Carolina Uplink’s first year in business was a mild success. The newest satellite truck company on the scene grossed right around a half million dollars in sales. We were able to pay off almost $200,000 of our $400,000 equipment loan, make payroll, and stay up to date on insurance and other expenses while still managing to turn a small profit.
Quite remarkable for the start-up run by myself, my young wife Gretchen, and our only employee, Wayne, considering we got stiffed for over $100,000 on the eighth job we ever did.
That’s right, invoice number 8, and to this day, it remains unpaid.
Over 25 years later, and I still have to pause when I think back to the days when Wayne and I crisscrossed the country with one of the most notable celebrities in the history of late-night television.
We were part of a project known as Ed McMahon’s Next Big Star.
Yes, that Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s equally-as-famous sidekick. The Star Search host. An internationally known personality. With his name attached to the project, I didn’t give a second thought to extending credit to the producers of the pre-American Idol talent show.
In the satellite truck, Wayne and I followed a branded and wrapped bus where McMahon, his wife Pam, along with a production crew, traveled to malls and county fairs all over the USA looking for who Kelly Clarkson ultimately became. The tour started in Kansas City, Missouri where a woman and her trained llama named Co Co Chocolate (pronounced Chaw-Co-La-Tay) auditioned for the show, it took us down through Atlanta where we worked with Steve Harvey, and up into Detroit where we did a sit-down interview with Dick Clark. The job ended two months later in our hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina when we abruptly jumped ship after realizing McMahon and company were selling autographed tour items off the bus on eBay to raise money.
After receiving a court judgement and having the Broward County sheriff’s department show up at the production company’s unkempt and seemingly abandoned South Florida offices to seize their assets, we received nothing. Not even a dime.
By late Spring of 2001, I had come to terms with not getting paid by the Next Big Star project. I stopped all court proceedings and wrote off the debt. After all, I had something bigger which now needed my attention. After a few years of trying, we found out Gretchen was pregnant and our first child was due in December.
Joy, of course, but it didn’t come without its concerns. For every piece of good news, there comes a piece of bad. The catch, if you please.
Debits and credits.
Winners and losers, “and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line,” as the Springsteen song Atlantic City has been telling me since before I was old enough to understand what he really meant by it.
Balance, and I didn’t have any in my life.
We had done some big jobs in the first half of 2001 which kept the business afloat. One of them was the Rae Carruth Trial in Charlotte, NC. The disgraced NFL star was convicted of orchestrating the murder of his girlfriend Cherica Adams, who was pregnant with his child. Covered that one for NBC with correspondent Dan Abrams. The Duke Blue Devils won the NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship that year, and they were always good for business. Tropical Storm Allison, Tropical Storm Barry, a shark bite in Virginia Beach and two turtles who fell in love at a petting zoo outside Charleston, South Carolina all kept our mailbox full of checks.
My gambling and cocaine use was out of control, though. As fast as the money came in, it was going out. I was losing $10,000 a day at the racetrack while shoving an additional $500 daily up my nose.
Pretty quickly the losses, combined with the drug use, outweighed the money coming in, and, by August 2001, we were broke. I was the only one who knew. Wayne wasn’t in on the financial side of the business and Gretchen was too wrapped up in her soon-to-be mom glory to think about money. She had no reason to believe we were penniless – personally and professionally.
Not willing to own up to the situation my bad habits and poor decisions put us in, I slowly started to spin the story. Each night I’d reveal a little more, telling Gretchen our sales just weren’t keeping up with the expenses. After agonizing over the situation, we decided together that if we didn’t get assignments for the truck scheduled immediately, we were going to have to lay Wayne off and start thinking about our exit from the satellite truck business.
We had one more job on the books, though, and we decided we were going to do it before we took any action. It was an interview with Elizabeth Dole in Lexington, North Carolina on September 10, 2001. After that one, we were going to lay Wayne off and close up shop.
Gretchen and I were set on breaking the bad news to him when he returned to the office on the morning of September 11, 2001.
That conversation never took place. Business picked up that day. Wayne worked for us another 11 years before moving on, having never heard this story. I stayed in the satellite truck business for another 25 years.
It goes without saying we would certainly never choose for a terrorist attack to happen, but, for all the bad which took place on 9.11, there had to be a good. It’s just how balance works.
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