Unfortunately, I realized last week that I made it to my financial deadline for making something happen with my business. According to my plan, I must now find another source of income, which primarily means that I have to get a job. When I realized what this really meant, I had a few rough days last week while I was still with my family for the holidays. I hurried out of town and headed back to Blacksburg to clear my head and start developing a plan of action.
Does this mean that I failed at my business? Well, that all depends on your definition of failure. In a financial sense, this was a near complete failure as the business fell on its face as quickly as it possibly could have. My opinion is slightly different, but it took me about a week to wrap my head around the entire experience.
I said before I started doing this full time that there was no such thing as failure. I still believe that to be true, but it was tough to comprehend when things went worse than my calculated worst case scenario. There are positives in any situation and I can certainly name a few that I have created…changed my career path to where I really wanted it, realized I have the balls to do whatever I need to in life, learned a ton about my personal productivity, and learned how much work and dedication it takes to really start a business. I could go on and on about all of these things, and maybe I will eventually…
For now, I’m going to step back from what I was doing as I search for a grocery money job. I have a hypothesis that when a business starts failing, owners work harder and harder trying to force the issue. Working harder may achieve more, but what is ultimately wrong is some of the underlying strategy. I’m going to allow my brain to reflect on my strategies to decide what needs correcting before I put much more effort into the business.
The time for reflection is desperately needed as the previous three months have flown by. My current thoughts remove all blame from myself and the methods I was using, which is probably incorrect. I would currently tell you that this ‘failure’ was simply a case of bad timing with the Google penalty. If the penalty hadn’t hit, I’d probably be approaching four digits in income in January. If I had waited to quit my job until the end of October, I would have seen the penalty hit and stuck with my employer for a bit longer. I’m sure these thoughts make me sound loony to anyone not living inside my head. Although they hold some truth, the underlying problem most likely lies with something I’ve been doing incorrectly.
It is difficult to guess at the cause of a rankings penalty (or anything the big G does), but usually these things lift in time. My hope is that I eventually land a wicked internet marketing job somewhere and then the penalty is lifted so I’ll be making a nice side income as well. I was bitter about the situation, but I’ve quickly recovered my attitude to make it forward looking and as positive as I can muster.
