It’s just a phase

When you run your own business, you’ll be on your arse more times than a toddler on a trampoline.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been running things, either. As the owner – or whatever title you give yourself – absolutely anything can and will go wrong in your business at some point, and you will experience all the falls available in front of you along the way.

Motivational, right?

Toddlers spend their days in a similar reality. They bump into all sorts of stuff – even if there’s no stuff to bump into – and they often lose balance (or any sense of where they are) and just end up falling over. Yep, they literally just stop being upright. We laugh at them, of course, but we feel okay in doing this because of two known truths…

Firstly… toddling, falling, stumbling, tripping, bumbling… it’s just part of your infant’s development and where they are in their life right now. It’s a temporary phase, not a permanent feature, and there is literally some form of improvement or progress noticeable in their activity every single day.

It’s just a phase.

And secondly… it’s very rare that your infant ever cares about their fall (or fail) in the long term. Once they’re back up, they don’t look back. Sometimes, they don’t even register the fall at all – unless there’s a suitable audience, of course, or they can sense you really don’t have time for this farce and so therefore they go nuclear. In the majority of cases, however, their tears (if any) dry quickly, they bounce back up, and they move right on.

It’s just a graze.

What you’ll find is that even if there’s a massive reason your little one has toppled over, they’re not exactly going to shy away from ever being upright again, are they? They just get back up. Some will approach things with caution and show learning, some will approach things with reckless abandon and show courage (or stupidity, not sure), and some will just go about doing something totally different altogether, but they always get up, nonetheless.

As we go about running our businesses, we really need to be learning from these small creatures of snot and instability, because although it’s usually our pride and our egos rather than our arses and elbows that have been bumped and bruised, we do tend to wallow a bit too long when things knock us down or trip us up. Ironically, we’ll often throw our toys out the pram for weeks or months and vow to never do something “ever again” when we fall or fail. This is pretty funny, given the fact that the longest a tot will stick to this commitment is a grand total of just eight minutes. Who’s the child now?

I’m not one of those people who waxes lyrical with a motivational quote or sweary cliché about getting back up when you fall down, but I am a big fan of telling people to get over themselves. Falls and fails in business aren’t permanent – they’re just part of the learning curve when your run your own business. A curve that probably has management theories written about it, too. And what else are you going to do anyway when you find yourself tits-up in business? You still need to make money, and I’ll put all my hard-earned cash on the fact that you’re not so down that you’re willing to go back to making money for some other fucker instead! Stuff is going to go wrong, and if you don’t trip yourself up at some point, then someone else will sure as shit be around to do it for you. Get used to it, then get over it.

Something you become really aware of when you’re no longer embraced by the safety net of being employed by someone else and you decide to run your own business, is that you can always be spun around, knocked off your feet, and left totally unprotected no matter how good you are at general businessy stuff, so if you stay down, things will move past you, step over you, and possibly trample on you in the process. Get up, acknowledge what’s just happened, have a bit of a cry and a biscuit, then keep moving like a toddler on a toast hunt. Same direction for another go, or a different direction in the hope of a different outcome. It’s completely your choice, but please, get up.

And, if people decide to laugh at you for the fall or perhaps even deliberately put you on your arse in the first place, throw something at them and scream that you don’t love them anymore.

Or maybe just make a note never to do business with them again.

Either or.

Chapter taken from my 2023 debut book, TOT ANALYSIS: Why Running Your Business is Child’s Play. Available online – and on shelves in real shops! Shop local.