What Killed My Small Business?
An autopsy and a cathartic vent
If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ll know that for the past four years, I have been running two separate (but interconnected) businesses. I have my art practice under my own name at Christabel Balfour, where I sell my tapestries and weave to commission. And then I have Balfour & Co - a small business that I set up in the middle of the pandemic as a place to sell yarn, weaving supplies and online courses.
You might also know that at the end of last year, I decided to transition Balfour & Co from a full-scale business to a part-time project that I do for fun. The website is still there, and the online courses are still accessible to everyone who signed up for them. Eventually I plan to run one or two online courses per year, just to make enough money to cover my running costs. But the business itself will no longer be my full-time job.
This decision came after much wrangling and heartache and difficult discussions, but it came down to the fact that a) Balfour & Co did not make enough money to justify how much work I was putting into it and b) I simply didn’t care enough about the business to keep working on it for free.
(Again, if you’ve been here since early last year, you might remember that I wrote an entire series of Substack posts called “How To Stop Working For Free”. Did I follow this advice in 2024? Absolutely not.)
I’m currently working on a more reflective piece about why I persevered so stubbornly with my business, as well as the tensions between being a business owner and an artist. But first, I wanted to share something cathartic.
It’s natural after a failure - whether that’s of a relationship, a friendship or a business - to want to pick over the remains and try to understand what happened. Ultimately we can never completely retrace every fork in the road that led us to this point of collapse, but sometimes we can cast our minds back and think “Ah… that’s a route I shouldn’t have taken.”
I’ve written this more for me than for anyone else. If you find it helpful, then great! If you want to give me advice - please don’t. I’ve already closed the door on this particular chapter, and I’m looking forward to what’s next. But here it is, because I just need to get it out of my system, a bullet point list of all the reasons why my business died the slow death that it did.
Brexit!
Coming strong right out of the gate. Is there a small business owner in the UK who doesn’t bemoan Brexit at least once a week? Almost a decade since that infamous referendum, and four years since it actually came into force, Brexit is the disaster that keeps on giving (as we’ve seen with the recent debacle around GPSR)
For Balfour & Co specifically, two things happened -
First, almost all of my EU customers stopped ordering yarn and weaving supplies from me. With new customs duties and sales tax on top, I can’t say that I blame them. However, EU sales had been around 30% of my yearly income, so my business shrank by a third almost overnight.