Lies, debts and rehab: Gonzalo lost everything. This is the story of how his worst fuckup became the beginning of a new life.
This month, we have one of those priceless stories; raw resilience at its finest. A story about an avalanche of debts, pyramidal lies, and escapes from a rehab clinic.
You know, the kind of stories that surpass fiction and prove that it's possible to hit rock bottom and come back stronger and more determined than before.
This story was first featured in our newsletter Speakers Stories, where every month we share one of the best failure stories from our global community. Be the first to receive these stories in your inbox— subscribe to our newsletter here.
Gonzalo Girault Facha is an entrepreneur with 21 years of experience in technology and video games. He is a husband, father of four, and founder of an interactive entertainment company in México. He currently lives in Spain, where he opened a subsidiary to promote Mexican talent and build international connections through creativity and technology. He writes for Forbes Mexico and has been recognized as one of the leading voices in innovative thinking and interactive business in Latin America.
Gonzalo: Failure is a very personal experience. Just as it is a breaking point and a moment of self-acceptance, it's also a moment of decision and action. Once we manage to accept failure, we gain the strength to take action, learn, correct, and continue on a new path.
Gonzalo: In 2019, I was starting a new project. I had just helped Gamers (one of the largest video game retail chains in Mexico) monetize and sell its new gaming website. I wanted to try something different within the industry.
Together with some partners, we decided to open The Game Rack, a video game store where, in addition to buying, people could compete, join tournaments, and attend special events.
It was very exciting to launch such a different project and see the vision take shape. At first, everything seemed like it was going to go well… at first.
Gonzalo: After the initial excitement and the grand opening, I realized several mistakes: intense competition (we had a Gameplanet store one floor below), poor location, lack of physical space, bad inventory management, high fixed costs, and very few sales.
But the worst decision of all was getting stuck in my ego and using a short-term strategy to finance the store and keep cash flowing. I dishonestly decided to look for "loans" from the same partners of the company to invest in "other businesses" and then reinvest those supposed returns back into the store.
Inmy mind, I believed I could generate those returns once the store took off. Although there was no way to keep the store afloat, I insisted on giving it more time and securing additional loans. What I was doing was essentially a Ponzi scheme.
Convinced that the store would eventually deliver results, I paid the interest on the loans with other loans. This made it seem like the store was performing well, which in turn helped me secure new loans.
I planned to do that a couple of times until I could pay everything back, but that never happened. The loans kept piling up, and what began as a short-term fix turned into a nuclear bomb.
Gonzalo: FFrom the very beginning. I knew that taking out short-term loans wasn't the best decision, but I chose to move forward with the "strategy" instead of stopping everything and turning back.
Before I knew it, I was already caught in a storm that was hard to control: lies and debts piling up more and more. This started changing my personality, my actions, and my reactions. A mix of ego and shame kept pushing me to continue with the charade.
The situation became unsustainable. I had no money left to keep paying the accumulated interest, no store, no company, and no way of getting more loans under the original scheme. Yet, I was still too proud to accept it all and face the consequences.
The absolute breaking point came in March 2021, when I could no longer handle the pressure of all the debts. I ran out of excuses for my wife and four children when there wasn't even money for gas, groceries, or the basics—and I was hiding more and more in alcohol.
One morning in March, my wife found me drunk once again and decided to throw me out of the house. From that moment, she started uncovering all the bad decisions, debts, and financial troubles I had accumulated over the past few years—all while I was admitted to an alcoholism treatment clinic.
Gonzalo: I felt nothing but total despair. I couldn't believe I had ended up like this, after everything we had achieved as a couple and as a family. I had simply become unrecognizable to myself.
On top of discovering everything, my wife also had to face family members whose behavior fell far short of the image they projected. Faced with all of this, she had decided to divorce me.
Igradually learned about everything that was happening, and it kept eroding my hope of recovering it all.
Gonzalo: I stayed for several weeks in a couple of clinics. The first days were filled with real uncertainty and despair—I didn't know what was happening outside. What was my wife thinking? My kids? What was going to happen to my marriage? My future?
As desperate as I was. I couldn't accept that everything was going to end there. IThen, in a sudden and miraculous change of heart, my wife called me at the clinic and said, "You're my husband, and I will always support you. I know we can get through this together."
Thosewords transformed my despair into hope. That was the signal I had been waiting for to take action. The following Sunday, with the help of a friend, escaped from the clinic and managed to get home.
No money, no company, no idea what was going to happen or how my wife and children would react when they saw me.
From that point on—and up to today, four years later— we've recovered everything and multiplied it. We've gone back to the original vision of building the great company and family project that my wife and I had set out to achieve from the very beginning.
Of course, these years haven't been easy, especially the first one after coming back, when I had to face the heavy consequences of my actions with partners, family, and friends. I've learned a lot about who I am, the value of trusting my intuition above outside opinions, my capacity for resilience, and the importance of my wife in both my personal and professional life.
Gonzalo: They say hindsight is always 20/20. Honestly, I believe all of this could have been avoided if I had kept my ego and ambition under better control at the time.
I would never have left behind the video game development and interactive marketing companies I already had, which were delivering good results—and which are precisely what I went back to after leaving the clinic.
However, I had to navigate this period, right before the advent of the new technological era, to capitalize on the metaverse boom, the latest wave of technology, and Artificial Intelligence. This time with more intelligence, clarity, and confidence.
Connect with Gonzalo:
On Linkedin
Remember, our channels are open for your questions, complaints, feedback, or collaboration at: rich@fuckupnights.com.
Edited by
Ricardo Guerrero
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Let's transform our perception of failure and use it as a catalyst for growth.
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