If your business has failed, you’re in a difficult and uncertain situation. While realizing that many other businesses have also failed throughout the past several months of lockdowns will be of little comfort, you will need to accept that there’s nothing you can do to change what has happened. Now, your focus should be on recovering and rebuilding your life.
Assess Your Mistakes
The first step in this process is to take a realistic assessment of what went wrong to lead to your business’ failure. While events beyond your control, such as the ongoing pandemic, are partly to blame, you should look for ways that you contributed to the problem. Perhaps you overspent on marketing, or you kept employees on staff when you should have laid them off. Knowing how you contributed to the failure of the business will prepare you for managing your next project better.
Identify Your Assets
Before you finally admitted defeat, you probably struggled with massive debt, financed and refinanced, and made every other financial move that would help you keep your business afloat. By the time you closed the doors, you were probably left with very little, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have assets to offer. Even if those assets are simply the skills you learned as a business owner, you have something to offer. You can use those skills to help you get a position with another company, so you’ll have consistent income as you create a new plan for yourself.
Create a New Five-Year Strategy
Finally, it’s up to you to determine how you’ll proceed with your life. Will you make another attempt at entrepreneurship, or are you content to create a new kind of career path? There are no wrong answers, and you should encourage yourself to follow your dreams. This will involve creating a new strategy for obtaining those goals and anticipating the challenges you’ll have to face along the way. The better you prepare yourself for this new path, the greater your chances for success will be.
Losing a business is a devastating experience, but you’ll eventually have to overcome those feelings of failure. Even if you work with a therapist to help you deal with those feelings, coping with the loss will prepare you for a new direction. When you’re ready, you’ll feel excited and prepared to embrace new challenges.