Back to the Black

Michael MacMahon wrote his first book, "Back to the Black: how to become debt-free and stay that way", as a result of the lessons he learned the hard way, during a brush with bankruptcy in the late 1990s.

Before that happened, he’d spent most of his 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. He then had an 8- year spell running his own training consultancy firm. Later he worked as a fundraiser and media spokesman in the charity sector.

The root cause of Michael’s debt problem was the fact that the costs of running his business gradually started to exceed the business’s income; a gap that he ignored at first and then, increasingly, began to fund on credit. By the time he realised that the problem would not go away, and the credit started to run out, the hole he had dug for himself was deep. At the lowest point he was close to bankruptcy. However, he managed to find alternative solutions and eventually got himself “back to the black”. The story of those experiences, and what he learned as a result, forms the core of this book. The information contained in it will be of value to anyone with debt problems, whether business debts or personal debts or both.

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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, presenter and public speaker and is also an actor and voiceover. He has two daughters, of whom he is ridiculously proud.