Failure To Launch - Pause, Reflect, Restart: My Journey After a Tough Launch

Launching a side hustle is often talked about or glorified and glamorized by social media these days, often by young 20-something year old’s that talk about how they changed their life around with their side hustle within the space of a 2-3 year period and found success. But that’s often not the case. I want to share with you what happened to me after trying to launch years into working on my idea (4 years for me 32) and how it’s ok after not having the launch you thought you would to keep going - and why it’s ok and sometimes necessary to take a breathe, pause and regain yourself when you restart.

In August this year I was set to finally launch my brand, I had spent the best part of a year planning, researching and most importantly paying for what was going to be my launch at the Reed Gift Fair at Melbourne.
I had everything lined up, my manufacturer, my marketing materials, my hotel, flights, samples, booth items and layout and prop decorators. I had my hired assistants, created my Instagram ads and ordered my furniture - there wasn’t one thing I had not planned for and hadn’t spent every free hour and weekend planning for - except for a failure to launch.

I’ll do another review as to what the Reed Gift Fair was like, as I would like to share my experience with other small businesses and start ups so they do not find themselves in the same situation as me. But this blog post is about what it’s like to tackle the emotional side of the failure.

The problem I had not planned for was what if I had not received the retailers necessary to gain enough traction to start my bulk ordering from my manufacturer, but that is what happened. It meant I walked away, with a loss of time, energy, effort, momentum and most importantly - thousands of dollars.
I mean serious money that I could have used to launch the business differently had I known this would not work for me. But hindsight is 2020.

It is now early October, and exactly 2 months ago I was finishing up the expo knowing full well I had failed to gain the traction I needed to launch how I wanted.

I walked away knowing only one thing - I was not going to quit or give up on my idea.
I had series burn out though, like many startups and side hustlers’ looking to launch their own brand, I juggle working full time and on a personal level being a carer for an elderly family member. This made the pressure I had put on myself even higher, as on some level my failure didn’t just affect me.

By the end of the 4 days of the Exhibition that was supposed to be the start of the launch of my brand, I found myself trying to process and in a way grieve the vision I had made for myself, of what my success would look like and and the return on my energy, time and money that I had poured in for the past 12 months while sacrificing family time and my personal wellbeing. I found myself so stressed and shattered mentally and emotionally that I had agonizing body pains that resulted in my whole body freezing up by the end of the day, barely able to stand or move around and even resulting in pain turning in bed, it was like my whole body said you need to pause, and we are going to make you. I have never experienced anything like it, and as soon as I got home it went away.

When I finally got back to Sydney, I knew one thing, if I was to move forward, I needed to pause for a while.

Often in the business world, when we face setbacks, there is such a narrative of you have to just push through and keep going, and in a sense that is true, you do have to keep going, but I think pausing and allowing yourself to think about and reflect on what went wrong, why it went wrong and how you would have done it differently is important. That’s how the growth and learning happens.

I am also a believer in the mentality. By the fourth day of the expo, I had gone through all the emotions - excitement, nervousness, hopelessness, grief and frustration. The last day I remember thinking to myself, the only way I can climb out of this situation and move forward is to look back at what I have learnt the past four days and add it to my business knowledge toolkit.

And the truth is I learned potentially an important piece of information that I can see has in fact changed the trajectory of my business long term. You see amongst all the frustration and sadness, I received support from the community of other like minded small business owners and exhibitors who were more than happy to assist me in my journey, who encouraged me and passed on a variety of other manufacturers who would be able to make a better product for me as well as some contacts who would help me source other designs and materials.

But I couldn’t rush into it, I needed my time to gather myself and process everything, to take all the lessons I had learned and the information and support I had received from other exhibitors and reset my brain, my nerves and my plan. I had to tell myself that while I was pausing, that didn’t mean I was giving up, and I didn’t need to feel guilty about taking a break, it was what was best for my business as it was what was best for me. I think that is something we forget as side hustlers’ and startup or business owners… we are the business. If we are not working well the business cannot be working well.

I’m now back on track and restarting the process for what feels like the 5th time… or maybe it’s the 6th or 7th.
I can’t keep up, but I am reaching out to a new manufacturer and having to start the process all over again.
I’m reminding myself that it will be worth it, that while yes it has meant a delay in my launch, it means that I have in the long term saved myself business costs that I might not have ever realised I could avoid if I hadn’t had this particular journey on my path to starting my brand.