Let me tell you the story of the worst day of my life. November 7, 1997.
I was in London, trying to secure funding to take Dispatch Management Services public on the NASDAQ. We had been building toward this for years.
Then the phone rang.
It was the managing director from Smith Barney. Our lead bank. He told me they were pulling out.
Just like that, everything was at risk. Our funding, listing, and our future that we had spent 10 years building.
I freaked out.
Greg Kidd, my co-founder, freaked out.
That same day, my American Express card was declined. It had gone over its limit.
As if things couldn't get worse, they did.
I crossed the road, looked the wrong way, and got hit by a taxi. I broke my back in three places. My pelvis too.
Lying there, I thought:
We lost our bank.
I have no money.
And now I might not walk.
I was back to work a few days later, welcome to entrepreneurship!
With some strong painkillers, I reviewed everything that Smith Barney had concerns about. They thought our vision was too bold. So I rewrote the story. I simplified the model. Then I went to two other banks and asked them to take over.
They said yes.
Because I couldn’t walk, the bankers rented a private jet for the roadshow. We flew to 20 cities where I showed up in a wheelchair with stage makeup covering the bruises.
But we made it fun too.
On every flight, we played Indian poker. When the bankers sat in front of a window, we could see their cards in the reflection. Easiest $5,000 I ever made.
(They made more than $10 million from the IPO. Trust me, it was fair.)
Then came the final meeting in New York. With three days left, we still had not secured enough investors. A lot was riding on this one
As we walked in, one man was playing with a computer. Another, in a red bow tie, tossed a report on the table and said, “This study says women CEOs don’t perform well. Why should I invest in a company run by a woman?”
Greg and I looked at each other and thought: What do we have to lose?
We gave them everything. Why it would work. Why we were the team. What we had on the line.
Greg and I had both left consulting partnerships. We had been building for a decade. I had literally broken my back for this.
They pushed hard, showing us every company like ours that had failed. It was a test. They wanted to know if we could survive the hard stuff.
We walked out thinking we had lost.
Thirty floors down, we stood in the lobby with the bankers, wondering how we were going to find the money in three days.
Then the man in the red bow tie came out of the elevator. He put his arm around me and said:
“Really good job. We just put in an order for the whole company.”
We went public the next day.