The Anguish of Being an Entrepreneur

Last week, I got a call from a friend of mine who's an entrepreneur that was probably one of the hardest calls he's ever had to make. He was calling to tell me that he hadn't raised a dime for his fledgling company in six months, hadn't taken a salary in almost a year and was about to miss his mortgage payment on his house for the third month in a row (after three, the banks tend to begin the foreclosure process).

His call got me thinking about how many more entrepreneurs out there were in exactly the same boat he was in but just either (a) couldn't bring themselves to make the call or (b) were still in a stage of denial where they didn't know their ship was sinking.

Now if this were some first-time, 20-something entrepreneur, you'd probably think that 90% of the reason he was in this mess was a combination of naivety, lack of experience and/or youthful brashness. What was so particularly disturbing to me was this friend of mine was a mature, experienced executive who'd "been there, done that" many times before.

How could someone like that get into such a hole? As if he'd anticipated my question, he volunteered, "At every step, it seemed as if I were making the right decision." ...