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Most of us don’t become entrepreneurs because we are afraid of failure. Being afraid has two implications. One is the social stigma. The other is the fear that once we fail as an entrepreneur, we become ‘unemployable’ for the rest of our lives. Social stigma is a fact. Everyone you meet will tell you how ‘you should have run your business’.

They will give you sympathetic looks, they will make patronizing noises and this is not just with you, but with your family members as well. This is always the hardest to digest and come to terms with, especially if prior to becoming an entrepreneur you were a ‘successful employee’ in a well-known organization.
So how do you deal with it? Like everything else, you just learn to live with it, develop what we call a ‘rhino hide’. A little self-deprecating sense of humor is a good shield.

A friend of mine failed as an entrepreneur. It was very painful for him, more so when he started looking for a job. It almost seemed as if he was being called for interviews only to be trashed. So he turned the problem on its head. He was called for an interview with the CEO of a large software company and even as he sat down, he told the CEO: “I couldn’t even run my own company, why do you think I can run yours?” Needless to say, he got the job and five years later, he also managed to take over from the same CEO!

The fear of failure operates on two levels. On one level, it tethers you into your comfort zone, holds you back from becoming an entrepreneur. On the next level, even if you become an entrepreneur, it stops you from setting for yourself that big hairy audacious goal. I have heard from many an entrepreneur that if he has to scale up, he needs to infuse fresh capital into the business. This fresh capital means loan from a bank or divesting stake to a venture capitalist, both of which are fraught with risks and possibilities of failures—therefore why scale at all! Bingo!

The ‘unemployabilty’ factor is part fact, part paranoia. It is true that in India, the value of failed entrepreneurs is yet to be understood by the large, established corporations. But as India is taking those baby steps towards becoming an entrepreneurial economy, this will soon become one of the biggest lessons it learns.

Years ago I was hiring a profit-center head for one of our business units in the Middle East and I had pretty much zeroed in on a gentleman who was a ‘failed entrepreneur’.

My logic? Learning compression. As an employee it takes you a decade to learn what you do as an entrepreneur in less than two years. So when an enterprise hires one, he hits the ground running!

Believe me, more and more enterprises are beginning to see value in the truism that a failed entrepreneur makes for a highly successful cost-efficient hire!
So stop agonizing about failure. Entrepreneurship is a lot like love. It is so much better to have tried and lost—than not to have tried at all.

PROF. NANDINI VAIDYANATHAN teaches entrepreneurship in business schools around the world and has co-founded two companies, Startups (forstartups.blogspot.com) and CARMa (www.carmagroup.in), both of which mentor entrepreneurs.

©Entrepreneur April 2010

Tags:
entrepreneur, humor, rhino hide, social stigma, women