How to Keep Going When Your Business Is Struggling Without Lying to Yourself

A struggling business is not necessarily a failing business. The absence of proof that it will succeed is not proof that it cannot. The challenge is to keep creating possibilities without ignoring reality or making others unknowingly carry the risk.

“How do you see the future?”

Sonja, who did our bookkeeping, had just shown me the numbers. According to her, we had already been technically bankrupt twice. Most businesses in our position would probably have closed their doors two months earlier, yet we were still there. There was not enough work, the tax debt was growing and other creditors were waiting. Some afternoons, we sat in the office playing computer games because there was simply nothing else to do.

“It will be all right,” I told her. “We just need more time.”

I had no figures to support that confidence. I did not know that MyCom would become a client three weeks later or that Samsung would follow about a month after that. The figures accurately described where we were, but they could not describe what I might still create, negotiate or earn tomorrow.

I did not know whether the agency would survive. What I knew was that I would.

My confidence was not based on certainty

I was 21 when I started the advertising agency. At the time, I was earning my money as a self-employed house painter and had around €2,500 in personal debt. There were no large clients waiting for us and there was no investor prepared to finance the idea. There was mainly my belief that opportunities would appear once people discovered what we could do.

If the agency failed, I could paint houses again. I could earn money, repay what I owed and eventually start something new. That did not make me less committed to the agency. It allowed me to commit fully without believing that my entire future depended on this one company.

There is an important difference between believing that your business cannot fail and believing that you can recover if it does. The first can make you ignore reality because failure has become emotionally unacceptable. The second can give you the freedom to take a risk while remaining able to look honestly at what that risk may cost.

My confidence did not come from proof that the agency would succeed. It came from knowing that failure would not take away my ability to create another opportunity.

The first office was necessary and too expensive

We needed an office as a place to work, meet people and build an actual company. It was not an unnecessary luxury, but it did cost more than the business could afford.

Renting it nevertheless changed something. We were no longer two people with an idea. We had a place with a door people could walk through. It made the agency visible to the outside world and showed that we were serious about what we were trying to build.

For a long time, that did not produce the stream of clients I had imagined. Eventually, the first small assignments arrived. They were just large enough to pay the rent and electricity, but people in the area also began to notice us. They saw that the agency was moving forward and became more comfortable recommending us to others. Those recommendations slowly brought in more work.

The office therefore contributed to our growth, although that growth did not yet happen at the speed our finances required. With the first clients came taxes, insurance, supplier invoices and all the other obligations that are easy to overlook when your main concern is winning work.

That was how I learned, long before I had the language for it, that growth and profitability are not the same thing. Commercial progress can be real while the company behind it is still running out of money.

At one point, we had enough cash to remain open for only another two months. I took on another painting job and my business partner deposited a small amount of money. Together, that bought us time. Then a client arrived with a slightly larger assignment, which allowed us to pay part of what we owed, although there was still less money coming in than we needed.

When a company is in financial trouble, people often talk as if only two possibilities remain: pay everything now or stop. Under pressure, I discovered that there are usually more. You can earn money somewhere else, negotiate, spread payments, make agreements, decide which creditor needs to be paid first or consciously accept an additional cost in exchange for time.

None of those choices guaranteed that the agency would survive. They kept creating possibilities. Many entrepreneurs do not stop after discovering that continuing is impossible. They stop because the current numbers make the future feel impossible.

A bank balance can tell you what exists today. It cannot tell you what an entrepreneur may still create tomorrow.

I did not make every payment reminder personal

I understood how collection procedures worked at the time and knew that some larger creditors would not take immediate action. Paying later would cost more, but I saw those additional costs as the price of time. In my mind, it was almost a very expensive loan.

That was how I dealt with the situation then. It is not advice to finance a business through unpaid invoices. Late payments can lead to interest, collection costs, damaged relationships and eventually legal action. What mattered in my situation was that I did not experience every reminder as a judgement about me.

An unpaid invoice was a serious business problem, but it did not automatically make me a failure or a bad person. By separating the problem from my identity, I could continue thinking about what to do next instead of becoming paralysed by shame. I did not make the situation personal, but I did take it seriously.

Where possible, we contacted creditors and tried to make arrangements. If there was not enough money to pay everyone, I considered who would be harmed most by a delay. Small suppliers who genuinely needed the money were given priority, while larger companies such as telecom providers could usually absorb a temporary delay more easily.

There was also a line I would not cross. I would not buy something if I already knew there was no realistic possibility of paying for it. Creating time was part of managing cash flow. Deliberately deceiving someone or quietly making another company responsible for our survival was something else.

If I faced the same situation today, I would contact creditors as early as possible and use formal arrangements wherever available. The Dutch Tax Administration, for example, offers options for payment arrangements and requesting a deferral. Entrepreneurship sometimes requires financial creativity, but that creativity should never come at the expense of your integrity.

The larger office made little sense if you only looked at the money

While we were still struggling to pay everything, I decided to move into a larger office. In one sense, we needed more space, but it was not strictly necessary. We could have stayed where we were, kept the monthly costs lower and waited until the figures made the move easier to defend.

Instead, I chose to make the growth of the agency visible. This was not about renting a fancy office or pretending that we were more successful than we were. The agency really was growing, just not yet at the pace it needed to. The larger office allowed people who visited us to see where we were going rather than only the financial problems we were trying to solve.

Success has an attraction, and not simply because people like successful companies. Recommending an agency is an act of trust. When you introduce someone to a client, you attach part of your own reputation to that recommendation. People are more likely to take that risk when they feel that a company has momentum and that the people behind it believe in what they are building.

The larger office helped create that confidence. People saw an agency moving forward and became more willing to recommend us. Those recommendations eventually contributed to the arrival of new clients.

I would not advise every struggling entrepreneur to solve a cash flow problem by renting a larger office. That is not the lesson. The lesson is that financial figures do not contain every possibility and that sometimes you have to make your direction visible before other people are prepared to believe in it.

You also need to understand what happens if you are wrong. I knew that if the agency failed, I could return to painting, earn money and start again. My confidence was not based solely on the belief that this company had to succeed. It was also based on the knowledge that failure would not take away my ability to build something new.

MyCom and Samsung were not in Sonja’s figures

Three weeks after that conversation with Sonja, MyCom became a client. At the time, it was a fast-growing Dutch computer retail chain. About a month later, we completed our first assignment for Samsung.

Had we closed the doors two months earlier because the figures seemed to justify it, neither opportunity could have reached us. We needed to remain open, visible and ready long enough for those opportunities to appear.

That does not prove that every risk I took was wise or that every entrepreneur who continues long enough will eventually meet their version of MyCom. It proves something else: the figures could describe the seriousness of our situation, but they could not know what would happen next.

Our office had contributed to the confidence people placed in us. Recommendations were growing and we had continued to create possibilities, even when there was no evidence that one of those possibilities would become a major client.

Perhaps part of that was luck in entrepreneurship. But luck can only reach a company that is still there.

The agency eventually grew into a successful independent agency with offices in Budapest and Jakarta. None of that was visible in the numbers Sonja placed in front of me that afternoon.

Later, Kijkshop taught me the other side of persistence

Years later, during the transformation of Kijkshop, I experienced how the same confidence that helps an entrepreneur move forward can gradually become something else. There, too, we had ambition, belief and ideas about what the company could become, but as the necessary financing failed to arrive and the obligations continued to grow, the consequences were no longer mainly mine.

Other people and companies were also carrying the risk. Some of them continued to supply us because they believed in the future we presented, while that future became increasingly dependent on money that had not yet materialised.

As I describe in the inside story of Kijkshop, there comes a moment when creating more time no longer produces new possibilities. It merely postpones the same problem and increases the damage if things go wrong.

This is also how an entrepreneur can become the guardian of their own success. The confidence that once made it possible to begin can turn into the belief that stopping, changing direction or admitting doubt is no longer allowed.

The dividing line is not whether you already have proof that you will succeed. I had no such proof when I was 21. The dividing line is whether you are still looking honestly at reality, learning from what happens, changing what you do and taking responsibility for the people who are helping to carry the risk.

How do you know whether to keep going with a struggling business?

When your business is struggling, the absence of certainty is not in itself a reason to stop. Many entrepreneurs give up not because their company cannot work, but because fear makes uncertainty feel like failure. As long as you can still create possibilities, learn, adapt and act honestly, continuing can be a courageous decision even when the numbers do not yet prove you right.

Persistence becomes denial when you stop looking at reality, refuse to change or make other people carry risks they never knowingly agreed to take. Fear, courage and denial may all lead to difficult decisions, but they are not the same. Courage sees the uncertainty and acts anyway. Fear treats uncertainty as if failure has already been decided. Denial refuses to consider information that no longer fits the outcome you need.

Fear rarely introduces itself by saying that you are afraid. It is more likely to tell you that the figures are clear, that continuing is irresponsible or that it is time to be realistic. Sometimes that voice is right, but sometimes we call something realism because we no longer want to endure the uncertainty.

When I speak with an entrepreneur who is unsure whether to continue, these are the questions I would want to explore:

1. Am I responding to reality, or mainly trying to escape the discomfort of uncertainty?

2. Am I still creating new possibilities, learning and adapting, or am I repeating the same actions and hoping for a different result?

3. Is there genuine evidence that this cannot work, or is there simply no proof yet that it will?

4. Who is carrying the risk of my decision, and have they knowingly agreed to carry it?

5. If fear were not making this decision, what would I do next?

6. What new information would genuinely make me reconsider my direction?

You do not need certainty before you are allowed to continue. You need the courage to remain open, active and honest while that certainty is still unavailable.

Your business can fail without making you a failure

When I told Sonja that everything would be all right, I did not know that MyCom was only three weeks away. The agency might still have failed, and if it had, I would have returned to painting houses, repaid what I owed and eventually started something else.

Knowing that I could recover did not automatically make every risk responsible. It did make me less afraid of looking honestly at what the risk might cost. My identity was not trapped inside the company, so I did not have to stop simply to escape the fear of failure, nor did I have to keep going because failure would destroy who I believed I was.

I believed in the agency, but more importantly, I knew my future did not depend on its survival.