Sounds fancy, but it wasn’t. I was surprised to learn that most development
deals pay next to nothing and that radio pays even less than that. In reality, I was a
mother of three driving back and forth to NYC, sleeping on friends’ couches in the
city, coaching clients on the side to make the ends meet, leaning too much on
friends and family to fill the childcare gaps, and doing whatever I could to make it
all work.
After several years scraping by in the media business, I got my “big break.” I
was cast to host a reality show for FOX. I had visions of magically solving all of
our financial problems by becoming a TV star. What a joke. We shot a few episodes
of a show called Someone’s Gotta Go, and then the network tabled the show. In an
instant, my media career hit a dead end. I only got paid if we were shooting. I
found myself unemployed and locked into a contract for ten months that prevented
me from pursuing another media job.
By this point, Chris had finished his MBA and started a thin crust pizza
restaurant with his best friend in the Boston area. In the beginning, things were
going great. The first location was a home run, the company won Best of
Boston™, multiple regional awards, and the pizza was fantastic. They opened up a
second restaurant and, on the encouragement of a large grocery chain, a wholesale
operation. On the outside, it looked like business was booming. But on the balance
sheet, the wheels were starting to come off. They had expanded too quickly. The
second restaurant failed and the wholesale business needed more cash to grow.
Things got scary very fast.
Like a lot of small business owners, we had poured our home equity line and
life savings into the restaurant business and it was now disappearing before our
eyes. We had no savings left and the home equity line was fully tapped out. Weeks
went by without Chris getting paid. Liens started to hit our house.