ShoeString Startup

This post of part of my life story as a Serial Entrepreneur.

You can read the other parts of the series here:

A Serial Entrepreneur is Born!

My First Real Business Blossoms.

I was out of cash and burned out. I was also starting to get sick, although I didn’t know it then.

The purchasing agent (My angel from the last post), had bailed me out, and I had payroll for another two weeks. I need to go sell a large order everyday to pull out of the cash crunch. My top salesperson had lots of orders in the wings, but nothing large pending for the next week, and we were hanging on, week by week.

Only thirty-something years old and I was ready to sell, to get out of business. Sell, close, move on to something more creative. (I didn’t know then how to keep the process fun and stop the burn out),

Now I look back and see how it was all part of my learning process. I’ve had lots of lessons about cash, but also lessons about business and about life – trust, betrayal, growth and loss. I’m a bit wiser now. I’ve learned some lessons along the way about cash flow, hiring, marketing. I’ve been forced to fire people, lay off people, and have had a business partner die. Once I was sued for sexual harassment by a guy who came on to me! (The case was dismissed but boy, what a hassle).

Business isn’t always pretty. It can be a cruel place to learn how to manage money – and also stress.

Early one morning sometime around 1990 my computer went down at the office. The thing crashed with all my invoices, customer records, purchase orders. I knew enough to have a tape backup – even in those days I was backing up every day and taking a copy home with me at night. I drove home the thirty minutes to retrieve the back up and Beth, my assistant, called my trusty computertechy and to come restore all the records. No one at the office could get any work done. They were looking for handwritten notes with phone numbers, guessing about which orders to ship, and the delivery person was just hanging around waiting for us to get back up.

Needless to say all I could think about was people sitting around for half a day when I’d only managed to keep them hired at all!

An hour later I arrived with the tape and it took only minutes for Roger, our computer wizard, to whisper. “The tape is blank”.

Uh, sorry, you could repeat that? Blank?

It is a wonder I didn’t get a speeding ticket on my second drive home that day. A weeks worth of back up tapes went in my car. Everything I had. The safe was empty.

I’m sure you’ve guessed by now that all the tapes were blank. Everything. Sometime in the last few weeks our tape backup and stopped working, and I didn’t have a clue. The problem was, the tapes hadn’t just not tapped over the old backup, they had managed to erase everything on them first! So I had 5 blank tapes – one which should have a been a complete backup completed every Friday and all the incremental daily backups done during the week. (I’m not the only one who has had this problem!)

After a quick crying stint in the bathroom I emerged, almost calm, and asked about my options.

Roger had managed to find an old tape that worked – but it was a couple of months old. Almost useless really.
Did I want to restore that or send the computer off to a lab to see if I could get anything retrieved. That would take at least a week and cost a thousand dollars. (remember, this was 1990).

So, lets look at this situation objectively.

I had no money.
Payroll was completed for two weeks – but then payroll taxes would be due.
Customer owed money, but I didn’t know from who or when. Everything was on the computer.

My stress level had been high before the day began. Now all I could do was laugh.

Could it get any worse? Well, you know how God works….

The next day I got a notice from the IRS……..