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In our experience, a first-year business will often fail, not because the idea was bad, or the person behind it didn’t care or didn’t work hard enough. In fact, these are often the reasons that people hang on to their business far too long. Sadly. An apparently increasing number fail partly because they didn’t see what was coming, they didn’t have the right support, or nobody gave them the warnings when they were falling into some common traps.
In short, they didn’t get the right advice at the right time.
Not that there is a shortage of good advice out there. There is plenty on how to write a business plan or how to understand the big ‘why’ of your business, and how to nurture your dream. What there seems to be less of is the not quite as nice to read about truth of how hard it can be dealing with the dangers your business can, and probably will, encounter in the first year.
We’ve spent decades working with businesses in distress. We’ve seen the impact it can have when a business becomes insolvent. It impacts the people behind it, the owners, the families, the staff and even their suppliers and customers. We do our best to treat our clients with empathy and understanding for these reasons. Businesses, from day one, are part of your life and often the lives of everyone around you.
So, with that in mind, we decided to use our experience to help businesses in that first, highly vulnerable, year of trade.
Starting a business is one of the most exciting things you can do, but it comes with a risk. You will usually be swapping a regular income for a variable one and committing to long hours. There is a huge learning curve to think about. So, yes, you may have the dream, but you also need the reality to ground you.
According to the Office for National Statistics, around 20% of UK businesses don’t make it past their first year (ONS, 2023). It's a scary statistic, but what it doesn’t tell us is why.
The real story behind those numbers is that these businesses often close due to one or more avoidable problems that weren’t spotted and responded to early enough.
Anyone who has run a business knows what the first year is really like. The long hours. The unexpected bills. The slow months. The mental strain. The pressure to turn a dream into an income. All these are things that you need to prepare for so that the passion of ownership isn’t overwhelmed by real-life problems.
We’ve launched a new section on our website, aimed entirely at businesses in their first year of trading. It’s simple, straightforward, and built from the situations we’ve dealt with time and time again.
It’s not about preaching or ticking boxes. It’s about sharing what we’ve learned, in the hope that a little bit of insight can help someone avoid a lot of trouble later.
When you have a successful business, as we do, combined with working in the insolvency world, you get a pretty clear perspective. So, why would we not share that knowledge? If, because of some insight we share, we only help one business avoid a cash flow crisis, if we help ten businesses see warning signs early, if we can only help a hundred people understand what they’re walking into, then it’s worth every bit of the time we’ve spent putting this together.
These new resources are designed to give first-year businesses a real-world look at what to expect. We want you to think about what to prepare for.
They cover areas such as:
We’ve also binned the jargon. There are no academic lectures, no trite sayings or flimsy ‘hacks’. There is just honest, practical advice based on years of experience helping businesses when things haven’t gone to plan.
We’re not writing these pages for clicks or credit. We’re doing it because we’ve seen what happens when businesses don’t have the right knowledge early on. If passing on some of that experience means fewer insolvencies, less stress, and more businesses making it past their first year, then we’re all for it.
We hope you’ll take a look. We think it could make a real difference. As counterproductive as it may sound from an Insolvency Practitioner, we would actually rather see you succeed in the first year than become one of the next round of statistics.