Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Next Party - April 3rd!!

Well, we're doing it again! I think we'll just keep throwing parties until we get our spot.

I have also been pondering the idea of doing a party on our own; get a special event liquor license and sell beer ourselves. That way it's really like our store. But insuring a night like that would be expensive. So we'll see. I'm just trying to think of things that will give us more experience.



Saturday, March 14, 2009

4th times a charm?

On Monday, we're going to visit our fourth real estate since this whole thing started. We gave up on a "traditional" real estate agents months ago, but this one kind of fell in our laps and he wants to help. He's actually Wayne's real estate agent (remember the recording studio/venue guy??). He offered to help us out and Wayne's taking the summer off from looking for a location so I decided to take him up on his offer. Meeting with a regular real estate agent is exactly where we started ... only this time we're a lot more knowledgeable.

Let's recap what we've learned:

To build out a space from an empty shell is hella expensive... like $350,000 (no, thanks)

Looking over a business' books overrules anything an owner or agent may tell you (the truth is in the numbers)

"Blue sky" = bullshit (ie a business is selling for $100,000 but only has $20,000 in assets... where'd you come up with the other $80,000?)

These are the big lessons that we're happy to have survived and learned from. We also know we're meant to be on the East Side... which already gives us a leg up from when we started.

Nick (the new realtor) wants us to make a list of everything we are looking for and he's going to send an email out to all his real estate buddies to see if we can't come up with a match. You never know if a cafe is falling behind in their rent payments or something and we may be able to swoop in. At this point we're taking any lead we can get.

Our dream location could be days away... 'just putting it out there'

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Gearing up for the next one

The past two weeks have felt like a recovery period of sorts for Justin and I. We put so much energy into our first party that we needed a break! But now it's three weeks out from our next party and we're gearing back up again. One of Damien's (our resident DJ) friends from Vegas is hooking us up with the flyer and we're looking forward to seeing it. We've been toying with the idea of bringing in another record dealer and adding another dj to extend our reach. The goal is to reach more vinyl enthusiasts and collectors and just to let people know what we're here to do.

We're also riding the economy wave and patiently awaiting our location :) Our old real estate agent, Andre, just bought into the Red Room on 82nd (just below Freemont in NE). We visited him at his new bar last week and it was great to reconnect. We've met some amazing people on this journey and we're happy to see he's still on our team. He recognizes that we are pretty particular about what we want and we heard some great words of encouragement that night... not that we need that much outside encouragement. We do pretty well keeping the positivity ourselves :)