Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. –Douglas Adams

Please remember that I am sharing about my experiences here, but I don’t think that everyone that goes into business in South Africa, should really be going that route. The ‘barriers to entry’ to starting a business are ridiculously low here, which is good for competitiveness. And I think South Africa offers a wonderful environment for creativity and entrepreneurial activity.

But it has been my experience that not everyone who is in business is either in the right kind of business, or has thought through the business model properly.

Robert Kioysaki’s Cash Flow Quadrant demonstrates that people are either an Employee, Self Employed, Business Owner or Investor. But he stresses that each quadrant requires different skills and that you have to educate yourself before moving to another quadrant.

As a trainer, I am self-employed. It is difficult and potentially dangerous as I am the sole source of income of my own enterprise. I ‘own a job’. And it is totally different from owning a business where there are staff, management, landlords, franchisors, suppliers, stock, machinery, business partners, lenders and opening times. To be completely honest, I naively thought that I would be an Investor – checking in every now and then on an investment business, rather than a Business Owner who was involved at all in business decisions. That is a failure to anticipate, to plan, to prepare for contingencies.

And the store business has left me with little time to pursue and develop my training business – which is a creative exercise requiring personal discipline.

There are many reasons we go into business. Sometimes we are attempting to move towards something like creating wealth or opportunity or freedom. Sometimes we are moving away from a previously repressive job. But I should have invested a great deal more time in investigating my motives, and anticipating the future before laying down that much money, and eventually losing it all. There are other ways of earning money and

investing time and different business models to pursue. Exploring those first would have given me more options.

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.

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!