If you're reading this because your business has just collapsed — or is about to — I want to start by saying something that nobody else will: this is one of the hardest things a person can go through, and you're allowed to feel like the ground has disappeared.
I'm not going to tell you it's a "learning experience" or that you'll "come back stronger." Maybe you will. Right now, that doesn't help. What helps is knowing what to do next, today and this week, so you can stop spiralling and start getting steady.
Here's what I wish someone had told me.
Stop. Breathe. You have more time than you think.
When a business fails, everything feels like it needs to happen now. Creditors calling. Emails piling up. Legal obligations. Personal finances. Staff. The temptation is to try to deal with everything at once — to stay up all night answering emails, to make frantic phone calls, to try to hold together something that's already come apart.
Don't. You'll burn through whatever reserves you have left — physical, mental, and financial — trying to fight fires in every direction.
The truth is: most things can wait 48 hours. Very few situations in business collapse are genuinely immediate-action emergencies once the initial crisis point has passed. Payroll that's due tomorrow is urgent. An email from a supplier chasing an invoice is not. A letter from HMRC needs attention, but it doesn't need attention at midnight tonight.
Give yourself permission to pause before you react. The world will not end if you take a day to get your bearings. I know it feels like it will. It won't.
Triage: what actually matters THIS week
Your brain is trying to process everything simultaneously, which means it's processing nothing effectively. You need a system, and it can be very simple.
Grab a piece of paper — actual paper, not a screen — and split it into three columns:
Must happen this week. Things with genuine, immovable deadlines or serious consequences if ignored. Payroll that's due. Court dates. Health and safety issues. Active legal proceedings. If someone could be physically harmed or you could face criminal liability from inaction, it goes here. Very few things actually belong in this column.
Important but can wait. Creditor negotiations. Office lease decisions. Conversations with investors. Telling your wider network. These matter, and they need attention — but they can wait a week or two without the sky falling. Most creditors have heard "the business is in trouble" before. A week's delay in responding won't change the outcome.
Noise. Everything else. The LinkedIn messages from people you barely know offering to "connect." The inbox full of meeting requests for a company that no longer exists. The unsolicited advice from people who've never built anything. The recruitment emails. The subscription renewal reminders. Park all of it. It does not matter right now.
Now only work on column one. Give yourself explicit permission to ignore columns two and three until next week. This isn't irresponsible — it's triage. Doctors in emergency rooms don't treat everyone at once. They treat the most critical cases first. You need to do the same.
Talk to someone who understands the legal picture
If your company is insolvent or heading that way, you have specific legal duties as a director under the Insolvency Act 1986. You need to understand what those are — not because you're in trouble, but because knowing the boundaries stops you making panicked decisions that could actually create problems.
The key thing to understand: once a company is insolvent (or you know it's heading that way), your duty shifts from acting in the interests of shareholders to acting in the interests of creditors. This means you shouldn't be paying yourself preferentially, selling assets cheaply to connected parties, or taking on new debts you know the company can't repay. Most of this is common sense, but in the fog of crisis, common sense doesn't always prevail.
You don't need a top-tier City law firm. You need a practical insolvency practitioner or a solicitor with SME experience. Many offer free initial consultations — they know that businesses in crisis don't have money to spend on expensive first meetings. Ask specifically: "What are my obligations right now, and what can wait?"
If you can't afford any professional advice at all, Business Debtline (0800 197 6026) offers free, confidential debt advice for the self-employed and small business owners. They understand the intersection of business and personal finances and can help you understand your position.
For more detail on the legal landscape, read our guide: Director duties during insolvency: what you need to know.
Protect your personal finances
This is where many founders make costly mistakes in the fog of crisis. When the business is collapsing, your instinct is to throw everything at saving it — personal savings, credit cards, even borrowing from family. Before you do any of that, stop and get clear on your personal exposure.
Personal guarantees. If you've personally guaranteed any loans, leases, or credit facilities, you need to understand exactly what your exposure is. Not roughly. Exactly. Dig out the paperwork. Read the guarantee. Understand whether it's capped or uncapped, whether it covers a specific debt or "all monies." This is probably the single most important financial task you have this week. For a full guide, read: Personal guarantees: what happens when your company can't pay.
Separate your money. If business and personal finances are tangled — company expenses on personal cards, personal expenses through the business — start separating them now. You need a clear picture of what's yours and what's the company's.
Cash position. Look at what comes out of your personal bank account this month. Mortgage or rent. Utilities. Food. Insurance. Debt repayments. What can you cover? What can't you? How long can you sustain your current personal spending if no new money comes in? Getting clear on this — even if the answer is frightening — is one of the most stabilising things you can do. You can't plan around uncertainty. You can plan around bad numbers.
Don't make big financial decisions this week. Don't cash in your pension. Don't sell your house. Don't take on new personal debt to prop up the business. These decisions might be right eventually, but making them in the first week of crisis, when your judgement is compromised by stress and sleep deprivation, is almost always a mistake. For more on the financial picture, read: Rebuilding your personal finances after business failure.
Tell one person
Not social media. Not your entire network. One person.
Someone you trust, who won't judge, and who can just listen. This person doesn't need to be a founder or a business person. They don't need to understand insolvency law or cap tables. They just need to be someone who'll let you say "I'm not okay" without immediately trying to fix it.
The isolation that comes with business failure is one of the most damaging parts. Founders are trained to project confidence — to investors, to staff, to customers, to the world. When everything falls apart, that training works against you. You keep performing "I'm handling it" even when you're drowning.
Breaking the isolation — even with one conversation — is a genuine first step. It doesn't need to be a dramatic reveal. A text that says "Things have gone badly with the business. Can we talk?" is enough. The goal isn't to solve anything. It's to have one person in the world who knows the truth about how you're doing.
If you don't have anyone you feel you can tell, that's okay. It's more common than you'd think. Organisations like Fortitude Foundation exist precisely for this moment — to be the first person you talk to when you don't know who to talk to.
For more on why this is so hard, read: Why founders don't ask for help (and what to do about it).
Look after the basics
You are going to be terrible at looking after yourself this week. I'm telling you this so you can plan for it rather than being surprised by it.
You're going to forget to eat, or eat badly. You're going to sleep terribly — if at all. You're going to drink more coffee than is wise and possibly more alcohol than is wise. You're going to stare at screens for hours without processing anything. You're going to snap at the people you love.
This is what crisis does to a human body and brain. You're processing a shock to your system while simultaneously trying to manage the practical fallout of that shock. Of course you're not operating at full capacity.
Set a very low bar. Eat something that isn't junk at least once a day. Get outside for at least twenty minutes — even if it's just a walk around the block. Try to go to bed at a reasonable time, even if you lie there awake. Limit alcohol to one drink or none. These sound absurdly basic. They are. And when your world is falling apart, absurdly basic is the right level.
If you're struggling with sleep — and you almost certainly will be — read: The 3am thoughts: dealing with insomnia during business crisis.
Give yourself permission to be bad at life for a bit
You're going to forget things. You're going to miss calls. You're going to make at least one decision you'll second-guess later. You're going to disappoint someone this week — probably several people.
That's normal. You're dealing with a crisis. The standard rules about responsiveness, reliability, and having your act together are temporarily suspended. Anyone who can't understand that isn't worth worrying about right now.
Set a very low bar for this week. Triage the urgent stuff. Talk to one professional. Talk to one human. Eat something. Sleep if you can. That's enough. That's actually a lot, given what you're dealing with.
What about the team?
If you have staff, they need to know what's happening. Not necessarily every detail — but enough to understand the situation and what it means for them. This is one of the hardest conversations you'll ever have, and it deserves its own guide: What to tell your team when the business is going under.
The short version: be honest, be human, give them practical information about what happens next (redundancy rights, notice periods, the Redundancy Payments Service), and don't make promises you can't keep.
What comes next
This article is about this week. Just this week. The coming weeks and months will bring their own challenges — grief, identity questions, financial restructuring, the "what do I do now?" phase. We cover those separately:
The first 90 days after your business fails
Why losing your business feels like losing yourself
Rebuilding your personal finances after business failure
But those are for later. Right now, your only job is to get through this week. One task at a time. One conversation at a time. One day at a time.
If you're looking for structured support from people who've been through this, Fortitude Foundation exists for exactly that. We're still building, but we're here. And we're not going to tell you to bounce back.
What NOT to do this week
While we're being practical, here are the things that feel productive but will actually make your situation worse.
Don't send a mass email to creditors apologising and promising to pay. You don't yet know what you can promise. Making commitments you can't keep creates legal exposure and damages trust further. Wait until you understand your position before communicating with creditors in writing.
Don't post about it on social media. Not yet. You're in shock and anything you write now will be shaped by that shock. You might feel the urge to get ahead of the narrative, to control the story. That impulse is understandable but premature. There'll be time for a public statement if you want to make one. This week isn't it.
Don't quit everything else. If you have other commitments — a part-time role, a board seat, freelance work — don't abandon them in a panic to "deal with the crisis." Those other activities might be your only income source. They also provide structure, social contact, and a sense of competence that you desperately need right now.
Don't try to be heroic. The founder instinct is to fix everything personally, to work through the night, to be the last one standing. That instinct served you when the business was alive. Now it's dangerous. You can't fix this by working harder. You fix it by thinking clearly, and you think clearly when you've eaten, slept, and talked to someone who isn't yourself.
Don't make permanent decisions based on temporary emotions. This week you will feel that your career is over, that you're unemployable, that you'll never recover, that you've ruined your family's life. These feelings are real but they are not accurate. They're the voice of crisis, and crisis is a terrible adviser. Any decision that can wait should wait.