About the author

I wrote my first book, Back to the Black, as a result of the lessons I learned the hard way, during a brush with bankruptcy in the late 1990s.

Before that happened, I’d spent most of my formative years working in the chemical industry, including British Oxygen and Unilever, ending up as Managing Director of the UK subsidiary of a Swedish group. I then had a seven-year spell running my own training consultancy firm. Later I worked as a fundraiser and media spokesman in the charity sector.

The root cause of my debt problem was the fact that the costs of running my business gradually started to exceed the business’s income; a gap that I ignored at first and then, increasingly, began to fund on credit. By the time I realised that the problem would not go away, and the credit started to run out, the hole I had dug for myself was deep. To clear the debts in full would have taken longer than the creditors would accept. At the lowest point I was close to bankruptcy and was advised to take that route. However, I managed to find alternative solutions and eventually got myself “back to the black”.

The story of those experiences, and what I learned as a result, forms the core of this book. The information contained in it will, I hope, be of value to anyone with debt problems, whether business debts or personal debts or both.

Editor’s note

Before writing ‘Back to the Black’, Michael MacMahon wrote many technical and trade journal articles and handbooks as part of his work in the chemical industry; his publications included a technical handbook that was published in a dozen languages and is still available 20 years later.

Michael lives in Bristol, UK. He works these days as a writer, voice actor and presenter. He has two daughters, of whom he is ridiculously proud.

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