Tag: business

You’ve discussed it with your spouse and weighed the financial pros and cons. You’re both excited and you’re ready to spread your entrepreneurial wings with your great new service. However, when it comes to really putting all the pieces in place, there may be some uncertainty of exactly how to start. Here are some easy first steps couples can take, along with mistakes to avoid, when they step off into entrepreneurship.

1. Work with people who have a proven track record. All too often we want to work with friends or referrals, and in many cases that means two things:

Ever since late winter, early spring, our friends, Warner and Pepa, have been telling me about the night of August 12th. It was a night not to miss, they said, when hundreds of shooting stars could be seen. They had witnessed it in years past and told of the spectacular sight that they had seen. Expectations high, I waited all summer for that day when we would be able to make hundreds of wishes upon the stars. And when August 12th finally arrived, David and I rushed the last lingering customers out of AlteArte so we could see for ourselves what we had heard so much about.

Little sleep, not much free time, lots of cleaning and a significant amount of sacrifice. As I expected, starting a business is similar to having a baby, but it wasn’t until my good friends from London arrived with their nearly 3-month-old son (only days younger than our bar AlteArte in Altea, Spain) that the resemblances really struck me. Sure, they are having to physically adjust to a different schedule, but beyond that they are having to learn how to communicate with each other in an entirely different way and that’s what struck me most and got me thinking about how their situation so closely parallels ours.

I don’t drink much. Actually, leave it up to me and I won’t drink at all. Ask my friends from college and they’ll confirm that while they would drink beer after beer at the frat parties Freshman year, I would slyly nurse one drink the entire evening. It’s not that I’m morally opposed to alcohol, it’s just that my body rejects it as if it were a poison. And try as I might (and my friends certainly did) raising my tolerance level is simply a no-go.

Therefore, some might see it as ironic that I’m now here in Spain running a bar, but I see things quite differently. I see AlteArte as being much more than just a bar. From the time when the original owner founded it and created the name and concept, it has been more than a bar.

Tired feet, aching head, growling stomach; these are some of the side effects of working 12 hour days, seven days a week. This is our schedule from opening business at 4:00 pm and finally coming home at 5:00 in the morning. It means sitting down to have dinner just as the birds are announcing the dawn of a new day.

For David, the 12-hour days are not so different from what he experienced in New York. As a private chef

In Spain, you can spend a lifetime waiting for things to happen. It took more than half a year of waiting, for example, to get my residency—considered a really quick turnaround. Therefore, I was naturally worried about how long it would take to get the lease and papers done for our new business, AlteArte. Not having the papers was fine in the beginning since we had to close to rebuild the staircase and add our own special touches to the business, but when the business was ready to go and the papers weren’t, it became a problem. So, when the month of February drew to a close and we were still waiting for the lease to go back and forth between the landlord’s lawyer and ours (who just happens to be the brother of our old landlord in Torrevieja), we decided that we simply couldn’t afford to wait any longer. In Spain, sometimes you just have to stop waiting and start doing.

The situation was looking hopeless and David and I were just exhausted from the up and down process. We had arrived at a point where we could no longer justify taking over the business and, at last, we were at peace with the fact that it was our final decision to not purchase the business. David sent Pepe, the business owner, a message saying that we had decided against the business. And with that, we assumed that we had put it behind us, closed that chapter, and resigned ourselves to looking for jobs.