By Julia Chanteray President,
Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce

Brighton and Hove has one of the highest rates of business startups and what they call one of the highest failure rates.
Some people see this as a negative side to business life in the city, that we have lots of little businesses which don’t really do anything and then die off very quickly. When you look at what counts as a “business failure”, you see a different story.
I’ve had The Joy of Business, my consultancy company, for 11 years now. I’m a survivor, according to the statistics. But if I sold my company to a bigger outfit, I’d be counted as a failure, because the company previously known as The Joy of Business would close down.
So even if I sold it for a million pounds, I’d still statistically be a failure. What about all the businesses which start up every year in Brighton and Hove? What happens to them along the way? Some of them do fail, that’s true. Some of them don’t work out, don’t make any money and probably cost their owners in time and money. But that’s okay – one of the big lessons in business is that it doesn’t matter if you fail, what matters is that you try again.
Lots of our big success stories are people who have had a couple of businesses which didn’t work out, but the owners went on to try again, armed with all the knowledge and experience of their previous efforts. Some of the other start-ups are always going to be short-lived. Maybe someone sets up a company for their freelance work and then they get offered a juicy job.
They end up winding up the company because they don’t need it any more. Again this gets counted as a failure in the numbers, but I’d argue that this is a success story – someone has worked for themselves for a while, and then been employed.
Many people do this several times over their lifetimes, going in and out of employment and different sorts of contracts. Other people set up a business which is successful for a while, but then they decide they want to do something different, or the market changes and the original business doesn’t fit anymore. For me, it’s a success story when the business owner recognises a declining market, or a well-armed competitor, and gets out in time.
Brighton and Hove Chamber of Commerce, of which I am president, is probably one of the few businesses in the city which has lasted for more than 100 years. So we’re a success story. But in the statistics, we’d be a multiple failure, just because we’ve had several different legal entities over the years for several different reasons which are only of interest to the most nerdy of lawyers.
So next time you read about our high business failure rate, have a look behind the numbers and think about the true vibrancy and resilience of our city’s business.