We all feel like it’s tough to admit when we are going wrong somewhere, and this is especially true in business. We must learn the rigors of failure and we, more importantly, must recognize where we are going wrong, but it’s tough to understand where this could be. From your perspective, as an entrepreneur, you are very likely doing everything necessary. You are learning ways to expand your knowledge and gain insights into each part of your individual processes. But this doesn’t mean your business is going to benefit, despite your best interests. Let’s show you how you can gain better insight into your failures and turn them into positives.

Know Your Business Objectives

As simple as this sounds, if you want to recognize where you are going wrong, you’ve got to go back to the original plan. This is because this is the stage where you were most true, and while you were crafting the business plan, you would have been asking yourself the hard-hitting questions, for example, “what do I want to achieve?” When you start to recognize the real objectives, you can then progress with taking action.

How Do We Specify the Lessons We Need to Learn? 

Part of the solution is in identifying each discrepancy in relation to the results you have achieved to date. When you describe the current state of affairs, in comparison to where you think things are going, but also in relation to where you think things should be going, you can start to highlight the differences between what you had expected and what has really happened. 

When you give careful consideration to the causes of these problems, you are likely to see errors in your judgment, as well as broader mistakes. This is where you can start to bring in the big guns, whether it’s in relation to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and getting top ERP consulting resources to boost your business or you sit down with your stakeholders or board of directors, or just yourself, and give major consideration to overhauling the scope of the project and pinpoint the mistakes to a finite degree and gain insight into the bigger picture.

Taking Action

When things start to go wrong, we can pinpoint the exact signs. One of the biggest mistakes business people make is that they ignore them or procrastinate to the point where these little niggles become large ones. The reality is the more they procrastinate, the fewer options you will have to save your business. One of the biggest things you can do to take action is in terms of its finances. Getting in contact with your accountant, and even if you do not have one, looking at the financial situation, allows you to make careful decisions that don’t compromise the business, while also ensuring that if there are major problems afoot, you do not get into the habit of siphoning off so much of your business through practices like outsourcing. 

There are times when outsourcing can benefit your business, but the reality of the situation is that when you start to recognize where things are going wrong, your finances are the best place to begin. But you’ve got to take an honest account of your accounts, rather than thinking you need to start cutting employees. It is critical that you get a health check on your company because it allows you to see things in terms of the bigger picture.

What Can You Do?

It can be very disheartening to find yourself in the midst of a stumbling block, because it may seem like there are very few avenues to get you out of this. This can mean we feel incredibly stressed and overwhelmed. You may be asking yourself if there’s anything you could have done earlier. The best thing you can do, rather than beating yourself up at this juncture, is to take action and be proactive. It may seem like it’s a very difficult thing to do, and as easy as it is to beat yourself up, make sure that you are doing everything you can to do right by your employees and yourself. 

The great thing is that there’s a variety of resources that can help you. The most important thing you can do at this juncture is to stay the course, stay focused, and ensure that you are steering the ship. When you think things are going wrong, as tough as it can be to try and move the ship through choppy waters, this is the best thing you can do so you gain a much better sense of perspective. Taking action is the thing that falls on you to get right. Helping yourself and your employees to do everything possible will ensure that, despite the mistakes, you are holding yourself accountable for them.

Future-Proofing Your Business

When we learn what we have done wrong, the most important lesson is to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Understanding where we are going wrong is not waiting for the worst-case scenarios to arise, instead, we have to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. The reality is that there are a variety of tasks and challenges that will occur at every new juncture. Rather than thinking that you need to avoid these at all costs, it is far better for you to lie down and accept the reality that challenges come thick and fast. 

Rather than panicking every time something untoward happens, you can future-proof your business by not just having a collection of action plans for every possible scenario, but actually willing these things to happen ensures you develop a far more agile mindset. When things go wrong, the weak-willed can believe that they just need to work on avoiding these things, but the reality is that there will be problems between now and the end of time. Understanding where you are going wrong will give you a better insight into what has happened now, but it also allows you to recognize that as your business progresses and gets out of these choppy waters, you will always have a solution up your sleeve.

Originally Published on https://www.breakfastleadership.com/

Michael Levitt Chief Burnout Officer

Michael D. Levitt is the founder & Chief Burnout Officer of The Breakfast Leadership Network, a San Diego and Toronto-based burnout consulting firm. He is a Keynote speaker on The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting and Burnout. He is the host of the Breakfast Leadership show, a Certified NLP and CBT Therapist, a Fortune 500 consultant, and author of his latest book BURNOUT PROOF.