--- title: "Lunch with Gerald Ratner: Mistakes Do Not Have to Define You | Colin Shove's Blog" description: "What lunch with Gerald Ratner taught me about owning mistakes, recovery, bad advice and why being found online still matters for small business owners." canonical: "https://www.colinshove.com/blog/lunch-with-gerald-ratner" last_updated: "2026-09-25T15:18:04.524Z" --- # Lunch with Gerald Ratner: Mistakes Do Not Have to Define You ![](/_next/image?url=%2Fapi%2Fmedia%2Ffile%2FIMG_7631-128x153.jpg%3Fprefix%3Dtenants%252F6a15f87c1461a7ed90cef9e0%26v%3D1790349250868&w=128&q=75&dpl=dpl_CFs6rTNULzxap4Vcdy6Y6yCErvku) Colin Shove PublishedFriday, 25 September 2026 ![Colin Shove with Gerald Ratner and Hutton Henry outside after lunch, under the headline Mistakes do not have to define you](/_next/image?url=%2Fapi%2Fmedia%2Ffile%2Flunch-with-gerald-ratner-mistakes-do-not-define-you.jpg%3Fprefix%3Dtenants%252F6a15f87c1461a7ed90cef9e0%26v%3D1790349133489&w=3840&q=75&dpl=dpl_CFs6rTNULzxap4Vcdy6Y6yCErvku) ## Lunch with a man whose name became a verb Yesterday I had lunch with Gerald Ratner. My very good friend Hutton and I had been talking about his book when we met recently. At some point one of us said the obvious thing: why don't we just ask him to lunch? So we did. And he said yes. If you are under 40 you might not know the name. If you are over 40 you almost certainly do. In 1991 Gerald ran the biggest jewellery business in the world. Then he stood up at an Institute of Directors event, made a joke about his own products, and watched hundreds of millions of pounds disappear from the value of the company. People still say someone has "done a Ratner" when they talk themselves into a disaster. What I did not expect was how funny he is. Not loud, not performing. Dry. He delivers a line so quietly that you are halfway through your next mouthful before you realise it was a joke. Underneath the humour is someone who is very honest, and who knows retail, selling and people better than almost anyone I have met. This is what I took away. > **The mistake made him famous. How he handled everything after it is the part worth learning from.** ## He stopped hiding from it Gerald has given more or less the same talk for 25 years. He does not need to change it. Audiences do not come to hear a polished success story. They come for the raw version: the speech, the fallout, and what it cost him. The turning point, he said, was the day he stopped defending himself and owned it publicly. His words were simple: "It was completely my fault. Let's have a joke about it." > **"It was completely my fault. Let's have a joke about it."** Gerald Ratner That honesty is what gives him permission to talk about the good bits. Once an audience has heard the worst of it, including the depression he speaks about openly, they are happy to listen when he tells them he later built a business to £25 million and sold a health club for £4 million. Light and shade. Without the shade, the light just looks like showing off. He was blunt about the opposite approach. Put up slides of your house and your cars and the room stops trusting you. Everyone in that audience knows nobody sails through life without setbacks. Pretending otherwise does not make you look successful. It makes you look like you are hiding something. I see the same thing in small business marketing every week. Websites and LinkedIn profiles that are all polish and no truth. Perfect stock photos, vague claims, nothing that sounds like a real person. They are not wrong, exactly. They are just forgettable, and forgettable does not win work. > **Nobody trusts a story with no setbacks in it. Your customers know real businesses have bad days. Stop pretending yours doesn't.** ## The seven years nobody talks about The speech is the famous part. The part that stayed with me was what came after. Gerald lost his job in 1992. He described the next seven years as the worst of his life. Debt. A £1 million tax bill on shares that were by then worthless. Selling the family home. He kept himself busy with projects that never really went anywhere, and he called it "kicking his heels". What changed things was not a clever plan. It was his wife telling him, in effect, that enough was enough. So he opened a health club. That one decision to stop drifting and do something real was the start of the recovery. His conclusion was very clear. Escapism does not work. Hiding from a problem does not make it smaller. The only way out is to face it head on. > **Hiding from a problem never made it smaller. The recovery started the day he stopped drifting and did something real.** The other thing he found in those years was cycling. It started as something to fill the time. It became the way he thinks. He talked about having "two brains": the one that grinds away at a problem, and the relaxed one that turns up on the bike and solves it. He said stories and details he had long forgotten come back to him when he is riding. And then, almost as an aside, the most important thing he said all afternoon. Losing the helicopter and the private jet taught him there is far more to life than business. Cycling. Walking the dog. A good marriage. He is happier now than he was at the top. > **He lost the helicopter and the jet. He gained a bike, a dog and a better life. Success is not always what it looks like from the outside.** ## Be careful who you take advice from Gerald has a healthy suspicion of advisers, and he has earned it. Years ago he was persuaded to split his role and bring in a chairman with a banking background. It was sold to him as good governance. That chairman later fired him. His rule since then: listen carefully to advice, and if it conflicts with what you know to be true on the ground, do the opposite. His point was not that all advice is bad. It is that a lot of advice helps the person giving it more than the person receiving it. Hutton added a painful example: an entrepreneur who built a children's nursery business valued at £34 million. She brought in an investor to reassure herself. The small print let that investor remove her, and she lost the lot. > **A lot of advice helps the person giving it more than the person taking it. Always ask who benefits.** He was equally sharp about people running businesses they have never worked in. Promoting a finance director to chief executive, he said, is like putting the goalkeeper up front. Brilliant at one job. Wrong for the other. I added one of my own. Taking your best salesperson and promoting them into management. You lose your best seller from the front line and gain a manager who would rather be selling. Gerald's answer to all of this was the shop floor. The best ideas in any business come from the people who deal with customers every day, not from directors in a meeting room. Hutton had the perfect example: a department store that spent £2 million on an internal communication system nobody used, because the staff preferred to talk to each other and pick up the phone. Nobody had asked them. I will be honest here. This applies to my industry too. Plenty of small business owners have paid for websites, ads or "SEO packages" because someone persuasive told them to. If the advice does not match what you see in your own business, question it. Including mine. > **The best ideas in a business come from the people who talk to customers every day. Ask them before you ask a consultant.** ## Every introduction goes digital before it gets personal again For all the talk of honesty and old-school selling, one of the most useful conversations over lunch was about how people actually find and choose a business today. We all agreed that people still buy from people. Gerald told a story about a friend who built a Christmas cracker business by personally visiting the buyers at the big supermarkets. They loved him. When he sold the company, the new owners went to meet those same buyers, who asked where he was. Same product, same prices. Within a short time the orders had dried up. But here is the part most small business owners miss. Even a personal introduction now takes a detour online before it becomes personal again. Someone recommends you. The very next thing that person does is look you up. They check your website, your reviews, your LinkedIn. Only then do they pick up the phone, or decide not to. > **A recommendation gets you looked up. What they find online decides whether they get in touch.** And when people do not already know your name, they do not search for you. They search for what you do. Gerald made the point with sushi: he does not search for a brand, he searches for "sushi in Eastbourne" and weighs up what comes back. Reviews do a lot of the deciding. More and more, so do AI tools like ChatGPT, which now read those reviews and use the language in them to make recommendations. That is why being online has to cover two things, not one. - **Who you are.** Your story, your personality, your honesty. This is what Gerald does so well, and it is why people trust him. It is what turns a stranger into a relationship. - **What you do.** Clearly, specifically, in the words your customers actually search for. This is what gets you found in the first place. Most small businesses only manage one. Some have a lovely "about us" story but never say plainly what they offer or where. Others list services like a price board with no sense of the person behind them. I have seen a salon go from around 25 online bookings a month to around 200 in a year, largely by being clear about what it does and where, for the people who had never heard of it. > **People search for what you do, not who you are. Then they choose you because of who you are. Your online presence has to do both.** ## Six things any small business owner can use tomorrow Between the stories, Gerald dropped in some of the most practical selling advice I have heard in a long time. None of it needs a budget. 1. **Put your phone number where people can see it.** He puts his on his public profiles. The risk of the odd prank call is tiny compared with the upside of one new client who picks up the phone. Most small businesses make themselves far too hard to contact. 2. **Trust your customers more than your accountant does.** At Ratners he introduced a 30-day money-back guarantee. The accountants warned it would be abused. It wasn't. Customers were overwhelmingly honest, and the guarantee brought in more business than it cost. 3. **Treat "no" as progress.** His view is that the average customer says no four times before they say yes. Most people give up after the first one. 4. **Sell the bear skin before you shoot the bear.** He pre-sold memberships to his health club before it was finished. Demand first, then build. 5. **Let scarcity do some of the work.** When something is nearly gone, people want it more. Be honest about limited availability rather than pretending you can take on anyone at any time. 6. **Go direct.** Around half of his speaking work now comes to him directly rather than through agents, and he expects that to keep rising. Fewer middlemen, faster payment, no commission. The internet made that possible, but only because people can find him. > **"Sell the bear skin before you shoot the bear."** Gerald Ratner, on pre-selling his health club On speaking, which he says is the most enjoyable and best-paid thing he does, his advice was just as simple. Don't rush. Talk as if you are speaking to one person. And never open with a joke you found on the internet. He has watched plenty of chief executives kill a room in the first minute that way. > **The average customer says no four times before they say yes. Most businesses give up after the first.** ## Mistakes do not have to define you Gerald Ratner made one of the most famous mistakes in British business history. For more than 30 years his name has been shorthand for getting it badly wrong. And yet the man sitting across the table from me was sharp, generous with what he knows, and very, very funny. The mistake is part of his story. It is not the whole of it. What defined him was what he did next: owning it, facing it, and building again. Most of us will never make a mistake on that scale. But we all have our version. The launch that flopped. The hire that went wrong. The website you spent good money on that never brought in a single enquiry. The temptation is to hide those things and hope nobody notices. Gerald's life is a pretty good argument for doing the opposite. Thank you, Gerald, for your time and your honesty. And thank you, Hutton, for saying "let's just ask him". > **Your worst mistake is part of your story. 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