I was in an apartment off Times Square, reading the newspaper, when Terri called from Atlanta. “Are you watching the TV?”
Within weeks both CatTrax and BMR Associates were gone. Thirty years of relationships, momentum, and reputation, in one blow. The second marriage ended in the same season. The hardest part was not the money. It was waking up without a mission. An entrepreneur without a purpose is like a submarine without sonar — a vessel moving blindly through dark water.
What came next did not look like a comeback. It looked like a basement in Atlanta and a tiny newspaper ad. Families brought 8mm film, VHS tapes, and slides. We made cinematic tributes for funerals, anniversaries, and reunions. One of them was for Joe, a retired Delta pilot fighting cancer. It played for hundreds of pilots. There was not a dry eye in the room.
My oldest daughter was home from Emory, studying to be a Baptist preacher, and the work felt like a ministry that happened to send invoices. VideoPhotoBuzz gave me more emotionally than it ever gave me financially. The crash of 2008 took it anyway. Failure does not always arrive as a moral lesson. Sometimes it arrives as a calendar.
This chapter is part of Failure Is Always an Option. The full book is still a free PDF, and the voice-over still plays on the book page: the book page