How to evaluate failure in 3 easy steps

“Brad usually fails.”

That’s what you might say if you looked at my career summary. But with each step of the journey, I’ve learned to process failure and eventually, turn it into a formula for success.

Today I’m sharing a simple way to evaluate failures.

This will help you decide if you should walk away (detonate), or lean in and try again (motivate).

When staring failure in the face, you have to realize it’s not a mirror. It is not a direct reflection of you, and the failure may not even be your fault. Too often, leaders abandon ship on what could have been a great project because failure makes them uncomfortable.

They’ll lower the bar to increase the likelihood of a successful the jump.

This is how and why I’ve come to see failure as a requirement for growth.

First, back story:

When I was 16, I wanted to be a songwriter. I played in bands, studied music production, self recorded albums, and desperately wanted to find my way into the music industry. I eventually realized my talent and ability was not enough, despite my 10,000 hours.

I failed.

At age 22, I earned a degree in journalism and founded a music magazine called “Shock and Yawn.” I hoped to combine my talent for storytelling with my passion for music. After 9 months, I had made $8.00 total in revenue and I quit.

I failed.

Just before my 23rd birthday, I founded a marketplace that helped photographers book more gigs. The concept was similar to Uber for wedding photography. The company was profitable, given it had little overhead, but I only had 2 photographers on board.

I failed.

One of the last weddings I photographed, which had some of my best friends as guests. These moments were fun, but it didn’t mean I was doing a great job at running a business.

I was 26 years old and tried to cofound a marketing analytics company. It was a side hustle, and when my full time employer found out about it, I was fired. The startup was dead before it ever got off the ground, and I was out of a job. 

I failed.

Twice.

Failure is woven into the narrative of my life, but I’ve come to see it as a scar, symbolizing earned wisdom.

It’s important to know when to move on (such as the music magazine) or when to dig in (as I’ve done with my current company, GoWild—I will be diagramming our failed and successful projects here in coming months).

I’ve failed time and time with these guys (left to right—Chris Gleim, Brad Luttrell, Donovan Sears, and not pictured is Zack Grimes). They’re my cofounders at GoWild. I will be documenting our lessons learned over the coming months.

Before you can evaluate your own failures, it’s critical to understand your metrics of success and what exactly failed.

For example, you don’t have to be Warren Buffett to know $8.00 in 9 months is really terrible—like, so bad.

But when your company is surviving yet not scaling, founders and leaders often dig in without realizing they’re not digging a tunnel out—they’re digging a grave. If you’re not making progress, you may be dying without a diagnosis, as was the case with my wedding photography company.

Every company is unique, so only you can come up with your success metrics. Once you have them and you identify a failure, the following process helps decide if you should be motivated to try again, or if the whole thing needs to be detonated and put out of its misery.

Start by asking yourself this simple question:

“Was this failure due to

• Lack of resources or effort?

• Poor execution?

• Product market fit?

• Something else?”

Resources

Talent is a resource, so I was never going to make it as a songwriter. Passion doesn’t mean profit, and lack of resources (talent or even money) can be hard to overcome. Some resources, though, can be generated.

Execution

If it was execution, you can possibly find ways to implement better—maybe I could have tweaked my wedding photo company’s model, for example.

Product market fit

Sometimes the pain simply isn’t worth the prescription to customers. Branding can sometimes solve this, but it takes a lot of more resources, most notably a metric shit ton of capital for this level of branding. Branding is also abstract, and most companies will never pull it off because a brand can’t be visualized in a spreadsheet.

Keep writing and identifying why you failed. Through this self reflection, you’re identifying things that are in your control, and things that aren’t. Now you only have two options after this assessment.

1) Try again—failure leaves you motivated

If most of that failure was in your control (execution, for example), then you should be motivated to try again with some thoughtful adjustments. We’ve applied this time and time again as we built and scaled GoWild. When you learn to do this quickly, your team will become a true force to be reckoned with.

2) Move on—time to detonate

If too much was out of your control (resources, product market fit), you’ve earned some new-found wisdom and should detonate the entire project. Sure, you may be able to overcome resources and product market fit, but it’s a long, hard road.

When you break it down like this, you have very little gray area for debate. It makes decision making easy. You can either improve things that were in your control, or recognize you failed because of things outside of your control and move on.

Don’t ever underestimate the power of being the decisive leader.

Motivate or Detonate process:

1. What are the reasons this project failed? List out top 5 reasons.

2. How many of these were within my control? You need more than half to move on.

3. Is the outcome of winning next time worth the time and effort to try again?

About Brad Luttrell

I'm an award-winning writer, photographer and creative director turned entrepreneur. I’m the Cofounder, CEO of GoWild. Me and three other guys took $500 and an idea, and bootstrapped our way to a beta launch in 2017. Since then, we've raised some money, quit our 9 to 5s, and built a great team to scale our content commerce platform. Today my No. 1 focus as CEO is to craft the product vision, and to curate a culture that makes chasing that vision possible. I've won some awards along the way, but nothing in my professional career makes me more proud than the team I've built with GoWild. I write about that here, on my Substack. Subscribe to stay updated.