Built over a lifetime, destroyed in a heartbeat?

Tonight, there are thousands of small business owners who will struggle to sleep. They will lie awake thinking of the bills they owe, the fact that today they had a few less customers than yesterday (again), and the people whose wages they know are reliant on their enterprise. They'll wonder how much longer they can keep going before their business collapses. They are living with fear and anxiety and dread but also the dogged desperate determination that maybe they can see it through... maybe they can survive... if they hustle enough, are clever enough, work more hours, cut costs further.

I know, because I'm one of them. It's not fun at the moment. I can see other businesses trying to strike a positive note on socials, but that behind them is a quiet desperation to try and get customers in and money in the till. Some of us are open about it: it's getting harder, we're really quiet, the shop is dead. Others feel we have to pretend all is well to attract people - no one likes a pity party.

Every small business that you know of took more effort and time than we can imagine to build. From the first kernel of an idea, the fear of failure and the brave risk-taking, to the huge step of leasing a premises. The product development with its trials and failures. The systems carefully built and rebuilt. The websites agonisingly created late at night when the rest of the house sleeps. The hours worked at 5am to email customers before your kids wake up. The cleaning up. The renovations. The death of weekends. Paying yourself the absolute bare minimum for months. The money haemorrhaged on breakages, new equipment, legal requirements, attempts and failures. The business cards designed and tweaked and updated, the staff carefully recruited, hired and trained, the networking, the hundreds and thousands of social media posts, the carefully curated Instagram grid, more product development, new line launches. The horror of seeing all your ingredients and supplies double in cost and the quiet courage to try and absorb it. The urgency of selling better and more in the face of a constant panic over the bank account.

And after all this, it can take weeks or days for a business to die. Staff turn up for shifts to be told there is no shift to go to anymore. Overnight, firms collapse and jobs are lost. And even more than this, a part of the community is lost. A chapter of memories for the local town is closed forever. A weekly ice cream outing is no more, a Friday cuppa with a friend has to be moved elsewhere, the DIY supplies have to be purchased from a faceless chain who don't know you like the guy who owned the paint shop did.

When people drive past where a favourite shop used to be, it sparks a melancholy nostalgia for good times gone by, times that won't come back. People that have lost their purpose. Buildings that have lost the joy and spark they once held, because of the people who worked in them.

It takes so, so long to build a beautiful business, and it takes a heartbeat to destroy it.

I keep thinking about this. I keep thinking about all the places we've lost, and the ones we are clinging on to. Weeks and months can easily go by where we mean to pop in, we really do, but we just never seem to get around to it. And then one day we'll drive past and it'll be gone, a To Let sign in place of the old sign.

I don't want us to be one of those. And I'll keep doing everything I can to keep us going. But with the government talking about raising more costs for employers on the back of years of back-breaking, unrelenting waves of pressure for us, it's hard to see how we can survive this.

Let's make a promise this weekend. Let's get out there and support our local small businesses. Whether it's by spending money with them, or just liking and sharing a post on socials - it's all important.

As I finish this, I worry as usual that I'm banging this drum too much, that this blog is too maudlin, or that it sounds like I'm just trying to throw my own pity party. But the thing is, I'm kind of willing to come across like that if it means doing everything I can to try and be a voice for the small business community. Because behind every website landing page, every business card and every shop sign, is a lifetime of work, a lifetime of blood, sweat, tears, and someone who just wanted to spend their life making people happy, and took a lot of risks to do that. I hate knowing that we are losing so much at the moment, after so many years of loss for the UK and for the world. Let's not lose any more if we can possibly avoid it.