A personal talk by Donna Genie describing a major business failure involving a franchised venture, the choices she and her husband faced (close, declare bankruptcy, or reinvent), and how hiring industry consultants and leaning on peers allowed them to turn the business around, operate it successfully for about a decade, and eventually sell it. The piece is motivational and offers lessons about learning from failure, investing in outside help, and persevering.
When was the last time you failed so hard that you weren't sure if you were going to recover? Well, if you're an entrepreneur, you've had these moments, I guarantee it. I'm a CPA and so is my husband. And we've had this moment. So I know it is a common thing. So I want to share with you a little story about how failure can become a really big learning opportunity and motivate you and help you throughout the rest of your life. So many, many moons ago, my husband and I decided that we wanted to own a business. And I was running a CPA firm as mostly a tax accountant. A little bookkeeping on the side at the time, and my husband worked in corporate America. Well, we decided we were going to look at a franchise business because we wanted something that we could run while we had other endeavors going on. So we found a franchise and invested in it. And it was supposed to have training to teach us how to do everything we needed to know. It was a business that we couldn't be involved in because we weren't skilled to have the knowledge and availability to do the services that that business provided. And we were okay with that. We did not want to get stuck working in the business. We wanted to work on the business and build an empire. So throughout our franchise history, we successfully opened the business. And I'm going to refrain from diving into the industry in particular. And you'll see why when I talk about the failure. And we opened the business, attempted to run it, we actually purchased another franchise from another owner who had to leave the business. So, same franchise, but multiple locations. We ran our tails off trying to make this thing work. And ultimately our franchisor failed to provide his end of the deal. So we didn't have a lot of support or the training or the advertising that was promised in the deal. Yet they still wanted to collect franchise fees. So this business was a complete disaster. We found ourselves at a crossroads and had to make some difficult decisions. So the first decision we could make in a failing business was to close it, call it a day, go back corporate America and move forward from there and pay off the loan or perhaps declare bankruptcy, whatever those conditions may be. And many people have felt that pattern of failure in the past, and that includes me. We also had another choice. We looked at what would it take to make this business be successful. We had leases, after all, that were five year leases that we couldn't just walk away from. A year into the lease, we would either have to pay the remaining rent until they found a new tenant, or we would have to buy our way out or negotiate our way out of a lease, and that wasn't a big possibility. So our other alternative was to reinvent ourselves, recreate the business in a different way, do it the right way, and see if we could make a go of it. So after a lot of tears and a lot of thought and stress, we decided that we would hire a consultant who specialized in that same industry to do it the right way, get the training that we weren't afforded in the first case, and do it on our own, but not be tied to a franchise. It ended up that. That failure created a lot of havoc in our lives for a while and a lot of stress, but it turned out to be a good thing. At the end of the day, we were successful in being able to turn that business around because we surrounded ourselves by people who were doing it the right way. We had consultants, we had some other colleagues in the industry who were doing it the right way, and we followed in their footsteps. We leaned on them for advice and consultation, and we were able to successfully turn a really bad situation into a really good situation. We actually owned that business. We closed down one location and we kept the other business running for about 10 years, and we successfully made money at that business, and we sold it. Ultimately, we learned some big lessons, and we learned that we were going to focus on some other energies and efforts along the way, but we made a success out. That business is still operating to this day, and we're talking 20 some years ago now, so I consider that to be a success. So we took those lemons and we really turned them around and made them into something great. So if you struggle in business, that's not a bad thing. Failure helps us learn how to create new opportunities and reassess our paths. So sometimes if your business isn't quite. Quite what you hoped it would be, don't give up hope. Perhaps you can lean on some other folks, Hire a consultant. Hire someone who can help you make the leap to that next step where you really want to be. Now, I say this message in that a lot of people look and they say, well, Donna, you're a cpa. You ought to know everything about running a business, right? No, nobody does. If I did, I would be in a lot larger place and a lot different scenario, probably. But my goal is to take what I know about operating a business and what I see going on in industry and help others achieve those levels of success, take some of that stress off their plate that they're feeling let them know that they're not alone and that there are things you can do to make sure that your business is running successfully and will become the business that you always dreamed it would be. So, if you find yourself in a situation where you feel stagnant or you feel like things aren't going the right way, take a moment to think about what it would look like to invest in yourself and invest in some help from some outsiders perhaps can together make a difference in your life. If you feel like you would like to talk and see what this could mean for you and determine if there's a right fit for you, please reach out. I'm happy to help you. Thanks. Have a good day.
