If You Are Going To Fly Have A Parachute

Do you ever wonder how long you will stay in your current business? Do you ever think that your current struggles are going to cause you to close the doors or worse, go bankrupt. Does your heart skip a beat when the mail shows up?

If you’ve ever felt like this keep reading, I’ve been there myself, multiple times and I wrote this for you.

I’ve been on this entrepreneurship journey for over a quarter of a century. If there is one thing I can say, whatever you are going through in your business, either I’ve experienced it or something very much like it.  There’s basically only two reasons a business will fail, lack of profitable sales and too much debt.

You can suck at so many things in your business but if you have lots of profitable sales and you don’t owe anyone any money, then everything else can be figured out.

But what happens when you have lots of debt and not enough sales to support it? Either you do something about it or the end is near my friend.

How do I know? I’ve had the privilege of taking the ride up and the rapid descent down and then the crash and burn. Let me tell you the crash and burn ain’t no fun as we say in the south.

I’ve owned several companies since I was 22 years old. I’m 50 at the time of this writing. One of those companies, V-Blox Corporation, was my bread and butter from 1998 to 2016. V-Blox manufactured electrical products that saved commercial and industrial customers money. We sold in 13 countries around the globe. It afforded me luxuries that frankly spoiled the heck out of me for a long time. I had the S550, the LS460L, the million dollar house, I flew first class around the world and had six figures in my bank account at all times. There were times when my take home pay was over a hundred thousand in a single week. I’m not bragging, just trying to paint a picture. Life was fun because my business was enjoyable.

But, I made some bad decisions in a crunch after a bookkeeper stole a half a million dollars from the company. She did this over a three year period of time and it all came to a head at a time when our economy was experiencing the worst financial crash of our lifetimes, 2010. I’m not going to tell you the whole story here, if you want to read the story get one of my books here, I promise it will be well worth the read.

But the worst decision I made in the crunch was to borrow lots of money and by 2016 the company could no longer support the overhead and the debt and V-Blox filed for bankruptcy. I’m writing this so you can recognize symptoms, like a doctor looks at symptoms and writes a prescription, I want you to be able to recognize that your business can fail even with a boatload of income.

The crash and burn story offers many lessons. But the biggest most important lesson I can tell you is that as an entrepreneur, you are a pilot and if you are going to fly you better have a parachute. My parachute was real estate. Thankfully my wife Beth and I have been investing in Florida and South Georgia real estate since 1992 and it saved my ass.

Sure I had to change my lifestyle but I was able to press control alt delete and start again. Control alt delete causes a reboot on a Windows operating system for you non computer geeks.

But my biggest parachute of all was not the real estate business, it was the knowledge of how to take an actual product or service and turn it into cash by starting a business and making that business grow. You have a lot of people online who try to teach you how to start a business and those “gurus” have never actually had a brick and mortar business and here’s the cold hard truth.

Most of those gurus don’t have a clue. They sell bogus products that don’t come with any real experience on the other end.

With the knowledge I had, once I was able to reboot I was back on my feet in a few months. Knowledge is the most important thing you can have. Proverbs 4:7 says “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it costs all you have, get understanding.”

Thankfully for most of my adult life I have sought wisdom through books, courses, coaches and blogs. I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on acquiring wisdom because once you have it, you will always have it. When Solomon writes, “though it costs you all you have”, he is not stating you will run out, he is stating that once you have it you will use it to make more.

I commend you, you are doing what that says, seeking wisdom. You are on the right path. Never stop seeking wisdom and never give up.

To your lifelong prosperity,

David Mulvaney

P.S. I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment and tell me if this has helped you in some way.