Learning from failure. If you go to the recovery room at the hospital, you’ll see a lot more people with gunshot wounds in their legs than in their chests. But that’s not because people don’t get shot in the chest; it’s because the people who get shot in the chest don’t recover.

As private investigators and business owners, there’s an important parallel: Autopsies done on the patients who made it back to the ER aren’t worth as much as those who never made it back. Likewise, learning from successful companies may not be as important as learning from failed private investigator firms. Understanding what fatal mistakes led to the failure is as important, if not more, than what made successful companies great.

So, what are those mistakes? How did specific PI companies go out of business? And more importantly, what can we learn from those mistakes?

For valuable insight on this topic, we polled private investigators from across the nation for insight into how their colleagues had failed, or, how they had failed and learned. Nearly a dozen PIs chimed in to help. And, though the resulting stories may be grim, they are telling.

Here are some of the insights they shared, along with a few of my own:

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