WHEN Rachel Elnaugh’s Red Letter Days business, which provided adventure and activity gift experiences, failed, it took with it not just the company she had founded at the age of 24 — it also sank her dreams of selling or floating the business one day and making a fortune.

After two-and-a-half years spent fighting to save the firm it went into administration and suddenly she had nothing.

However, it has not taken long for Elnaugh — a former panellist on BBC TV’s Dragons’ Den programme in which budding entrepreneurs try to raise the funds to finance their projects — to put her experiences of watching her business fail to good use.

Her first book, Business Nightmares, published by Crimson Publishing, draws on not only her own experiences, but also those of other entrepreneurs such as Simon Woodroffe, Gerald Ratner and Jeffrey Archer.

She said: “After Red Letter Days I got loads of messages of support from other high-profile entrepreneurs who shared their experiences with me of crisis points in their own business journey.

“They were saying how they got through similar situations by the skin of their teeth. I thought that if all these successful people have had similar issues, it might be quite interesting to write a book about it.”

She added: “The aim of the book is to help people on their business journey and to give them the strength and encouragement and a bit of advice during the difficult times.

“I think there is a lot more to be learnt from someone who has had a negative experience than from someone who has had a wonderful trajectory into fabulous wealth.”

Her book includes the story of Doug Richard, another former Dragons’ Den panellist, who took shares instead of cash when he sold his first company in America and then watched them plunge to 1% of their value three weeks later.

It also tells the tale of the late Sir James Goldsmith, who came very close to bankruptcy in the 1950s and was saved only because the banks went on strike for three weeks on the day they were due to foreclose on all his loans.

Goldsmith’s experience resonated particularly strongly with Elnaugh, who said: “I know that feeling of running out of time myself. I am sure that if I had

had a few weeks more I could have saved Red Letter Days; there is no doubt in my mind about it.”

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