There are few things more stressful than wondering whether or not your business is going to make it.
Clients may be slow to pay, cash flow might be low, and payroll is always coming due. You’ve got team members, some with families, all with bills and responsibilities that you’ve got to take care of. The stress of possibly not being able to do that is monumental.
So it’s understandable if, going through this, you feel like a failure. But you’re not.
You haven’t failed just because you’re struggling. You only fail if you decide that your story ends there.
One of the biggest mistakes we all make as humans is confusing difficult chapters with the end of the book. But success isn’t a destination. It’s a journey, filled with ups, downs, plateaus, beautiful landscapes, and treacherous roads. Being in a scary or uncomfortable stretch of your journey doesn’t mean you’ve arrived — unless you stop and don’t go any further.
Great times will come again, as long as you decide you’re going to make adjustments necessary to survive. That might mean uncomfortable decisions.
You love going out to nice dinners every weekend? Might be time to stop. Nice vacations? Pause them for a while. Maybe you need to go back to eating ramen noodles for dinner, or calling up everyone in your phonebook and asking if they need representation. Or maybe you need to go back to basics and start knocking door to door.
It won’t feel great. But when your business enters survival mode, what you want and what you need become two very different things.
These are the moments when leadership gets tested. Are you willing to sacrifice your comfort to protect your organization?
I remember during the COVID-19 pandemic, Crisp, like every other company, was going through a rough patch. We had to start making some tough decisions to survive. But Jessica and I sat down and decided that laying people off wasn’t what we were comfortable doing. So we made extreme cuts and changes elsewhere to accommodate that decision.
It wasn’t comfortable. But in times of war, leaders do what the situation requires, not what their pride prefers.
Delays only make the crisis worse. The longer you stretch and linger in inaction, the harder those decisions are going to be. Every week spent hoping things magically improve is another week your cash reserves shrink, opportunities pass by, and problems grow larger.
Every great comeback — and every great success story — starts with a refusal to quit.
If your business ultimately fails after you’ve exhausted every option, learned from every mistake, and gave everything you had, I still wouldn’t view that as failure. That’s experience, lessons, and wisdom. That’s circumstance as opposed to inaction.
Real failure happens when you convince yourself there’s nothing left to do before you’ve actually tried everything. When you become the victim of your circumstances instead of taking ownership of your response. You can’t control the economy, the competitors, or unexpected setbacks. But you can control whether you’re willing to make the sacrifices necessary to give your business another chance.
Every entrepreneur eventually reaches a point where they wonder if they have what it takes. The answer isn’t found in whether you’ve experienced setbacks but in what you do next.
Because as long as you’re still looking for solutions, learning, and moving forward, you’re not failing. You’re simply in the middle of the story. I encourage you to keep going.
