"Pursuing ShareValue"
Most all our funding dried up after 911. We collected less than half of our accounts receivable, and the rest of our projects cancelled. The one deal that could have made our day was stalled in provisioning at Quest. With no way to keep payroll going, we had to lay everyone off and close the office.
I let our sales manager take our Quest deal with him so he could leverage it to get another job. He did and informed me a few months later, it was earning them a little over one hundred fifty thousand dollars ($150,000) gross profit per month.
I retreated to my home ready to call it quits. I had made too many mistakes, and I was just worn out. Sad about 9/11, sad about Jim Ford’s passing, and sad we hadn’t been able to complete our development, I was about to call it quits. But in the middle of all that, the fact that “The War That Would Never End” made me even more convinced that the “Big Event” would indeed happen and that I needed to just keep going. Nobody said this would be easy.
Over the next seven years, I worked consulting deals to help fund development along with some of the die-hard investors providing some funds, as well. By the time everything was ready to launch sales, I was running on fumes and in debt.
Lori and I decided to move back to Bozeman as that is where we really loved and wanted to live. I could find work there and find a way to raise the capital to do a proper sales launch. This turned out to be one of the worst mistakes of my life.
Long story short, everything that could go wrong went wrong and I landed in prison. Trying time and time again for parole and on my ninth try I got parole but with extreme restrictions preventing me from ever running a business.
I decided to write my story to at least warn those who could hear my belief in what I have come to call “the Big Event” and get prepared for it as best as possible.
The one thing that I have never done before is tell anyone but my family why I started ShareValue, and I see now I should have explained why I was starting ShareValue back when we first incorporated. However, I have explained it now and I am hopeful something good will come of it.