Episode 07 - Whoa on the Woes - 10-2-2013

Well, there comes a point in every story where the heroes reach their nadir, and their plans unravel before their eyes.  Yup, that tells the whole story really, but GOONIES NEVER SAY DIE! What follows is a story that still plagues us here at GLC.  

Well, the biggest issue is that both of the investors who were talking pretty good amounts had to pull out for personal reasons.  We might get their help in the future, who knows, but for now, we were on our own.  There were definitely days when we wanted to walk away, but we already had the location chosen, and had about a month before we had any rent to pay, so we had time to regroup, and find new ways to deal. 

Our initial strategy was to find other people, and mostly Eddie was in charge of this at the time.  Nothing really panned out, despite his best efforts, and of course he was starting to feel really guilty about the whole situation.  Amy and I sat down with him, and told him that we needed to move either way, so whether the store works out or not, we’re in a better place. 

With what little money we had, we wanted to try to raise more, so Eddie had the idea to throw a fundraiser open bar at the City Tap and Grill next door.  Of course, the issue is that he wanted to throw this in two days.  It seemed like a bad idea, but the dude was positive it would work.  We did everything we could to promote the shindig, but ultimately it was a complete and utter failure, and no one really came.

It was a pretty big bummer, but we knew it was a gamble when we attempted it.  More than anything else, I think it showed us that failure was indeed possible, even if I already knew that, deep down.  We ended up raising smaller amounts here and there, but it was not nearly enough to even get the store running up to snuff.  It really seemed as if the store was not going to happen at all, which was a pretty depressing thought.

It wasn't working out for Eddie, so now it was my turn to try to save the dying dream.  I assumed that most of my friends wouldn't be interested or financially stable enough to help out much, but it turned out I was wrong.  A good buddy of mine from high school, Gordon Erdman, was a Naval guy, and it turns out that military guys save their money.  We didn't really come to any sort of agreement on coming is as an actual investor, but he did borrow us some money when we really needed it, and we were able to plod on, and come up with a new plan - sell everything!

And we did... well, Eddie did.  More on that in the next episode!

Thanks for reading!