I’m putting this in the Pit assuming that there’ll be bad language at some point.
Here’s the story: I was co-owner of a business that closed a few months ago. Before the financial collapse, things were going OK, never great. But we got a big project from a client, had a plan laid out for payments from him and were ready to go. We just needed to have him sign the contract.
To do the work, we needed employees, so we started interviewing. My business partners were enthusiastic about this part, but I was a little reluctant. We didn’t have the client’s signature yet, and nothing was 100% certain. But, let’s get things lined up so we’re ready, I reasoned.
The client started getting a little twitchy around September. He was nervous about money, his investments weren’t doing well. He was starting to act like it was time to put on the brakes. I talked with my partners about holding off on hiring anyone till we knew which way he was going to go. They disagreed, and I was outvoted. They started placing call and making job offers.
We all know what happened last fall. Our client strung us along for a few weeks, but ended up dumping us. We suddenly had employees we couldn’t pay. We scrounged up money for one payroll, but then we were stuck. We tried to get loans, we dipped into personal funds, but…you can guess the outcome.
We should have laid everyone off at that point, but we were trying to bring in new clients and needed people to work on them. Most of our new hires quit, along with one of the partners. We kept track of how much everyone was owed and paid them whenever money came in.
There was less and less of it, until it finally became obvious that we couldn’t keep going. We closed and starting working on selling off the assets.
The remaining partner couldn’t deal with it and went underground. Changed his phone number, cut off contact with anyone but me. I fielded calls and emails from employees, trying to do the right thing by talking with them. They attempted personal lawsuits (the partner who quit even tried to get a class action suit started against us personally), they called/emailed our lawyer and ran up huge bills with him.
We made a few thousand dollars selling the company assets, but by then the legal bills had eaten up all of it. (Unless they had a lien from the Dept of Labor, money was supposed to go toward closing expenses first, according to our attorney.)
One small claims suit went so far as to cause me to appear in court. The judge dismissed it since the company was an LLC.
And now they’ve finally done things the right way, and gone through the Dept of Labor to get a lien against the company assets. Unfortunately, it’s now too late and there’s nothing left to give to them.
We look like the bad guys–scummy employers who screwed their employees and then closed down. I’m avidly pro-labor and would probably see it exactly that way if I didn’t know the situation. I wish there were money to give them. I wish I had the money to pay them personally. And I wish they all knew that I was always on their side–and still am. I wish it had all gone very differently.
So there it is. Let 'er rip.
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