Psychology - A practical case of Employee thinking vs Entrepreneur thinking

Recently I got the opportunity to advise a relative of mine in the purchase of a new restaurant. He recently retired from a global corporation after 30 years of service and had been looking for a while to fulfill his long time dream of starting his own enterprise.


As someone with experience as a business owner, and someone with acceptable knowledge of the market he requested my advice on his new venture. I accepted to review the prospects of the business and give my opinion on it.


After looking at the asking price, the location, I thought he had a great opportunity on his hands. He was buying at a very deep discount from a serial entrepreneur who had over expanded too quickly. The business would require, in my opinion the execution of a few initiatives/opportunities such as:
1) adding delivery service - this business was one of the only few who did not offer it in the area
2) extend  the hours of service to include Sundays which being a blue collar neighborhood, should mean Sunday to potentially become the best selling day of the week. Current owner were not open on Sundays.
3) Adding to the menu a new ethnic product which was widely known by the  customers in that neighborhood but was not being offered by anyone else in the area. On top of that my relative had some previous success selling this
particular product in a different market.


So he purchased the business and I moved on with the day to day activities of my own enterprise. I knew the potential was there, but since he was coming from a 30 year protectionist environment at his corporate job, I knew the real question mark would be about his ability to think and act like an entrepreneur.


One weeks later I get a call from him, telling me he had decided to return the business back to the seller.
After a couple of days of disappointing sales he decided to return it to the seller which thanks to a clause in the contract, he was allow to do.
I was amazed to see his transformation after only one week in charge of the business, how quickly this would-be entrepreneur was ready to say "this is not for me, take me out of here".
He named to me all the reasons why the venture was not going to work, and quite honestly they all made sense. Comparing them to the reasons I saw a week before  for the venture to work, I realized that Henry Ford's words, "Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right,”could not be more true.


While I listened to all his reasons I could only think to myself that it was the fear to fail, that made this venture fail and not the actual circumstances around the enterprise.


Of course you always want things to work, but you also need to be aware of how importance is to learn to fail. The more you fail, the more you learn and the closer you are to your next victory.


It also made me appreciate and respect the mind of an entrepreneur. The ones who risk failing.


I thought once again that entrepreneurship is not for everybody. It really takes courage and the ability to go out there every day knowing that most likely you will fail, which means a lot, but  those who refuse to take a chance,  miss out on the opportunity to fail and learn. There is something beautiful about never giving up, about failing and keep getting up, again and again.


I am now more convinced the world belongs to those who master the art of failing.