Brendan Mahony is sometimes referred to as the Grim Reaper at parties. He and his staff routinely deal with clients in tears.
But the entrepreneur insists his job is not depressing. His start-up, Sunset, handles the death of businesses — one of a number of consultancies offering specialised legal, administrative and even emotional support to companies that cease trading or are acquired.
“It’s really weird that it’s so difficult to shut down when that is the usual outcome for most companies,” says Mahony, an alumnus of tech incubator Y Combinator. US Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows two-thirds of companies established in 2013 had closed before the decade was out. But while new companies can call on plentiful resources as they grow, those dealing with the likely outcome of failure often find themselves without help.
Mahony experienced the “horrible . . . emotional and logistical complexities” of this himself when he shut down his first tech company. He realised the need for help after his friends started quizzing him about their own closures. “‘How do I sell this thing?’” he recalls them asking. “‘How do I talk to my VCs? What about my employees?’”
Sunset launched in 2023 with the promise: “We shut down start-ups. You get to move on.” SimpleClosure, which offers similar services, was founded in the same year and says it has worked with more than 2,500 founders.
Both companies handle the nitty gritty of clients’ closure — tax and legal work, project management, distributing funds and finding buyers for assets.
Jonathan Porter, whose tech start-up PorterLogic was acquired by a larger firm in March last year, is among the founders who have taken advantage of Sunset’s services. “We gave them access to the payroll and bank account . . . and they just handle a lot of this stuff for you,” he says. The biggest relief was Sunset taking care of “the mental load”.
For a flat fee, Porter and his co-founder Anya Skomorokhova got help from tax and legal experts, who managed paperwork according to strict timescales and compliance requirements, closed contracts with suppliers and service providers and ensured there was money in company accounts for unexpected costs. Other items on the to-do list included withdrawing accounts from state tax authorities and other entities.
“I would never have even thought about details,” Porter says. “A lot of people think about [the closure of] a start-up as you turn the lights off, go home one day, and that’s it. No, no, no. There’s a lot more.”
Mahony compares a company to a Lego model. “When it’s time to unwind, you literally need to take off all of the Legos one by one . . . If you take them off in the wrong order, that can also cause issues.” There is also a human element. “Founders . . . love the empathy and they love knowing that people are there.”
Some consultants work across personal and business endings. Anand Kalra, who offers care to dying people and their families, describes himself as an end-of-life ‘doula’ — people who provide non-medical assistance to new mothers and their partners — for people and organisations. He deals with grief, loss and change in both parts of his job but avoids “loaded” terminology in workplace contexts.
“Where things are already stressful, I don’t want to put more on it by putting the word ‘death’ into the room . . . We can talk about closure, about transitions, about change management,” he said.
Such discussions are driving the growth of a vibrant professional community of “endings practitioners”. In October, more than 100, from management consultants to “doula carers”, gathered in Birmingham for the first ever “Deceleration Assembly”, a conference organised by The Decelerator, which offers free closure support to UK non-profit organisations.
Attendees included Alison Lucas, a UK-based executive coach, who describes closure consulting as an “embryonic” field, fuelled by demand from large corporate clients. “Larger commercial organisations are often acutely aware of the reputational risk around how people leave, so they often invest in these services alongside the legal and financial mechanics of closure.”
Demand is also high among non-profits and start-ups, though many lack funding to hire consultants. The Decelerator says government cuts are increasing demand for its services, which include an “endings hotline” with free coaching. Co-founder Iona Lawrence says closure is too often understood as failure, which prevents leaders considering it until they hit crisis point. Then, their “ability to think about legacy, taking care of people, enduring impact, and the transfer of assets is all completely narrowed”.
Where organisations have planned ahead, they have been able to use leftover assets productively. Lawrence points to Campaign Bootcamp, a UK third-sector training organisation that used its remaining cash to help start a new community-focused fund. “They gave themselves enough time and exercised enough courage to be able to make sure that their ending wasn’t in vain.”
This applies to the private sector too, says Joe Macleod, whose Stockholm-based design agency andEnd helps brands thoughtfully terminate customer relationships. “Think about the [hiring] experience of employees, it’s incredibly celebratory. But at the end it’s lonely, it’s secretive, it’s collusion, it’s separating, and those aren’t two similar experiences. They should be.”
One example of closure done well, he says, was a team at Finnish phone manufacturer Nokia, which handed its archives to Finland’s Aalto University to create the openly available Nokia Design Archive.
Other positive stories can be found in the museum of closed NGOs, a crowdsourced website run by The Wind Down charity in New York. Founder Camille Acey, whose services include scenario planning, communications and project management, says she rarely hears leaders express regret about making the decision to shut down.
Mahony agrees. He compares company closures to the break-up of personal relationships. “Once you make the decision, you typically wish you’d made it two, three, six months ago.”