How to make a company go under in five easy steps

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

The word “entrepreneur” is so “in” now that it’s rather commonplace. Any new company, especially if a young person heads it up, is an entrepreneurial project, and we can find tips and recommendations for the entrepreneur who embarks on new projects everywhere. But on this occasion, I’ve opted for the opposite stance, offering you five simple and practical tips for collapsing your company quickly and efficiently.

You don’t need to be young or an entrepreneur, although your company is firmly consolidated, if you add that extra effort, you can manage to make it go under before the cock crows.

Here you are:

1. Underestimate the value of communication. Neglect the transmission of your messages, be incapable of communicating your values, your goals, your hopes; practise informative secretiveness or a false transparency; talk only to those outside your walls, don’t bother listening to the opinions of those on the inside or go out of your way to make them feel valued and proud of the work they perform… These are only some of the circumstances experienced on a daily basis in organizations that believe that communication is a secondary aspect and independent of their main activity, in which they should only invest when there is an information crisis or when they want to launch an advertising campaign.
2. Be rigid. Many companies believe that being faithful to their principles is synonym of rigidity, but in fact, it is quite the opposite. If we are not capable of being sufficiently flexible to adapt to the changes, we run the risk of falling in the first fight. Rigidity (or in other words, inflexibility) means neglecting the training of each worker, keeping structures excessively hierarchical and dysfunctional, wasting constructive criticism or adversities to strengthen our weak points, and believing that our sole purpose is to sell and obtain an economic profit, ignoring the fact that it should be the consequence of proper management and not the objective of our actions.
3. Do not become involved emotionally. What would the world be without emotion, hopes or dreams? We all have some, but to make them come true, we need to know how to communicate them! This means sharing our concerns, making them understandable to our audience and, beyond that, becoming involved emotionally. Dreams tend to be difficult goals to achieve and on occasions, Utopian, but if we make our employees, our customers, our partners share them and feel part of them, there will be more people who can, on many occasions unconsciously, add their grain of sand to achieve those goals.
4. Scorn the competition. If we look after the first three points, we will be an organization with a high level of knowledge about our essence—although it seems an exaggeration, many companies don’t even know their raison d’être— and it will contribute to making our collective self-esteem higher and make us feel proud of what we are. It is something essential and healthy, provided it is used with humility. We should never scorn the competition, no matter how inadequate we think their strategy to be, that their managers are incompetent, that their business vision is absurd…. Instead of wasting time mocking their defects, we should study the differences and try to learn from them in order to boost other aspects, which result from a completely different vision, that we hadn’t even considered.
5. Lack a sense of humor. My last tip for making a company go under quickly and effectively is having a complete and absolute lack of sense of humor. A person can enjoy themselves more or less in their job, but it shouldn’t be a daily torment. Organizations that know how to laugh at themselves and accept that humor improves performance and the feeling of belonging have greater chances of consolidating the company and generating strong relationships between employees, which will translate into better results at the end of the month. But if your goal is to have a company with a strained atmosphere, where tempers fly at the slightest degree, and people feel out of place, impose severity and intransigence and you’ll soon see sparks flying.

Sandra Bravo is founding partner of BraveSpinDoctors, a strategic communication and political marketing consultancy.