How Should Business Owners Respond To Failure?

By Brian Gubernick

Brian Gubernick, Co-Founder of Metrix Masterminds, has more than 15 years of industry experience. He’s held the role of investor, agent, team owner/leader, multi-state expansion team owner, brokerage operating partner, coach and trainer, and corporate executive. Brian started his real estate sales career by launching his sales team, Homehelper Consultants (HhC), in 2007.

How do you recover from a major business failure?‌ At 27, I was calling a bankruptcy attorney, and I thought my life was over. Here’s what happened: I owned nine houses, and every single one went upside down. I managed to short-sell five, but the other four ended in foreclosure. It was my first major business failure, and I felt completely defeated—like I’d hit rock bottom.

I was young and didn’t know any better, but that worked in my favor. The next day, I realized wallowing wasn’t going to help, so I said to myself, “Alright, let’s just go to work.”

That’s the first and biggest step in overcoming a loss or failure—to dust yourself off and move on. Assess what went wrong, learn from it, but immediately get back into motion. There is no value in dwelling in the past, and the faster you regroup, the faster you’ll get back on track.

When people ask me how I succeeded when so many others didn’t during the downturn, I point back to this moment.

The majority of my peers in real estate failed to bounce back, thinking the short sale and foreclosure crisis was just temporary, and they did not deal with it. Two years later, they were still trying to figure it out or shifted careers. To put it into perspective, in Arizona, the number of realtors dropped from 90,000 to just 25,000. I guarantee that most of them did not dust themselves off and found themselves out of the game.

So, what went wrong? What did I learn from this failure? I realized that my first mistake was not understanding real estate. I bought many properties and acted more like a speculator, banking on appreciation. When the market took a nosedive, my properties lost value fast. It felt like it happened overnight, but in reality, I just ignored 18 months of bad signs. Many of you have had this experience.

In the end, my biggest takeaway was that I turned things around only because I chose to get back to work.

So, if you find yourself in a tough spot, remember this: dust yourself off, assess what went wrong, and get back to work.

If you want to learn more and take your business to the next level and join a community of like-minded business owners, reach out to our team.