Good Deals 12: when it all goes Pete Tong

‘Embrace failure, learn from failure. Failure is the heart of innovation and the heart of entrepreneurship.’

This is what social entrepreneur Dave Dawes urged delegates to do in the ‘It’s all gone Pete Tong’ session at Good Deals 2012.

He complained that failure was too often only talked about in the bar, rather than on a public platform.

‘Success is very hard to learn from,’ he said.

Anna Whitty, CEO of ECT Charity, described the dramatic rise – and then the dramatic fall of ECT after the community transport enterprise expanded into recycling, street cleaning and community rail while she was working in the operations department.

The enterprise’s turnover rose from £8.9m in 2002 to £51.8m in 2007, but it had cashflow issues which led to catastrophe when ECT’s bank ‘credit crunched’ it by suddenly pulling away its overdraft.

When your enterprise fails ‘it’s like watching someone die’, she said. ‘For weeks I cried every day.’

Then the survival instincts kicked in. Whitty volunteered to try to resurrect the organisation, taking on the chief executive role.

‘We went back to our core business of community transport,’ she said, ‘where reputationally we were right up there.’

She said taking things bit by bit, and being open and honest were key to establishing ECT on the stable footing that it is on today.