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In Reply to: Re: Hi Joseph! posted by WC on November 26, 2009 at 05:49:16:
Our youngest daughter was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder about two years ago. She has always had trouble, starting with her birth when Jane was only 6 months pregnant. Things really kicked into high gear when she turned twelve, hit puberty and progressed off to middle school.
What followed was a lot of very shocking behavior, violent at times. She ended up in the Psychiatric hospital eight times in a little over a year. The whole thing really turned our lives upside down.
At the same time the economy here was failing, and with me at the hospital and running around trying to help Jane with our child, I wasn't at the business enough. Around this time last year our 22 year old family business collapsed putting three generations of my family out of work suddenly.
I had been fully employed for over 30 years, and for six months last year found myself drawing unemployment insurance. I was heavily in debt from trying to save the company financially, and then creditors of the company began to come after us to try and collect money the company had spent. I finally had to file personal bankruptcy last month, because I couldn't afford to fight the banks in court to get them to leave us alone.
This was starting to go on when we were still running NDN, and I had to tell the people I worked with there that I just didn't have the ability to keep up with it like I used to. It wasn't the only reason we closed, but having the primary technical guy unavailable so much was a contributing factor to that website closing.
The good news is that things seem to be finally improving after almost three years of mostly dark and troubling times for us.
I started a new company doing similar work based on a totally different business model with dramatically lower overhead.
I still do the exact job that I did personally for my clients, but now I don't have the 30,000 sq ft warehouse, or a crew of union Teamsters sitting around it waiting for something to happen. In the old operation, if we didn't have a show for one week, we would spend $25,000 just keeping the doors open. With the economy tanking, I was getting into stretches of two months sometimes without an event, so there would go almost a quarter of a million dollars that was hard to make back when we got busy again, which accounted for all the borrowing to keep going.
Now I work with one of our former competitors who had the exact same equipment we did, and contracts with the unions. When I have a show, I organize it with the help of my Daughter and Mother (we are the only three employees). Then once I have all the requirements figured out, I hire the other company to provide the labor and equipment. They get business that they didn't have to sell or maintain, and I don't have around the clock equipment, warehouse or employee expense. After operating like this for a year now, my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner and save us from being in so much debt.
Our Daughter is also doing much better. She hasn't been back to the hospital since January, ad is doing much better at school. She was placed in a school for kids with mood disorders, and has really been thriving there because of the specific support she gets that is not available in regular school.
The last few years have been a real change for me. I've had a life were I was always very successful, and always made great money and could do whatever I wanted. I never thought about things like food or gas prices. I never even paid for my own car! I really had no idea how isolated I was from normal life, and it's interesting to finally be living like most people do and struggling in my 50's rather than doing that in my 20's (when I was already making big great money).
I really did go from thinking I knew everything to realizing I knew nothing, and all of my success really had been an illusion, that just vanished in weeks. It took me 30 years to build up the sort of gold plated credit I had, and that was ruined in what seemed like days. It has been quite an education.
