Our biggest single loss was about 60K, for wages that I put on a credit card instead of laying people off. We had just spent the last 2 years building up our crew (specialty contractors) and going after bigger projects. We hit a slump in between jobs that just kept stretching on.
I just didn’t want to lay people off. But then of course, we HAD to. And once work started coming back it took us 3 years to pay off that debt. We refinanced it thankfully. But that taught me a very good lesson about going into debt to keep people employed. It also informed our choices going forward about building up a large crew. We have only gotten smaller and smaller (less employees) with more investment into tools and machines and technology. Our overhead shrank, the problems with finding good people shrank - and we’re able to be more nimble overall.
Can you point me in the right direction to do this?