Bloodletting, True Grit and Living Your Potential

The attorney pointed at the whiteboard. The numbers were a tangle, but they didn’t lie. To him, the answer was clear: “This is your path to freedom.”

To us, it seemed more a death sentence for someone we loved but failed to properly nurture. Across the expanse of the mahogany veneer conference table, we were on the verge of deciding to commence with the bloodletting, declare bankruptcy, and let our business fail. It felt like we were turning our backs on a dying child.

It was our child. Conceived not too long after we were married —a few years before our actual flesh and blood children— on a sun-baked slope, after a wild, excruciatingly hot mountain bike ride, while dousing ourselves with tepid water.

“Let’s do it! Let’s just do it!” what started as a tentative whisper quickly grew to a full-throated declaration as we made the decision right then and there. By the same evening, we informed our incredulous parents and several friends: We were starting a business.

How could we now slaughter it with the same decisiveness?

BLOODLETTING

We’d spent months working up the courage to see this lawyer. I knew before Chris did that our enterprise had run its course, and had no future. After thirteen or fourteen years of solid growth, it started first to stumble, then falter, and eventually drag itself and everyone around it down. But maybe, with legal help, there was something we could do…

“You’ll walk away free and clear,” the lawyer said. “You’ll have to start over, but the debt will be erased.”

We were shellshocked. We had hoped he would help us find a way to keep it going, prayed that our deepest fears were wrong, but inside… we knew.

“What’s going to happen now?” with that question, we took our first step toward acceptance.

But real acceptance was far off in the future.

“Most people find it to be a tremendous relief. No more debt, no more harassing phone calls from collection agencies. It gives you breathing room and a chance to rebuild your life.”

“With what?” we asked.

Sulaiman rested his knuckles on the mahogany table.

“What you created is not that business,” he said nodding toward the massacre on the whiteboard. “What you created, you carry with you. And you can start anywhere.”

But for the moment, our grief, shame and regret were overwhelming, and the import of those words was lost.

TRUE GRIT

Over the next four months, we clenched our teeth and went about liquidating the business. The bankruptcy court determined that any remaining assets were too insignificant to make a meaningful difference in our outstanding liabilities, but to us, any proceeds were seed money for a new life. The fact that our house was in foreclosure turned out to be a blessing, because we were able to live rent-free for months.

We had never been without income before. Even in its last months of decline, our old business was always generating some revenue, so we could put food on the table. We couldn’t imagine life without income, so we were in an utter frenzy to get something new off the ground. The business liquidation ended in early February, by the end of March we had a new lease with an exceptionally open-minded landlord on not much more than word of honor and, and by May 7th we were in again in business.

Starting a brick-and-mortar business in the second decade of the new millennium was quite different from when we did it in the 1990’s. The first time around, we were either singularly lucky or clever to have picked an undervalued neighborhood that took off like a rocket. This time, we set up shop where it was affordable, and the stable but sleepy community was warm and welcoming, but did not offer prospects for rapid growth. And the fact that the contemporary retail landscape has shifted away from Main Street, and onto the internet superhighway, made our startup a lot slower and more challenging than we hoped.

But the biggest obstacle was inside ourselves.

We’d failed, after all. We’d always be remembered for the business we closed, and not the fact that we created it in the first place.

Yet, the customers came. The new ones didn’t seem to care where we’d been. They were just happy to see us in their neighborhood. The old ones were happy to discover us in the new incarnation. These were encouraging signs, and made us feel we were on the right track. Unfortunately, they did not make up for the marketplace challenges: seasonality, and pressures from online retailers. And then there was our own faltering confidence in our ability to rise from the ashes, and creeping regret that we’d squandered our lives and —in our mid-fifties— had nothing to show for it and nothing to leave to our kids.

We had to do something.

LIVING YOUR POTENTIAL

When I was a kid, my parents hoped I would become a writer. I had a way with words. Even in high school I could write short stories and essays that had grown men weeping in the aisles, and my writing won trophies, awards and accolades.

But I gave all that up —with some relief, after five years of writing scholarly papers in graduate school— to pursue the life of a small business owner. I still dabbled in writing. I tried my hand at writing a novel, and for several years maintained a blog that primarily served as a marketing platform for our old business and now the new one, won a bit of a cult following, but I wasn’t really sure where to take it next. I enjoyed writing about bikes and outdoor adventures, but what I really wanted to express in my writing seemed presumptuous for the audience I had built.

I wanted to write about taking risks and failing, about growth and flourishing, about pushing your boundaries, about being scared but acting anyway, about singing like no one’s listening, and letting that true voice ring out. And about bloodletting and healing wounds.

For us, that bloodletting was a supreme sacrifice, and it should nourish the ground we walk on now. We seem to have made peace with who we were then, what we built and destroyed, and where we are now. But we carry inside of us a vessel brimming with the consciousness, the pain of having killed something we once nurtured. And the only way to pay it homage it to let the lessons of it enrich and sustain us, and feed the creative energy that flows from us still.

If you want to succeed in business, you can’t ask for pity. No business owner ever wanted to build their enterprise on handouts. But at the same time, you can’t always be a self-effacing martyr. You have show the blood, sweat and tears it takes to claim the square of earth you built your stall on. You have to fight like your life depends on it, and more. Because what’s at stake here is more than individual loss, it’s the loss of community. If you give up, faceless virtual transactions will replace real human connections, and we will forget what empathy means.

We believe in the individual, the small guy who brings his offerings to the market stall, and says: “This is my best, I threw in my heart.”

We believe that in the exchange of the best we all —as individuals— have to give, true community grows. Whether your business makes it in the end or not, may not be entirely up to you. But as long as you bring your best, you’re never a failure, but the sum total of the success you create each day.