During those months I remember feeling completely stressed out and overwhelmed because it was a challenge to pay our employees, rent, taxes and vendors.

I can remember several times being so tight we were unable to take home a check ourselves. 

Challenges like these drove me to push harder to find a way to increase our 

Cash Flow.

I was always looking for new ways to not only keep our guys busy, but at the same time be looking for new different innovative ways to offer our customers new products.

Our customers absolutely loved the glass green acrylic. They could now get the glass look without the expense and the long wait times of glass. Using this type of acrylic was also extremely resistant to scratches as well. 

Here is a few more reasons we liked working with it as well...

1. You didn’t have to have a high paid glazier do every project

2. It isn't as fragile

3. Its easier to cut 

4. Its harder to crack 

5. Its very easy to modify if a piece doesn’t fit quite right in the field

Not to mention that it passes most safety building codes making it possible to use in places where you would have to normally use safety glass. Places like stairwells, wall panels that go to the floor, dividers for offices or restaurants, showers and much much more.

Our company took some big losses. At the time we were in the middle of several large commercial glazing projects. Many of the contractors that were struggling started to hold up the payments they owed us. They would use just about any reason they could find not to pay us each month. This went on for several months.

They would do whatever they could to sit on their money as long as possible. It was a struggle even getting our 10% retainage money once the projects were completed. We even had one owner that filed bankruptcy at the end of the project and we lost over $100,000 from that one contract alone. 

During this time I had started educating myself on how to market our company on the Internet. I figured that was the way the future was going. I started learning different sales and marketing techniques that were mine blowing. I figured this would take our company to the next level and pull us out of the debt we were starting to accumulate because of the recession.

We made it all the way to the summer of 2010 and I thought we would just be able to pull out of it. At the time I applied for a loan to consolidate our debt that would result in reducing our monthly expenses by 26%. However at the time the banks were still tight and very strict on who they would let borrow money. The local bank I was working with said they would finance a portion of our reconsolidation loan, then team up with the SBA "Small Business Administration" to finance the rest of the loan amount.

Everything at our local bank was approved quickly. Then it was a waiting game for the final approval through the SBA this process took several months. 

Finally I remember the exact day, I had just finished up having lunch with a new project manager we were going to hire. He had flown in the day before from California. I remember clearly I was on my way back to the office when I received a call from my wife saying that the SBA office in California denied their portion of the loan. 

At this point our cash flow was so tight that I can still remember the feeling of the pressure and how desperate I felt. Money was so tight that I was going to the post office at 6 AM every morning to catch our mail lady before she left on her route. She would give me the mail early so I didn’t have to wait for her to deliver it to our shop several hours later that afternoon.

In May 2010 after much work and implementing new sales and marketing techniques. We found ourself with $1.8 million in signed contracts for commercial projects. Some of the projects we had already started shop drawings for. The big problem was we had no capital in which to do them.

When you “Do It Yourself”, you can cut your costs to a fraction of what “retail” would normally cost.