On Negotiations...

I was pretty excited when I got out of my first negotiation call with the guys from The Chippery. It seemed things had gone well; I got them to agree to giving me pretty much all of Florida in exchange for a healthy development schedule and zero cash. We agreed that I would rework their original supplier agreement and that we would get back together to finish up the deal. This was on March 11th!

After submitting the revised agreement to the Chippery guys, it seemed that we weren't all on the same page during our first call. All sorts of issues came up and hesitations delayed us quite a bit. We went through four rounds of revisions. Each time, I would ask during the end of the call if we had an agreement or not. The answer was always yes, but when they received the updated drafts, things would change again. At the same time, we found that the corporations that they had formed in the states were not in good standing. The Nevada company was in default for failure to file an officer's report (relatively simple process) and the Delaware company was void altogether for failure to file capital tax forms for the last two years. These forms were also relatively simple and inexpensive to do. I ended up getting very frustrated and informed them that if they didn't get things settled by yesterday (I gave them a week), I was going to have to walk away.

Luckily, when I called today, Geoff recognized that the week off helped him realize the amount of risk that I was willing to bear to get their brand up and running in Florida. He agreed to fly down to meet me in person during the next week and iron out the remaining details.

My big lesson has been not to assume things are settled until the ink is dry. Needless to say, the ink isn't even on the paper yet, so I'm still in limbo in terms of the license.