We started a business out of thin air.  Where there was once thin air, we created granola bars and cookies and popcorn chips.  Then we sold them across the country and around the world.  Lots of kids ate them.  An equal amount of people seemed to be amazed that we did it.  Maybe because we had never done it before.  Maybe because we had zero experience in packaged goods or food science or entrepreneurship.  Maybe because everyone you know has an idea, a big idea, that thing they’ve wondered about doing for a long, long time and we went ahead and did ours.  “But how did you do it?” It’s really not magic.  I couldn’t reveal our tricks if we had them.  It was the steady culmination of thousands of Google searches and many moments of doubt.  Entire afternoons of tears, coffee shop sketches, hundreds of phone calls, road trips, plane food, manual labor, sudden flashes of inspiration, vulnerability, matching tshirts, a promising meeting, boat loads of our own cash, several big loans, and tons more doubt.  Celebrate, innovate, post on social media, hand out samples and coupons in a freezing grocery store, mostly just survive. Honestly, how did we do it?

At the beginning of 2020, we were hitting our business stride.  The eight plus years behind us seemed to culminate to this moment.  After a year and a half of traveling around the country to meet with nutrition directors, I was finalizing the details to start selling snacks to schools across 10 states.  My business partner, Silvia had nurtured relationships with two of the country’s largest retailers that materialized into brand new, front-of-store opportunities that came with some of our biggest purchase orders ever.  Every single category of business that we had nurtured and grown was on fire.  And we were top ten finalists out of thousands of applicants in a national women founder event.  A first.  Everything, everything was about to happen.  We high fived across our desks.  We turned the music up every day and sometimes danced.  We congratulated each other and our employees.  We smiled and laughed and really enjoyed the moment.  Every day felt overwhelming, but in the best way, not the way that you lose sleep over.  It was fun and celebratory.  And if you aren’t picturing this as a slow-motion video montage set to Hall and Oats’ “You Make My Dreams Come True” then you are really not grasping the joy of this time period.  This. Was. The Year.  The biggest year of our lives!  2020.  We weren’t wrong.

In between the levity was a murmur of a coronavirus, causing trouble in Asia.  Possibly on the west coast of the US.  I remember going to a Billy Joel concert at Madison Square Garden with my husband during the last week of February and asked, as we walked in, “should we be doing this?” No answer.  Just a shrug before we walked in, sang “Only the Good Die Young” with 20,000 strangers.  Days later, Silvia and I were meant to travel across the country to California for our biggest trade show of the year.  Growing more and more aware of the virus and the crisis in its wake, we wondered if we should go.  But also, of course we should go.  We had already invested thousands of dollars into going and with the wind at our backs, we wanted to capitalize on our momentum. No one really knew what was going on.  San Francisco had some sick people.  San Francisco was close to LA, where the trade show was being held.  Definitely closer than New Jersey, where we lived.  But the trade show organizers kept sending emails assuring us that everything was safe.  That the show would go on.  But also how could 80,000 of us fly in from around the world to eat and drink together in one space when there was a virus that was spreading by eating and drinking together?  Or spreading by standing close to each other?  Or spreading by walking outside on the same side of the street?  (Everyone tried, but none of us knew). 

We were working women and moms.  What would happen to us if we got sick in California?  Would we be able to come home?  Being away from home for five days was already the biggest strain our families could take.  The rumors of weeks of quarantine had us all shaken.  Eventually, inevitably, the event was cancelled.  Looking back, it’s funny how long it took for that decision to be made.  Funnier still was the short sightedness that we had somehow averted crisis.  We stayed at the office and continued our momentum.  The women founder competition took place on Zoom, a word we would say more than our children’s names in the coming months.  Although we didn’t win, we were undeterred, because literally everything else was going our way. 

That week, I stopped at Target on my way to the office, after dropping my girls at school.  I got two bottles of hand sanitizer along with some other random items that would prove useless but felt necessary.  Like 3-year-olds playing sports and elementary school reading levels.  Cough syrup, cold and flu medicine, tissues.  I was worried they would be out of stock, but everything was fully stocked.  You couldn’t even tell I grabbed a bottle from the shelf after I did.  Trust me.  I took one off the shelf and put it back, then closed one eye and did it again.  I had plenty of time and no embarrassment to do this because no one else was even in the aisle with me.  I was overreacting and felt ridiculous.  I left Target with one bag for the first time in my adult life.  I couldn’t even look at the candles, I was so upset. 

Three days later, schools closed, the world closed, and we never worked in our office again.  The only time I ever went back was to gather my computer, some notes and eventually to pilfer through the cleaning supplies for sanitizing wipes and disinfecting spray.  Then, finally, to pack it up and move out.  Collecting dust on my desk were the receipt from the last group lunch we ordered as a team, a half empty water bottle and the three-year lease extension that we had almost signed but got too busy to execute in February.

Between home-schooling children and trying to figure out how many sanitizing wipes to ration for cleaning groceries, we lowered our center of gravity on everything surrounding the business.  Shipments that had safely landed at school distributors were being turned away because kids were not at school.  Export orders were being cancelled because borders had closed.  Those giant, national retailers pulled our product from the front of store and put them in the back, replaced by what was left of their toilet paper and sanitizing wipes.  Those opportunities were over and would never return.  Nothing in our company was working as it had.  We continued to pay our employees but knew that couldn’t last.  We negotiated out of everything we could and delayed payment on everything else. 

Twenty twenty was the year of tears and not wanting to sit still.  I paced and cried and couldn’t figure out how we had gone from the top of the world to this.  I tempered my agony with out loud soliloquies on how much worse other people had it.  How lots of businesses were suffering and struggling and worse, people were very sick and dying.  But sometimes I did that to deny what I was feeling instead of looking on the bright side.  And those times usually inspired a 5 o’clock cocktail hour.

We threw out the old way of working and crafted a new plan.  By the summer, I was rebuilding our website, about to launch ecommerce out of my house to generate a new income stream.  Anything to find a way to move and work.  Even if that meant selling a box of cookies at a time, which we all knew wouldn’t make up for the deficit we were facing.  I also planned my family’s first trip away from home.  A road trip to see my family, four states away.  Going on vacation when you own a business is a little bit like putting a turkey in the oven and then leaving the house to run errands for the day.  Everything will probably be fine, but if the turkey suddenly catches fire, you might lose everything because you were in North Carolina with your sister, like a selfish person who doesn’t watch their turkey.  To add to the stress, my husband and I had an embarrassing number of conversations about how to avoid stopping on the drive unless we really had to, but also how to “handle” rest stops when we did.  There were accessories and probably a lot of resentment from my end because we have two girls, and he would breeze through the men’s rooms per usual.  We walked into rest stops with masks and gloves and carried our own paper goods.  Fighting an invisible virus made us look like we were fighting an invisible virus.  And I never warmed to it.  These are the sorts of meaningless details I will have to pass down to my grandchildren.  Nothing of consequence, just short anecdotes about how we sanitized groceries and baked bread for our neighbors for a while. 

Two months after the website was up and running and orders were coming in, I tore my Achilles tendon playing tennis.  The following weeks were the most physical painful agony I’ve ever experienced in my life.  Something (something!) was sending me a clear message.  Sit still and surrender, dummy.  But honestly, that could have just been the pain meds talking.  I also watched the entire Gilmore Girls series and ate 100 Tootsie Pops, neither one of which was divinely intervened.   

If 2020 was the year of tears, 2021 was the year of letting go.  I literally lay on the couch for 4 months.  Couldn’t drive, scooted up and down the stairs on my butt once a day and had to relearn how to walk.  If I wanted to go to Target to steady my fears, I needed to place a delivery order from my phone and their app doesn’t really evoke the same kind of numb that their aisle of art supplies does.  Work and the motivation to overcome COVID obstacles naturally became even harder.  I had to rely on everyone to do everything, which is a language I’ve heard of, but don’t speak well. 

Once the calendar turned and we crossed the pandemic’s first anniversary, Silvia and I faced the reality that our company really might not survive.  Up until that point, we had adopted a mantra of survival.  We knew that surviving the pandemic would speak for itself.  That surviving would mean more about our brand than the sales we lost.  Losses were expected and nearly one third of New Jersey small businesses had already closed.  Survival! The redemption story we all pay for at the box office.  But prices and timelines were squeezing us beyond what was sustainable.  We had to shift gears again and find help to survive.  As a small brand, we had grown used to expecting pain on impact.  Forecasting and planning and experience got us further every year, but we didn’t have the high-level viewpoint that major companies enjoyed.  If they could spot the swells in the stormy sea ahead, we were singing “row, row, row your boat” just before we capsized.  When we needed packaging, we always stood at the back of the line because they had over-ordered to mitigate loss.  When we needed to ship finished goods to a store, we had to wait for theirs to ship first and then pay more for ours.  No one was lending money.  People cared less about organic snacks and went back to eating Oreos because they were stressed.  The year hadn’t created space to heal, it had tightened the vice. 

We made dozens of calls, seeking a strategic partnership.  Not just money.  Money was good and important and necessary, but not enough.  We were too smart to just take money.  We needed connections and leverage.  A higher vantage point.  We had dozens and dozens of phone calls all year.  By the Fall, after more conversations than I could count, I didn’t shy away from asking the head of mergers and acquisitions at a top ten global food company what stopped him from scooping up a portfolio of small companies like ours and just seeing what would happen.  He hadn’t really considered it.  But then again, a “small company” to him looked like an ocean liner, not a row boat.  He should have seen us at the end of 2020 without the pandemic.  We would have wowed him.

Almost every phone call included someone on the other end who saw our company as impressive and what we built as incredible.  That if we could just hold on until this was all over, there was no reason why we couldn’t get back the success that we were just about to realize when COVID hit.  Unfortunately, “when this was over” felt to us a lot like my oversized flannel phase in the 90s most likely felt like to my parents.  Hopefully about to end, but also might last forever.

The final blow came in the Fall, when our manufacturing partner announced that we would have to increase our production run size by six fold.  A several hundred thousand dollar demand that finalized the decision we had begun preparing for, but hesitated to make on our own.  With nothing left to do, we called the attorney we had already spoken to twice and began the process of closing our business. 

Nothing is ever as it seems.  Closing a business is no different.  It’s not fast or easy.  It drags on and requires more surveillance than we want.  It’s news to people all the time.  It’s a wound that reopens again and again.  It will definitely leave a scar.  The questions about what will come next are well intended but relentless.  I want everyone to ask how I’m doing and then no one.  One friend suggested that I open a nonprofit food company.  For orphans.  I love this person.  We’ve been friends forever.  But in my head, after he suggested it, I threw my hands up over my head, screamed at the top of my lungs, “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?” and then let out a long, low, guttural noise that suggested such pressure might be the end of me.  In reality, I replied, “That means a lot that you think I could do that.”  It’s a grief I haven’t felt since my dad died and a relief I haven’t felt since I could finally stop worrying if there would be toilet paper at the store.

What comes next for me will be many things.  They will be unscheduled stops while closing this business.  Like writing.  Here.  This.  Some I will discover by chance or by busting through fear that has held me back in the past.  Some will be totally for fun or rest, both of which we all need.  What comes next will probably land somewhere on a scale from shock-and-awe to what-a-waste-of-time.  But that is life and I’d like to be known as someone who took her chances and also sat down once in awhile.  Life is a constant interruption from what we were just doing.  The sooner I embrace that, the sooner I get on with making the most of it.  So, my friend’s, here’s to the next unscheduled stop.