How do I explain this to potential employers?
- by ReferencelessBob
Backstory:
TL;DR: I've gained a lot of experience working for 5 years at one startup company, but it eventually failed. The company is gone and the owner MIA.
When I left sixth-form college I
didn't want to start a degree straight
away, so when I met this guy who knew
a guy who was setting up a publishing
company and needed a 'Techie' I
thought why not.
It was a very small operation, he sent
mailings to schools, waited for orders
to start arriving, then ordered a
short run of the textbooks to be
printed, stuck them in an envelope
posted them out.
I was initially going to help him set
up a computerized system for recording
orders and payments, printing labels,
really basic stuff and I threw it
together in Access in a couple of
weeks. He also wanted to start taking
orders online, so I set up a website
and a paypal business account.
While I was doing this, I was also
helping to do the day-to-day running
of things, taking phone orders,
posting products, banking cheques,
ordering textbooks, designing
mailings, filing end of year accounts,
hiring extra staff, putting stamps on
envelopes. I learned so much about
things I didn't even know I needed to
learn about.
Things were pretty good, when I
started we sold about £10,000 worth of
textbooks and by my 4th year there we
sold £250,000 worth of text books.
Things were looking good, but we had a
problem. Our best selling product had
peaked and sales started to fall
sharply, we introduced add on products
through the website to boost sales
which helped for a while, but we had
simply saturated the market.
Our plan was to enter the US with our
star product and follow the same,
slightly modified, plan as before. We
setup a 1-866 number and had the calls
forwarded to our UK offices. We
contracted a fulfillment company,
shipped over a few thousand textbooks,
had a mailing printed and mailed, then
sat by the phones and waited.
Needless to say, it didn't work. We
tried a few other things, at home and
in the US, but nothing helped.
We expanded in the good times, moving
into bigger offices, taking on staff
to do administrative and dispatch
work, but now cashflow was becoming a
problem and things got tougher. We did
the only thing we could and scaled
things right back, the offices went,
the admin staff went, I stopped taking
a wage and started working from home.
Nothing helped. The business was wound
up about about 2 years ago. In the end
it turned out that the owner had built
up considerable debt at the start of
business and had not paid them off
during good years, which left him in a
difficult position when cashflow had
started to dry up.
I haven't been able to contact the
owner since I found out.
It took me a while to get back on my
feet after that, but I'm now at
University and doing a Computer
Science degree.
How do I show the experience I have without having to get into all the gory details of what happened?
