In this monologue, Charlotte Kemp revisits her first book, I’m Not Afraid of the F Word: 50 Lessons Learned on the Way to Business Failure, which she wrote during the collapse of her own business as both therapy and a factual record of her experience. She explains why the book remains relevant in 2026, sharing an emotional update and two stories from the new introduction. The first story recounts a reader who bought the book, used its lessons to ask critical questions about a dream business, and ultimately avoided a disastrous purchase—creating an "unheralded void" where a potential crisis never materialized. Kemp then introduces her leadership concept of the "unheralded void," describing it as the invisible, preventative impact of wise decision‑making that averts crises and therefore goes uncelebrated. She argues that both entrepreneurs and leaders can benefit from recognizing and creating such voids. The talk concludes with a call to visit her website to obtain the book.
Chapters
During some admin housekeeping the other day, I came across the document for my very first book. I already guess the very first one I'll admit to writing. It's called I'm Not Afraid of the F Word, and that F word, people tried to guess what it was and could never say the 2 Fs, the one that we're thinking of and the other one being failure. So the subtitle is 50 Lessons Learned on the Way to Business Failure, and I spoke very openly about the mistakes that I had made that led to the loss of my business, having to retrench family members, and ending up under huge financial obligations for years afterwards. I wrote the book partly as therapy, but also as a record of what I had gone through, because I didn't want to wait until I had somehow recovered in the future and then go back and try and remember what those experiences were. So I wrote it right in the middle of all of the meetings with lawyers and people that I owed money to and staff. And it was a very traumatic time. So as I looked at the book recently, I wondered, you know, if it is still relevant. And I glanced over the chapter titles and they're still relevant today. And then I updated the document with an introduction for 2026, and I told 2 stories in that introduction. And as I was telling— writing the stories, I started crying again. And not so much about what I had gone through, but compassion for people who do, who are going through business loss or the loss of their financial foundation in all the turmoil of the world. And entrepreneurs and self-employed people are really at risk for making some of the mistakes I made, but also for the various variables in the world that can upset them. So I'd like to tell one story, and hopefully I can tell it without crying. After I published the book, I was going to many business networking meetings and any organization that would give me an opportunity to speak about the book. And I would speak and sell a few and be able to buy groceries and fuel on the way home. But one particular afternoon, Friday afternoon, somebody phoned me and said, I need a copy of your book. And so I was starting to tell her where she could find it, or I could post it. And she said, no, she needs it day. So we met that afternoon in the parking lot behind a fast food restaurant, and she gave me the money, I gave her the book, and she was very brusque and businesslike, and she said, thank you very much, and she took off. And I bought my kids a treat on the way home with the book money. And then sometime on Monday, she sends me an email, and the email starts off with, I was very disappointed. Now, no author wants to hear that, especially when it's such a personal story. But I read through the email, and what What she was saying was there was a business, a going concern that she wanted to buy. It was her dream business. This is something she had always wanted to have. And she'd had a meeting that Friday with the business broker and with the current owners of this business and asked a whole lot of questions. And she was so eager to buy this business, but she had this little niggle. So she asked for time to consider. And she remembered my book because she had heard about it from somewhere and bought the book and read it over the weekend. and went back on Monday morning with new questions. And the business broker and current owners could not answer those questions to her satisfaction, and she realized that had she bought this business, it would have failed and it would have been a huge burden on her and her family financially and emotionally and all the other ways that we experience when we lose a business. So she decided not to buy the business. And so her disappointment was that her fantasy wasn't coming true, but her reality was that she had just dodged a really serious bullet. She had asked the right kind of questions and made a decision not to do something that she wanted to do because she'd learned the lessons from what I had shared. And that's really important. In my recent work, when I look at leadership, I've written about a concept I call the unheralded void. And the unheralded void is when a leader has the insight, experience, wisdom, to make decisions, to make things happen so that other things don't happen, so that there is not a crisis. And at the end of that leader's term, they're feted for all the things that they did right, and people will analyze everything that they can see that's visible, but they can't see what didn't happen because that leader acted with wisdom. It's a void where a crisis, a scandal might have happened, it didn't happen, and it can't be heralded, it can't be awarded because nobody knows about it. And that unheralded void is such a powerful thing that certain leaders get to experience when they get leadership right. And I thought about that, and I thought about this woman, and I realized that she had this unheralded void in her life, that something bad didn't happen because she had learned from somebody else. And that's why I wrote the book, and that's why I think the book is still relevant. So if you'd like to have a look, it's on my personal website, charlottekemp.co.za, and it's called I'm Not Afraid of the F Word.
