When setbacks happen in your business
How will you respond?
No matter how hard you try. No matter how much you wish otherwise. No matter how positive you are when it comes to your business. Setbacks will happen.
It might be a slow quarter, a client that walks, a launch that flops, or a trusted team member who gives notice out of the blue. No matter how thoughtful and strategic you are, how much you’ve planned, or how aligned things felt, even just last week — something will eventually catch you off guard.
When it does, it will feel personal. It will feel frustrating and unfair. Especially if you care deeply, which if you’re like me, you probably do.
But here’s the thing… every business owner I know has a story like this. And not just one.
And, in my experience, these stories are often positive turning points in their business. Lemons —> lemonade.
Because the founder used the setback to sharpen their focus, clarify their values, or reroute them toward something stronger and more aligned with the work they truly want to be doing. Something they never could have planned for had the “inciting incident” not happened. COVID anyone?
You won’t be able to avoid setbacks. It’s what you do with them that matters.
When setbacks happen.
Ryan Holiday, stoic guru and author of the must-read The Obstacle Is the Way, has a daily newsletter that I subscribe to — Daily Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Everyday Life.
On March 18, 2025 he shared this:
“It didn’t feel good at the time. In fact, it felt awful. You were crushed. You felt betrayed. You were anxious. You were scared. It was unfair. It was unexpected. It was the worst.
But now? Years later? We think about it a little differently.
Marcus Aurelius went through a lot. Floods and wars, plagues and coups. He had health issues. He lost people. He made mistakes. But with the passage of time, like all people, he came to understand that this misfortune was in some ways fortunate—because it taught him, because he grew from it, because it challenged him to evolve and become greater than he already was. Good fortune, he came to understand, is not what happens to us but instead is something we make for ourselves, in how we respond to things.
It’s inevitable that you will experience obstacles and setbacks in life. Just like it’s inevitable you’ll catch a couple bad breaks and unfortunate mistakes somewhere along the way. But ultimately we are the ones who get to decide what these moments meant over the course of our lives.”
This is such an important point. We get to choose.
As Victor Frankl articulated so beautifully in his book Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms— to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
Moving into this century…
Bon Iver framed it this way in his song “Awards Season”:
“What was pain now's gain
A new path gets laid
And you know what is great
Nothing stays the same”
Philosophers, songwriters, artists — they know how to get to the heart of the matter and how to help us find a way through.
Potential.
This word got on my radar yesterday while listening to a podcast and I felt it dovetailed with this idea of working our way through obstacles and setbacks.
Being a bit of a word nerd, I got curious. I wanted to know its origin (aka “etymology”).
So I consulted ChatGPT and here’s what it came back with:
“The word "potential" comes from the Latin root potentia, meaning power, might, force, which in turn comes from potens (present participle of posse), meaning to be able or to have power. Here's the breakdown:
Latin potentia → power, ability, capacity
From Latin potens → powerful
From the verb Latin posse → to be able
The term entered Middle English via Old French potentiel, meaning "possible" or "capable of being or becoming."
So, when we use “potential” today—whether it’s a founder with so much potential or the potential for growth—we’re really pointing to someone or something that has the power or ability to become something more, even if it hasn’t happened yet.
A little poetic twist? It’s a word rooted in power… but directed at the not yet.”
I love that… “directed at the not yet.” Sometimes it takes the unexpected circumstance to shake us out of our comfort zone, to back us into a corner, to make us great creative. To take the risk. Because WTF… there’s no alternative.
Turning lead into gold.
If ever there was a master (pardon the upcoming pun) of turning lead into gold (or lemons into lemonade), it would be Taylor Swift.
In case you’re not familiar or need a refresher, in November 2020, record executive Scooter Braun sold Taylor Swift’s master recordings (“masters”) to LA-based investment firm Shamrock capital. The sale was made without her approval and it meant she no longer owned her songs, any of them.
Needless to say, T Swift wasn’t happy. She writes all of her own music and now, she was forfeiting income and there were restrictions on when and where she could perform the songs from her six albums (e.g. not on television, not in her documentary Miss Americana).
Once her anger subsided, she devised a plan. One no other musician had the audacity to pull off (or work ethic to make hapepn). She decided to rerecord the albums she didn’t own as “Taylor’s Version,” all while also recording new music like Folklore.
This was a genius move. Her fans loved it, which led to her being streamed constantly between the Taylor’s Version releases and of her new albums. Landing her on the charts pretty much constantly for 3+ years. Which led to the sold out Eras tour. The massive success of which no doubt funded her ability to buy back her masters for an estimated $360 million at the end of May.
She made it through four of the six record (Fearless, Red, Speak Now, and 1989). No word on new versions of the albums she now owns once again.
Taylor Swift showed us what I like to call the “alchemy of entrepreneurship”: taking what feels like failure and using it as raw material for transformation, doing something no one’s done before. And make no mistake, Ms. Swift is indeed and entrepreneur.
The process starts with the uncomfortable stuff — the emotions, the reality of the impact on your business and life. No matter who you are, you need to work through this piece.
Once you have, if you can hold steady and stay curious, you’ll often find a way through. Something poking through underneath: a new insight, a different direction, a strength you didn’t know you had.
A dropped client becomes the reason you finally raise your prices.
A stalled project leads to a newer, deeper offering or an entirely new way of working.
A hard conversation surfaces the clarity you’d been avoiding, providing a new way to move forward.
It’s not magic. But it’s powerful.
It’s how lead becomes gold.
Hanging in there.
Because not only will setbacks happen, when you take action wonderful, positive surprises will too. I’ve seen this in my own business and those of my clients.
Until next time,
Katherine
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Setbacks are inevitable, but we forget that it's part of the entrepreneurial process. Beautiful and timely reminder to turn lead into gold. Thank you, Katherine!