Summer is a particularly tough time for the meal assembly business. Many people take the summer off, and trying to retain customers is difficult. Combine that with the state of the economy and no cash reserves, and that made last summer our first and last. We didn’t actually close our doors under mid-October, but the writing was on the wall. I won’t go into the gritty details, but I will say that we made the decision very quickly, at a point where we could pay our employees, refund or provide food to our customers, and help out some of the other Dream Dinners owners nearby. So we no longer own Dream Dinners in Hagerstown, and that started all of this (unless you count me knocking up the Boss earlier in the year).

Then comes Kaylee Elizabeth. Our second beautiful daughter was born on October 22, and she is as sweet as her sister. I never did think I wanted kids before I met the Boss, but I think being Daddy is the best, and this little Kaylee-bear makes it even better. Life was a little rough for the first few months, as she was colicky and had a bad case of acid reflux. Now she’s cutting her first teeth, working on her first word, and crawling everywhere. She is quite chatty, which is no surprise if you know Bella.

While we were adjusting to life with Kaylee, we were still dealing with the financial implications of closing the business. We had a 10 year lease, a $220k loan, outstanding vendor invoices, and royalties, all of which we had to personally guarantee. This meant that declaring personal bankruptcy was a foregone conclusion. Maybe in the near future I’ll talk about that process a bit, but the wild card here was that we also had over $370k in mortgages on a house that was worth much less. Combine that with a 90 minute commute each way, all the time and money costs of home ownership, and the Boss and I had a very hard decision to make. The bankruptcy gave us a chance to walk away from the house, and we did. We moved back to Virginia, just 8 miles from my office, into a rented townhouse.

Needless to say, this has taken a bit of adjustment. We’ve gone through several rounds of getting rid of stuff that we didn’t need. We still have a garage and a storage unit full of boxes. We miss our big kitchen and yard, but we don’t miss having to take care of a house that was poorly built. Not to mention that it takes me 15 minutes or less to get to and from work. There is just no price I can put on getting back 10 hours a week of my life. Even this close to these hard choices, there is nothing in the world I would trade for 2 hours a day with my girls.

I’ve barely scratched the surface here. There is just so much to talk about, and my head is finally clear enough to do it. Yes, I am still going strong with GTD, and I have that to thank for being able to make most of these decisions and know for sure that I am doing the right thing. Expect to hear more on that soon.

For those not familiar, Getting Things Done (aka GTD) is a methodology for capturing, defining, organizing, and reviewing every aspect of your life, from where you want to be in 10 years to what you need to pick up at the grocery on the way home.  It’s not tied to a specific tool, and the concepts involved are generally things you already do, just not with enough regularity.  If you want to know more, there are dozens of people out there who can explain GTD better than I can.

This is actually my third time trying to implement GTD. The last two times I lost control of my system and then just stopped trying because I was not doing regular weekly reviews and I was disregarding the “hard edges” of my calendar by trying to plan out when I was going to do things, rather than keeping my calendar to the “must do” things for a particular day and working from my context lists. But both times taught me the joy of clarity. Do you have any idea how amazing it is for someone like myself, who works in computers, to be confronted with a completely empty inbox?

It’s very easy to remember when I started working on GTD this time around, because it was two days before I registered this website. Like the previous times, I took a work day and went to Starbucks instead of the office. For the serious brain dump I needed to do, I have to get out of the office where I can be interrupted, and I can’t be at home where I’m distracted. But once I got everything that was on my mind down into the computer, I decided I wanted to start writing. I quickly came up with the site name and several topics that I wanted to write about. Which, of course, created new projects in my GTD system. A very clear example of how the human brain is made for having ideas, not holding them. Once you relieve it of having to hold onto things, it can get back to what it’s good at.

So why did I just take over a month between posts, if I’m so organized and clear? Life, that’s why. The whole reason I started up again is because things were getting out of control. I have a full time job, a full time retail business, a house, and a 3 year old. I got myself together, but June and July threw a few curve balls. I felt like I had to let a few things on my list slide while I dealt with whatever the current crisis was. Everything was still in my system, though, so I was able to look at those things and say “not today.” I actually came up with the topic for this post a month ago, but I wasn’t in the right place to write it until now.

OK, so why write it now? I realized this past week that I’ve caught up on many of my stalled projects at work, simply because I had clarified them and had discrete actions available for each. Meetings that I had been putting off scheduling suddenly got on the calendar because I put an action on my list first to write an agenda for them. When I was in a mood to take care of things that I had been ignoring, I was able to because I was adhering to the GTD concepts and I knew what all the actions that were required were.

It doesn’t stop there. I’m picking back up on projects around the house, and around the business as well. It feels so good to check the actions and projects off my list that I want more of that. Clarity is addictive, and I wonder what else is going to flood in to fill the void when my head is clear.

Dream Dinners is doing well for us.  Since we opened almost eleven months ago, our sales have rapidly trended up.  April was a fantastic month, and we nearly made it to profitable month over month.  Then came May.  We knew that summer was a traditionally slow time for the meal assembly business, and we thought we were ready for it.  And the truth is, compared to other franchise locations across the company, we are still right in line with our trend.  But when you don’t have enough money in the bank to pay all the bills, and you need to start deciding whether you’re going to pay the employees or the suppliers first, it doesn’t really matter what the trend looks like.  One of my few buttons is money.  When it’s tight, I get stressed easily.  I have the tendency to just shut down for a while, and that’s exactly what I did.  Add to that the fact that my day job was giving me a bit of a headache at the same time.

Then I got my head back in the game.  There is no way I am going to give up and walk away merely because we’re having a hard time finding working capital.  While I’m willing to make the decision to stop throwing good money after bad if it ever comes down to that, I know from looking at the financials every day that that is not the problem right now.  As long as the trend holds, the fall is going to completely blow up for us.  We just need to get to the fall.  So we have a problem to solve, but it’s not a show-stopper.

I’ve got a plan ahead of me.  I may have gotten shot down in one phone call today with our current lender (who now has a minimum loan amount of about 8 times what we need), but I immediately followed that up with phone calls to the SBA, another bank, and the local development council.  Tomorrow I’m taking some time to go and talk to people in person, and there’s a meeting tomorrow night about the SBA’s new loan programs.

What they say about success is absolutely true.  It’s 90% perspiration.  Bring it.