Can someone please give me some advice or tell me what you think!?

Sorry its a bit long. My family started a big automotive shop 3 years ago. We work on both cars and heavy duty trucks and do EVERYTHING but tires. Well from the time he started trying to get the loan many of the other repair shops that have been here for 30 years have been makign it real hard. Many of the "good old boys" are friends with bank owners and commercial customers all around the county. so after a long tiresome task of getting a loan we planed on having 50k as start up capitol well the person that we paid to develop the land did the job wrong and than ditched his equipment and left town, so we had to use most of the start up capitol and i had to quit my job to help do it ourselfs. We had a lot of customers at first, we had big corporation, all the citys work, firetrucks, ambulances you name it. Well as time went on they just stoped comming and going back to our competitors who are 15 to 20 dollars more than us. Well than we had to fire some employees and they started to spread rumors and our competitors started spreading rumors and it has gotten worse. I and my family have put every penny we have into this place and we are honest and do good work at a great price but i feel like we lost the game and they won. And the economy isnt helping at all. I hate to go under i feel like we lost. But i know many people may start and lost 3 or 4 businesses in a life time but idont know. Any words of encuragement or advice???