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Failure, according to billionaire inventor Sir James Dyson, is far more interesting than success.
It’s an important process in succeeding. If you get it right first time, every time, you learn nothing and gain nothing. Mistakes in business, although often a temporary setback, almost always create a memorable lesson that you can take with you as a valuable contribution to the future of your business.
When the Dyson dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner burst into shops throughout the UK in 1993, its creator was hailed a genius – an original-thinking leading light of Britain’s technological revolution.
But Sir James’ invention was built on a catalogue of mistakes. It had taken almost 16 years to bring his first vacuum cleaner to market. Each one of those years was peppered with errors, 5,126 of them to be exact. That one rethink – a reinvention of everything Hoover had swept before them – was version number 5,127.
Today, the Dyson company has annual earnings of £800m, while Sir James himself commands a personal fortune in excess of £4bn. Not bad for a 15-year cycle of continual failures.
It’s a legacy that resonates across many and varied business minds throughout the world.
Steve King, CEO and founder of Black Swan, one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech start-ups, set out at the age of 25 to open a music studio in Devon. “I borrowed £50,000 from my parents to get the business started but had no real business plan and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it went bust,” he says.
“Not only had I failed, but I’d also put a big dent in my parents’ retirement fund, which was not a great feeling. I had to sit down with my dad and have a very difficult conversation where I told him the bad news, but the only thing he said was, ‘never give up’.”
It was a lesson that has never left him and a mantra that echoes around his current business. “Don’t fear failure or making a mistake, as long as you can learn from it and move forward,” King says. “Also, and in case you’re wondering, I have since paid my parents back.”
Your biggest mistake being your first serious error of judgement in business is a learning curve that Phil Riley, former chief executive of Chrysalis Radio, is familiar with.
“I’d set up a company to make short, pre-recorded music features for radio stations – I had demos made, got them cleared for transmission, but outsourced the sponsorship sales to a third-party sales house,” he says.
“Don’t fear failure or making a mistake, as long as you can learn from it and move forward”
Steve King, CEO, Black Swan
“I was a tiny part of their business so they simply didn’t focus on getting any sales. I had to close the business down in the end and I’ve tried very hard never to let third-party sales houses have a dominant say in my businesses since then without putting in place really stringent service terms, normally including some form of revenue guarantee or performance clause with penalties for failure to deliver.
“If you’re going to pay people a substantial portion of your revenue for representing you, try to make sure it’s on your terms – not theirs, and the time to set that up is before you sign the deal.”
Mistakes aren’t restricted to the early planning stages – sometimes inaction over a lack of judgement can have consequences throughout your enterprise.
Sarat Pediredla, CEO of App designer Hedgehog Lab, says: “I think one of the biggest mistakes I made was to put faith and backing into a team member, despite everyone else telling me how disruptive they were and the impact it was having on the company and wider team morale,” he says.
“It baffled a lot of my other team members that I couldn’t see the obvious but I felt like it was my responsibility and, if I tried hard enough, I could fix the problem. But the whole episode ended very badly with this team member leaving – with extreme animosity on both sides.
“The reason I’m glad it happened was it has really helped me realign my expectations around questioning everything I hear as a leader and ensure I follow my gut.”
Pediredla adds that the episode has caused him to be more decisive and take action swiftly when he recognises a problem. “In the past, I was too slow to respond to issues, either burying my head in the sand hoping they would go away or trying in futility to resolve them,” he says.
“Now, I take a much harder but fair approach to resolving problems quickly before they fester.”
Dave Matthews, owner of the Magic Alley attraction in Stratford-upon-Avon, first set his business up as Creaky Cauldron in London in the late 1980s, which, upon reflection, began with a branding error.
“The premises that I took on was the basement of a building just off the Greenwich High Road,” he says. “You went through a big iron gate, into a small door in the side of the building and down a few stairs to where the basement suddenly opened up in front of you – appearing to stretch on forever.”
Visitors would constantly refer to Matthews’ fledgling business as “Magic Alley” because of the interesting location, completely ignoring its correct name. It was at that point Dave realised his first mistake was a big one – he’d given his business the wrong name.
“It was quite infuriating at the time because that’s not who we were,” he says. “But it became established and that’s who we became and we’ve never looked back.”
For digital entrepreneur Michael Tobin OBE, the fear of making mistakes often became a mistake in itself. Tobin led the FTSE 250 company Telecity for a decade, but around that appointment his hopping from boardroom to boardroom as a serial non-executive director always triggered doubts about his own ability.
“Every time I quit a job and moved on to the next thing I was faced with the fear of the unknown, and sometimes it felt like I was making a serious mistake,” he says.
“But the mistake I was actually making was giving in to the fear of failure because, certainly on reflection, it was always the right move to move on as I didn’t always have the right people around me.
“The lesson I took from those experiences was to always surround yourself with the best people you can find and afford ¬– they will make you a success.”
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