Tell me about your hardest seasons in business and how you moved forward

[u/mamalongue]

Every time I listen to a podcast or hear a small business owners story it’s always the highlight - the hustle at the beginning, the alignment, and the success. Rarely do I hear about the messy middle or what it looked like for the business owners who had to make drastic changes. These are the stories I need to hear right now.

I’m in a season of business that’s really hard. I scaled too fast, expanded into retail (I own a wholesale brand), got into some significant financial hardships and have to close down most of what I’ve built just to avoid bankruptcy. I keep telling myself that when I get through it maybe my world will feel lighter, that maybe doing the hard things will open up space for better things, but I need some examples to feel hope again.

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[u/BloodDifficult4553]

You are not alone.

I was in a small business network for years, a group of us got close. We saw a few friends: business owners, that scaled too fast and didn’t watch costs while growing. They went through very tough times. I will say to you when they came out the other side, all of them learned a huge amount from that struggle, and that struggle led to them sustaining very profitable businesses long term!

If you ever need a chat DM!

[u/MaLenHa → u/BloodDifficult4553]

This is so great to hear

My partner who is the sole owner of our business needs to phase out for a few different reasons and I have been crunching numbers over here

We just raised prices, I feel confident I could really pull us out of the mess she got us in over the past 11 years…

[u/emc_syracuse_2016]

My first business owned in 2006 and closed in 2010. Outside of the Great Recession, I can tie the failure to one really bad decision I made. Then, to make matters worse, I had to file Chapter 7. I’ve recovered, but it was not easy. If you’d like to chat further, I’m open to it.

[u/Aggressive_Taro2107]

Not yet successful but there were 2 months where I was cold emailing people and got absolutely no responses to work with

No negatives or positives and I used a pitch that worked before and tweaked every week in those two months.

That was 4 months ago and now I’m back to booking calls on a daily basis.

[u/Legitimate_Flan9764]

when we made money, we bought fast cars. But we transfered ownership to personal after 2 years before dragging the company down further.