I have been chosen to be part of a NYT blog series that is following the realities of 4 women as we run our businesses in NYC. In one of the conversations they asked us to talk about the thing that we were currently thinking the most about. I have been in a phase of deciding whether to raise capital or not and so I said- financing growth. The conversation developed from there and turned into this series- that talked very candidly about how I did not finance our growth correctly in our early years- and the impact that that has had on our operations (and my sanity!).

The reality is that I tried to fund Silver Lining like a small business (with my small credit card limit) but I tried to grow it like a fast growth entrepreneurial company.  The result was over $400,000 of debt within 3 years of being in business and then a couple of years of constantly sitting on the edge as I tried to pay off that debt and continue to grow the company- still without any funding.   Looking back I have perspective and the root business problem is pretty clear- I was not funded properly.  I should have raised half a million dollars in seed financing, grown like I did and I would have been 3 years into the business and had money in the bank and looked like an entrepreneur rock star!  (Well, we would like to think that, anyways. J).  But I did not.  I kept believing that I could solve our cash flow problems by just generating more revenue- and just growing the company more.   It resulted in a ton of tight years from a cashflow perspective, insane amounts of stress and being really really hard on myself.  As I look back over the last few years where we started to get much more profitable and have made a ton of progress in paying off the old debt- I see that I was still stuck.  I felt like such a failure for getting myself into that financial position and then I felt such a huge burden of responsibility to fix it and “right it” that I never asked for help.  It took me an extremely long time to be able to treat this as a pretty simple business problem with a pretty simple business solution.  If the company needs more money to grow- go raise money.  Instead – the entire journey around this very much became about me learning how to handle the things that I screw up and how to ask for help.

Growing a company very quickly without any capital injected to fund the growth was a complete misalignment of expected outcome and reality.  Aggressively pursuing all life has to offer and being prepared to choose passion, creativity and freedom above all else- without an understanding that this was high risk or an ability to ask for help when things would inevitably go wrong-  was also a complete misalignment.  I was aggressively fighting to break all the rules of how life “should” be- yet I was scared to fully acknowledge that.  I was still trying to play by the rules as I was fighting to break them all.  It wasn’t working.

I made the huge mistake of believing that being a successful entrepreneur meant you had to get it right all the time.  Now I realize that successful entrepreneurs are wrong all the time.  But what they are great at is being completely open to trying anything new and quickly identifying what is working and what is not.  For me, with that realization, a couple of major things have changed.

• I love asking for help.  I am constantly asking for help.  I cannot get enough of people who probably know something that I don’t even know I don’t know.
• I embrace things going wrong and am completely aware that living a life full of trying to challenge norms and push for the most requires taking risks- which means that things will go wrong- and those are the best situations to learn from.   I am completely dedicated to living my life full of passion, full of trying new things and full of pushing against norms to see if there is a better way.  This inevitably means my life will be full of things going wrong, full of people having opinions about me and full of highs and lows.  For the first time- I can say that I am totally ok with that.
• I am much better at separating business challenges/issues/failures from me as a human being- and can react to them and solve them much better as a result.

A major reason for telling this story with such candor (in the NYT no less!) is because I have seen almost every single one of the 10,000 small businesses we have worked with struggle with many of the same issues around cash flow and financing growth.  My story may be an extreme version- but if you know anything about me- that should not surprise you!  Seriously, though- small businesses are not talking about money enough.  We are not talking about how hard it is to find capital.  We are not talking about how much stress cash flow problems cause us all on a day to day basis.  For the significant majority of small businesses that never raise capital- this is a huge and very real issue.  I also hope that we realize that the challenges of growing a small business are never just business challenges- they are always tied to something much bigger.  I am a huge believer that our biggest job as an entrepreneur is not to figure out how to make our business work- it is to figure out how we work.

I hope you will take some time to read through these NYT blog posts.   You will see that they elicited some rather strong reactions from some of the readers.  Telling the story was far less painful than seeing some of the very strong comments and responses to it. I have decided to embrace this entire process though, and you will see many of my responses in the comments section.  Aside from surfacing some people who think I am insane (!), I honestly hope that every small business owner who reads them realize that we all screw up, that no matter how successful we are we have made mistakes and that there is no small business out there who has never struggled with cash flow and capital at one point or another.  What we have to do is work together, help each other and continue to figure out how we can see more small businesses out there make more money.

Read the NYT Columns Here
Sept 16- http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/behind-the-scenes-with-four-owners/
Sept 27- http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/what-do-small-business-owners-want/
Nov 3- http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/growing-pains-at-growing-businesses/
Nov 8- http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/what-can-happen-when-you-try-to-go-big/
Nov 10- http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/will-a-new-software-release-get-silver-lining-out-of-debt/

We love hearing success stories from our clients and congratulations once again Dan! Read the full article here.

There will be an outstanding line of up speakers at this intensive event:

Rha Goddess

Daymond John

Corey S. Kupfer

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski

DJ Chela

JLove Calderon

Marla Teyolia

Carissa Reiniger

Michael Waas Smith

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“Two nights ago, the White House announced a collaboration with the Gen-Y Capital Partners, which will invest ten million dollars in early-stage Gen-Y ventures. In addition to the traditional funding approach made by most venture capital firms, they will be piloting a new approach, which includes Income Based Repayment, academic partnerships and a support network of young entrepreneurs. This is in response to students fear of paying back loans and most colleges not grooming students to become entrepreneurs. In essence, ambitious Gen-Y’ers will have the opportunity to create a company and bring back jobs to America!” Read the full article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2011/10/27/help-stimulate-youth-entrepreneurship-in-americ

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With this in mind, you must set up a system for yourself to hold
yourself accountable to executing this plan and sticking with it, on
task until the end of the year. If you do not do it all from beginning to
end you will not see results.

I strongly believe that doing is way more
important than thinking.  Imagine you spent all day long every day
thinking about this plan but never did anything with it because you
were too busy thinking. Nothing would happen for your business.
Literally.

On the other hand, if you spent none of your time thinking
and all of your time doing — trying different things at different times,
the result could very well be disorganized and scattered — but
something would be getting done for your business.

Are you growing your business?  Need a SLAP™?