So the last couple days have been pretty stressful as we signed the lease on the new warehouse for our I-502 operation. The days leading up to the signing were some of the most stressful in my life. I had been charged with all initial operations. Compliance, forecasts, cost analysis, and facility location. I am not exaggerating when I tell you I have over 100 hours into just facility location and several tanks of fuel. I covered the better part of 4 different counties in my search, spent time in meetings with City Mayors and spoke at city council meetings in closed and open sessions. When I found the perfect location I was so excited and thought the hard work was over. Little did I know it had just started.
You see my partners are very smart and professional guys. Experts in their fields and I know they know their stuff. My expertise lies in this side of things. Leases, contracts. and start ups. Things that I just do automatically and see as tasks they approach more cautiously. A simple commercial lease agreement is a daunting thing and took 10 days to go over and decipher. There was a lot of education that happened at several stages of the process. Now it is important for me to point out that these guys are looking at dropping serious cash here. A 36 month lease and 10’s of thousands of dollars before there is ever a crop or the first dollar that comes back. They are nervous and no doubt should be.
When I am faced with a task and there are things I don’t know how to do, I look for partnerships to assist me through those processes. I can easily look at their track record and after meeting them I can get a pretty good idea if I can trust them or not. This is how I have created my last few businesses. I did not know how to make waffles on a commercial basis, Make a syrup or have any idea on how to navigate the federal liquor system. I had to be trusting in the individuals that I chose to work with that they knew what they were doing and could deliver.
The stress from the last week was because as much as these guys said they trusted me their actions spoke otherwise. In the end they signed the lease as it was written with one addendum that in my opinion was unnecessary as I signed a personal guarantee. I made a couple assumptions and could have avoided a lot of this myself. I assumed they knew more than they did when it came to leases and start ups. That was dumb because that is why they have me.
I look at it from the other standpoint though and I come to the same conclusion. If you partner with someone because they can do a task or handle a situation you cannot you have to trust them. If you are going to second guess them you will either ruin it by stalling when you need to act or your lack of trust may cause them to throw in the towel. My wife can tell you I may have been pretty close to just that on a couple occasions. Something someone said to me a long time ago. If it starts hard it most likely will not get any easier. In this case the reward far out weighs the couple days of stress and we move forward.
Scott . . . I love you brotha!
365 Days To My First Million. 