They say when it rains, it really pours and I can personally vouch that this is true. The hardest period of my life was in early 1999, when I decided to leave behind a steady corporate job to work at SKALI full time.

It’s something I felt I should do since all my other business partners were stuck there. They were my friends and I couldn’t stand by the wayside while the ship was sinking. I had to jump in and help to keep it afloat.

I remember feeling kind of useless at times because many of the problems were out of my hands. The Asian economic crisis had driven interest rates sky high and we had shareholders and creditors constantly knocking on our door, chasing for payment.

Our employees were also getting disgruntled because we couldn’t pay them their full salaries, and at one point, they actually quit en masse. Overnight, from a company with over 30 employees, we were left with only two, who were loyal enough to stay behind.

To make matters worse, all of us (the founding directors of SKALI) were facing domestic problems because we were spending so much time at work trying to fix things that our spouses began to get fed up with us.

But probably the most demoralising moment of my life happened when I had to travel down to Singapore to meet the representatives of Nomura, one of our main creditors, which had lost patience with us.

At that time I was flat broke, and couldn’t even afford to catch a plane to go there so, I took a cheap express bus instead.

I boarded the bus at Pudu Raya at 10 pm but could not sleep throughout the whole journey. When I arrived in the Lion City at around 4 am, I headed straight for a nearby hotel and loitered around in the lobby, waiting for the sun to rise.

While lounging around in the lobby, I kept turning away the waiters asking me to buy a drink, telling them my limousine to the airport would arrive at any moment. I kept that up until 8 am, and then headed for the Nomura office.

"Farith-san, I want to shut you down" the Japanese representative from Nomura told me shortly after he invited me to sit down. I was shocked. He didn’t even have the courtesy to offer me Japanese tea before breaking the bad news to me.

I forced myself to smile as my mind raced around for a suitable reply. What I really wanted to say was, "If you shut us down, all you’ll get is the shirt off my back!" But better sense prevailed. He had me by the balls and I didn’t want him to squeeze.

Someone once told me that effective negotiation was about increasing the cost of the other party disagreeing with you, and decreasing the cost of him agreeing with you.

So, I explained to him that there were several parties now interested in investing in SKALI and if he’d give us more time, he’d get so much more than if he were to force us into liquidation. I promised that Nomura would be among the first to be repaid once we got a new investor in.

After a long silence that seemed to last forever, he replied, "Okay, we’ll wait."

I had bought us some time, but I knew this was a bandage, not a cure. We still had a lot of firefighting to do in the days to come.

On the bus journey home, my mind was filled with "what if" thoughts. What if the Japanese guy changes his mind? What if we fail to get a new investor? What if we really went bankrupt?

Then, all of a sudden, a feeling of defiance rushed through my veins. I wanted to prove all our creditors wrong.