Backstory:

TL;DR: I've gained a lot of experience working for 5 years at one startup company, but it eventually failed. The company is gone and the owner MIA.

When I left sixth-form college I didn't want to start a degree straight away, so when I met this guy who knew a guy who was setting up a publishing company and needed a 'Techie' I thought why not.

It was a very small operation, he sent mailings to schools, waited for orders to start arriving, then ordered a short run of the textbooks to be printed, stuck them in an envelope posted them out.

I was initially going to help him set up a computerized system for recording orders and payments, printing labels, really basic stuff and I threw it together in Access in a couple of weeks. He also wanted to start taking orders online, so I set up a website and a paypal business account.

While I was doing this, I was also helping to do the day-to-day running of things, taking phone orders, posting products, banking cheques, ordering textbooks, designing mailings, filing end of year accounts, hiring extra staff, putting stamps on envelopes. I learned so much about things I didn't even know I needed to learn about.

Things were pretty good, when I started we sold about £10,000 worth of textbooks and by my 4th year there we sold £250,000 worth of text books.

Things were looking good, but we had a problem. Our best selling product had peaked and sales started to fall sharply, we introduced add on products through the website to boost sales which helped for a while, but we had simply saturated the market.

Our plan was to enter the US with our star product and follow the same, slightly modified, plan as before. We setup a 1-866 number and had the calls forwarded to our UK offices. We contracted a fulfillment company, shipped over a few thousand textbooks, had a mailing printed and mailed, then sat by the phones and waited.

Needless to say, it didn't work. We tried a few other things, at home and in the US, but nothing helped.

We expanded in the good times, moving into bigger offices, taking on staff to do administrative and dispatch work, but now cashflow was becoming a problem and things got tougher. We did the only thing we could and scaled things right back, the offices went, the admin staff went, I stopped taking a wage and started working from home.

Nothing helped. The business was wound up about about 2 years ago. In the end it turned out that the owner had built up considerable debt at the start of business and had not paid them off during good years, which left him in a difficult position when cashflow had started to dry up.

I haven't been able to contact the owner since I found out.

It took me a while to get back on my feet after that, but I'm now at University and doing a Computer Science degree.

How do I show the experience I have without having to get into all the gory details of what happened?