Yesterday I had two people from Ernst & Young perform a site visit and interview as part of the nomination process for their entrepreneur of the year program.  The woman who lead the interview was intrigued as to how I had been able to ‘figure out’ so many different components of business without schooling, prior knowledge, etc.  My answer was simple – I have been failing successfully for the last ten years.

I’ve made a number of good decisions throughout the course of my career.  I’ve also made a number of bad decisions.  Each bad decision has become an opportunity to become an expert in that segment of the business.  I used to think that I could manufacture any product and put my brand name on it, and it would turn to gold.  Surprise – thats not how the world works.  Below is a list of 9 products from Apple that were complete failures.

You may have never heard of these products.  There is a reason for that.  In my case, it was a new product category that we brought to market.  The product line did not sell.  I immediately analyzed why.  The answer was a mixture of what is now clearly obvious. We had not performed the necessary due diligence prior to bringing the product to market.  The product was overpriced, the market cap was not there, the supply chain was slow – it was a disaster!  What made this a successful failure was that rather than dwell on the failure, I flipped this into a positive and used this as a lesson moving forward.  Now we have a very systematic process for product research which evaluates the above factors, and more.  Our chance of failure in this area moving forward will be substantially reduced.

I’ve always hired good people who are better at their defined area of expertise than me.  This has also been a critical factor of my success, as I use this as an opportunity to learn.  The most important part of failing successfully is to react quickly.  Identifying that you are failing is absolutely critical and will determine whether you fail or fail successfully.

-Mike