WORST DAY: A day in March 2000
WHY: Our company was five years old and getting ready to move
to our third location. The first three years, we had been in a 1,200-square-foot
shed with no running water. We would end 2000 with $11.8 million in sales, but
we were still using QuickBooks 6.0 for our order entry system. We could only
have five users on it at any given time, so our accounting people would come in
at five in the morning to do the accounting, and then our customer service
people would enter orders from eight to three. Whenever there was a quiet
moment, they would close out so accounting could get in. It was a mess.
We were going to be switching over to a new vendor and new software when we moved into our new building in June. But in March, the vendor stopped returning my calls. I could not figure out what was going on. We had already put down $18,000, which was the most money I had ever invested in anything in the history of the company. Finally, I got a call back from the sales rep who had sold the software program to us. He informed us that the company was going bankrupt. It was one of those moments when you think, ‘Crap!’ I had just started taking a salary, but not much. We were still bare bones. I was absolutely sick that we had lost our $18,000.
AFTERMATH: The sales rep ended up putting us in touch with
another vendor. Thanks to the rep stepping up to help us, we pulled through it.
When we moved into our new location, we had the new program installed and were
up and running.
LESSON LEARNED: It seemed like a killer at the time, but I
believe that emotional and psychological recovery is a mental discipline. After
having gone through personal crises, including losing my husband and brother a
couple years before, I learned how to flex that mental muscle that asks, ‘Is
this in my circle of influence?’ And it was not.
