A Lancaster construction director who had spent autumn watching his company’s cash flow tighten, his HMRC arrears climb, and his accountant’s advice grow increasingly bleak, hadn’t slept in months.
By December, James had accepted the reality many UK directors facing insolvency eventually confront behind closed doors: after eleven years of building the business, it could no longer be saved.
Two weeks after cracking open RIGGED: The Directors’ Survival Manual, he was still trading. The company had a future. And for the first time since spring, he was sleeping through the night.
“For the first time in months, I can actually sleep,” he says. “I finally understand what’s happening and what my options are.”
He’s not the only one saying it.
A Book That Found Its People
RIGGED: The Directors’ Survival Manual comes from Matt Haycox — a British entrepreneur who’s spent twenty-five years in business, raised north of £250 million, and once ran a lending operation that pushed close to £1 billion into UK SMEs. He’s also, somewhere in the middle of that arc, lost everything himself. That personal collapse, he says, taught him more about the UK insolvency industry than any qualification could.
Published through his platform Insolvency World, the 200+ page book has become something unexpected for UK directors facing insolvency: not just a manual, but a lifeline. The reviews flooding in aren’t the language of business books. They’re the language of relief.
“I felt like everyone was against me — my accountant, HMRC, the Insolvency Practitioner,” writes Sarah, who runs a recruitment agency in Birmingham. “Reading RIGGED was the first time I felt like someone was actually on my side.”
That’s what’s driving the book’s quiet spread through Lancashire and beyond. Not the controversy it’s stirred. Not the arguments about industry incentives. Just the slow, private experience of directors recognising — sometimes for the first time — that they’re not stupid and they’re not failures.
The Weight Nobody Mentions
The thing nobody talks about with UK company insolvency, Haycox argues, is the shame.
Directors don’t tell friends. They don’t tell family. They sit in offices late at night, opening letters they’d rather not open, taking calls they’ve been dodging for weeks. They absorb — alone — the slow build-up of a situation they’ve been led to believe is their personal moral failure.
“By the time most directors come to me, they’ve been carrying this alone for months,” Haycox says. “They haven’t told their wife. Haven’t told their business partner. They’ve been getting up every morning pretending everything’s fine, while internally they’re falling apart. The book isn’t just information. It’s about telling people that what’s happening to them is happening to thousands of other directors right now. And it’s not because they’re stupid.”
That recognition lands first, according to reader feedback.
“I’d been carrying this weight alone for months,” writes David, a hospitality director from Leeds. “The book made me realise I wasn’t stupid, wasn’t a failure — just stuck in a system nobody explains until it’s too late.”
Not what a business book is supposed to do, maybe. But increasingly, it’s what RIGGED is doing.
The Practical Bit
The emotional response is half the story.
The other half? The information itself.
A big chunk of RIGGED walks directors through the actual menu of options available when a company hits trouble — Company Voluntary Arrangements, administration, pre-pack sales, informal creditor deals, and yes, where genuinely appropriate, liquidation. The argument isn’t that liquidation is wrong. It’s that liquidation should be one option on a list, presented honestly alongside the others — not the default outcome quietly engineered by advisers whose fees jump when the company dies.
For many readers, this is where reading the book gets physically uncomfortable.
“My accountant told me liquidation was my only option,” writes Emma, who runs a small retail business in Glasgow. “This book showed me five other routes I didn’t even know existed. I’m now in a CVA and the company’s still trading.”
Another reader — a manufacturing director in the Midlands — was further down the road than most when the book reached him.
“I was about to sign everything over to an Insolvency Practitioner,” he writes. “Then I read Chapter 3 and realised he was earning more from liquidating my company than saving it. Got a second opinion and saved my business.”
Haycox is quick to point out the book isn’t a replacement for proper professional advice. He’s not a solicitor. Not an Insolvency Practitioner. The consultation calls he offers through Insolvency.
World are positioned explicitly as second opinions — not restructuring services.
“Get the second opinion,” he says. “Get it before you sign anything. Get it from somebody whose fee doesn’t depend on which option you choose. That’s the whole point.”
What Directors Didn’t Know
If there’s a single chapter readers mention most, it’s the section on personal liability.
The book spends serious time on the financial landmines that, in Haycox’s experience, almost never get explained properly to directors until it’s too late.
Directors’ loan accounts that quietly transform from book entries into personal debts the moment the company enters formal insolvency. Personal guarantees signed years ago — sometimes for facilities long since refinanced — that surface unexpectedly when banks decide to enforce. Wrongful trading exposure that crystallises at the moment a director should reasonably have known the company was insolvent. That moment is rarely as obvious in real time as it is looking back, and it can turn a corporate failure into a personal financial catastrophe.
“The chapter on personal liability changed everything for me,” writes Michael, an IT services director from Bristol. “I didn’t even know my directors’ loan account could become a personal debt. Nobody told me.”
It’s the conversation, Haycox says, that the system relies on directors not having.
“By the time most directors find out what a personal guarantee actually means, the bank’s already called it in,” he says. “By the time they understand their directors’ loan account, the Insolvency Practitioner is already asking for the money back. That’s not bad luck. That’s a system that benefits from your ignorance.”
A Long Way From Where They Started
What’s striking, reading the messages directors have sent since the book started circulating, is how often the response isn’t gratitude for advice but something closer to grief.
Grief for the months spent alone with a situation they didn’t understand. Grief for the decisions they made because nobody told them there were others. Grief for the time that, looking back, they didn’t need to lose.
“I wish I’d had this book two years ago,” writes one reader. “I would have made completely different decisions.”
It’s the most damning verdict on the system the book describes. Not that directors don’t have access to information when they need it. Not that the information is locked behind expensive doors. But that by the time it reaches them, the decisions that mattered have already been made — and made, in many cases, by people whose interests were quietly different from their own.
That, more than the polemic, is what RIGGED appears to be slowly changing. One director, one kitchen table, one night of sleep at a time.
“I read the whole thing in one night,” writes James, the Lancaster construction director, in the email he sent to Insolvency World the morning after. “It told me more about my situation than six months of conversations with my accountant.”
For a book that’s being quietly resented by parts of the industry it dissects, it’s hard to imagine a more telling response.
Haycox’s broader work across business, finance and entrepreneurship can be found on Matt Haycox’s official website.
