Losing

You're painfully aware that I have three time-consuming hobbies.

1. Headphones.
2. Weather.
3. Pickleball

There are different disciplines within Pickleball. You have gender doubles (i.e. I partner up with another guy). You have mixed doubles (I partner with a female player). And then there is singles. I enjoy playing singles in tournaments.

On Saturday, I won two games 11-0 and 11-2. I didn't learn anything there. I lost two games 3-11 and 3-11. I didn't learn anything there either. The other three games I lost 7-11, 9-11, and 11-13. I learned A TON in those games!

Yeah, this relates to your business.

Let's pretend you are a $70,000,000 business that generated $500,000 of profit. Honestly, you are on a losing team. Yes, you made a profit, but you should have made a $7,000,000 profit. What are the mistakes you made along the way? Did you have good business in early June and fail to do anything to take advantage of what you learned? Did you learn why business was good? 

Did you run out of a key product and feature it in an email campaign anyway? Did you have huge successes in Marketplacces and choose to not spend any additional money? All of these are like the 9-11 game that I lost on Friday. You're close to doing the right thing, but you choose to do something else. And at the end of the year all those little losses add up and you have a losing season.

When you have a losing season, you'll have good days and bad days. It's all those close losses that make a difference. How many close losses did your department and/or company have in 2025? What will you learn from the close losses?

P.S.:  This is what losing looks like. "Irreparably harmed". My goodness, they spent fifteen years pursuing the failed omnichannel thesis, that's what caused "irreparable harm"!!