Yaneek Page | 7 signs it’s time to quit your small business

Is This You?

It’s the start of a new month and your business account is empty.

In June, you barely managed to pay your staff.

The rent was late.

It was a struggle to pay the JPS electricity bill and your suppliers.

When the dust settled, you couldn’t pay yourself a full salary and only managed to cover the primary personal bills.

In fact, you haven’t drawn a salary in months.

Though the outside world sees a ‘boss’ calling the shots and running your own shop, on the inside you know:

The stress.

The strain.

The sleepless nights.

The heavy weight of keeping the lights on and appearances up.

It wasn’t always this hard. You didn’t go out on a limb to start your own business just to end up broke and broken.

Yet, here you are, asking the question you’re afraid to answer: Is it time to pivot, push harder, or just walk away?

The bravest thing you can do is confront the signs staring you in the face once you know what to look for.

Here are seven critical signs it might be time to close the chapter on your small business:

1. You’re no longer a going concern

In accounting, ‘going concern’ is the biggest survival signal. It’s the assumption that a company is financially stable and has the ability to operate for the foreseeable future, at least the next 12 months, without needing to liquidate its assets or significantly curtail its operations.

Under IAS 1 (International Accounting Standards), a business must be evaluated as a going concern. Now, if your business consistently struggles with payroll, hasn’t paid you in months, can’t service basic debts, and relies on emergency loans, overdraft, or credit cards to survive, it may no longer meet this standard. Once you’re patching leaks in your ship every month with no lifeboat in sight, it’s a signal to step back and reassess everything.

2. You’re borrowing to survive, not to grow

Debt in business can be helpful and necessary once it’s being used to scale and invest or stabilise cash flows as you pivot. But if you’re constantly borrowing and leveraging unearned income to cover daily expenses or past-due invoices, then you are trapped in a financial spiral.

Entrepreneurs are especially vulnerable in Jamaica, where high interest rates and currency risk make borrowing costly and volatile. Debt must be your bridge not burial ground. If you need a loan every month, you need to exit the stage.

3. Your profit margins have disappeared, and you have done everything right

This is especially touchy in this age of increased tariffs and tightening consumer spending. If you have optimised your costs, haggled with suppliers, and secured the best credit terms, promoting the heck out of your business on social media, but you’re still only scraping by, or even worse, operating at a loss – it is time.

That’s your red flag of a fundamental structural mismatch between your business model and Jamaica’s limited market capacity. For example, if your product depends on frequent foreign exchange purchases and your customers can’t absorb those price increases, you’re squeezed at both ends.

4. Your target market is too small for sustainable growth

In a few weeks we should learn the results of the 2022 census according to the latest release from Statin. This new information should be very helpful for entrepreneurs and business owners. Notwithstanding, it is unlikely that we will see a major shift in population size.

If your focus is exclusively Jamaica and your total available market is well below three million before you even factor in age, income, geography, or interest in your offering, then you could plateau fast, particularly if the competition is fierce. Unfortunately, without access to reliable export channels or digital scaling, many businesses become trapped in low-growth ceilings.

Therefore, if you’ve already tapped your entire viable customer base and can’t expand profitably, it’s a strategic dead end.

5. You’re burnt out and no longer growing as a founder

This is a big one that I often hear entrepreneurs complain about. They feel like they hit a brick wall. Once you’ve hit a roadblock emotionally, financially, and physically then you’re not just running on fumes, you have become a liability to your own business.

Burnout robs the business of vision. It clouds decision-making, drains creativity, and increases risk exposure. This is especially significant for businesses that don’t operate with a governing board to provide strategic oversight and guidance. Worse, if you’ve stopped learning, networking, or evolving, your business may stagnate around you.

6. Your customers are getting poorer

Imagine you’ve priced your product and services fairly and customers want it, need it, or better yet, they love it. Yet your sales are slow because most can no longer afford what you offer. They consume less and visit less, trying to stretch their dollar.

Jamaica is classified as an upper middle-income country, according to the World Bank, but our per capita income is on the lower side of this category at under US$8,000. For context, Singapore’s per capita GDP is US$92,000 and the United States’ is US$89,000.

In Jamaica, median household income remains low, and consumers are extremely price-sensitive especially post-pandemic. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but a great product with too few buyers is still a failed business model. If the economics don’t support sustainable demand, it’s time to explore new markets or new ideas.

7. You’ve outgrown the dream

It is possible to outgrow a business. Perhaps you started when you were younger, when market conditions were different, or during COVID. Maybe the business gave you independence when you needed it or capitalised on a new opportunity.

However, both you and circumstances have changed. You have more responsibility, less energy, or you need a new challenge. It’s possible that you could be craving stability, in the midst of the constant chaos that is entrepreneurship. Remember that you don’t owe any version of yourself a lifelong commitment to the same idea. It’s okay to change!

Business exit is not failure. It is strategy. The fact is that walking away is often the only way to make room for the next, better thing.

One love!

Yaneek Page is the programme lead for Market Entry USA, and a certified trainer in entrepreneurship.yaneek.page@gmail.com