For a while, Matt Coffin's last name seemed appropriate. A
death knell seemed to ring at his first two businesses. Well, the
first, a storage facility that he started running in college in
1988, wasn't truly a failure. He wanted to earn money to put
himself through school, and he did; making $20,000 over two years
only working part time. But that was a veritable hit compared to
his second enterprise, Fashion Reporter, a magazine he
launched in 1997 and proudly described as "Entertainment
Weekly meets Women's Wear Daily." It lasted
nine issues.
"The last six months were an emotional roller
coaster," says Coffin, 33, who had spent more than a year in
preparation for the first issue. "I kept wondering: Should I
shut it down? Should I not? And it put a lot of stress on my
relationship with my wife."
Coffin couldn't find interested buyers, so he shut down the
magazine, let his employees go and surveyed the mess. His last
issue had broken even, but Coffin was just plain broke. He had lost
$50,000 on the venture. And so he went to work for a publishing
firm and tried to pay off his debts. It was 1998, and, for now, he
was through with owning a business. For now.
Content Continues Below
Not Alone, Part
II
"I am quite familiar with the flavor of dirt in my mouth,
having landed face-first in the small-business arena on several
occasions," Lisa Johnson, 34, says matter-of-factly. "One
of the things I've learned is to just dust myself off and keep
going."
In the mid-'90s, Johnson's first business-a computer
parts retailer that made more than $2 million per year-had been
successful, except that her colleagues were running a dishonest
operation. Reticent about the details, Johnson says she was
"fearing jail time," so she bargained her way out of the
business and struck out on her own. The Harvard graduate went from
a business that paid her $120,000 per year to working for $8 an
hour as a personal trainer at a gym.
Later, Johnson started a second business as a personal trainer,
visiting clients throughout Massachusetts, sometimes traveling more
than 200 miles in a day. Says Johnson, "I wasn't very
successful, but I was in fabulous shape."
And Part III
Coffin and Johnson, of course, were paying their dues-just as
Patrick Brandt did in the aftermath of his 1996 creation, Cyberpix,
an e-commerce service photographers could use to catalog and
distribute images.
But soon after he started the company with a business partner,
it was in enough trouble that Brandt couldn't draw a salary.
Meanwhile, the business had put him deep in debt. Brandt had 10
credit cards-with an average balance of $5,000 to $7,000 on them.
So he left the company; his wife, Natalie, went to law school; and
they traded in their condo by the lake for a 600-square-foot
apartment.
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