One of my friends in the UK quit her job to start a management consulting business. She spent nearly nine months building her service offering, finding the right office location and assembling the best team members.
She would often consult me on her corporate profile and logo design.
All in all, she dedicated nearly every waking hour of those nine months to ensure that her service offering stood out.
She possesses the industry expertise, had the right referrals and her website was beautifully designed. Everyone, including her friends and ex-colleagues, predicted that she would soar high in no time. But that wasn’t the case.
As experienced as she was, managing her consultancy wasn’t as easy as she had anticipated. A number of organisations she was hoping to sign agreements with rejected her services. She knew that it would be challenging, but what she had not anticipated was how discouraging rejection would be.
Nine months in and she wanted to quit.
She stopped following up on her leads and started thinking about asking her previous employer to take her back.
But a conversation with her acquaintances helped to point her in the right direction.
They advised her to look at rejection as a way to improve her service offerings.
Instead of accepting “no” as a final answer, she asked “why” and that provided her with insights.
She kept in touch with her potential clients and suggested solutions to problems they didn’t know existed. It wasn’t an easy route, but it paid off eventually.
As an entrepreneur, I know that being discouraged by rejection could make you question your business and your hopes for it. You may even think that you are not cut out for it.
However, once I started to look at rejection differently and to use “no” as a way to pivot, it helped to make all the difference.
I started to review the meetings I attended, and the questions being asked by my potential clients.
If the questions raised were to clarify my services or how I could help them, then I knew I had to work on presenting my services and my concepts more clearly. I also made sure to provide as much context and reference examples as possible. Visuals work wonders.
Just like my friend, I asked why whenever I was faced with a rejection to an offer. The feedback helped me to strengthen my future pitches and provided me with insights into what my potential clients were truly looking for.
I also started to look at rejection as a guiding compass. If I was receiving multiple rejections from different clients, then something must be off.
Perhaps I wasn’t providing the right service, or perhaps I needed to adjust my pricing to offer a more competitive offering. I started to analyse how the “no” could help to guide me in the right direction.
At the beginning of my consulting advisory journey, my service offering wasn’t focused and my competitive advantage wasn’t highlighted clearly.
However, narrowing down the services to offering those I was really great at and were aligned with market needs helped me to improve drastically.
Overcoming rejection at the beginning stages of building your business may be discouraging. However, if you decide to look at rejection as a learning opportunity, it would greatly help steer your business in the right direction.
Be persistent. Pivot. And try every possible way before calling it quits. Had Thomas Edison quit inventing the light bulb after a few trials, the world would be a very different place today.
Manar Al Hinai is an award-winning Emirati writer and communications adviser based in Abu Dhabi
