The 7-Year Collapse of an SBA Acquisition

Which, by the way, sorry to interrupt, Scott, but I have to say that disappointing to hear because lenders always say your best course of action is to get in front of this with us. If you think it looks like you might slip, tell us before the fact, not after the fact, so that we can work with you, so that you've given us heads up. So you were following the best practice and yet it seems to have…

And really, they didn't care to talk to you until, as you just said, you miss a payment.

I think it was because they didn't have any experience with it. It was a relatively small regional bank. It was pretty clear when we closed on the loan years beforehand that they didn't have a ton of experience with anything like that.

They didn't even have an internal workout team. So when I was Having this negotiation. I was talking to my relationship manager and I don't know where it was going in the bank after that, but it wasn't somebody who had deep expertise in SBA loans or turnarounds or restructurings. For sure.

Yeah. Yep, yep. Okay, so you miss a payment and then what?

Nothing. Nothing. If the bank wasn't my problem at that point in time, it was vendors. And my experience was that the more sophisticated my vendor was, the less they cared about my payables. It was the small shops like me that got like ridiculously aggressive.

I had creditors calling my wife's cell phone number. They were emailing my father in law. They were emailing her.

Allegedly. My employees told me that they were. One vendor was sending pictures of my house that they hired a private investigator to take. Like it was, it was crazy.

Oh my God. Was that, did that make you feel unsafe?

I think this says more about my state of mind at the time than the actual, I think, threat. But I, I was looking over my shoulder if there's a car park parked on my street and I didn't know who it was. I'm like, it was, I was paranoid.

I was, I wasn't sleeping. I was on a sleeping medication. I was barely talking to my wife.