Free The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions by Gurbaksh Chahal

shut me down and I was powerless to do anything about it. When I contacted the people at Frontier Global, they were polite and apologetic, but they couldn’t help because he controlled the account. Worse still, he owed them money, and Frontier Global had been after him about that for several months.
    I went so far as to call the San Jose branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but they weren’t any help either. This wasn’t the type of case they handled, they told me. My father called and reached another officer, and he was told the same thing. The FBI only handled much bigger cases, and it was already backlogged, so the chances of getting around to my case were slim to none. “So my son is paying taxes, but the government can’t help him because he’s one of the little guys?” my father asked.
    “If that’s the way you want to look at it, I can’t do anything about it,” the officer replied. “I am just describing the reality of the situation.”
    We considered filing a police complaint, but computer crimes weren’t within their jurisdiction, and we couldn’t find the guy anywhere because he’d moved out of his apartment and had left no forwarding address. For all I knew, he might have been living in San Jose.
    At that point I realized that this was the rainy day I’d been expecting. I again called Frontier Global, the company thatran the servers, and asked how much he owed them. It turned out to be in excess of $100,000, and they had considered shutting him down, but if they had done that they would have never seen their money. The Mafia has a similar approach: Don’t kill a guy who owes you or you’ll never collect.
    “I can pay off that debt,” I said. “But I want to take over the account.”
    “Fine,” they said.
    Then I told my brother to find someone with enough technical expertise to run the software for us. “I need him now!” I wailed. “Today!”
    We were off-line for an entire week. Can you imagine a week without e-mail? A week without the Web? Well, that was the lifeblood of my business, and that week almost put me under. The ads weren’t appearing on the Web sites, and the advertisers weren’t getting any traffic. They couldn’t even log on to view their own accounts! It was a complete disaster. Time on the Internet is measured in dog years. For that entire week, Click Agents had ceased to exist.
    All week I refused to answer my phone. I didn’t know what to say. What was I supposed to tell my customers: We’ll be back next week?
    That wasn’t going to do anything for them, especially if I wasn’t up and running. My goal was to get back online, and that was my
only
goal.
    On the seventh day, we were back, and that’s when I began trying to make amends. It had been a hellacious week, and I had avoided absolutely everyone, even at the risk of pissing them off, because I knew that nothing I could have said or done would have made them happy. I could have told them “My programmer screwed me,” which was the truth, but it wasn’t exactly confidence inspiring. What kind of fool was I, that I had let a greedy programmer bring me to my knees? The experience taught me another valuable lesson: Never put yourself in a position of vulnerability.
    And that wasn’t the only lesson I learned. I also learned that damage control can happen only once you’ve got the situation in hand. At that point I could get on the phone to my clients and make my apologies: “Sorry. We had serious technological issues. I know it’s unacceptable, but you have my word that it won’t happen again. Please let me know how I can make it up to you.”
    I gave them credit, I gave them free advertising, and—for a period—I even gave the publishers a slightly larger percentage than they’d contracted for. And you know what? It worked.
    I didn’t lose a single customer. The following month we did $200,000 in business and we began to work our way back toward record levels. In the meantime, I took steps