The roller-coaster

To say I've been on an emotional roller-coaster the past week would probably be a gross understatement. We've had uber high highs of our Grand Opening, amazing 1/2 Price Sandwich Night on Monday, a Banana Republic Employee goodbye party on Friday that rocked the house all night long and slow and steady growth of our business as we meet new people and form new relationships with customers.

But who would have guessed that the re-arranging and "feng shuiing" of our furniture would have turned me in to an emotional basket case. But it did! I'm talking like can't sleep, going to lose it at any minute.

I guess I should probably start by explaining how the baby we've created has taken on a life of its own. As my neighbor, Jen, put it we birthed a child that is now a unruly teenager that wants to do whatever it wants. I say that because our intention in creating it was to be a record store, cafe & bar that opens early and closes around 11PM.

I know that some people I tell this to look at me like I'm insane and point out that we have music and beer, so of course people are going to see you as a bar and want to come late at night. Maybe we were naive, but that's what we thought and this is our first business. So anyways, what has happened is that now we're a record store bar that opens at 4PM and closes late. The whole "cafe/coffeehouse" part has gone out the window - except for the fact that we have really good food and sandwiches.

Now, I love the bar business and being a bartender. I feel bad for my partner, Justin, who is still pulling double duty, working his old job during the days and working late in to the night at the bar. He hasn't had a day off in over a month. So this adds to the stress a little.

So for a control freak like me, letting our business figure out its own place in the world has been an exercise in patience (or lack there of) as evidence in the rash decision to re-arrange the furniture to fit this new "bar bar" model. Well, what seemed like a good decision at the time put me in a tail spin of epic proportions.

You see, I've spent the past 2 years drawing out the floor plan for our store hundreds of times. I firmly believe that it's that persistence of vision that got us the store in the first place. The physical end result is exactly like I've been drawing for two years. So as soon as we started changing the physical layout it threw me uber hard and I felt like I was losing my vision. I had nothing to grab on to and it turned me into an emotional wreck.

So yesterday, after a night of tossing and turning, I went in and put all the furniture back the way we originally intended, with the exception of the listening stations, which was the reason why we moved all the furniture in the first place. So we have a happy medium. We fixed our crowded record area but also kept the couch area in tact. And last night I slept like a baby :)