Liverpool-based brand and business consultancy, Matchstick Creative, has closed.
The purpose-driven business has generated revenue of £1.2m in the last seven years but co-founder and CEO Ruth Wildhart took to LinkedIn to explain they’d shut their doors for the last time.
It follows last week’s news that Liverpool PR and marketing agency, Moore Media, had gone into liquidation with founder, Jayne Moore, pointing the finger of blame at the Labour government.
Wildhart said: “We tried to do stuff with integrity and a bit of humour and joy. We did our best work.
“Running a business is an insane venture. Not only are you responsible for generating money, delivering work and creating an elusive thing called a ‘culture’ – you’re also trying to enjoy it at the same time.
“It is often the case you will do one or two of these things to the best of your abilities, and the others will flounder in the background.
“You’ll also have stories constantly pumped at you about how other people are doing it better than you and are making more money. Business ownership is for the relentlessly positive and insane amongst us.”
Wildhart praised her co-founder Greg Macoy for his patience and empathy.
“By working alongside Greg, and the people we employed, I understood for the first time in my life what it meant to be in a team,” she said.
‘It is very, very tiring to run a business…. The current ‘normality’ isn’t normal, and is creating a false status quo that is unsustainable.”
Matchstick Creative employed a total of 15 people during the seven years they were in business.
“I can say that perhaps half of them were good,” admitted Wildhart.
She said her ‘epiphany’ came when she asked herself one simple question. “If I was in a relationship with another person, and more than half of the time was unhappy, why would you keep going back?” she asked herself.
“Something that started out with boundless energy and enthusiasm, turned into a hard slog up a hill we couldn’t see the top of.
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“It also propelled us into rooms we couldn’t have dreamed of being in if it weren’t for the vision and message we were sharing.”
The entrepreneur added: “You have no idea of the impact you’ve had until you take a step back. When we began to break the news to our networks that we were closing, every single person said they were sad to see us go.
“They said we’d made an impact. They said they’d miss working with us. They said we challenged them in a way that was helpful and long lasting.
“To anyone who hired us, freelanced for us, cried with us over drinks, invited us to speak on panels, attended our events or was a member of our team, thank you.
“You understood what we were trying to do and you held the fire with us. Any time we felt our flame dwindling, it was always our community that refuelled us.”