Sometimes when you’re starting a business, no amount of preparation and thoughtfulness can avert a problem. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, we got paid for our work. Nice. I deposited the check in the bank. I wrote checks to people we needed to pay. I made sure that the amount of checks I wrote was less than the amount in the bank. (Seems like a good plan.) I waited to have the receivers of said checks deposit them until I confirmed online with my bank that the money had indeed become available in my account. And when it did, I gave the go ahead.

Several hours later I got a call from the bank. “There’s a problem with the check you cashed.” Oh shit. Did it bounce? No… “The check wasn’t signed.” Remember, this is the first check we’ve gotten. I made a color copy so we could frame it later (like the first dollar at a little retail establishment). So excited to actually be earning money, and paying our vendors, I didn’t even notice that it hadn’t been signed. OK. So I’m a dumbass. But knowing that fact, didn’t help much as I had to call all the folks I wrote checks to, to ask them not to cash them yet (that was ‘fun’), and as I wondered what the bank thought of me. I tried to carefully cultivate this relationship of trust and consistency with the bank only to have the very first check we cash have an issue. Luckily nobody had deposited yet, and the folks that forgot to sign the check were super and immediately ran over another check to our bank within hours.

Nowhere, in any book I read on starting your own business does it remind you to make sure the checks you get are signed. And you would think they wouldn’t have to remind you of this. But apparently I could have used the help.