What happened to the author’s company five years ago?

Five years ago, I had to make a big decision. At that time, I was working for a small engineering company. However, things were not going very well for the company and it was losing money. One day, the boss told us that the company was out of business. We were all unemployed. That lunch time we went to the pub as usual. We were all very depressed. Of course, we talked about the problem. Then the landlord of the pub heard the news. He said, "Why don’t you buy the company?" At first we all laughed and then we started to discuss it properly. We knew the problems. The company had lost a lot of customers because it hadn’t developed new products, but finally we decided to go for it. So we bought the company. The first few years were very difficult. But we worked hard and we had a bit of luck. We began to im-prove 3 years ago. Since then we have done pretty well. Last year we took on 4 new people. And so far we have taken on another ten.