What Should You Do When You Feel Like Giving Up on Your Business?
When you feel like giving up on your business, do not make a permanent decision on your worst day — give the business one more cycle of contact first, and make those contacts to people who have already trusted you rather than to strangers. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment. There was a day when my bank account was nearly at zero, I had just taken three no's in a row, and I was ready to shut the whole thing down. Then a past client texted me out of nowhere. That one message is the reason the company is still here, and why we now build teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the United States.
Why does the urge to quit hit hardest on your worst day?
The urge to quit hits hardest on your worst day because that is the day you have the least evidence and the most emotion. Three no's in a row is not a trend. It is three data points, collected inside one bad week, by a tired person. But when the account is low, your brain stops treating them as three events and starts treating them as a verdict on you.
I started CPG Recruitment in March 2020 — the single worst month in living memory to start a company that places people into jobs. So I am not romantic about hard days. What I have learned is that the quality of a decision tracks the state of the person making it. On a bad day you are not deciding whether the business works. You are deciding whether you feel like continuing. Those are different questions, and only one of them deserves an answer that day.
What actually happened the day I almost gave up on CPG Recruitment?
I had almost no money left in the account, three prospects had said no back to back, and I had genuinely decided to stop. Not in a dramatic way. In the quiet, practical way founders actually quit — sitting there doing the math and concluding it does not work.
Then my phone buzzed. A past client, someone I had worked with before and had not spoken to in a while, sent me a message. Not a referral request. Not a pitch I had sent. Just a client who remembered the work and needed help again. I had done nothing that morning to earn it. The relationship had been earning it quietly the whole time.
That is the part I want business owners to sit with. The thing that saved the company was not a new tactic I tried on my worst day. It was work I had already done, months earlier, coming back around.
Why did one text from a past client change everything?
A past client is the warmest pipeline you will ever own, because they have already paid you, already trusted you, and already know what you are like to work with. Every other lead source asks a stranger to take a risk on you. A past client has already taken it and survived.
This is the whole idea behind relationship-based B2B selling, and it is what I used to 3x my own company's revenue — the same system I later built into Booked55. It is not clever. It is a list of people who already know your name, contacted on purpose, on a schedule, instead of only when you are desperate. Most owners treat past clients as finished business. They are actually your cheapest, fastest and most likely source of the next deal.
So when I tell someone not to quit on their hardest day, what I am really telling them is: you probably have a text you have not sent.
How do you tell the difference between a bad month and a dead business?
You tell the difference by checking your two engines instead of checking your feelings. Every business runs on two of them: a sales engine that brings customers in, and a talent engine that puts the right people in place to serve them. I wrote about this in detail in what are the two engines every business needs to grow.
A bad month looks like this: both engines still work, but you stopped feeding one of them. You got busy delivering and stopped making contacts, so the pipeline emptied out eight weeks later. That is fixable in days, and the fix is boring — go make the contacts.
A genuinely dead business looks different: the engine itself is broken. Nobody wants the offer at any price, from anyone, even people who already like you. Since 2020 I have seen far more of the first than the second, and almost every founder in the first category was convinced they were in the second.
What should you do on the day you want to quit?
Do four things, in this order, before you decide anything permanent. First, take the decision off the table for 30 days — write the date down. Second, make ten contacts to people who already know you: past clients, old colleagues, anyone who has worked with you and would take your call. Not cold outreach. Warm reconnection.
Third, write down exactly what would have to be true in 30 days for you to keep going — a number, a signed deal, a specific conversation. Make it concrete enough that you cannot argue with it later. Fourth, tell one person who is not inside the business. Founders quit in isolation far more often than they quit because the numbers say to.
Thirty days is not optimism. It is a sample size. You are simply refusing to run your life off a sample of one.
Why is desperation the most expensive state a founder can make decisions in?
Desperation is expensive because it makes you accept the first available option and call it a decision. It shows up in pricing, where you discount to close anything at all. It shows up in clients, where you take on the one you already know will be a nightmare. And it shows up worst of all in hiring — which is why I tell owners never to hire out of desperation.
The pattern is always the same. Cash is tight, so you need someone in the seat yesterday, so you hire the candidate who is available rather than the candidate who is right. Six months later you are paying for that twice — once in salary and once in the damage. A hard month is exactly when you should be raising your standards, not lowering them, because you have the least margin left to absorb a mistake.
How do you build a business that does not depend on your best day?
You build it by making the important work systematic instead of emotional, so it still happens on the days you are flat. A business that only produces when the founder is inspired is not a business — it is a mood with a bank account attached.
In practice that means both engines run on a schedule you do not renegotiate. Client contact happens weekly whether you feel like it or not. Recruitment runs on a defined process rather than a panic — the same discipline that cut our average time-to-fill from 68 days to 37. And the work that only lives in your head gets documented, so the company has three parts that can run without you.
I talk about this on stages now, including a TEDx stage, and the question I get most is some version of “how did you know it would work out?” I did not. I just had enough process still running underneath me that one text could catch me. Systems are what make luck possible — they keep you in the game long enough for the good thing to land.
What is the next step if your business is at that point right now?
If the problem is that you have no customers coming in, start with the sales engine at Booked55. If the problem is that you cannot serve the customers you have because you do not have the right people, that is a talent problem, and it is what we do every day at CPG Recruitment — you can book a recruitment consultation with our team or reach me directly through my contact page. Do not make the permanent decision today. Make the ten contacts first.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should you give a struggling business before you close it?
Give it a defined window with a written condition attached rather than an open-ended one. Thirty days is usually enough to see whether warm reconnection produces anything, and long enough that you are no longer deciding inside the worst week. Decide in advance what result would justify continuing, so the deadline means something.
Is it normal for business owners to want to quit?
Yes — it is close to universal, and it usually clusters around cash-flow pressure rather than around genuine failure. Almost every founder I have worked with since 2020 has had a version of the day I described. What separates the ones still trading is not confidence, it is that they did not act on it the same day.
Should you tell your team when the business is having a hard month?
Tell them the truth at the level they can act on, not the level that just transfers your anxiety. Say what the situation is, what the plan is, and what you need from them. Staying silent does not protect people — they can already feel it, and the guessing is worse than the facts.
Should you fix sales or hiring first when revenue stalls?
Fix whichever engine is actually empty, and in a stall it is usually sales. If no new customers are coming in, hiring will only add cost. If customers are coming in and you are losing them to poor delivery or missed deadlines, the constraint is people, and hiring properly is the fix.
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