A year ago, Jeffrey Yarbrough -- the man behind Club Clearview, after its initial success in the mid-1980s, and Liberty Noodles -- shared his secret shame with the readers of Forbes Small Business: filing for Chapter 13. His reasons for writing the piece? "There is no shame in bankruptcy," he notes one year after the fact. "It's not an escape hatch for people who lack business ethics, but an opportunity for recovery when bad things happen."
In the October FSB, not yet online, he revisits his failures yet again in order to claim victory: "I will soon pay off the last of my debts, and the end is in sight." It's a short piece from the man behind Big Ink on South Lamar, which, he says, is doing "about $400,000 a year in sales"; hence, he writes of his PR agency, "Sometimes I think of Big Ink as a phoenix rising from the ashes." --Robert Wilonsky