Resilience And Grit In Rebuilding: How I Survived

Resilience And Grit In Rebuilding: How I Survived

Two years ago, I thought one of my businesses was going to go belly up. Bankrupt. Doors closed.

I had failed to oversee (let go of) an employee correctly. My big heart got in the way and the consequences were devastating, financially and emotionally. There was no blaming the economy, a bad client, or some unexpected out of my control circumstance. I was the owner. I was responsible for overseeing what was happening inside my company. And while I thought we had the performance plan and extra guidance heading in the right direction, I was very very wrong.

Letting clients down and losing revenue was painful. But losing credibility, my reputation, and trust was downright devastating. When people have trusted you with the inner workings of their business, and you disappoint them, it is not a simple fix. You can’t just launch a marketing campaign to make everything better. As you and I both know, building your reputation takes years to grow. I had to accept what had happened, learn from it, take responsibility for the areas I had failed as a leader, and figure out if I was capable enough to rebuild what business I had left.

Resilience And Grit In Rebuilding

In the seasons of entrepreneurship when hope and optimism comes naturally, life feels good and like you are serving your purpose. Sales grow, clients find you and rave about you, your employees are well paid and thriving, and the future looks exciting with opportunities everywhere.

But in the seasons of owning a business where the walls are caving in and you are being tested and failing over and over again? It is much harder to have hope and believe that everything will work out when it feels like you may lose everything you spent years building.

Two years ago, after owning 7 businesses and being an entrepreneur for 17 years, was the first season that required a different kind of resilience and grit from me. I am very blessed that the rest of my team was incredible and the faithful clients who stayed with us while giving us honest feedback, will forever be a part of my story and healing.

And while none of us knew how long it would take for us to triumph, we kept doing the next right thing, working on rebuilding trust, serving the clients who remained, correcting the problems internally, and creating a high trust, high accountability team with myself and my team. I cried a lot. But through it all, I never lost faith in my team, even when I had to pull from SAVINGS to make payroll month after month after month.

We all believed that with this incredibly dark season we were all amazing people that were highly capable of being the best accountants our clients would ever have. It took over a year to climb out from under the loss of revenue and to have our clients become raving fans about us again. But we did it. And I am so proud of my team that they hung in there and got to see the darkness turn into hope again.

My SAVINGS Bought Me Time To Rebuild

Full transparency, what actually bought me time, and gave my company the opportunity to stay open, was my SAVINGS account (via The STOP Method. When the seasons of great profit margins were happening, I was transferring up to 10% into the SAVINGS account. I was consistently transferring every two weeks, and over time, I had built up close to three months of cash reserves!

When client after client cancelled, and then we had to regroup before new clients could onboard, every payroll cycle had to be supported by the SAVINGS. Payroll was often double what we were even bringing in via deposits. It was a very tough time. If those cash reserves SAVINGS had not existed, I would have had to make some very different choices. These would have been those choices:

• reinvested my personal money into the company again,
• taken out a business loan,
• maxed out credit cards, or
• tapped into lines of credit, or
• closed up shop

These alternatives would have changed my story. Good or bad, we’ll never know, because the three months of cash reserves kept me afloat and gave me the time to lead, fix the issues, and come out of the dark with my head held high.

Every owner will eventually have a season you don’t think you can survive.  It was more  painful and shocking than I expected it to be when it happened to me. And your hard and dark season may or may not look like mine. You might also lose clients, have an employee situation like I did. Or, you might experience a lawsuit, watch your industry change, lose a large contract, or hit an unexpected slow season.

Final Thoughts From Your Favorite Accountant

This roller coaster is part of entrepreneurship. Try as we might, we cannot plan or predict every painful season. But what we can do is create a business with enough financial cushion to give ourselves time, hope, and opportunity if that crash does come our way. I also believe that there is something amazing about coming out of a season you weren’t sure of how you would survive, but you somehow found a way. It gave me peace to realize that just showing up, messy and all, was what the journey was all about.

Action Step, should you want it:

1.     Open a dedicated SAVINGS account
2.     Begin transferring 1% of gross revenue to SAVINGS every two weeks
3.     Get my “FREE” budgeting worksheet: CLICK HERE

Because at the end of the day, positive cash flow isn’t luck, it’s strategy. And it’s my goal to make that strategy as simple as possible for you.