Small businesses don’t always work out. There are so many factors at play: maybe it wasn’t the right time to move your product to market, maybe there was an unexpected breakdown in the supply chain. New taxes might have sliced into your profit margins enough that you couldn’t keep the business going, or a new technology might have rendered your service obsolete. No matter what the cause, having to shut down operations of your small business can be quite a blow; you’ve invested a lot of yourself into it, and to see it end can be downright painful. Once your business is gone, what should you do? I have a suggestion that might seem a bit outré – start another business.

Who better to start a business than someone who has already started one? You know what it takes to set up the business, the steps that are necessary for hiring a great team. You have connections that you’ve made from your last start-up, and you know how to file all the paperwork. You have expertise, which is something so few startups have; after all, you need to have started a business already to know how to start a new one! All this means a lot of the upfront effort, researching how to start your business, making those connections – it’s all already there. Inertia is working in your favour, because the ball is already rolling.

That’s just looking at the things you know to do; now consider the things that you know not to do, the lessons you’ve learned along the way. The mistakes you made that might have hurt your last business won’t be mistakes you make again, so instead of mistakes, they become learning experiences. You might have said to yourself “If I could start over, I wouldn’t have chosen this neighborhood for my store” or “If I could go back in time, I would try to inspire a more relaxed culture at my business”. When you start anew, you can go back, righting the mistakes you made and creating a better business. Your experience, here, is unique and powerful.

There are plenty of stories of people who left business and got back into it. Some ran successful businesses, like this Forbes story about Jess Butcher, who started a billion dollar company but left when she needed a change to her work-life balance. Others, like Vitaliy Rizhkov, lost millions on businesses before finally finding success. When it comes to running a business, tenacity is key. When you’re on your search for funds to start a new business, or you want to see what tax breaks and incentives can help your new endeavor, an efficient Winnipeg accountant from Compass Accounting can help. When a business fails, you might feel like there are ashes all around you; remember, it’s only from the ashes that a phoenix can rise.