After a bankruptcy

In December 2023 Lifeguard Health was declared bankrupt. We had run for seven years, employed 40+ people along the way, had Maersk as a client, a joint venture with Dansk Sundhedssikring and investors behind us. At its height the company was valued at 35 million kroner. Then covid came, and we never found our way back.

The last months went on keeping it alive while we waited for the client who was meant to save it. The client pulled out at the 11th hour. There was no plan B, and there rarely is at that point - you have spent everything you had on getting there.

Seven months later I co-founded ESGRapporter.

On a CV that reads as a smooth transition. It was not.

It takes longer than the accounts say

A bankruptcy has a date. The administrator sends a letter, the company ceases, and a year appears in the company register. All of that is over in a few weeks.

What takes time is something else. A company you have built over seven years sits in your head as a collection of unfinished thoughts: what should have been done differently, when you ought to have seen it, who you owe an explanation. None of it closes because the administrator is done.

I thought I would spend the time working out what I wanted to do next. That was wrong. The time went on working out what had actually happened.

What actually went wrong

Going through it, it split into what the market did to us and what we did to ourselves. The line between the two is less sharp than I would like it to be.

The first looked like pure timing for a long while. We built a B2B health platform for HR departments and entered an investor world where a company is meant to be sold on within three to five years.

The timeline is worth holding up against that expectation. 2015 and 2016 went on building. From 2016 we ran VitalityGuard as a joint venture with Dansk Sundhedssikring for two years, growing on their sales operation. In 2018 the partnership was dissolved over a disagreement about sales strategy, and we spent the time that followed finding our own direction again - and selling for ourselves, for the first time since the build-up.

There is something here I only saw afterwards. We entered a world that counts in exits without having built towards one. There was no plan for who the company would be sold to, or what it would look like on that day. We built a product we believed in and assumed the rest would follow.

Something I have noticed since about business people who succeed is that they rarely have only one place their income comes from. We had one shot. And it was not built to be sold.

That is where we were when everyone went home in March 2020. And when they came back a year later, HR was buried in logistics: moving workstations back, working out who came in on which days, holding together an organisation that had grown used to something else. Preventive wellbeing was not top of the list.

In 2021 we tried something else: a partnership with the Danish tabloid BT, which we called Reload, an attempt to take the concept from B2B to B2C. It was an attempt to find a way around the market that had just closed - and that did not carry either.

The rest is harder to look at, because it was ours. We could document the value. Better wellbeing, fewer sick days, less stress, higher retention - numbers we could put on the table. And the companies still would not pay for it.

The reason was the price, and the price was our own decision. We developed continuously and our ambitions were large, and on top of that sat the personal coach - the thing that made the product work, and the thing that made it expensive. HR could see the value perfectly well. HR simply did not hold that kind of budget - finance did. And finance actually understood the numbers better: productivity, and two fewer sick days per employee, is a sum they can do. They just did not need a wellbeing product to arrive at it.

There is a question I still have not answered: was the product too complex? We worked constantly to solve every challenge the company and its users had, and each individual decision made sense when it was taken. But we ended up as a Swiss army knife. Something that does everything, and is therefore hard to explain simply.

I do not know whether a smaller product would have sold better. I do know it would have been cheaper to build, cheaper to run and easier to explain to someone outside HR.

That is the mistake I think about most. Not that we built something that did not work, but that we built something large for someone who could not buy it. We built for HR and spoke HR's language, while the decision sat with someone measuring in something else entirely.

In some ways it felt like a car crash in slow motion. You can see what hits what, and you have plenty of time to think about it. You just cannot move out of the way.

What I took with me

The first is obvious and still hard: build the thing that proves the assumption before the thing that rests on it. We had the technology in order long before we knew whether anyone would buy. Building feels productive. It is also the easiest way to postpone the question that decides everything.

The second is about what you say yes to. At Lifeguard I was CTO, co-founder and for long stretches the person writing most of the code. That made sense while we were few. It made less sense with 25 people on the payroll at once, and it is hard to let go of something you built yourself — even when it is the only right decision.

The third is the one I took most of: a technical decision is a financial one. The white-label architecture we built for VitalityGuard was expensive in the week it was decided, and it was the reason the platform could be resold under another name six weeks after founding. The GDPR work with Bech-Bruun was expensive and felt excessive, right up until Maersk arrived with demands we could not otherwise have answered.

You cannot know in advance which of those investments pay off. But you cannot build something that holds without making some of them either.

Why I did it again

When three people approached me in the early summer of 2024 about ESGRapporter, my first answer was not yes.

What made the difference was not the idea. It was being recommended by a former investor from Lifeguard - someone who had watched it fail and still put my name forward.

I also knew what I was walking into this time. Not how it would end, but I had been at the other end of it before. I knew what it costs to build too much, what it costs not to leave things out - and how much has to be in place before you write the first line of code.

What a success does not teach you

There is a great deal written about starting a company. There is vanishingly little about closing one — at least from the person who was standing in it.

Not because it is rare. Most companies close. It is because there is nothing to sell in the story, and because the person who has been through it rarely wants to be the example.

Victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan. That is why one kind of story gets told over and over, and the other gets told by nobody.

But I think it is the most useful experience I have. Not because it makes me better at avoiding it — it does not — but because I now know what the decisions I advise on cost when they go wrong. That is a different kind of knowledge from reading about it.

When something works, you do not know why. You did a hundred things, and they worked. When it does not, you get that bill itemised.

Lifeguard ran for seven years. That is not a failure lasting seven years. It is seven years that ended in a bankruptcy, and those are not the same thing.

This text will probably never be finished. New realisations turn up over time, and each one shifts what I think happened, a little. That is presumably how it goes with this kind of thing.