The first thing Keith Neville said when I sat down across from him at a diner on Cleveland’s west side was that he didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for him. He said it with a laugh, but there was a firmness behind it — the kind you earn from two decades of running your own business and figuring things out mostly alone. I’d heard about Keith through a neighbor at a block party last July, who mentioned, almost casually, that the barber down the street was fighting to keep his shop after what had been a brutal few years. Keith agreed to talk over coffee, and three hours later I left with a story I hadn’t expected.
Keith Neville is 58 years old, single, and the primary caregiver for his 81-year-old mother, who moved in with him in early 2023 after a fall that left her needing daily assistance. He owns Neville’s Cuts, a four-chair shop he opened in 2004 on Cleveland’s near west side, and for most of those years it was steady, solid work. But beginning in 2022, and accelerating through 2024, something started shifting — foot traffic thinned, longtime clients moved or switched to cheaper options, and the numbers that once felt comfortable started shrinking in ways that kept him up at night.
When the Chairs Started Emptying
At its peak in 2021 and early 2022, Neville’s Cuts was pulling in roughly $94,000 a year in gross revenue. Keith employed two part-time stylists and kept the books himself on a spreadsheet he’d been updating since 2009. By late 2024, that annual figure had dropped to approximately $67,300 — a loss of nearly $27,000 in revenue over three years. Overhead hadn’t moved much. His rent, product costs, and utilities stayed roughly flat. The margin just compressed.
“I kept thinking it would bounce back,” Keith told me. “Every slow season, I’d say, okay, this is just a rough patch. But rough patches don’t last three years.” He described cycling between long stretches of focused hustle — new promotions, extended hours, a loyalty rewards system he built himself — and periods of near-paralysis when the numbers felt too discouraging to confront.
Adding to the pressure was his mother’s care. Keith told me her needs weren’t catastrophic — she manages most of her day independently — but the time and logistical demands had pulled him away from the shop more than he anticipated. He’d had to hire extra coverage on days he couldn’t be there, which added roughly $600 to $900 per month in irregular labor costs he hadn’t budgeted for.
The Loan That Wouldn’t Let Go
In April 2022, during what Keith described as a “hustle phase,” he financed a 2022 Ford F-150 for $31,000. The logic, as he explained it to me, was that the truck would pull double duty — personal use and occasional supply runs for the shop. The payments were manageable at the time. By the fall of 2024, however, they weren’t.
He was, as he put it bluntly, “stuck in a truck I can’t afford and can’t sell.” Trading in or selling the vehicle privately would have required coming up with close to $9,000 out of pocket to cover the gap between what he owed and what the truck was worth. With shop revenue already down, that wasn’t a realistic option. He was making the $587 monthly payment, but just barely, and only by pulling from reserves he’d built over better years.
“That truck was a dumb buy,” Keith told me, without much bitterness. “I knew it the second I drove off the lot, honestly. But that’s how I am sometimes — I get in an optimistic mood and make a decision before I’ve really sat with it. I’m working on that.”
Discovering the Employee Retention Credit
The Employee Retention Credit, or ERC, was a federal tax relief program created under the CARES Act in 2020 and later expanded through the American Rescue Plan. It was designed to help small businesses that experienced significant revenue declines or government-mandated disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic retain employees. According to the IRS, eligible employers could claim a refundable credit of up to $26,000 per employee across qualifying 2020 and 2021 quarters.
Keith told me he first heard about the ERC in late 2022 from another small business owner at a supply trade event in Akron. He’d dismissed it at the time, assuming he wouldn’t qualify. His shop had stayed open during the pandemic — reduced hours at certain points, but open. He didn’t think “reduced hours” was enough. It wasn’t until a tax professional reviewed his records in the fall of 2023 that he learned his situation likely met the revenue decline threshold for several 2020 and 2021 quarters.
“I almost didn’t even file,” Keith told me. “I thought it was for big companies, not a four-chair shop in Cleveland.” His tax preparer calculated that based on his two part-time employees and documented revenue declines, he had a credible claim totaling approximately $18,600 across six qualifying quarters. Keith filed amended payroll returns — Form 941-X — in November 2023.
Fourteen Months of Waiting
What followed was a period Keith described to me as one of the more psychologically exhausting experiences of his professional life — and he’d been through a lot. He filed in November 2023. The IRS’s stated processing timeline at the time was anywhere from several months to over a year, owing to the backlog. Keith checked the IRS’s online tools repeatedly. He called twice, got limited information both times, and ultimately had to sit with uncertainty while his shop’s finances continued their slow squeeze.
In December 2024, things got more complicated. The IRS sent a letter requesting additional documentation to support Keith’s claimed revenue decline for two of the six quarters. His tax preparer helped him respond with payroll records, bank statements, and monthly revenue logs he’d kept on his spreadsheet. The response took three weeks to compile. Then there was more waiting.
“At that point, I was almost numb to it,” Keith said. “I’d been waiting over a year. Every month I was basically robbing Peter to pay Paul — using what was left in my business savings to cover what the shop wasn’t making. It was wearing me down.”
What Finally Arrived — and What Didn’t
In mid-March 2025, roughly fourteen months after his initial filing, a check arrived from the IRS for $11,200. It was real money — Keith told me he sat with it in his hand for a few minutes before depositing it — but it was also about $7,400 less than what he had originally claimed. The IRS had disallowed his credit for two of the six quarters, citing insufficient documentation of the revenue decline threshold for those specific periods.
Keith used $4,800 of the refund to bring his business savings account back to a level that gave him some operating cushion. He used another $3,500 to pay down a credit line he’d opened in 2024 to cover the months when the shop’s cash flow had fallen short. The remaining $2,900 went into a separate account he’s designated specifically for his mother’s care expenses.
The truck loan remains unresolved. Keith told me he’s continuing to make payments and watching the market, hoping depreciation slows enough that in another 18 to 24 months the gap between what he owes and what the vehicle is worth narrows to something manageable. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, negative equity on auto loans has become increasingly common in recent years as vehicle values have softened after pandemic-era highs — a dynamic that has left many borrowers in situations similar to Keith’s.
Looking at the Ledger Now
When I asked Keith how he felt about the whole experience, he was quiet for a moment. “Mixed” was the word he landed on. He was grateful the credit existed and that he’d been told about it at all. He was frustrated by how long it took and by the portions that were denied. He was realistic about the fact that $11,200, while meaningful, hadn’t solved the larger arc of the shop’s declining revenue — a problem the credit couldn’t address.
Neville’s Cuts posted approximately $71,000 in revenue in the first three months of 2025, an annualized pace slightly better than 2024. Keith told me he’d cut back on some impulsive spending on equipment and promotions that didn’t pan out, and was trying to be more deliberate about where money went. His mother’s health has been stable. He hired a part-time home aide two days a week — at $18 per hour through a local agency — to give himself more time at the shop without guilt.
What struck me most about Keith’s story wasn’t the credit itself or even the money. It was the way he described the months of waiting — the particular exhaustion of doing everything right and then having no control over what came next. According to IRS updates on ERC processing, the agency worked through a significant portion of its backlog by early 2025, but many small business owners spent the better part of two years in exactly that limbo.
Keith Neville built something over 22 years in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a lot of reasons to celebrate stability. The chairs at Neville’s Cuts are still full more days than not. That, he told me as we wrapped up, is what he comes back to when the spreadsheet looks grim. I left the diner thinking that sometimes the most honest accounting isn’t on paper at all.
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