The SME Leader's Trap

Part one of three exploring why business leaders can't ask for help, what crisis makes possible, and the work of supporting people through both.

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The median net profit for an SME leader in Britain is £13,000 per year.

Thirteen thousand pounds. That's what the average business owner earns for carrying all the personal liability, all the risk, all the stress of keeping other people employed and businesses running. After paying overheads and wages, potentially before taking any salary themselves, they walk away with thirteen grand.

When friends tell me they're thinking of starting a business, the reason is always money. They think they can earn more than working for someone else. I tell them: you're delusional. Don't do it for the money. Do it because you love it, do it for the autonomy, do it for the impact. But do not, for your own sake, do it believing you're going to get rich, because the numbers don't lie and the numbers say you're going to earn less than a graduate trainee while carrying risk that could cost you your house.

And yet 99.8% of businesses in the UK are SMEs, turning over less than £44 million. They employ 60% of the workforce. The entire economy rests on their backs. Only 78% of them are even profitable. The rest are bleeding slowly, their owners propping them up through personal guarantees and sleepless nights, performing success because admitting failure means accelerating collapse.

We need these people. They push limits, take risks, create employment. As I teach my young sons, if you're not failing, you're not pushing your own limits. Leaders who push those limits allow the rest of us to stand behind them, employed, taking safe salaries while they carry the downside. We need them for society to function.

And we've built them a trap with no exit.

Here's how it works: business leaders have to perform constant success while simultaneously guaranteeing they'll face regular crisis. I told an old friend that my turnaround work was built on personal experience of crisis. "That's just running a business!" he said. He was right. Crisis isn't the exception, it's the baseline. And in that baseline, you cannot tell anyone the truth.

You don't win clients by explaining your cash flow crisis. You don't retain employees by admitting you're not sure you can make next month's wages. You don't maintain supplier credit by revealing you're juggling payment priorities. You don't get your facility extended by telling the bank the turnaround isn't working. So you learn to perform success even when you're dying inside, because the alternative is watching everything collapse faster.

I ran an SME business for twelve years through so many near-death experiences I lost count: 85% revenue collapse, administration threats, supply chain crises that should have killed us. I told friends and family everything was fantastic while lying awake at 3am working out which creditors to pay first. I smiled at employees and talked about growth plans while trying to prevent the business entering administration. I presented confidence to clients while the building was genuinely on fire, because stopping the performance meant signing the death warrant.

Every part of the model depends on this lie. Clients need to believe you're stable. Employees need to believe their jobs are secure. Suppliers need to believe they'll get paid. Your family needs to believe the sacrifices are worth it. And your own ego, conditioned by a culture that celebrates entrepreneurial success and treats failure as personal weakness, needs to believe you haven't completely fucked up this thing you've poured everything into.

The performance becomes your identity. You get so good at it, so practiced, that you can't tell anymore where normal business difficulty ends and genuine crisis begins. By the time you're actually drowning, you've spent years building a self-concept around being the person who has all the answers, who thrives under pressure, who never admits weakness. Asking for help doesn't just feel like admitting business failure, it feels like admitting you've failed at being the person you've told everyone you are for years.

Society loves this. We celebrate founders who "never gave up" without acknowledging that sometimes giving up earlier would have saved years of suffering. We've built an entire cultural narrative around perseverance and grit that makes admitting you're drowning feel like character failure rather than honest assessment. We do not support the people pushing limits for all of us. We do not allow them to fail. We just expect them to keep performing until they break.

So they stand inside burning buildings, performing success because that's what keeps things upright for one more day, trapped by the conditioning that helped them survive every previous crisis. And there's no way out. Not through sympathy. Not through better support systems. Not through recognising you're stuck, because the trap is also your identity and your business model and your only means of survival.

The only thing that breaks conditioning this total is crisis becoming so absolute that the performance becomes impossible to maintain. When the building is so obviously on fire that pretending costs more than admitting the truth. When the gap between what you're performing and what's actually happening becomes unsustainable.

That's the only exit from this structural trap: catastrophe. Complete, undeniable, absolute crisis.

Which sounds like the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone. And for a while, it is.

But here's what I learned from living through it multiple times: crisis stops being the worst thing that ever happened to you and might just become the best thing. And that transformation, that shift from catastrophe to opportunity, is what nobody tells you about because they're all too busy performing success to admit they went through it.

Next time: Why the burning building might be exactly what you need.