$700,000 in Liabilities
My prayer journal entry from June 30th, 2020
Sometimes we have to persevere in prayer. I know we always want an answer right away, but God says, “Be still and know that I am God…” (Psalms 46:10 NIV). Waiting on Him is a discipline He wants us to exercise. Patience is becoming a lost virtue.
Romans 12:12 ISV “Be joyful in hope, patient in trouble, and persistent in prayer.”
My prayer from June 30, 2020…
[Retyped and elaborated for context and clarity…]
Tuesday, June 30, 2020 4:50p
Jesus. Talk to me please. Help me change my mindset. Bring some positivity to 2020. COVID, race issues across America, the weight of business, the weight of debt, the weight of it all. I’m tired. I’m stressed. I know I’m not getting the message. I’m cloudy. Bring me clarity Lord. The questions I have for you…
Will this refi happen? Do you not want it to happen? I could save so much money.
[It would be 2022 before I would end up refinancing the property about a week or two before interest rates started climbing. God’s timing was perfect and you’ll hear more about this later. Looking back, I now know God had me in a perfect position… I was in a place of no mortgage payments at the time I wrote this prayer due to the relief my current mortgage holder was offering me. My head wanted to refinance the property, pull equity out at the same time, pay off debts, and take a shortcut to an exit strategy to remove myself from NS4L. Obviously, that was MY plan. God’s was different and much better. More on this in the near future.]
Am I always supposed to be in the scooter business? I thought I was supposed to go down this new route but now I feel I have two below-average businesses. I want to step into this podcasting world, but is that not what you want? What do you want me to do?
Should I step back into NS4L full time? [If you know where I am spending all of my time these days, you know God’s answer was “YES!”]
What steps do I need to take to get NS4L out of debt?
[Since this prayer journal entry was at the end of June 2020 (meaning our numbers are reconciled and correct), I thought it would be interesting to show you the liabilities from our June 30, 2020 balance sheet… Scary stuff.]
[$700,000 IN TOTAL LIABILITIES (in this one company! I have the media company and the Holdings company for the property, too!). The number of times I justified this debt as “necessary to grow” is too many to count. I was wrong. SO WRONG.
God would certainly start leading me on a journey toward being debt-free. It really didn’t start coming to fruition until nearly a year after this point (in mid-2021). That’s when I could at least see a spec of light at the end of the tunnel. For comparison, I thought I would share with you where we stand today (as of reconciled numbers on March 31, 2023)…]
[So, of the $122,877.40 in liabilities today, $59,014.44 is our actual debt and this is collateralized by some of the scooters on the showroom floor. My goal is that by the end of this year, New Scooters 4 Less will be 100% debt-free and every scooter on the showroom floor will be an asset, no longer a liability to the company.
Now back to the rest of the prayer…]
What about Repaint [short for Repaint The Wall, our digital media un-agency I started in 2018 that was on hanging on by a thread]? [Names of amazing friends] invested $200k. I wanted this to be a worthwhile investment for them. I don’t want to let them down.
[Never say never, but I’ll pray long and hard before stepping into another partnership. I had a failed partnership in the early days of the scooter business and I thought this one would be different because it was cash for 20% equity in a new business and I would have the ability to operate it the way I wanted to. At the end of the day, however, I still had $200k of great friends’ money that I felt responsible for. I knew that they wanted to see a return at some point, and the weight of that - especially given the unforeseen circumstances of Covid-19 - was something that I wish I never would have had to carry.
Unlike my other prayers, this one abruptly stops here.]
As you can see… God’s pushing me to get super transparent in this blog. The more I want to remain in my comfort zone, the more He keeps pushing me out of it.
I ask that you would share this blog with anyone you think it may resonate with. If anyone is struggling with something like debt, whether personally or in your business, I’d be happy to try to meet with you, look at your situation, and offer some guidance…
Though I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Step 1: Surrender it all to Jesus.
Have a blessed week! Thanks for reading!
Collin
I thought it would be fun to share photos in my phone from the week of June 30th, 2020…
I can’t remember where I saw this. I think I saved it from someone’s LinkedIn feed, but I remember thinking a couple of things when I saw it. 1. What a creative way to still hold an event during a time of so much fear and uncertainty. 2. Fear is crippling.
I probably should have, but I still have the Gator.
#GNVBIZ masks we had made for the WHOA GNV Podcast fans.
If this is your first time visiting my blog, please read about it here and consider subscribing… Thanks!
We will have a huge party and praise God when the business is debt free! Can’t wait!