I Failed
When I relaunched this blog, I said I was going to be real, and vulnerable. I wanted to talk about my pitfalls, as well as my successes. Well, I've had a pitfall, and I'm going to talk about it today.
Not that it's easy to do. Nay nay, my type A inner self is straining at the reins, urging my hands to stop typing, because admitting a failure is just about the last thing I like to do. I set lofty goals, and crushing them is what I do. But I haven't done that, and talking through these feelings is what I'm going to do in this post.
I founded Level Up Prep because I loved helping people find success in their job search. Career coaching is good, but I wanted to disrupt the field. I wanted to take the model and upend it. Instead of having a person sit there and go through the resume creation process with you, I wanted to automate it. I wanted you to be able to sit down, plug in some information, and a bot would populate the resume for you. It would take advantage of the information I know as a recruiter, that I leverage when talking about automated resume readers, and what I look for in the seven seconds I review a resume for. Is this starting to sound familiar?
Yes, it was such a good idea that LinkedIn and Microsoft had it, too. But where I'm just one person, they have a squadron of engineers, coders and other smarties to work on it. They made a great product. I'm now obsolete before I even made it out the gate.
Sigh.
Okay. Think, think, think. Where do I go from here? Do I keep going forward with Level Up? I still love helping people. But it isn't a goal to have a career coaching business. In truth, I think it's an industry in mid-disruption. I do still love helping people, and I'm currently coaching a nice group of people, but I'll just continue to do it through my personal consulting brand. I don't need Level Up to do it.
My business, as it were, is no longer needed. So I'll move on.
So, maybe it's not a fail. It was clearly a good idea! I'll take that as a win. And I certainly learned a lot about launching a business - it's part of what gives me the knowledge I need to coach others to launch their own businesses. I've been through it myself. And I'm going to do it again. And hey, I'm doing it now. The consulting business is going like gangbusters. I couldn't be happier and more excited to try again.
In fact, I've already got another concept in my head, and the research process has already begun. Because you can't keep a hustler down for long.
I have to admit, though, it's hard not to feel embarrassed. I feel like I worked so hard to put myself all the way out there, push this concept, and I had a boatload of people in my network who backed me up and signal boosted me. It feels like I let them all down. It's like they trusted me and they shouldn't have.
It makes me wonder if they'll take a chance on me again. I don't know the answer to that. I suppose I'll find out when I launch my next big adventure.
But for now, with this post, I'm officially done licking my wounds. I'm bandaged and getting back in the fight. I'm not just going to ask for faith. I'm going to work hard, fight hard and earn the right to take my next giant leap into the unknown, and I am just as excited to try again as I was the first time.
Who knows what's going to happen next!
