Page 26 - PWM2025_SEPTEMBER EBOOK

BETTER BUSINESS

Failure was

only option

Some may recall the famous line in the 1995 film,
Apollo 13: “Failure is not an option”. Gene Krantz
didn’t say that but instead commented “We’ve
never lost an American in space, and we’re not
going to lose one on my watch!”, by Adam
W Levels: “I left school with zero quali-
Bernstein

hen things go
wrong and a
fications, two pissed-off parents and
a ton of ambition.”
business goes
under, the nat-
He then was taught to fly by a for-
ural response
is to feel pain
thing in me and got me in front of the
and shame, but it’s vital that entrepre- mer Spitfire pilot. “He saw some-
RAF recruiters who saw the same... I
neurs learn from mistakes, to do bet- graduated from RAF Shawbury Air
ter next time. Traffic College with the highest aver-
It takes a very special person, who, age test scores in the college history.”
in light of commercial adversity, can He then ran his RAF station’s print
admit not just failure, but that they club with an ABDick 9840, publish-
had no one but themselves to blame. ing the station maga-zine too. But in
Just step back a moment and think the early 1990s, cutbacks led to his
about it. leaving the RAF and starting the Ink
You’ve created a business from Shop.
scratch, grown it, and then, in an Mason says that the business grew
instant, it’s gone – along with its well in the first five years. He started
associated impact on personal to scale it – “and that’s when the busi-
wealth, pride and reputation. ness really rocketed. At the peak we
For most, failure will be met by had 10 print centres throughout “measurable benchmark of success” was, he says, his ability to land his heli-
upset, hurt and an awful lot of defen- Scotland all ‘fed’ by one very well copter at McDonalds in For-far for a Big Mac.
siveness. But as we’ll see over the equipped ‘hub’ located in Mason says that he never appreciated what success should look like –
next few pages, two former print Cumbernauld”. business “became an obsession around growth”.
business owners not only saw their At its most profitable it made He describes himself as “spontaneous” – something that worked well
business-es fail but learned to around £2.5m, but the goal was to early on. He recalls saying that “projects should never take longer than a
embrace the loss and are now evan- scale to £5m. And that, he says, “was week unless you’re NASA”. He acknowledges, though, that “that later
gelising to others on the lessons that the biggest mistake. I was growing started to work against me”.
they have learned. turnover assuming that profit would When asked about the business failing, Mason refers to eight fundamen-
Stuart Mason, former owner of tal causes, noting that “every error was 100% avoidable”.
The Ink Shop follow. It rarely does.” He says, though, that of the eight, none was business ending, but “it was
The spark for a businesses can orig- He reckons that 2005 “was the the combination of them that created the ‘perfect storm’”.
inate from almost anywhere. And in height of the ‘glory years’ – big prof- And he knows when the rot set in.
Stuart Mason’s case, he points to the its, huge cash reserves, super cars “It all started to really slide in September 2008 when a friend said
1978 movie Convoy that kickstarted and we’d just won the BAPC Business ‘Lehman Brothers have just collapsed. My response was, ‘that’ll never
the CB radio craze in the UK. of the Year. Complacency was giving affect us’”.
He recalls: “In the early 80’s I way to arrogance.” But the truth was that the world economy was stalling. The problem is
bought a second-hand Adana 8x5 and He felt “unstoppable” and had no that Mason “had made a very strong business weak and vulnerable” and
started printing CB cards”. He was idea what was around the corner. “was arrogantly unaware of what was about to unfold”. He says that he was
earning more than his father but still And this is where Mason reckons he too slow and arrogant to change, thinking: “It’s been like this before, it’ll
at school and so too busy to take O got too big for his boots; his most

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