Setbacks are scary. They’re destabilizing. They shake your confidence in your leadership abilities and make you question your skills as an entrepreneur and an expert.
But they’re also inevitable, and a gateway to leveling up both your skillset and your firm.
Every firm, and every CEO you can think of, has most definitely had a moment in their career when they were hit with a massive challenge. Most have had those moments more than once.
The ones who are still around and thriving today are the ones who knew how to meet that challenge the “correct” way.
Every time I think of a setback, my mind goes back to 2019…
Crisp had started with nothing but $500 to my name and over time grew to a six- and then seven-figure organization. It was every entrepreneur’s dream, and I couldn’t have been happier.
But be careful what you wish for, as they say.
One day in 2019, I woke up to find my company had grown almost overnight, and the systems and processes we had set up were nowhere near capable of supporting that growth.
My team and I were putting in intense and long hours, even coming in on weekends to try and support the influx of new business without letting our clients feel the strain. Soon, members of my team started leaving in droves, saying they felt overworked.
It was destabilizing, to say the least. I started questioning my leadership skills and whether or not I really knew what I was doing. (Truth be told, I probably didn’t then.)
But with each challenge and stress test comes an opportunity to grow and change.
First of all, challenges allow you to learn who’s truly in the foxhole with you.
So many mediocre and non-committed team members could cruise by for months without you noticing, but a challenge brings out everyone’s true nature.
We may have lost a staggering 25 percent of our staff, but I chose to focus on the fact that we also retained 75 percent of them. I now knew exactly who my real, super-committed A-players were, and together we got to rebuilding the systems, processes, and operations we needed to get to the next level.
That year ended up being the best year we had ever had. Plus, we were left with new and improved systems that supported us not only then, but ever since.
It was that challenge that laid the groundwork for what turned Crisp into the company it is today:
One that plans ahead. One that thinks in years, not days. One that ensures it has the capacity to support an initiative before we ever implement it. One that shifted its hiring strategy to vet, attract, and set up the right candidates for success.
I went from being the leader who tried to make everyone happy to a leader who knows that it’s each team member’s job to find motivation and fulfillment in their role.
So while setbacks are scary, stressful, and destabilizing, remember that there’s always a lesson hiding behind them. Every single challenge presents an opportunity to meet it, evolve from it, and come out better than you were before.
Leaders who don’t grow from challenges are those who have failed to learn a lesson from them.
So are you going to meet your setbacks head-on, gather the information you need from them, and change your behavior to come out on top? Or are you going to let the challenges define you and your firm?
Because a challenge doesn’t define your skillset. How you handle it does.
Setbacks are inevitable. How you handle them will determine how resilient and successful you’ll be.
