Your biggest failure

blackbeans said:

My biggest failure as an agency owner was not adequately preparing for success.

When I first started in the business process outsourcing industry, I was bombarded with offers because I was part of a community of affiliate marketers.

I knew affiliate marketing inside-out, and I myself was fairly successful as an affiliate marketer.

I was making $100,000 a year from AM, and people knew it.

I've made money for people so they know what I'm about.

They know what my skillset is.

So they started hiring me for side jobs, and I did well with them that people told their friends and their friends told their friends.

And before I knew it, I was being interviewed and all this good stuff.

My name was getting out there, and I started an agency to capitalize on this.

But the problem with my agency was that everybody was in-house, and everybody was a fresh hire.

I basically found myself micro-managing the company.

When people think about working for themselves and building a business, they think about freedom.

They think about sitting on the beach, chilling by the pool, and the business runs by itself.

In reality, my BPO business, although it was making good money and had a lot of people, was a hellhole for me because I was the first one in the door and the last one out the door.

Even if I didn't show up at the office, my business was weighing down on my mind 24/7.

I screwed up.

Every single day, the phone would ring off the hook, and my emails would just be bursting at the seams with people wanting to give me their money.

They're sending me their money:

"Hey! Do my project.

Do this, do that."

That's how "successful" my BPO business was, and I couldn't hire good people fast enough.

I'm not even talking about people who know what they're doing, just people with a pulse.

That was how crazy it was back in the early 2000s.

So what lessons can I share with you?

Tip # 1 - Have a scalability plan

First, you have to have a scalability plan.

If things go well, how can you handle that success?

Are you ready for it?

Remember, good news travels way slower than bad news.

If you have a business and you've mishandled an account, I'm gonna tell you right now.

The news of that fuck up will continue to haunt your company far longer than the many times you made other businesses millions of dollars.

So be ready to handle the volume of orders in such a way that you deliver on your customers' expectations.

This requires a scalability plan.

Tip #2 - Think in terms of systems

When I jumped on a plane from Los Angeles to go back to the Philippines where I was born, I was just thinking of palm trees, hot chicks, crazy nightlife, and of course a little bit of money on the side.

I wasn't thinking about building systems that would enable my business to run without me.

In hindsight and hindsight being 20/20, I should have first hired an HR person.

If you're gonna build an agency, this is your most strategic hire because this person's personality, viewpoint, and values will be reflected in your company.

So here I was raised in the US with absolutely no clue about contemporary Filipino culture at that time just hiring people randomly based on their resume and based on some ridiculous low-quality test that I set up, and people were performing mediocre work.

And guess what!

It's not their fault.

It's on me.

That's because I didn't have a system.

I didn't have an onboarding system.

I didn't have a skills training system.

I didn't have a revenue maximization system.

I didn't have a career development system for the people who signed up for my company.

It was unfair to them.

I wasn't doing myself any justice.

Everybody was losing.

That's how bad things can be if you don't think in terms of building systems.

Systems are self-reinforcing.

They create standards, and they tend to attract the people that would push your company to the next level.

They're not gonna attract mediocre people.

They're not gonna attract parasites.

They're not gonna attract dead weight if you set them correctly.

And at the end of the day, it's all on you.

Tip #3 - Know when to sell

The third tip that I can give is to know when to sell.

The funny thing about my business, as chaotic as it was, as random as it was being run by my wife and myself, was doing really well financially.

In fact, it was doing so well I got a buy-out offer in the second or third year of its existence.

This is where you have to park your ego.

A lot of people would say, "I put in all this time, and it takes so much of my mental space on a 24/7 basis.

I want the world for it."

No!

It may seem low whatever the offer is.

It may seem low, but it's actually a golden key to get out of that jail.

If you run a company where it's all about you and you're just micro-managing everything and you feel that you have to have your finger in every project and everything has to pass through you, it's only a matter of time until it eats you up and you just give up.

Look at any buy-out offer as a golden opportunity to exit with a nice payout and learn from the mistakes that you made to come up with a better company the next time.

I didn't do that.

I had that buy-out offer in 2005, and I got an even better buy-out after that.

I still think about that missed opportunity.

This is why I am sharing these with you.

If anything, learn from these tips because they point to the biggest failure.

A lot of the times, the biggest failure doesn't look like a failure on paper because there's a lot of money.

There's a lot of soul that was paid for that money.

So keep that in mind.

Click to expand...

charles133 said:

Well i fail so many times that its part of the process now and you should accept and embrace failure if you want to achieve big dreams in life

Click to expand...

PROXYfather said:

My biggest failure? Not taking more risks early on. Like in Rich Dad Poor Dad, sometimes playing it too safe can cost you more than taking a leap. Learned that the hard way!

Click to expand...

MrDenz said:

I’d say failure is a constant in marketing and life in general, and honestly, it’s a good thing.

If we’re learning something new every day, it usually comes from mistakes.

So, in a way, we’re probably failing more than we even realize.

It’s important to understand that failure is a part of success, as strange as it sounds.

Each failure teaches us something new, unless, of course, you’re the type who refuses to learn and spends 60 years insisting that 1 + 1 = 3.

I’ve had my fair share of failures, but looking back, they’re the reason I’ve grown and become who I am today.

Without them, I wouldn’t have the experience or insight I do now.

It's never easy to get over failure and admit that you made a mistake, but that's where the real difference between people lies.

Unfortunately, I’ve had more failures due to others than my own actions, but that's on me for allowing it to happen.

Click to expand...

blocksrey said:

In the last months I lost over $3,000 to crypto scams and getting robbed out of $1,000 in Japan. Then converting yen to USD at the wrong time.
A lot of these problems stem from my naiveness, but "you live and learn," they say.

Click to expand...

PDLProfit said:

Share your biggest failures in your work, digital marketing. Any failure that can be useful to someone is welcome

Click to expand...

rabib2024 said:

at first i focused too much on quality and detail it really took too much time and ruined a lot of projects for that, because at first no one knew me it was pointless, later i realized at first focus at least 60% of effort on marketing, then quality and detail

Click to expand...

PDLProfit said:

Is your agency all right?

Click to expand...

Vadim639 said:

My biggest failure was when I focused more on the quantity of traffic rather than its quality. As a result, not all conversions were paid for, and I ended up wasting a significant amount of time and energy with little return.

Click to expand...