This goes until April, it started in late january, and it is pure torture on a daily basis. Now for some reason our owner has agreed to let a "workout guy" named Joe something or other come in on a weekly basis and do a weekly P&L on a piece of 11"x14" yellow paper???? I am sitting in the room supplying him numbers and he's looking at me like I am some antichrist! But everytime he left with his $800.00 check in hand , his numbers were showing that we were clearly making a profit. Now, not as big as we thought but we weren't losing money!!! Which was my contention all along. Even if everything went wrong the year before with waste, mismanaged production, throwing away packaging materials, whatever? I could only come up with a worst case scenario, that we wasted $480,000. That means everything went wrong, which it didn't, but for arguments sake let's take 50% of that. Ok, that is $240,000 we wasted on inefficiencies. Fine, I could live with that, I couldn't live with the fact that, what that means is there is still almost $1 million unaccounted for. I was at a loss.
I wrapped my head around this for months but then I realized, whether it was a computer glitch, which I swear to this day it was, or an errant entry, which means a whole lot more, I knew we could turn a profit. This is when I started thinking, this guy could close down the business no problem, and who could blame him, or maybe, just maybe, he would sell it to me!!
But there was just one problem with that theory, I had absolutely no money, I just bought a house and put pretty much all of our savings into it. My bonus, my wife's money everything. I had to find a way to not only finance and buy this business, I had to find a way to convince my boss to sell it to me! It was the biggest challenge I had ever faced, but my wife was behind me and I had some friend's in the industry that were sort of behind me. I don't know, it kind of what back to my uncle in Virginia telling me when I was 15, "if you ever get the opportunity to work for yourself, jump at it, just know what you are risking", he was a Harvard Grad so I kind of took his advice to heart.
But this was a BIG jump and a semi risky complicated jump. I would first have to negotiate with my current boss, then have the bank agree to the terms, then sign a forbearance agreement with them, which ties me up six ways to Sunday, and oh by the way, it had to be a stock sale, which means I am responsible for all the debts the previous owner owes!!! Would you do that, in a 100% privately held company, where there was no disclosure? Suicide right? You bet, and I didn't even blink for some strange reason. I was compelled!!
I wrapped my head around this for months but then I realized, whether it was a computer glitch, which I swear to this day it was, or an errant entry, which means a whole lot more, I knew we could turn a profit. This is when I started thinking, this guy could close down the business no problem, and who could blame him, or maybe, just maybe, he would sell it to me!!
But there was just one problem with that theory, I had absolutely no money, I just bought a house and put pretty much all of our savings into it. My bonus, my wife's money everything. I had to find a way to not only finance and buy this business, I had to find a way to convince my boss to sell it to me! It was the biggest challenge I had ever faced, but my wife was behind me and I had some friend's in the industry that were sort of behind me. I don't know, it kind of what back to my uncle in Virginia telling me when I was 15, "if you ever get the opportunity to work for yourself, jump at it, just know what you are risking", he was a Harvard Grad so I kind of took his advice to heart.
But this was a BIG jump and a semi risky complicated jump. I would first have to negotiate with my current boss, then have the bank agree to the terms, then sign a forbearance agreement with them, which ties me up six ways to Sunday, and oh by the way, it had to be a stock sale, which means I am responsible for all the debts the previous owner owes!!! Would you do that, in a 100% privately held company, where there was no disclosure? Suicide right? You bet, and I didn't even blink for some strange reason. I was compelled!!
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