Tweet
A Remembrance of Things Past...
This is going to be one of those Pekka-ish posts – very long, very self-absorbed… as a matter of fact, I will likely outdo the Master for this is a multi-parter already, exceeding the word limit by a bit. However, with the judgment this past week I think we’re coming to the end of what is easily the worst year of my life, even if you don’t count losing a friend, and my beloved dog, being sued, my personal near-bankruptcy, and my fathers heart failure all in the last two months.
It’s long. Sorry ‘bout that, but I did edit out quite a bit. I'm sure what's left is wild-eyed and hysterical enough for y'all to get the point.
The Death of CRG
It began… well, it began long before I got there, but I was there to catch the full force of the decisions made by the other co-owners of CRG:
1. One co-owner was irreducibly lazy. If you dissected him to the smallest part possible, he would have lazy quarks. The quantum vacuum that makes up the spaces between his quarks is smooth as a lazy sea. I was told this, by everybody who knew, but ignored it anyway.
2. One co-owner was congenitally pessimistic. I could live with this, figuring his pessimism sprung from losing so much business – down to 1 million directories when I took over (which ain’t shiite).
Neither co-owner 1 or 2 were particularly imaginative, but they seemed devoted to the company and my belief was that with some more business giving the company some hope that they would improve.
3. One co-owner was exuberant and positive, plus he did financials. I liked his attitude, but there was a single thing that he insisted on that made it near impossible, in my opinion, for CRG to succeed.
I came on board. Improved some operations (routing and verification), tried to inspire and lead my co-owners/workers, started an entire marketing effort including website www.crgdelivery.com (if it’s still up), a targeted mailing/call campaign with professionally designed flyers and brochures, and increased the number of books on the schedule from 1.07 million to 2.75 million in 9 months (which still ain’t ****, but it began paying a salary). I was responsible for a large number of operations, and I had to tend to a number of field projects after I fired one of CRG’s two field managers for insubordination to a client (I was pretty smooth about it too, considering).
I was easily working 60, 80 hours a week – I would come home around 6:00pm, play with Sophie for a few hours, and go back for 3-5 more hours of work. If I was on the road, I was doing stuff all the time. We were making progress and while we weren’t rich yet, we had a few potential large things on the horizon, including a distribution in Louisville, KY that could, if it went well, seal the deal on 10 million more books at excellent rates.
The problem, as it is with many small companies, was financing. And had I known that co-owner 3 was going to insist that he would not support any financing on CRG’s part that required his guarantee, I would’ve never gone on board.
For CRG qualified for a quarter/half-million line of credit via their bank – the company itself wasn’t doing so hot then, but it was showing signs of life and growth and did have a good history (CRG got into trouble in the first place because they lost a client that represented 80% of their business). This line of credit would’ve saved the company had we been able to secure it – but one of the co-owners balked at signing it, saying that putting his name on a loan for CRG (the agreement required personal guarantees from any shareholders owning more than 20% of the stock – we each owned 25%) would detract from his ability to finance his other business interests. (He then suggested that I line up a $50,000 personal credit card and give CRG cash advances when needed! CRG had apparently self-financed itself, with the three co-owners having over $100,000 in personal, home-equity debt that they spent in saving the company, keeping it running from 6/2002-9/2003. It was a point of pride for me that they had to put no more of their money in the company… that’s because I was putting my money in.
)
I should've walked right there. I would've taken a $25,000 hit, but I would've saved myself a lot of grief.
That decision not to get the line of credit was pretty much the death knell, though I really didn’t know it at the time and, in fact, thought I could work my way through it. (Of course, the best time to ask for credit is when you don’t need it – why CRG didn’t ask for it when they were flying high in 1999-2002, I don’t know). We had to do something fast: this Louisville job was coming up and we were going to be about $50,000 short by the end of November – something had to happen!
Well… co-owner 2 decided he didn’t want to deal with it anymore and bolted last (2004) July. He was, in large measure the “face” of the company and when he left, and in the manner that he left, dealt CRG’s reputation quite a blow. The fact that we had nearly tripled our business while the salesman (myself) was being distracted by stuff he and co-owner 1 should be taking care of probably didn’t cross his mind.
So, to keep the company going, we had to sell some equity – find a private investor who wouldn’t mind throwing a quarter-million or so at a distribution company, seeing if it would fly – people like that exist, and in larger numbers than you think. We first tried my parents, figuring that CRG could either run as a subsidiary, or be taken over completely. That didn’t work, though it did lead me to reconciling with them. We then met with a local real estate investor here in Knoxville, a guy noted as being valued in the 8 figures. Now he had a pretty good idea, a sort of “outside the box paradigm shift” thing – he pointed out that CRG’s core competency wasn’t in delivering just phone books, but performing saturation deliveries of packages weighing more than four ounces. This re-conceptualizing would allow CRG to pursue a strategy away from phone books and into a larger market – delivering soap and shampoo sample boxes from Colgate, for example. This is where being consumed with the details kills you – this opens yourself up to deals with Fortune 500 companies and you can’t think about it because you’re debating on whether to pay one creditor who will piss off your client if not paid soonest, or paying another creditor who has the ability to shut down an already-going delivery.
Whatever. That’s neither here nor there, what’s important is that we had synergy with this guy: he understood the business and brought some ideas as well as cash to the table. He sold me. And I sold him. Hard.
You see, I had no choice. The most pressing issue from October to December was that the Louisville delivery was a disaster and that CRG had no money to cover an estimated $50-80,000 shortfall by the end of November. With co-owner 2 gone, I depended upon co-owner 1, who is frankly the laziest man I’ve ever met. CRG couldn’t spend its way through the problem as that would make the $50,000 hole increase in size and approach faster, and while I also made two trips to Louisville to talk to the manager, I didn’t have the resources needed to save the delivery.
But… the investor bought it. But he wasn’t stupid – he waited until the very last day, when CRG was gasping its final, dying breath. And I’m not joking – had he not bought CRG, it would’ve had to shut its doors that evening. $4,000 was hitting the bank and there was not a thing behind it.
I had no more money – I had sunk over $50,000 into CRG, giving myself a second mortgage, this on top of a financially disastrous 2002-2003 (during the period that I was subjected to the non-compete and was able to earn no income in my field). The problems with the Louisville delivery and the imminent collapse of the company at large weighed heavily on my soul, a weight I literally felt as my neck, back, and shoulders were contorted so much by stress that there were days which I sat twisted, typing at the computer, my torso oriented away from the keyboard. The headaches were plentiful and nothing could solve them except getting up and thinking about whatever problem was causing the headache – there was no shock when their frequency and intensity started dropping last February.
For those of you who have been there (and I hope none of you have), when your business is failing, and your dreams dying, a never ending complex of problems and issues, schedules and payments, all boiling down to one conclusion – you need MONEY. And in a world seemingly full, where everybody else is awash in it… you can’t get it. It keeps you up at night. You think about it in the shower, in the car, while playing with your kid, while sleeping with your wife – How am I going to arrange things so that the payments come right after the deposits? Is there anybody else I can think of who would be interested in buying into a distribution company, into me? Tomorrow, I need to call our guy in Louisville and talk to him about the bags... which we still need to pay for.
When you internalize everything as I do, it just leaves you racked.
The original co-owners were putting no more money into CRG. They didn’t have it to give, and therefore I couldn’t achieve any other financing other than selling invoices (which is a step above the Mob and a step below pawn shops).
So it seemed until the investor bought CRG. He drove a hard bargain, knowing the company’s position and our personal state of affairs. The shareholders had an agreement both on the terms of the sale and on the direction CRG was to take, but it was harsh – the four of us selling our shares to him at par value, whereupon he will take control of the company. My original $25,000 investment – now worth $500. And not even that, as I was told that my personal expenses on the AMEX bill for the past two months equaled $500, would you sign here please? (Sound familiar?) Mark the day – January 6th, 2005, the day that I lost $24,500 on one investment.
I sold him my stock, got copies of all the agreements and documents (including the notarized, closed certificate and transfer papers) – when I realized just how bad things were getting I made copies of the corporate books and gave them to the other co-owners, telling them it was in their best interest to hold on to them (I then gave the investor the originals - it was his company now). This was the best thing I could’ve done, by far. Nothing beats a signature – nothing.
Because this guy pretty much ****ed CRG in a way that I never expected and was ill-prepared to deal with, both psychologically and emotionally. I had just come off an incredibly grueling 6-9 month period where I watched my efforts to save the company almost fail, finally selling it to a person who could supply us with the financing to allow us some breathing room (You wake up on Monday morning, go to work. You see that you’ll need, say, $17,000 to meet this weeks expenses. You have $0-$12,000 in the bank. Repeat every week, for-****ing-ever. That was my life). My joy and relief on Friday, January 7th was palpable – even though I booked a personal loss of $24,500 the day before, not all was lost – after all, the company was saved. Payroll would continue, there was a new corporate direction, and there were provisions in the agreement for me to regain equity in the new corporate entity, provided certain goals were met. I didn’t have to go through the constant, every-****ing-week worry about payroll, I could finally devote myself to marketing, sales, whatever. I was buoyant with joy – investor was worth $11,000,000! Investor wouldn’t be destroyed if the $100,000+ he will have sunk into CRG turned out to be a bad investment, but that wasn’t the goal in the first place. Suddenly, the last two crappy years seemed all worthwhile.
This feeling lasted three days. Three days.
The investor all of a sudden took the tact: “I bought it, I own it, I’m going to run it”, and so he took control. And I mean TOOK CONTROL – negotiating with our clients, talking to our bankers, opening up a separate checking account for CRG when he ****ed up relations with Bank of America. The first thing he did was tell our largest client (1 million books) that he was going to shut down the on-going delivery unless the client raised the book rate and coughed up the monies that were due upon completion of the delivery – I find this out when the client called me up, asking who the hell investor is and what the hell was he doing??!!? They absolutely freaked, telling me and co-owner 1 that they were going to personally sue us, that they were going to pierce the corporate veil and hold us personally liable. I myself freaked, telling our new investor that his approach was wrong, especially as we were on the final book of a three year contract that is coming up for renewal as soon as this delivery ended. I told him that we haven’t even formally announced the sale of the company to him to all of our employees and clients – his response? “They know now.”
Keeping the client didn’t matter. The investor lived up to his word, insisting he wasn’t going to spend another dime and not doing so, causing our client to pay directly for his delivery and to feel $20k in the hole. The client called me one day about two weeks into this pissing match and asked me if I truly believe that the investor would honor that weeks payroll – after a pause that pretty much answered the question all by itself, I had to answer “no”. CRG wasn’t invited to bid on the new contract.
The Louisville delivery ended pretty much the same way, but worse. CRG got booted from the delivery when the investor called up the client (the very day he bought in) and said he was sending the Louisville manager home, closing down the delivery. To give you an idea of this guys craziness, the investor convinced himself that he could successfully sue the client for putting CRG out of business – even though the investor was the one who caused us to default on the contract, therefore defaulting on most of the final payment. Their attitude was “So? Sue us. That is, if we don’t file first.”
The investors lawyer eventually (I think) disabused him of that notion. I tried, but it didn’t take. Thank God somebody could do it.
Then there was the agreed-upon financing. Rather than having the $50-100,000 in financing, the investor decided to shut down CRG’s accounts for two weeks while he went on missionary work in Costa Rica. Then, while he was down there, he cancelled the original check that he deposited into CRG’s accounts. Even though he continued to negotiate with CRG’s clients while in South America he never mentioned to me that he cancelled the first part of the financing, causing over $20,000 in checks to bounce for, until he decided to stop writing checks, I was happily paying off creditors thinking there was $50,000 behind it.
All those checks bounced.
So CRG had no clients (well, one, but how long would they last? (They lasted one more delivery)). CRG had no money, in fact, we have a bunch of pissed of phone book delivery personnel calling us at work… at home… on our cell phones. Daily. Hourly. “You have 2 hours to perform that wire transfer, or my lawyer is going to file his paperwork – I’m sitting at the computer right now, checking my account.” “Ma’am, I don’t know what to tell you. We sold the company and the guy has destroyed it while freezing our accounts.”… “It’s been 15 minutes since I last called – has that wire-transfer gone through?” “Ma’am? I just tried to call the investor, but he didn’t answer his cell phone. Again. For the 20th time today.” Monday morning at 6:00am, they would call. Saturday evening at 10:00pm, they would call. Thursday night at 1:15am, they would call. I get down on my knees and Thank Og that the phone is in my wife's name, and that her surname is different from mine. They would eat up my minutes leaving long messages, I would eat them up listening to them (at first... after a while you just delete the damn things. I mean, you're not getting paid either so **** them).
I developed a bizarre compulsion to check my cell phone every 30 seconds, scared that I would miss a call, but not really knowing why I was scared because it would’ve been just somebody else calling to yell at me for money. Money that, a week before, I thought was there. I’m still leery of the damned thing, and absolutely will NOT answer a call if it’s from a number I don’t recognize.
We lost ALLTEL with the first bounced check and they invoked a never-used-before clause in the contract about their right to revoke in case of ownership changes. Of course the delivery people called ALLTEL. Many times. Even hourly.
This is one of those things… if you haven’t lived through it, you don’t know what it’s like. The collapse of everything you worked for, the loss of ownership, the assumption of debt. People calling you on your cell phone, wanting money. Clients telling you that they were suing you personally. Your wife, frantic with worry, supporting her husband but concerned over the mounting debt and outraged at the impossibility of the investor situation. (Yes, the man has a name, no, I’m not going to repeat it here). The loss of your dreams, your goals, your image of yourself, of seemingly everything… physical, tangible, financial, intangible… that you worked for 15+ years to create. I’m gonna let you in on a secret – it ****ing sucks. Hard.
There’s a lot more. A lot more, including reconciliation with my parents, and other stuff that I either don’t remember or don’t want to go into this post. Just know this: September 2004-February 2005 was the blackest period of my life, even compared to the past two months, a living hell I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It was bad enough running out of money and watching your business die – selling out to a madman only to have him drive a stake in its heart made it a wrenching experience.
I resigned from CRG in mid-February, though my presence didn’t make a damn bit of difference from mid-January, on. The investor finally put some money in an account that he created, paid off the loudest squawkers, and decided to have nothing to do with me. I know that CRG lost their last client in March but have had no more dealings with them since then, other than one meeting with the other three original co-owners that started with me saying “I am here on advisory capacity only – nothing I say or agree to should be construed with having any effect on the actual decision making process.”
My goals and dreams… reduced to legalistic denials.
It’s long. Sorry ‘bout that, but I did edit out quite a bit. I'm sure what's left is wild-eyed and hysterical enough for y'all to get the point.
The Death of CRG
It began… well, it began long before I got there, but I was there to catch the full force of the decisions made by the other co-owners of CRG:
1. One co-owner was irreducibly lazy. If you dissected him to the smallest part possible, he would have lazy quarks. The quantum vacuum that makes up the spaces between his quarks is smooth as a lazy sea. I was told this, by everybody who knew, but ignored it anyway.
2. One co-owner was congenitally pessimistic. I could live with this, figuring his pessimism sprung from losing so much business – down to 1 million directories when I took over (which ain’t shiite).
Neither co-owner 1 or 2 were particularly imaginative, but they seemed devoted to the company and my belief was that with some more business giving the company some hope that they would improve.
3. One co-owner was exuberant and positive, plus he did financials. I liked his attitude, but there was a single thing that he insisted on that made it near impossible, in my opinion, for CRG to succeed.
I came on board. Improved some operations (routing and verification), tried to inspire and lead my co-owners/workers, started an entire marketing effort including website www.crgdelivery.com (if it’s still up), a targeted mailing/call campaign with professionally designed flyers and brochures, and increased the number of books on the schedule from 1.07 million to 2.75 million in 9 months (which still ain’t ****, but it began paying a salary). I was responsible for a large number of operations, and I had to tend to a number of field projects after I fired one of CRG’s two field managers for insubordination to a client (I was pretty smooth about it too, considering).
I was easily working 60, 80 hours a week – I would come home around 6:00pm, play with Sophie for a few hours, and go back for 3-5 more hours of work. If I was on the road, I was doing stuff all the time. We were making progress and while we weren’t rich yet, we had a few potential large things on the horizon, including a distribution in Louisville, KY that could, if it went well, seal the deal on 10 million more books at excellent rates.
The problem, as it is with many small companies, was financing. And had I known that co-owner 3 was going to insist that he would not support any financing on CRG’s part that required his guarantee, I would’ve never gone on board.
For CRG qualified for a quarter/half-million line of credit via their bank – the company itself wasn’t doing so hot then, but it was showing signs of life and growth and did have a good history (CRG got into trouble in the first place because they lost a client that represented 80% of their business). This line of credit would’ve saved the company had we been able to secure it – but one of the co-owners balked at signing it, saying that putting his name on a loan for CRG (the agreement required personal guarantees from any shareholders owning more than 20% of the stock – we each owned 25%) would detract from his ability to finance his other business interests. (He then suggested that I line up a $50,000 personal credit card and give CRG cash advances when needed! CRG had apparently self-financed itself, with the three co-owners having over $100,000 in personal, home-equity debt that they spent in saving the company, keeping it running from 6/2002-9/2003. It was a point of pride for me that they had to put no more of their money in the company… that’s because I was putting my money in.
)I should've walked right there. I would've taken a $25,000 hit, but I would've saved myself a lot of grief.
That decision not to get the line of credit was pretty much the death knell, though I really didn’t know it at the time and, in fact, thought I could work my way through it. (Of course, the best time to ask for credit is when you don’t need it – why CRG didn’t ask for it when they were flying high in 1999-2002, I don’t know). We had to do something fast: this Louisville job was coming up and we were going to be about $50,000 short by the end of November – something had to happen!
Well… co-owner 2 decided he didn’t want to deal with it anymore and bolted last (2004) July. He was, in large measure the “face” of the company and when he left, and in the manner that he left, dealt CRG’s reputation quite a blow. The fact that we had nearly tripled our business while the salesman (myself) was being distracted by stuff he and co-owner 1 should be taking care of probably didn’t cross his mind.
So, to keep the company going, we had to sell some equity – find a private investor who wouldn’t mind throwing a quarter-million or so at a distribution company, seeing if it would fly – people like that exist, and in larger numbers than you think. We first tried my parents, figuring that CRG could either run as a subsidiary, or be taken over completely. That didn’t work, though it did lead me to reconciling with them. We then met with a local real estate investor here in Knoxville, a guy noted as being valued in the 8 figures. Now he had a pretty good idea, a sort of “outside the box paradigm shift” thing – he pointed out that CRG’s core competency wasn’t in delivering just phone books, but performing saturation deliveries of packages weighing more than four ounces. This re-conceptualizing would allow CRG to pursue a strategy away from phone books and into a larger market – delivering soap and shampoo sample boxes from Colgate, for example. This is where being consumed with the details kills you – this opens yourself up to deals with Fortune 500 companies and you can’t think about it because you’re debating on whether to pay one creditor who will piss off your client if not paid soonest, or paying another creditor who has the ability to shut down an already-going delivery.
Whatever. That’s neither here nor there, what’s important is that we had synergy with this guy: he understood the business and brought some ideas as well as cash to the table. He sold me. And I sold him. Hard.
You see, I had no choice. The most pressing issue from October to December was that the Louisville delivery was a disaster and that CRG had no money to cover an estimated $50-80,000 shortfall by the end of November. With co-owner 2 gone, I depended upon co-owner 1, who is frankly the laziest man I’ve ever met. CRG couldn’t spend its way through the problem as that would make the $50,000 hole increase in size and approach faster, and while I also made two trips to Louisville to talk to the manager, I didn’t have the resources needed to save the delivery.
But… the investor bought it. But he wasn’t stupid – he waited until the very last day, when CRG was gasping its final, dying breath. And I’m not joking – had he not bought CRG, it would’ve had to shut its doors that evening. $4,000 was hitting the bank and there was not a thing behind it.
I had no more money – I had sunk over $50,000 into CRG, giving myself a second mortgage, this on top of a financially disastrous 2002-2003 (during the period that I was subjected to the non-compete and was able to earn no income in my field). The problems with the Louisville delivery and the imminent collapse of the company at large weighed heavily on my soul, a weight I literally felt as my neck, back, and shoulders were contorted so much by stress that there were days which I sat twisted, typing at the computer, my torso oriented away from the keyboard. The headaches were plentiful and nothing could solve them except getting up and thinking about whatever problem was causing the headache – there was no shock when their frequency and intensity started dropping last February.
For those of you who have been there (and I hope none of you have), when your business is failing, and your dreams dying, a never ending complex of problems and issues, schedules and payments, all boiling down to one conclusion – you need MONEY. And in a world seemingly full, where everybody else is awash in it… you can’t get it. It keeps you up at night. You think about it in the shower, in the car, while playing with your kid, while sleeping with your wife – How am I going to arrange things so that the payments come right after the deposits? Is there anybody else I can think of who would be interested in buying into a distribution company, into me? Tomorrow, I need to call our guy in Louisville and talk to him about the bags... which we still need to pay for.
When you internalize everything as I do, it just leaves you racked.
The original co-owners were putting no more money into CRG. They didn’t have it to give, and therefore I couldn’t achieve any other financing other than selling invoices (which is a step above the Mob and a step below pawn shops).
So it seemed until the investor bought CRG. He drove a hard bargain, knowing the company’s position and our personal state of affairs. The shareholders had an agreement both on the terms of the sale and on the direction CRG was to take, but it was harsh – the four of us selling our shares to him at par value, whereupon he will take control of the company. My original $25,000 investment – now worth $500. And not even that, as I was told that my personal expenses on the AMEX bill for the past two months equaled $500, would you sign here please? (Sound familiar?) Mark the day – January 6th, 2005, the day that I lost $24,500 on one investment.
I sold him my stock, got copies of all the agreements and documents (including the notarized, closed certificate and transfer papers) – when I realized just how bad things were getting I made copies of the corporate books and gave them to the other co-owners, telling them it was in their best interest to hold on to them (I then gave the investor the originals - it was his company now). This was the best thing I could’ve done, by far. Nothing beats a signature – nothing.
Because this guy pretty much ****ed CRG in a way that I never expected and was ill-prepared to deal with, both psychologically and emotionally. I had just come off an incredibly grueling 6-9 month period where I watched my efforts to save the company almost fail, finally selling it to a person who could supply us with the financing to allow us some breathing room (You wake up on Monday morning, go to work. You see that you’ll need, say, $17,000 to meet this weeks expenses. You have $0-$12,000 in the bank. Repeat every week, for-****ing-ever. That was my life). My joy and relief on Friday, January 7th was palpable – even though I booked a personal loss of $24,500 the day before, not all was lost – after all, the company was saved. Payroll would continue, there was a new corporate direction, and there were provisions in the agreement for me to regain equity in the new corporate entity, provided certain goals were met. I didn’t have to go through the constant, every-****ing-week worry about payroll, I could finally devote myself to marketing, sales, whatever. I was buoyant with joy – investor was worth $11,000,000! Investor wouldn’t be destroyed if the $100,000+ he will have sunk into CRG turned out to be a bad investment, but that wasn’t the goal in the first place. Suddenly, the last two crappy years seemed all worthwhile.
This feeling lasted three days. Three days.
The investor all of a sudden took the tact: “I bought it, I own it, I’m going to run it”, and so he took control. And I mean TOOK CONTROL – negotiating with our clients, talking to our bankers, opening up a separate checking account for CRG when he ****ed up relations with Bank of America. The first thing he did was tell our largest client (1 million books) that he was going to shut down the on-going delivery unless the client raised the book rate and coughed up the monies that were due upon completion of the delivery – I find this out when the client called me up, asking who the hell investor is and what the hell was he doing??!!? They absolutely freaked, telling me and co-owner 1 that they were going to personally sue us, that they were going to pierce the corporate veil and hold us personally liable. I myself freaked, telling our new investor that his approach was wrong, especially as we were on the final book of a three year contract that is coming up for renewal as soon as this delivery ended. I told him that we haven’t even formally announced the sale of the company to him to all of our employees and clients – his response? “They know now.”
Keeping the client didn’t matter. The investor lived up to his word, insisting he wasn’t going to spend another dime and not doing so, causing our client to pay directly for his delivery and to feel $20k in the hole. The client called me one day about two weeks into this pissing match and asked me if I truly believe that the investor would honor that weeks payroll – after a pause that pretty much answered the question all by itself, I had to answer “no”. CRG wasn’t invited to bid on the new contract.
The Louisville delivery ended pretty much the same way, but worse. CRG got booted from the delivery when the investor called up the client (the very day he bought in) and said he was sending the Louisville manager home, closing down the delivery. To give you an idea of this guys craziness, the investor convinced himself that he could successfully sue the client for putting CRG out of business – even though the investor was the one who caused us to default on the contract, therefore defaulting on most of the final payment. Their attitude was “So? Sue us. That is, if we don’t file first.”
The investors lawyer eventually (I think) disabused him of that notion. I tried, but it didn’t take. Thank God somebody could do it.
Then there was the agreed-upon financing. Rather than having the $50-100,000 in financing, the investor decided to shut down CRG’s accounts for two weeks while he went on missionary work in Costa Rica. Then, while he was down there, he cancelled the original check that he deposited into CRG’s accounts. Even though he continued to negotiate with CRG’s clients while in South America he never mentioned to me that he cancelled the first part of the financing, causing over $20,000 in checks to bounce for, until he decided to stop writing checks, I was happily paying off creditors thinking there was $50,000 behind it.
All those checks bounced.
So CRG had no clients (well, one, but how long would they last? (They lasted one more delivery)). CRG had no money, in fact, we have a bunch of pissed of phone book delivery personnel calling us at work… at home… on our cell phones. Daily. Hourly. “You have 2 hours to perform that wire transfer, or my lawyer is going to file his paperwork – I’m sitting at the computer right now, checking my account.” “Ma’am, I don’t know what to tell you. We sold the company and the guy has destroyed it while freezing our accounts.”… “It’s been 15 minutes since I last called – has that wire-transfer gone through?” “Ma’am? I just tried to call the investor, but he didn’t answer his cell phone. Again. For the 20th time today.” Monday morning at 6:00am, they would call. Saturday evening at 10:00pm, they would call. Thursday night at 1:15am, they would call. I get down on my knees and Thank Og that the phone is in my wife's name, and that her surname is different from mine. They would eat up my minutes leaving long messages, I would eat them up listening to them (at first... after a while you just delete the damn things. I mean, you're not getting paid either so **** them).
I developed a bizarre compulsion to check my cell phone every 30 seconds, scared that I would miss a call, but not really knowing why I was scared because it would’ve been just somebody else calling to yell at me for money. Money that, a week before, I thought was there. I’m still leery of the damned thing, and absolutely will NOT answer a call if it’s from a number I don’t recognize.
We lost ALLTEL with the first bounced check and they invoked a never-used-before clause in the contract about their right to revoke in case of ownership changes. Of course the delivery people called ALLTEL. Many times. Even hourly.
This is one of those things… if you haven’t lived through it, you don’t know what it’s like. The collapse of everything you worked for, the loss of ownership, the assumption of debt. People calling you on your cell phone, wanting money. Clients telling you that they were suing you personally. Your wife, frantic with worry, supporting her husband but concerned over the mounting debt and outraged at the impossibility of the investor situation. (Yes, the man has a name, no, I’m not going to repeat it here). The loss of your dreams, your goals, your image of yourself, of seemingly everything… physical, tangible, financial, intangible… that you worked for 15+ years to create. I’m gonna let you in on a secret – it ****ing sucks. Hard.
There’s a lot more. A lot more, including reconciliation with my parents, and other stuff that I either don’t remember or don’t want to go into this post. Just know this: September 2004-February 2005 was the blackest period of my life, even compared to the past two months, a living hell I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It was bad enough running out of money and watching your business die – selling out to a madman only to have him drive a stake in its heart made it a wrenching experience.
I resigned from CRG in mid-February, though my presence didn’t make a damn bit of difference from mid-January, on. The investor finally put some money in an account that he created, paid off the loudest squawkers, and decided to have nothing to do with me. I know that CRG lost their last client in March but have had no more dealings with them since then, other than one meeting with the other three original co-owners that started with me saying “I am here on advisory capacity only – nothing I say or agree to should be construed with having any effect on the actual decision making process.”
My goals and dreams… reduced to legalistic denials.
) so we had some time to relax and get into the swing of things quietly. 
To top it off there was a pack of condoms, one opened (never saw the used one ( 
) are very neat people – our “messy” is likely cleaner than 80% of your people’s “clean.” We also have a strong distaste for consumerism, the wanton buying just to have and to hold so our house is dramatically sparse in decoration and items – we have room to park both of our cars in our garage while having our attic utterly and completely empty.
Comment