I often find myself thinking about work when I’m doing something completely different.

Outside of work, one of my hobbies is wing foiling. And it involves a lot of falling in the water.

At the moment, I am learning how to gybe (turning in the same direction as the wind while staying up on the foil). My goal of spending more time on the board and out of the water means that, at the moment, I’m spending more time off the board and in the water.

It got me thinking about the many similarities to when we work to improve our consultancies.

The example of sales

When you want to grow your consultancy, you have to sell. On the surface, sales seems quite simple. Speak to ideal fit prospects about the service you have designed specifically for them, and a proportion of them will buy.

When you break it down further, there is a lot more complexity and many more potential failure points. It is many times more complex than learning to gybe on my wingfoil. Yet, I’m not necessarily as willing to fail in the pursuit of perfecting it.

When I think about how many times I have to fail to learn something that is inherently simpler, it puts what I need to do to grow my business into perspective.

Accepting the failure

When I decided I needed to master my gybes, I accepted that I would fail. I set myself a goal of putting in at least ten turns every session. In the first session, I failed 10 out of 10. In the second session, I made one gybe, a 90% failure rate. Slowly but surely, I’ve made progress, and I’m now at about 50% success rate.

By accepting my starting point of 100% failure, I’m measuring my success by the progress I’m making rather than the distance to my goal. Which makes it much easier to stick with.

I understand that if I want to succeed consistently, I have to work through failure.

Why your failure matters

Whether I get good at gybing on my wingfoil or not adds very little to the world, or even those around me. However, when you make more sales to your ideal clients, deliver a better service to them or do anything that makes your consultancy better at what it does, it has a massive positive impact.

It makes your ideal clients' businesses and lives better, which improves their customers' and teams' experiences, which in turn ripples out from there.

So any failure you make in your consultancy's pursuit of growth matters a lot.

Success lies on the other side of that failure. So stick with it.