Improving your mistakes to grow lucrative business

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’ve got at least one nightmare story to tell.

To reach business success, most of us have overcome tough situations and recovered from some very bad decisions.

Hoping that other women might learn from them, two women who built multimillion-dollar businesses offer their advice on how to get past mistakes and move forward.

Denise Haney of Phoenix: Denise founded Newport Furnishings in 1998 with the goal of redefining the way homeowners buy furniture.

She wanted to provide upscale gallery furniture in an affordable way by selling it through a warehouse showroom. And she’s done amazingly well.

But Newport’s growth didn’t happen by accident. And it didn’t happen without error.

Haney winces when she thinks of the major mistake that almost upended Newport during its second year of business.

Up to that point she had focused all her energy on the Phoenix showroom, not even considering additional locations.

Out of the blue, she was approached about expanding into another city, and she let her enthusiasm—and the vision of dollar signs—lead her into a bad decision.

Excited about the opportunity to earn additional revenue with minimal effort, Denise and her husband, Chuck, quickly developed a licensed dealership agreement that enabled the new location to use the Newport Furnishings name and run the business independently in return for a percentage of sales.

But a few months into the deal, Haney began to hear tales from vendors that this location was trying to shortcut the relationship by going directly to the vendors behind her back.

Gravely worried, Haney realised she had placed too much trust in the licensee.

Although Haney was seriously concerned from a business perspective, it took an even greater psychological toll on her.

She was taken aback that someone she had trusted and planned to work with for many years had taken advantage of her. She vowed never to let such a thing happen again.

And she’s held to that vow. As a result of her experience, Denise responded two ways.

First, she became aware of a huge opportunity, and opened 11 new locations over five years.

To make this expansion work, Newport Furnishings developed a unique joint-venture partnership agreement that requires specific approval from Denise and Chuck for the things that bit them in the earlier faulty agreement.

By developing strict controls that create a partnership that is fair for all, Haney was able to get past her mistake and develop a new model that really works.

Adrian Guglielmo of New York: At a time when many businesses were trying to “deal” with disabled employees, Adrian Guglielmo built her whole business around them.

She developed a for-profit business staffed entirely by the disabled.

Her creative agency, Diversity Partners, focuses on promotions for national corporations seeking to market to individuals with disabilities.

While Diversity Partners started out strong, Guglielmo made a classic mistake when her company reached the $150,000 mark.

She bid on a multimillion-dollar project for Johnson & Johnson that was way outside of her company’s range.

A flush of embarrassment still flows over Guglielmo’s face every time she thinks about it.

She worked herself ragged to produce a 200-page proposal that she delivered with 290 typos.

She knows now that she had no business even bidding on that job, and her dismal proposal was proof of that.

After that fiasco, Guglielmo never expected to hear from J&J again, but her stubborn streak wouldn’t let her give up.

After she continued to maintain contact for more than a year, J&J gave her the opportunity to bid on a $7,500 project that she won and executed flawlessly.

That project got her foot in the door, leading to continuously larger contracts, which culminated in her production of an entire catalog of J&J products for the disabled.

From this experience, Guglielmo learned to go after projects that are reasonable for the size of her company and work her way up from there.

And as her company has grown, she’s tackled larger and larger projects.

Over the years, Guglielmo has learned to chase dreams, not pipe dreams.

And those dreams have paid off—big time. Besides Johnson & Johnson, Diversity Partners’ client list runs the gamut from Avis to UPS, from Microsoft to McDonalds, from Avon to the New York City Marathon.

So, although each of these women lived through a nightmare experience, both of them have grown through the lessons they learned during the worst season of their lives. And they’ve capitalised on their experiences to become even more successful.

Cantando’s is the author of Leading with Care: How Women Around the World Are Inspiring Business, Empowering Communities, and Creating Opportunity.