The tale of the demise of William Ball will be told whenever members of the kitchen industry gather round the campfire to tell sad stories.But unlike all the best fairy tales it's not quite so clear-cut who exactly are the villains and who are the heroes. 

Is acting chief executive Anthony Pratt the bad guy? Did he muster the William Ball board to stage a revolution and oust the heroic managing director Terry Ball, bringing the castle crumbling down?

Or did the heroic Anthony Pratt ride into the kingdom on a white horse and try to save it from the marauding army of the recession only to fail thanks to the machinations of bad guy Terry Ball?

We've got both sides of the story in our coverage [here and here] and the only real conclusion is that the truth is probably somewhere in between. What is clear is that one of the major factors contributing to the company's failure was a basic lack of communication. 

Letting bad situations get worse usually drives boardroom upheavals and dramas, and in this case it had the worst possible conclusion. But whatever was going on in the boardroom at William Ball, the most serious lack of communication was with the only people that could trade it out of trouble - its retailers. 

The biggest complaint from every former William Ball retailer I've spoken to is simply this - "why didn't they tell us they were in so much trouble?" It hasn't been about who's to blame and who should've listened to whom within the company, it's "we had no idea they had got so bad."

This lack of communication with customers is what will leave a bad taste in the mouth as so many of them will be left trying to complete orders. If they'd have been brought into the discussions much earlier, they might have been able to help by adjusting their own cash flow to help William Ball.

Neville Johnson at Johnson & Johnson also needed a CVA (company voluntary agreement) to get his company out of trouble, but it worked and his own legendary candidness about his predicament must have engendered faith in his customers.

Same goes for distributor Mark II. It only survived the demise of its biggest customer, MFI, by hard graft, good emergency planning and the goodwill its customers and staff had for the management of Nick Hopkinson.Every fairy tale should have a clear-cut moral and here's the William Ball one - if your business is in trouble, be as honest as you can, as soon as you can, with your customers and suppliers. You might be surprised how much they're willing to help.