveraged.

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What are your thoughts on that from your perspective, in terms of how business has been for you people that you've talked to other entrepreneurs that you know what?

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do you think?

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about that.

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Well, I mean from a leverage standpoint.

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I guess it depends on what kind of leverage.

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For me, pretty much all of my businesses up until now have been bootstrapped, where I had to be really, really scrappy about how they started, how much budget I had to get things off the ground.

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So for me I learned really really fast and me for me learning fast.

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And I guess, going back to the word failure, if we can go back all the way back to the beginning, I mean for me I had to reframe what that word meant at early on into my entrepreneur career because at my first business, you know, I, I there was no blueprint, there was no YouTube videos that taught you how to start a meal prep business.

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I mean, I didn't have any experience in food, the food industry, I didn't have any experience building a business from scratch.

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So everything that that business became was because something failed.

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And again, how I kind of thought about those failures after the first couple of banging my head up against the wall was I learned something.

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And as long as I learned something and I learned how to prevent that from happening again, then it wasn't a failure.

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And, like I said, I mean you know it wasn't a franchise and I imagined going through that business, what running a franchise or buying a franchise would look like, because of all of the hurdles that I had to go through to make our business work the way that we had intended.

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You know, like I again, I, when I started in this in the meal prep space, I didn't.

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I didn't know what the running up the back end of a kitchen looked like, and what I didn't realize is that our kitchen operation looked a lot more like a catering business.

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And it happened, because of the all of the different obstacles that I ran into, that if you were looking at it from a 30,000 foot view, you would have called it a failure, but it was the way that we had to fit around a peg, into a square hole in order to get it to work.

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So you know, for me, the way that I leveraged my what.

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The leverage that I had was the experience that I brought from failing from quote unquote, failing and it helped me to prevent that from happening again.

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And when I went into another type of a scenario where I needed to figure out the solution for something, I had that experience to pull upon.

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That I tried it this way.

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It didn't work, so I think I may want to start this way, with it having a higher likelihood of succeeding and not being a failure.

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So that's really what I leveraged in the beginning was just failing fast and figuring out how to fix that and prevent it from happening again.

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Yeah, and I think that's, you know, important too is that to kind of differentiate these in the sense of you know I feel like there's, you know, a strategic level of this, in the sense of you know, make sure that you have a backup, and usually a backup to your backup.

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So that way, I mean, really the way most businesses fail is that you know you just run out of money.

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So you know, make sure that you don't run out of money and you know you can pretty much work your way through a lot of different things if you've got, you know, at least a little bit of cash in the bank in order to be able to pivot.

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So you know, that's a strategic perspective.

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But then I think it's also important to look at it from a tactical perspective, and that can look like a couple of different things.

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The first thing that comes to my mind is sticking with that financial theme is and we're starting to experiment with some of this is taking a portion of the budget and depending on what your business looks like and what your margins look like, it could be different but taking maybe it's 10% or 20% of your budget for product development or marketing or something of that nature and saying, hey, we're going to spend this on something that is risky or that is not proven in order to see what happens, and we're just going to assume that there's going to be zero return on that and we're going to be super happy if there's great return on it and we're going to be totally fine if there's zero return.

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I think back to if you listen to the episode that we did with Abe Tamale, where he talks about TikTok and he's like hey, the advantage of being at TikTok is that you know or at least right now as far as TikTok shop is is that you know you've got a one in 1000 chance that your product just goes absolutely viral.

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Now, is that a high probability?

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No, but your probability is zero if you're not there.

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So that's an example where there's a lot of asymmetric reward and it's almost like getting the golden ticket and just assume you know, if you go into that, assuming you're not going to get that golden ticket, but you're still putting yourself, you know, in the pool at least, and giving yourself a chance to get lucky.

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I think that there can be a lot of power in that mindset.

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Yeah, I think the one of the things that.

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Yeah, I think the one of the things that.

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So right now with Amazon, I think, because fees are so high and margins can be so slim that one of the I mean and we've talked about this before, but I think it's it's one of those areas that you know relates to this idea, relates to this idea of can you fail without it being fatal?

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And that is, if you have the margin, you can overcome almost anything.

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And really that comes back to that same thing of do you have cash in the bank?

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Margin combined with cash flow means cash in the bank, because that's another problem too.

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Like you can have some margin, you know, maybe more than the average bear, let's say, and still not necessarily have strong cash flow, although if you have strong margin, you certainly have a much better likelihood of having strong cash flow than somebody who doesn't have good margin.

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But there are ways to build cash flow into a business that don't necessarily rely on a really strong margin and that's, you know, making sure that you've got terms with your suppliers and you know if you structure things and you organize things properly so that you know money isn't going out faster than it's coming in.

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You have opportunity, you know, say 60 to 90 days maybe, to pay for the inventory that you're already selling and bringing in cash flow from that in and of itself is a big help in terms of making sure that the failures that you have aren't fatal and assuming that you're going to fail.

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I mean I enter every test every time I'm entering into new territory with a new ad campaign or, you know, whatever it is.

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I enter it with the assumption it's probably going to fail because, reasonably speaking, 80% of the stuff that I try fails At least to the degree of.

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I want it to accomplish X and it didn't accomplish that.

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It may not cost me a ton of money.

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And it didn't accomplish that.

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It may not cost me a ton of money.

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Failure doesn't necessarily always cost a ton of money, but failure means it didn't serve the purpose that it was designed for, that we were aiming for.

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But at least you know, if I've got cashflow and I've got that margin, you know I can take those risks, I can assume failure, and if it's not, then that's icing on the cake and you know we can move forward with it.

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But cashflow combined with with margin I think are the are the two easiest solutions to that idea of avoiding, you know, fatal failure.

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And there's new opportunities now you know, for cashflow, I mean, that's, that's something that didn't have, you know.

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We didn't have, say you know, five or six years ago, because now there's services like Parker and things like that, you know where you can get.

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It's much easier now as an Amazon seller to get, say, line of credit.

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You know 30, 60 days.

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You know line of credit and use it to pay suppliers that maybe ordinarily you'd have to pay by wire with with money you have now and it gives you that extra 60 day window.

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And if you happen to have 60 day terms with your supplier, now all of a sudden you've extended it to 120 days.

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So there are ways to really improve your cashflow that didn't exist not all that long ago.

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Yeah, and I think the other thing too is so, again, I think there's an opportunity to try these things both at a strategic level, but also at a very tactical level.

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So what I also think about because we do this, you know quite a bit for brands that we work with, which is, you know, testing out different, you know titles and product messaging and that type of stuff in order to test, click through rates, to test conversion rates and all those.

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You know the various aspects of a product and the reality of it is is that I think for some sellers, especially if it's you know a product that has been doing well for a while, it can be nerve wracking, quite frankly, to say, okay, well, we're going to try this other keyword or you know we're gonna, you know, test something out on this listing and it may increase our conversion rate or it may not increase our conversion rate.

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So even those and those, you can iterate a lot faster and test a lot faster, and I guess you know one of the things that I see constantly is is that it's generally not you know your well.

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There's a number of cases where it's not that first time you tested, or even the second time you tested.

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But sometimes the third or fourth time where you've tested, you know different main image or a different title or something like that, where you really start to see significant results, whether it be your conversion rate, your click through rate, you know, whatever it happens to be in order to really move that particular listing forward, that has an impact.

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But most people kind of give up after that first time.

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They're like, hey, I tried this, it didn't work, Rather than what I learned from it.

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How can I try?

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You know, what else can I test out of this based on what I learned and you know, test it again and again.

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We've talked about that A lot of my biggest failures came from me thinking that I knew what was best for my main image or what was best for my title, and in a lot of cases it wasn't, and that was what I needed to learn is that, yes, in a lot of the categories that I sell products in, I am the consumer, but still I don't have the same eye that a consumer does when they look at Amazon, Like I think.

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Being a seller for as long as I have, I completely change how I look at products on Amazon and I don't shop like the normal consumer, so like I don't see the things that they do.

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So that's usually.

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My biggest failure is that I think that my title is going to sound like the best worded in this way and it's people don't even understand what the heck I'm talking about.

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So like that's that was what I had to learn to.

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I can skirt failures a lot faster If I just let the data decide, do a split test, let the data decide and follow the data, as opposed to this is what I think that it should be.

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I think it's actually one of the biggest benefits of split testing especially if you haven't really done much of it is that it teaches you, especially if you haven't really done much of it is that it teaches you you don't know.

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You don't know because the number of times I mean we talk about you know failing without it being fatal, the number of times that I have run a split test on something an image, a title, a landing page, whatever it was and I was absolutely confident that the change that I was making was going to have a significant positive change conversion rate, click through, whatever it was, the number of times that not only did it not improve things, but it was worse than what I already was running.

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I couldn't even begin to count.

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I mean, it's dozens to hundreds of times that that has happened.

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And so the whole idea that I could trust my judgment as being the sole arbiter of whether this is going to succeed, or fail is really utterly ridiculous, and I think it's probably one of the things that makes for the best entrepreneurs and those that are the most successful is those that recognize.

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The market will tell me whether I'm right or not.

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Let's try it and find out.

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Let the market tell me, and I'm just going to receive the information that they give me and I'm going to act on it, as opposed to I know what's best, and this is what's going to happen, and I'm not even going to test it.

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I'm just going to assume that it was the right way.

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Yeah.

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And I think there's some.

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You know, I think about this at least at the tactical level.

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If we're talking about Amazon, it blows my mind the number of brands out there that are not using manage my experiments on a regular basis, because it's such a good tool for allowing you to test out you know, different titles, different main images, things that really have a big impact on your listing that, especially if you have a big catalog, I completely understand that you can't test every product all the time, but at least prioritize maybe a couple of products a month and look at how can I improve the title, how can I improve the main image or other aspects of your listing in order to increase conversion rates.

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Unfortunately, they don't do click-through rate.

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I really wish that they did as part of managing my experiments.

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That would be nice.

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Maybe they'll come at some point.

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So, yeah, I think that's an easy one.

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The other one that we've been spending more time with that, I will say, is more complicated but has a bigger impact and, quite frankly, kind of the same thing I've been surprised with the results is price testing.

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So you know, I think that we get trapped in this concept of especially as time goes on and Amazon gets more competitive, that a lower price is always better for sales volume and those types of things, and the reality of it is is that, yeah, that's probably true 70% of the time, but there's still 30% of the time where you can increase your price and it can actually lead to more sales volume.

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For you know a few different reasons.

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I mean the first is the perceived value of the product, but then the other is is that, quite frankly, you just have more money at the end of the day to spend on?

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You know, advertising and improving your listings, and you know other things that you can provide value to your customers that you're not able to do if you're, if you don't have the margins for it.

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If you're a seller that's been trying to hold the line on price as Amazon continues to raise fees and as PPC continues to climb, your margins have been getting slimmer and slimmer and slimmer, and the slimmer that margin is number one the closer you are to a potentially fatal failure.

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But also, as you said, it limits you in terms of what you can do, what sort of creatives you can run and how many you can run, and that sort of thing.

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So if you're not paying attention to the rise in expense and accordingly making adjustments to price to make sure that your margins remain good, then you have a problem.

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The other thing I think in relation to that price testing is that I think there's a twofold strategy there.

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Sometimes, price in and of itself will change the perception of your product in terms of the quality level and whatnot.

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I would say that it's likely, though, that if you're going to make any sort of significant change to the price, one that, realistically, is going to change somebody's psychological perception of your product, right, like if you're selling a product where everybody else is selling at $20 and you've been selling at $23 and you decide to increase to $25, you haven't changed anything in terms of consumer perception of the quality of your product.

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It's when everybody else is selling at $20 and now you're selling at $40.

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You know there's where that distinction.

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You know people are paying attention.

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They're like, well, why is it $40?

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Right, but that's where that second piece comes into play, that if all you do is make the change in price and you don't take any time to step back and think about how different is the potential consumer that I am now marketing to at a $40 price point versus a $22 price point or a $25 price point, then I think you lose out because the person who is going to see that $40 and not just simply look at it as being too expensive, but is actually going to take a moment to decide is there a reason that it's $40 where everybody else is $22?

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You have to think about who is that customer that's actually going to take the time to think that through and what potentially is a different message that I need to be telling that customer than the person that I was selling at $25.

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That's potentially a much different message and if you don't potentially change that messaging, you may lose out on the benefit of that price increase and you might not see that change in perception because you're not catching the right customer.

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Yeah, yeah.

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And that's the thing.

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Is that Go ahead?

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Sorry, John.

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Well, I was just gonna say that's a great point.

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Well, two things there.

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One, recognizing when you're jumping into a whole new price category and looking at that from either customer perception, but then also how much value add.

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So, like Bradley Sutton did a great job in the interview that we did with him of talking about his coffin shelf and how, basically you know, in order to make the margins work and to be where they were, they had to add something to that product and in doing that, they also significantly increased their price in order to make it work.

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So there's definitely something to be said for that.

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The other thing that I would say is that, for people that are listening out there also, don't undervalue what it means to go from even a 10% to 20% price increase.

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So let's talk about the example that you gave Mike of $20 to $25.

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Well, if you've got an additional 20% margin, all that margin goes right to your bottom line, so that allows you to do a lot more.

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So let's say that you were at a 30% margin before.

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Well, if you had another 20% of that, now I'm at a 50% margin.

00:23:09.563 --> 00:23:11.266
That's a whole different ballgame.

00:23:11.266 --> 00:23:24.788
So, even those incrementals, maybe you're not able to sustain an additional 20% margin, but you might be able to sustain an additional 10% margin and that can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line.

00:23:24.827 --> 00:23:30.346
So I just want to make sure I pointed those out in that, because I think it's so important for folks that are listening.

00:23:30.346 --> 00:23:33.953
Well, it's even more significant for somebody who has a low margin.

00:23:35.482 --> 00:23:52.384
If your margins are pretty slim, that differential going from, say, $20 to $25 could double your margin, right, I mean depending on how you're selling the product, and so it's much less significant on the consumer side than it is on your side.

00:23:52.384 --> 00:24:03.712
So the lower your margins are currently, the more you should be looking at that possibility of raising your price and just how much you might be able to raise it, because that change in margin for you could be massive.

00:24:04.933 --> 00:24:22.683
One way to fail faster if we're sticking with the price increase example, I mean Amazon whether it be Amazon or tools that leverage Amazon's data gives us as much information as we need in order to make at least somewhat informed decisions.

00:24:22.703 --> 00:24:30.872
I mean, in my category, in a barbecue accessories category, there's a lot of products that are inundated with Chinese manufacturers selling direct, and they're selling it for a fraction of what the rest of us are selling for.

00:24:30.951 --> 00:24:42.424
But I mean, I know I am so intimately familiar with the search terms that drive sales for our products that I know the price points of each one of those search terms, and it took a while for me to learn that.

00:24:42.465 --> 00:24:54.630
But now that I know that you know, there are search terms that sound very similar to each other, just an extra word that seems inconsequential, but the price point changes $4 or $5 per unit in that category.

00:24:54.630 --> 00:25:01.553
So I know with that search term I have a better chance of increasing my price and still converting at a pretty high clip.

00:25:01.553 --> 00:25:31.970
So when you think about making decisions like this on Amazon, like raising your price, for example, there is enough data out there to look at in order to make an informed decision to where you can get to an educated answer a whole lot faster just by looking to see what's already there and if you see search terms in your search that it's a higher price point, there's a less likelihood of failing by raising your price in that and there's enough data for you to show you that before you even even actually tactically raise the price.

00:25:33.071 --> 00:25:34.614
And maybe you adjust your listing right.

00:25:34.614 --> 00:25:40.041
Like I mean, as an example, let's take, let's take our category, we'll take our pool poll, for instance.

00:25:40.041 --> 00:25:46.984
There are a number of terms that people search for and they're certainly not nearly as heavily searched as as a lot of the other terms.

00:25:46.984 --> 00:26:04.467
But commercial pool poll, professional pool poll, things of that nature, somebody who's searching for that, they already know that a poll that's being sold to pool pros or commercial users is going to be considerably more expensive than a poll that's being sold to residential users.

00:26:04.467 --> 00:26:06.955
So they expect that higher price point.

00:26:07.518 --> 00:26:41.232
So, depending on the differential in the number of searches, let's say, for a category of search terms that maybe focus on that product in a particular way, you might change your entire listing to focus directly on that particular category of search terms and double your price or triple your price or whatever it is, and you may end up working out you know way better doing that Because, again, if you double your price, you may triple your margin on that product and you're selling to a customer who recognizes the value of it.

00:26:41.232 --> 00:26:44.410
You know, at that price point, make sure, of course, you're selling a product that's worth it.

00:26:44.410 --> 00:26:46.926
You know that they're going to feel like they still got the value right.

00:26:46.926 --> 00:26:54.550
But there's certainly they're going to feel like they still got the value right, but there's certainly a case to be made for the possibility of doing that.

00:26:54.550 --> 00:27:01.556
Or creating a brand new listing, another ASIN that targets that category of search terms and changes the listing in that way.

00:27:01.556 --> 00:27:03.060
Yeah, that's a great point.

00:27:03.541 --> 00:27:12.303
Well, I think we've kind of covered what it means to fail without it being fatal at the strategic level, talked a little bit about the tactical level.

00:27:12.303 --> 00:27:27.448
This might be this probably a good place to kind of pause on this topic for now For listeners, as we kind of wrap up on it, is there one piece of advice that you give to people that are listening on how to fail without it being fatal?

00:27:28.329 --> 00:27:37.369
Well, for me, I would change your mindset on fail being a four-letter word and know that failure.

00:27:37.369 --> 00:27:48.445
As long as you learn from it and you don't make the same mistake twice or you improve on your decision-making process because of the failure, then I don't think it's a failure at all.

00:27:48.445 --> 00:28:01.304
And that's really what I had to learn that early on in my entrepreneurial career because, like we were talking about at the beginning of this, I do have some experience in the failure department, but it's resulted in a different way of doing business down the road.

00:28:01.304 --> 00:28:05.201
That makes it easier for me not having to worry about that mistake the next time.

00:28:06.784 --> 00:28:07.104
I think.

00:28:07.104 --> 00:28:10.529
I think psychologically that's that's probably a big deal.

00:28:10.529 --> 00:28:13.595
Right, fear of failure can be fatal.

00:28:13.595 --> 00:28:37.731
If you're an entrepreneur and you're afraid of failure, that will eventually be fatal to your business because it'll cause you not to do things that you should do, not to try things that you should try, and not to arrange your business and structure your business financially and otherwise in a way that provides room for those failures, because you're going to shy away from them.

00:28:37.731 --> 00:28:39.744
So why structure your business to account for them?

00:28:39.744 --> 00:28:41.529
Right, if you're going to shy away from them?

00:28:41.529 --> 00:28:45.471
I think something that I heard Hermosi say a while back that I really liked.

00:28:45.471 --> 00:29:00.471
I don't remember exactly how he said it, but essentially the idea behind it was if, if you're looking at something from a law with with a long enough time horizon, then the the way that you can guarantee you won't fail is just don't quit.

00:29:01.692 --> 00:29:24.309
As long as you keep playing the game, you haven't failed, and I think right, I mean that's really the key right, like, if you choose to keep playing the game and you set up the parameters of the game so that you still have chips to play, you still have some money somewhere, then you can't fail, at least not fatally.

00:29:24.309 --> 00:29:34.248
And so I think that's really the key you have to bring yourself to the point of not being afraid of failure and recognizing that it is a step forward.

00:29:34.248 --> 00:29:53.605
I used to tell when I was in that multi-level marketing company I had dealers that worked underneath me affiliates essentially and our business model at the time was a lot of dealers would go to local shops to sell it was a synthetic oil infiltration products that we sold.

00:29:53.605 --> 00:30:00.575
They would go to local auto shops to sell them on the product at wholesale, and most of them had never done any sales.

00:30:00.575 --> 00:30:02.361
They didn't really know, and so they were afraid of it.

00:30:02.942 --> 00:30:12.644
And essentially I would just tell them go to the small shops first and assume that you're going to fail like, walk in the door, let them ask the questions.

00:30:12.644 --> 00:30:25.688
You're not going to know the answers to their questions, but as soon as you leave the store, write down what the questions were, write down what your answers were, write down how you failed and then go research what the right answers are and then go to the next one and go to the next one.

00:30:25.688 --> 00:30:36.691
By the time you've done that, you know 10 times, you know all the questions that pretty much any auto parts store is going to ask you, and so you've learned from those failures because you probably didn't sign them up.

00:30:37.039 --> 00:30:37.200
You know?

00:30:37.200 --> 00:30:45.986
I mean, if you're going to look at not signing them as a customer as a failure, then you know okay, you didn't sign them, so I guess that's a failure, but it's not fatal because now you've learned what you need to learn.

00:30:45.986 --> 00:30:52.414
You know to go pitch the big one because now you know the answers and I think that's true with everything you know you're going to learn those things you pick up.

00:30:52.414 --> 00:30:56.740
You know, just like Matt said, every failure is a learning experience, as long as you look at it that way.

00:30:56.740 --> 00:30:59.971
And then it can't be fatal as long as you keep playing the game.

00:31:01.119 --> 00:31:10.989
Yeah, yeah, and I think you know back to what you were saying earlier, mike, I think is you know a Earlier Mike I think is a really important takeaway for folks, which is a lot of it's about setting your expectations.

00:31:10.989 --> 00:31:19.457
You know 80% of especially, anything new is going to fail, yeah, and that's okay, at least in the short term.

00:31:19.457 --> 00:31:37.162
And again, you know, repetition definitely helps and understanding that that first you know 10 places you walk into the first 10 products that you launch you may only have one or two that actually work out and then over time you'll get better at it to where maybe that's only half of them work out.

00:31:37.162 --> 00:31:44.332
So just going into that with that mentality, especially when you're doing something new, that 80% of the time it's not going to work out.

00:31:44.332 --> 00:31:48.265
So allocate your expectations and your resources accordingly.

00:31:48.786 --> 00:32:01.182
And I would argue that most entrepreneurs that are successful probably did succeed at the first thing they tried, because most people don't push through that.

00:32:01.182 --> 00:32:02.666
For me, I was fortunate.

00:32:02.666 --> 00:32:09.125
The first thing that I kind of entered into I was fortunately successful at that gave me the confidence to move forward.

00:32:09.125 --> 00:32:18.692
Most individuals, if they failed at that and I might even fall in that category had I failed that first time, I might not have continued in that entrepreneurial journey.

00:32:18.692 --> 00:32:21.249
I might have just walked away and got a job someplace.

00:32:21.249 --> 00:32:23.426
So don't be that guy.

00:32:23.426 --> 00:32:29.612
Assume that you're probably going to fail, even though most entrepreneurs probably succeeded on that first try, which is why they continued.

00:32:29.612 --> 00:32:30.357
Don't be that.

00:32:30.357 --> 00:32:32.203
Know that you're probably going to fail, even though most entrepreneurs probably succeeded on that first try, which is why they continued.

00:32:32.203 --> 00:32:32.318
Don't be that.

00:32:32.318 --> 00:32:33.007
Know that you're probably going to fail.

00:32:33.007 --> 00:32:34.263
Be willing to fail and walk through that.

00:32:34.263 --> 00:32:39.645
You'll probably succeed at an even higher level than most of the other entrepreneurs out there because you failed the first time.

00:32:40.587 --> 00:32:41.851
Yeah, all right.

00:32:41.851 --> 00:32:55.980
Well, I think this is a great place to wrap for today, and I would just encourage the folks that are listening to this to think about what can you test in your business, whether it be something big at their strategic level or something really tactical that we talked about.

00:32:55.980 --> 00:33:11.185
As far as testing on Amazon, whether they'd be pricing or conversion rate or something of that nature on your product in order to move your business forward, because I think the more testing that you do, you're going to be shocked by how quickly it moves your business forward.

039: Tactic Tuesdays: Failing without it being Fatal

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