Fresh out of business school, armed with an MBA, confidence and youth, I took a sabbatical from my consulting job to become a magnate. That was the plan, anyway.
I had watched too many movies. Fuelled by delusions of grandeur, a gut feel substantiated by narrow research and the belief that I would do it better, I pushed swiftly through obstacles using my contacts within industry. I took money from friends and family, thinking we would save the institutional round for expansion. But, being eager to push ahead, the funding I secured was very expensive and also came with advice. Some of it was good, some was bad.
We overcame operational issues, labour disputes, supply chain mix-ups, fraud, theft, corruption and bullying. And I learned more about myself. I also realised that this was something I had started for the glamour and the experience. Managing it gave me no pleasure compared to starting it up. I had bad luck with managers and whether it was because we could not afford the right skills, or whether the competition was getting heavier, the business was taking more than it was giving. I started dreading Sunday evenings when the impending burden of Monday made me envy the ‘carefree’. I longed to get back to the relative distance of a job, where we separated personal from business. For me, every waking and sleeping moment revolved around the debt hole I was in. Notwithstanding that the friends and family money ran out fairly soon and I had been funding a year of deficits out of my own pocket, I had also accumulated a substantial overdraft.
That needed to change.
I made the decision to free myself: either I find someone to buy into the business and run it properly, or I sell it to a competitor. In the end, I realised that that our competition were better equipped to serve our realistic market segment, so I spent a few months repackaging the business further and negotiated a fair price. Not an elegant cash out, but neither a fire sale.
I paid off all the friends and family investors a substantive return. I had never thought I would have had to work so hard to stick to my end of the bargain. What I got in return for close to 2 years of hard, unpaid slog was a few thousand dollars and a mental tune up.
I had been through labour courts, sleepless nights and pleadings with the bank, emotionally draining retrenchment and firings, and customer disappointment. There were fun moments too: a good week’s sales, glowing customers, watching the team band together under pressure…
The experience was not one I wanted to repeat in a hurry, but it made me a better businessman, be it as a banker, trouble-shooter, investor or executive. I cherished it and used it well. I did not rush to repeat it. I found other ways to satisfy my entrepreneurial talents. In the steady suited world of finance.