What ten years of survival mode can do to a person
|
Nobody warns you about this part. They talk about the financial risk of starting a business. The long hours, the stress, the uncertainty. What they don't tell you is what a decade of fighting to keep something alive does to who you are. I became someone I didn't recognise. Harder. More defensive. Quicker to anger. The qualities that kept the business alive, the refusal to back down, the aggression when cornered, the ability to absorb pressure and keep moving, had seeped into everything else. Into how I dealt with people. Into how I saw myself. I told myself it was necessary. That I'd go back to being myself once things stabilised. But things never stabilised, and I kept becoming more of the person the business needed and less of the person I wanted to be. You don't have to have run a business for this to be familiar. A decade in a demanding career does the same thing. A profession that rewards a particular kind of toughness. A role where the version of you that survives is harder, more guarded, and further from the person you set out to be. The mechanism is different. The result is often identical. At my worst, I couldn't see a way through at all. If you've ever been in that place you'll know what I mean. I'm not going to dress it up. What pulled me back was not a plan or a strategy. It was simpler and more human than that. The people I was doing it all for in the first place. The exit from the business didn't fix everything overnight. But it started something. Space to breathe. Room to ask who I actually wanted to be now that survival mode was no longer required. Time to look at the whole picture, financial and personal, and start making decisions that were about living rather than just enduring. I should be clear. I'm two months out of the business. I'm not standing here with everything resolved and a perfect life to point at. I'm still working through it, the same as you might be. But something is already shifting. People close to me are telling me they can see it, the tension that used to follow me everywhere, the stress, the edge, it's starting to lift. Two months in and I can already feel the difference between building something to survive and building something because you want to. That's what I want for you. Not perfection. Just that shift. I'm closer to the person I intended to be when I started. That's what this is really about. Not just the money. The whole picture. Richard The Poreia Perspective |
Poreia
I ran a business for a decade and never once wrote down what "enough" meant. Not until after I'd already sold it. It wasn't carelessness. There was always a nearer, louder milestone. Get through this quarter. Land this client. Get the numbers right for this valuation conversation. Enough is not that kind of question. It doesn't have a deadline attached, so it never got one. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I also learned how business valuation actually works, which turned out to matter...
I ran a business for a decade. I thought about money most days of that decade, sometimes most hours of it. And I never once wrote down what "enough" actually meant to me, until after I'd already sold the business. That's not carelessness. If you'd asked me at any point along the way, I could have given you a number. What the business might be worth. What I needed the deal to clear. What a good year looked like versus a bad one. Those numbers were always close to hand, because the business...
For the first few months after selling the business, I had a list of things I needed to sort out. Financial things, mostly. Not a short list. Money sitting in a corporate vehicle that needed to come out, but not all of it, and not yet. Some ring-fenced for liabilities still running through the wind-down. Creditors to manage, obligations that don't disappear the moment the sale completes. A stage payment due in on a future date. A pension that hadn't been looked at properly in years. Property....