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Business nightmares : hitting rock bottom and coming out on top / by Rachel Elnaugh.

By: Elnaugh, RachelPublisher: Richmond : Crimson, 2009Description: 236p.; 20 cm001: 12812ISBN: 9781854584748; 185458474XSubject(s): Business failures | Entrepreneurship | Business managementDDC classification: 338.04 ELN

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Rachel Elnaugh, entrepreneur and founder of Red Letter Days, announces her book Business Nightmares. Brought to fame as the original female Dragon in the BBC TV cult business show Dragons' Den, Rachel had achieved success at the helm of the a multi-million-pound company. Here, for the first time in her own words, Rachel speaks about her dramatic fall from grace and the spectacular, high-profile collapse of her market-leading business, Red Letter Days. Rachel has used her experiences to persuade 20 of the world's most successful business personalities including Jeffrey Archer, Simon Woodroffe, Doug Richard and Gerald Ratner to talk about their own troubled times in business. Here in Business Nightmares they divulge what it felt like in their darkest hour, and how they faced the dawn...

Originally published: 2007.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.MY STORY SO FAR I always knew when I was growing up above my dad's electrical shop in Chelmsford, Essex, that one day I would run my own business. While other girls were out playing with their friends during the school holidays, I was down in dad's shop, sitting at the cashier's desk counting the money, or sorting out the light bulbs into a neat order. Every Christmas my mum and I would set up a little table in the shop from which we would sell homemade crackers, gift tags made from old Christmas cards and various other seasonal paraphernalia, all in aid of charity. Every time we made a sale it was hugely exciting to me, like a little piece of gratification, a bit of positive feedback, and a clue to what the customer wanted to buy. I was starting to get hooked on ways to sell more and more. So I turned up production on the most successful cracker colours and phased out the ones no one wanted. Much of my childhood was spent with my mum at various wholesalers and manufacturers, buying paper, packaging, novelties and various off-cuts, which we could somehow use to make things to sell on our Christmas table. We would spray twisted willow silver and attach tiny baubles for table ornaments. Everything we sold went into Christmas bags that I had made. I would also be assigned to various tasks to help my mum with my dad's business administration, like folding invoices to go into envelopes and sticking the stamps on ready to post. When I was a bit older, I started helping with the accounts and bookkeeping, managing the client ledger and sending out reminders to people who hadn't paid. I had all sorts of career ideas when I was at school - I wanted to become a journalist, an astrologer, and work in the art world. Being an entrepreneur was never on the radar of the career options at school and so at first I embarked on the traditional route that was expected of me by the girls' grammar school I went to, and I applied to university to study history of art. Having received rejections from all the universities concerned (not least because I subsequently found out that my headmistress had written on my UCCA form that I `excelled at mathematics'), I decided to start applying for management training courses instead. Rejection letter after rejection letter followed (and that was from those companies that actually bothered to reply to my feeble applications). In fact I received so many rejection letters I could have wallpapered my bedroom with them. Although I didn't realise it at the time, I was already receiving my first lesson in business - how to keep going despite rejection. Eventually, in desperation, I replied to a little advert in the local paper asking for an office junior to work in a local firm of accountants for just £2,750 per year. My experience working in my dad's business clinched it for me, and when I received the offer letter I was the happiest girl in the world. Someone actually wanted me at last! So I got my foot on the ladder and worked my way up from doing the filing and making coffee to doing tax returns for wealthy individuals and small-business owners.I took my taxation exams by correspondence course and eventually ventured up to the City, where I landed a job specialising in the taxation of Lloyd's Underwriters. This was the time of the PCW scandals at Lloyd's, and even though I hated every moment that I spent at that firm (thanks mainly to a bitch of a boss, who made my time there a living hell through consistent and relentless criticism of everything I did), the experience I gained helped me get a much better role at Arthur Andersen, which was at the time the biggest accountancy firm in the world. Those two and a half years I spent at Andersen's in my early twenties were probably the most important work experience of my life. They taught me the value of thinking big, and they also introduced me to the world of fabulously wealthy clients, including the entrepreneurs Sir Terence Conran and Anna Vinton who founded Reject Shop. I have always been in awe of celebrities (maybe it's because I'm an Essex girl), but it was a real thrill getting into the lift and finding yourself alongside someone really famous like Bryan Ferry or Joan Collins, who were among Andersen's clients at the time. Excerpted from Business Nightmares by Rachel Elnaugh All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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