Successful entrepreneurs aren’t fools. They know a sinking ship is not a healthy place to be. If it’s necessary to bail out, they will.

But first, the savvy entrepreneur will try to salvage the situation by changing strategies and tactics. Can I appeal to a different crowd? Can I stay open later? Can I add a new product line?

Those who succeed are decisive by nature. They make the critical decisions, right or wrong, without endless agonizing. They don’t waste energy in useless second guessing and recriminations.

But sometimes failure can’t be avoided. Maybe the product was wrong for the market, or the economy cratered. Maybe the business idea was always half-baked.

What then? Entrepreneurs need a thick skin and worlds of self-confidence to survive failure and the general brickbats of commerce.

“It’s actually good to fail sometimes because only by failing can you learn,” explains Tony Warren, Farrell professor of entrepreneurship at Penn State University. “You pick yourself up and you move on.”

That’s the attitude of Tom Antion, who counsels small businesses about Internet marketing. “It doesn’t hurt me a bit to fail. It’s part of how I get to where I’m going,” he says.

Antion’s skin is thicker than most. Failure is usually painful for most people. It sends many entrepreneurs retreating to the safety of a steady job and a paycheck.

The strong entrepreneur, though, takes Warren’s advice: He dusts off, learns from the failure and starts anew. Often, he comes back stronger.

Dave Ratner, for example, owned three successful Dave’s Soda & Pet City outlets in Massachusetts. Then he opened store four. “I did the right everything, but everything that could go wrong did,” he says.

Ratner shut that store, losing his savings and incurring a small mountain of debt. It took four years to repay all his vendors. But it didn’t stop him.

Since then, he’s started two new businesses. He also made another stab at a fourth Dave’s Soda & Pet City.

Like Antion and Ratner, successful entrepreneurs usually believe that they create their own success. Failure? They know it’s just another way not to do something.