I think we’ve hit rock bottom. 300k in debt.

long read- Quick back story – Im a serial retailer (i know, awful industry to devote my life to). My weakness is finances. I grew up poor and never learned good habits from my parents. I am also a high school drop out. No excuses ofc, just context.

I had a brick and mortar operation for a decade that did well enough. That is until covid came and dessimated us. We reopened after covid shutdowns and closed our doors for good 6 months later.
About a year prior to covid I was working on building out my clothing line based on the feedback from in store customers about what was missing in the market and what they wanted to buy (i also knew ecommerce had massive potential vs b&m). We launched it about 4 months before covid, in my store and sold out in days. We restocked once and sold out in a day.

So after I shut the b&m down, I took what little capital I had, about 30k and poured it into the new line and hit ecom hard with ads, influencers and product development.
Year one we did 220k
Year two we did 800k
Year three 1.2m
Year four 600k
This year we are on track for only 400k.

Here's what happened.

Obviously our growth was substantial. It came fast and hard. We outgrew our warehouse within the first year and moved to a new space.
We we're doing photoshoots and mass content days bi weekly. We were renting studio space at 500 a pop each time. The unit next door came available. It was small but had space to grow into and we could dedicate a portion to photo studio. So we snagged it.

Staff was growing. Costs were growing. We were spending a small fortune on ads but business was growing. I hired a marketing director with quite an impressive background who cost a small fortune. She missed some big issues with adspend and that's where the trouble started.

We had a freelancer running our ads. At the height he was spending 1500 to 2k daily on fb ads. During all of this I couldn't figure out why we were always short on cashflow. I knew I was spending too much but where.

FF I came to the realization that he was spending 40% of revenue on ads. He was fired. The marketing director was let go and ads were taketh in house to be run by me. (Yes I had experience).

At first it went well. I cut spend by about 30%. Sales held steady and only dropped by about 10 to 15% as expected. So profits were up.
Then the rest of the issues began. Site outages, spam attacks etc. We were plagued with issues all 2023. Sales continued to drop and we couldn't find a footing to scale back up. Obv we had debtload. A mca from shopify and payroll costs and warehouse costs that were sustainable on the previous revenue numbers but not now that we were doing 30% less.

I began reducing debtload like crazy. I laid off all non essential personnel. I got out of my lease and took a loc to buy a building (50k down) that would save me about 40% in warehousing fees each month. Sales continued to decline as issues persisted on the backend.

Shopify rolled out opc and we went from 20 to 30 sales per day to 1 to 3. Rode that wave out for 2 months until they fixed whatever they broke and sales stabilized. But we lost our asses during that 2 mos so I took out more of the loc.

Long story shortened…we are 300k in debt. The cost of said debt is killing us every month.

Sales are still coming in and we have an amazing following. We recently found a viral product but the sales from it haven't yet set us on the positive.

I don't know where to go from here…. any advice is appreciated.

Do i stop paying debt to save the business?
Do i pack up and file bk?
Do i restructure debt? How?
Do i sell part of the biz and who buys struggling businesses anyway?

The plus is i have 165k in inventory. About 65k equity in the property i bought… but we are cash poor again…..