It was 2014, and I had been hustling trying to build my branding agency for 3 years. From the outside, I looked like I was succeeding. I had a super cool office in Brooklyn, NY, two full-time employees, and the last project I was invited to pitch for was a 20,000 square foot restaurant in Times Square that wanted that cool Brooklyn vibe.
I had all the glitz of a successful owner, but behind the scenes, things looked very different.
I was networking every day, hoofing it around NYC to meet with whomever would have coffee with me, I was pitching project after project and either not hearing back or just losing them. And my overhead was high. By March 2014, we had maxed out all of our credit cards, were overdrawn on our bank accounts, and had no idea how we were going to make payroll in two weeks.
I was desperately trying to figure out how to bring money in. Not only did we need money to live, but we needed to pay back this $40,000 we now owed. Tell the prospects with proposals that we would bargain with them? Network… MORE? Just cry in the corner with my fingers crossed that one of these proposals would close in the next week and pay a deposit? And if none those things worked, I assumed the only option left would be to give up, admit that I FAILED to all my friends and family, and get a regular job.
I was working SO hard to get clients and busting my butt 24/7 to be at the beck and call the few clients we had, so why couldn’t my business at least support itself?
I had the best intentions, I had done my homework, read every book, studied other success stories, pounded the pavement networking, took courses, and was willing to work round the clock on my business while giving my all to deliver for my clients… I was doing everything that every expert, guru, mentor, and colleague had recommended. I had even thrown money at my problems by hiring other service providers to solve them for me and not only did that not work either, but it also cost me more money I didn’t have.
But despite all my knowledge, experience, and effort, none of it was showing up in my bank account. It felt unfair. I was depressed and felt more and more like a failure.
And one night, while having dinner with my husband and business partner Steve, I was in a catatonic daze over the crushing burden of my failing business while he was just chatting along as if everything was fine, making me even more anxious! Just as my anxiety was turning to rage, the adrenaline must have heightened my senses and I snapped out of my failure coma to hear him say
“...why don’t we just let the employees go?”
For all my butt busting and desperate efforts, I am embarrassed to admit that I had not even considered that as one of my options and that was a wake-up call.
Because I was trying to create an agency, a big business that looked like what I imagined success was, in my mind, letting our employees go would be failure and the end of my business. Because I was on a trajectory of building an agency, I refused to entertain any ideas that felt like backtracking and saw any of my efforts that didn’t achieve that goal as failures. I was so set on a specific idea of what a successful business looked like, that I was actually entertaining closing our business to get a normal job instead of entertaining the idea of running a different kind of business.
Now Steve had my attention and he was saying more great stuff… he said we had built a LOT of value in our business, had a lot of experience, great work to show and happy, satisfied clients. We weren't at a dead end, we actually had tons of options of what we could do with what we had created and achieved.
He forced me to entertain the idea that there were infinite options available to us, and just because they were different from what I had originally planned, didn’t mean they were inferior.
My lightbulb not only went off – it popped.
A huuuge weight had been lifted off of me and I was able to see my business with a ruthless, cutting clarity that was unencumbered by my previous fears of failing (because I already had!).
Now I was free to do ANYTHING.
Immediately, my new terminator vision was assessing my business problems.
Fact: We couldn’t afford the employees right now and hadn’t been able to for some time, hence the debt, so keeping them was no longer an option. I had been avoiding that fact for months. The second I accepted it, relief washed over me.
We won’t need to find $8,000 for them this month. WOW. I had just made $8,000 in a moment of clarity.
I’m gonna date myself here but you know that game Minesweeper? Where you’re clicking the boxes without clicking the mines? And every once in a while you click an empty box and the whole area opens up all at once? That’s what this was like. Everything broke open for me.
THAT was the moment I became the boss of my business & my whole demeanor changed
We started looking at our business as a clean slate and started brainstorming like crazy all the possible ideas of what we could do next. We started listing all the skills and assets we had and how to make money off them. We questioned why we had done everything the way we had, and why we felt we had to do it that way.
We were EXCITED for the first time in a long time. It was like when we first started our business and anything was possible again. We were no longer desperately trying to do what we thought we had to succeed. We were asking ourselves what we really wanted out of our business and how we could structure it to get it.
In that MOMENT, I went from being at the mercy of my business and the situation I was in, to stepping up and showing my business who’s boss.
Before that moment... I thought MONEY was my biggest problem.
So I thought if I just had more money, more clients, more work, things would be better.
Before that moment... I blamed all the people I was pitching for my business’ problems.
They would take our proposals and then end up hiring other, less expensive companies... how could I compete with that?! So I thought they’re just ignorant of the value of my services.
Before that moment... I thought I was doing ...
