Livia moved to a bigger office she’d rented and had a brand new kitchen installed there with high end appliances, marble worktops etc and had a dozen new hires in quick succession aiming for expansion….. right before a pandemic appeared. I don’t know how the kitchen was financed, but with the snowball that followed I suspect it wasn’t in cash. Her brand had multiple new products recently launched in quick succession and was mainly focused on commuter lunch sales at places like Boots, so when the pandemic hit and everyone became a remote worker, overnight sales plummeted. She survived thanks to her father lending money to the business (why her father and not a bank is an interesting question to ponder) Sales hadn’t recovered so she then sold shares in Livia’s via crowdfunding (again its curious she didn’t get a bank loan) this was under the guise of expanding the business, without ever letting on what kind of trouble they were in, and avoiding reporting any financials or business updates to shareholders for the entirety of her time on the crowdfund platform… within 12 months the company had become insolvent and the investments made by thousands of her devoted Instagram following were gone in an instant. Records showed that the company was heavily in debt, and that any proceeds from the sale would prioritise her father as beneficiary because of his previous loan. Shareholders have never received a single penny back. She hasn’t ever apologised for leading followers along and taking money under false pretences, her departure was very much a victim mentality, lots of sadness for herself and convenient amnesia for everyone else, she claims that she made no profit from the sale but the recently purchased multimillion pound home with a full back to brick renovation/extension and a garden in London was secure and safe throughout, and she’s spent the past year as a stay at home mum without an income so I wouldn’t say she was left destitute and struggling afterwards.
To watch the whole thing unfold was a fantastic lesson in how to balance growth with security, and to make sure you build on solid foundations. Over leveraging lead to a collapse, she risked it all on expansion being her saviour out of the mess and it failed.
Matthew closed down as much of DE as he could do to get a lower valuation to then purchase the remaining parts of the company from the bank in order to own it outright, now he’s expanding quickly to plump up the value and (I suspect) to either gain higher dividends for both of them to put towards a pile in the midlands or to float the company publicly (or both!). The trouble is an expansion this quick without a solid foundation is a veeeeeery risky gamble, yes they don’t have the loans that Livia did but they’re still leveraged with a high staff turnover, there will be hundreds of thousands of pounds outstanding, total apathy from the workforce in maintaining a balance and all it takes is one supplier or one retailer to fold and suddenly he’ll find himself forever chasing his tail to catch up.
imagine going to business meeting and the two people from tjr company walk up holding hands and grinning like wtf
I can’t imagine anyone less suited to the realities of cold water swimming
