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Reader Stories: Entrepreneurs' Stories of Business Cliffhangers and How They Prevailed

From , former About.com Guide

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Most entrepreneurs have survived a cliffhanger moment (or two): a period during which something happened that nearly put you out of business. Maybe it was when you had just a week's operating cash (or less) in the bank before it was curtains. Or you had to coax people to work for free until the VC financing came through. Or you had a personal crisis that derailed you almost to the point of giving up your business. Entrepreneurship is about overcoming obstacles in extraordinary ways. Here are stories of entrepreneurs who peered over the abyss...but didn't fall in.

It's Never Too Late to Turn A Business Around

My partner and I sat down, under intense pressure, and stared at the walls – feeling completely constrained by them. But then we noticed the clock and had an epiphany: we weren’t constrai…More

Be Ready to Change Your Business Model

Instead of selling our technology to large media agencies, we brought the technology in-house, and added a services team to complement the technology – evolving what was a third product line in…More

Beating Cancer and a Lawsuit to Win in Business

Was not easy making some hard decisions, but I forged forward by using a strong positive attitude with lots of humor, quite difficult under the dire circumstances of a legal battle coupled with fight…More

16 Years Later, Looking Back on a Success

One of my hopes with the printing company was to start a business publication and to print it on my own presses. We had done the initial layouts of Strategies but never had the opportunity to launch.…More

Music to a Founder's Ears: "Wake Up, Your Product is on The Today Show"

In late October I got a call from Time Magazine telling me that they were considering our speakers for their 50 Best Inventions of the Year list. I thought it was a prank call at first and immediatel…More

Sell What Customers Want to Buy, Not What You Want to Sell

So, out of this failed business to sell the “total package” to law enforcement came the founding of US Fleet Tracking in Jerry Hunter's basement in 2005, which specialized in GPS devices.…More

Lighting Business Stuggles Through Dim Times But Now Looks Bright

Andrew Chris started OLighting in 2005, with a partner. At the time, he owned and ran another company, in the call center outsourcing space. In 2007, he successfully negotiated the sale of his first …More

Getting a Big Company to Do the Right Thing

For about five years I have been collecting data every morning based on the search term "Origami Bonsai." In January of 2009, the results I retrieved through the Google search engine suddenly changed…More

When It Comes to Investors, Anything Can (and Does) Happen

Everyone on the management team huddled together to weigh our options. We zeroed in on a $800,000 proposal we had out with a major public corporation. The deal was setup such that we would get half t…More

Sometimes You Have to Look Over the Edge and Not Blink

We built a Recovery Plan that addressed each area of the company. Sales: We need to look for additional revenue streams with the people we were already working with. We met with clients and found som…More

How to Almost Run Out of Cash But Not Run Out of Cash

To earn extra capital during this time we started doing social media consulting under the name Derek Media, Inc. In less than 30-days we were earning enough cash through our consulting efforts to kee…More

Novel Approach to Auto Insurance Squeeks By to Survive

Not long after MileMeter Founder and CEO Chris Gay sent the shut down notice to shareholders, he learned MileMeter had been named a finalist out of 900 entrants in Amazon.com’s first start-up c…More

Backstabbers, Thieves and a Sinking Ship -- With a Happy Ending

We first had to take inventory of who was loyal and who wasn't. This was tough and involved a series of very serious conversations with everyone at the company, as well as an assessment of who was ac…More

The Rachel Ray of the Green Products Movement

Instead of giving up or think I need a partner to launch, I started to brainstorm about how I could launch the site on my own, without an engineer. After a few weeks, the idea of doing video reviews …More

Amazing Things Happen When You Focus on ONE Thing

FOCUS! We turned out attention to the one idea we believed in the most, ResumeBucket, and threw our passion at it with full force. I spent 2 days calling all the clients and potential business opport…More

Success is Easier When Failure Isn't an Option

When existing clients didn't need more products, I sought out new clients. I looked for more ways to expand the items I sold to existing accounts by serving other departments and other buyers.I had h…More

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