It has been a year and a half since my franchise business failed and I lost all my money and learnt a whole book full of lessons.   Eighteen months is a good time to stop and reflect in a world where the entire business landscape can change in a mere six months.   And since there are 52 lessons and 52 weeks in a year, I can’t help the temptation but to post a reflection once a week throughout 2011.  This is my challenge for the year.

I wrote the original book, “I’m Not Afraid of the F Word, 50 Lessons Learned on the Way to Business Failure” for a number of reasons.

• As an account of my failure to let others know of what foolish mistakes and arrogance can cost them
• As a record for myself so that I will recognize my own mistakes sooner rather than later and not repeat them when I go into business again
• And for the sake of my daughters, so that when they grow up and look back on this part of their history, there will be an explanation for what their mother went through, and hopefully, part of the reason why I would have recovered from it.  I do not want them to be afraid of business, of being entrepreneurial, just because I failed once.  In fact, I don’t want anyone to be afraid to go into business, in spite of the statistics of business failure.   I simply want us to be aware that there are risks, that they can be mitigated and that the eventual reward will be worth it if we apply some uncommon sense to the enterprise.

I am very grateful for the support, encouragement and feedback I have received over the last 2 years since my business failed and since I started speaking about it.  And I am also grateful for the people, mostly women, who have come to me for advice or encouragement for themselves, when they found themselves in similar circumstances.  I have been honoured to be able to talk with, encourage, but mostly just listen to some people to make decisions about their business lives and to know that there are people who have not lost businesses or money, because they looked at my example and made better decisions because of what they saw.  That is worth telling my story for.

Please feel free to pass on this post to others and encourage them to subscribe to the feed or the Facebook page.  I would also love to hear your comments and feedback, as well as your good and bad business decisions.  Even anonymously.  But please do share.  You will feel better for it.

“I’m Not Afraid of the F Word” can be ordered from any book store.  The distributor is Redline books and they can be contacted on christopher@redlinebooks.co.za or 021 557 2146.

I have just entered a club in South Africa. It is apparently quite a large one, one very difficult to actually find out who are members.

There must be statistics out there showing how many business owners lose their businesses and for what sort of reasons, and they would be very useful to have. But the statistics are not comforting. I would like sometimes to get advice or guidance from someone who has been here before, and can tell me how it works. Is it better to have made the choices I have eventually made, or should I have done something slightly different? How does it work with a liquidator and the courts etc? How long does this all take?

Well this is a blog where we can share that information. You can use pseudonyms if you like, but if you have anything useful to add to the conversation, please do contribute. Lets help each other through these difficult times, at least with some encouragement, advice and information.

And let us learn from our mistakes – from my mistakes. I am going to be as honest as I can as every day I cover a lesson that I learned – positive or negative, that led to this eventual course of action. And hopefully by the end of the journey, I would have found a way out – a new direction.

These are the first 7 lessons I learned:

• Business isn’t right for everybody
• Focus or get frazzled
• People aren’t going to act the way you want them to act
• The difficulty of delegating
• The value of networking
• Learning to quit
• Create systems to improve your life

I really would like your comments on the blog, on what I express as well as your own experiences.

This blog is an exploration of the lessons I learned when my business failed. Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas, as well as your own experiences. It will eventually be published as a book – hopefully as a warning to new entrepreneurs to avoid some of these mistakes. Please see the first few posts as an introduction.

Failure is an event, never a person.

-William D Brown

Since I am asking you to join me on this journey, I should share a little of who I am. My name is Charlotte Kemp and my career is as a trainer. I operate my training through a closed corporation called Niche Training and Development. I develop some of my own material and offer both in-house and public courses, and sometimes train on behalf of other companies.

The business that has gone insolvent, was a franchise store offering postal, courier and business services as well internet café access. It was in a mall in Hillcrest KZN and was run by my parents. I purchased the franchise with funds that came from my divorce settlement and initially funded the monthly shortfall from my bond. I lived in Gauteng while my folks were managing the store in KZN, but in the month that the business opened, my mother suffered a series of heart attacks. After a number of complications, she only had her bypass three months later, in October. Consequently the first seven months of the business June to December of 2007, were effectively a write off in terms of anyone concentrating on the actual business.

I moved to KZN in 2008 with my two junior school daughters, to see if I could help at all with the business, and to allow my children to spend some time near their family for a few years. But I also needed to develop my own training business at the same time, because even if we got the store working, it could not support all of us.

Unfortunately, through the course of 2008, in spite of many ups and downs, victories and set backs, it became evident by December that we had to sell the business. We put it on the market at the beginning of December 2008. There were numerous enquiries but now in May we took legal advice and submitted the papers to the wind up the business, and face the consequences. In the meantime I have also had to sell the house I owned as I could no longer keep up the payments. I lost money there too.

I bet if you take out your pen, you can make a start on that list of mistakes I made. I can add a few to that. Before my divorce and moving here, I worked in a volunteer position in a church. I am going to dispense with the euphemisms and inverted commas and just state the obvious. My time was my own, I could come and go as I pleased, I had time for my children, my husband paid my bills and my theory of life was, dare I say, very naïve. Two years later, I know so much more! And the first thing is this, when we move from one stage of our lives to another, we should take quite a bit more time exploring the other side before moving in and setting up shop!