■ A fortnightly business advice column by Whakatāne accountant and business adviser, Jason Lougher

A mate rang me a few weeks back on a Tuesday night for no particular reason.

Nothing had happened. He was not after advice, and he did not have a problem to put in front of me. He had finished up for the day and felt like talking, so he did.

We were on the phone for the best part of an hour. A good chunk of it was a boat he is never going to buy.

A bit of it was nothing at all. And somewhere in the middle he mentioned a thing at work he had been going round and round on for the better part of a month.

By the time he had finished explaining it to me he had more or less sorted it out himself.

I reckon I said four useful words the whole call, and two of them were yeah and nah.

I have thought about that one a bit since, because I do not think most of us have that call available to us, and I think it costs us a lot more than we realise.

Here is the question I keep coming back to.

When do we actually learn anything, in the good times or the bad ones?

I would love to tell you it is the good times. They are far nicer to be in and it would be a much cheerier article.

But I do not think it is true.

When a year goes well, almost nobody stops to work out why.

You bank it, you feel pretty good about yourself, and you quietly assume it was you.

We are all outstanding operators in a good year. Ask any of us, we will happily talk you through it.

Nothing about a good year forces you to look at anything, so you do not.

The bad ones teach you plenty. That is where it all comes from, if I am being straight about it.

But there is a catch, and it is a big one.

A hard patch only teaches you something if you unpack it, and unpacking is precisely the thing you cannot do while you are standing in it.

Because when you are under it, it does not arrive as a list.

It arrives as one enormous shapeless thing sitting on your chest at three in the morning, and I have yet to hear of anything being solved at three in the morning. It does not have edges.

If somebody asked you what the problem was you would say “the business” or “everything” or “this year”, and you would mean it. That is what stress does.

It takes 11 separate items and welds them into one wall, and a wall is not something you can start on.

The truth is it is nearly always a wall of little things.

Not always small ones, but individual ones. A debtor who has gone quiet.

A price that has not moved in three years while everything under it has. A tax bill you have not opened.

None of those is the end of the world on its own. Ten of them stacked up and unnamed absolutely feels like it.

Once you get them apart and written down, the whole thing changes shape.

Nothing is solved. But you can see it, and what you are looking at is a handful of jobs that can be done one a day rather than one thing that cannot be done at all.

That is the work.

Pull the wall apart into bricks, then pick up one brick a day. It is not clever and it is not quick, but I have never seen anything else actually shift it.

Which brings me back to the phone call, because here is the part I got wrong for years.

You cannot do that unpacking on your own. Not properly.

In your own head it stays a wall, because your head is the thing that built it.

Say it out loud to another person and it comes apart almost by accident.

They ask what the actual problem is, you start answering, and by the third sentence you are hearing yourself list five separate things instead of one.

They do not need to be an expert, or to know your industry or your numbers.

They mostly need to be there and not be in a hurry.

I have written before that I am not good at asking for help, and this is the smaller and sneakier version of that.

It is not even help. It is just talking. And I still do not do it often enough, because ringing someone when nothing is wrong feels like a strange thing to do on a Tuesday.

You feel like you need a reason.

So you invent one, and then you spend the first 10 minutes of the call discussing the reason, which neither of you cares about.

So, that is the bit worth acting on. You do not need a board, a coach or anything with a name.

You need two or three people you can ring, and you need to ring one of them while things are going fine, so the line is already warm when they are not.

Otherwise, the first call you make in a hard year is a cold one, and there is nothing worse than opening with how have you been, before we get to the part where I have not slept since June.

Anyway. I owe him a call back. No reason, nothing wrong, and I will almost certainly open with the boat.

Hi, I’m Jason Lougher. I’m the owner of Calc Business Advisors & Chartered Accountants.

I advise businesses throughout the Eastern Bay of Plenty and across New Zealand. Like this article or want to chat? Send me an email at [email protected]

n Jason Lougher is the owner of Calc Business Advisors & Chartered Accountants. Our team advise businesses throughout the Eastern Bay of Plenty — and across New Zealand. Like this article or want to chat? Feel free to send me an email: [email protected]