the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

There was a time in my life when I came to believe that walking away was, whilst it seemed the easy option, was the wrong one, and that I should face what life brought me head on. To walk away was the coward’s option, I thought. This would have been when I was in my late teenage years, on the threshold of manhood, and, perhaps, there was a macho element to that way of thinking. I suppose that it is one of the ways that life teaches you, for it was an approach that got me knocked about a bit a times, both mentally and physically.

I learned that I needed to judge when to stand fast and when to walk away. My father had always told me that the best weapon in a fight was a four minute mile, and maybe I should have listened to him more carefully, for I was to find out later that he had some experience that he didn’t share with me, but more of that later. Walking away is not the easy option that I had initially thought, and it certainly is not cowardice. It often requires a lot of strength to do it.

When a relationship goes wrong, whether personal or professional, it’s not often that you can get it back to where it was, so you have to decide whether or not it is worth salvaging. For the party that lost faith, it is hard to get back the level of trust that you once had, and trust is at the heart of every successful relationship. Sticking with it and trying to repair the damage is always an option, but it is rarely the best one. In business, the risks to reputation are huge, and in a personal relationship the emotional baggage is not worth carrying.

I remember a classic business case. We had won a contract to store and distribute, throughout the UK, stock for a client. We had not been allowed to see the previous contractor’s operation, but the product was of a type we were very familiar with, and we foresaw few problems. We were wrong. The client could not have organised a bonk in a brothel and their systems and processes were chaotic. The same stock codes were shared between multiple, and unrelated, items and there was no catalogue, amongst other fundamental issues.

We offered to put all of this right at our own expense, but the client would not allow us to, so we wanted out. We decided to let them carry out their threat to sack us, and that they did, albeit that they tried to walk the threats back when they realised that they would invoke penalty clauses in our favour by getting rid of us, but the end result, for us, was that walking away was our best option. They were the client from hell.

Later, and in another job, I walked away from a contract worth around £15m over two years, simply because the cleint’s wishes were unviable. They awarded the deal split between two other contractors, but had to come to us on an ad-hoc basis because neither of those contractors could work with the way that the job was set up. We ended up earning close to £20m from the work, but doing it our way. Walking out on the original deal was the right thing to have done.

In my personal life I have walked away from five relationships that were doomed, but with three of them I held on, for various reasons, far longer than I should have done. The last of those relationships brought me to the brink of suicide, but I walked away from both that extreme solution and the relationship. It was later that I found out that I had followed my father down exactly the same route, in terms of leaving a wife and two children, albeit that I had held on for twice as long before making my move. Like father, like son, but he never told me about that piece of his history.

Even if it is the other party that wants to end the relationship, as it was with the three of my personal relationships that went wrong, two of the ones that I held on to for too long were that way, I had to accept that I had lost, and that walking away and not looking back was best for me. I may still want you, but if you don’t want me anymore, what is the point? Life is too short to waste, so walk on and get on with living.