WHAT IS BEYOND BANKRUPTCY

Beyond Bankruptcy is all about Real Experiences. I tell it how it is.

BACKGROUND

My entrepreneurial journey started in late 2017. I was full of life, excited and happy about finally being able to fulfill my lifelong dream.

After having my firstborn in 2015 I discovered that Finland was missing a proper online store for premium kids clothes.

You may wonder what I mean by proper.

Surely there were online stores selling babies and children's clothing back then. Ecommerce had been booming in the United States for decades, as in other parts of the world. A digitally advanced nation such as Finland lacked in the e-commerce a user friendly experience which is enabled via a good UI, which is user interface of a website or online store.

Fast forward a year years to 2017 when I gave birth to my daughter, and started spending even more time online shopping for clothes for my two kids. Compared to their western counterparts, Finnish online stores were lacking in so many ways. I a busy career mom wanted to shop quickly with ease. This means finding what I am looking for quickly as possible, with a pleasant checkout experience.

While doing competition research for my business plan prior to starting my company, I came across time and time again. Imagine a product page, where you have one or two photos of the product ( usually provided by the brand). Some stores MIGHT mention what material the product is made from. Then just a shopping cart to add the appropriate size to your shopping basket. No other information to help the consumer make an educated shopping decision.

Compare image 1 and 2 below, do you see the difference? Which store you would shop from?

Sadly, this figure won’t be shrinking any time soon. When you thought it couldn’t get worse during the pandemic with businesses having to shut doing over the world, the economic landscape currently is unstable with high inflation, weak growth and rising interest rates, as pointed out by James Watson, chief economist at the European Union’s employers’ federation BusinessEurope.

After my painful story, how my deteriorating business destroyed my marriage and family, lead to a severe burnout spanning almost two years, allowing me to finally accept failure and declare bankruptcy for my private company, and thereafter apply to the debt adjustment program, which can be compared to declaring personal bankruptcy in the United States. That last part was HELL let me tell you. The aftermath of that experience left me so depressed; it took me over a year to realize the toll it had taken on my mental health.

The European Union which started recording data on declared bankruptcies released figures for 2022, which showed bankruptcies at a record high having risen 26.8% in Q4 of 2022, compared to Q3. 😱

FOR WHOM

WHAT

Beyond Bankruptcy will deep dive into an array of topics, including:

• Starting a business- There is so much more that goes into running a business that potential entrepreneurs could've ever imagined, one reason for high failure rates.

• Running a business- Running a business is so much more than selling the product or service.

• Public and private funding options for your company at different stages (pre-seed for pre-launch, seed you have launched and have paying customers, Series A a startups first private equity round, then Series B, Series C, and so on up to IPO).

• Founder mental health- very important, often IGNORED by founders and investors. Something so basic, but still an issue that is not focused on enough, only a healthy founder can give their startup the attention and focus it needs

• Business Failure.

• Bankruptcy in Finland.

• Bankruptcy in other countries ( USA, Western Europe, and Asia tbd).

• Stigma of bankruptcy in Finland versus in other countries.

• Personal bankruptcy in Finland and other countries tbd.

• Life beyond bankruptcy .

• What success looks like. Since the idea of this blog isn't to be entirely negative and scare you away from your dream of becoming an entrepreneur I want to highlight some kick ass success stories.

So now that you’ve got the WHAT I will be writing about, WHY is important. Naturally you don’t want to end up like me, or the growing number of other individuals having to declare bankruptcy. The last three topics are bolded as they are very personal to me and results in a ripple effect in one’s life, which can be drastic and life altering.

While these are great, they are misleading. As much as we can learn from things went right, I believe there is even more to learn from the huge mistakes and failures.

Table 1 below shows historical data on the number of private company bankruptcy filings, as well as private debt adjustment applications processed in Finland.

In the startup world the term unicorn refers to a company with a valuation over $ 1 billion. The valuation of a company refers to how much it is worth, but it is a tricky calculation, as it depends on the method and techniques used to calculate it, which can result in different outcomes. Valuations are a critical component of fundraising, more on that when I discuss start up fundraising, a topic I am very passionate and conflicted about.

But most are like the rest of founders, part of the 90% of companies that FAIL.

So many that fail, yet mostly we hear about the success stories. For example, open any startup newsletter, website, LinkedIn, you read about those multi-million funding rounds. Successes should be celebrated, but they do yield a bit of an unrealistic image of the startup scene, since a small fraction of companies pitching for capital from investors actually secure it. For example, if we compare to Finland's neighbor Sweden, where startups received €7 billion in funding from seed to growth stage, Finnish startups ONLY received €900 million in 2021. 🤯

Is there a correlation with the number of unicorns from Sweden, which is 41 to the amount of funding startups have received to grow and scale their business? You can look forward to more on this soon, as I will be addressing startup funding in one of my upcoming posts this spring. Below is a list of all-time Finnish unicorns, with the first three quitwell known Finnish success stories.

Content marketing rose to popularity in the 2010's, and Adobe defines it as a strategy and business process using important digital tools to grab the attention of a clearly defined audience. These tools can be text, images, or video, with video having become the most popular form of content people absorb on social media in the late 2010's.

While I excelled at important aspects of getting my business off the ground and running the day to day, there were many areas I did not have experience in. As the title suggests, things didn’t go as most aspiring successful entrepreneurs plan at the start.

Beyond Bankruptcy is about what went wrong, why, and the implications that followed in my life.

You can expect a cutthroat tell it all. My uncensored story, with facts and research of the real struggle the many entrepreneurs face. We mostly hear about the grand success stories. Highlights of growth companies that reach unicorn status.