It's been a while ...

It's been a while since my last post. There were so many things needed to get done, and there was so little time.
Last October, we acquired a new business. I had to spend over six months to negotiate and to hammer down all the details.
Buying a business is a complicated process that could take months to complete. This humongous deal was much more complicated which involved the business, the catering side of the business, the building, and the properties to which the business resided on. It took so much of my time and effort during which the thought of dropping the deal had been hovering on my head days and nights.
There were more than a few times I thought the deal was being pulled off, but fortunately, when I had no hope to revive it, it went sailing to the finish line without a hiccup.

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The next three months had drained me physically, mentally, and spiritually. We was so busy trying to implement the new format of running the restaurant. On top of that, we had to prepare and get ready for the busiest quarter of the year operating Steak Escape in the malls. At the same time, I was working on renewing, extending the lease for one of our Steak Escape of which the lease was going to be expired in a few months.

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2012 brought a big change in our operation. The negotiating of lease extension went sour. We lost that business completely. During the negotiating phase with the mall's office, I found and learned much about the dark sides of signing the contract with big corporations owning the mall. They have nothing in mind but money. They don't care for your business. They don't care for whom they had been dealing with as partners for the last several years. They don't care about you even though you had been contributing big time to their success. They don't care if you went with them thru thick and thin over the year.
The only thing they see is the dollar sign. The truth is before the end of your lease, they have already been shopping your space around for a higher paid potential renter.
We packed up and moved out on the last day of February 2012, ending a seven years run on that most beautiful-high-end mall in North Carolina, the Streets At Southpoint.

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Our new business has been keeping us busy since. By the end of Spring, we have been bombarded with our new venture, the catering side of the business. This is something totally new to us. Luckily, we are a quick learner. After a few round of learning on the go doing the catering, we bid on a biggest contract of our new catering job ever, the contract with the five Wake Tech Campus in Raleigh for their Orientation Day. The first time ever that we feed more than a fifteen hundreds people on our catering truck and trailer. It was fun. It was ecstatic. And it was successful. We now have so much confidence in doing catering. We strongly believe that we could feed 3000+ people a day on their site at any given time.

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I have had plenty of time nowadays. Everything is settled nicely. We have been very tired, drained, and need some vacation to recharge our almost emptied batteries. We haven't taken a vacation in almost three years.
The idea of taking a vacation in ... Europe did not take place seriously at first. It keeps on building its steam by early April. We finally settle our choices between a month in Viet Nam or three weeks in Western Europe. Dues to the harsh weather during the summer time in VN, the trip to Europe won hands down.

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