DISCLAIMER: A quick but important note: closing a business also comes with real legal and financial steps, contracts, taxes, final filings, obligations to vendors and lenders, that fall somewhere within these ten steps. Those pieces matter enormously, and if you are in this position, please get an actual lawyer and accountant involved. But those are also the obvious ones. Most people already know to go find a lawyer. What almost nobody talks about is everything in between the legal boxes you check, the human parts, the timing, the language, the way you actually treat people while the paperwork gets handled. That is what this piece is for.
Deciding to close a business is hard. Closing it without wrecking the people inside seems harder, but it doesn’t have to be. In 2024, I made the decision to close my creative agency, a company filled with incredibly capable and talented creative women, who I deeply respected. Everyone told me it would be extremely difficult, that they would be disappointed and deeply upset. I chose to believe that while I could not control anyone else’s emotions, I could make this incredibly challenging life pivot with grace and integrity, with their wellbeing and experience top of mind, and therefore do the opposite of what seems to be the norm in this country: closing a business, or letting people go, in the most disrespectful and inhumane ways possible.
Remember Better.com? In December 2021, CEO Vishal Garg pulled 900 employees, about 15% of the entire company, into one Zoom meeting and told them their jobs were gone, effective immediately, before most of them had even processed why they were on the call in the first place. Garg took a leave of absence shortly after, once the internet made unmistakably clear how monstrous that move actually was…but the damage was done.
Better.com is not some outlier. Major tech companies do this constantly now, mass layoffs delivered through automated emails that land in inboxes before 6AM, cold and impersonal and engineered to avoid one real conversation with one real person who helped build the thing being dismantled. The whole system is built to protect the executive delivering the news, never the person receiving it.
That is the norm I was trying to opt out of.
Where It All Began
Two years ago, I found myself sitting across from a team I had built and believed in, and somewhere in the middle of an otherwise ordinary workday I understood something I had been avoiding for months. I was no longer being a creative. I was an operating executive, and I hated my job. It didn’t matter that the business was profitable or taking in seven figures a year. I spent my time on health insurance, invoicing, new business pipelines, and boring logistics, basically the entire scaffolding required to keep a company standing upright. It was a slow burn, something I didn’t recognize was happening until it smacked me in the face. I had replaced the thing I actually loved doing, which was the work itself.
I did not sit with that for long. Within weeks I had made the call. I was going to close the business, take a real beat, and figure out what came next without the pressure of growing something I was already losing myself inside of. One of my skill sets is decisiveness, and willpower. I do not believe in failure as a concept. A lesson my dad taught me at a really young age is, “you don’t have to like losing or enjoy starting over, but you have to respect it and be willing to do both.” So I knew closing my business would only mean starting over again. And when I came back, I was going to come back smaller and sharper, as a consultancy, without the weight of full-time payroll. But what felt even bigger than closing was answering the question: how the fuck do you close your business with respect and appreciation for the people who have made it all possible? I didn’t know, and no one else seemed to know either. With that, I built a blueprint, and I’m sharing it with you through this piece.
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