This morning I lit $81,666.66 on fire. 🔥🔥🔥

Well, at least that’s what it felt like.😒

See, if you’ve been reading my blog recently…

Then you saw my blog post about how I started that agency in 2018, how that business failed, and how it cost me around $1.5MM.📉

Well, actually it looks like we can update that number to $1.75MM.😓

Here’s why: 

My agency had a traffic partner back in 2019 who sent us a TON of sales…

But it was for offers owned by some of those former “Free Trial Guys” I mentioned in the other blog post about the agency…

And over time, several of those guys ended up skipping their bills and stiffing my agency.

By a lot.

Like, by $245,000 to be exact. 

When that happened, the agency didn’t pay out the traffic partner…

But over the past few months, that partner started hitting me up about the money…

And after some back and forth, I was faced with a difficult decision…

Do I just pay him the money he’s “owed” or tell him tough s**t?

Because here’s the thing, I feel like I did have some grounds to push back:

   1 – The traffic partner’s sales all came from their email list. 

So they didn’t “spend” any money to drive these sales. However, they did have an opportunity cost associated with sending to offers that were on my affiliate network, instead of someone else’s.

   2 – For all the sales that the traffic partner sent, for something like $190k's worth of sales we never collected any money from the offer owner. 

So they sent the traffic to the offer owner, the owner kept it, and my network got stuck with the bill. Meaning we got screwed.

And yes, we've gone down the legal path with some of those offer owners to try and get the money owed, etc. But it’s a slow and painful process, so I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back.

   3 –  Then there’s another $39k in sales that this traffic partner sent after I’d already told them to stop. 

Granted, it wasn’t a formal notice. But during a conversation with the owner of this company back in September of 2019, I told him three times he should probably stop sending traffic to the offers on the affiliate network since it wasn’t very solvent.

   4 – And then there’s the fact that sometimes stuff doesn’t go the way you think it will in business. 

Isn’t that the point of an LLC? To give you an “out?”

Couldn’t I just claim insolvency and tell him if he wants the money, to sue me for it?

Realistically if I did that, it would drag on for several months and almost certainly end up in a settlement for a fraction of the total amount owned.

So there are some pretty compelling reasons not to pay the traffic partner, right?

And yet, after some soul searching…

I decided that despite all of these things, I’d just send them all of the money owed.

Why?

You can almost always bounce back from a hit to your finances, but it’s much harder to bounce back from a hit to your reputation. 

Really, in any business or industry…

Your reputation and your name is everything.

If people trust you, and they know that you’ll do the right and honorable thing…

Even when it’s the hard thing and even when it SUCKS…

Every door becomes open to you.

You get opportunities that others don’t…

Deal making is frictionless…

And you cement yourself as the kind of person that people want in their lives.

But if you go back on deals…

Or don’t honor your word…

Or make excuses when the going gets tough…

People take notice.

Word starts to spread…

And before long, things become increasingly difficult for you.

So that’s why, even though it SUCKS, I agreed to just pay back the full amount of $245,000. 

I’m doing it in three payments of $81,666.66 (one payment every 30 days)…

And I just sent out the first one this morning.

It's a large chunk of change (at least for me)…

Especially since I just put $650k down on the house I bought…

And I’m now spending more money furnishing that house…

Plus, I just had to pay taxes too.

So seriously, I would really rather not give away that money (it feels like I’m lighting it on fire)…

Yet at the same time, I have a feeling of satisfaction in my gut as I write this, because at least I know I did the right thing.

– SPG

P.S. This post originally came from an email I sent to my private list. If you want to see more stuff like this from me, you can apply to join my list using this link.