When Victor Sacks left employed life to set up his own firm he knew he was taking on a sizeable amount of risk but little did he know that a small mistake he was about to make would nearly cost him his livelihood.
Sacks took the plunge into business ownership after an 18 year career at HSBC (and a couple of stints at smaller firms), despite admitting he never saw himself as someone who wanted his name above a door.
"I wanted something more," he says. "I didn't know what it was. But I wasn't feeling the love for being an employed individual in a bank."
He says working with business owners throughout his career made him think he knew what it took to run a business but this could not have been further from the truth.
What's more, Sacks did not have a big amount of savings when he opened VS Associates and this meant when things took a turn for the worse, times became tough quickly.
"I never experienced the irregularity of income, the downward pressures from running your own business from the start, how much banks kind of say, yeah, we understand you and then don't," he says.
He had a new baby and a wife who'd just been made redundant. "So the heat was on," he says, "but I knew what I wanted to do."
His goal was to be the go-to financial adviser in his area of Cambridgeshire for self-employed, startups, and micro business owners - client groups he was used to working with.
But his business almost didn't survive its forming years. And Sacks blames this on a big mistake he made early on - blindly listening to people on social media.
Business in crisis
Sacks had built his business plan with a view to breaking even after year two.
He had set an initial charge of 3 per cent plus an ongoing ad valorem fee for his service, a charging structure he was used to from his bancassurance days.
But when one day he came across a post on social media, from someone he deemed respected within industry circles, everything would be turned on its head.
"Someone put out there that anyone who [charges percentage based initial fees] was a rogue, a charlatan and a thief and I stared at that and I thought that person is talking to me," he says.
He was so bothered by the post he changed his charges to a fixed fee with the effect that "my cash flow modelling and forecasting for the business went through the floor".
He said for every new client he had factored in per month he now needed two. He had an overdraft and a mortgage, started to miss payments, and was hurtling towards financial ruin.
But a certain business savviness and the refusal to be precious about approaching people for custom helped him.
