Not so epic fails

The New York Times rung (wrung?) out the old year with an article that contained a set of thumbnail sketches on five small businesses that had failed in 2011.

Small business failures – hey, large business failures, for that matter – are nothing new. The fast fact, I believe, is 50% of new ones fail in the first five years.

Most of the small – and, hey, large  - businesses I’ve been associated with, which would be most of the outfits I worked for when I worked full time, ended up failing in one way, shape, or form.

Let’s see, of the five places where I hung my hat during my 20+ years in corporate, the two small companies were acquired  by (still-standing) larger companies. In both of those cases, most of us would have preferred to continue to operate as a stand-alone entity. But the companies were way too weak for that. And that swooshing sound we heard was our fun little workplaces being sucked out of our comfort zone – whee! - and into the maws of what we regarded as an evil empire.

The larger companies I worked at weren’t exactly models of stability, either.

Other than watching the few shares I held plummet to zero – gotta love those capital gains losses – I didn’t pay all that much attention to Wang once I breezed out the door, heading for one of those swooshees (which when I joined it was going to be the next billion dollar software company – this was 1989, when a billion was a BILLION; needless to say, LOL on that one). I vaguely remember that Wang filed for bankruptcy before being acquired by a Dutch company. Basically, it did a Douglas McArthur and just faded away.

As did Genuity, after it went bankrupt and bits and pieces were picked up by dumpster divers like Level 3.

Ah, the good old days.

The fifth company I worked for remains standing. Everyone I knew there is long gone, so I don’t really follow their fortunes. Its name comes up occasionally – it’s a partner of a company I’m doing some free-lance work for. But, mostly, yawn.

Anyway, the companies that were cited in The Times article were really small ones – far piddlier than even the piddliest of the piddles I worked for.

For the most part, their problems were “weak sales.”

On the surface, this is kind of duh obvious. But company can have decent sales but poor ability to deliver, or mispriced products, or insane cost structures, or whatever. 

All of the long-gone joints where I worked had, to some extent, “weak sales,” but I wouldn’t say that any of this could be attributed to a weak economy. It was due in each case to some combination of weak strategy, weak discipline, weak resources, weak products, weak marketing…

These days, of course, weak sales can be a reason in itself, I guess.

Anyway, in tomorrow’s edition of Pink Slip, we’ll take take a look at the not-so-fab The New York Times Five.