My Three Biggest Business Regrets.

Originally posted October 4, 2021

There is a significant difference between making mistakes and having regrets. I've made more than my share of mistakes and learned from them. I have no misgivings for making mistakes. Anyone breathing makes mistakes. What's important is to learn from them, improve, and move on.

Regrets are actions we do or don't take that have significant consequences. When I look back on my first business, I have my first two regrets:

1. Not buying a Building.

It never dawned on me that I could have bought a building rather than rent and put thousands of dollars into leasehold improvements for someone else.?

From the time I started my business until I sold it nine years later, the real estate value on the Outer Banks had gone through the roof. I didn't know that once R&R was established, I was eligible for an SBA commercial loan with generous terms and low interest rates.??

Had I bought a building instead of paying rent, I would have built equity in the building worth more than the business, which I could have sold at any time or rented.

2. Not having a coach, mentor, or professional peer group.

There was so much we didn't know about running a seasonal retail jewelry business.

We learned by doing and paying the costs of mistakes based on inexperience and naivety. There were endless lessons that included:

• The art of pricing.
• The importance of managing the margins.
• You make your money in your buying.
• It's more important to be respected, not loved.
• How to hold people accountable.
• The importance of following trends.
• How to maximize our advertising budget.
• The importance of working with an experienced insurance broker rather than an agent.
• Not recognizing that the bank where I had my line of credit was too conservative and there were better options out there (which might have enabled us to buy more merchandise to carry for the seasonal business).

We never learned how and where to search for capital for growth, or how to find the best buyer for our business.

We would have learned these lessons and others much earlier if we had had a mentor, a coach, or belonged to an organization like the Entrepreneur's Organization.

And after selling R&R, I had another regret:?

3. Not Publishing the Book.

After I sold R&R and spent five years as a successful business broker, I hired a company to help me write a book entitled How to Buy, Sell, and Run a Business for Maximum Profit. I spent several weeks collaborating with a ghostwriter to write the book.?

The company's policy was that I could only see the manuscript once they completed it because it would slow the process down, and I should leave it to the professionals. When they finished the book, I was devastated. I hated the ghostwriter's style and, as a result, never published it. It was not my voice.

In retrospect, I should have published it. It had excellent information, and I would have been an author in 1987, which I could have leveraged at the beginning of my speaking and coaching career.

A coach or mentor might have opened my eyes to the possibility of buying a building, minimized the mistakes I made out of ignorance or inexperience, and encouraged me to publish How to Buy, Sell, and Operate a Business for Maximum Profit.

As I look back on all the business decisions I've made, I realize that my regrets are all things I did NOT do.

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