(Steve Rae’s living The Dream. He took risks, worked long hours, and went above-and-beyond what was required to semi-retire in his early 50s. He’s the newest contributing editor to The Daily Blur.)
“I can’t sleep.”
So goes the refrain of small business owners everywhere.
The pressure of running a small business can be immense, but the staff come to work every day oblivious to the demands their bosses.
“Tomorrow is payroll and we don’t have the money to pay it.”
“Where are we going to get a quick $9000 to cover?”
When my wife Carolyn and I owned our small business this happened a few times in our 15 years at the helm. Because cash flow is king and we held a pretty high accounts receivable amount there could sometimes be $150,000 + owed to us, but we had no actual cash in the bank. We knew our clients were good for it because our history of collections was really good. We rarely lost more than $6,000 or $7000 in bad debt in a year. But where do you get the money for payroll?
You get creative.
We borrowed from parents, we took from our meagre personal savings, we borrowed against our house and a couple of times we even put it on VISA.
So if you are a small business owner I commiserate with you and respect you greatly.
If you are an employee then have a little compassion when it’s payroll day and your boss has dark bags under his or her eyes because it looks like they didn’t sleep last night.
They didn’t.
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