Wow – now THAT’S bad luck!
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here before, but, I still supposedly own 5% of R & S BBQ. The owner and I had discussed it a while back, and I get to keep my shares for 1 year after the open date, at which time he has 180 days to buy me out (though I keep drawing dividends during that time), or I get to keep them. Forever. Not a bad deal.
So we touch base to see what’s up from time to time, and he called today to ask if I had any ideas why the AC was acting up. Not a damned thing I could do for it, of course, but i asked him what all was up, since the place wasn’t open STILL.
The manager is (er, was) convicted of dealing drugs quite a while back, and she served 7 years for it. He paid his dues to society. Eventually, he ended up landing the gig at R&S, and was damned excited about it. But he’s still on probation. Welllll…. he aparently posted a picture of himself on MySpace, holding a pair of guns all gangsta like. The wrong person saw it (aparently his parole officer), and back to jail he goes. OUCH.
OK, that’s stupid, and bad luck for the owner. But it gets even worse…
They have two HUGE (er, had) smokers, gas fired. Nice ones. Setting outside. A little ways away was a power poll with a set of transformers on it. At 5 PM, they got the gas turned on to the smokers, and got ’em hooked up. At 6 PM, the power poll blew over in a storm, lands on the smokers, and the transformers EXPLODE, spilling PCB’s everywhere. The building wasn’t damaged much (water damage from the fire department, which is pretty common – they don’t like to take chances it’s gonna catch on fire!), but the smokers are slag (toxic slag at that!) Then the hazmat team shows up to survey, and removes 6″ of dirt from the ground, because it’s got PCB’s in it now. Then return the next day and remove another 6″ because it seeped deeper into the ground than they expected!
You don’t really plan for that sort of bad luck, except to get insurance in case bad things happen. In his case, he had done the smart thing – he had insurance 🙂
More Work
Looks like two or three more contacts will be showing up tomorrow or so. Sweeeet. This isn’t enough to let Lance quit his day job yet, but, we’ll do the jobs together anyway in the evening. This allows two things – one, to start proving out our teamwork stuff, and two, he can start putting money in his war chest for when he does quit. Â
But each time you pick up work with a customer, it’s rarely a one-shot deal. Instead, it’s usually the beginning of a business relationship (‘specially when you know the people from other fields or other jobs). Which increases your potental base of contacts and contracts to work with.
Just gotta keep ’em coming. Get a nice base of customers like that, and everything will be perfect 🙂