Didn't sleep at all last night. It's astounding the degree to which things are just different than they've ever been, before. Not just for my company, but for whole swaths of the economy. In the macro sense, things will take years and years to get back to where they were.
I thought, when this whole thing imploded, that it would take 5 years to be fully back to where we were in mid 2008. Now, that's looking awfully optimistic. I'm guessing more like 10 years. In the macro-sense, we'll be recovered, but plenty of businesses will go away, never to return.
Small business really is it's own discipline. I worked for large companies for 13 years (17 if you count the US Army, which is a large company in and of itself.) Small business? You really lay it all on the line.
The day I opened this business, I put in everything I had to show for over two decades of work. If this thing goes down, I start all over again, at age 45. However, I'll be starting in the hole, not with the clean slate I had when I was 17 and shipped off to basic training.
A year ago, we were in awesome shape, still. We had savings, we had credit. Now, that's all gone. It's literally been 12 full months of bleakness. Actually, more like 13 or 14.
Last payroll, I had to scramble around at the last moment to get cash advances on what little credit I had remaining on what few credit cards I had that weren't already completely maxed out. I am, literally, completely out of money and completely out of credit right now.
We have another payroll due in a few days. Now, we've got assurances from 3 adjusters that they're finally going to pay their bills. Trouble is, we had those same assurances 2 weeks ago. When the checks didn't arrive, I was running around spastically trying to scrape every loose dollar of credit available to me.
We have, literally, over $100,000 due to the company right now. We have never had that kind of A/R hanging out there. Not even when we were a million dollar a year business. Yet day after day, week after week, we call the adjusters who all say, "Oh, I just cut that check", or "I'm cutting that check today", or "Oh, yeah, soon as I get back to the office I'll cut that check."
We've been hearing that for 2 months. Things continue to get nasty in this industry, pretty much like most industries. We're not recession-proof, no matter what some folks may say or think. We're subject to the same macro and micro economic conditions as any other small business.
It looks like payroll is going to be on the smallish-side. So, I dunno... I can probably scrape up enough to get us through this week, but I'm not sure I can do that AND make my house payments, too. It's that bleak.
It's axiomatic in business that you can be a perfectly profitable company, but you go bankrupt due to cash flow issues. We just haven't collected much money in the past few months. It's all accumulating in A/R.
It's entirely possible that if we don't see at least one of these checks this week that the business will be forced into liquidation. I'll keep one or two employees to sell off the assets and wait for the A/R to come in. (I think it will come in... the question is when?)
I'll be able to get my original investment out. In the grand scheme of things, it could be worse.
However, this is a sickening feeling. I've got every credit card I own loaded to the gills right now. (12 months ago, they all had zero balances.) I just can't live like this for much longer.
I guess this is what it feels like when it all comes down in a heap. I heard somebody describe this type of disaster as happening "slowly, for a long time, then all at once." This just blows.
So, in the mean time, cross fingers for me. If the checks can come before the bills go overdue, I'll be right as rain in a month or two.
If not, I'll probably have to liquidate and volunteer for deployment and try to rebuild my finances.
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