Closing Well with Tom Nixon

The Happy Startup School

When Laurence and I closed our digital agency it seemed like the natural thing to do. At the time we had a beautiful studio, a talented team and clients with ongoing projects but we’d lost the creative energy to keep it going. We weren’t clear about its future and we were being drawn to grow the Happy Startup School. While it wasn't plain sailing closing Spook Studio was a lot less traumatic experience than what many other founders have had to go through. In this episode of the podcast, we’re joined for our Friday Fireside by Tom Nixon, author, coach and founder of Maptio (a tool to help develop self-managing organisations). He's on a mission to support founders and research what it takes to create (and close) impactful companies. Tom shares his story of entrepreneurship, how he closed his company and why some businesses have a natural shelf-life, and that’s fine. We talk about the taboo connected with closing a company and how we’ve lost sight of the creativity and humanity at the core of business. Businesses may be legal entities in themselves but in reality they’re just a collection of people brought together by the creative energy of the founder. When we forget this we can easily become imprisoned by the structures we’ve created. If you’re a founder thinking about closing your company or at the beginning of a startup journey we hope that this conversation will give you a new and more energising perspective on what it means to be an entrepreneur.