Without failure, there is no success.
We all know the saying right? If at first you don’t succeed…etc etc.
And it's true for all parts of life. From sport to business, day-to-day life and even relationships.
We all make mistakes in all parts of our lives, and so the real skill isn't always how to stop making mistakes, but how we deal with them and move forward.
I have been self-employed a few times throughout my career, started a couple of businesses which didn't work and I had to re-evaluate what I needed to do to continue to pay my bills!
You may have recently seen on my social pages about a business I opened during COVID with my sister. This one sticks in my mind as I feel like it was a bit of a turning point for me.
We launched Ladies In The Field Ltd in December 2020 - yes, COVID!! The idea behind the business was to provide a platform for women who participate in Country and Fieldsports - such as shooting and hunting - to be able to find clothing designed specifically with the female shooter/hunter in mind.
Coming from a country and fieldsports background, my sister is still passionate about these sports and was frustrated with the lack of female choice when it came to clothing. Everywhere she went, there would be a huge selection of clothing for men, and very little for women.
Though these are heavily male-dominated sports, the. the number of women participating is always increasing and she wasn't the only woman finding she had to order male clothing because the female options were just inferior.
The discussion came about during a socially distanced walk. I was brainstorming an idea with my sister about a children's clothing brand I was thinking about starting up (I even got branding done for it and everything!) and she talked about wanting to create an online shop selling female country clothing, for ladies like her - who actually want to get dirty, get involved and have practical and comfortable clothing to do it in.
As she talked about it, I began to see what a great opportunity this could be. There was a huge gap in the market for something like this, and although country sports wasn't necessarily my interest, I did have an understanding of websites and had the time to research everything we needed to do to get it off the ground.
From researching wholesalers and IT companies, we taught ourselves everything from scratch and eventually launched our online shop in December 2020.
Gallery: We had our branding and logo all designed bespoke to our vision and I absolutely loved it! The colours we chose and the font just looked beautiful and I loved building our social media pages with the branding! We also featured in several magazines, websites and across different platforms.
I had recently been made redundant, and so I was able to dedicate a fair bit of time to Ladies In The Field - starting and managing the social media channels, regularly checking stock levels across our supplier's websites, updating our own website and fulfilling orders to our customers.
Alongside running the business, my sister had (and still does have) a successful dog grooming business that was of course her priority, and I took on some paid roles with other companies (because, you know....bills!)
Long story short, we gave it our best shot, but after our first year, we weren't making any profit and our paid work had to take priority, so we decided to close the business.
Now, we know that most businesses don't make a profit within the first year, but for us, it just felt like we had a run of bad luck with the business - problems out of our control - and we couldn't invest more of our own money into the business. Plus, with the aftermath of COVID, money was even more important than normal!
To be completely honest, I didn't want to close it originally. I wanted to keep trying, to make it work, and to succeed. I felt like closing it would make me a failure.
But. We did close it. And for a long time, I did feel like I failed. And it's taken a long time and quite a lot of work on myself to actually realise that it wasn't a failure - it was a stepping stone to where I am today.
I've been a big believer for a long time of fate. What's meant to be will be, and everything happens for a reason. And I can absolutely see that now.
Off the back of Ladies In The Field, I:
Learnt the ins and outs of running an e-commerce business.
Gained experience in working in detail on a WordPress website.
Fell in love with Marketing - from social media to PR articles and everything in-between.
Opened my knowledge of a whole new industry.
Began my self-employed work with The Country Girls UK.
Made contacts that I still talk with to this day.
There are many more but I'm hoping you get the point!
If you've got this far you may be wondering what the point of this post is, and I guess what I really wanted to say is:
"Failing is not always failure."
Yes, the business wasn't a success. But look at the positives that came from it.
For me, I have been through many stages in my life where I feel I have failed, but for the last 18 months or so, I have really focused on working on myself and my mental health and I am eventually seeing the benefits of it.
My outlook on life feels completely different to this time last year and I feel so much more balanced when faced with challenges.
Take losing a big client for example. A couple of years ago I would have let this affect me. It would play on my mind and I would feel like I just wasn't good enough. It was always so easy for me to talk myself down.
But now? Nope!
Of course, I was gutted when the contract ended, but instead of beating myself in to the ground, I looked at the positives I could take from my role and the effect it could have on my business.
It's given me more drive to chase after the industries I WANT to work with and those that I am passionate about. It's removed a whole heap of stress from my life that was becoming increasingly challenging, and actually, I feel like this was the exact right time for us to part ways.
There have been many other occasions that I could use as examples, but I'll save those for another time.
If you take anything away from this, make it this: