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Saturday, November 9, 2013

It's Been a Long Time

It's been a long time since I've written a blog post. My schedule has been incredibly tight as I have been walking the tight rope of life trying to survive financially both personally and in my business. The Lord has to get all the credit for me being able to keep the roof over my head and still have a business. And, there is a reason why I've had to live like this.

I work a full time job (four 10 hour days a week Monday through Thursday) and work with my business partner on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Every time I get to the precipice of personal financial collapse, I find a way to come up with the money either through bonuses, negotiations, loans or creative due date movements. Every time I get to the precipice of business collapse, my business partner and I also find a way to get a customer to pay in the nick of time or we use our own money (which leads back to the personal side issues) to save it. It's been a balancing high wire act for sure.

The nightmare started when I was laid off in 2011. The four months I was out of work due to the Obama recession nearly cost me my house. But I saved it. Having been back to work since December of 2011, it's been one long two year game of playing catch up.

When things were at their darkest and I thought I wouldn't be able to make a mortgage payment or when things were at their darkest and I thought the business would have to shut down leaving me with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, I turned to the Lord in prayer and asked Him to take my burden from me; and if it was His will that I should succeed or fail then so be it. I asked Him to give me the strength and I promised Him I'd do the work.

The Lord provided me in my faith. He allowed me to help my business partner grow in his faith. I don't know exactly how I'm still surviving because it's all been a blur. But, some how some way I've been able to keep it together with spit and glue.

Today, my business partner and I are working on obtaining business lines of credit. Pray this works. We have the potential to take on a fairly large sized client by the end of the year. We have an investor who is involved in another line of business with us now. Things are starting to look up. But, we are in no way out of the woods yet. Our server blew up yesterday, so now we are going to be set back more time and more money to get that up and running. It's one thing after another. Most people would have quit and gone on welfare by now. But this mouse still believes there's cheese in the maze somewhere.

It never used to be this way. The capital markets flowed with cash. Businesses expanded regularly. New small businesses popped up everywhere. Many of those grew into large companies. Yes, you always had to pay the price for success. Entrepreneurs have always succeeded and always failed. But today, the success to failure ratio is nowhere what it was in the years past when we were creating record numbers of millionaires in this country. What I just described were the Reagan years (and it spilled over into the Clinton years). We are now in the Obama years. Conservative, free market approaches to how our country was run made us the greatest nation on Earth. Today, liberal, collectivist approaches are destroying us.

My business partner and I believe we will be successful despite the collapse of our once great nation. If we were willing to endure five years of this stuff (that's how long we've been in business) and we have the perserverence to make it work and never quit, we should reap rewards beyond our wildest dreams. But unlike the way it would have been had this been the Reagan years, it will take twice as much hard work, twice as much suffering and twice as much sacrifice to make it happen. The reason it has to happen: we have no choice. If our business fails, we are destroyed financially.

Our country is over $17 trillion in debt. If our government was a business, it would be the most incompetent business ever run and the free market would have destroyed it years ago. Both my employer and my own business has to comply with ridiculous Orwellian regulations that are imposed upon them by this gargantuan government gone mad. If my business extorted money from people using the law or if it printed its own money, we'd go to jail. But the government? No, they actually can do all the things that their regulators and the statutes tell us we can't do. I'm not saying we should be allowed to extort and counterfeit. I'm just saying the government shouldn't be allowed to either.

If we have become the nanny state, then the nanny is a very abusive one. She beats us. She destroys us financially. She keeps the poor pinned down in poverty. She rewards bad behavior and punishes good behavior. She suspends kids from school for using their fingers to play a wholesome game of cops and robbers, but she'll take the gun out of your hand before you shoot the person robbing you. She takes God out of school, but puts sex education (some of it deviant sexual education) in.

If our government was a private business, it would be forced into bankruptcy. Its executives would go to jail for mismanagement of funds. Its customers would suffer because the product and service they would get would be piss poor. Websites wouldn't work and the price of the product would sky rocket. If our government was a private business, it would be run out of business. If USA, Inc. was ever audited by its own regulators, it would be shut down. If USA, Inc. was ever indicted for fraud and misuse of money, its executives would go to jail.

If I ran my business like the government runs its, I'd be in jail and be completely destroyed financially. Try to find a private business that's $17 trillion in debt and see if it can just raise its debt ceiling or get a triple AAA credit rating. Logic and common sense no longer applies!

The whole flipping thing is upside down. What's right is wrong and what's wrong is right. Life in America is like one big acid trip. Only the hallucinations are real.

So what's the reason I work like a dog? I'm broke. If I am ever to survive this nightmare we call America, I'm going to need lots of money. Becoming wealthy isn't about the mansions, the yachts and the strings of polo ponies. It's about survival! It's about being able to take care of your family and inner circle while the ship we call America goes down. It's about doing God's will and having the means to help others. I'm not interested in luxury. I'm interested in financial self defense. Wealth is to the individual what national defense is to the nation.

The arduous sacrifices and the prices that had to be paid by those who have become successful were voluntary. Read Napoleon Hill, Andrew Carnegie, Robert Ringer or any other book written by a successful person and you will find the keys to success. The reason why it doesn't work for everyone is that most people won't do the things necessary to become successful. And, that used to be okay. Success is hard. It's unconventional. It goes against the grain of everything we were taught. It wasn't for everyone.

We had a country where if you worked hard, you earned enough to raise a family and enjoy a comfortable middle class life. Surely, the extravagances weren't necessary and the problems like car repairs and home appliance repairs were setbacks, but for the most part, you could have a family and enjoy weekends. Those that wanted more were blessed to live in a country that gave them the environment to work harder and make the sacrifices for the bigger and better things. Those who wanted to make the extra sacrifices lived in a country where they were free to do so.

Today it seems most households are in distress. The family is being torn apart. People are working twice as hard just to stay afloat. Weekends off? What's that? Family time? What's that?

We have come to the days Ronald Reagan told us about. We are in the days where we are telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. We are in the days where we are telling our children and our children's children what it was like to earn what you have.

We no longer have that choice of being middle class or working harder to move up. The middle class is the toy boat about to get sucked down the whirlpool in the drain. The sacrifices, the price that once was only required for the successful are now required of us all. The weight that has to be lifted now is much heavier than the one our last generation had to lift. Unfortunately folks, the sacrifices are no longer voluntary. We all have no choice now but to do it

Welfare and food stamps is not the answer. Obamacare is not the answer. All of that is going to implode. If you're not ready financially when that happens, your screwed. Just as I am a prisoner to my business (it's either get it profitable or else die financially), we as Americans are prisoners to this great experiment gone bad. If we don't get it back in line with the tenets of our founders, your grandchildren will be telling their grandchildren about how America fell.

It may cost tens of thousands for me to get out of my business. But it will cost America tens of trillions to get out of whatever this is now. Call it socialism, call it secularism, call it progressivism. But most of all, call it garbage.

If we don't have a revival from the grass roots on up, we're doomed. This isn't about religious zealotry or traditional evangelization. This is about life and death. It has to start in the house, then on the block, then in the neighborhood, then in the town, then in the county, then in the churches and the boardrooms. It has to start from the bottom and grow its way up.  Right now, we are being run by a top down model that is a complete failure. It is controlled by government and it is controlled by elites in both political parties. It's time to put an end to that.

If the bubble gum machine is filled with black licorice bubble gum (you know, the kind everyone hates), you can't fix it by smashing it. And, you certainly can't fix it by adding more black bubble gum to it. The way you fix it is to put a penny in, take out a piece, open the top and add a red one in its place. The pennies are the price. The pennies are our hard work at self improvement and re-prioritization. It took the progressive movement nearly 100 years to get us to where we are. Replacing the bubble gum in the machine is going to take time and effort - one red one in and one black one out at a time. But it must be done. There is no choice.

When everyone asks generations from now where America has been since we last heard from her, let's hope the country can explain its absence the way I've explained my absence from blogging.

Pray for strength and do the work. God bless you all.

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