How to Close Your Business in 5 Easy Steps

Running a business is challenging, but closing one? That can be accomplished far more quickly with a few bad decisions. Whether you’re a start-up, freelancer, or established SME, making the wrong moves can lead you straight to failure. In this guide, i'll cover five easy-to-follow steps to close your business and ensure you don’t recover. And, yes, there’s some humour here—but these mistakes are no joke.

Operations may not seem glamorous, but overlooking them is a perfect recipe for disaster. Imagine running your business without clear processes, without understanding key systems, and with no focus on improving efficiency. Hiring without understanding the expertise needed, disregarding workflow bottlenecks, and neglecting management oversight will quickly create chaos.

• Operational Chaos: Skip the processes and reviews—just wing it. Missed deadlines? Eh, part of the adventure. Supply chain breakdowns? Just part of the game. Chaos keeps things interesting, and without strategy, you'll have plenty of it!
• Blind Hiring: Hire without evaluating actual skills. It’s more fun to work with the incompetent! Plus, nothing bonds a team like daily trash talk about clueless colleagues.

Ignoring operations leads to systemic problems that will drag your business down fast.

Finances are the lifeblood of any business. When a CEO wants to make decisions outside the norm, they need to check with 'mommy'—the CFO—first. To close your business, take a hands-off approach. No budgeting? Perfect. Overspending? Even better.

• No Budgeting: Avoid having a clear financial plan. Let every month be a surprise.
• Random Pricing: Price products or services without considering costs or competition. It’s more exciting when margins fluctuate.
• Spending More than You Make: Hire a large team and pay premium salaries while your revenue sinks.

Mismanaging finances will drain your business resources and fast-track you to closure.

Why bother developing your team? Employees should just know how to do their jobs, right? Wrong. Lack of training leads to inefficiency, mistakes, and dissatisfied customers.

• No Onboarding: Throw new hires into the deep end with little training. It’s like teaching a baby to swim—just yeet them in and let them figure it out.
• ‍No Continuous Development: Industry changes? Who cares. If you can figure out how to make sure your staff never grows or learns anything new, congratulations—you’ve hit the sweet spot of stagnation. After all, why bother evolving when your competitors probably aren’t either?

A favourite conversation on this topic: Manager 1: 'What if we train them and they leave?' Manager 2: 'What if we don’t, and they stay?'

Neglecting training ensures unmotivated employees, stagnant quality, and unhappy clients.

Want to ensure your business fails? Simple: ignore your customers. Dismiss their complaints, refuse to adapt, and assume you know best. The phrase 'the customer is always right' is wrong. Instead, it should be, 'the customer doesn’t fully understand what they want, but they know when something isn’t working for them.' Your job is to figure it out. If your target market, marketing, and delivery are on point but your product/service misses, the problem is with you, not them.

• Avoid Feedback: You know better. How dare they question your genius? They should be grateful to even experience your brilliance.
• Resist Change: When flaws are pointed out, just ignore them. Change is for people who aren’t already at the top of their game—like you.

Ignoring customers erodes your competitive edge and loyal base.

This is my favourite step. For some reason, people think it's easy to regain trust after a failure, but it’s not. Keeping a happy client happy is far easier than winning back a disgruntled one. So, let’s ensure closure by throwing away the number one asset every brand needs: trust. Start cutting corners on quality:

• Cheap Materials/Services: Cut costs, cut trust. Pizza lunches for the team will be totally worth it.
• Poor Customer Service: It’s fine, really. Mediocre clients deserve mediocre service—no point in going the extra mile.
• Ignore Presentation: As long as prices are cheap, customers will love it… right?

Compromising quality signals unreliability and erodes trust.

There you have it—five easy steps to closing your business. But in reality, each of these mistakes is a warning. To succeed, you need strong operations, financial oversight, quality team training, customer responsiveness, and a commitment to quality. By avoiding these pitfalls, you’ll set your business on a path to long-term success, instead of failure, if you want.