There was a book by I think Steven Covey or his father, a Latter Day Saint (aka Mormon) businessman who talked about entrepreneurship in the context of the early nineties. Didn't talk about tech, although that's always a part of the story, now it's tech, centered around AI. But that was always tied to entrepreneurship, it's just back then it was the inventor, not the founder. But it was more focussed on starting up a business by out-executing. He said 90% of businesses were not executing well, just execute well and live by American/Christian/Middle-class values and that's all you need.

It seemed widely believed at the time, or he wouldn't address this, that to start a business you needed to hire all these executives at huge salaries, and lease cars for them, and rent office space. He countered no, just do it on your own, just BE PUNCTUAL which is worth gold, and the hack is if you can't be on time call ahead of time expressing sincere interest in respecting people's time. This, so people aren't left doing nothing while waiting for you. He said 90% of the time that solves the problem. It just has to be sincere, which does not mean figure out the magic words to sound sincere, it means express it if you feel it, and if you can't...hit the bricks, accepting you can't be a businessman if you don't have a problem being a burden. You could be a beggar instead.

Just that part of being punctual, doing what you said you'd do, or figuring out how to be of help, really own your failures. Another move is talking about it if you have a strong excuse, courts absolutely want to hear mitigating factors, and actually people do too, it actually helps people feel like they weren't betrayed completely, like they do if you say there's no excuse for what you've done. Or say you'll examine the personal and external failures for some time, though for the moment it's on you, and explain in full in a week when cooler heads prevail and you did a true post-mortem, identifying all the lessons that failures are richly laden with. Like how personal and external factors interplayed, so you can do something about it being repeated.[1]

I have a relative who was a very successful self-made man and the way you hacked him, was a good short haircut (like a 1940's haircut, this man was buttoned-down) and punctuality, that was literally all it took.

[1]: On that note, some people are incapable of being punctual without using controlled substances. Attention Deficit Disorder. It's not something that can be addressed just by visiting a psychiatrist and saying you think you might have it, you might imagine that would be enough like it is with practically anything else. Ideally find a psychiatrist who is also a patient, that's the ideal.