Every entrepreneur I know has made mistakes. Some are little. Some are not (do the words "New Coke" mean anything to you?).

As with all areas of our lives, success in business isn't necessarily reserved for those who make the fewest number of mistakes. Rather, success favors those who face their mistakes squarely and learn from them.

And if we can be successful as we learn and grow from our own mistakes, how much further ahead are we if we can learn and grow from the mistakes of others?

In the Jan. 18 edition of BusinessWeek magazine, 10 entrepreneurs and CEOs from companies with annual revenues ranging from $500,000 to $1.6 billion were interviewed. Among other questions, all of them were asked to look back on 2005 and talk about the things they wish they had done differently. Even without knowing a lot about the respective companies, I found their responses interesting and thought-provoking - and perhaps instructive to entrepreneurs everywhere.

For example, Rick Field, founder and owner of Rick's Picks, a New York company specializing in homemade pickles, said, "Focus is everything, and I'm cognizant of spreading myself a bit too thin at times. Being CEO and errand boy comes with the territory in a small business, but sometimes I could have done a better job of letting certain things go."

Sound familiar? I thought it might. Establishing business priorities and sticking to them despite all the peripheral "stuff" that always comes along is critical for any entrepreneur - pickled or otherwise.

Similarly, Steve Greenbaum, founder, president and CEO of PostNet, a Denver-based mail and shipping service franchiser, said that his company's biggest mistake in 2005 was adding a layer of management to its corporate infrastructure.

"We were going to create and hire a new position to oversee the managers to assist with the day-to-day operations of the company and enable the founders and senior managers to focus more on strategic planning and execution," Greenbaum told BusinessWeek. "After attempts at filling the position, we concluded that our time, effort, energy and dollars were better spent developing and empowering our existing department managers to take ownership of their departments, hold themselves accountable for performance and report to us directly in a more streamlined and efficient manner."

In other words, bigger isn't always better, but efficiency almost always is.

Nach Waxman, founder and owner of Kitchen Arts & Letters, a New York bookstore devoted to food and wine, told the magazine that his company missed some significant opportunities for financial growth by being a little slow out of the gate.

"We had identified our customer group - professionals in the food industry - more precisely than ever before, and we came up with good ideas to encourage them to buy books, such as employee gift programs, discounts and store credit. But we dragged our heels in implementing a program to reach those people and practically missed the boat.

"We had offered these programs randomly previously, and it turned out to be a good thing," Waxman continued. "But we didn't get around to applying it as a program until late in the year and only got half the business we could have gotten had we set it up earlier."

So it isn't only a matter of doing the right thing for your company. You also have to be perceptive enough to do the right thing at the right time in order to receive the maximum benefit.

Of course, you probably already know that. Maybe you already made that mistake or some of the other mistakes mentioned here. But if you haven't, learn from the mistakes of these successful entrepreneurs.

You'll be that much further ahead.