There's the Captain!
Here is a shot of your pissed off looking little buddy from the tail panel of my Duster project to provide some motivation....
LMAO! I remember my "pissed-off little buddy" all to well! And the red. Thanks for the trip down Memory Lane!
OK, now a little trip down 'Diversity Lane'.
You readers remember how I came to be be part owner of a small aircraft maintenance facility...now let me tell you about how I came to NOT be.
What?!! Sorta got my tongue tangled there, I know what I meant. If you don't, that's your problem....
Things were not going so well, what with the recession and all. Our 'senior partner' (read: controlling financial partner) decided early in 2013 that we managing partners would have to take a 'temporary' salary cut...as in 20%. Really?!!!!
Well, we did, with reluctance, being as it was only 'temporary' (right...joke's on you, sucker!) and it was our company....
So I went from having few bucks left over at the end of the month to....barely breaking even. Since we were salaried, and my wife was no longer working due to disability, it was looking pretty grim. My other biz partner was a divorced single parent; he was faring no better.
Still, we soldiered on...for over a year....doing all the work, scheduling, customer contact, facilities management, you name it, while the money man did his thing twice a week....namely paying bills and accounting functions. I hadn't taken a vacation day in five years, working 40+ hours a week, every week. It gets worse, but I won't go there. I got through a lot of those hard times by immersing myself in The Duke doing things that cost little or no money, like the cleaning and painting of the interior and underside as chronicled earlier. It helped...some.
As 2013 was coming to a close, a couple events came home to roost that changed everything.
First came the notice from my mortgage company that due to an escrow shortage, my payment for the next 12 months would be going up almost $300.00 a month to cover the shortage. Huh?!! Yeah, whatever! This was followed by the looming certainty of Obamacare, and either paying for the insurance that I could no longer afford, or pay the penalty that I couldn't afford. There were a lot of nights I slept poorly, if at all.
Then, as 2013 lumbered to an end, the paychecks began coming late...
"here's your check, but don't cash it until next week", followed by
"there's no money for payroll this week" Of course, being listed as 'salaried owners', he could legally get away without paying us late, or not paying us at all. And there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it.
Or was there?
We had a meeting; I expressed my concerns about the future of the company, and more importantly, of
us.
I suggested we either do a business loan for additional capital, or extend our line of credit. Moneybags made his case plain and simple: No loans, no credit. Both were bad business.
Easy for him to say; he owned another business he was drawing a full-time salary from. Me and my partner were hanging on a thread, and doing all the work to boot.
It was a time for soul-searching; for self examination. A time to cut the bullshit and look in the friggin' mirror while shaving.
As humans frequently do, it's most easy to delude and deceive ourselves than others, but I felt as if I was viewing the situation from the outside for the first time, and not liking what I was seeing one bit.
From a strictly business-like standpoint, I couldn't argue his points about borrowing money being 'bad business'. But neither could I refute that not having enough income to pay bills and mortgage was also 'bad business' on a personal level. Was I dedicated, driven, sacrificing? Sure. All of that plus more. But I was also not stupid. Something was rotten in Denmark, and we could no longer deny the stench wafting our way.
Something needed to be done, and quickly...
rayer:
