Everyone we’d worked with up until that moment had been paid on time. So they had no idea we were standing on the edge of this cliff. No one had any idea that there was anything wrong. If we called them now, they’d all be hit just as hard and shockingly as we’d been hit by the bank’s news.
My banker insisted he would help us get through it, and he did. We came up with a plan. We had managed to save some money that we had tied up in a CD, so we cashed that in. Our banker friend even waived the penalty so we wouldn’t lose the little bit of interest we’d earned. Jo had some cash she’d been saving up on the side, too, just as she had way back when the shop was open. The banker was able to open us up a couple of smaller lines of credit so we could pay some bills while we tried to pull the rest together.
All of this took a lot of finagling and creative thinking. Those big developers in Miami or Las Vegas would have just wiped their hands of it, walked away, declared bankruptcy, and said “adios.” In fact, many of them did. But Jo and I couldn’t do that. We wouldn’t do that. There was no way we were going to let anybody we’d made promises to not get paid.
After all of the scrambling, after everything was said and done, after we literally poured everything we had into trying to fix this thing, we were still $100,000 short of the finish line.
Chip and I prayed together. A lot. We were doing well in our new house. The kids were happy, and we did our best to hide our problems from them, even as our stomachs clenched at the breakfast table and we felt like breaking every time the mailman brought another stack of bills that we had absolutely no money left to pay.
It wasn’t just a matter of paying construction bills now. We were literally tapped out. In a few weeks’ time we would have nothing left to pay the electric bill and the mortgage on our home, where we lived with our children.
We were still working on some remodeling projects. In fact, I was doing the best work of my life, and we brought in some money through that work. But it wasn’t nearly enough. So at that point, all of our praying led us to do something that felt completely radical to us.
I reached out to two friends of mine—and I’m using that term very loosely. These were people I didn’t know well, people I’d worked with here and there. And they were fairly comfortable financially. Not rich—not by any means. But they were the type of people who might have some money in the bank and might be interested in earning a better return than the 1 percent the bank was giving them at the time.
I took these two guys to lunch, and as sick as I was on the inside and as much of a panic as I was in, I tried to keep the conversation all business. “So look: I’m in a bit of a pickle. It’s not bad news, like I’m in this huge bind, but we do have this development called Magnolia Villas under way, and we would be interested in your financing the completion of it. The bank has essentially capped us at an amount that was much lower than what we had initially agreed on.”
I explained what the status of the development was and what we had already done to raise the money. “I’ve got all the work on the ground, but I still need about $100,000 to get us across the finish line.”
I asked them for $50,000 each and laid out some terms on how quickly we believed we’d be able to pay them back with interest. It was a very fair deal, and even though I’d kept it focused on the business aspects, I basically felt like I’d spilled my guts to those guys.
One of them was completely silent, just didn’t say a word. The other guy said, “I don’t know, man. It sounds too risky for me.” He asked a lot of questions and seemed nervous about the deal in general.
I’d never had anybody react that way to a deal of mine, ever. It felt like a kick in the gut. In their defense, however, this is not what those guys did for a living. They were not angel investors or financial gurus. They were just good guys I thought might want to get in on this with us.
Long story short, they both walked away without much commitment and seemed generally uninterested. They were much better friends with each other than they were with me, and I just hoped that maybe the one who hadn’t said a word was on my side and would convince his friend not to be so skeptical.
I walked away feeling like Russell Crowe’s character in that boxer movie Cinderella Man. I wondered if I was going to have to be that formerly proud man who had once been at the top of my profession and now had to wander around to all of my old cronies with my hat in my hand, begging for a dollar so I could buy my kids some milk.
We decided we’d better sit down and go over everything again. We went through the old invoices that were still unpaid and the new ones that had come in since we got the news, and we realized that we now had $100,000 in invoices sitting there. So even if those two men decided to make the investment (which at this point seemed very unlikely), all of that money was already spent, and we’d be back to falling behind again the very next month unless we could presell some of the houses or encounter some other windfall.
A couple of very long days went by, and I finally got a call from the silent guy I’d taken to lunch. He said, “Hey, man, I really want to see the development. My wife and I want to meet you out there and walk the property and just get a better sense of what exactly you’re talking about.”
So we met them over at the site, and these two walked around just as calm as they could be. “This is beautiful,” they said. “This is awesome,” they said.
“Wow,” I said. “I was hoping you would think that. So what are you guys doing? Why did you want to come walk the site?”
“I know that meeting was a bit rough the other day,” he said. “I just want you to know that I’ve never done this kind of thing before. But when you were talking, you were really speaking my language. I admire how hard you’ve fought to keep the project alive and make sure everyone gets paid, and I was actually eager to help you out. But I wasn’t sure if it was just my heart talking, you know? So I went back and told my wife about it, and we prayed about this. And, well, we’ve decided that we want to give you the $100,000.”
I reminded him that I only felt comfortable with the $50K investment to spread out the risk.
“I know, but we prayed about it, and we just feel this is the right thing to do. You’re doing a good thing here. We need this kind of development in Waco, and we have no doubt you’re going to sell all of these houses and it will make a big difference to a lot of people.
“And if you don’t? Well, as I said, we’ve prayed a lot about this, so we don’t want you to worry if you don’t ever pay us back. We’ve already imagined that, so if this doesn’t work out like you hoped it would, don’t worry about it. We’re already over it. We don’t want this to be awkward as far as our relationship is concerned.”
My knees almost gave out. It took everything in me not to break down right then and there. This wasn’t like a best friend who would bend over backward to bail you out of trouble. They were just acquaintances at the time. So for them to say something like that came as a complete shock. They had that $100,000 check with them, and they handed it to us right then and there.
The two of us went home in absolute awe of what had just happened. Then we sat down and considered how best to use that money. There were a number of invoices that were due in two days. But for a moment, we wondered if maybe we should invest the money in a quick flip house, something that might turn that money into $150,000 and give us some leeway to pay other bills. But that would mean putting some people off by thirty days or more, and that just didn’t feel right to us.
So what did we do?