Closing down a company
Posted by: Peter Dawe in Hardware, entrepreneurialism, economic downturn, credit crunch on Sep 15, 2008
Simple advice. If you are having to close a company, simply walk away and let the shareholders/creditors/employees sort out the closure. As ever in today's society, doing the 'right thing' is expensive, thankless and risky!
| The right thing: | The Alternative |
| You close down when you have just enough money to almost meet the demands of the all the creditors, except yourself.. | You wait until the creditors are knocking on the door, and keep going for several extra months. You can reduce your personal risks by careful advanced planning . |
| It consumes weeks of your time | You attend one or two short meetings with the receiver and creditors |
| The staff have notice, are able to seek jobs while still employed, get paid their notice and redundancy at the end of their employment | The receiver fires everyone at 9:00 on the fateful day, they are lucky to get their last months pay, let alone pay in lieu of notice. They get state redundancy some months later |
| You get to sort through all the now near worthless fixed assets and get charged to dispose of them. | Liquidators problem |
| You find all the passwords, keys and other essential information has gone with the staff | " |
| You get all the abusive phone calls from creditors etc. | " |
| You get the blame from shareholders | You get the blame from shareholders |
One of the unexpected consequences of extreme down-scaling is that I find I am without a techie to look after my systems. Contrary to most peoples expectations, I am totally ignorant about the management of modern systems.
I know from trying to use Windows XP at home, that I don't want to use that. I've been using Linux for sometime, but I now have a iPhone, my remaining employee uses an Apple MAC, and there is one left-over from the demise of DaweVision.
So I'm going to try the Apple way. What terrifies me is the degree of lock-in Apple have designed into their system.
You have to use their hardware and software for just about everything. OK maybe while Microsoft keeps market share, but if Vista remains the dog it is today, will Apple sit on their laurels?
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