Brian Smith

And I said, look, I'll be up tomorrow and I'll commit to working a year for the business to see if we can salvage it.

And that became, coming off the three best years of my life, this became the hardest year of my life for sure.

It was, what you said, a mess.

And I had to try and reconcile everything.

And it ended up about $87,000 in the hole when I finally finished the accounting.

Had no leads on financing for the following year.

My supplier, Country Leather, had just had three fabulous years working with Neil.

And he got his money on time all the time.

And when I called him up and told him the news about Neil...

He started to clam up and I knew he was thinking back to when I was running the company before Neil.

And I always paid him, but he never knew when the money was coming.

And so he started to get very cautious.

And I said, George, don't worry.

I'm going to do a business plan.

I'm going to go out and refinance the company and I'll have plenty of money to start production.

Right.

But it didn't work out that way.

You know, I wrote a business plan, but I got nowhere with the bankers.

Friends and family were way beyond that.

So, you know, I really was desperate for three or four months on who the hell can I approach.