An email popped into my basket today from a contact. I read the exchange of conversation and realised it was not intended for my eyes. Well I wondered for a minute. After all, things are often leaked accidentally on purpose. But I guessed this one was not. It was CCed to all participants in the email exchange between the director of a group and one of their clients that is a public figure. It’s ………………..
I could say here. I could tip off the business media. I could tip off the tabloid media. They’d probably make something of it.
One thing was for certain from the emails, and that was the sheer pain and torment of someone desperately trying to make a business work. They listed all the negotiations that had taken place but ultimately failed to deliver a result. The other party spoke of the impact on their business of non-payment of the account. Everywhere through the exchange was the pain of keeping something going. There had been frantic discussions with potential new backers, and then old clients who had pulled out when it was not clear if the money was there . Most of all was the deep pain of being on the brink of admitting that the business could not be saved in its current form, and of realising that years of blood sweat and tears may come to nothing. Trouble is that it’s like that at the moment.
Give me another week, came the plea in the email. In another week or two people will know. Maybe there will be a miracle in that week to prevent its collapse. We often never know when we smile at the client how hard they are paddling underneath the smooth surface. They never know it about us. Sometimes we skate perilously close to the edge and don’t go over. Of course there may be investors in this company who don’t know how close the company is to failure. As investors it is the kind of thing they should be finding out long before reading about it in the media.
There must be thousands of companies in the same boat. Can they all be news? I guess the thing that interests me is what the owner of this business does next. And a little bit later I’d been interested on hearing their reflections on what they did. They won’t see it now because the pain is too great and the battle of survival is still on.
Maybe they should have seen it coming. Maybe they could never have seen it coming. Maybe they deserve a kicking. Or maybe it’s just what was always going to happen.
