2011 was the beginning of me almost losing my business and mind.
To set the stage, I need to backtrack a little to a comment I’d made to my husband Tom a few months earlier: “I’ve spent my entire life putting myself last. Now it’s MY time. I’m gonna concentrate on myself and my business and build something really cool that I can sell for retirement!”
Piece of cake. I’ve got this – yeehah! My runway was wide open and I was soooo excited. The world was my oyster. I’d been an entrepreneurial idea factory for the past 20 years, anyway, so all I needed to do was figure out which of my ideas I wanted to run with.
Our kids were now adults and out on their own, healthy and happy. And I had a history of doing anything I set my mind to:
I’d sold two other businesses in the 90’s, one that I started when the kids were just 4 months and 24 months old. I’d started my web and marketing strategy business in 1996 while raising them and cared for my father-in-law with Alzheimer’s for over 7 years in our home. I’d taught myself how to develop a shopping cart in ‘97 from books I bought at now-defunct bookstores (in case you’re too young to know, there was no Google yet and Altavista couldn’t index nonexistent information). I’d homeschooled the kids for a couple of years, moved the business and family to another state, volunteered innumerable hours, and served on multiple Boards…. What could possibly stop me from achieving this new goal?
Fast forward two weeks to a phone call from my mother: “I passed out while visiting a friend in assisted living and I’m afraid to drive home. Can you come and get me?”
Little did I know that this was the precursor to my creating a huge clusterf*** instead of something exciting I could sell. I won’t go into the details of all that happened along the way, but the troubling signs I had noticed in Mama over the past several years were to be diagnosed as Alzheimer’s later that year.
Mama always had to stay busy & was never one to sit around. When she became immobile I gave her papers so she could tear the pages into strips…
In my heart I’d seen it coming because of the years I’d already lived under the same roof with that damn disease. Now it was entering my life again. I knew that the blackberry cobbler with the soupy middle, the phone calls to tell me something exciting that I had just called to tell her 10 minutes earlier, and the changes in her personality were all bad signs, but they were signs I was hoping I was wrong about. After all, she was the one who always kept me straight by reminding me of dates and times of events. How could she have Alzheimer’s?
Alzheimer’s itself is just the catalyst to what led to the misery and chaos I created, though. In a nutshell, rather than doing for myself what I’d already spent 16 years doing for clients – helping them use technology to adapt their business to make or meet disruptive changes in their industry or personal life – I made a poor hiring decision that culminated in me spending the last 6 months of Mama’s life working my ass off to save the business from potential bankruptcy, going into debt, hurting my staff, and hurting my family.
At this major crossroads in life I had turned in front of oncoming traffic and almost destroyed myself, my family, and my business. Tom had retired to help me care for Mama; if not for him, this whole thing would have been much worse and I doubt the business would exist now.
If that’s not bad enough, that poor decision was the gift that just wouldn’t quit giving. It left me with overwhelming guilt for the damage to my family. I was doubting myself professionally for the first time in my adult life, thinking of myself as a loser, afraid to trust my judgement any more, and seriously considering getting a job.
Anyone who knows me well knows that even considering getting a job is a serious sign of bad things going on in my mind. That would be the last thing this nonconformist would do!
Thankfully I, my family, and my business have survived but the episode has haunted me. I know there’s a huge number of other entrepreneurs out there who are outwardly very successful but on the inside are miserable. They’ve built a business that isn’t personally fulfilling, or they may be facing a life situation that has them on the verge of taking that figurative turn into oncoming traffic that I made.
While my own downward spiral began due to a major life transition, it doesn’t really matter what has brought you to this point. What matters is that you take back your business, your life, your family, and yourself. If I can overcome the depths of despair I faced you can, too.
[excerpt from Disrupt Your Now]