Business is like baseball, you can't win 'em all: reflections from NKY entrepreneurs

Business is like baseball. You can’t win ‘em all.

But unlike in the world of sports, what separates those who rise to the top from those who fall to the bottom isn’t how often you win or lose. That’s because all successful entrepreneurs know first-hand that failures happen just as often as wins.

In the business world, what truly separates the winners from the losers is how they deal with failure. Setbacks can and will happen. Some entrepreneurial Northern Kentuckians who know a thing or two about growing a business tell Thrive that those challenges have to be met head-on. And if you learn from them, like they did, you can grow and come out of adversity stronger, smarter and better prepared.
Robert O. Martichenko, CEO of LeanCor in Florence, founded his company nearly five years ago. It’s a third-party logistics provider that manages, develops and supports lean supply chain functions.

“I’ve probably had more setbacks than times I’ve moved forward,” he said. “The first thing you have to be intellectually aware of is that every setback is a huge learning opportunity. You have to be aware of that intellectually and emotionally. When you have setbacks, they can seem like the worst thing in the world. But what I’ve found is that in almost every case, the things that I thought were the absolute worst things that have happened to me, ended up being the best things that happened to me,” Martichenko says.

Roger Griggs, president of Union Springs Pharmaceuticals, in Union, says dealing productively with failure can make or break a venture. “The cornerstone of business is adversity and solving problems. I think there are a whole series of problems and those who can solve them, and are most persistent and most creative, tend to flourish. Those who wither in those circumstances don’t stick around very long,” Griggs says.

Both Martichenko and Griggs have faced their fair share of challenges as their businesses have grown and evolved. They say their experiences weren’t unique and there comes a time in every entrepreneur’s journey when they’ll have to face, and face up to, a setback. Often, especially in a business’s early, growing-pain years, circumstances happen that you can’t anticipate. How you react to a challenge can alter your business plan or make it better as you find your market niche, they say.

But first, you have to accept and move past failure.

“One thing I’ve learned, especially with this current economy, is not everything is the end of the world. It’s like the old saying ‘when you get knocked down, you have to dust yourself off.’ Get up and say to yourself Okay, that was terrible. What did we learn from this? How can we be stronger, and what parts can we control the next time?” Martichenko says.

Early in his business Martichenko lost a large client when it was bought by another company. The result could have been devastating, but he stayed in touch with the network he had built at the original company before it was bought. The result turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

“We essentially had one customer. We lost that customer because they were acquired by another business and I thought that was the end of our company. Two months later, when this company acquired my customer, a bunch of people left because they weren’t fitting into the new corporate structure. They went to other places and we got no less than three new customers,” remarks Martichenko.

One of Griggs’ more recent setbacks opened up a whole new dimension to Union Springs, which has a lot of public sector clients like fire, police and other emergency service personnel. The recent economic downtown has hurt government budgets, which in turn affected Union Springs’ bottom line.

“The most recent one is the whole economic downtown. We introduced two new products in the market and we were skimming along doing quite well. Then we all got hit by economic downtown. (Our customers) really got hit because they are on fixed budgets. It certainly got a lot thinner, so we had to respond to that.”

That’s when the company changed course with the help of an experienced consultant.

“What we got really good at, that we had no expertise in before, was grant writing and alternative funding. We enlisted a grant expert and discovered a whole series of grants. It really ended up being positive for both us and the municipalities. We would help them discover sources of capital that they didn’t know existed,” he says. “So there is a case where we took lemons and made lemonade.”

The key to this success was being proactive in the face of adversity, he adds.

“We’re the ones who had to adjust, municipalities don’t adjust well.  It’s really our job as a company to find those resources. This was not originally a part of our business plan,” Griggs says.

LeanCor takes learning from mistakes so seriously, that’s it’s engrained in the business culture.

“LeanCor is a supply chain organization that focuses on lean principles. By nature we are process-oriented. We actually have a process. When we have a setback and something happens that was unplanned, we get the right people together and we have what we call a reflection session where we quite methodically go through and do an autopsy on the situation. We ask, what were the assumptions made when we went into this? What did we think was going to happen? What actually happened and where did our assumptions go wrong, and what can we learn from this so next time we don’t go into it with the same pair of glasses on.”

It’s that kind of attention to detail and reflective thinking that can turn a failure on its head and turn a company around.

Writer: Feoshia Henderson
Sources: Robert O. Martichenko, LeanCor and Roger Griggs, Union Springs Pharmaceuticals