🌟 Knowing when to quit & my failed business

Hey Flawsome Human,

This year for me has been a year of truly embracing & understanding failure.

Last week I got to speak publicly about my business failure for the first time since shutting down at Fuckup nights Toronto.

There were 2 other founders sharing their failures as well. The whole premise of this event is to show others that failure is OK.

Failure is inevitable.

Failure is a part of the process.

It doesn’t make you any less of a person or entrepreneur.

In fact, it makes you more qualified because every time you fail, you LEARN.

I know a lot of people struggle with failure, and sometimes they stay somewhere too long because of it.

“If I quit now, what will people think?”

“Maybe if I hold on a little while longer, things will get better?”

What if you thought of failure as a badge of honour, what would you do differently in your life right now?

I held onto my business for longer than I should have - simply because I felt obligated to.

I was scared of what people would think, but I knew deep down a year before I closed my business that it wasn’t for me & things weren’t working.

I just released my second episode of You’re Not a Bad Person where I talk all about my journey of building my cookie dough business & how it ended.

You can take a find it here:

Listen on Apple

Listen on Spotify

Let’s get into QUITTING and when to know it’s time…

💪When to quit & questions to ask before you do 💪

1️⃣ Lack of passion or interest: This is something that wavers - not every day are you going to be super passionate or excited about what you do. There’s going to hard days where you question EVERYTHING (which is normal). But if you start to get into long periods where you genuinely lose interest in what you’re doing, and if it no longer aligns with your values or goals, it might be time to reassess your path.

Can you get the passion or interest back? How? Are there things you need to delegate so you can focus on the things that you enjoy & are good at?

2️⃣ Lack of progress/results: if you’ve been PUTTING in the work, consistently enough (not just a few weeks, or even a few months), and things don’t seem to be working - reassess.

Maybe you need to pivot - for me it was scrapping my first product, and launching an improved one. I collected data, spoke to other founders, customers, & made the necessary changes. You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results.

What can you do differently? Why isn’t your current strategy working? Are there things you can do to become more efficient?

3️⃣ Exhaustion: If you are constantly exhausted, emotionally or physically (or both), look at the bigger picture. There are going to be seasons that are harder than others (like Black Friday, I’m talking to you DTC folks) but you shouldn’t always feel like a sack of rotten potatoes.

Why are you exhausted? Are there boundaries you need to put in place to help avoid this? What specific things are causing this and what can you do to reduce it?

A month before I made the decision to pull the plug on Bro Dough, I had a call with a good friend of mine.

He told me to do this exercise; write down the terms and conditions of your ideal life (he told me his was about 20 pages long).

Where do you want to live? How many hours do you want to work? What does your average day look like? How do you feel? What are you doing?

If what you’re currently doing isn’t bringing you closer, you should - you guessed it - reassess.

In the 4 years of building my business, I realized I loved marketing & content creation, not managing operations & sampling cookie dough in stores on weekends.

Did I quit my business? Yes.

Did I quit on me? No.

I don’t feel like I’m stuck, uninspired, or exhausted anymore.

The more time you spend doing something that isn’t meant for you, the longer you delay what is.

Stay Flawsome,

-Erica