The Avoiding Insolvency Checklist
This will take you ten minutes. It could spare you a conversation you never want to have.
Thousands of UK businesses are heading towards insolvency this year, and a great many of them through absolutely no fault of their own. A bad debt from a customer who let them down. The domino effect of someone else's failure landing on their desk. Costs rising faster than they can pass them on. Margins being squeezed from every direction at once.
For a growing number of directors, the hardest part is not the business at all. It is sitting down with the people they love and explaining why the money has stopped, why the holiday is cancelled, why things have changed.
Ten minutes, answered honestly, could be the difference between catching this early and explaining it later.
Begin the checklist now ↓One thing before you start. This checklist is written from personal experience, one captain to another. It is not legal advice, financial advice, or a regulated assessment of any kind. If anything you read here raises a serious concern, please speak to a qualified solicitor, accountant, or insolvency practitioner. They are the right people for that conversation. This is simply a plain-English prompt to help you think.
Mark Smillie has spent three decades sitting across the table from company directors, in the good years, and in the very worst ones. He has seen how quietly trouble tends to build, and how much difference one honest conversation, had early enough, can make. He put this checklist together because he would rather you never needed the harder conversation at all.