I want to tell you about a former client of mine.
Back in 2016, I walked into his family’s rubber mold manufacturing business. They had been operating for 35 years. Three and a half decades of building something. Generations of knowledge. A legacy.
And they were days away from losing all of it.
When I arrived that morning, they had less than $1.400 in available cash. By a few hours later, after paying what they thought they absolutely had to be pay a vendor for, they were down to $41.
Forty-one dollars. For a 35-year-old manufacturing business.
Outside of their other substantial long term debt, they owed $600,000 in overdue vendor payments. Their most critical suppliers had placed them on COD. Several were threatening to cut them off entirely, which would have shut down production completely.
Multiple CNC machines sat broken and inoperable, needing expensive repairs they could not afford.
Employees were jumping ship. The ones who remained were demoralized, watching what they assumed was the final chapter of a dying company.
This was not a business in trouble. This was a business in its final hours.
And I turned it around.
What Turnaround Actually Looks Like
I did not perform magic. I performed methodology.
First, I installed a cash flow management system. Not a spreadsheet someone glances at occasionally. A real system that tracks every dollar and projects cash position 13 weeks forward with remarkable accuracy. When you are bleeding, you need to see exactly where the blood is going and how much you have left.
Second, I stopped all vendor payments immediately. Then I identified which vendors were truly essential, the ones who could shut down the business entirely if they cut us off: Critical raw material suppliers, electricity, the non-negotiables. We ensured those relationships were protected.
Third, I set up payment plans with everyone else. Here is something most business owners do not understand: Vendors do not want you to fail. They want their money. If you communicate with them, if you pay them something every week consistently, they will work with you. We paid everyone something, every week, without exception. Within months, we had paid down the $600,000 and restored those relationships.
Fourth, I had one-on-one conversations with every employee. I discovered that one person in particular was poisoning the culture, spreading negativity, convincing everyone the ship was sinking. I had a tough love conversation with that individual. The tone changed.
We did not fire anyone. In fact, we soon started hiring.
I raised funding. Yes, it came at a high interest rate. But when you are drowning, you do not complain about the cost of the life preserver. That capital bought us time to execute the turnaround.
Then I did something I do with every client: I looked around the business for all the cash that was laying around.
My top colleagues and I used to say this constantly: Every business has cash laying around everywhere. The owners just cannot see it. It is hidden in inefficiencies, poor decisions, uninformed priorities, waste, bloat, and dysfunction. Finding that hidden cash is often the difference between survival and extinction.
We fixed machines. We grew production. We installed performance metrics and systems. I built a management team. I created processes that would outlast my involvement.
Within the standard 12-month measurement period we use in our work, the business was not just surviving. It was thriving.
The owners had more time than they had in years. The stress had lifted. The legacy was secured.
I did that. Not alone, but I led it. I made it happen.
And he knows it.
Fast Forward
A few years later, my former client calls me. He has a new opportunity.
He and his wife, a couple of his daughters, and a son-in-law have found a dumpster rental company for sale. A couple of trucks. About 65 dumpsters. A solid little business with real potential.
He is excited. He sees the opportunity. He wants to build something new with his family.
I am happy for him. Truly.
He asks for my advice on the acquisition. Out of the goodness of my heart, out of respect for our history, I help him. I give him guidance.
But ultimately when its crunch time, he keeps me at arm’s length on the critical details. The valuation methodology. The negotiation strategy. The due diligence.
He does not want to pay for that part. He wants the free version.
So, I give him what I can, and I watch from a distance as he moves forward.
He buys the business.
And he overpays catastrophically.
The $800,000 Mistake
The dumpster business he purchased had revenues of about $200,000 at best.
He paid approximately $800,000 for it.
Let me explain why this is a disaster.
He believed, as many people incorrectly believe, that you buy a business based on a multiple of its revenue. And yes, in some cases, particularly high-volume tech companies or platform businesses where you are essentially acquiring masses of customers, revenue multiples can make sense.
But for a small service business with trucks and physical assets? You value it based on something like EBITDA, the actual cash flow the business generates, plus a realistic assessment of the physical assets you are acquiring.
What were those assets worth?
The two trucks were old and run-down. They broke down constantly, costing far more to operate than they should.
The 65 dumpsters? Upon closer inspection, at least half were in such poor condition they could not even be rented out.
He paid $800,000 for a business that was probably worth a fraction of that.
And he did no real due diligence. None. He relied on what the seller told him. He did not verify. He did not investigate. He did not bring in expertise.
Free advice only goes so far. What he needed was paid expertise. He declined.
Now he was starting his new venture not from zero, but from deep in a hole.
The Spiral
Almost immediately, he had trouble making the payments to the previous owner, who was financing the purchase.
The matter ended up in court.
Soon the previous owner had claims against my former client’s other properties, anything of value. Wages were garnished. His own, as well as his son-in-law’s wages were garnished.
Eventually, they had to settle. The deal stretched the payments out to essentially 30 years at a slightly higher interest rate. Not ideal, but what choice did they have?
Even that reduced monthly payment became difficult to meet. Cash was perpetually tight. Vendors started getting strung along.
And through all of this, over the course of years now, he has reached out to me intermittently.
Always with problems. Always with crises. Always with questions.
Never with the willingness to actually hire me to fix it.
The Offers He Rejected
I have made offer after offer to this man.
I have explained exactly what I would do. How I would install the same systems that saved his other business. How I would get the cash flow under control. How I would help him actually understand the business he bought, because to this day, he and his partners do not truly understand what they own.
He always agrees. “Yes, let’s do this. Let’s engage.”
And then when it comes time to send a deposit, to sign the agreement, to actually commit?
He disappears.
He ghosts. He goes silent. And when I finally reach him, the excuses come:
“It’s not going to work right now.” “I don’t know my numbers yet. I need to figure that out first.” “Let’s wait.” “I’ll come back to you.”
This has happened repeatedly. Over years.
I even lowered my price. Then lowered it again. And again.
I went from a substantial annual investment to a fraction of that. Then to a fraction of the fraction. Eventually I offered an entry point so low it was almost symbolic, just to prove a point.
He still backed out.
Because it was never about the price.
What It Is Actually About
Here is what I have learned from this experience, and from hundreds of similar situations over my career:
When someone repeatedly refuses help they clearly need, from someone they know can provide it, the obstacle is never the stated obstacle.
It is not about money. I proved that by lowering the price to almost nothing.
It is not about timing. Years have passed. There is no perfect time coming.
It is not about needing to know the numbers first. That is circular logic. He needs help to understand the numbers. He says he cannot get help until he understands the numbers.
It is about something deeper. Something psychological. Something that has nothing to do with the rational business decision.
Pride, perhaps. He wants to prove he can fix it himself, even though years of evidence suggest he cannot.
Fear, perhaps. Committing to help means admitting he cannot do it alone. And that admission feels like failure.
Comfort with dysfunction, perhaps. Strange as it sounds, some people become accustomed to struggle. It becomes their identity. Fixing the problem would mean becoming someone else.
I do not know exactly what drives his resistance. I am not a psychologist.
But I know this: He watched me save his 35-year-old family business from extinction. He saw it with his own eyes. He acknowledges it in almost every conversation we have.
And he still cannot bring himself to let me help him again.
The Tragedy
The dumpster business has real potential. I can see it clearly.
It is an asset rental business at its core. You acquire dumpsters, you rent them out, you focus a few key items, you scale the fleet, you optimize pricing. Done right, it can be a cash-generating machine that does not require massive staffing to grow.
All the problems are solvable. The cash flow issues. The pricing mistakes. The operational inefficiencies. The lack of financial visibility. All of it.
I have solved these exact problems hundreds of times. I know exactly what to do.
But I cannot do it if he will not let me.
And so he continues to struggle. Month after month. Year after year. Making the same mistakes. Fighting the same fires. Never getting ahead.
Meanwhile, his family is stressed. His relationships are strained. His dream of building something with his children is slowly dying.
All because he cannot bring himself to invest in the help he knows he needs.
The Lesson
I share this story because it illustrates something I see constantly:
Knowing help is available is not enough.
Seeing proof that help works is not enough.
Even acknowledging that you need help is not enough.
Until someone is willing to commit, to invest, to actually say yes and follow through, nothing changes.
My former client has all the information he needs. He has seen the evidence. He has access to expertise that could transform his situation.
He just will not use it.
And every month that passes, the hole gets deeper. The opportunities shrink. The potential fades.
This is the real cost of refusing help. Not just the money you do not make. But the future you will never have.
I still hope he will change his mind. I still care about him and his family.
But I have learned that I cannot want someone’s success more than they want it themselves.
And right now, he does not want it enough to do what it takes.
What help have you been refusing? What would change if you finally said yes?
