My First Business Failed (And What I Learned From It)

My first business, a cold-pressed juice company I built after leaving corporate, collapsed one month before launch when manufacturing fell through. I had spent a year building it and had invested tens of thousands on my savings. I was weeks away from leveraging everything I had to salvage it.

The failure was the lesson I didn’t know I needed.

When I left corporate, I wasn’t thinking small.

I had managed multi-million-dollar pharmaceutical brands. I managed million dollar budgets. I had led large teams. I knew how to build a marketing strategy, execute a launch, run a P&L. I had the skills.

But when I left corporate I wasn’t just disillusioned with corporate. I had become disillusioned with the industry I was in as well. “Once you see the sausage made…” as they say – or marketed, in this case, you can’t go back.

So naturally I did a 180 and looked for opportunities – big opportunities – in health and wellness.

I found it in juice.

Not juice as a small local operation. Juice as a national, then global, opportunity. Canada had just approved a process called high-pressure processing, a way to take cold-pressed juice and significantly extend its shelf life without heat or preservatives. I was already a consumer of cold-pressed juice. I could see the gap in the market. I had the business and marketing skills to fill it. I started building.

I built for a year. I invested tens of thousands of dollars in pre-launch activities.

The honest part, the part I couldn’t see at the time, is that it felt like a slog almost from the beginning.

The marketing work? Easy. Creating the brand, building the sales strategy, developing the marketing plans. I did all of that in my sleep. That part felt like me. Everything else felt like pushing a boulder.

Developing the juice recipes. Going through regulatory and label approvals. Working through the supply chain. Managing the manufacturing relationship.

I was doing things I didn’t enjoy, every day, for the idea of the payoff at the end. I kept telling myself this was what building a business looked like: you push through, you get to the other side, and then it’s worth it.

I was chasing the success of the idea, not the actual work of the business. There’s a difference, but I didn’t know that yet.

The thing that stopped me from seeing it was a very familiar motivator: I needed to succeed.

I had spent a career being the person who delivered. I had the awards to prove it. And now I was going to take that same energy and build something of my own. The opportunity was real. The market timing was right. I had the skills. I was going to make this work.

The problem with needing to win is that it has no brakes.

When manufacturing fell through right before launch, I didn’t stop. I went looking for a manufacturing plant to buy. The manufacturing business was $600,000 for the equipment and a lease. I was going to leverage my condo to do it. Friends reached out and offered to loan me money. And I was going to take it! Which meant I was now carrying their hope and their risk on top of my own. I was that close.

Another buyer came in and bought the plant the week before I was going to put in my offer.

When I heard that, it was a gut punch.

Now, I’d love to be able to tell you that when that happened that I felt relief.

The real version is that I reeled. I felt lost. I had poured everything I had into that year, including most of my savings. It was a slog, yes, but I had worked so hard, and now it was gone. I was also alone. I was the sole breadwinner with no partner to say “it’s okay, I’ve got us.” It was just me. I sat with “now what?” for a long time before any of it started to make sense.

Looking back now, 11 years later, I know what was really happening.

The slog was feedback that I was out of alignment. The boulder-pushing every single day was feedback. The fact that the marketing was easy and everything else was hard was feedback. I was doing something that used some of my skills and none of my soul, and I had wrapped the identity of winning around it so tightly that I couldn’t see what the feedback was trying to tell me.

The juice company didn’t fail because my business strategy was wrong. I had a Fortune 500 strategy toolkit. The strategy was fine.

It failed because strategy without alignment will always fall flat. The same drive that won awards, that built pharmaceutical brands, that could execute a go-to-market plan in her sleep, almost leveraged my condo to fix a problem that wasn’t worth fixing. Nobody was there to check my thinking. Nothing in my skillset told me when to walk away. The strategy knew how to push. It had no idea when to stop.

Mindset isn’t the soft half of business. It’s the steering.

When it was finally, fully over, I had to do something I don’t think I had ever done before. I sat down and asked myself what I actually wanted. Not what looked like a good opportunity. Not what would be a big enough success to justify the leap. What I genuinely wanted to do, every day, as the work.

The answer I kept coming back to surprised me: I wanted to help women entrepreneurs.

So I started coaching and consulting women with sales and marketing, the piece that lit me up, and that most small business owners struggle with. And something really interesting happened. I gave them the strategy, and they didn’t execute. Not because the strategy was wrong. Because there were things underneath the strategy, fear, self-doubt, self-worth, imposter syndrome, that the strategy didn’t solve for. A great marketing plan sitting on top of an unexamined belief that you’re not the kind of person who gets to do this? The plan doesn’t move.

That’s when I went and got my coaching training. I needed to be able to help women with both.

That’s the founding story of Her Big Leap.

The juice company chased the opportunity. Business coaching looks at the strategy. Her Big Leap looks at the person and the business…in that order.

Here’s what I’d say to the woman who’s working on something that feels like a slog but is convinced she just needs to push harder:

The slog is feedback.

Not “quit everything” information. Not “you’re not cut out for this” information.

Just: the thing that feels like pushing a boulder uphill, every day, for an idea of a payoff at the end, is different from work that comes from alignment.

You’ll know the difference when you feel it, because when the work actually fits you, there are challenges sometimes, yes, but you’re inspired to take them on.

Sarah Janzen is the founder of Her Big Leap, a program that has helped hundreds of corporate women across North America and Europe build thriving businesses on their own terms. She does all of it while raising two boys, which is the best proof she knows that “waiting for the right time” was never the strategy.