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"Failure, Success, and The Study of Harsh Reality"

By: Perry Sink Marshall

The most uncomfortable conversation I ever had with my wife’s parents was not the day I asked if I could marry their daughter. It was the explanation I made at the age of 21, ten months into our life as newlyweds – the phone call about why I’d just been fired from my perfectly good, not-too-difficult warehouse job.

“Well Ron, at first this was kind of funny, you see… Tony and I had this really hilarious idea… we made up this fax that explained how the company’s stock had just taken a severe nosedive, they were closing all their branches and would make every effort to make payroll for the current week… We were just sure the folks in Omaha would know it was a practical joke, but then the lady thought it was real and started crying. She faxed it to Arkansas who faxed it to Minneapolis, and… well, the CEO didn’t think this was quite as funny as we did.”

Such was the end of the best-paying job I’d ever had up to that point, complete with a rather tense phone call to the in-laws.

You would all recognize the name of this particular industrial supply company if I told you. And, yes indeed, I learned that Fortune 500 companies take their stock prices very, very seriously. There’s nothin’ funny about money in Corporate America, no-siree Bob!

Eleven years later, it’s a funny story, but at the time it was a devastating blow to my tender ego. It was really the beginning of a whole series of events that has shaped my life since. At the time, I defined success as “Never get fired from a job, and never flunk a class.” If that was the definition of success, then I was suddenly a 50 per cent failure. It really messed me up. I was taking summer school at the time, and all the sudden I couldn’t concentrate on my thermodynamics class. I started falling behind… pretty soon I was flunking quizzes and the relentless pace of a double-speed summer class was overtaking me. I was forced to drop the course and forfeit all my tuition money. So I was a 100 per cent failure. Then, at the next job I found (yet another lowly warehouse position), one day I stopped in the computer department office to ask if a little field could be added to the database. My deeply paranoid and rather incompetent supervisor took great offense at this and fired me for going over her head. Now I was a 150 per cent failure.

This was a summer of humble pie, at the impressionable age of 21. My wife was extremely supportive and I eventually got back on track, but this series of minor disasters left a deep impression. So when a friend invited me to join him in a business startup that required me to sell (to an engineer, a 4-letter word!), he didn’t have to remind me how volatile life in a company can be. He also didn’t have to explain that occasional, serious doses of rejection are as inevitable as death and taxes. So I accepted his proposal with a strong mix of excitement and fear.

Along the way, I picked up an aphorism by motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar: “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you can learn to do it well.” I’ve seen that this is a fundamental belief that all successful people share – in stark contrast to my “never get fired, never flunk a class” philosophy, which is how mediocre people define success.

In the years since my summer-of-humble-pie, I’ve failed much, much more than I’ve succeeded. A pre-Internet business project, 119 presentations in a row and nothing but “no”s. Two years in an engineering design job where none of my major projects saw the light of day. Two more years of fruitless fieldbus “missionary work” in Chicago, eating baloney sandwiches and ramen soup, and a whole series of other large opportunities and projects at the same time, all of which eventually slipped through my fingers. My boss, whom I both liked and respected, was at the end of his rope. He wished I would just sell some sensors or circuit boards or something, and was quite weary of this un-profitable, cutting-edge networking stuff.

Push came to shove. I was no longer a college student, but a working man with a baby at home and a mortgage. I pleaded with my boss: “I want to succeed at this. This is what I want to do. Just give me a couple more months, I’m sure I can close some of these deals”. He replied, as politely as he could: “You know, Perry, I could have this fantasy about, say, being a politician. But that’s just not what I am. You’re a good engineer and you’re a good problem-solver. I’m really sorry, but you’re not a salesman.” He showed me the door.

One week later I started yet another job at a teeny startup product company with very little name recognition, no reps, no distributors and few customers. My position: national sales manager. I was the best they could afford at the time. We figured there was a market for industrial networking boards and software, and I was allowed to sell anywhere I wanted, as long as nobody had to buy me a plane ticket. This time it clicked: my career took an 180-degree turn virtually overnight. Business started moving, and four years later, it’s still growing at a healthy pace. They say you learn more by failing than succeeding, and there’s truth in that. But you can only understand what doesn’t work in the context of what does. There were very definite reasons for that “180.” Here are some things I learned:

Don’t partner with uncommitted people. In 1996, I had a clear shot at doing the first DeviceNet retrofit in all of Ford Motor Company, and I spent a month collecting signatures and drawings so it could move forward. The company I represented lost the drawings and basically puked all over the whole project. I needed a facial egg scraper. I was committed, they were not. It was really doomed to fail from the beginning, I just couldn’t see it at the time. Things were quite different later, when I had engineers on hand who would commit to finishing projects successfully.
Don’t sell things that people don’t want. Most folks have heard that Harlan “Colonel” Saunders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame pitched his chicken recipe to more than 1,000 people before he got a single taker. As the story was told to me, he added salt to his ten spices, and then the very next prospect – presentation #1009 – was a taker. The recipe he had before the salt addition was very, very close to what it needed to be. Likewise, you can start with a really, really great idea, but after the first pass, it’s still not usually what people want. Minor tweaks to the design make a big difference, especially when it hits the “sweet spot.”
Hard work and determination alone are necessary, but not sufficient. Colonel Saunders could have made 1,000 more presentations, driven his car until the transmission fell out, spent every dime of his $105 social security cheques, prayed for success and recited positive affirmations every morning in front of his mirror. But he still would have come up empty-handed, had he not been willing to change what he was selling.
Look for opportunities that capitalize on your true talents. The boss who showed me the door once said to me, “You’re always trying to solve problems. Why can’t you just sell connectors?” In that job, my engineering background was more of a distraction than an asset. I should have seen the handwriting on the wall right away, but I ignored the warning signs. Once I got into a situation where my technical skills were essential, life got a whole lot easier. Each of us has a list of “THINGS I WISH I’D KNOWN 10 YEARS AGO.” You just read a few of mine. But as I look at this list, most of these are things I would have known much sooner, had I only been paying closer attention.

How about your list? It’s seductively easy to be preoccupied with the way things should be, while ignoring the way things really are. The diligent student of Harsh Reality rarely fails a final exam. Failure is not much of a failure at all, so long as we learn from our mistakes.

Perry Sink Marshall is a founding member of the Industrial Ethernet Association (http://www.industrialethernet.com)

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Perry S. Marshall & Associates is an independent consulting & publishing firm, and is not affiliated with Google.