Timothy Melgund

I suppose it was.

When you spent that long building up a business with a team, and we were a pretty solid team, and then to have to get rid of your colleagues and then somebody else come in, it's not easy.

In retrospect, we probably should have gone deeper.

I mean, I don't like CVAs.

I think they're a very artificial way to try to keep businesses afloat.

Although, of course, you can save quite a lot of jobs.

But it is the people who really suffer are the property companies.

And sure, there are some huge ones.

But equally, you're taking shops off individual families, individuals who own particular shops.

And you're going to them and saying, you know, we're going to stop paying you rent.

Or we can only pay you 10% of our turnover or something like that.

And it's not an easy thing to do.

I think once the customer is starting to move away from you, it's very, very difficult to get them back.

And at the same time, all the financial ratios were working against the business.

Do you think there was something you could have done a bit earlier along the way?

Yeah, well, as I say, I think we probably should have gone slightly deeper on the CVA.

I mean, the property guys wouldn't have been at all happy, but I think we could have done that.

And I think we should have stuck to the belief that it was design and creativity that drove the business, which was, I'm afraid, lost with the change of the management team.

It's a very good question, that.

My feeling is no.