Failure is an inevitable part of success. The way startup owners handle setbacks from any scale shows their character and their ability to handle the roller coaster of building a business. Entrepreneurs, who try to avoid failure, sometimes play it too safe, don’t take risks and lower their chances of getting ahead in business.

As an entrepreneur, you need to make bold moves. The stakes are big, but the rewards are even bigger. If you are afraid of failure, entrepreneurship is not for you. Failure isn’t the end; the end comes when you give up. Failure can be used as a stepping stone and these are five examples how you can actually make it work to your advantage.

1. Own your mistakes – be accountable for your actions. If you play the blame game, you will not learn from the mistakes you make, you will just continue to hold different people responsible, which will harm your reputation, will worsen your relationships with others and will eventually destroy your business. Own your mistakes and everyone – from your team through your customers to your investors – will respect you more.
2. Jump starter – use failure as a motivator to grow. Analyze the mistakes you’ve made and see what went wrong. This information will help you get a different perspective on the things you could have done differently. Failure will also motivate you to learn more – it can be the fuel that you need to power your curiosity to learn new things and your ambition to be better than you were yesterday.
3. Confidence – handling major failure for the first time is painful. It requires a lot of courage to get up and move on after you’ve taken a hard punch in the gut. But once you do it, you are unstoppable. Handling a major setback builds confidence, which is important in the business world where everyone fights tooth and nail for their place.
4. Sensitivity – entrepreneurs, who have survived catastrophic failures, become more sensitive to the warning signs. They pay attention to small, day-to-day setbacks, which in the long term can be the reason why major problems occur. Failure teaches the entrepreneurs to be more careful and to deal with the problem when it occurs before it is too late.
5. Opportunity – when one door closes, there is always a window that opens somewhere. Failure can get you a new perspective on the situation and can point you in another direction. There might be a new horizon in front of you that presents a different opportunity and another path that leads to success. Just keep your eyes open!