About Me
When I met my husband (Greg Arnold) in 1997 my life took another turn. When we met he wanted to open his own business, and growing up in a family owned business environment and having owned a business in the past, I said “Sure, go ahead”. After all I had my career, and I didn’t think at the time that I’d be getting involved. Well, I should have seen the writing on the wall. Within the first month, not only was I working outside the home, but I was also working with him at night, and weekends, and frankly, all the free time I had. I was his logistics person, ensuring that we had all the product on order, invoices, shipping orders, processing payments, and paying the bills. He was responsible for the customer service and marketing. We had a great business going and continued the family part of the business by hiring his daughter and son-in-law.
Nine-Eleven
That was before 9-11-2001. When that day of infamy came, it was just the tip of the iceberg in the struggles that we would share over the next few years; struggles that forced me to go back to my roots and really sink my teeth into IT again. Our business declined by 80% overnight and our journey into darkness began. The next four months seemed like we had stepped right up to hell's doorstep and rang the doorbell. Just when we thought it couldn't get worse, it did. Late one night when I went off to the High School to pick up my son from a wrestling match that he participated in, I was hit head on by a young girl who was driving too fast for the icy conditions.
Both my lower legs were shattered and it left me wheelchair bound for over 4 months. It would take two years and five surgeries before I could walk without help again. The months immediately following my accident of course took their toll on our already ailing business. Not being able to walk or work and no longer finding any institutions, in a post 9/11 economy, willing to loan us the large sums of money to save our business, we were forced to sell before our entire customer base was gone. That left us financially devastated.
So what would you do from there? Would you stay down or would you get back up and try again? As much as we wanted to just take a break and feel sorry for ourselves, we didn't have that luxury. So Greg and I decided to brush ourselves off and start all over again. Since we lived in a very rural area, we decided to begin the process of learning to develop a business over the Internet.
One of the first things that we learned from this is that there are an awful lot of people out there that are willing to sell a great deal of misinformation and outdated materials for a lot of money. Once we sifted through all of the expensive sand and begin to find the nuggets, things got better. We started developing our own websites and learned the process of getting indexed on the search engines. We also learned to write copy and to install scripts and we learned a myriad of other useful skills.
My son still remembers how I would pull the wheelchair up to my computer and put the keyboard in my lap and work on the Internet. We laugh about that today. After months of 14-18 hour days it all began to come together. In addition to everything else, we discovered where to find the right people to fill our specialized programming needs. After that, we began gathering clients and developing web sites for others.
Turning It Around
My life has changed for sure. I'm not able to get out on the street and run like I used to, but I still have the ability to do just about anything else that I want to. Life isn't about whether you get knocked down or not (you will), it's about getting back up. There is a lesson in there too. The last two years have seen our son join the Air Force making us empty nesters, and we have moved to St Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Through hard work and perseverance, we've turned it around. Life still isn't perfect, but it's awful close!
