This is the first line of a quote from the 13th Century Persian poet Rumi – the whole quote reads as follows:
“Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open. You were born with wings, why do you prefer to crawl through life?”
And so it is with owners of distressed businesses. Trapped like rabbits in headlights they freeze. Unable to take action they crawl through their business life fighting fires rather than taking the bold actions that are required in a turnaround situation.
The reasons for this are numerous. Firstly salvaging a failing business requires a completely different set of skills and knowledge from those used by the business owner to date. Starting from nothing and growing a business is completely different from saving one. The business owner literally does not have the required skills or knowledge to save their company.
Secondly they are in denial… “this can’t be happening to me”. Up until now they have conquered everything – they have started form nothing, built out a product or service, recruited employees and generally grown from nothing against all odds. This has imbued them with a false sense of confidence which makes them think they are incapable of failure. Many entrepreneurs refuse to believe the predicament they are in when things go bad.
Finally there is the pain of making the hard decisions. Making people redundant, giving up the flash offices, cutting out products and services, giving back the smart company car. Nobody wants to do any of these things as they feel like a step backwards, but it’s better to cut things now and survive than to carry on as you are and end up with nothing.
And so entrepreneurs stay in prison until it is too late to escape. Unwilling and unable to act they bury their heads in the sand and hope that doing more of what they have always done will work – when actually the complete opposite is true.
Don’t stay in prison. Get somebody like me to show you how to walk out of the open door. Doing nothing will literally get you nowhere.
