Highly successful CEOs share best tips for responding to setbacks

Running a business often has three components: the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good happens when your company is thriving. The bad tends to occur behind the scenes, like budgeting for a high cost of advertising or spending long nights going over payroll. The ugly can range from 100-plus-hour workweeks to betting your life savings on your startup — and struggling to get it off the ground.

CNBC Make It spoke with a group of highly successful entrepreneurs about how they recovered from major career setbacks. Here are some of their top tips for weathering unexpected hardships:

‘Be comfortable’ trusting your gut

If you’re confident that your business idea will be successful one day, don’t quickly throw your hands up when problems arise.

This mindset helped Bogg Bag CEO Kim Vaccarella after she lost her kids’ $60,000 college fund on bad inventory. Vaccarella founded her business as a side hustle in 2008, and after selling out of two limited runs of stock of her waterproof tote bags, she ordered over 1,000 more in 2012. Her factory shipped her defective bags — functional, but covered in black streaks — that she “couldn’t sell,” and she didn’t have the money to buy more, she said last year.

″I went for broke and spent my kids’ college money and bought a full container’s worth [of bags], and they were all bad, so my heart sank,” said Vaccarella.

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Vaccarella knew she had a good product, but lacked the funds to recover quickly and worried it was the end for her business. She decided to donate the bags to victims of Hurricane Sandy. Unexpectedly, some of the recipients came back to her, asking: Where could they buy more?

The new demand pushed Vaccarella to find a factory and secure a $120,000 loan from a family friend to get Bogg Bag back up and running. The business now brings in roughly $100 million a year, and the ordeal taught her to “be comfortable” trusting her gut, she said.

Success can require a relentless sort of confidence, she added: “Somewhere in my mind, I think that I can do anything.”

Don’t be afraid to take a detour

When you hit a snag, you can sometimes benefit from thinking creatively and changing your approach. Take it from Karen Robinovitz and Sara Schiller. who co-founded The Sloomoo Institute, an interactive slime experience — similar to a museum or “play space” — in October 2019 after realizing just how therapeutic playing with the colorful goo was.

They put $600,000 of investment money towards launching their slime business, and sold $1 million worth of tickets in their first week. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, five months later. The business let go of roughly 90 part-time employees, keeping just the co-CEOs, a bookkeeper and their resident slime-maker.

But Robinovitz and Schiller didn’t close their doors. They sold slime online, hosted virtual slime-making camps for kids, and hosted corporate workshops for companies like Google and Pfizer until fully reopening in 2021.

Last year, The Sloomoo Institute brought in about $4.3 million a month from in-person ticket sales across five U.S. locations, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

“We want people to know that you can choose to try, get out there and do something that’s never been done before,” Schiller said. “After what we’ve both been through, what are we going to be afraid of now?”

Get out of your own way

You probably can’t run a successful business by entirely yourself. Shizu Okusa, founder and CEO of wellness brand, Apothékary, learned that lesson the hard way.

Her first business, a cold-pressed juice company called Jrink, ran for seven years but ultimately couldn’t brought in enough revenue to stay afloat. Fresh ingredients were expensive and spoiled quickly, and Okusa — who viewed Jrink as her baby — struggled to trust her team, believing she knew what was best, she said last year.

“One of the key lessons, I think, was getting out of my own way,” said Okusa. “In terms of allowing and hiring people that were much better than I was in certain areas of business. Now, I just move aside. I have my strengths and give my weaknesses away.”

This is a common piece of advice, both entrepreneurial and otherwise. “Trust the process or fix what’s broken if you always have to micromanage,” billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban wrote on social media platform X last year.

Okusa runs Apothékary by hiring people who are smarter than she is, and working to enable them to do their jobs without roadblocks, she says. Her business brought in over $20 million in annual revenue as of November 2024, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. 

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