7 Strategies For Bouncing Back When You Make A Business Mistake

Nobody wants to fail, but even the brightest and most successful people have faced failure at some point in their careers. Life is a constant see-saw. Most of us teeter between our achievements and our mistakes.

Some mistakes are greater than others. Blowing a vital presentation, missing a big sale or losing out on a business opportunity certainly stings, but you know you’ll be able to bounce back. Then, there are times where you may have missed something even bigger. Your mistakes threaten to crush everything you’ve worked so hard to build. Then what?

Whatever you do, don’t lock yourself into despair. Everyone falls short from time to time, so your ultimate test is how you deal with failure. Pity and self-loathing won’t fix anything, neither will pretending as if nothing happened. Entrepreneurs are expected to hit the shot out of the park each time and if that doesn’t happen, you’re going to face a bit of a tough time.

Here are 7 strategies for bouncing back when you make a business mistake:

1. Evaluate Your Company Culture

It’s easy to overlook the role your company culture plays when it comes to success, but a positive culture will lead to much better results, less employee turnover and increased revenue. If your employees are happy, they’ll handle challenging problems faster and even outperform their peers by 20 percent.

Consider ways to improve the culture at your company, such as more open communication and asking for your employees’ opinions and ideas. By making a few small changes to your workplace culture, you can make a big impact on your bottom line.

2. Accept That Making Mistakes Is Part of Life

Embrace your mistake. Don’t try to hide it. Failures don’t somehow work themselves out. They take work, so ignoring the problem only digs a deeper pit. Remember that mistakes are fundamentally part of the human condition. Some degree of making mistakes is inevitable every time we step outside our comfort zone.

Many of the most successful people throughout history had significant mistakes and failures as well as excellent accomplishments. What sets them apart is how they channeled that failure into something positive. As long as you can accept and embrace your mistakes, you’ll be able to bounce back and do just fine.

3. Look For A Positive Outcome

Mistakes are going to happen, but we cannot live life in fear of mistakes. When mistakes do happen, it’s important to think about why that mistake happened and to learn how to avoid making it again. It’s also important to find the positive outcome that came from making that mistake. Bouncing back is hard, but you bounce back with more experience and more intelligence than before.

4. Own Your Mistake

If you’ve been honest about your misstep and learned from the experience, it’s still critically important to take ownership of the situation. Taking responsibility for your mistakes is key to showing others you are an accountable individual who lives with integrity. It might seem counter-intuitive, but putting your mistakes front and center will help restore others’ confidence in you. In turn, this will enable you to regain support as you try again.

5. Get Rid Of Underperforming Products & Services

It’s never easy to abandon products and services that you’ve spent time creating and marketing. Just like you need to purge yourself of your previous business plans, you also need to eliminate anything that’s underperforming.

When you continue to provide these products, they only distract from your real moneymakers and take up time you could use for development. Set a hard line regarding profitability and cut anything that doesn’t reach it.

6. Make Sure It Doesn’t Happen Again

The worst mistake in business and in life is the one that you’re repeating. Don’t repeat the same mistake twice; make sure to not only learn from your mistakes but to implement processes and have discussions with your team to ensure they don’t happen again. Also, don’t dwell on it; we all make mistakes. Positive thinking goes a long way.

7. Take Action & Move On

This step is the biggest test to see if you can rebound from your failures. What solutions do you have to rectify the problem? How can you offset the situation to avoid or lessen harm to others? How do you get things back on track?

Deal with your mistake head on and then advance to the next thing. Start your next project, look at new ventures or consider a new task at hand. Remember your hard-learned lessons as you keep moving forward and you’ll emerge stronger and far more resilient than before.

Conclusion

No one likes to fail or make mistakes, but success in business depends on how you bounce back from tough times. When you learn from your business failures and move forward with your newfound knowledge, you’ll have the right tools to improve your startup and find long-term success. In this post, I shared with you 7 strategies for bouncing back when you make a business mistake.