The first business she owned was barely a business at all. She bought used equipment, borrowed a station wagon to carry it, and offered cleaning services to two medical offices that needed somebody willing to work weekends. Her husband had been gone by then, and Nia was still young enough to fall asleep in the back seat with a coloring book on her lap. Loretta would park where she could see the car from the office windows, clean until the floors shone, and carry her sleeping daughter upstairs when they reached home.
The following year, an independent bakery hired her to clean its kitchen after midnight. The owner, Mrs. Pritchard, was a stubborn woman who wore flour on her sleeves and counted every penny herself. She told Loretta one night that the difference between a company and a hustle was whether the people who worked for it could count on being paid Friday. Loretta had remembered that more clearly than any lecture about scaling a business.
By the time she needed a second van, she had four clients, one employee, and enough steady work that the single vehicle was keeping everyone late. A used commercial van would cost eight thousand dollars, which might as well have been eighty thousand to a woman who was already paying wages before she paid herself. She put on the best dress she owned, carried her business records in a cardboard folder, and went to the bank where she had maintained her small business account without a single overdraft. The receptionist had told her to sit in the lobby until a loan officer became available.
She arrived at ten in the morning. At noon, someone offered a coffee to a man who had arrived fifteen minutes earlier and introduced himself as a property developer. At two, a manager came out to escort an elderly couple into a private office, passing Loretta without looking at her. At four, the loan executive she had been waiting for left by the service corridor, and the receptionist announced that the office was closing.
Loretta had stood up so suddenly that her knees hurt. "I've been here six hours," she told the receptionist. "Is anyone going to speak to me about my appointment?"
The woman had looked almost apologetic. "I'm sorry. Perhaps you'd have better luck next week."
Next week, Loretta found a community lender across town where the owner sat down with her, opened the folder, and asked how much she was charging each client. He read her records all the way to the last page. He asked about late payments, operating costs, and what would happen if one customer disappeared; then he helped her work out a repayment schedule that kept enough cash available to meet payroll. When he approved the loan, the amount was still eight thousand dollars, but the difference between the two banks had felt much larger.
She bought the second van and painted her company name on both doors herself. By the end of that year, she had seven employees. Five years later, she owned a small facility-services company, and five years after that she had bought the building in which the company rented its warehouse. People who used to hand her a trash can without a greeting began asking for investment advice, sometimes without remembering where they had seen her before.