I’m not a lawyer. I’m not an accountant. I’m not a liquidator.
What I am is someone who has sat exactly where you’re sitting, and found the way back. More than once.
1988
The first time my world came down was 1988. I had a business and all the confidence that comes before you know what you don’t know. When it went under, it took a lot more than the business with it. I’d never felt anything like it: the shame, the sleepless nights, the certainty that I was the only person who’d ever got it this wrong.
That was the lie that nearly finished me: that I was the only one. I wasn’t. Plenty of good operators were going through exactly the same thing, in silence, each one convinced they were alone. The day I understood that is the day I stopped drowning and started swimming.
I built it back. And somewhere in that rebuild I worked out what I was actually for.
Nearly four decades on the other side of the desk
For the better part of 38 years I’ve done one thing: walk business owners through the worst stretch of their working lives. For the first 18 of those years I never even owned a business card, every client came by referral, one owner telling the next that I’d actually helped. I’ve worked right across Australia, sat across the desk from directors losing sleep over an ATO bill or a wind-up notice, and I’ve never once read to them from a textbook. I don’t have to. I’ve felt what they’re feeling.
I coordinate, I strategise, and I connect people with the right help at the right time. I work for the business owner, not the creditors, not the tax office, not a process. That’s the whole job.
The part most people in my position would scrub off the internet
It happened to me again.
During COVID, when the government froze the ability to wind companies up, my core work disappeared overnight. A mate’s pool-construction business was in trouble and I stepped in to help. I got more and more involved until I was effectively carrying the company, and more than $300,000 of my own money went in with it. We had good months. Then eight straight weeks of rain meant we finished only four jobs while the wages kept running, supply lines fell apart, and a separate insurance problem put the final nail in. The business didn’t make it. It went into liquidation, and people were left worse off, including me.
I could dress that up. I’m not going to. I know what it is to be the director of a company that couldn’t pay everyone it owed, recently, not just back in 1988.
I’m not proud of how it ended. But I won’t pretend it didn’t happen, and I won’t let anyone tell you I don’t understand your situation from the inside. I do. That’s exactly why you can talk to me straight, and get it straight back.
What I’ve put on the record
Along the way I’ve written four books. Three are on Amazon, and my latest, Broke, Not Broken, you can get right here on the site, plus more than twenty ebooks. I built the Doug on Debt YouTube channel, around 55 videos, because I’d rather you heard this from a real face than a brochure. There are 12,000 people who follow my thinking on LinkedIn. None of that matters on its own. It’s the evidence that I’ve been doing this a long time and I’m still standing.
Why you’ll see me work under a few names
In front of the tax office, creditors and solicitors, an institution carries weight a single name can’t, so the formal work runs through Resolvency for insolvency and bankruptcy, and Resolve Business Solutions for advisory and recovery. This site is me, no firm, no logo. It’s where you work out whether you trust the person before you deal with the firm. Fair enough, too.
