Winston Churchill once said: “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better description of an entrepreneur. According to Harvard Business Review, about two-thirds of startups never deliver a positive return to investors, and about 50% of startups fail within five years.

One often-cited statistic is that the average entrepreneur fails 3.8 times before their first major success—a factoid attributed to leadership expert John C. Maxwell. Whatever the veracity of the claim, it has a ring of truth.

It’s often said that every failure is a learning experience, but failure can certainly warp one’s enthusiasm. This thought came to mind when reading our interview with Phillip Mills. The founder of Les Mills International, Mills created a group exercise system that is now taught in 22,000 gyms in 120 countries.

The company struggled through some lean times before it reached its current status. As Mills describes it: “We tried to launch a personal training system and that failed. We’ve tried other programs that failed. We didn’t make a profit for a decade when we went international in the mid-1990s. You grow resilient and find your way.”

For Mills, the fire in the belly kept burning.