By bob Meyer

In Southern California a bus shelter company faced almost certain oblivion five years ago when a “Ponzi” scheme forced it to seek bankruptcy protection, threatening to wipe out more than $45 million from investors.

Today the company is profitable and growing, and soon will be able to pay back some of the money its investors lost in the scheme by the founder who is now in prison.

The success story is a result of an unusual show of unity, support and cooperation by the investors, who persuaded a judge to allow them to draw up their own reorganization plan.

Barter Funds Turnaround

After the reorganization was OK’d the investors turned to barter—putting in almost $500,000 worth of labor and services to get the company moving in the right direction!

Four dozen of the investors drove to every bus shelter in California and Las Vegas—cataloging the shelters’ conditions and the advertising on them. A 72-year-old former military car-pool mechanic maintained the repair trucks and sales cars; another mechanic fixed the air conditioning at the office. Others brought food for employees.

Without having cash on hand to pay for labor costs, others worked together to handle the multiple mailings to the 1,185 investors. All the legal costs were on trade, as well as help with the daily operations.

In all, it was a team effort—trading time to revive the company and get the opportunity to collect on a long-overdue investment.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 4:33 am and is filed under Entrepreneurs & Small Business, Media & Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.