This is my first proper Reddit post, so if I've formatted something incorrectly or posted in the wrong subreddit, please don't throw too many tomatoes at me, if possible.
UPD: English is not my native language, so I used a translator to write this post. I reviewed the result to make sure my original thoughts and writing style were preserved. However, I understand that this might bother some people, so I decided to mention it right at the beginning.
For the past 8 years, I've been the director of a small IT company, and for the last few months I've been forced to work without a salary. But let's start from the beginning.
We founded the company quite a long time ago, more than 10 years back, as part of the university where I worked. For the most part, it was a way to run a business without cutting ties with my main job. For a long time, the company remained small and was mainly used for taking on outside projects without creating conflicts of interest.
However, in 2024, after a rather lengthy approval process involving every level of university management (including the ministry level ā yes, that's how the laws work in my country. And yes I like my em dashes a lot), I finally got the opportunity to sell the university's stake to a private company we'd already been working for for about 5 years.
As a result, the university sold its stake (which was actually quite beneficial for them, since they made a profit), all the other individual shareholders sold theirs, and my stake, as the last remaining individual shareholder, was significantly reduced.
The decision was made to keep me as a shareholder so I wouldn't be tempted to simply walk away or start doing my job half-heartedly.
So, I remained the director and a minority shareholder, while the rest of the company was owned by a new individual shareholder and another company.
At first, things were going pretty well.
Apart from the fact that their internal processes were... questionable, and that I had lost pretty much all my autonomy (I couldn't sign contracts without approval from a bunch of departments at the parent company, couldn't pay my own employees, couldn't just hire people, etc.), things were going well.
We had plenty of work, sometimes even too much, because tasks would appear out of nowhere and, of course, every single one of them was urgent. But this allowed us to grow our official staff to around 25 people.
Which was great!
And everything was going well until the beginning of 2026...
At the end of 2025, I was given a plan as the director that included approximately 10,000 working hours' worth of tasks to be completed during 2026.
So we had a lot of work planned, the projects were interesting, and the team was practically itching to get started.
Our company's main product is developed for our new owner. It's a large corporate system that we've been actively developing for years. It has gone through numerous changes and grown into a fairly large system with some rather non-trivial infrastructure and architecture.
When hiring people for the team, I always looked for those who were somewhat like-minded.
Since I've spent my entire professional life working at a university, money was never the deciding factor for me for a very long time. Throughout my career, I consciously accepted salaries below market rates and even turned down opportunities to join other great companies because I wanted to build something of my own.
As a result, people who came to work with us often understood perfectly well that we paid less than the market average, but they chose us for something else.
For the projects. For the approach. For the values and processes.
And I was very proud of that.
I was always proud that nobody could say I was making money off my employees, because I actually earned significantly less than my specialists.
I always followed one principle: "First, fulfill your obligations to your employees."
Just six months ago, I could proudly say that I had a deputy in every area of the company, and every one of them had, figuratively speaking, a gun they could use to destroy me. But I knew none of them would ever pull the trigger.
And that was genuinely true.
We were all responsible professionals, but also, frankly, a bunch of absolute idiots.
We made cringe jokes, behaved like kids from the early days of the internet, and everyone was perfectly fine with that. After all, we hired people based on their skills and whether their vibe matched ours.
But from the very beginning of 2026, something started going wrong.
Business stopped booming for our parent company. Their major clients began delaying contract payments, and the company started holding back new orders from us, despite spending all of December and January shouting about how urgently they needed new functionality developed.
I won't go into all the details of that part of the story, but the amount of planned work from our main client started shrinking rapidly.
And finding external clients in 2026 became extremely difficult as well. That volume also decreased.
We had to make some optimizations and say goodbye to a few underperforming, ridiculously overpriced newcomers. But the experienced employees stayed. Nobody was leaving, even though their earnings had decreased.
They decreased because, for the most part, we pay people based on the amount of work they do.
We started moving slightly into the red for the year.
Nothing critical compared to the other companies owned by our "master", but still, a loss is a loss.
And this is where things started going downhill VERY quickly.
Because I'm not actually the one controlling the flow of money, despite being the director ā there's a governing body above me that handles all of that (I don't even have timely access to the actual amounts of money available to us) ā one day, on payday, the president of the corporate group simply stopped all salary payments.
Instead of working out a targeted plan to optimize the company's operations and get us out of the situation, they started making promises that nobody would later keep.
And all the while, we had a very substantial amount of work that we'd already completed for our owner, but which had never been formally accepted or signed off.
So, technically, they owed us money. But also, technically, they didn't.
And this is where things started getting awkward.
After two months of promises that we'd be given a loan, or that at least something would be paid...
A representative of our owner directly stated during a meeting with our employees that "the director is to blame for everything."
Period.
There was a long speech about how all questions should be directed at the director, how this was his job and his responsibility.
And when I asked questions along the lines of "But we've completed several very large blocks of work, nobody has raised any issues with the results, and yet for more than two months you haven't signed off on them or paid us," the excuse was:
"Well, our client hasn't paid us for that work, so we can't pay you either."
And there were several such blocks of work.
The worst part started towards the end of that meeting, which was held online.
The meeting wasn't even over yet, and almost half the company had already sent resignation letters to me and HR.
In a single day, I lost an incredible team that I'd spent years building.
A team I genuinely loved.
Because we really did flirt a little with the idea of being more than just colleagues.
I always tried to find ways to help when my guys had problems. I lent them money, they lent me money, we often got together outside work, and if we weren't exactly a family, we were at least very close friends.
And none of this ever interfered with our work.
And I was proud of that.
My dream was to build exactly this kind of "family" company, where every employee was paid fairly and was genuinely happy to work with me.
But unfortunately, it looks like that dream is unlikely to come true.
That same day, I was ready to write my own resignation letter.
But what stopped me was discovering that, under the laws of my country, I could potentially be held responsible for all sorts of things, blamed for the company's problems, and even end up in prison if I failed to prove that the losses weren't caused by malicious intent on my part, and so on.
As a result, I had to pull myself together and remember that, apart from dealing with my own problems, I was probably the only person willing to fight for those who had resigned.
More precisely, to fight for justice for them.
Because the company still owed them a lot of money.
MY company.
Which means that, essentially, I allowed this to happen.
And so, for the past few months, I've been working according to the following system:
- The company receives payment for work. Whether it's something we completed a long time ago and the owners finally decided to pay at least part of what they owed, or new work we're doing with the few people who decided to stay and help us keep the company from sinking.
- I immediately allocate that money to paying off the people we owe. Everyone except the director (me). He gets absolutely nothing until everyone else has received their money.
- The representatives of the financial management department above our company turn my requests into actual payments and process the transactions. Assuming they don't screw it up. Unfortunately, last time they failed to process the payments twice in a row because... honestly, I have no idea why. I practically had to fight to get it done.
And meanwhile, we still have plenty of challenges.
One of the most recent ones required me personally to work 8ā12 hours a day, without days off, to save a product that had suffered a major emergency.
And I actually managed to save it.
But against the background of all this, for the first time in my life, my right arm has started giving me trouble. The muscles have become so tense that they won't relax, my arm constantly hurts, and I can barely move it properly.
And all of this would be one thing, but officially, I'm currently employed as the director on a 0.25 FTE basis (a quarter-time position), because I'd reduced my own working hours before the collapse as part of our financial optimization efforts.
I don't really know why I wrote this post.
Maybe I just needed to get all of this off my chest and tell the story to someone neutral.
Looking back, I can see my mistakes. I understand that I could have done things differently.
But I can't change the past.
All I can do now is settle our debts to my colleagues, both those who left and those who stayed, and only then decide what to do next and where to go from here.
Thank you for reading this stream of thoughts.
TL;DR: I've spent 8 years running a small IT company, building a team I genuinely cared about and a workplace I was proud of. After a change in ownership, I lost most of my control over the company's finances and operations. When financial problems hit, salaries stopped being paid, the owners blamed me, and almost half my team resigned during a single meeting. Now I'm trying to pay off everyone the company owes, while deliberately taking no salary myself. I'm exhausted, my health is starting to suffer, and I'm still trying to figure out how to move forward without abandoning the people who trusted me.
Has anyone here ever been in a similar situation, where you felt personally responsible for people even though you no longer had the power to protect them? How did you deal with it?