The Financial Times Guide to Business Start Up 2015

28

Not waving but drowning

If you put this book’s guidelines into operation at the right time, fewer of you should need this chapter than the average small business. Nevertheless, there are those who will. Some businesses will go to the wall.

Few people can appreciate before the event how traumatic the slide into failure can be. Gradually hemmed in with fewer and fewer avenues of escape, you have to come to terms with the crushing of your hopes and expectations. For natural optimists, such as entrepreneurs, it is appallingly difficult to do. At what point do you realise that your business is not going to survive? When do you accept that to carry on is to put other businesses in jeopardy and to impose the same pressures on them as on you? At what ...