Hitting Rock Bottom: How to Overcome
a Business Collapse

In a leader’s mindset failure is not an option. You have a vision, you have an idea, and you have a plan but unfortunately, it still happens. Sometimes we hit rock bottom, everything goes south and we feel like quitting.

This is an experience almost every person who starts a business goes through, and your success is, in many ways, due to how you deal with failure.  Sometimes it’ll be money, sometimes it’ll be legal shenanigans, and sometimes it’ll be not finding the right team or investors that trust your vision, but hitting rock bottom is something that happens. It is a career-defining moment: do you go back to the 9-to-5 job you hated or you give it another go?

Here we’ll give you some tips to overcome failure.

Accept it and use it

Life is not heaven. It comes with punches, walls, and falls. The road to success is tough. There’s a reason why there is a stairway to heaven but a highway to hell. To thrive you need to go through many failures and endure them.

When you’re aware that failure is part of the process, you’ll be stronger and more confident when you face it. In Hinduism and Buddhism teaching it’s common to learn to use pain to propel our inner strength: turning our feelings about failure into motivation to achieve your goals.

Create a vision and develop a plan from it

How do you know where you are if you don’t know where you’re going? Sometimes facing a difficulty may seem as the end of your business but when you see the big picture, it’s just a small hiccup. If you learn to create a vision and act with a telos in mind may help you develop a plan. A telos is the end of your actions. You must do everything for a reason, and that reason has to be oriented with your final goals. You cannot act randomly.

After knowing where you’re going you have to develop a plan that’ll get you there. Then, you plan for what you can control and prepare for what you don’t control. Sometimes, you may feel you’re failing but then you’ll see you’re ranting about things that are not under your control that are leading you to forget about those you can control (your human capital, your plan, your money, etc.)

Rome wasn’t built in one day

As you know that failure is part of the process and develop a plan with a vision you’ll see that changes don’t happen as quickly as you may think at the beginning. Some of the shortcomings and bumps you may face may seem like the end of the world. But they are not. Most times, all you need is persistence. When you enter in despair, your team notices it, and trust in you diminishes. That can’t happen. Yes, a plan tells you what you need to do to achieve your telos, but tenacity is what moves you there non-stop.

In conclusion

Many times, “rock bottom” is a state of mind. With the adequate mindset and plan, you’ll notice most failures are temporary, are mere setbacks, instead of full-scale collapses.

Failure is not the end of the world. It lets you know what’s not working to change it and to focus on what you can control. If you see failure as an opportunity to hit the reset button instead of a crisis, you’ll learn to wage it and use it in your favor.