I have spent thirty years listening to founders explain why their businesses failed, and not one of them has ever blamed the actual culprit.
It was the bank. It was Brexit. It was the weather, the landlord, the marketing agency, that chap in accounts with the lanyard and the grievance. It was anything, in fact, except the one square foot of real estate that actually ran the show: the founder’s own brain.
Because that’s all a business is, when you strip away the WeWork membership and the laminated mission statement. It is one human skull, roughly a foot across, making perhaps a hundred decisions a day, some of them before coffee, most of them under pressure, and a frightening number of them based on what a bloke said at a barbecue in 2019.
We talk endlessly about premises. Commercial property this, business rates that, the eternal sob story of the high street. And yet the only premises that genuinely determine whether your company thrives or files for insolvency is the cranial one, unmortgageable, unlettable, and in urgent need of refurbishment more often than any of us would care to admit.
The science, irritatingly for the excuse-makers, backs this up. A vast study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports found that founder personality traits meaningfully predict whether a startup succeeds or folds, and research in PNAS covering thousands of technology ventures concluded much the same: the psychology of the person at the top shapes outcomes from first fundraise to final exit. Not the product. Not the market. The person. Meanwhile, closer to home, ineffective management costs UK businesses over £19 billion a year, which is a polite, spreadsheet-flavoured way of saying that an awful lot of expensive decisions are being made by brains that haven’t had a service since the millennium.
And here’s the thing nobody tells you at the launch party: that square foot depreciates. Badly. Sleep-deprive it, marinate it in cortisol and lukewarm Pinot, deny it a single weekend off for three years, and it starts making the entrepreneurial equivalent of drunk texts. The founder who won’t delegate because “nobody does it like me”? That’s not dedication, that’s a brain running on fumes mistaking martyrdom for strategy. The one who pivots four times a quarter because Silicon Valley told him failure is a love language? He’d do well to read why the ‘fail fast’ mentality is actually failing UK small businesses, preferably before the administrators do it for him.
Consider what we lavish on every other square foot we own. We insure it, survey it, repaint it, argue with the council about it. We will happily spend four grand on an air-conditioning unit for a stockroom while the chief executive officer of the entire enterprise, the brain, gets five hours’ sleep, a meal-deal sandwich and a personality slowly pickling in its own adrenaline. If you treated a rental property the way the average founder treats their own head, the tenants would have you in court by Easter.
I once watched a perfectly viable manufacturing firm die in eighteen months, not because the order book emptied, it didn’t, but because the founder’s marriage collapsed and he brought the wreckage into every meeting. He priced angrily. He hired vengefully. He treated his sales director the way he wished he could treat his solicitor. The business didn’t fail; his head did, and the business simply followed it down, loyal to the last, like a labrador walking off a pier after its owner.
The maddening part is that this is the one asset class where improvement costs almost nothing. You cannot will your factory to double in size, but you can demonstrably upgrade the firmware between your ears, and as Business Matters has argued before, mindset matters for business owners more than any tactic, funnel or growth hack ever devised. Sleep, ludicrously, turns out to work. So does admitting you’re wrong occasionally, a manoeuvre most founders attempt about as often as a total solar eclipse. So does the radical act of taking a holiday without checking Slack from a sun lounger while your spouse silently calculates the cost of divorce in the next deckchair.
So by all means, agonise over your unit economics and your five-year plan. But do a survey on the property that actually matters first. Check the foundations for resentment, the wiring for burnout, the loft for unexamined nonsense you’ve been storing since your first failed venture. Because businesses don’t fail. Brains fail, and businesses, loyal, stupid, devoted things that they are, simply follow them down.
Your most valuable premises came free with the body. Maintain accordingly.
