Cracked Cauldron Spillings

We found a bank that will work with us on applying for a small business loan, and the process has now been started.

Yeah, hooray!

And we found a place to make the corporate seal at a reasonable price. We should have that within the week.

I wonder what it is about people that they don't listen to what they hear? The attorney was clearly and specifically told all we wanted from him was to file the incorporation papers, to get the certificate of incorporation, we already had the By-Laws and such written. We wanted the stock to sart out no vote and no par.

Did he do what we paid him to do?

No.

OK, I wrong him. He did finally get the certificate of incorporation.

But he also tried to do - wrongly - a lot of other things we didn't ask him to do, nor hire him to do. He wrote the Articles of Incorporation, and did so as if the stock were voting stock, and the big hold up was the par value.

He had it in his notes that we wanted no par, no vote stock. He even read that back. He still insisted on setting up the stock with par value and as voting stock.

I have no patience with incompetence, especially not professional incompetence. He supposedly went to school to learn how to do this, was trained to listen to his clients, and supposedly was competent in his chosen profession.

I don't know how well he treats his other clients, but if he tries to steal from one client (as he did us), what is preventing him from doing so with other clients? Or, if he only ever tried to steal from us, targeting us for his foray into criminality certainly didn't pay off for him. We weren't the easy marks he thought we'd be.

Still, he's trying to make us do things his way, not the right way, nor the way we paid him to do it. Mind you, what we wanted was perfectly legal and acceptable, and his way is, too. It's just that his way isn't what we paid him to do.

Anyway, the lawyer episode is now completely behind us. We've got the certificate of incorporation. We've got our own by-laws suitable to our business. We now face the loan process and the rental of the property.

We are asking for considerably more than we think we'll need, and even at that, what we have said we need is based on new prices, not reconditioned. There are a lot of things we can get at discount places and bargain outlets, or reconditioned with guarantees on them. We also planned for more equipment than we initially need. And then we added extra to the total we reached so we would have a cushion from which we can repay the loan if it takes a month or two longer to start showing a high enough sales volume to repay.

Banks are all about repayment, and this we clearly understand. They want to know how soon we can start giving them their money back, and how much we can give back and how soon we plan to have them repaid. They want pro-forma analysis and cash flow analysis, and profit margins ad all sorts of things.

Banks are not altruists.

We expect to be able to start repayment of the loan at the end of the first month of business. It'll be tight, but we can do it. Each month should get progressively easier.

The good news is, we've pared our menu down to a manageable variance, and by doing so have reduced the number of employees we will initially need.

I, of course, am going to be slave labor at first because I have a paying job, and can only help out after my normal work hours. I have volunteered to fill in as needed both for the baking and for the customer service up front, but only if it doesn't conflict with my paying job.

It's that job that's going to pay for housing and utilities and other such essentials of living, so Manager can get by without a paycheck if she needs that money to cover business expenses instead.