When you start out on your own, you are in constant fear of making mistakes that will damage your business.
Businesses make mistakes all the time, and they aren’t always fatal. Today the BBC published a story about when businesses mess up and it is reassuring.
When Google didn’t rule the world
In light of a 12-year old boy who recently spent €100,000 on Google AdWords accidently, it is hard to believe there was a time before the search engine giant. In 1999 Google was not number one, in fact it wasn’t really anywhere. The number one search engine at this time was Excite.
In 1999 Google’s co-founder offered to sell google to Excite for less than $1m. They declined. Google is now worth $543bn.
NASA get it wrong
Sometimes it’s a case of getting your numbers wrong, and if this is something you have done then you are not the only one. NASA lost about $98m when two sets of engineers working on one project used different measurements.
Aerospace company Lockheed Marin used imperial measurements when creating their part of the rocket thrusters. Unfortunately, NASA’s team used metric. The result was disastrous.
Numbers are difficult
It’s not only NASA who get their numbers wrong. Airline Alitalia advertised first class tickets from Toronto to Cyprus for just $39.00, instead of $3,900. Two thousand people bought tickets and although the company tried to cancel the tickets they honoured them – losing $7.7m in the process.
So whatever happens in your own business, you can rest assured you aren’t alone when it comes to making mistakes. It is how you learn from those mistakes that can make or break your success.
