Don't give up in the face of failure

The business world can be ruthless, where it is either eat or be eaten, but entrepreneurs should not throw in the towel so easily. Instead, they should keep on trying and be relentless in the pursuit of their goals.

WATCHING a documentary on National Geographic recently, I saw how a giant octopus finds a cave, lays 100,000 eggs and stays in the cave for six months without food in order to care for her brood.

At the end of the six months, she dies of starvation, the eggs hatch but only a handful of her young survive into adulthood.

After watching this, I thought about all that hard work with so little results and the futility of it all.

In another documentary on the animal kingdom, a mother bird watched helplessly as a large snake slithered up the tree into her nest and gobbled up her chicks one by one.

In the following season, she set up yet another nest but this time, right after hatching, her chicks were evicted from the nest by the chick of a cuckoo who had laid her egg there.

All that planning and trying and, in the end, she had unknowingly benefited a competitor.

Sometimes running an SME business can be like that. We can go through an exhaustive, life-sapping, process of preparing and sending out a lot of proposals to prospects and only a few (or none) have positive outcomes.

We can come up with great plans on expanding our business and building up our existing team and, in the end, they can be ‘gobbled up’ in a fell swoop by a bigger competitor who is willing to pay them a higher salary, while we watch helplessly.

People who are starting out in business are often idealistic and starry-eyed. They do not see what I have just described above. But the business world can be ruthless. It is either eat or be eaten.

It is about staying ahead. No customer will be with you for life just because they like you (on or off Facebook).

No employee or shareholder will either. Even Bill Gates discovered recently that not all the investors want him around just because Microsoft is his ‘baby’.

So, what consolation do SME business owners and entrepreneurs have?

Do we still want to take a gamble and risk losing everything with the business we are starting or running?

Will we come out of the arena of entrepreneurship, victorious or bruised and battered?

There is no consolation and it is scary. As much as we want certain things to happen our way, we need to be prepared that not everything will.

But I believe there is one thing that sets good SMEs business owners and entrepreneurs apart — they do not give up. If at first, they do not succeed, they try and try again.

If one way does not work, they will find another way. They are relentless in the pursuit of their goals, despite encountering challenges and naysayers.

They are willing to sacrifice and are hungry to see their dreams come true.

When I started my business more than three years ago, I told my family that if I did not make enough to support myself in the first year of my business, I would consider ‘crawling’ back to the world of employment.

I did not have to and my business, although growing slowly and organically, has been profitable every year.

There were, of course, moments when things did not work out and I was down. That is when I would seek out former colleagues to lament and whine.

But they would always respond, “But you are Jeanisha. Jeanisha never gives up!”

I did not know that and, perhaps, they were right but how do I find another person like me?

Since early this year, I have been trying to fill a managerial position in my company. One of the requirements stated in the advertisement was ‘ambitious, with an entrepreneurial spirit and wants to build own reputation in the industry’.

I have interviewed scores of people and discovered that some people are looking for jobs because they give up too easily and quit when they face challenges.

And the reason I still have not filled this position is because I have yet to come across those who will try and try again when at first they do not succeed. Are there any who can prove me wrong?

Jeanisha believes that many are ambitious when it comes to titles and salaries (nothing wrong with that) but not with achievements. If you think you are the person she’s looking to hire or know of someone, talk to her at [e-mail]