How I handled business failure, by Deborah Meaden

My first business was a financial failure. When I was 19 years old, fresh out of business school and after a brief stint as a fashion showroom model, I had moved to Italy.

I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do – I just had a burning desire to run my own show. I have always loved art and sculpture and was incredibly inspired by what I saw during my time in Florence.

The craftsmanship, style and breathtaking beauty of what was on offer moved me to make the decision to set up a glass and ceramics import business.

The next few months were a heady mix of dashing around the Italian countryside to visit factories where the air was filled with an intoxicating mix of rich tobacco smoke and chemicals, followed by endless sunny days stumbling down cobbled streets in historic cities to negotiate with immaculately turned out businessmen and women.

Eventually I secured sole agency distribution rights with a good number of Italian businesses and immediately set about organising the next stage of my plan. I decided to launch my exciting new venture by exhibiting my prizes at the prestigious Top Drawer retail gift fair in London.

On my trip back to the UK I was strangely nervous and apprehensive. I wondered if I had my timing right and whether the British public would be ready to recognise the extraordinary style of these Italian works and, more importantly, welcome them into their homes.

As it turned out, my fears were groundless. The reaction was electric. And leading stores were soon vying to sell complete ranges of my goods. It was an exhilarating time.

I was delighted with my success and quickly imagined that I would be able to grow the business to include works from other European countries.

Then, after a great start, the orders suddenly stopped coming in. At first I simply could not understand what had gone wrong.

A quick trawl through top London stores showed there was still a huge public appetite for these goods, but it did not take me long to discover what had happened to my previously thriving business.

All my major customers had spotted that there was a huge demand for Italian glass and ceramics, and they had simply cut out the middle man, or in my case woman, and gone to my suppliers to buy the goods direct.

I was forced to think on my feet. Although I had contracts saying that I was the sole agent for these various companies, I quickly realised that to enforce my rights I would probably have to spend at least a year in complex and expensive legal battles, and whatever the final outcome I would have fallen out with my Italian companies and the buyers at the key stores.

Either way, my fledgling business was dead in the water.

I am not a sentimental person when it comes to business. My head has always led my heart, and once I have made up my mind about something it doesn’t weigh me down.

I calculated the odds and saw no point in wasting a year of my time, energy and money on a fight I could never win. So I shut down the company.

The circumstances vary, but hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs experience business failure every year.

The difference between me and the majority who find themselves in trouble and then keep going until the bitter end is that at the moment when I could have got myself into debt and there was a likelihood that it could have got worse, I took the difficult decision to close the business down.

This is a snippet from Deborah's new book 'Common Sense Rules'. For more information or to buy a copy click here.

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By LaunchLab.co.uk  on   Jun 10,2009

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Keywords

Deborah Meaden    business failure    Italy    import business    failing businesses   

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