The road to starting your own business is not paved with flowers most of the time, ask any entrepreneur and he will undoubtedly confirm this information to you, and we can say that the most successful and most famous companies have had their share of challenges, just like any startup that is established.
When you are in the midst of launching your business, you may frequently have that urgent desire to retreat and leave it, especially in light of the difficulties and challenges that come to you from all sides, and at the same time you have to deal with a lot of other things, such as maintaining strong relationships with customers. Meeting their needs, maintaining a good reputation, retaining employees, creating an effective brand, and effective marketing in a market saturated with competitors, all of these things are required of you at the same time you have to overcome unexpected obstacles .
Getting to know others’ success stories, studying the challenges they faced while building their own companies, and how they overcame them, will lift your spirits. It will inspire you to continue the journey. Then the truth will become clear to you: it’s okay to fail at tasks, it’s okay to waste some resources, it’s okay to make wrong decisions, it’s okay to feel tired and exhausted; Every entrepreneur, no matter how prepared he is, faces unexpected obstacles, the successful ones learn how to overcome them as quickly and with minimal losses. Here are some stories of companies that almost failed, got it right and then prospered and expanded.
FedEx… Impossible problems require crazy solutions!
It is perhaps the most famous story of all the start-ups that saw failure as visible; FedEx was founded in 1971 by Frederick W. Smith, who used his $4 million personal fortune, plus an additional $90 million, to fund the startup.
The goal behind FedEx was to make it the first company to ship packages anywhere in the world for overnight delivery. Three years after the company was founded, Frederick faced a major problem. Fuel costs rose sharply in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. Therefore, the company’s losses doubled, which amounted to one million dollars per month!
At this difficult point, the company was on the verge of having to file for bankruptcy, and all that was left in the company’s account was only $5,000, an amount that wasn’t close to covering the cost of jet fuel on Monday morning. Weekly, they will need a miracle to get the money for fuel.
After his request for additional funds was rejected, Smith decided to travel to Las Vegas this weekend and gamble $5,000 playing blackjack, and on Monday morning the company had $32,000 in his bank account. Enough money to keep working over the next few days, during which Smith secured an additional $11 million in capital, to get FedEx past one of its toughest ordeals, and FedEx is now worth about $30 billion.
Evernote .. a helping hand extends in the darkest of times!
Evernote was only a few days away from having to shut down the company to stop the bleeding of losses, when founder Phil Lieben got into a big problem as stock markets crashed in the Great Crash of 2008, and they saw 60% of their company’s value disappear.
One October night at 3 a.m., Libin was getting ready for bed and getting ready to shutdown the company the next morning. He checked his email one last time before bed, to find a long letter from someone from Sweden thanking him for creating the app, describing how much it helped him manage his tasks. And because of his keen interest in this application, this person had offered at the conclusion of the letter that he was willing to invest in Evernote.
Phil did not believe his eyes, and then contacted this person, and after a 20-minute Skype conversation, the Swede offered him $500,000 as an angel investment in Evernote, and the following week, the money was transferred to the company’s account, to complete the company’s journey and then attract the attention of investors, arriving today Evernote has about 300 employees, and is one of the most popular and important task management applications, currently worth more than $1.5 billion.
Kentucky Fried Chicken ( KFC ) .. If the place let you down, spread all over the place!
The famous fast-food chain, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), was founded by Harland Sanders, and today its branches are spread all over the world, although there was a time when Colonel Sanders almost gave up the Kentucky brand once and for all, because he It wasn’t going in an upward direction due to factors hindering its spread, KFC started as a one-way restaurant on the side of the highway that Sanders ran, but eventually this highway was converted into a secondary road, as a larger road was built nearby, which Pulling traffic away from the old restaurant and seriously affecting restaurant sales, then, instead of becoming desperate, Sanders traveled to more than 1,000 restaurants trying to sell his restaurant license with his own recipe, through authorized commercial agent contracts. In return for the contract, a commission of 5 cents per piece of chicken is prepared in the agent’s restaurant according to his mix.
He did not reach international fame before his death at the age of 90, but his name and image are still alive through the famous KFC logo, as the number of KFC branches reached 11,000 branches around the world, which is considered one of the most famous fast food brands.
Finally, obstacles appear to everyone, and few overcome them!
Many successful and prestigious companies in the world almost failed at some point, and just as there are examples of companies that have overcome the failure that awaits them, there are tens of thousands of companies whose owners have not been able to overcome threats and move forward to safety.
