I have Weaknesses and Strengths within that.

“To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.” — Criss Jami.

One of the representatives from the class walked up to me during breaktime and told me that they appreciated my sharing. He told me that it’s tough to show the company’s vulnerability and shared with them our failure. So it was in 2021, I was conducting a day’s training on eCommerce and sharing our recent defeat to the adult learners as a case study.

Before the session, I wondered whether I should share this incident with the class. My thoughts were if this will diminish by credibility as a facilitator, will they want someone who failed to conduct the session for them. However, I thought this would be a valuable lesson to bring across the critical pointer I am sharing throughout the day. There are many considerations besides setting up an online store.

That weakness turns into a strength where my team dissect the issue and work towards having something that does not bring us to the same situation. In 2022, we customer had another launch, and this time, everything went on well as planned. The online site does not have any issue handling the high load of the customer and giving the customer a smooth shopping experience.

While there are companies that tried and failed for multiple rounds before getting it right, we did it on the next round. It was an impressive feat as we do not have a considerable team and resources.

What could be the worst situation after that failure? Another failure, maybe. But the probability of having an upside is now much higher. So while we didn’t give in to a chance, we are fortunate to have another opportunity to prove to our customers that we can do it! The strength that we had was the ability to pick ourselves up, work on the issue and make it happen.

Since then, I have been sharing this story about our failure and how we have done it. It will be a shame to let a loss beat us down, but it is not a shame when we acknowledge where our gaps are and work towards bridging them. So, are we stopping there after this successful launch? No! Instead, we continue to work with our customers to improve that further. We are working to streamline the operational process further and make it a much better platform to improve customers’ experience.

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” — Albert Einstein.