In 2008, while working at the commercial industrial division of Gordon Brothers – Smith Hodgkinson, Richard Parkinson and I realised that we would have more fun doing it ourselves.
We thought we had the skills to start a specialist restructuring, recovery and surveying practice that could serve, to start with, the North West.
We decided early on that we would be hands-on, highly responsive and, despite lying awake at 4am worrying about cases, both Richard and I came to the conclusion that it would work because we genuinely cared.
We cared about doing a good job. We cared about the quality of the work. We cared about the clients. And we cared about doing a good enough job to get the next job.
When we started out, we sorted our contacts into three categories: nailed on, may not win and unlikely.
We were wrong about a lot of them.
The people we thought would definitely work with us often didn’t, while many of the ‘unlikelies’ did.
Don’t assume
That was one of the biggest surprises. You quickly learn that assumptions count for very little.
Everything came together, though. Perhaps it was timing, perhaps luck, but we have never really looked back.
Another lesson we learned was to stick to what you know and stick to your core skills.
If you branch out, there has to be a genuine link to the market you know and your core competencies.
Another key lesson is that, if you get the hiring right, you can move mountains.
We have found that growing our own people is often better than bringing in somebody from a big corporate business.
There is nowhere to hide in a start-up. Everyone is accountable and, if you are not up to snuff, it becomes painfully obvious very quickly.
In a small business you hold a mirror up to yourself and ask: ‘Can I really make this work?’ ‘Can you build relationships?’ Can you actually make a difference?
You have to be honest with yourself and, if something stops working, do something different.
It is also important to understand that growth is not always permanent. Markets go down as well as up.
We started with five years of positive growth and then got hit with a market-driven downturn.
Starting a business with nothing is hard, but suddenly seeing income levels fall is emotionally very difficult. I lost even more sleep and a lot of hair.
We had to work incredibly hard, offer different services within our market and go to every event we could to grow our network.
One thing I would always advise small business owners is to be very careful about taking money out of the business unless they really need to.
By 9.30am every morning I know exactly what our cash position is. Every day I know exactly what we are owed. Businesses don’t fail because they are not profitable; they fail because they run out of cash.
Don’t take cash out of the business
If you don’t need to take money out, don’t. Taking working capital out of the business introduces the risk of a loss of control of your business.
It has now been 18 years and every new instruction still delights me as much as it did at the beginning. I still feel honoured that people trust us with their work, and I have never lost that feeling.
Now, though, when you instruct Landwood Group, you get five partners, four directors, two associate directors and a team of 25 who have lived through every cycle, seen every trick and solved every unsolvable problem.
One of the things that remains the same after 18 years is that we still care about every job.