Mark Cuban was left ‘flat broke’ when an employee stole $82K from his first-ever company — here’s how he bounced back and what you can learn from his approach

That being said, Cuban admits he is resentful of one particular employee who nearly drove his first company, MicroSolutions, out of business. “She took $82,000 of the $84,000 we had,” he told Sharpe. “We were flat broke.”

Here’s how Cuban rescued the firm from near bankruptcy after this ordeal and what it can teach us about recovering from financial failure.

Rescuing MicroSolutions

Cuban says the money that was stolen was earmarked for his vendors, which put the company in a challenging position. With only $2,000 left in the bank, the company faced an existential cash issue.

Cash flow problems like this are common killers for small and mid-sized businesses. According to a Quickbooks State of Small Business Cash Flow survey, 61% of small business owners say they frequently struggle with cash flow, with 32% saying a lack of cash flow makes them unable to pay employees, suppliers, loans or themselves.

And, according to U.S. Bank, 82% of businesses that fail attribute the failure to cash flow issues.

To avoid the same fate, Cuban says he reached out to his network of vendors to explain the situation and ask for flexibility.

“We had to call the vendors to say, ‘Please work with us, we'll bust our a–, we'll make sure you get paid,’ and they did. They worked with us, right, and the rest is history,” he said.

Eventually, the company got back on its feet, and Cuban sold it to internet services company CompuServe for $6 million.

Dealing with setbacks

Cuban isn’t the only famous billionaire who’s faced such setbacks. Steve Jobs once claimed Apple was 90 days away from bankruptcy in 1997 and was rescued by an investment from Microsoft.