PART 05

When our daughter was born, I used my maternity leave to look for a new job and landed in the Boston startup scene. I worked for several tech startups during those years. It was fun and I learned a lot but I never felt like tech was the right career for me.

I hired a coach to help me figure out “what to do with my life.” Working with a coach led me to want to become one. So, like a lot of people, I worked during the day, focused on the kids when I got home, and then I studied at night to get the certification I needed. Eventually, I launched a coaching business. I loved it, and I would probably still be doing it if the media had not called.

My media career began as a fluke: Inc. magazine published an article featuring my coaching business and an executive at CNBC saw it and called. That one call led to lots of meetings. After months of tryouts, I landed a “development deal” with ABC and a call-in radio show on Sirius.

Sounds fancy, but it wasn’t. I was surprised to learn that most development

deals pay next to nothing and that radio pays even less than that. In reality, I was a mother of three driving back and forth to NYC, sleeping on friends’ couches in the city, coaching clients on the side to make the ends meet, leaning too much on friends and family to fill the childcare gaps, and doing whatever I could to make it all work.

After several years scraping by in the media business, I got my “big break.” I was cast to host a reality show for FOX. I had visions of magically solving all of our financial problems by becoming a TV star. What a joke. We shot a few episodes of a show called Someone’s Gotta Go, and then the network tabled the show. In an instant, my media career hit a dead end. I only got paid if we were shooting. I found myself unemployed and locked into a contract for ten months that prevented me from pursuing another media job.

By this point, Chris had finished his MBA and started a thin crust pizza restaurant with his best friend in the Boston area. In the beginning, things were going great. The first location was a home run, the company won Best of Boston™, multiple regional awards, and the pizza was fantastic.

They opened up a second restaurant and, on the encouragement of a large grocery chain, a wholesale operation. On the outside, it looked like business was booming. But on the balance sheet, the wheels were starting to come off. They had expanded too quickly. The second restaurant failed and the wholesale business needed more cash to grow. Things got scary very fast.

Like a lot of small business owners, we had poured our home equity line and life savings into the restaurant business and it was now disappearing before our eyes. We had no savings left and the home equity line was fully tapped out. Weeks went by without Chris getting paid. Liens started to hit our house.

With me out of work and Chris’s business struggling, the financial pressure mounted; scary letters from attorneys seemed to arrive daily and checks constantly bounced. The collection calls were so relentless that we unplugged the phone. When my dad sent us money to cover the mortgage, I was both grateful and ashamed.

In public, we tried to keep up appearances because so many friends and family members had invested in the restaurant business, which only made the pressure worse. Chris and his partner were working around-the-clock to save it. I tried to keep an upbeat façade, but on the inside I was overwhelmed, embarrassed, and afraid. Our financial problems were tearing us apart. I blamed the restaurants and he blamed me for pursuing a career in the media business. In truth, we were both to blame.

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