Selling Out or Cashing In

The transition from corporate hack to budding entrepreneur took a long long time for me. I had been working in Corporate America for DIRECTV in one form or another since I was discharged from the Navy. By the time AT&T had bought DIRECTV, I was cruising right along, with my fancy title, Senior Director (WTF does that even mean), on auto-pilot. I knew how to succeed, how to play the game, who the players were and what it all meant. Or at least I thought I did. 

Corporate Kyle

After the AT&T purchase, I went into existential crisis mode. It felt like I was in an Indiana Jones movie, trying to maintain and stay on the cliff, with little bricks falling away and the bottom about to completely collapse out from under me.

Efforts to try to assert expertise and confidence came off half hearted and really were never considered by my new overlords, it was a new world and I had gone from a name to literally a number, a number that no one knew or was trying to find. My discipline and area of expertise had gone from one of prominence with a huge potential for upside, to a necessary evil where personalities and careers seemed to go to die. Welcome to gargantuan business!! After two years of a punishing travel schedule and way too much time spent in Texas, I knew it was time to explore a new avenue in the world of entrepreneurial endeavors.

The Stars at Night Are Big and Bright…

I made this trip way too many times!

Fallene had been managing our salon for upwards of six years now and we were making it work. It was time to revisit the coffee shop idea. While traveling for the evil empire, I took the opportunity to develop a business plan and refine the coffee shop idea. Fallene was amazing with her encouragement and drive to think bigger and look at the bigger picture. It took a solid year and a half, but in July of 2018, I took one of the many AT&T Management Volunteer Opportunities (MVO or Corporate Speak for we have way too many people and no way to evaluate talent, get 'em off the books!). It was serendipitous as we were moving along with the Coffee Shop, now branded Torpedo Coffee and starting the build out of the physical location. 

Torpedo as it came to be known was my end all and be all. Fallene had the salon and I had the coffee shop, heck yes, we were an entrepreneurial power couple!  Opening a shop, hiring people, serving the public, and making sure everything was of an excellent quality was an intense experience. It was fun, it felt like a lot of the things I was missing in my previous career, were now being fulfilled. I was gaining a larger sense of community, opening myself up to so many more people than I was used to and challenging myself to learn and master an industry that I had really only observed as an outsider. It was great! A lot of work, but the challenges were new and exciting to solve. But man, it was a lot of work, even after I had a solid team of baristas in place the day to day always had something new in store, challenging, but I just kept managing each new thing. I got cocky, and when a customer reached out with an idea that I should expand into a shop that was smack dab in the middle of a transit line, I thought why not, let's grow the empire. We can do it!! and all of those inspirational sayings.

The funny thing is that we did do it. We opened up a cafe with a liquor license and all of the trappings of being a real restaurant complete with a menu consultant, back of house, and much more. Realistically, I was forgetting what I set out to do in the first place. Have a quality coffee shop that focuses on community, connections and coffee. I never wanted to have an actual restaurant with all of the equipment, overhead, and headaches that I heard about from other owners. Torpedo Coffee had gone so well, I just knew we could keep the momentum going with our cafe, Close Quarters. What I didn't know was that a global pandemic was coming and would strike one month after our grand opening. Now this isn't intended as a cautionary tale about getting in over your head and all that noise, but this is about recognizing the signs and evolving/adapting as the hits keep coming. Quite frankly, we saw it coming, we didn't want to acknowledge it, we fought it, but ultimately closed all of our businesses for at least two weeks, the salon was more than 8 weeks as the world tried to stem the tide of COVID.

Bandana Masks

So while we closed the shops and stayed in touch with our employees helping with unemployment, other funds and more, we also filed every bit of paperwork for grants, low cost loans, and more to keep everything afloat. We cut hours at both shops and ended up doing a lot of take out during this time. It was tough, but really it became another problem to solve. Not enough business at Close Quarters, what else can we use the space for and keep employees busy with, well, how about making our own breakfast burritos? As usual, Fallene challenged me to try and was at the prep table tasting, rolling and figuring out what we could make to cut costs and keep people employed. We did it, we came up with an awesome burrito and systemized it, so we could knock em out every day and sell them from both Torpedo and Close Quarters.

We slowly kept adding hours as people became more comfortable with leaving their houses and made a viable food production business at Close Quarters. However, this shit was daunting. If I thought running two businesses was a challenge in regular times, doing this with dramatically reduced customer counts and standing up a solid food production business was fucking rough! One day in January 2021, I came home and told Fallene, "I don't know about you, but I think I am ready to cash out and do something else." In my heart I knew I was serious, but I also knew Fallene loved the life of an entrepreneur, a year before in 2019, we had been discussing growing the salon and possibly the coffee shops more. So would she be ready to call it quits and do something else? Much to my surprise, she responded with "I am over it too!" So what would we do, what would this mean? I had no desire to go back to corporate America and we had these three business children we had to figure out. We couldn't just close things down and move on, we had employees, debts, leases, etc that all had to be accounted for and it wasn't going to be easy. Our journey to deciding on Spain and retiring early is its own story, but once we landed on moving to Europe, we put the wheels in motion to exit our businesses. Much like a lot of things in our life, started with a class. Fallene found this company, Exit Factor, and we started our weekly calls with a coach learning what it means to sell a business, valuation of said business, listing the business and more. We continued to navigate the pandemic and run our businesses with all of the stresses, challenges and other highs and lows.

It was a lot, a coffee shop and a cafe 7 days a week, with constant supply chain issues, employee call outs, new mandates, old mandates, variants and more. We kept our focus on Europe and what this may look like for us if we could sell the businesses. It was a journey, and we kept our head in it by almost religiously looking at real estate sites with the potential of what could be. Through the Exit Factor classes, one theme kept coming up, secrecy! We couldn't tell anyone about the sale of the businesses as we needed them to be functioning with a solid team in place and we knew if we were to tell our employees, the exodus would begin. Potential buyers would want to buy not only the concept, but a running team. So we continued attending classes, running our businesses, navigating COVID, consulting for AT&T (oh yeah, I started doing that in the summer of 2020), and sending each other new listings in Spain all the time. We knew how to dream and this was now a new challenge. 2021 felt like new difficulties almost every day, but we kept telling ourselves it will be worth it. Figure it out, we can do it. This was the new norm, with masks everywhere all the time, conference calls from the Costco parking lot, zoom meetings about documenting everything in our businesses and on and on. Covid vaccines were a thing and travel was opening back up, it was time to go see Spain and decide if this was really where we wanted to move next. This also meant we had a new shiny object to look forward to and oh how awesome the trip was. We looked at houses, and saw a number of cities in our new country, which only helped to crystallize the idea of moving abroad.

Now it was back to the grind and figuring out how to make it a reality all while putting on a face that nothing had changed and we didn't actually have this huge secret plan we were working on. Well, it was tough, there were so many times I looked at business decisions differently because I knew deep down we wouldn't still have the business in 6 months, let alone a year. Some decisions were a complete waist of money because we had to keep up the illusion of ownership, some we knew were going to be a good decision for a new owner or the employees, but were not going to benefit us in the long run. Fallene took the plunge first, listed the salon and approached our manager about buying the salon from us, at a very good deal. The cat was out of the bag, so while those negotiations were happening, I decided to list the coffee shop and cafe. The intent was to sell them both as a package deal with our Eastern Bloc agent giving me all of the heavily accented stereotypical encouragements that one would expect from a movie with that kind of character. "Yes, yes, Kyle, you have a very good business, someone will buy it!" All while not truly supporting with showings or other helpful aspects that a listing agent should do. Don't get me wrong, I didn't really care, he couldn't meet potential buyers, no problem, I'll do it. He couldn't chase down paperwork, I got it, no biggie, I can, and when only two perspective buyers came forward to look at the shops, I knew I had to put the feelers out. Uh but how does that work with NDAs and all the secrecy we had been instructed to maintain. "Ok, ok, Kyle, you can talk to other people in the industry, just tell them to keep quiet!" Right, cool, I guess I can do that. Which is exactly what I did, we found a potential buyer in Atlas Coffee, who was down to purchase both Torpedo and Close Quarters. We signed the paperwork and moved forward with a litany of unknowns, specifically, lease transfers, SBA loan reassignments, asset purchases and more. As this process progressed, Atlas changed the deal and brought in a new player, Grist Brewing Company. Atlas had cold feet about Close Quarters and were hesitant about the challenges that came with a liquor license. They liked the food production business we had created there, but were uneasy about the day to day cafe operations. Luckily Grist Brewing saw it as an opportunity for a new tap room and we pivoted the deal to split out assets for Close Quarters to Grist and the food production to Atlas in addition to Torpedo Coffee. I have to say February and March were strange days at the shops, we needed people as things were ramping up at both shops, so I was still hiring, all the while, knowing that I wouldn't be their employer for that long. Keeping the straight face and not letting people know about the sale was definitely tricky, I was used to it with the employees, but it was a challenge with our family who had been supportive of our businesses all along. I wasn't outright lying, but definitely keeping things close the vest with the larger plan and what was happening with the sale. Once it became time to announce, we had some snafu's with certain employees deciding that their need for gossip outweighed their professionalism and creating drama purely for the sake of drama and chaos. Hindsight is 20/20, we should've handled the notifications differently, but we were selling the shops and the daily grind was soon going to be a memory. It wasn't until we had sold both spaces and I wasn't getting texts/calls at all hours of the day about equipment failures, employee issues, supply chain issues, break ins, customer issues and more that I felt like I could actually take a breath and just be. I was constantly on, constantly checking numbers, calling someone, reacting to something, generally not being present when I owned the coffee shop and cafe.

I have to admit, we still haven't really slowed down, as we went from owning three businesses to owning one and getting ready for the big move to Spain. We had to get our house ready to sell, list it, get rid of all of the stuff that collects (new blog post idea), keep things moving with the house in Spain, keep consulting for AT&T (weird not doing that from the Costco parking lot), and so much more. As I write this, we are finally recovering from a wicked bout of COVID that hit us both and forced some downtime. We are two weeks out from the big move and it is looming over us both inducing nervousness, excitement and anxiety like anticipation can only do. Strange to be sitting at a kitchen table that isn't ours anymore (the new owners will pick it up in August) and recalling the last couple of years. Most rooms are empty and our house has been sold, we are like ghosts that refuse to leave the known, even though we are both so ready for the new chapter to start. The thing is, the new chapter started way back in January 2021 when we were first considering it, we just didn't know it yet.