Preface

The company was falling behind on bills to suppliers and I was stressed beyond belief between worrying about bills for the store and my new family. The suppliers would call and scream for money and either Peter or I would call Nancy and ask what to do. She always said, "Stall them, I have to get paid, it is the law. They can wait." It was an awful time.

I asked Peter if I could call around to find an accountant to take over cutting checks to suppliers. Nancy had an accountant that she had used for years that took care of all of the taxes and returns, but supplier checks were cut from the shop. I thought if we hired an accountant to handle the supplier payments, I could advise the suppliers to call the accountant and we would not have these awful calls coming into the retail shop. The salesgirls’ morale was sinking fast.

We asked around and were told that Arthur Anderson was a very prestigious firm with a great reputation. (This was prior to their downfall, of course.) I called the local Arthur Anderson office and met with them a few times. They suggested that we have them review a larger portion of our financials to help us figure out a better way to manage cash flow. I thought that was a great idea. They asked to look at the tax returns to help us figure out where we were going wrong.

Another thing they asked for was a depreciation schedule. This is the method used to depreciate assets for the tax return. I could not find anything like that in the records. They advised calling the accountant that prepared the returns and ask her to fax it to them. I called the accountant that Nancy used but she did not return my phone call. Peter followed up with a call and she told him that Nancy had advised her not to give any financial information to him without Nancy’s prior authorization. Peter told her that he was a stock holder and Vice President of the company. She said she could not tell him anything.

I gathered the tax returns and carefully looked them over. If Nancy was so worried about financial information that even Peter wasn’t authorized to see it, something was very wrong. I realized that the tax returns showed a net loss each year for many years. The old managers had not produced profitable years. It was all untrue.

I told Peter what I discovered. I became very worried about our future. Now that we had a family to worry about, it was even more important for us to have a stable future. I did not know what to do. Nancy had told Peter numerous times that she was going to give him the store, but she had stopped giving him stock in the company when he met me. And she had lied about so much already.

If the store was not profitable and hadn’t been in the past, we were working for no future. Any day Nancy could decide to close the store the same way she closed the Lexington store. What if she was just waiting the few remaining years it would take to pay off the bank loan before she closed the shop?

Peter and I decided to look over things and see what could be done to make the store profitable. The mall rent was extremely high, we were robbed regularly and our Hyde Park clients were moving to the Mason and Loveland zip codes in droves. We started looking at per capita incomes in the suburbs and decided to look into moving the store.

In addition to moving, we spoke to other shop owners at a jewelry show and realized our sales needed to increase by at least $300,000 per year to meet the industry average for a successful, independent mall shop. That was an increase that would be impossible to meet without an advertising budget. 

Our other serious problem was competition squeezing our profit margins. With more people shopping on the internet and in catalogs, our jewelry was not as unique as it once had been. We needed to manufacture a higher percentage of the jewelry in our shop to control and increase our profit margins. Small stores like ours were going out of business in high numbers across the nation. (The same basic business model we used at the mall store was used by Newstadt, Loring and Andrews who left the mall and Bailey, Banks and Biddle who have now closed that location due to low sales volume--so we were not alone.)

Peter and I figured that we would propose these ideas to Nancy and if she took us seriously, we would know that she was serious about us and our future. We shared our ideas with Nancy who told us #1we were not moving from the mall-no further explanation, #2 the jewelry Peter made was too heavy and not the "flash for cash" look that was the most successful jewelry item, and #3 we didn’t need to put a bunch of money in advertising because it doesn’t work.

She then proceeded to call the bank and transfer 2 ‘loan’ payments out at the same time without telling us. When we called the bank to check the balance and find out what checks had cleared, we were shocked. There was no money in the bank and we had sent checks to suppliers. I had to call suppliers and tell them to hold the checks or they would bounce. While I was making the calls, Nancy called us and actually had the nerve to ask what happened to the money in the account. I told her that she transferred all of it out into her account, that’s what.

We attended the wedding of Peter's aunt on his father's side of the family in Indianapolis.  Everyone wanted to see Pierson, the newest addition to the clan.  Peter's late grandfather, Joe, was there and was proud to see the latest boy to carry on his family's name.  We chatted for awhile and he asked about the jewelry store.  I told him about the proposal we made to Nancy and the 2 'loan' payments incident.  He told me in no uncertain terms that she had always been obsessed with money and if we didn't get out of there and do our own thing we would wake up one day and be left with nothing.  He had voiced my worst fears and he knew her far longer than I did.  I knew I had to do something but I was afraid to just quit without a plan.  It took me a few weeks to realize we did have a plan, our proposal to Nancy.

Nancy spent the next few weeks calling the store and telling the salesgirls to tell me what to do. Some of the salesgirls had only been working there a month or two and she wanted them to tell me what I was doing wrong in Nancy’s opinion. She was living in Eagle and calling to tell us what we were doing wrong while she was putting $150 per square foot wool carpeting in her entryway with the money that should have been going to pay the suppliers.

I began to wonder about Peter being banned from financial information.  The whole 'loan' thing seemed peculiar and I asked Arthur Anderson about the minimum loan payback amount law.  They told me there was no such law or IRS code.  I could not believe it.  I began to wonder about the veracity of the alleged loan.  I went through the company's bank statements all the way to the year of her divorce and I could find no deposit matching the amount of the loan.  The suppliers were paid with the company checks drawn off of that account, so she wasn't paying the suppliers directly and then calling it the loan.  There were no large deposits of any kind on the bank statements.  Yet again, I could not believe it.  I was appalled and I did not want to work for a person, mother-in-law or not, who had no integrity and a bad character.

I told Peter that I could not take the lies and drama anymore; I was quitting. Since Nancy was in Colorado, I told him that I would stay through Christmas to help them through the season but that was it. He told me that he didn’t care if his name, albeit middle name, was on the sign, I was his wife and if I went then he went with me.

I wrote a resignation letter and sent it to Nancy. She was happy until she heard that Peter was leaving too. Then she went off the deep end. For awhile she pretended like everything was fine and told Peter that "they would get through it" with the store and everything intact. Peter reiterated that he was leaving too and she booked a flight to come to Ohio in a week or so.

In the interim, she did nothing but scream at me on the phone and I realized that there was no way I could stay through Christmas. I told Peter that as soon as she was back in town, I was finished with her and the store. I did not want to see her or talk to her, the whole experience had been a nightmare. Maybe after a cooling off period, we could work on a relationship again.