Failure Is Part of Entrepreneurship. These 5 Lessons Will Help You Recover.

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Most businesses stumble at some point. How you respond decides whether the failure becomes a setback or a turning point, and the research has some useful pointers.

In 1989, I opened an Italian restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong, where the waiters sang opera arias between courses. It was a lot of fun, but it was not a good business, and it closed in 1993.

I had assumed running a restaurant was easy. It isn’t. The location was wrong, the costs were too high, and I didn’t know the trade well enough to see either problem early. Around the same time, I put money into film production and property. Both businesses struggled and were sold in the mid-1990s.

Here are five lessons I have learned about failing — and about recovering.

Most of my early setbacks came from businesses I entered because they looked exciting, not because I understood them. The pattern is common. CB Insights’ 2026 analysis of startup shutdowns found that 43% cited poor product-market fit. I suspect many of those founders were very capable. They had simply misread a market they didn’t know well enough.

My rule since then has been simple: Never set up a business you don’t know. If you want to enter an unfamiliar field, partner with someone who has spent years in it, and listen to them.

The hardest decision in a struggling business is often the decision to stop. CB Insights found that 70% of failed startups ultimately ran out of capital, but running out of money is usually the last symptom, not the cause. By the time the bank balance forces your hand, months or even years may have been lost.

The same analysis, as reported by Crowdfund Insider, found that nearly a quarter of these companies had been “walking dead” for three years or more after their last funding round, still operating but no longer really growing. Hanging on rarely saves a business. More often, it makes the eventual decision more expensive.

Selling the film and property businesses was painful, but it freed up time, money and attention for something better. Closing a venture is not the same as failing as a person.

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