My First Big Failure

Over the past 10 years, I failed in business dozens of times.

You don't care that I was fired from my job in 2010 or that my first business collapsed in 2012, nobody does.

We only care about the failures in ourselves. Even though you're reading my emails, reading my books, reading my blog, listen to my podcast.

You don't care about failures in the past. You care about the now the successes of the now and that's what's so powerful.

The first business I built was selling local marketing services. I started off selling video marketing services and then I learned how to do general search engine optimization. I would help businesses all over the South.

Eventually, my business grew to ranking in Google, so they'll get more customers, more phone calls, and make more money.

And then one day after I'd been in business, about two years, they released an update that pushed all of my clients sites, way, way down in the rankings.

And I remember this moment and I said, I have two choices.

I can move in a new direction and focus on product creation, which I'd begun to do a few months earlier, or I can try and save these clients, go back and revamp and rebuild my SEO strategy.

Go back to something that's more powerful, re approach the entire business model and save that business.

Then I got a phone call from my most expensive client. This client at the time was a land developer. If you wanted to buy hunting land anywhere in the South, this was the company that you would go through.

Their website had listings for land. The cheapest piece of land was one point $5 million. If I generated one extra sale for them in the next hundred years, my $2,000 a month fee was covered.

The dream client, their time was so valuable that after they hired me, they said, look. Don't call us. It's not worth our time to even talk to you. As long as you do your job, we'll pay you automatically and you won't even think about it.

And they called me when their website crashed because they'd been number one for all of their search terms, like hunting land, Florida, hunting land, Alabama, things like that.

And I said, look guys, the business has changed. We're not doing this anymore.

Rather than lead you on for a few months saying, I'm going to keep trying, keep trying. I'll just tell you guys that this, the rules have changed. It's a lot harder now. And I'm closing up shop.

And the guy appreciated my candour because I could have certainly kept him on board probably for another six months before they would've fired me with an extra $12,000 in my pocket if I hadn't said anything.

But it was over, that business failed.

The rules are continually changing in that market and had to go in another direction.

So I built an SEO company, I grew it, and it failed.

That wasn't even the first time it failed. I'd hired a subcontractor that messed up all of my clients at one point, and I lost all of my clients in the middle of that company and I had to start over again.

Why tell you about my failures? Not so that you'll look at me with pity or contempt, it's so that you'll realize you don't care. It doesn't matter.

One of the most fascinating stories in recent sports history was when Michael Jordan quit basketball to play minor league baseball.

He went from being the best athlete in the world at his chosen sport, into being someone who couldn't even make it into the major leagues in baseball.

He played minor league baseball and people would go and see him because it was so strange and you could see him for way less. You could see your favorite athlete doing something they're not very good at.

Obviously minor league baseball is pretty good.

But nobody remembers that. He then went back to play basketball and won more championships.

That's what we remember.

So even when people quit and do really weird things and have strange failures, success erases every single failure, and that's why you don't need to worry about when things go bad.

To Your Success!

Steve.

Master Online Entrepreneur