A Beginner's Guide To Making Mistakes

When was the last time you got it wrong? Blew it? Ballsed it up good and proper?

Go on, be honest...

For me it was quite recently. We put a slug of money behind a piece of marketing activity and it bombed. Big style. One big waste of hard earned.

But, I had budgeted (sorry Sig- my apologies for using the B word) for it to have zero impact. So I am philosophical. We always set out a cautious plan. Something along the lines of "this is what we have so lets assume that is ALL we get". On that basis we decide how much to risk on new schemes and the ones that fly are cream and cherries. The ones that bomb... bomb.

I haven't formally sat down and tried to count up the things that went wrong over the last five years. I haven't tallied them off against the things that went right.

I know if I did that the list of decisions that ended up being reversed, the products that failed, the great ideas that turned out to be not so great would be longer than this blog post.

But the select few that have really worked have made a major impact on our business. Behind these stars are a good handful of unsexy moderate successes that have covered their risk costs and made a small profit. Together these and the ongoing positive churn management of the bread and butter mean we can take some punts every year and try new things knowing that we can afford for some initiatives to fail.

I guess you could say that along the way we are seasoned pros... in getting it wrong as well as getting it right!

Sometimes of course the mistakes have spiralled away from us and taken some hard yards and piles of cash to put right . So it goes.

My advice to the beginner is threefold:

1. Be prepared to be wrong. To be fallible. To be calamitous. You will find your willingness to have a go will increase threefold.

2. Be sensible though, every gambler knows that if you bet more than you can afford to lose there will be tears, broken bones and bruises.

3. When it goes wrong: take the blame. Own it. Particularly if it is high profile. Stand between the fire and your people and take the flames.

And enjoy the ride.

It is better to have enough ideas to be able to afford for some to go wrong than to have no idea at all.