Former Navy SEAL and CEO Shares the Advice That Helped Him Turn Failure to Success as an Entrepreneur

Brandon Webb, a former U.S. Navy SEAL and the CEO of Force12 Media told Entrepreneur in an interview Thursday that one piece of advice he received changed his outlook on business and helped him turn failure into success.

Webb, whose Force12 Media operates foreign policy news, military lifestyle and entertainment websites and publishes books on the same topics, said that failure can lead to success because “sometimes people have to learn the hard way.”

After he ended a 13-year career in the Navy, Webb said he started a company that turned out to be “a complete disaster.”

“A lesson learned, both in the SEAL teams and as an entrepreneur, is that failure is sometimes a critical component of success,” Webb told the magazine.

The vet said that one of the biggest lessons he learned from the failure of his first business is the necessity of “choosing your partners wisely”: “Oftentimes, what I see — and what happened in my case, too — is you have two very similar partners and there’s this struggle for control. There has to be one captain of the ship.”

Webb said one of the best pieces of advice he received is to look at business opportunities like a garden. If a “one-man gardener” is trying to “water” too many different projects, they might be “dead” when you return. “So I just said, you know what, I’m going to focus on one opportunity,” he added. “The moment I did that is the moment I started having success as an entrepreneur.”

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