By Peter Windatt
BRI Business Recovery
UNLIKE with most skydiving mishaps, people can and do bounce back from having a company failure to their name.
In the States it is, arguably, one of the badges of honour to have got some bankruptcies under your belt – they show that you were really trying. In the UK we were perhaps brought up too much on Dickens; Mr Micawber and debtors’ prison – all a bit off-putting. Richard Branson may be the UK’s exception to this with a number of business ventures running into the buffers notwithstanding the general view that he has the Midas touch.
Numerous articles have been written on ‘if you fail to plan, plan to fail’ and yet newspapers love to write about overnight success stories. People we’ve never heard of suddenly appear on the scene and rise straight to the top. Other than in the media this is a rare thing. The accepted wisdom is that it takes 10 years to become an overnight success. Malcolm Gladwell has written best-selling books on the subject.
A major difference between successful people and those we never hear about is that the former kept going. It isn’t how often you are knocked down that matters, it is how often you get up again. For the sake of many children the world over, and for the British film industry, thank goodness J K Rowling could take rejection; keep calm and carry on.
But you do need to be aware of what your plan is, what the contingencies might be and how you can quickly adapt and survive. Who is to argue with Charles Darwin when he says ‘it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; not the strongest that survives; the species that survives is the one that is able to adapt and adjust best to the changing environment in which it finds itself’. The same is true for businesses.
* Have a plan;
* Regularly monitor performance against that plan;
* Be alive to opportunities you had not considered (Coke, Post-it Notes, Listerine, bubble wrap and Play Doh were all intended for other purposes when they were launched);
* Be prepared to drop the dead-end projects – learn lessons and move on.
Being a business recovery and insolvency practice we see numerous examples of people whose businesses seemed, on the face of it, a good idea. Sometimes they are unlucky. Sometimes they are the victims of circumstances beyond their control. All too often they hadn’t committed their thoughts to paper, did not have their finger on the pulse and, by the time it became clear that the end was nigh it was too late to do anything to save the day.
For a free, confidential conversation about your business call BRI Business Recovery and Insolvency on 01604 754352 – we offer much more than just tea and sympathy.
