There is a strange moment that happens in the middle of a corporate collapse. Everything feels like it is happening all at once, yet nothing makes sense.
People cling to optimism because the alternative feels too big to confront. Advice splinters, messages conflict, and leaders freeze. And then, sometimes, the business goes under anyway.
The organisation I was part of did not survive. I did. And so did Chris and Joe. All three of us worked at the 79th Group during its collapse. We each saw different failures up close and took different lessons from the chaos, but the outcome was the same: three senior leaders forced to rebuild from the ground up. The lessons from those months were sharper and more honest than anything a leadership book or seminar could ever offer. They shaped our thinking, our standards, and ultimately the creation of Arx Nova.
Our recent feature on TheBusinessDesk.com was more than PR. It marked the point where something difficult in our past became something valuable for other leaders facing crises of their own.
You can read it here:
Specialists launch new crisis management advisory business | TheBusinessDesk.com
The truth about collapse that no one talks about
When a business starts failing, people imagine drama: screens flashing red, journalists knocking, phones ringing nonstop. The reality is far quieter and far more dangerous. A little less clarity every week. A little more confusion in the boardroom. Different advisers pulling in different directions. Leaders are trying to project confidence while privately losing control. By the time the crisis becomes visible externally, the damage is usually done. By the time people admit what is really happening, the available options have already narrowed.
The three of us saw that first-hand. We watched good people try to steer through confusion without a unified plan. We saw legal, financial, operational and reputational issues all collide, while the response remained fragmented. We saw the consequences of leadership being forced to make critical decisions without alignment, structure, or coherent direction. You do not walk away from that unchanged. You take the lessons, and you build something better.
The human side of collapse is often ignored
One thing leadership teams consistently underestimate is how sensitive their people are to early instability. Employees usually know something is wrong long before anyone at the top is prepared to say it out loud. You see it in a thousand small ways: meetings shift tone, rumours travel faster than facts, faces tighten, decisions slow down, and priorities drift without explanation.
At that point, the wider team is not looking for perfection. They are looking for three things: control, honesty, and unity. When they do not get them, the fallout begins quietly. The first people leave by choice, handing in their notice because uncertainty feels worse than change. The next group stay physically but quietly check out mentally, waiting for the inevitable. By the time the leadership team notices the cultural damage, organisational confidence is already gone.
I saw that. So did Chris. So did Joe. Once internal trust fractures, the crisis becomes twice as hard to contain externally. This is why clarity and alignment matter so much in the early stages of any crisis. Employees do not expect leaders to have all the answers. They simply want leaders to stop pretending everything is fine and take control. When leadership hesitates, the organisation begins to hollow itself out from the inside.
Why that experience shaped Arx Nova
When the three of us built Arx Nova, we did it with a shared conviction born from lived experience: a crisis cannot be navigated through fragmented advice. It requires one plan, one team, and one point of leadership. Individually, we brought different expertise. I brought two decades of crisis communications and reputation management. Chris brought legal clarity, governance discipline, and structural oversight. Joe brought operational control, financial rigour, and the ability to restore order in complex environments.
What united us was having lived through the same collapse, each from a different angle. The same pattern kept reappearing: too many advisers, not enough alignment, no single point of truth, and far too much time wasted reconciling opinions that should have been unified from the start. Arx Nova was built deliberately to remove exactly that problem. We deploy quickly. We take control. We stabilise the organisation and give leadership back the clarity they have lost. No noise, no ego, no competing viewpoints slowing the response. Just a calm, senior, fully integrated crisis leadership team.
The difference between surviving and not
After twenty years in communications, one thing has become very clear: every crisis has a turning point. Some businesses recover, some do not, but the difference is rarely luck. Survival depends on the speed and quality of decisions made in the earliest stages. It depends on honesty, structure, and the ability to align quickly, and it depends on whether leadership has the right support around the table when the pressure hits.
At The 79th Group, the business did not survive. The three of us did. What we built afterwards is the difference.
Starting again, with purpose
Arx Nova was not created as a reaction to the past. It was created as a solution to the problems we witnessed inside it. We built a senior only model because junior resource has no place in a crisis. We built an integrated model because crises are never single issue events. We committed to rapid deployment because time lost is value lost. And we built it because we know exactly what it feels like to be inside an organisation that is spinning out of control.
The collapse we lived through did not define us, what we built afterwards did. Arx Nova exists to give other leaders the clarity, structure, and control that we once needed ourselves. The experience was difficult, but it taught us the most important truth in crisis management: businesses rarely fail because they lack talent; they fail because they run out of clarity, leadership, and time. Our job is to give them all three back.
Who’s behind this post?
Simon Larkin
Director & Co-Founder
Simon Larkin is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and a Chartered Marketer. As Co-Founder of Arx Nova, he brings over 20 years of experience in crisis communications and marketing. Simon works with leadership teams to manage reputational risk, control the narrative, and restore stakeholder confidence during periods of uncertainty.
