Failing Doesn’t Make Me a Failure
Surviving the loss of a family business
“It’s always darkest before the dawn.” Thomas Fuller
I will never forget the day. Thursday, March 2nd, 2017. The day also was my 34th birthday. I received a call from the CFO of our main supplier asking if I was leaving the company. He heard my brother was coming back to the business and wanted to confirm I would still be there as we had developed a strong bond and he enjoyed working with me. I told him of course I would still be there. I had no plan on leaving; I loved the business and couldn’t imagine walking away from it.
The truth of the matter was I knew I would never return to my role as CEO or to the company. The company was my family grocery business, Gordy’s Market, that my father started in 1966 when he was 26 years old. I felt dead inside.
My brother had retired in August 2016 and had no plans of coming back. We had worked together for nearly 20 years. We both started working at the store as kids, however he was 21 years older than me. The last few months working together until he retired had been incredibly trying. Patience and understanding were scarce. There was a lot of tension between us and it had been physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting. The grocery business was becoming harder and more competitive every day.
We are from a small city in west central Wisconsin, Chippewa Falls. The city is home to 13,000 people, but the community is very tight knit. Everyone knows everyone. I started working at the stores in 1996, a scrawny 13-year-old who could barely see over the counter. Working at the stores was amazing. Serving people, getting to know the customers and working hard fit right into my personality. I worked full time starting my junior year of high school until I graduated from college in the spring of 2006. At that point, we were a 3 store successful chain of grocery stores.
There wasn’t room for all of us in the business, I had 2 additional siblings, a sister-in-law and my father all actively involved. I took my accounting degree and moved to the Twin Cities area to work for one of the Big 4 accounting firms, Ernst & Young. The experience I got and the caliber of people I worked with was amazing. I spent 2 years there before spending a short time at a hedge fund and then moving on to Best Buy for a year.
However, in 2009 my family acquired two additional stores. My father called me and asked me to return in a full-time role as CFO for the corporation. After much discussion with my family and my wife, we decided this would be a good time to return to the family business, and I returned in the spring of 2009.
When I first got back, the business was struggling to cash flow, and I knew we had a lot of work on our hands. We focused on the income statement, determined our number 1 problem was excess labor for the sales we were doing and went to work fixing the problem. After a few months, we started to turn the ship around. Between the fall of 2009 and fall of 2015 we added 20 more stores, started a trucking company from scratch and became a 26-store chain. There were definitely many difficulties along the way, but overall things were good.
Then 2016 happened. When a new competitor opened in our largest market, things got very challenging. Cash flow got tight. We made some business decisions that hadn’t panned out and a few of our newer acquisitions were severely under performing and burning cash. The stress was wearing on everyone involved. We tried many things to drive sales, but nothing worked. Besides all this, my brother and I could not work together anymore. We had very different management styles and views of the world and we knew one of us needed to step aside.
After a few different discussions, my brother and I sat down and discussed our options for the future of the company. I offered to leave, but he was 21 years older than me and had enough of a very grinding business. He decided that he was ready to sail off into the sunset and do something different with his life.
Which brings us back to March 2nd, 2017. We had a meeting as a family on February 28th in which he discussed a desire to return to the business. We were making small amounts of progress to improve upon things, but we still had a long way to go to become a stable company again. In fact, it was getting very close to needing a miracle to pull out of the vortex we were in.
“I would like to return to the business,” he said. “I will come in and run the marketing department and you can continue to be CEO.”
This was a situation I wanted nothing to do with. We had been through this so many times in the past and the last thing I wanted to do was relive that experience again. Even if things had been going well, the mental stress and exhaustion coming from the dysfunction was too much to take.
I asked to be given until Monday, March 6th to determine next steps. We had agreed to that as a family and adjourned the meeting.
Then March 2nd happened. After talking with the CFO of our supplier, I was frustrated, angry and hurt. I realized my brother had been talking to the supplier behind my back trying to make him sound like the white knight riding in on his horse to save the day. This was all so tiring, and I needed to get off the merry-go-round from hell.
So, I did the one thing I did not want to do. I walked away. From everything I had ever known. I walked away with no clue what would happen next. I jumped without a net. However, I walked away knowing that I had done everything I could do to make a hard situation easier. Of all the decisions I have made in life, this was the hardest one I have done.
Leaving everything you know for who knows what next is stressful. However, staying seemed like even a worse solution. Unfortunately, what happened next was very ugly. The family business collapsed, I fell very ill from pulmonary embolisms and life felt like it was over.
I went through some painful, gut wrenching lows. I wondered what my purpose was on this earth. Did I have a place? Would it be better if I just checked out of life? I felt lost, hopeless and full of despair. I broke down on my bathroom floor. Would the world have been better off without me? I felt like such a failure, like I let my whole family down.
Guess what happened next? Life didn’t end. Not only did life not end, but it slowly started to get better; better than I could have imagined. I realized that my business failed, but that didn’t define me as a father, husband, businessperson or man. I got a new job as a marketing manager at a local non-profit company and felt like I had a new place in the world. Slowly but surely, I started to regain faith in myself. I put myself in uncomfortable situations. One of my goals for the past 10 years had been to have a better understanding of programming. I signed up for a few online courses and learned SQL, Python and R.
Then I learned something about myself. Feeling uncomfortable is a good thing. From the moment that our early ancestors realized they were uncomfortable from being cold and mastered fire to stay warm, being uncomfortable has driven a lot of human innovation.
Which brings me to why I am sharing my story. I have always wanted to write and to share. However, writing has terrified me for years. I always felt like I wasn’t good enough to do it. After doing a lot of reflection, I felt writing was the next uncomfortable thing in my life I wanted to tackle. I hope that my story can help others hurting or going through painful situations.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Mark Twain
P.S. I mainly wrote about my experience in this article as that is what I know and understand. However, there were quite a few other family members the failure of the business affected. We are struggling to reunite as a family and there is still a lot of anger and resentment. Will we be able to heal and move on from everything? I hope so, but we have a way to go to get there.
I am Dave Schafer, an always learning entrepreneur, recovering accountant, experienced marketer and writer. One of my large passions is all things digital marketing, an ever-changing field that offers so much upside done right. Have questions for me? Reach me at Dave2742@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!
