Fighting Back: Lessons in Resilience and Teamwork

In the early 2000s, I got a call from the Special Assets group of our business bank. I don't know if you have ever gotten a call like that, but Special Assets is not like the VIP group. I wasn't being upgraded, I was being kicked to the curb. The Special Assets Group is the group that calls you when they don't want your business anymore, when they want to shut you down. Anyway, I got a call from these guys and they're like, hey, we need to refinance your business. And I was in a very difficult position. I'd recently taken over this business as CEO and things were going well. It was in the aftermath of the 2001, the 911 and the end of the dot com era and that recession. And I was still trying to like pull a turnaround out. But in the middle of that the bank came to me and said, we don't want to be your partner. We don't want to help you with that whole thing. So I had no real plan and I was really stressed about it. And for several weeks I just suffered alone in silence. I worried about it. My wife knew about it, but. But nobody else knew. So. And I was trying to think of what to do and how to deal with it. I talked to a couple of advisors, nobody seemed to really have any idea, but it was very hush hush because I was feeling particularly trapped and anxious about the situation. And so the bank said to me, listen, you got a nice house. I could laugh now, but I couldn't laugh back then they said, if you can't settle this out, can't refund it, we'll just, you know, we'll settle it with your house. And I was like, f you because what I thought about was like, listen, you could take my house because I had guaranteed the loan for the business. But if the business fails and they take my house, I was pretty sure that my wife would leave me and I'd become a weekend dad. And there's almost nothing that bothered me that I worried about more than that. The thought of being a weekend dad and having my family fail with a business failure was the thing that terrified me the most. So that really amped it more and I still didn't want to go private. And I, I was out in the middle of the day, gone to lunch with my wife. And then we stayed and talked for a little bit longer and I started sharing with her how I was feeling and what was going on. And I finally said the real fear, right? The real fear for me was that I would. She'd leave me and we wouldn't be a family anymore. And I got down. She kind of laughed. She said, no, that's not what's going to happen if the business fails, if we. Even if we lose the house, we go live with my family. We could do. There's a lot of things we could do. We've done businesses, jobs before. Like, we'll do something else. We'll figure it out. I'm not going to leave you over that. It could be something else you could do that might do it, but not that. And I was just like, wow. So then we started to go. Well, I was just like, super relieved. So. And we started to think, well, what do I need to do? And what would it be? And we started to talk about somehow fixing it. I had no plan for that or. Or escaping it. And what we realized in that moment was that we could figure it out. Like, we could start over. We could do something else with some other business or some other line of work. She said something then that. She asked me a question that was really, really, really helpful for me. She said, what is the lesson or the message that you want to give the kids about this experience? Now, our kids at that time were very young, like, barely aware of a whole lot, you know, only a few years old, like under 10. And I paused and I thought about. So let's see, one kid would have been like six, and the other would have been like four. So there are many message. The lesson that I would give them would not be, like, super top of mind. It'd be more like a background underneath things. But it was really crystallizing for me because I thought, no, I want to teach them to fight. I want to teach them to stand up to adversity and to not cave, not to give in. And that, like, in that instant, that question, who do you want to be for the kids? Like, what example? What lesson do you want to teach them? I think is useful in so many situations in life. So I'm like, oh, I want to fight, you know, I want to teach them to stand up for things. So she's like, okay, well, what do you got to do? And I'm like, I still don't know. She said, okay, well, maybe you can't figure it out on your own. Maybe you need to get some other people involved. So I went back to the office. I said, listen, I've been suffering in silence for a while. There's this thing going on. The bank wants to shut us down and take my house. And I don't have a plan and this might freak you out and I was a little more emotional and teary at the time as I told this. But I could use your help. And I understand if you can't help if you need to go take. If you're like worried about your security, you need to go get another job, take care of your family, whatever. But I could really use your help. If you stick around, I could promise you only a couple things. One of them is I'll be really open on it. No more secrets. Like I'll tell you what's going on. The second thing is I won't give up. I. I will fight to the very end till a sheriff comes and locks the door and kicks us out. I will fight to the very end no matter what happens. And people loved that. Nobody left. Everybody stayed together. We figured out a whole bunch of different things and we solved the problem with the bank. We settled at the bank, we turned it around. We had to double the revenue, profit and cash by the next year and had gotten rid of the bank. The whole team was super victorious. I appreciated them to the ends of the earth. I did things for them. It was a magnificent time. And the thing that was like the leadership lesson for me was that honesty and vulnerability is a far stronger leadership trait than like your stand and you're willing to be honest. The courage it takes to be honest and open. That's a much stronger leadership thing than having a specific plan in mind than like figuring being smarter than everyone else moving much more important. So I was open. I was honest. I was courageous. I took a strong stand. People love that. People followed all the way through that thing and together we figured out what I couldn't figure out on my own. I hope that's helpful and gives you a way to access a higher level leadership for yourself and your business. We'll talk to you again soon. Keep scaling.

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