Survival and recovery are two different things

Early 2020Two very different businesses under one company

At the beginning of 2020, I was operating two very different businesses under one company. One was Rover, an all-electric taxi company that provided local transportation in our community, including transportation for people who did not have many other options. The other was my pest control business.

Then, right at the beginning of 2020, we were hit with an event that changed everything.

January 2020Dustin Parker

Dustin Parker, who was part of our taxi operation, was murdered in McAlester in January 2020. His death received national attention at the time. An arrest in his murder was not made until 2026.

That tragedy forced changes in the business at almost exactly the worst possible moment. We were trying to separate the two operations and reorganize when COVID arrived.

Spring 2020Then the bottom fell out

For a taxi company, COVID was devastating. People stopped going places. Businesses closed or reduced operations. Events disappeared. Normal transportation patterns changed almost overnight. At the same time, I was trying to keep the pest control operation alive.

That is the context in which I took the EIDL money.

2020Why I took $498,000

I do not look back at the $498,000 as money I took casually or as some kind of windfall. I took it because I had businesses, employees, equipment, obligations and years of work invested in something I was desperately trying to save. At the time, none of us knew whether COVID would disrupt business for six months, a year, or several years.

The years afterWhere the money actually went

We never returned to our pre-COVID level of business. As the immediate pandemic emergency faded, we were left dealing with a very different economy, higher costs, inflation, the debt accumulated while trying to survive, and businesses that simply were not producing the revenue they had before 2020.

That distinction is important when people look back at EIDL borrowers today.

There is a tendency to look at someone who borrowed several hundred thousand dollars and ask, “Where did all that money go?” In a struggling business, it does not disappear in one dramatic event. It gets consumed month after month trying to keep the doors open. Payroll, insurance, vehicles, equipment, rent, utilities, vendors, taxes and all of the ordinary expenses of operating continue even when revenue does not.

Eventually you realize you have spent years financing a recovery that never actually happened.

By 2024, we had reached that point.

2024Rover shuts down

We shut Rover down in 2024. The all-electric taxi service that had carried people around McAlester — including people who did not have many other ways to get where they were going — stopped running.

September 2024The pest control business collapses

Later that year, the pest control business collapsed as well. In September 2024, I shut it down.

There were additional local circumstances involved in that decline. I had written a satirical song criticizing our county sheriff, who became embroiled in a bribery and embezzlement scandal. Afterward, someone published personal information about me online. Whatever combination of factors was responsible, our business declined rapidly afterward, and by that point we did not have enough financial cushion left to survive another major disruption.

February 2025Chapter 7, non-consumer

In February 2025, I filed bankruptcy.

May 2025Discharged — but not unscathed

My bankruptcy was discharged in May 2025.

On paper, I came through it remarkably well. I did not lose everything I owned, and the bankruptcy gave me the ability to move forward financially.

But saying I walked away “unscathed” would not really describe what happened. I lost two businesses I had spent years building. I lost an enormous amount of time and energy trying to save them. I spent years believing that if I could just keep everything operating a little longer, business would eventually return to normal.

It never did.

What was missingThe gap between paying and failing

That is probably the part of the EIDL story that I think gets missed.

The government created an emergency lending program to help businesses survive an unprecedented economic shutdown. For many of us, it did exactly that in the short term. It prevented the immediate collapse.

But survival and recovery are two different things.

Once the emergency phase ended, a lot of borrowers were left carrying enormous debts against businesses whose revenues had never returned to their previous levels. There was not, in my experience, a meaningful long-term path for businesses that had genuinely used the money trying to survive but discovered several years later that their businesses were no longer economically viable.

I also believe the federal government's handling of COVID contributed substantially to that outcome. The constantly changing response, politicalization of the pandemic and uneven economic recovery made an already difficult situation worse. My criticism is not that the SBA should have simply forgiven every loan. It is that there should have been a much more realistic process for dealing with legitimate businesses that could demonstrate that they had used the money to survive COVID, had continued operating for years afterward, and still could not recover.

By the time many business owners discovered they were never going to get back to 2019 revenue, the emergency was long over and they were effectively on their own.

For me, bankruptcy became the restructuring program of last resort.

And that seems incredibly wasteful.

If the government can determine that someone legitimately operated a business, legitimately suffered a COVID-related loss, legitimately spent the EIDL proceeds trying to preserve that business, and continued trying to operate for years afterward, there should have been options between “pay the original debt” and “eventually fail and file bankruptcy.”

I am not suggesting that every failed business was caused by COVID or that every EIDL borrower deserves forgiveness. Businesses fail for all kinds of reasons, and fraud in the pandemic programs was real.

But there is another group that deserves to be part of this discussion: people who were operating legitimate businesses before COVID, borrowed money in good faith to keep those businesses alive, spent years trying to recover, and eventually discovered that the business they were trying to save simply wasn't coming back.

I'm one of them.

And five years after COVID began, bankruptcy was ultimately what allowed me to finally close that chapter and start over.