On 23 March 2022, a care home director stood before her staff — some of whom she had known since she was eight years old — and told them that the administration team was already in the car park. She was five months pregnant. The business she had helped build, alongside her brother and mother, was being handed over to strangers. That moment, brutal and unflinching, was the culmination of a chain of events that began with a management buyout signed at the worst possible time: the exact moment the world closed down for COVID-19. This is the story of what happened next, and the seven lessons that emerged from the wreckage of voluntary administration.
The Buyout That Collided with a Pandemic
In 2013, the author joined her mother’s health and social care business, taking on a role in finance and HR. For years, the family operation ran with the quiet steadiness typical of care provision in the Highlands of Scotland — two older adult care homes serving a community where personal relationships and professional reputations were deeply intertwined. When the author and her brother signed a management buyout to become joint shareholders, they did so with the kind of calculated optimism that fuels family business transitions. They could not have anticipated that the ink would barely be dry before the world shut down.
The COVID-19 pandemic arrived with ferocity. The new joint shareholders led their team through the early waves with what can only be described as relentless vigilance. The rules around them changed weekly. National guidance shifted, infection protocols were rewritten on the fly, and every decision carried life-or-death weight. For a considerable period, they succeeded in keeping COVID out of both homes entirely. Key performance indicators held steady. Finances, while stretched, remained manageable. They believed they had made it through the worst.
Then came the summer of 2021. COVID arrived in both care homes with little warning. For any care home experiencing an outbreak, the protocol was immediate and unforgiving: closure to all new admissions. In the world of adult social care, where margins are razor-thin and every empty bed represents a financial drain, a forced admissions freeze is not merely an operational inconvenience — it is an existential threat.
When Empty Rooms Become an Unbearable Weight
To understand what happened next, it is essential to grasp the economic reality of care home operations in the UK, particularly in rural and remote areas like the Highlands. Margins are notoriously tight. The cost structure is heavily weighted toward staffing, regulatory compliance, and physical infrastructure. Revenue depends almost entirely on occupancy rates. When a home is full, it can just about break even or generate a modest surplus. When occupancy drops — even by a handful of rooms — the arithmetic turns hostile.
The periods of closure that followed the COVID outbreaks pushed the business past its financial limits. The author and her brother went to the bank. No further lending was available — a blunt but not unusual response from lenders who had become wary of the care sector’s vulnerability during the pandemic. They went to the NHS, seeking support that might keep the homes open and the residents safe. The NHS was not able to provide any assistance at that time.
This is a detail worth pausing on. The care homes in question were serving some of the most vulnerable members of society — older adults requiring round-the-clock care in a remote region where alternative placements were scarce. Yet the institutional safety net, stretched thin by the pandemic’s broader demands, could not extend to them. The family was on their own.
The Decision That Put Residents First
In early January 2022, after weeks of difficult conversations and sleepless nights, the author, her brother, and her mother reached a conclusion that none of them had ever imagined they would face. Voluntary administration was the only route left that would keep the people in their care safe.
What is voluntary administration? Voluntary administration is a formal insolvency process in which an external administrator takes control of a company’s affairs to either rescue the business as a going concern, achieve a better outcome for creditors than immediate liquidation, or — if neither is possible — wind the company down in an orderly fashion. It is not a decision taken lightly, because it effectively cedes control of the business to an outsider. For a family-run operation with decades of personal investment, it is a wrenching surrender.
The decision was made in consultation with the company’s accountants. It took weeks to finalise. During that time, the family weighed every alternative, every possible source of funding, every potential buyer. In the end, the arithmetic was clear: without external support that was not forthcoming, the only way to ensure residents would not be abandoned or transferred in a chaotic, unplanned closure was to place the business into administration and give a professional team the mandate to find a buyer or manage an orderly transition.
On 23 March 2022, the author stood before her teams and delivered the news. She was five months pregnant. Some of the staff had known her since she was a child. She told them that the administration team was in the car park and that the business would be handed over. There was no sugar-coating, no false reassurance. The truth was stark, and she gave it to them straight.
What Worked and What Did Not
Reflecting on the process, the author is blunt about her own assumptions. What did not work, she says, was walking into the administration thinking it would not be personal — that it was “just business.” It is entirely personal. It is painful, and there are no winners. That single insight, hard-earned through direct experience, is the one she would carry into any future administration process without hesitation.
What worked was communication. Relentless, clear, and honest. Even when the most honest answer was difficult to say or to hear.
In the early days of the administration, the directors could not answer every question. Would the homes find a buyer? Would staff be transferred under TUPE regulations? They did not know, so they said exactly that. They did not guess. They did not make promises. They told people plainly that a closure was likely and what the timeframe would be. Every single person — directors included — entered consultation with no real answer and no false hope.
It also mattered that the board had more than one plan. Before any information was provided to the team, the directors were in full agreement on the approach. This allowed them to pivot quickly as circumstances changed, without the team ever seeing disagreement or uncertainty at the leadership level. A united public front, even when internal discussions were difficult, proved essential to maintaining trust and stability throughout the process.
Seven Lessons From the Wreckage
From this crucible of experience, the author distilled seven lessons that are worth examining in full. They are practical, unsentimental, and applicable far beyond the care sector.
First: Never take any strong business for granted, because things can change very quickly. A care home with solid KPIs, a loyal team, and a good reputation can be brought to its knees by forces entirely outside its control. The lesson is not to live in fear, but to shed the illusion of permanence. Success is not a destination; it is a fragile, provisional state that must be actively maintained.
Second: Professional relationships and personal relationships are not the same thing, and both will be tested. The professional ones will shift during a crisis, and it can be lonely and isolating. The author’s advice is to invest in personal relationships while things are going well, because you will need them when things are not. Friends, family, and trusted confidants become a lifeline when the professional world turns cold or indifferent.
Third: A genuine end goal is critical. Work backward from that point, and keep more than one road to that destination open. Having multiple contingent plans allows you to pivot quickly when circumstances change, without having to start from scratch each time.
Fourth: As a board, protect a united public front. Losing this can be enough to topple the entire process. Internal disagreements should be resolved behind closed doors; the team, the residents, and the creditors need to see coherence and conviction from leadership.
Fifth: Have the difficult conversations early. Putting them off does not make them any easier. In fact, delay almost always compounds the damage. The conversation that seems impossible today will only feel more impossible tomorrow, and the window for action may close in the meantime.
Sixth: Resilience is not only yours to find. Your team’s world is falling apart too, even while you are trying to hold yours together. Giving each other grace matters as much as being strong. Leaders who demand stoicism from their teams while crumbling privately are missing the point — crisis is collective, and so is the need for compassion.
Seventh: Directors can be made redundant too. Those businesses you helped build are no longer yours. This is perhaps the hardest lesson of all: the legal and emotional ownership that comes with building a business can be extinguished in an instant by the cold mechanics of insolvency law. The business you built can be taken away, and you may have no say in the matter.
The Personal Cost of Leading Through Collapse
The author does not pretend that the experience left her unchanged. Beyond the practical lessons, the process altered her as a leader in ways she is still unpacking. She describes herself as more resilient and, if she is honest, harder too. She is still unclear whether that is a good thing.
She now has the ability to separate emotion from decision-making publicly far more easily than before. The emotion is no longer etched on her face. She is not sure if that is a strength or something she has lost. This is a nuanced and honest admission. Leadership literature often celebrates stoicism as a virtue, but there is a fine line between composure and emotional suppression. The author’s ambivalence about her own transformation is a reminder that resilience can come at a cost, and that the armour leaders build to survive a crisis does not always come off when the crisis ends.
The experience also taught her to listen sooner. She reflects that if she had listened to certain things earlier, the outcome might have been different. But she is careful not to fall into the trap of “what ifs.” The past cannot be changed, and dwelling on counterfactuals is a form of self-punishment that serves no one.
Perhaps the most important insight is this: the failure of a business does not make the person who ran it a failure. The author came to see that the collapse of the care homes was a chapter, not her whole story. The next opportunity, whatever it might be, would not be predetermined by the last one. This is a vital message for any leader facing insolvency or business failure — the stigma is often worse than the reality, and the shame is almost always self-inflicted.
What Voluntary Administration Reveals About the Care Sector
The author’s experience is not an isolated incident. The care home sector in the UK has been under extraordinary financial pressure for years. Chronic underfunding, rising staff costs, regulatory burdens, and the demographic reality of an aging population have created an environment in which even well-run homes can fail. The pandemic added a layer of acute shock to an already fragile system.
When a care home goes into administration, the consequences ripple outward. Residents and their families face uncertainty and disruption. Staff face redundancy or transfer to new operators under terms they did not choose. The local community loses a trusted institution. And the directors, who may have poured decades of their lives into the business, are left to reckon with the emotional and financial aftermath.
The author’s decision to enter voluntary administration rather than fight on until the business was forced into compulsory liquidation was a calculated one. It gave the administrators the best possible chance of finding a buyer or managing an orderly wind-down. It prioritised the safety and continuity of care for residents over the directors’ personal attachment to the business. That is the mark of responsible leadership, even — perhaps especially — when the outcome is painful.
For other directors facing similar circumstances, the author’s story offers a rare combination of practical guidance and emotional honesty. The seven lessons are not abstract principles; they are forged in the heat of a real crisis, with real people depending on the outcome. They are worth reading, worth internalising, and worth acting on long before a crisis arrives.
