Ha, brilliant! Boomin has gone bust… so, I suspect many of you will be saying today.
Of course, you’ll caveat your comments with ‘…but my heart goes out to the staff’ and ‘…I really feel for the creditors and suppliers’ etc. But you won’t really mean it.
Instead, your inner schadenfreude will squeal with delight that the Bruce brothers have, in your view, got their comeuppance after all those years of presiding over Purplebricks and it’s assault on traditional UK estate agency, driving down fees, nicking listings and staff and causing you, well, commisery.
Many of you gleeful souls will have a spring in your step as you go about your business this week, your criticisms and, frankly, your bitterness for Michael and Kenny Bruce apparently validated now that the Boomin venture has failed.
In some countries, the USA in particular, people have an attitude toward entrepreneurs that is the opposite to ours. It’s respectful and steeped in adoration. Those that start and grow businesses under their own steam are seen as inspiring and rather cool. Maybe it’s the whole Land of Opportunity thing that the country is built on. After all it has little actual history – no aristocracy, no class system and has had to invent itself from scratch relatively recently to become the most prosperous nation on the planet. Bootstraps are pretty much all they’ve had with which to pull themselves up by whether arriving at Ellis Island as an Italian or Irish immigrant; or jews fleeing persecution or, more recently, Brits seeking fame in the studios of Hollywood or whatever
Business owners, the self-employed, the entrepreneur – they are applauded and looked up to.
In the UK launching a business is a cultural ambition and we now see wannabe founders everywhere. Where once our desire was to be a train driver or an astronaut it’s now to be the ‘CEO’ of a tech start-up. But, we should remember that most businesses go bust – around 60% fail in their first three years.
Think about that for a second… there are currently said to be 5.5m small businesses in Britain which means that about 10m businesses had to be created in order to net 5.5m. That’s a lot of failures.
Here, when a business fails many onlookers feel a sense of delight and satisfaction. That is then ramped up to mockery and to outpourings of “I told you so” and critical bile by competitors, employees and the disaffected. We just love to see the great and the good pushed off their pedestals, to revel in the celebration of the failure of our peers. It’s a real contrast to attitudes in other countries.
But without those that actually take risks in starting new ventures, we would have no new ventures at all. Without the bold entrepreneur that puts their money, their efforts and their reputational life on the line, there would be no Netflix, no Ford Motor Company, no Virgin Altlantic, no Dyson, no Amstrad, no M&S, Tesla, Apple etc. And do you think that the founders of these brands got it right first time? No, their success masks multiple botches, bankruptcies, let downs and disappointments.
Sadly, those dissenting, jealous voices that laugh at other’s failure are often the type that shy away from risk, will not attempt to improve themselves and probably don’t have the brain to form a kernel of a decent idea in the first place. They play safe, watching from the cheap seats without the nerve or the mojo to step forward and, whilst they secretly crave wealth and notoriety, they hope and pray that anyone else that has the wit, the confidence and the balls to try to achieve betterment will soon fall on their face. This failure of others is a relief to them because it vindicates their inner reasons for not having the courage to act themselves.
Theodore Roosevelt said it the best (he was a President after all):
“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming ….
“Who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and, at worst, knows if he fails, he at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat”.
Failure? It’s all part of the journey to success and, if you haven’t experienced it, … well then, you’re not trying hard enough.
But you have. Experienced failure that is. A poor grade in an exam, a relationship that didn’t work out, your driving test where you ‘only failed because of [insert excuse]’. A dinged car. A job you didn’t get. And so on. Your pride won’t acknowledge these as fails because they are all a normal part of life’s progression – which is kind of my point.
In my case, the failure was big and loud. Emoov went into administration four years ago having previously raised a load of money and its demise was played out very publicly. But all those affected learned lessons from the experience and grew a little bit because of it – I certainly did and am now in a much, much better place mentally, financially and from a career satisfaction perspective.
So it may sound crass to say (I’ll say it anyway) but failure can often be the best thing that ever happens to you. And if you don’t get that, then just carry on behind that safe (ish) corporate desk on your safe (ish) salary – but don’t dare to criticise those pioneers and crusaders that do go it alone, that try to fulfil ambitions and above all who have a damned good go. Not until you’ve ventured to do so yourself.
Here’s to more failure. Go on, I dare you…
Russell Quirk is co-founder of ProperPR, the property PR agency and a regular commentator on property and politics for TV and radio
Comments (12)
It’s not the type of business that an entrepreneur starts up that bothers me. It’s the way in which it is done that does.
Being a purported “disruptor” is all well and good, except when you are doing all the same things that everyone else has already been doing perfectly well for years and years but doing it badly.
Worse still, the typical mantra of disruptors is that “we do it better and for less money” which typically translates to “we’ll do a worse job and use our VC money to make it look like we’re doing it for a lower cost”. It’s an attractive sales pitch because who out there doesn’t like saving a bit of money? But most property owners will never know how much extra money they could have made using a full service agent and paying a proper fee. Oh the “commisery” of saving £1000 worth of fees whilst losing £10,000 on the sale price of your property!!!
To top it off, most “disruptor” CEO types are horrifically narcissistic or perhaps even sociopathic in their approach and typically trample roughshod over the reputation of the industry that they are trying to allegedly “disrupt” whilst damaging the reputation of their peers in the industry as a whole. I admit that it probably takes a little bit of narcissism or sociopathy to be a successful boss in a sales environment, but honestly these guys have a nasty habit of taking it to the next level. And of course, who better to part an unsuspecting investor from their cash than a charismatic sociopath…?
The honest failure of a decent attempt at entrepreneurship should indeed be celebrated. And following the old adage of “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!” that person should perhaps consider other entrepreneurial opportunities in the future.
But serial “take the VC money” and run merchants should be banned from holding directorships in the UK. There are a number of “disruptors” that I consider should go on that list immediately.
Well said Anonymous Coward.
[Sentence removed as it breached posting rules]
“Bootstraps are pretty much all they had to pull themselves up with” , our author writes of USA entrepreneurs – ignoring the irony that Purplebricks, eMoov, Boomin and others didn’t bootstrap – they used other people’s money in an effort to more quickly scale.
“It starts raining money on fools. Any dumb idea gets money. At some point it gets out of control and the ******** companies go bankrupt and the one’s that are building useful products are prosperous.” – Elon Musk talking about recession not necessarily being a bad thing.
Nobody minds failure or, for that matter, entrepreneurs with whom we vehemently disagree – what they do mind is entrepreneurs that enrich themselves whilst everyone around them is falling apart and then trying the same trick twice.
Who put a pound in him today?
Another failed businessman parading as the messiah.
If you are going to comment on how the US came to be so successful and then literally list groups of people who contributed, you might want to mention that they had quite a lot of free land and free labour which helped them along the way.
Not saying that others didn’t but surely worth noting if you are going to make the points you made in the way you made them.
How smug is Quirky feeling this morning? I don’t think this article is even aimed at the Bruce brothers or Boomin, just a self-promoting feature. Why is this numpty given air time!? If this is his attempt at sounding even slightly sincere, then, ironically, you’ve also FAILED.
To use this platform as a ‘welcome to the ‘failures’ club’ article is so shallow and to claim he’s all for the entrepreneur when he’s spent his entire career lambasting the Bruce’s makes it even more so.
This guy makes me embarrassed to be in the estate agency industry.
‘welcome to the ‘failures’ club’
Something he relates to no doubt !
It seems some have just read the intentionally controversial headline rather than the article itself.
There’s a huge difference between good honest genuine entrepreneurs and people that rinse opportunity through greed and don’t give a toss about the repercussions; especially when they have previous form. I hope PB and the even worse Strike soon follow. Whether or not they impacted on the profitability of traditional estate agents is irrelevant – that’s just part of being in business – but what does matter is people enduring awful experiences from over promising, under delivering sub-standard service providers and selling for less than they should in the mistaken belief that saving a few quid on fees would get then a better deal overall.
Oh no…Just no
Self proclaimed ! Im still suprised people give this self styled pr guru the time of day.
Does he recall his business and what happened to that?, and also that of his staff?
Really Russell?
“Puke Emoji”