How failure taught me to succeed as an entrepreneur

"Over the past 50 years in the shoe trade, I have had my fair share of failure. The biggest lesson I learned, at the start of my career, is not to devote time and energy to a business or project that has little chance of success. This might sound obvious, however sometimes you are so involved in the detail of the day to day running of the business that you don't stand back and question the future viability of what you are doing."

"Another example is from the 2000s. I was a successful importer from Asia, a business I set up in 1986 called Browning Enterprises. It had a turnover of £60m. As communications improved and markets opened, more Chinese manufacturers and trading companies came directly to the major U.K. retailers, putting pressure on the margins of the middlemen, like me. Our costs were too high. We couldn't compete. The import company struggled on till 2009."

"Another failure was opening unprofitable stores. This is an expensive mistake as the £400k investment is written off when the store is closed. The failure is usually due to overestimating the level of sales. The costs of a new store are easily calculated. The big variable, that is largely a matter of judgement, is the sales number."

Over fifty years in the shoe trade produced repeated failures that taught clear lessons about business viability and adaptability. Early experience in 1980s London footwear manufacturing showed low-technology, labor-intensive production was unsustainable in the U.K. as production moved to lower-cost, high-quality Asian factories; seeing identical shoes at half the price in Taiwan prompted a shift from manufacturing to importing. Growing direct access between Chinese suppliers and major U.K. retailers in the 2000s eroded margins for intermediaries, undermining an import business. Opening new stores without realistic sales forecasts caused expensive write-offs, because start-up costs are fixed while sales projections remain uncertain.

Read at Fast Company