I've lost time, money, sleep and a bit of my sanity recently by having done a bad recruitment process for a sub-contractor to handle a task whose failure could have cost me my whole business.
He got it done, finally, but the trust is gone, and I've learnt my lessons:
- Ask other people that were successful at what you want to do to tell you how they did it, and what mistakes they regret making.
- Rely on your network, but don't trust recommendations blindly.
- Get more than one quote.
- If your guy is better than the last guy, doesn't mean he's good enough.
- If you're losing time, money and sleep – time to investigate & address the problem.
- Wanting to be kind is not a reason for letting someone fuck you over.
- "Cultural differences" is not a good reason for someone to do their job.
- If a contractor sends you an angry email calling you out on a behavior when you didn't mean any harm, don't stay stuck in fear, confront the problem head on.
- Do not isolate yourself when struggling. Get over the shame and talk to someone you trust.
So… Those are my lessons learned – or at least the lessons I hope I'll integrate.
I don't know which American President said "Never waste a good crisis" 😅
Fellow entrepreneurs – what mistakes did you make along the way? What did you learn from it?
What mistake costed you the most, as a beginner?
byu/Vit4vye inEntrepreneur
Posted by Vit4vye
20 Comments
For me the biggest mistake I made/make (sometimes) is indecisiveness. Whenever I am being indecisive I procrastinate and slowly end up doubting myself. And that mistake can be very costly!
My company got blacklisted by the ONLY leasing company in the country. Because of their mistake… (they forgot to issue invoices). At the end we paid for extra use (1.5 years) and returned the asset but they still blacklisted us because it was one of the CEOs mistake and not ours and they needed to cover their asses.
So they blacklisted every owner in the company.
Another one was signing contract in English in a non-English speaking country, lawyers said it’s a very slippery slope and we won’t be able to prove anything because English understanding is up to a debate. So the easiest would be to just drop it.
Don’t admit any guilt or responsibility in any letter. Don’t outright deny it, unless the other side is confrontational. Use corporate two-speak unless lawyers are involved. Then it’s a lawyer battle.
If you do research and your lawyer sounds stupid it’s most likely because they have no idea about the topic you are dealing with so find another opinion asap. Lawyers are like doctors for company, always have 2nd or 3rd opinion.
Before going into a small country find out what is holding back others from exploiting that country. Most likely you will find very laid back “tropical island” tribal culture of which you will never be a part (at best your job will be a “translator” of services). You’ll never master the language and always be deemed foreigner just based on your accent.
indie hacker here!
In my early days I started out at scale when I should have started small with the problems I was trying to solve. It worked out better that way for me now and I’m still learning on the job
When I first started, I hired a company of “WordPress experts” to help me migrate off of WordPress into a custom angular front end.
The company accidentally triggered $8,000 worth of artificial renewal charges in a development environment that I had to refund. Learned to do literally everything in-house after that and had to fire someone for the first time.
Not starting sooner.
Not enough capital
Trying to find a perfect idea before start.
OP just curious, how much was the budget for the sub-contractor? Have you hired by salary or by task/job/deliverable?
Just want to know what you think the problem was. I have seen some people hiring and expecting the work to be done without knowing market value/salary for the domain area. So basically accepting the cheapest and expecting the best quality.
I have also seen paying above market and getting nothing.
What do you think was your mistake?
Cheers!
Focusing on different things at the same time and not being consistent. I started networking pretty late, these realizations has helped me. Also I have wasted my time in useless AI tools, many of them are gimmicks and don’t deliver what they say. Now, I have joined forebrain, they provide weekly most relevant AI tools which are not gimmicks and works. They don’t spam and the updates are pretty helpful. [here](https://forebrain.beehiiv.com)
Requiring A+ performance when an A will do.
Sometimes “good enough” is just perfect.
not starting soon enough, probably cost me a bit. I could have starter 2 years earlier, I’m 2 months into my first time actually trying and at 11k/m with 98% margins (service business). I can only imagine 2 years of compounding, but it’s all good, it’s going now
Those all sound like pretty solid lessons. It’s good that you roped all that out of one toxic experience. Would you say you look back on it and think it was worthwile?
I run an eBay store and my biggest amateur mistake was selling some expensive Pokemon cards without first immersing myself in the culture for a couple days, learning the terminology, the keywords, applying SEO. I just knew it was valuable and had to flip it ASAP.
Sold the 50-card collection for $350.
Couple weeks later, I looked at the buyer’s *own* online store: He’d sold *one* of the 50 cards for $350.
**Lesson**: if you get your hands on a sellable, you’re sure it’s valuable but you don’t know anything about that industry or the consumer culture, *sit on it*, clear your schedule as best you can for a day or two and do the research.
Letting family have shares lol didn’t think they’d ban together to override me and bring it to the ground with their bad choices lol
Well. Im currently in the middle of my “master plan or fuck up”
In short, had a successful contracting get up which would have made me quite well off in the long term. However I had an itch for VR development and was annoyed at the products I was developing. The field of VR interaction is stuck with a laser pointer and i hate it. So went off to do a PhD. It was funded but still expensive. Currently trying to understand if i fucked up and cost me a lot of money, but knowledge is knowledge. My experience from finanical fuck ups from other agencies is not hiring the talent that are worth it and resorting to low budget development teams that havent published a polished MVP before.
Trying to do too much myself or within the company that should have been outsourced.
Initially, not understanding who our “ideal” type of customer was.
Being impatient, over-reactive, and not letting things play out. Had a product on Amazon FBA stocked overseas with warehousing fees. Wasn’t selling for months, so I destroyed most of the stock to save on fees. Then a few months later the small amount of remaining stock sold out within a week, the algorithm gave me a chance.
Trusting too many people without proper assessment
could you give some details about what they did? from a generalized pov?
test
Not cutting it off sooner. Each subsequent failure increases the likelihood of success. I was too afraid to cut losses and move on.