In a meeting with some business women the other day, I heard a comment that blew my mind for the sheer boldness of it.

One of the women who owns and runs her own business, recounted when she faced one of those the life changing points in her career.  She had a young child and new baby and was already juggling the demands of motherhood, her marriage and her business career when she realised that one of her children had serious health issues that required more attention than she was able to give at that moment in time.

I am ashamed to say that while I listened to her story about to unfold, I was quickly trying to work out what she gave up, because I knew her business was still going strong, as was her marriage, but surely in order to give more attention to one area of our lives, we have to give up something else.   But what she said next taught me such humility that I felt like I should go back to Business 101.

“I knew that I was the only one who could take care of my child.  I am the mother.  So to take care of my child and my family, and not lose my business, the only solution was to expand my business.”

How many of us would do the exact opposite?  Contract the business?  Pull back.  Put things into maintenance mode until we can come back and grab the reins again.  Instead she outsourced, delegated, trusted and brought people in to take her business to places that she wasn’t able to go to at that time.  It grew bigger while it was out of her immediate control.  When she was ready to come back, she did reshuffle things, but she took the reins of a bigger and better business than she left.

Now that is the example of a big business thinker; someone who is not afraid of taking a risk and whose risk is paying such awesome dividends now.

Are we prepared to trust the people we work with to that extent?  Have we hired well?  Have we partnered with the right kind of people?  Are we strong enough to recover if we haven’t done so?  But we certainly cannot do it all ourselves and survive anyway.  She would have lost something had she held onto it all, but in giving up some control and trusting others whom she had already mentored, she was rewarded with exponential business growth and still has a happy and strong home life.

As for me; I take Jim Rohn’s advice seriously: make sure you are not the smartest person in the room.  I am privileged to learn from people far smarter and more experienced than I am.

By Charlotte Kemp

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.

John Foster Dulles

One word I noticed that I have used quite often in this blog, is the word arrogance. I hadn’t realized how arrogant I was about my capabilities. Now I now practically speaking, that I am capable of achieving certain things. I also know that I am going to strive for some fairly awesome goals in the near future.

But I will no longer judge other people by the standards I assumed I could achieve. Some things are harder than they seem and I have learned not to assume that I would make better decisions, or cope better than others in a given situation. It is easy to look at someone else’s life and see their mistakes and poor decisions and recognize where they went wrong or what they should have done differently, and we are so quick to judge and to offer advice. Yet our own lives are so often not quite as rosy as we would have them be. We are judged and found wanting by others. And we don’t like being judged any more than they do when we do it to them.

So I will give other people the benefit of the doubt when I see them work through tough times in their lives. None of us knows what an individual has to struggle with in his or her own life and heart and mind and the decisions they have to make and the consequences they have to bear.

As for me, I am young enough to still make more mistakes in business, and in life. I may fail again. Hopefully though, I won’t repeat the same mistakes. I trust I will be stronger in the areas I have failed before and that my mistakes in the future will be less reckless than in the past.

So while no one likes to fail, discovering that life does not hand us everything on a plate, and that we have to struggle to overcome difficulties and work and plan and strive towards goals, makes our lives meaningful and worth living. I look forward to learning my next lessons. Part of me hopes it won’t be quite as painful a lesson as this one was, but I know that I couldn’t stand to stay still and not learn. Let’s see what else life has to teach us.

This blog is an exploration of the lessons I learned when my business failed. Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas, as well as your own experiences. It will eventually be published as a book – hopefully as a warning to new entrepreneurs to avoid some of these mistakes. Please see the first few posts as an introduction.