The

Entrepreneurial

Code

Lessons from an

Ivy League Entrepreneur

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Two months after the College Card mailer launched, the partners began the painful process of shutting down the business.  It was a depressing ordeal made worse by the fact they had to let go their entire staff.  The office, which was filled with an exciting buzz not six weeks prior, now was empty. 

The company needed cash badly, so Johnny began knocking on the doors of neighboring companies trying to liquidate the assets.  He asked office managers to buy the fax machine, refrigerator, copy machine, printers, computers, etc.  As the neighbors haggled with him on price, it felt he like was running a garage sale.  Suddenly, getting $50 for a copy machine they had bought for $300 two months prior seemed like a good deal. 

Johnny felt like he was going door-to-door selling the belongings of someone very close to him who passed away.  It felt surreal to watch the office slowly emptying until all that remained were piles of boxes and a few telephones on the floors of the respective offices.  It was hard to believe that everything else was gone.

Abe’s father drove to the offices everyday from Pennsylvania to supervise the shut down, because he wanted to make sure everything got done properly.  It was the worst kind of work in the world as Abe and his father read through all of the leases, agreements, and liabilities.  The company had bills outstanding to printers, graphic design firms, equipment providers, landlords, staffing firms, and mailing houses.  Abe and his father closely monitored the bank account and cash balances as they worked to unwind the company’s obligations. 

Johnny felt incredibly guilty about letting his parents invest in the business.  He wanted to make them rich, but he was so blindly confident that he lost their money instead.  Now, he needed to borrow more money from them to pay for his share of the outstanding bills.  

Johnny recalled reading articles about successful entrepreneurs who financed their businesses with credit cards, second mortgages, and “friends and family” equity rounds.  That’s exactly what he tried to do.  He accepted money from those that knew him best and he had a stack of credit cards with large outstanding balances.  Unfortunately, when things didn’t work out as planned, he was so deeply in debt that he lost the money of those he cared about most.  In that regard, it was a much riskier financing strategy than he ever contemplated.  Johnny dreamed of the upside potential, instead of making sure he was okay with the worst-case scenario. 

For the prior two years, Johnny and his partners played the role of big entrepreneurs.  They became so egotistical that they didn’t listen to anyone but themselves.  Everything was a game to them with their late-night strategizing on the giant dry-erase board, their 4 A.M. runs to Wawa for pretzels and caffeine, and their spreadsheets and financial projections of wealth. 

They were too obsessed with becoming rich entrepreneurs.  It filled Johnny with a sense of anxiety that never left him and he believed he would only be able to relax after the company became “successful.”  Therefore, he tried to grow the business as quickly as possible.  It was a very “end justifies the means” mentality.  When he thought back to that guest-speaker in his entrepreneurship class who played full court basketball games with his staff during the middle of their workday, he realize that some entrepreneurs create jobs for themselves they loved doing.  Unfortunately, Johnny had not. 

While Abe and his dad straightened out the finances, Johnny was charged with the task of driving Abe’s car to shut down the Bullfrog Card office.  It was during the summer when the campus was empty, and usage of the system was low.  Johnny drove around to each merchant and informed them they were closing the business.  He went behind the counter, disconnected the wires and removed the equipment and in five hours, the trunk and backseat of Abe’s car were filled with terminals and a tangled mess of wires.  It took two years to build that program, and a day to tear it down. 

Eventually, Johnny moved back to Queens with his parents, Abe moved in with his girlfriend in Philadelphia, and Maverock moved back with his family in California.  One of the strangest things for Johnny about being back in his parents’ house was sleeping in the same bedroom as he did as a kid.  It was as if time stopped in that room.  The same posters still hung on the walls from high school, along with the same trophy case and Little League plaques.  It was a small room with a single bed, and a desk he barely fit into, as he sat in silence thinking about how he got there.

Picking up a pen, he began to write.

Copyright  2005 by Chris Cononico
All rights reserved. No part of this manuscript may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.