How I Failed
During the registration of my coaching company, KVK specialist asked me if I had a “solo-business” before in the Netherlands. I did, and she asked me what went wrong.
The first thought that came to me was “I FAILED”. And then “Wait, that was actually great EXPERIENCE & LEARNING”.
In 2016 my friend and I decided to create a company Like Me Family Look . We both were passionate about fashion and liked the idea of creating matching outfits for the whole family. Ilona was leading the creative part: designing the clothes, choosing fabrics, finding personal, etc,. I was responsible for commercial, marketing and logistics part: business plan, developing website, marketing campaigns, buying fabrics (I even flew to Milano to buy some Valentino fabric leftovers for our raincoats).
The day our Capsule Collection was ready, I pressed the button on our website to go life.
At that moment strange thing happened to me. Suddenly I have realised that I was so much focused on the “doing part” in the whole process, that I didn’t ask myself what was really important for me personally in this business. And don’t get me wrong here. I did enjoy the whole experience as a lot of my personal values were honoured – creativity, learning, courage, even adventurous. But somehow I overlooked the core one, and that is Connection with people. Yes, the idea was to produce family looks for people, but because that was online business with random offline events, I didn’t see how I could fulfil enough that value, that is extremely important to me, my core one.
The business existed for sometime, we had good sales that helped actually to cover all the costs at least. That was during the time I was not familiar with co-active coaching model at all. And I am very grateful for the best learning: in order to succeed in “Doing”, it is essential to understand the “Being” part first.