Don’t try calling florist Delilah Whitesmith at 678-957-8030. The number doesn’t work anymore. Never mind that it’s the one all of her clients know. It’s gone, vanished in a mix-up with the phone company.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s not like the phone still rings the way it did a few years ago, when Whitesmith’s small boutique, Floristique, was humming with $400,000 a year in sales and flowers were pouring out of the place like a waterfall of bold blue irises.

So now, Delilah Whitesmith, avatar of the American Dream — an Ohio girl who scrapped her way to an officer’s commission in the Army and parlayed a string of jobs into her own business — finds herself having to make a choice.

She can keep her business running. She can keep her employees working. She can keep her house. Or she can pay her debts.

But she can’t do them all. Not now, not in this economy.

“I’m trying to save everything,” Whitesmith said one recent afternoon, between delivering toy trucks to a pair of birthday toddlers and a fruit basket. “Right now, I’m just trying not to lose everything.”

Few people seem to notice

Owning your own business isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s hard work. Long hours. And risky, too. There’s no health insurance plan, no pension or 401(k).

Today, the task is even harder. Untold thousands of business owners across metro Atlanta, Georgia and the country are trying to work through an unprecedented economic confluence that’s left them with falling sales that no longer cover operating expenses, debt service and ever more modest living allowances. And unlike past recessions, borrowing their way out of the mess has been harder than ever.

When a little company goes under, it sounds little more than a quiet yelp amid the deafening roar of rising unemployment numbers and frightening news about the latest megacorporation to lay off thousands. The only notice from the community might be a brief, transient recognition that yet another storefront has gone dark.

But the potential impact is enormous. In 2006, according to the Small Business Administration, 84,417 Georgia companies employed between one and four workers.

And those companies accounted for 170,472 jobs in the state, and a payroll of $5.3 billion.

From mechanic to florist

Whitesmith has been many things.

Helicopter mechanic. Army officer. Restaurant manager. She delivered newspapers in Florida. Picked up trash at an apartment building. Sold Amway and phone service. Dispatched trucks. And finally, investigated equal opportunity complaints for Gwinnett County government.

In 2000, she added small-business owner to her résumé, paying $50,000 for a little flower shop in Norcross.

Flowers had always been a hobby. She’d studied floral arranging in trade school back in Ohio, before she joined the Army — ending up in Hanau, Germany, as a helicopter mechanic. “I wanted to be a dadgum pilot,” she said.

She later left the service but then earned a commission through ROTC and eventually served several more years in the Army, this time as an officer.

Friends were always asking for help doing floral arrangements for weddings and such. She did them on the side for years. So when she went searching for a shop she and her husband could run together, flowers seemed a natural choice.

It was a rocky start. She said she found discrepancies in the books. The store wasn’t in a great location. And it relied too much on walk-up sales. Whitesmith changed the company’s focus from primarily serving walk-up customers to catering to corporate clients that send flowers to employees for weddings, births and deaths.

Sales doubled after the first year, peaking at about $400,000 a year for four straight years.

Things were going so well, she tried to expand in 2004. The experiment failed quickly, leaving Whitesmith with $100,000 in business debt on her personal accounts.

Fortunately, her original location was still thriving, creating enough revenue to run the business, pay her employees and her own salary and service the debt — even with payments that approached $4,000 a month.

But the industry was shifting beneath her, and the economy was beginning to change.

Competition gets stronger

Used to be the corner flower shop is where you’d go to pick up flowers for most anything, even a spur-of-the-moment bouquet for the missus. But in recent years, grocery stores, mass merchandisers, even home improvement stores have moved aggressively into the game — undercutting florists’ prices and offering one-stop convenience to harried customers.

Over the past decade, market share for retail florists has dropped from one-third down to a quarter, according to IBISWorld Research.

It will be increasingly harder for such companies to survive in coming years, IBISWorld predicted in a February report, with or without improvement in the economy.

The picture is little better for small businesses generally. Failure rates are rising rapidly among businesses backed by loans from the Small Business Administration, according to the Coleman Report, which tracks small-business performance. Its analysis of SBA lending data showed 12 percent of such firms defaulted on their loans last year — up 101 percent from 2005.

Sales drop, problems grow

It doesn’t take much to push Whitesmith’s finances over the edge these days.

Revenues fell more than 20 percent last year. This year isn’t looking fabulous, either. Sales for February — a key indicator month for a florist because it includes the Valentine’s Day holiday — were less than half those in February 2008.

Already going through a distracting divorce, Whitesmith had to take a week off to visit her daughter from a previous marriage, 15-year-old Bianca Reyes. The girl is living in Ohio with her aunt while Whitesmith works to save the business.

The visit wasn’t social. Bianca has cystic fibrosis and needs frequent hospitalization. Fortunately, the girl has health insurance from her father, to whom Whitesmith hasn’t been married for more than 12 years.

But the time commitments remain enormous. It’s one of the reasons why Whitesmith wanted to own her own business in the first place. “Nobody’s going to let me off that much,” she said.

But the flexibility comes at a huge cost — the full-time salaries she has to pay to her handful of mostly part-time employees to keep her shop open 40 hours a week in her absence.

Whitesmith doesn’t let on much that she’s under stress, said Vera Gunnels, her longtime flower designer. And she doesn’t talk much about money issues.

She just keeps going, Gunnels said.

“What are you going to do, go out and roll around in the parking lot and wail?” she said. “You’ve just got to keep going.”

Whitesmith doesn’t want to declare bankruptcy, but she wants to save the business even more. So she keeps grinding away, trying to keep up with the bills, waiting on her lawyer’s advice for the day when a creditor sues her before declaring bankruptcy.

“I just want to get it over with, get on with it,” she said.

She doesn’t like sitting around waiting or worrying about what’s around the corner. Whatever it is, she said, she’ll deal.

“God just has not put a spirit of fear in me,” she said.

Skeptical of Obama plan

In mid-March, not long after she spoke those words, President Barack Obama announced plans to boost lending to small businesses in an effort to help them cope with the recession.

Whitesmith welcomed the news, but she’s still skeptical. After all, the big bank bailouts were supposed to unstick lending, too.

“Somehow the end results never end up being what was said,” she said.

Whitesmith says she may have had enough of owning her own business, this one at least, and she has listed it for sale at an online brokerage. She has gotten a couple of bites, but there’s been precious little lending to would-be entrepreneurs.

Maybe the newest plan will help change that. If it does, if she does leave the world of small business, what job would she add to her already lengthy résumé?

“God , I don’t know,” she said. “Something easy.”