Fight or Flight? How I Made the Decision to Shut Down My Business

By Aly Saxe

Most business owners don’t spend their free time looking for best practices on closing up their business. That’s sort of the antithesis of education for growth. Indeed, the topic you don’t usually go searching for is the one that’s the hardest to face: when and how to close up shop.

In business, I’ve come to learn, the end is inevitable. Whether it’s a successful exit, a forced buyout, a change of leadership, or just closing right up, every company has its own circle of life. Even the best exit possible comes with a period of emotional adjustment for the entrepreneur.

I have a good friend who recently sold her company. The buyout was perfect. She got everything she asked for. And she still had a hard time adjusting to seeing her company become something else, and her role within it become different as well.

Through it all, she did what she knew was best for her company. I recently went through something similar. After eight years of putting everything I had into growing a PR agency, I made the painful decision to shut it down. In hindsight, I realize I was fighting a losing battle for months. My attempts to prevent closing–and they were aggressive, passionate, tenacious attempts–proved to only delay the inevitable.

On the day that the last gauntlet was thrown, I sat down and asked myself the hard questions I had been avoiding. My answers helped me realize that closing shop was the best route. Not just for me but also for my employees and clients. These are the questions:

What is this business costing you?

There’s the financial cost, the emotional cost, and the opportunity cost that need to be considered here. In my case, financially my company was fine. Emotionally, it was killing me to see a team of hard working, dedicated people not receive the kind of opportunity that I hoped to give them. Then it came down to the opportunity cost.

In the last year I had gotten pulled into another direction. The software I had created for my PR agency was now its own company and taking off. We were funded. I thought I had set up my agency in a way that it could run without me, but it really couldn’t. I kept getting pulled back in, which meant time and brain space that should have been going to my software was going to the agency. I realized that this was costing my software company greatly. I knew I would never be able to give it the attention it deserved so long as I had this agency, even if I wasn’t involved in the day-to-day activities.

Most business owners are familiar with sacrifice. They give up time with family, exercise, hobbies, and many other things they used to enjoy. Make sure you get clear with yourself on what you’re comfortable sacrificing and what cost would be too high.

What is the reward?

Why are entrepreneurs fine-tuned to make sacrifices? Because we’re going for the big reward. Whether that’s a huge payout someday, changing an industry, or simply never having to work for someone else again, we all have our reasons for making those sacrifices. The rewards of staying in business must outweigh the costs, or you will always feel that you’re fighting an uphill battle.

The reward for me was keeping people I really cared about employed, and having a safety net of income. The former is what truly kept me up at night. It took one of my advisors to point out that I had a team of highly talented and employable people in a market that was hungry for talent. They’d be fine, and I could help them find new jobs.

This gave me peace of mind but I still had to grapple with the loss of income for myself. The answer for me came in knowing that I was already all in with my new company and letting go of my safety net was a good way to prove that–to myself, my team, and my investors.

What reward are you realizing from your business? Is it enough to offset the cost? Alternatively, what rewards are you missing out on by fighting to stay in business?

Can you let go and not look back?

One of my mentors calls this the “regret test.” If you walk away, will you look back and wonder if you could have done it different? Better?

About a year before I chose to close my business, someone suggested the idea to me. At the time I couldn’t imagine not having my agency still going. I knew then that there were still things to do with it, still successes for me to conquer. If I had let go at that time, I would have always looked back and wondered “what if?”

When the time came to close the doors, I knew in my heart I was done. It was sad, and more difficult than I imagined, as things didn’t exactly end the way I’d hoped, but it was also a relief. I had cut the strings in my heart and knew I could move on in peace.

If you aren’t sure yet that you could let go of your business without looking back, then I encourage you to find out why. Is there an accomplishment you want to reach before calling it a day? A BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) that is within reach? If you feel there’s still work to be done, then fight like hell. That’s the stuff great turnaround stories are made of.

Facing the end is probably the hardest decision a business owner must face, and it’s as much a part of business as anything else. By being honest with yourself on the tough questions, hopefully you can make the choice that will leave you feeling zero doubt, no matter what direction you choose.