Mistakes. We all make them. In the early years of a business, inexperience may lead us to make quite a few. Don’t worry about that. It is important to learn from mistakes and move on.
Starting out we are going to be telephoned by the business directories such as Yellow Pages and Thomson. If we have a plumbing business or a car repair shop that may be just the way to get business in the early years before our good reputation gets to spread around. What we don’t need to do is persist with paying large amounts of money for directory listings which don’t work. A couple of years is quite enough and if there is no result, move on.
There are people who keep trying things in the hope that somehow things will change and something will start working. This reminds me of one of my colleagues who had once been my boss. He tried hard with his IT which was to his credit, but I remember over about a week he was trying to do something in Word 97 or with Windows 2000 and it didn’t work. Of course that was because he was making the same error over and over again. The software didn’t know what he was trying to do, so it just didn’t work. My colleague should have asked someone what he was doing wrong, but he was just too proud to until a staff member just happened to notice his predicament. Yes, it was comical, but demonstrated the need to get help, and how stubbornly some people resist asking for it.
We must not beat ourselves up over our mistakes. We must learn and move on and know when we need help, and the value of that for which we pay.
