Living on borrowed time.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: Ashley Emergency Vehicles & Equipment - Company profile

LIVING ON BORROWED TIME Richard Ashley, builder of death-defying machines, discovered his own business was in critical condition.

Last June, Richard Ashley decided to drive across the mountains to Boone to visit his loan officer. Though he'd just turned 34, had only a high-school education and had been building ambulances for just four years now, the bright-eyed Ashley didn't think twice about asking Watauga Savings & Loan for a $250,000 letter of credit in addition to the $850,000 credit line his Jefferson-based Ashley Emergency Vehicles & Equipment already had with the S&L.

"I'm there checking on getting an additional $250,000 letter of credit," says Ashley," and they ultimately tell me not only can I not do that but I must reduce my present line of credit by $250,000."

In the end, Ashley had to seek out a new source of funds. His S&L, whose huge picture calendar dominated one whole wall of his office, was telling him it could do just fine without him.

"You talk about being devastated," Ashley says. "It was like pulling the rug out from underneath me."

What really turned Ashley's world upside down, though, were the fruitless visits he made that summer to NCNB, Southern National, Wachovia, First Citizens, First Union and other banks.

Even though he had built a $6 million-a-year business and had orders for 50 or so ambulances, every bank he went to said no.

Ashley's search for a lender made him take a hard look at the soft underbelly of the business he had spent more time building than running. It was not altogether a pretty sight. His books were late. He needed a business plan. His 80-employee operation was not as efficient as it should have been. He didn't have enough supervision on the floor. He wasn't charging enough for his product. These are things he has fixed or is fixing.

But Ashley's search taught him some things that he wouldn't have learned in business school, even if he'd had a chance to go: how hard it is for an owner to control a business as it grows, how a company can outgrow the good will of the institutions and suppliers that got it started and how easily a burgeoning business can get away from you. But perhaps the hardest lesson Ashley had to learn is that there are times when a company gets too big to be little and too little to be big.

Rick Ashley got interested in ambulances while he was a teen-ager working as an orderly at Ashe Memorial Hospital. "One day," he remembers, "I was in the emergency room. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I'll never forget it. They brought a 40-year-old man in by ambulance, and he'd had a heart attack. I opened up the back door and brought the patient out on the cot, and it was quite obvious that he was not breathing anymore. ...

"The driver made the comment, 'He was breathing when I put him in.' And that just kind of burnt me up."

In his spare time, Ashley took an emergency-medical-technician training course. In 1975, the county decided to open its ambulance service up to competitive bids. Ashley submitted a proposal and, much to his surprise, won the contract. "I was 20 at...