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.........This is MK, all please read.........
my brothers,
i am posting this new thread in reply to some of the responses i received in my last thread. i see i need to clear up some things. i'll address what was posted in that thread and i will, for the first time, write out an account of everything that's happened these past 21 months or so. hopefully this will clear up all questions people have had in the past, and present. this will be the first time i will go into such detail, and, even though it is not in my habit to share details of my personal life, i see that it might have been a good idea to do this from the beginning. i apologize for my shortcomings in that area.
first, let's go back in time to 1998 when i started up and quickly earned a good rep. by 2000 my rep for integrity was probably better than anyone in the biz, and by 2001 i was completely on top of the game.
during that period of time, there were literally thousands of orders placed, and every one of them was delivered. at any given time during that year, i could have walked away with literally hundreds of thousands of dollars . . . all i would've had to do is hold on to all the money that was sent to me every week, rather than forwarding my supplier roughly 75-80% of it. at the rate i was receiving and filling orders back then, it wouldn't have taken more than eight weeks to walk away with about $200K. why didn't i? because i'm not a thief, because i value my integrity, which is what my business was built on, and because i believe in treating people the way i'd like to be treated myself.
in november of 2001, i started getting warning signs that there was trouble. i got word that my supplier at the time, one Mark Davidson, was falling apart at the seams. indeed, the following month, december 2001, he died of a possibly accidental, but nevertheless self-induced, drug overdose. i later found out he was into all sorts of shit and had been going downhill for a while . . . from my point of view things were fine because orders were still getting shipped out.
before he died, there was approximately $1.5 million worth of goods that were successfully delivered over time. when he died, he took with him approximately $75 thousand, a good chunk of which was mine, the rest my customer's money which was intended for product. . . in other words, there were several tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise that were supposed to get shipped but never did after he died. it is this amount which represents the sum of those who lost money.
his death was a devastating blow to myself and to my associates. not only did i not have a steady supply line anymore, but i was at a loss as to how to reimburse those who lost money at the end. i knew that, even though on the surface i didn't do anything wrong, from the customer's point of view he wouldn't care and would blame me. of course, that's what happened (for the most part . . . there were a few very understanding souls, God bless'em ).
the one mistake i made which i am completely to blame for, is that i didn't plan for such a contingency . . . meaning i never set aside an "emergency" amount which i could use in case something like this would happen. i'm completely to blame for that, and, of course, now i would do things differently . . . live and learn . . . but things had been going so smoothly for me for 3 years that i never thought of it. that's entirely my fault.
despite this, i had no intention of leaving people hanging. i decided the only way i could repay the people who lost was with profits from new orders . . . if i continued to roll well, like i had been before all this happened, i figured i'd be able to pay everyone back in 9 weeks.
i found a new hookup, but it didn't work out, and in the meantime the orders were drying up. when you want to do something like this, it's a process that can't be interrupted: get new orders, keep whatever minimal profit i need for day-to-day living expenses, use the rest to pay for supplies for someone who lost money, and *BAM* there would be one person who was compensated. and so on. but if this process gets interrupted for any reason, the whole thing falls apart and everyone loses out . . . old customers, new customers, myself, everyone.
as i said i wasn't able to get a steady supply and in the meantime orders were drying up and finally i dropped out completely and stayed away for a year.
in april of this year i decided to start up again, still with the intention of paying everyone back, only there was one problem: i didn't have the funds anymore to do it, as my standard of living had gone down to even less than it was before i ever started in this biz.
despite this, i didn't have trouble finding someone who was willing to work with me, based on my reputation alone. he knew that i know how to run a business and all i need are good connections. as such, he was willing to front a chunk of the money needed to pay for products to compensate those who were stil out their dough. he knew he'd get back his money after my business built up, and he would have. at this point i did, in fact, contact the people concerned and told them i would be compensating them. most were shocked, since no source in history ever came back a year after the fact to pay back what he owes.
from that point until maybe a month ago . . . a period of 4 months all told . . . there was problem, after problem, after problem, on the supply side. a string of bad luck like i've never experienced in my life, as if all the good fortune i had from 1998-2001 needed to be offset with an equal amount of bad luck now.
during that whole process, anything that i wrote to people was, to the best of my knowledge, the truth. i don't lie, never have never will. the fact that the information i gave out didn't pan out was not due to lack of effort on my side, nor was it due to lack of effort on the supply side . . . it was due to back luck, pure and simple.
this brings us to the present time. i am now, finally, in the position to fill new orders, and have been doing so for a few weeks. i have only received 8 orders so far, 6 of which have been shipped and received, and i have a couple more on the way. as business increases, i will get in touch with the people who are still owed and settle with them. i STILL intend to do this; despite everything that's happened, and despite all the bullshit that's been posted about me, it's still the right thing to do.
the only way i'm going to succeed in doing this with volume. if more people give me the chance to prove i can once again deliver, like the 10 or so people who already have in the last few weeks, i will do the right thing. if people wish to block this process from happening, then i won't be able to fulfill my promise. i hope that won't happen, because i won't rest easy until people are paid back. i hope people will remember the thousands of successfully delivered orders. i hope they'll remember i reached the top in this biz because of integrity. i hope people will allow me to show i am still that person.
i will now email the six people who has received their orders recently and ask them to post in this thread. i don't know how many will . . . some people never post, some don't read the boards, some may not want to because it tooks 6 weeks to deliver instead of 2 because of the aforementioned startup troubles (that's all behind me now btw), and some may simply not want to go to the trouble of registering to a board they don't normally frequent. to offset this last, i'll be posting this message to three other boards for now: Meso-Rx, the UG and Professional Muscle.
to continue building back trust i will continue this practice of asking satisfied customers to post for the next little while, if i have the board mods' cooperation with this.
thanks to whoever managed to sit through this long-ass post =). any questions feel free to email me, or post them here . . . i'll check back in a couple days.
- MK
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