[Personal Branding]MBA Essay advice

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Q:
All,

In the "failure" essay I plan on using my experience stuggling to develop my small tech company. I failed at launching the businesses for many mistakes i have made and which I learned from.

Is that a good subject to talk about? I have learned so much about myself and business in general from this experience. On the other hand, I failed in Business? How will the commitee judge that?

I was thinking about using the same subject of Business startup to use in the "Leadership" essay. Which fits bests in your opinion?

Should I use my failure in business in "leadership" or "failures"? I am proud to have invested time, effort and taken a project from paper to reality, and I have learned so much about me and business in general at the same time.

Thanks




A:
There's always a great deal of stuff to learn from an entrepreneurial experience. How to organize your operation, how to build your personal brand and reach your potential clients, how to develop your standard operating procedure, where should you rent the office, how to adjust the price constantly to satisfy the market dynamic, how to sustain your business by stable income cash flow cycle, and most importantly, how to get the capital to build up all these. You'll learn 10 times more if you really "fail" the business and have to kill your own baby--close down the whole operation, also need find alternative job "fast" to pay back your debt before the interests crash you. You may live in hell for the next 10 months.

So the key question is, did you really "fail" in this case and closed down your venture?

If you eventually survived, then it's actually a "success" story, but only lots of take aways that made your much more "seasoned" in business world. Since the lagacy matters. Adcom should be looking for a "true failure" that totally killed you and reborn from hell. If you flunked your last credit in college and was about to be kicked out by school, but you saved yourself in the last minute by showing all hardworks you've done in clubs so that convinced the dean to keep you in school, this is actually a success story. Since if you really "failed," you really got kicked out from school without a degree, no mercy, and you needed to face the reality that had to compete in job market with regular college graduates, and you didn't know how to write your degree in resume since you didn't have one. The experience would totally change you into a different person that needed to find a job with lower requirement, and you needed to study at night for another 3 years after exhausted work in day time. This "failure" experience could turn you into a super competent candidate since you were forced to become a superman to catch up with others, and it totally changed your life instead of just learned some mistakes from staying in school.

So if you have one, the true failure story will be far more compelling for adcom to know how much it changed you to be a more mature person, and also know how did you deal with the consequence.

Hope these help.

David