Focusing on success is a crucial part of becoming, well, successful. But ignoring the failures does us all a disservice and ignores what it really takes to succeed: grit and perseverance.
You can learn about my successes here, but it might be more interesting to see what I have failed miserably at below. Note that this resume will certainly continue to be updated over time.
Cheers!
Shannon Jean
Company Fail: OnDemand Investments. Still in college, I figured I knew just about everything I needed to know about making money. Bought and sold tractors and heavy equipment. With a $10K investment from the parents, I proceeded to burn through it by forgetting I actually had to eat and pay rent while I built the company. Upside: got to drive a 40-ton crane from the SF Bay Area to San Diego – that was fun.
Judgment Fail: A few years out of college and trying to hold a tiger by the tail with our fast-growing company, MacResQ, I made a bad judgment call about business associates and shortcuts. Said shortcuts wound up costing me a cool $1M to get out of, and I noticed I was getting some new gray hair. Upside: Got to meet some very cool lawyers.
Accounting Fail: After a successful merger with a midwestern company, I thought it would make my life easier by giving up control of the accounting side of our business. Yes, you read that right. After battling over this issue for 4-years, I would sell my interest in the combined company for…wait for it, a buck. Upside: life got way better after I left.
Company Fail: Got a little greedy when a public company offered to buy our DealBrothers business. I went back one time too many to try and get the price higher and proceeded to make the deal champion mad enough to lose enough passion for the deal to walk away on the last day of due diligence. Upside: I had a lot of extra money…in my head…for a little while. You can hear more about this failure in this episode of the Small Business Show.
Company Fail: TechRestore Canada. Trying to offer overnight repair services with population centers that are on opposite sides of the country – bad idea. Partnering with people that didn’t really believe in the concept – even worse idea. Upside: Vancouver is a lovely place to visit.
Company Fail: TechRestore EU. Combining a complicated parts supply chain from China with distribution through Europe of low-margin commodity repair parts for phones, iPads, and Macs has got to be a great idea, right? Nope. Upside: met some great folks at DHL that remain friends to this day.
Company Fail: ReBound TV. Flat-panel TV’s are just big laptops, right? Surely we can repair those? There’s got to be money in selling refurbished LCD TV’s just like we sell refurbished laptops, right? Think again. Upside: I still have a TV that I jokingly tell people cost $100K. It really did.
Company Fail: BuyBack+. Just as the trade-in market started to heat up for mobile phones, I figured we could make an impact by starting a new company. This was just about the same time that AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and other multi-billion dollar companies decided to get in on the action. Timing and implementation quickly killed this one. Upside: cool new logo.
Company Fail: Peak Social Apps. I was using software to manage my social commerce businesses, so certainly it would make sense to start a business to make my own software and sell that software (subscriptions are hot!) to other companies, right? Wow – this was a life lesson in how hard it is to provide support for products you are charging $10 per month for. Without scale, it crashed and burned. Upside: I have some killer apps for my own use. Apps that I need to use for about 10-years to offset my investment.
As an eternal optimist, this was very hard for me to write. With each failure, I wanted to explain how much I had learned, what great connections I had made, and why the experience was just one more “tuition payment” on my road to success. But I am not going to do that.
Want to hear about more of my mistakes? Listen to me talk about creating your own reality, writing your own success story, and more each week on the Small Business Show.