When running harder stops making sense
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For the first five years of running my business I paid back over two million pounds in debt. Asset finance leases, punitive lenders, terms that should never have been signed but were because we needed the equipment to open the doors. Most people thought it was impossible. We did it anyway. Then just as we cleared the last of it, COVID hit. Government enforced closures. No income, no choice, more debt taken on just to keep the business alive. Nearly a million pounds gone through no fault of ours or anyone's. There was a class action. Hundreds of businesses like mine, trying to recover something. I sat on the committee, spoke to lawyers regularly, listened to endless updates over months. After years of work we reached the point where the risks of pushing further outweighed the potential rewards. We accepted a settlement. It was a fraction of what any of us felt we were owed. That was the moment. Not dramatic. Just quiet and final. I had nothing left. No heart for it. No stomach. The thing that had kept me going through years of relentless pressure had simply run out. I'd spent a decade believing the answer to every problem was to push harder. Work longer. Fight more. It's not a bad instinct. It's what gets businesses built and debts repaid and crises survived. But there's a version of that instinct that turns on you. When pushing becomes the only mode you have. When you've forgotten what you were pushing toward. When harder stops being a strategy and becomes a habit you can't break even when it's costing you everything. Most people I talk to in their forties and fifties know this feeling. Not necessarily from a business. Maybe from a career that consumed everything. A role they outgrew but kept showing up for. A version of success they achieved and then kept chasing past the point it made sense. The shift isn't about stopping. It's about recognising when the thing that got you here stops being the thing that takes you forward. That's what I had to learn the hard way. You don't have to. Richard |
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....