I have to say, this was a very bitter pill to swallow...

I had taken great pride in my team and what we’d achieved and this didn’t sit well, but it’s also true that good things can come from adversity and disappointment if you let them.?

One more things I haven’t mentioned about these years. I met the absolute love of my life. A mutual friend told me pretty much as soon as I had arrived in my new role that there was someone I had to meet and employ before a competitor hired her.?

Timing for this was awful. I had only just got my feet under my desk, wasn’t really sure exactly what it was I was going to be doing and now I had this urgent dilemma.?

However, fortune favours the brave and I invited this young woman for an interview. We hit it off immediately. Her pedigree as a sales master was already well established and part of my portfolio was in her exact area of expertise.?

So, on a Saturday morning in early Autumn, I offered her a contract, a starting salary and for good measure gave her my company car, just to really cement the deal. I have to say that I was mildly concerned about telling my boss on Monday about what I had done and “by the way, I need a new car”. But I knew this was going to work out fine.?

Sometimes you have to just act and back yourself. Look at the potential downsides but if it feels right and doesn’t endanger anything else, just do it.?

Well, for the next 2 years we worked very closely together on multiple projects and were innocent colleagues. Then one fateful evening after a long trip to Whangarei and back with clients, we assembled in the office where we kept a well stocked fridge for entertaining customers and suppliers and pondered the day over a glass of Sav Blanc.?

…quite the change in circumstances…?

Pondering led to a dinner invitation and my much beloved colleague made the trip out to my ramshackle country retreat in Muriwai for a bite of dinner and although Muriwai is in the way distant rear vision mirror, she still hasn’t gone home 24 years later.?

A very happy marriage, a good life together, a fabulous baby who is about to go to University are some of the great things that came out of this time.?

Funny thing was, I had long been determined that my “breeding programme” was over and that was fine with my wife who favoured a career and being step-mother to mine. Then a tragedy happened in her life and the need to be a mother became painfully evident.?

I was in a terrible bind. I loved this woman with all my heart but was terrified of being hurt again around children so I know I had a choice to make. Either I cut this magnificent woman loose so she could find the man to have a baby with or I had to get over myself. In the end, I could not imagine life without her so the choice was easy.??

Now we face the empty nester scenario come next year and I’m quite resigned to the fact that when youngest daughter is studying in Auckland, I’m going to be a bachelor for a lot of the time and that’s ok.?

Life can provide you with seemingly impossible choices, but if you weigh up the upside vs the downside, the answer can come pretty naturally if you free your mind.?

…a new adventure…?

By now I’d been around the building/construction industry for quite a while and had developed some more refined analytical and strategic skills along the way.?

I next became a kind of hybrid senior manager in a mid-sized group housing company. I may have been Sales & Marketing Manager, or I could have been Franchise Manager, but in the end, it didn’t matter. It was a small Support Office team and everyone had to pitch in together.??

I liked the people at Support Office. I liked the franchisees and I liked the opportunity to grow and develop a group into something more.?

We did some fundamental things such as bringing the branding into the 21st Century and a few other bits and pieces that fell out of a national conference and then I went on a tiki tour around the traps to meet the franchisees in their natural environment and do a deeper dive into how they were tracking, what they needed and what they didn’t.?

This was sobering. The star franchisee owned two of the biggest performing franchises, one in a mid-sized provincial centre and one in a very out-of-the-way and very beautiful small-town destination.?

…oh no, I wish I hadn’t seen that…?

One of the up and coming franchisees had been in the business for a couple of years and was still finding his feet. However, the shock came as I discovered that all three of these critical franchises were trading insolvent.?

I’d never had to deal with that scenario except in my own past, but there were a few things I knew. First is that facing the fire and acknowledging it is of primary importance. Second, hope is not a strategy. Third, when in a deep hole, stop digging. Finally, try and minimise the bad outcomes for others.?

Here was a situation that had been brewing for some time. Support Office were fine as long as the franchise fees kept rolling in and largely they did. The problem was that no-one was talking about what was going on behind the curtain.?

This is not uncommon in the building industry. The life cycle of a build can be long and new projects begin before older ones are completed. That’s fine in a cash positive situation, but when cash gets tight, the deposit from the new project gets used to pay for the completion of the old.?

In itself this is unwise, but if it is only done rarely and kept tight, it can be legitimate-ish. But the problem is, it’s almost always a sign that things are on the slide and more often than is recognised, it has an inevitable course.??

Funds for work not yet started get absorbed deeper and deeper and by the time the next project is ready to start, the money for it is gone and then it’s a crisis and people get hurt.?

Who gets hurt? The poor people who have now given away $100,000.00 or more that they will never see again and the suppliers who supplied similar sums in goods that they won’t get back and nor will they get the money. Leave aside the incalculable damage done to the families associated with failed businesses, who probably had no idea their worlds were about to be upended.?

Cognitive dissonance is when you don’t want to believe the facts staring you in the face so you deliberately cling to a different reality.?

Talking to business owners about the fact that their business is worth less than nothing is not for the feint-hearted, but having had the experience of Levene & Co, my determination was to minimise the damage. That meant to cease trading immediately. It might sound brutal, but think of an insolvent business as being like a wild fire. The only way to stop the damage spreading is to cut a fire break around it and starve it of the opportunity to grow bigger.?

What also makes this tricky and it comes back to the cognitive dissonance thing, is that business owners in this state have whistled past the graveyard and looked away whenever signs of doom appear and convince themselves that just one more deposit will put it all right again.??

Actually, the better metaphor might be a heroin addict.?

______________________________________

If any piece of my story resonates with you and you would like to explore how I might be able to help you on your business journey you can find out more HERE .

?