Some dates burn themselves into your memory. For me, it’s September 19, 2019.
That evening, one of my employees — she was working the night shift, until one in the morning — sent me a message: “My account is locked.” I told her to use another one. “That one too.” I told her to go home, that we’d figure it out in the morning.
The next day, we watched our accounts fall one by one. Like dominoes.
To understand how I got there, I need to go back a bit. In 2015, after going bankrupt in the online appliance business — nine years of work gone — I started over in e-commerce. Dropshipping this time. And it worked. So well that by 2018, my company was doing close to $10 million in revenue.
But there was a hidden trap. My clients paid me on 25 to 30-day terms. My supplier, I had to pay cash. Every time sales spiked, my cash flow was choking. I had to wait for money from past sales to fund future purchases. And in the meantime, orders were slipping through my fingers.
So in 2019, I made a choice. Instead of slowing down, I sped up. I asked three people to lend me money to build a working capital buffer. My aunt. My wife’s uncle. A friend’s father. People who trusted me, who put their money on the table because they believed in what I was building.
I had about fifteen employees, including six buyers. So they could place orders without using my personal credit card, I created accounts with my supplier for each of them, funded with gift cards. It was clean, it was organized, it was legal.
Except that other teams, elsewhere, were using the same system with fraudulent gift cards. And on September 19, 2019, my supplier decided to shut down — in bulk — every account that used gift cards at scale. No distinction. No investigation. No appeal.
Half a million dollars — between merchandise in transit and unused gift cards — frozen overnight. And in that amount was the money from my aunt, from the uncle, from my friend’s father.
That night, I didn’t know it yet, but I had just crossed to the other side. The side where you no longer count what you earn, but what you owe.
Day 2.