Waiting and More Waiting
Looking back at our journey to where we are today, I am thanking my lucky stars that all the delays happened even though at the time I was frustrated.
It started with finding the perfect space back in February of 2022. I wanted a space at the 5-Points shopping center which is near where I grew up and I know that area very well. (My first job was at the Burger King on that corner of Arden and Fair Oaks which was knocked down and a McDonald’s was built in its place). There was a perfect space at 5-Points, but by the time I was ready to commit to it, it was pending with another company which we were told was waiting for permits. This should have been a clue how long the process would take when they didn’t get their permits for about five months and we were officially told that the space was definitely not available to us. It was now June.
My realtor, Danny Arroyo with Capital Rivers Commercial, hung in there with me as I had a VERY small radius for where I wanted the store. Long story short, we looked at about five places and tried to get one on Arden and Eastern (and now so glad we didn’t), and when we finally chose to negotiate for the space we are in, it was August 2022. It took 6 weeks to finalize the contract (thank you Danielle Stevens with Downey Brand law firm!) and now we were in October.
Our amazing contractor, Davin Vculek with Build General Construction, submitted for permits immediately, and we waited and waited and waited for those. When they were approved on Valentine’s Day 2023, we all freaked out and were so excited!
My assumption was that we would be opening at the end of March because everything would go super smoothly… oh you naive, new business owner. Don’t you know the MAN loves to create new codes and things need to moved six inches this way or ducts need to be a different material now?
But truthfully, all the extra time has allowed me to make mistakes about a bunch of things I will mention in another post. I am shocked at how many things I need to do to be a compliant business owner. There probably is a checkoff list somewhere that would have helped me, but I never found it, and everyone has been kind when I tell them I have never done this.
There are still things that aren’t quite ready for opening day such as the LiveScan Fingerprinting system, but those things will be coming soon, and that’s good enough.