'Tis the season.
First, a few caveats: I'm not writing this to vilify any of the many Sob Stories that have been posted, real or otherwise. I'm not writing this to garner sympathy, links, cash, good wishes, or props. And though my Sob Story is a pretty darn good one, I'm not writing it to top anyone, or steal anybody's thunder, or pretend I have some Brilliant Unknown Truth that everybody else hasn't figured out.
If anyone is so moved to offer good wishes, please put them in your community's food pantry or Toys-for-Tots bin at the bank. Put some coins into whatever can is held out for you.
I'm only writing this because I think it can help at least someone. It seems like during this historic economic disaster, a lot of people are having one-of-those-days more often than anybody should. For my family, 2005 was one-of-those-years.
It all started when my wife brought up an idea over dinner. "Let's open our own salon." she said. It was late 2002, and she was a very skilled and brilliant hair salon manager. I was a newly-graduated MBA with a strong yen for entrepreneurship and a bigger-than-average willingness to take risks.
I mean, my personal motto was "That sounds ridiculous. I'm in." Still is.
We had a house, no children, and few bills. Stellar credit. So we looked into options. Did we want to open our own little thing for a small SBA loan, or get involved with a big deal? We looked into real estate, and learned immediately that if you wanted a decent (visible to traffic) retail space, you had to be a big deal. In short, we got involved with a franchising concern that was brand new itself, based on bringing affordable haircoloring services to "the great middle class" as the founder described it.
At the time, we didn't realize the middle class was about to die.
I harbor not one shred of bitterness for the organization we got involved with. They were smart, experienced, dedicated, optimistic, honest people who just wanted to be on the ground floor of the next big thing. So did I.
So we got some good friends as partners, wrote a business plan, developed projections going out three years, put up the house, got a huge SBA loan, found a space, hired architects, got the permits, built the store, arranged vendors, hired 10 stylists, trained, marketed, kept books, and hit the ground running on November 3, 2003. I was up until midnight the night before putting up signage.
All of the exciting, glamorous things people think about entrepreneurs, are true. We were living it. I've paddled whitewater and skied backcountry, but there isn't a bigger rush than being out there in the economy with your name on the door.
And what was the point of building a business without a family to share it with? So while all of this was going on, we spent a lot of time with the fertility doctors. We learned about IVF, ICSI, CF, Fragile-X and a few other things that few people should ever want to know about.
Late 2003 and 2004 went pretty well (despite the obvious November outcome). We hired more stylists and continued growing the business. We were getting tantalizingly close to that breakeven number. We supported Toys-for-Tots and raised money for the tsunami aftermath. We did events. We even got creative enough to sponsor a group of four extremely talented female vocalists.
In spring 2005, my wife became pregnant with twins. Congrats were given and champagne was popped (non-alcoholic, of course).
While the salon was open, I did everything I could to pay the home bills. I temped for awhile and finally took a full-time job doing something I hated. But keeping the salon open was the most important thing.
A funny thing about that. The worst call I could have received from my wife was "We're all in the parking lot. The building is on fire. We're out of business." A doctor could call to tell me I had cancer, or that I had to lose an arm, and I would have thanked him. Nothing would compare with losing the business.
The winter of 04-05 was tough. You may remember that was the first year we started to really see heating oil and gasoline costs rise above $2 and stay there. The real estate bubble was also heating up. A lot of customers started to lag their visits from every 6 weeks to 8, then 8 to 10 and 12.
One customer told us she had just refinanced her house, and was using the money to get her hair done, get some furniture, and go on a cruise. That's probably when I knew that the end was coming.
We started financing our product purchases more "strategically". We slowed down the rent payments. We started using credit cards to make payroll.
Yes, it's true, companies do that. To either bridge the gap or postpone the inevitable.
Finally, in July 2005, we announced that we would close. Our twelve stylists were given their customer lists and our effusive references. We also helped them move to some nearby salons. Good stylists, which every one of them was, can land easily if they have a good book.
The banks, landlords, and vendors came calling, of course. We got a good lawyer and declared Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. This was just after congress voted to change the law to make it much harder to do. Before the new law took effect, we had our declaration in hand and were using it to tell the creditors where to go stick it.
Really, once you declare, that's what you're supposed to do. Give them the docket number and law firm contact and they can't call you anymore.
In September, the judge made it official. We were cleared of liability on all except that we were willing to pay, like the car loan and the bank credit line. They closed that anyway after we paid it off. The house was in foreclosure but we had time.
Then sometime before Halloween 2005, my wife got up in the middle of the night and said something was wrong with the twins. She was only 20 weeks along. We headed for the hospital where we were told that she may have a miscarriage. Labor had not started but they admitted her for several days and put her on antibiotics. I built a downstairs bedroom at home, where she stayed while we hoped everything would turn out okay.
It was not to be. At 21-1/2 weeks, we were back at the hospital where the twins were born alive, without lungs, to live for about one hour. I never cried like that in my life, not before or since. We returned to the house to decide what to do with all the baby toys, clothes and supplies we had collected.
The proprietor of the funeral home told me the babies were waiting for me in heaven. Was I supposed to say, "No thanks, I'm an atheist"? Of course not.
By the time the spring of 2006 arrived, when we sold the house to avoid foreclosure, we were numb. The house that had been in my family for three generations, was just a pile of wood to me. Nothing would ever bother us again. I'm a much nicer guy than I ever was before. Heavy traffic makes me chuckle. Today my marriage and even my friendship with our former business partners are stronger than ever.
My lesson: Very little matters.
So what you're going through, I know it. I've been there. I'm not going to offer an admonition to network to get a job, ride your bike more, tell you this is just a cycle, or tell you how to "stretch your holiday dollar." I offer only sympathy. That's all.
No matter what happens, that damned sun will come up again. I know it sounds like a stupid song, but it will. You can't stop it. Just watch.