My company, Commercial Flooring Services of Huntsville, Ala., literally rose from the ashes. Previously, I was in a partnership with four other individuals in a primarily residential flooring company throughout the southeast. Our business was solid and life was good. It was good until one partner embezzled virtually all of the money and disappeared. To this day, we don’t know where he is, and we don’t know how he got away with his crime. It was 1994 and I was facing a decision: I could abandon the flooring business or try to rebuild a business in the only industry I knew.
My late wife, Wynn, gave me the courage to consider rebuilding. She said, “They may have taken your money, but they didn’t take your brains.” Working together, just the two of us, we stripped the business back to the bare bones and started to rebuild. I retained the rights to our Huntsville branch and we were off and running. Unfortunately, we were on the verge of losing our building and we had to let all of our employees go. However, we believed that if we could lower our overhead to the bare bones and focus on securing new accounts to the new business, we could make it.