As a small business owner, it's important to recognize the importance of failure and why it can be a positive thing. It can be easy to become discouraged when things don't go as planned, but learning from our mistakes and continuing to strive for success is key to achieving success as an animal based business owner. Failing can help us to identify what works and what doesn't, allowing us to make necessary changes to ensure the best outcome. In some cases, it can even open us up to new opportunities that we hadn't previously considered. Additionally, failure can help to foster resilience, giving us the strength to persist even when things don't go as planned. We can also use it as an opportunity to evaluate our processes and make improvements to increase efficiency. While failure can be difficult, it is an essential part of the learning process and an invaluable tool in the pursuit of success. Embracing it and using it to our advantage is the key to success for any animal based business owner.

Welcome to The Business Animal podcast. Saddle up for a

gallop to the top of the animal industry, where you'll learn how

to tame your wild business beast, with tips, techniques,

and tools that will take overwhelm to obedience school.

And have you wagging your tail with joy. And now your hosts,

Kim Beer, and Cara Taylor Swift.

Hey there business animals. It's Kim with

Be More Business

and Cara with Fast Horse photography. Hey,

Kim. Good morning.

Good morning, Cara. How are you today?

I'm okay, I had to take my earrings off

before we got on the call today cuz I keep forgetting I can't

wear earrings when I have my headphones on. So I have a

meeting after this. And I'm all like you probably can't tell

because you can only see like my messy hair. But I'm actually

dressed up today. And I had earrings on and I forgot I can't

wear earrings with my headphones. So did you know

that? Do you have that issue?

I do. I don't wear earrings with my headphones

either. But I am not dressed up for anything. today. I'm in my

chevrolet Motor Company t shirt and a pair of lazy jeans. I have

no plans, but meetings for the rest of the day. And none of

them are extremely formal. So

Oh, no, no nice. I have a fun meeting. It's

my annual I shoot for a local nonprofit every year just as a

way to give back to the equine community. And we're doing a

calendar this year. So we're working on outlining the shots

that we would hope to have for each month so that we can kind

of plan out that shoot. So I'm kind of excited. I haven't been

there all year. So I'm excited to see all the updates. It

should be a fun meeting. But I did have to get dressed up for

it.

That does sound like right. I would love that. I

don't have to get dressed up until Wednesday, then I've got a

lot of stuff in Kansas City and classes I have to teach and all

kinds of stuff going on. So Wednesday I will have to look

presentable. But today, it's Chevrolet motors t shirt and

bare feet. So we're all good, nice. So today's topic has

nothing to do with any of that. Because I'm going to tell you

even in my chevrolet t shirt, I do not feel like a failure. And

that's what we're talking about today. Actually, we're talking

about why failure is a good thing, right?

Yeah, I think I don't know if this is actually

a quote, but maybe I just made it up. But I like to think about

it as like failures. I've known a few.

Oh, my goodness, and I am not going to sing

because that would definitely lose us listeners. Singing is

not my strong suit at all. But it is true. We've all had a lot

of failures. I was actually talking to somebody the other

day about my business and about business failures and that kind

of thing. And I was rattling off my list of failures that I have

had in my life financially. I have been to bankruptcy court.

Oh, God, you

were key you keep a tally? Yeah, well, I

think we were talking about think we're having

a discussion around resilience, which is actually in our big

three here. But they failures, I've known a few I have been to

bankruptcy court, I have stood in front of a federal judge and

told him I would never own a small business, it was not a lie

at the time, it turned out to be a lie moving forward, obviously.

And I recovered from that that's been well over 30 years ago. So

there was that at one point with this ranch, I did get

foreclosure papers, because I missed a large loan payment that

I couldn't make at the time. And I had to scramble to figure out

how to do that. That was right, shortly after my mother's death.

And I wasn't quite to the point where I had the cash flow to

support a large piece of acreage and my business and my bills and

everything else. But I came out the other side of that, okay.

And I can see how people would look at those things, those two

events and say those are failures, right? I mean, the

rather big public failures, actually, particularly the

bankruptcy was a huge failure. In the scheme of things. For a

lot of people bankruptcy can be extremely devastating. But I

think here's the key to why that wasn't a failure that kept me

from being an entrepreneur, again. It was in how I

eventually held that failure. I will tell you when I was

standing in front of that federal judge that day and said

I wouldn't own another business. I really did mean it because I

felt like the business was to blame for it. But I learned

pretty quick after that after I got a little perspective, and I

mean, not very long. Within a couple of weeks or months, I had

a much better perspective about what went wrong and how I could

do it better the next time. And I didn't hold on to that failure

as being repeatable. It was not a factor in me starting the

business that I currently have right now. I didn't hold on to

it as oh my god, I went bankrupt one time I'm gonna go bankrupt

again. So I think a good Rate deal of it is how you hold it.

Well, it

can be crippling. For some people, I

would think you know what you experienced, it can be crippling

if you don't take the time to do the work or you don't come from

a place of failure. You know, it's not a terrible thing we can

go forward from here, I could see that being crippling. And

for some people, that could mean NEVER starting again, never

trying, never realizing dreams that you have. So I think that's

why this topic is so important, because failure is something

that if you are an entrepreneur, you will experience at some

point, it's inevitable. So if you don't come at it from that

perspective, I think that it can prevent you from ever realizing

your dreams because you, you don't have the ability to just

keep going.

Yeah. There's a quote that says, Fear of failure

kills more businesses than finances ever Well, then money

ever will. And I do. I do truly believe that, that there's a lot

of people that are very afraid to fail in entrepreneurship.

You're very right. If you go into entrepreneurship, there's

failure attached to it. I'm sorry, it just is part of the

package. But I also think we could extrapolate that to life.

I mean, I don't think that there's a human being walking

around on the planet that hasn't experienced failure at some

point. And I think that the biggest thing that I want to see

people attached to is that failure is not always a bad

thing. I think that we like to attach to it as something

horrid, right. But it's not always a bad thing, even

something as bad as going through a bankruptcy. That

bankruptcy that I went through. It taught me how to manage cash

flow, eventually. I mean, it wasn't immediate. But when I

started another business, I got help. I did it much better. I

understood cash flow, I understood how things should

function in a business. And here's another thing it did. It

taught me that that failure was not the end of the world. You

know, what if I ended up in bankruptcy court again, I could

go through that it didn't kill me. And I guess we're back to

that, to that cliche of if it What doesn't kill you makes you

stronger. It did make me stronger. It made me a better

business person. And it gave me the skills to help other

business people overcome that. And I think that's so important

to understand that failure means you're trying failure means you

took the risk failure means you took a chance. And maybe you

didn't hit the mark this time, but you learned something

that'll get you closer to the next time.

Well, I like what you said, because I had

that point in here, that idea of like, what's the worst thing

that can happen if you fail? And you just said to yourself, you

know, well, I know now, what that looks like, you know, and I

think for some people listening and sometimes for myself, too, I

think about like how I have a little bit, I wouldn't say I'm a

perfectionist, but I feel a strong sense of responsibility

towards the people that I work with, towards my family towards

everyone around me, you know, that I'm interacting with as a

business person, but there are like, internal struggles that

come with that. So it's like, what's the worst thing that can

happen is an activity that I have to do sometimes, where I'll

be saying to myself, Okay, if I give this a go, what's invested

in this, what's the worst thing that can happen? And sometimes

that piece around like the perfectionism and needing things

to go well, and needing to be responsible to other people is

sometimes the hardest part for me even harder than losing

money, or harder than losing a job or harder than making a

mistake on a purchase of some kind. You know, it's the other

side of things that internal partners have in my head, but

that internal part and that perfectionism side can sometimes

be just as agonizing.

Well, that's has a lot to do with your

temperament. Cara, you are an SJ, which is in the Keirsey

Bates, temperament, your word, your currency in life, the way

you walk through life is the word responsibility. That is

your key word in life is responsibility. Sure, and yeah,

I can see where that would hold a lot. And if you judge yourself

is not being responsible, that is a failure, or that you would

consider that a failure. My hope is that you don't keep an

attachment to that very long that you say, Okay, I need to

get closer next time. That's I think the bigger thing right

with this that we're trying to get people to understand and

from two people who've been in business for quite a while, is

if it doesn't work out, don't go Oh, dammit. I'm gonna quit. Go.

Okay, that didn't work. So now I know that didn't work. I can try

the next thing. And that's part of how do you hold it? How do

you carry around Only a failure, if you carry around a failure is

oh, I'm a failure, and I'm never going to get it right, you're

never going to get it right. But if you carry it around as

dammit, well, that didn't work. Let me try that, again, you can

get a lot farther with that attitude.

And that rolls is right into our big

three. Number one, which is no one find success without

failure, just like we said, when we opened, if you are a business

owner, you will absolutely experience failure. At some

point, if you're not experiencing failures at some

point, then you're probably not stretching, you're probably not

growing, you're probably not trying out new things. And you

need to be looking at that.

Absolutely. Because entrepreneurship is a

lot about risk. Entrepreneurs are the risk takers in life. And

nothing gets furthered when you play it safe. Entrepreneurship

really is about getting out there putting yourself out

there, it is about being open to failure. And I think that's

another thing too, when you're afraid of failure, you're not

open to all of the possibilities, because you shut

off a tremendous amount of the possibility moving forward, you

shut it down, before we can ever really allow itself to evolve

into what it needs to be because you look at it and go, I'm

afraid I'm gonna fail over here at this, because it feels risky.

I think in life entrepreneurs, people who are drawn to owning

their own business, they have a higher tolerance for saying, I'm

going to try it anyway. Even though it looks a little risky,

I'm going to roll the dice, and I'm going to be okay, if it does

fail. And I find for myself, there are things that I look at

in my business that I want to try maybe different concepts or

ideas. And you know, I'm never short on any of those. And what

I'll do is I'll weigh the risk, right? What is the risk if I do

this? And I do ask the question, what's going to happen if I

fail, and I do work through that ahead of time, and then I make a

calculated decision to say, Okay, I'm going to try it

anyway. And then when if it does fail, I'm going to be okay with

that. I'm like, Okay, well, at least I rolled the dice, I

dried. And then here I am back at square one. Or I find that

and this is what I find more often than not, I just when I do

take those risks, I end up with a much bigger reward than if I

would have been afraid of the failure and not taking the

chance.

Absolutely. And I like one of the things I'm

Kim in this section here that no one finds success without

failure, one of the things that when we were kind of prepping

for this show that we were talking about is that you know,

success is not, it's not a straight road, it's not an

uphill continuous climb. It's not, you know, on the graph of

life, you're not in a constant upward trajectory, it's much

more full of hills and valleys, right, you're on your way up,

you take a dip, you're on your way up, you take a dip, and the

idea is that you're at least always moving forward, you're

always moving up, but you might have some dips in the road

there. And that's not a bad thing. Sometimes those dips in

the road, those little valleys that we get pulled back down

into are the things that are going to help realign us,

recenter us and pull us back into the things that are really

important in our business and really important to the goals in

our life. Right?

Absolutely. And you know, what's beautiful about

that metaphor is if you think about it as a metaphor that life

has its hills and valleys, hills give you VISTAs right where you

can see out over a large area, and it feels fantastic to be up

there. But where we really feed our souls where we would get

nourishment, where we would always come back to and get

greater understanding is in the valleys, because that's where

the green grass grows. I mean, that metaphor is beautiful,

because it isn't just a straight road up. There are hills and

valleys in life. And both of them have their strong points.

That's why I say failure is not a bad thing. Failure is just

simply another step on the way to success. It's the value walk

through to feed yourself and really understand it. So when

you get up there to the VISTA again, you can decide where you

want to go next and what you want to experience.

And I think that moves us right into

resilience, which is our number to grow your resilience. And

really what that is, is it's the ability to bounce back and keep

going after a failure or after a setback. And one of the things I

think about here is, you know, failure can feel horrible. It

can feel so terrible and I mean someone I don't know about you

can but I can take it so personally and I can really get

down about it for a little while and kind of wallow and it's okay

to do that. But we have to have the resilience to move forward

to move past the setback and to not okay, that's it. I failed.

I'm closing my door. for good, I'm going back and getting a job

somewhere. And going back to the brick and mortar nine to five, I

mean, we have to have some resilience in order to keep

growing and to keep going. What are your thoughts on that?

Oh, definitely, resilience is a big part of it's

one of my Sustainable Entrepreneurship practices, it's

one of the biggest ones is working towards resilience. And

I always imagine resilience as a rubber band, right. So if you

stretch the first time you stretch a rubber band, it's

stiff and it hard, it's hard. And it's, it's a struggle to do

so. But if you keep stretching it, you have more elasticity.

And when you work, your resilience as a muscle in your

body, it becomes easier for you to be able to be resilient, and

for you to bounce back faster after a failure. So the first

failures hit you the hardest, that bankruptcy that I had, I

was in my mid 20s. When that happened to me, that was a hard

bounce back because it was the really the first time life had

stepped me on my ass. I mean, that was the hard part.

I always love that you so openly share about

your bankruptcy because I think that there are so many people

out there that would be terrified to share about a

failure like that in their business. And the thing is, is

that we have to also find safe ways to share about our failures

in order to process them in order to work through them, and

to get feedback and learn from them. And that's the thing is

that a lot of times people are only putting out their highlight

reels. I mean, we're on social media, we're reading blog posts,

we're reading success stories, all of the promising the

exciting stuff, all of the winds are out there. But it's not very

often, when people are sharing their every day life those every

day behind the scene moments that really aren't glamorous,

they're probably full of lots of mistakes. And it's probably just

kind of that more boring side of life. So we can kind of get

sucked into that. What do you think about that cam, after

sharing what you shared,

I think it's very true. And I think that it also

gives us the impression that nobody bid us fails. So if we're

only seeing all of the things that other people are doing

successfully, then it's really easy to think, Well, I'm just a

total failure. I see that in my clients. Because the whole

reason for having social media really is to always show the

positive side of things, you know, and people do that quite

frequently. And then I have clients that come to me for

business consulting, or working on their business plan. And

they're like, this is so hard for me, I'm defective, I just

watch everybody else do it. And it's so easy. And I'm like, No,

it is not easy. Yeah, you're not defective. There is you're not

failing, you're you're you're not even close to failing. It's

just this is hard. And the problem is, is what you see of

everyone else is all of the good things. And unfortunately,

there's a lot of downsides in life. And in business as well.

And I think it's embracing those, the shadow moments as

well as the sunlight as photographers were really aware

that the sun may be the thing that or the light is the thing

that illuminates the subject, but the shadows are what give an

image depth. And the same is true with our life. Such a good

point, the light illuminates us, you know, in those moments, but

it's our shadows that give us depth. And your failures are

part of that shadow.

I'm gonna interrupt you for a second

because I just read this book, and it was an audiobook and I

was needing something lighthearted. And when I started

reading the book the whole time, the book was like, one happy

thing after another. And I kept thinking, Okay, this is where

the grandfather's gonna die. Or this is where the car accidents

going to happen. Because I was constantly looking for the

moments of controversy in the book. The book never had. Yeah,

it was the strangest thing. And it was the boring book I've ever

read in my life. Because it was literally just one person's like

experience in life, but they didn't share any of the like

downsides. It was all just like, happy, happy, happy, happy,

happy, happy. And the little things that came up were very

trivial. And I remember like afterwards I was thinking about

and I was like, your story, what you share. It is, like you said

the shadows, the moments that are of controversy. Those things

are what makes all the other things so much better. And I was

just like reading the book, and I was like, I've never read a

book like this in my life and it's the boringest thing I've

ever read.

Yeah, but that made

me think about that the shadows.

Absolutely. I love that analogy.

Yes. And in any good story. You need a conflict.

I learned that that's like first weekend. A creative writing

school, you must have conflict. A good story. So that's that's

that's like the number one thing they teach you. But yes, in real

life to give our lives depths, we do experience the hills and

valleys like we talked about earlier. And I think that leads

us really well into number three, which is embrace failure,

welcome it kind of shift your perspective, from it being

failure to being a not right now, that wasn't the right idea.

Let me try that. Again. I have a neighbor who is a horse trainer,

and he works primarily with teenagers. And so we all know

teenagers are high drama when things don't happen quite the

way that they would like for them to. And he has a 15 minute

rule. So if you go in the show pen with your western pleasure

horse, and you totally fail, your horse does something

stupid, or you do something that causes the horse to do something

that's not exactly perfect, and you come out or you lose, then

you get 15 minutes, and you can't be mad at the horse. But

you can be mad at yourself, you can be mad at everybody else,

you can go cus go to the grooming stalls have your 15

minutes, but after that 15 minutes, let it go. And whatever

it is absorb the lesson and move on with your life. So I think

that that's a great practice with teenagers and adults. So,

and with ourselves to just say, alright, basically I effed up

and own it, and then move on from it. And then also, when you

move on from it, look back at just a moment before you

completely move on and say what did I learn from this? Get

curious about what was that moment, teaching you. And I can

guarantee you, when you look back at failures that have

changed your life, they always change your life for the better.

I think that when you embrace it, you really do get to the

point that you make the changes you needed to make. And if you

don't make those changes, you're setting yourself up for another

lesson. Not a failure. But another lesson.

I agree with that. And I think you can take

that failure and try not to take it so personally separate it

from yourself and actually look at it and say to yourself, Okay,

so what worked? What didn't work? What would I do

differently? If I had the chance? Looking back this

failure? What didn't I plan for that? I should have? You know,

was there something there? I should have planned better for

was I following my procedures that I've set in place? Are was

I stepping outside of my boundaries? Were there places

where I was where my boundaries were down? I think it's okay to

take that failure, pull it from yourself and take a look at it

and say ask yourself these questions because that is how

you're gonna break down and learn from it. I saw this quote

recently, and it was like, this isn't a one shot only world just

do better next time. And I love that because it absolutely is

the truth. Like we're constantly we're not walking through this

world. And we get one tried everything, you know, we get to

try over and over and over again. And we can do better next

time.

Absolutely. And Maya Angelou, I believe is the

quote that says when you know better you do better. And I know

that is around knowledge. But it's also around failure,

because you learn from every single time that you try

something and it doesn't work out, you know better and so you

do better. That is a beautiful sentiment in a way to, to think

about that. And actually, I think a very nice closing for

this episode.

Excellent. Okay. So, you know, we hope that

you guys have enjoyed this episode, just to recap the Big

Three on failure and why it's a good thing, why it's a good

thing is that first of all, as entrepreneurs and just people in

general are, we're never going to find success without failure.

It's part of the journey, spend some time growing your

resilience. And just remind yourself it can feel really

terrible when it's happening. But how do we move past this?

How do we bounce back? And how do we keep going after the

setback? And then the third is just try to embrace the failure,

welcome it and flip your perspective. So we hope you guys

have enjoyed this episode today. Please let us know you can find

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Thanks for listening to this episode of The Business

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Find us at the business animal.com We'd love to hear

from you until next time keep your business well trained with