Things were going well. The SBA had one of their specialists work on fine-tuning my plan, and then whether to recommend whether I qualified for the $250,000 I had asked for. I was put in touch with the Valley Economic Development Center, a nonprofit organization that would assist me in packaging and shopping the loan with banks.
Things were happening, but they were also going slowly. I was out of money and needed a fast turnaround. And I fell into old traps. A credit card company sent me an envelope with a check asking if I needed extra cash, and I accepted.
You can imagine where that led me. This time, I needed that money to pay interest on the other payments I had to make! By now I had accumulated some $130,000 in debt. I learned to worry about bills only twice a month, when you have to figure out how to pay them. This was not a way to live. And this was not a way for a smart (at least I thought I was smart) businessperson to get her new company off the ground.
Eventually, I was recommended for a loan. But the loan amount was about half of what I wanted and only to be used to restructure my debt. Still, I was desperate, so it sounded fair enough to me, as it would free up my lines of credit so I could once again go further into debt until I could hit my breakeven point. I could see into the future: a vicious cycle of mounting debt and interest. We were so close to a terrible way of doing business that I could feel it.
Then something else was thrown my way. Real-estate problems. Not the kind you were thinking of.
We’ve all been there – we think things are going all right. We’ve overcome one difficulty, and then another roadblock pops up. What do you do? I’ll share with you what I did in the next few posts, but tell me your thoughts. How did you face the next big crisis in your life, after you thought you’d already solved a big one?