For the Right Reasons (8 page)

A few weeks later, I got to see our future up close.

“
This
is ours?” I asked, walking through the carpeted hallways of our new office building in the Dallas financial district.

“Well, it’s not
ours
ours,” said Josh. “We’re just renting.”

“Can we afford it?” I asked.

“It’s all thanks to you,” Don said.

“Do I dare ask how much the rent is?” I asked. Though I wasn’t involved in the business aspects of our new venture, I knew how much money was coming in. I think the financial term for it was
a lot
! This new space was going to be the hub of our ever-growing practice.

“Come check out the break room,” Josh said. “And I’ll show you the conference room along the way.”

We walked through the spacious, empty office space. There was one huge room with floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall. We were on the fifth floor, and our view was amazing. It overlooked the Ritz-Carlton pool across the street.

“The cubicles are arriving this week,” Don said. “I splurged and got the kind with glass panels at the top. Like windows.”

“I want an office.” I laughed. “Corner, preferably.”

“Yes, I’ll show you your space,” Don said. “But we’ve got twenty-five employees ready to move in as soon as we set up.”

I took a deep breath and smelled the aroma of success. It smelled like new carpet and the bleach used on the beautiful, sparkling bathrooms.

An office is great, if you aren’t the guy punching the clock.

I’d finally figured out the right direction for my life. Entrepreneurship, like football, required guts. I was certain I was going to be a millionaire before I was thirty, and I couldn’t have done it with two better friends.

“Sagi,” I said into the phone, tightly holding the piece of paper I had with his phone number scrawled on it. “I’ve heard you’re the guy who can transform any body.”

Sagi Kalev was a legend among the fitness crowd. He became a bodybuilder when he was sixteen, and then had a four-year tour of duty in the Israeli Army, where he learned the discipline and training techniques he later used to start his bodybuilding business. I’d heard he’d been shot and stabbed while in the military—it added to his mystique.

It had taken me months to get up the nerve to call him. However, after Brooke and I broke up, I wanted to change things around. Getting serious about fitness seemed like a good next move.

“Are you interested in training?” he asked in his Tel Aviv accent. “If you become my client, you can transform your body from the inside out. You can be the person you’ve always wanted to be.”

“How is your program different than all the others?” I asked him. I knew a great deal about fitness, after all. Was this guy really worth his $150 fee?

“I’ll take all the guessing out,” Sagi said. “I’ll make you gain muscle and lose body fat at the same time. It’ll be hard, but you can do it if you follow my instructions.”

As he began rattling off his services and the costs, I interrupted.

“Actually, I can’t afford one-fifty,” I said. It was true. I was stretched thin. I’d made plenty of money in oil and gas, but it quickly evaporated when I didn’t take a paycheck for several months getting the start-up off the ground. Was an exercise regimen worth the sacrifice?

“If you truly want the transformation you say,” Sagi said, “you’ll find a way to pay for it.”

The man was like an Israeli Yoda. Even though I had only a few hundred bucks in my bank account, he was right. I worked, saved money, and—finally—was able to afford it. When I met him in person, I noticed he was about five foot ten but absolutely solid. I don’t normally notice whether guys are attractive, but Sagi had been “Mr. Israel”—twice—with eyes that seemed to see right through me. Immediately, I could tell he was the real deal. He wasn’t just some big guy telling me how to bench-press more weight. This was a very well-respected man with an amazing, holistic understanding of the body and how it works. The first thing he asked me to do was to have blood work done, then a saliva test, and even a hair analysis.
He wasn’t interested in just building bulk. He looked at every aspect of my health as a detective looks for clues.

As he pored over my medical results, he grew quiet.

“Did I pass?” I laughed. Even though I was strong and had a lot of muscle, I didn’t have great symmetry yet, and I wanted to be absolutely ripped.

“If you follow my book—take your supplements, say lots of prayers, and eat right—you’ll be a new man in no time at all,” Sagi assured me. “You ready to do whatever it takes?”

Josh and I were talking one morning over a cup of coffee in our office with the sounds of a company waking up in the background of our conversation—phones were ringing, people were exchanging morning pleasantries, a fax machine was emitting its high-pitched ring. The sound of money.

Don burst into the room with a splotchy, red face. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, plopping a copy of the newspaper on my desk.

The headline caused my throat to tighten: “Debt Relief Companies Prohibited from Collecting Advance Fees under FTC Rule.”

Don shook his head vigorously. “Read it and weep.”

“The Federal Trade Commission has created a new regulation that protects consumers trying to settle their debts,” I read. “They will now be protected by a rule that stops debt settlement companies from charging fees before settling or reducing a customer’s credit card debt.”
³

I stopped and swallowed hard. “Does this mean what I think it means?”

Josh was already tapping away on his phone, trying to find more information about the new FTC rule. “The government wouldn’t just come in and tell us our way of doing business is illegal. We’re not doing anything wrong.”

We all got quiet. Debt-relief companies had sprung up overnight, and there was definite abuse. We’d heard heartbreaking stories about how some unscrupulous firms told people to quit paying their creditors and send their monthly payments to them. Of course, the firms simply stole
their money—including “referral fees” and “cancellation fees.” We’d heard about these guys, but we were definitely not these guys.

“So,” I said, taking a deep breath, “this means we can’t charge our clients until after we settle their debts?”

Josh, who had found several articles on the subject, read from his phone. “If you charge consumers before actually helping them, the FTC and state enforcers will knock at your door to enforce the rule.”

I popped my knuckles as I looked out the window. There were cars stopped at a red light below while people walked through the intersection. It sometimes took a year to eighteen months to start showing results for our clients.

“How can we survive this?” I asked. “We can’t just float all this money—people depend on us.”

There was only one answer and we all knew it. We needed more money. It was hard for me to accept since I was the one on the phone asking people to hand over their hard-earned savings, but I knew my co-founders were right. We needed money to make money. Because the new government regulation prohibited us from taking money, we had to come up with it some other way. That’s how I found myself on the phone with Jim Perryman once again.

“How are the kids?” I asked him.

“Sean,” he said, skipping the small talk, “I told you already. I don’t have it.”

There’s one thing I’ve learned from all my time with investors. When they say they don’t have any more money, they always do.

“You know I wouldn’t come to you if I didn’t need it.”

“I heard about the new FTC regs,” he said. “Do you have a plan to combat it?”

“Yeah, we’ve got it covered. We’ve switched to loan modifications instead of settlement. That means we’ll work with attorneys to modify people’s interest fees. Which is exactly why I’m calling. With the changes, we’ll need more operating money.”

Faced with the possibility of losing his initial investment, Jim’s voice—finally—started to soften.

“How much more do you need?”

Within the week, I had the thirty thousand dollars we needed to pay our twenty-five employees and our exorbitant rent.

At least for the time being.

My phone rang and my heart stopped.

“Jim Perryman,” read my caller ID.

“This is Sean,” I answered with a forced casual tone.

“Hey, thanks for picking up,” he said. “I tried to call Josh and Don, but it went straight to voice mail. I guess they’re already gone for the weekend. Hey, I guess it’s five o’clock somewhere.”

I knew why they didn’t answer. For the same reason I didn’t want to answer. Our business, which had been going so well, had gone belly up. We tried to realign our business models to comply with the new regulation, but we didn’t have the margin to float all the loans while we worked to help settle everyone’s debts. After weeks of trying to make ends meet, the math finally won. We’d run out of money, and our staffers—no matter how awesome our downtown office space was—wouldn’t work for free.

“So my daughter’s wedding is coming up,” Jim continued, “and you would not believe how much stuff like flowers and the cake costs. I’m almost ready to buy them tickets to Vegas to find the nearest ordained Elvis impersonator.”

He laughed at his joke before continuing. “Anyway, I was hoping to get some return on my investment so we can start making deposits on the dress, church, band, and whatever else. I was thinking that thirty thousand dollars I gave you had probably turned into, what, say fif—”

“I lost your money.”

I’d been dreading this moment—this sentence—ever since Josh and Don broke the news to me. We had gone under so fast that we had to break our lease with the owner of our downtown office space. To avoid detection, we’d packed up our office in the middle of the night. Because we had to get out of there fast, we packed up four thousand square feet of brand-new
cubicles, phones, and office supplies and gave them away. When the office management company realized we were gone, they told me they were going to sue me. Thankfully, the lease was in the LLC’s name, not in my name, so I wasn’t personally liable.

Jim didn’t respond. The phone was so completely silent that I pulled it away from my face to make sure we were still connected. I didn’t know what else to say other than the truth. Perhaps I could’ve led up to it, but no additional language would soften the blow.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “But the money’s gone.”

“All of it?”

“I hope to get some back,” I said. “But, yeah.
All
of it.”

“Do you even know what the word
investment
means?”

“I’m so sorry. That new regu—”

“You mean the regulation you told me we needed to combat, with my thirty grand?” he asked. “The one that meant you needed—absolutely
needed
—my cash?”

He didn’t wait for me to respond. He was right. Josh and Don said they’d be able to pull it off with an infusion of cash. That’s what I—in turn—had told Jim.

“The word
investment
means that I give you money, and then I make money on it,” he continued icily. “At no point are you supposed to say to me, ‘The money’s gone.’ ”

“Maybe I could’ve said it better, but I didn’t want to prolong this.”