Sing Into Your Storm

paying customer yet! A company that had not made any money yet! A comp any with a payroll now of three… the two college grads I had hired, and now myself! Oh boy! I realized that I was going to have to start drawing a very minimal income from the company from the dwindling investment money that was still in our account. I also understood that the last $90,000 that our most recent investor had promised to put in later that summer was going to be needed much sooner! So I called him up to let him know that we could use the money now, and once again, I was stunned by the news he shared with me. He had tried to withdraw those funds from a special retirement account he had, and found out that he would have been penalized by almost 50% of the total sum of the money if he did it!, So he let me know that he was not going to be able to put any more money into the business! My world began to cave in very fast! The building rent was due, and to make matters worse, the payroll was due for the first two week pay period in June of that year. Our bank account was worse than I had imagined. We did not even have enough money for payroll. I had to call in our employees and tell them “I know y ou are expecting to get paid today, but I am sorry to tell you, we do not have any money to pay you.” The discouragement was painful news for everybody! To make matters worse, our product was now just about ready for marketing, but we had no money actually to finance the launch our marketing campaign. We found ourselves in a terrible Catch 22 situation!

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