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THINKING BIGGER
Growing Your Small Business After Personal Crisis
New business, newly shattered legs? No problem.
Three months after opening my business in Boston — which took three years and a million dollars to build — I had a freak fall in Tennessee. It left me with two horribly disfigured feet, five-inch compound fractures on both legs, multiple dislocations, four shattered bones, and twelve torn tendons and ligaments. While the surgeon was discussing the possibility of double amputation, I turned to my partner and said, “How are we going to keep the gym open?”
Welcome to entrepreneurship. I had partially severed both of my feet and all I could think about was financial statements. But I knew that if we didn’t get a grip on the reins, fast, our business would disappear in a fraction of the time it took for it to appear in the first place. I was not about to let everything collapse just because one thing collapsed, no matter how horrific that one thing was. So we made a crisis plan that we hoped would stem the (metaphorical) bleeding. But we didn’t know that that same plan would launch growth in ways we could never have expected.
Amplify Fitness Boston, our gym and personal training business, was freshly hatched at the time. We were already losing twenty thousand dollars a month when I —…
