to £ 500,000. All of them carried a personal guarantee so I was completely exposed. I had no problem with exposing myself when I took the loans out because as I wrote in my first book, the only way this system could ever fail was if all the banks stopped lending money … a Black Swan event … and unfortunately, those sort of events happen from time to time!
I wasn’ t concerned about my institutional creditors, as I knew they would play the long game, so my only other concerns were the tax man and my personal creditors. If I was going to survive this I would fight one battle at a time. I considered making myself personally bankrupt but considered that to be a cop out, so instead I would get everyone’ s support and make the money again. Don’ t get me wrong it would have been far easier to go down the bankruptcy route from the beginning.
So, with making myself personally bankrupt off the table and nearly all my creditors being ok with a wait and see policy, I turned my attention to solving the problem. The current business plan was officially declared‘ in the toilet’, so I had to come up with a new plan. I looked into multiple different businesses, all of which I believed I could make work. I picked one- it failed, I picked another- it failed, I picked another- it failed. I had a process for finding quick results and knowing whether or not a business would work, so we’ d put in a week or so of work go and test the market and see what results came back.
However, the results all came back as a failure, every one. Everything I tried to do failed, there wasn’ t even a glimmer of success in any of them. Things I had done in the past and succeeded at just failed fast. From everything I touched turning to gold, now everything I touched turned to sh * t. Now I am a very together person and this was doing my head in. I would have long conversations with Alison about it. I just didn’ t get it- how could all these things which had worked so well before, not be working now? Everything was not working where once everything was working … What had changed? What was I doing wrong?
In August, all bar two of my creditors had said,“ we’ ll wait for you to sort it out”. Don’ t get me wrong, they weren’ t happy about it, but they knew that either I would create money again, or eventually my property would, or at anytime they could always push the bankruptcy button. However, there were two who just didn’ t‘ want’ to know, they thought they would have more chance of getting their money if a trustee controlled my assets. They thought I had buried a big pile of money somewhere and that the trustee would find it.
I explained that they would be far better off waiting and seeing what happened as they could always push the bankruptcy button later. In the meantime they wouldn’ t be crystallising their and everyone else’ s loss; well, their minds were almost in as much trouble as mine was. Obviously there was no pile