The demise of Border Demolition will impact more than just the owners.
There are times when it truly sucks to be a journalist. Obviously, not when you’re being wined and dined in swanky restaurants by PR-types with equally swanky expense accounts. Nor is it the case when you’re flown half-way across the world to see the launch of a new machine or the completion of a major demolition project.
But I have just had the unenviable task of calling a Scottish demolition contractor to find out if – in common parlance – they’d gone down the toilet.
I reassured myself that this was “just my job” and pulled around me my cloak of “don’t shoot the messenger” invincibility. But that call wasn’t any easier to make.
Perhaps I am growing soft in my old age. Maybe this latest recession has required me to make too many of these deeply uncomfortable phone calls. And maybe the news comes just a little too close to Christmas.
All of these might be true. But the real truth here is that when I look at instances like this, I am reminded of my own fragile corporate mortality.
Almost five years ago, I was a partner is a very successful PR company (which is why I know about swanky expense accounts). We counted the likes of Caterpillar among our client-base; we operated from two offices; we drove nice cars; and we enjoyed the trappings that this degree of success can afford. And then the wheels fell off.
Through various reasons too complex and painful to recall, the business failed and – as a direct result – my business partner took his own life, leaving behind a wife and six children, and bringing to an end a 20-year business relationship.
Yet bizarrely, my lasting memory of those events was not the loss of the nice office, the flash car or the overseas holidays. Nor was it the funeral of my business partner, deeply painful though that was.
The part that still haunts me to this day was telling the people we employed – the same people that had given up their weekends and evenings for the good of the company – that all their work, loyalty and dedication had been for nothing and that they were now unemployed.
When I spoke to the receptionist at Border Demolition just a short time ago, I was swept back to the day that my employees helped me empty the office for the final time before we went our separate ways.
Thankfully, all of us have gone on to other (and generally better) things.
I can only hope that the same will apply to all those that helped build Border Demolition.
