At what point do you say enough is enough and close your business?

Jeremy Jacobs, experienced entrepreneur, consultant and mentor talks about closing his business of 13 years after Covid caused a 97% drop in revenue overnight. He discusses the first thing you need to consider when closing, why failure is always an option – and why mental health and well-being should be everybody’s priority. 

On the 1st of September 2021 I stood on Hove Lawns walking my dog, Biff, exhausted, frustrated and upset. That was the moment I took the decision to close my business after 13 years. Covid has destroyed my business. The business I started with my parents in their kitchen. The business we had invested all our time, energy, and love into making it work. A business that had, to us, been incredibly successful.

If you run or have ever run your own business, you will know how challenging it is. It can, if you allow it, take everything you have physically and mentally. Running a business is a choice. Yet it can feel, like it did for me, that it wasn’t, and I felt I had to keep on going despite the negative impact on my physical and mental health.

The problem with the hustle culture

We live in a culture of “hustle” and “the grind”. Social media is awash with messages of people who are working harder, smarter and better than you. We’re continually pushed the message that if you’re not working 70+ hours a week, you’re not a good business owner. You will never be successful. 

Yet conversations around burnout are common, more so during the pandemic. It’s no wonder people are questioning their life, career, needs and wants. It’s been dubbed the “great resignation”, and people are quitting their jobs to go and find work that makes an impact, has purpose, and allows more freedom and flexibility. This is good news. The world of business is changing for the better.

We must be honest with ourselves that this kind of life is not sustainable long-term. We all have our breaking point and mine came on that day in September. Since then, I have learned a lot about myself and business. 

Here are the most important things I learned.

It’s your decision but consider others

When you run a business by yourself, closing is hard. You will have suppliers, customers and people that depend on you. It’s even harder when you have people working for you. You may have a partner, family, friends and loved ones that will be impacted by your decision to close. There are a lot of people to consider. 

My advice is to have conversations with the people you trust as early as possible, don’t deal with it by yourself. You need to think carefully about who you tell and when. I made sure I prioritised my team and smaller suppliers and customers first, those impacted the most by my decision. Be prepared for potential backlash and difficult conversations, yet be considerate of the impact, take time to listen and understand their concerns.

When telling friends and family, some will reflect their own fears back at you in their response. Some will ask “what are you going to do?”, “how will you cope?”, “what’s the next move?”. I didn’t know or want to think about that in the early stages, I just had to take it a day at a time. I had to be clear with them that I was focussing on the closure for now and I would deal with that later.

The most important thing I learned is that the decision is yours and yours alone to make. You can listen to other people’s views, but you alone must take it. 

Finally, your circumstances, legal and financial obligations are unique to you. You should seek the advice from trusted legal and financial experts before making or executing any plans to close.

Failure is always an option

There’s this quote I hear being said often, “failure is not an option”. It was made famous in the film Apollo 13. In the film, the flight director for the mission, Gene Kranz, says the line (he never said those words in real life). I can see the intention behind the saying, it was meant to motivate the team to succeed. He was in a highly stressful and precarious position, he was responsible for many lives and a very expensive, public operation. In this scenario, failure was not an option. Most people reading this article are not running businesses with this level of intensity. For me, this highlights the culture around success and failure. It suggests the idea of failure as something that cannot and should not happen. Success is glamourised, failure vilified. 

Those who have been around the block in business will know that failure is inevitable and a critical part of growth and success. You cannot have innovation and growth without failure. As business leaders, we must have the humility to look at ourselves, put aside our ego, admit mistakes, and learn from it. 

Yet the business world acts like failure rarely happens. I am not going to sugar coat it but there is a lot of BS out there. Mostly on social media. People showing us a false or heavily edited picture of their business and lives. They make it look easy and fun. Truth is, it isn’t all the time and it’s not often people share the true, full spectrum of their lives.

The issue with success and failure

There is nothing wrong with being successful. There is nothing wrong with failure. The true definition of success is to achieve an outcome or an aim, failure is the lack of success. Where we trip ourselves up is what we make it mean about ourselves and our abilities.

When we are successful, we big ourselves up and give ourselves a pat on the back, we go onto social media to share our wonderful news. But when we do, we feed our ego. This makes it harder for us to accept failure. The fall is greater. This isn’t to say your achievements and successes shouldn’t be celebrated. Absolutely not! Celebrate, but remember that you are a fallible human. It’s a tricky balance but it allows us to exercise humility and more willing to share our failures.

On the flip side, the problem with failure is we make it mean something about our skills, knowledge, or abilities. We say or think “I am bad”, “I knew I couldn’t do it”, “nothing ever goes my way”. Whatever your version is, it’ll be something negative that will leave you feeling disempowered at best or giving up, slipping into a depressive state, or suicide at worst. It feels uncomfortable to bring up the subject and it’s important to acknowledge that this is the real and true cost of failure for some. For me it’s critical to have open discussions around the subject of failure to normalise it, to allow people to speak up without fear of judgement or ridicule and not suffer in silence.

Build a business around your life, not a life around your business

If I was given the opportunity to go back and do it all over again, what would I do differently? The most important thing would be is to build a business around my life and not a life around my business.

The idea of success seems to be about wealth creation, big revenues, big teams, big houses, big cars, luxury holidays and status. I used to think like that, I wanted it all. Then I got older and thought “hold on, is this what I really want?”

Yes, I still want to create and build a business, I still want to achieve success, but my version of success is very different from what I wanted only a few years ago. It is possible to do business differently, to positively impact the lives of ourselves and our teams. To have better mental health, more time with family and friends, doing things that we love, having a better work life balance.

About the author:

Jeremy Jacobs is an experienced entrepreneur, business consultant and mentor. He started his career in digital marketing. He left that career to start 2 businesses including a food manufacturing company with his Mum which ran successfully for 13 years. He now works as a mentor and consultant for a wide range of businesses including start-ups and solo entrepreneurs. He has an MBA with Distinction from University of Sussex. 

He is the host and founder of “How Not to Run a Business” podcast, launched to normalise conversations around failure, mental health and what it takes to be an entrepreneur/business owner. The aim is to help people achieve success by understanding the mistake/failures and subsequent lessons of others.

Personal website: www.jeremyjacobs.co.uk
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyjacobsuk
Instagram: www.instagram.com/jeremyjacobsuk