Always Growing Pt. 4

If you aren’t growing, you are dying…  That’s a life principle that we have learned to apply to every aspect of our lives including business.  We were slowly working to expand the Starbucks.  We were now in both hospitals, and we were beginning to find our groove.  Adam and I noticed that God had strategically made each of us strong where the other was weak.  I began to do the hiring and the scheduling for the Starbucks, because let’s just say Adam isn’t detailed enough for all of that!  LOL!  Longview Regional also asked us to put a hospital gift store along with our coffee shop in their hospital.  I began to do all of the ordering for the gift store as well, and Adam is your typical visionary.  He began to notice another need in our city.  We were getting lots of requests to cater breakfasts from our coffee shops.  Then the requests grew.  We do not like to ever turn customers down, so now began the quest to start another sector of business that we had never done.

 Adam learned this as he went also.  He was familiar with the restaurant business, but not catering.  We had many original recipes from our college days that he began to introduce.  People LOVED them.  The catering organically grew and was actually growing so quickly that we had trouble keeping up.  We needed a commercial kitchen.  We were renting a kitchen and carrying everything back and forth.  I say “we”, but honestly this is where I became emotional support. :) I absolutely despise the food business.  Our joke about my perspective on cooking is “The kitchen is for resale value only.”  This being said, we always planned to build this catering business up to sell it.  And that is exactly what we did.

Again, just like the coffee shops, it was SO MUCH WORK!  My parents actually moved from Illinois to Longview to allow my dad to work in the catering company to help grow it and to be closer to us.  My mom would babysit our kids on weekends to allow me to go help at the weekend events.  Some weekends, Adam would literally work all weekend (with only a few hours of sleep).  We even would enlist friends to help at some of the events on the weekends.  Keep in mind, we still had the coffee shops to run as well.  We also had 2 young children that I was homeschooling at the time.  This was when life began to get a little more difficult for me, and I began my own personal quest in which God was ever so present and real to me throughout all of it.  That is a whole other story in itself, so I digress.

Finally, the catering had grown to a point that we felt we had done all we could at the time we were in our lives.  We were also working on launching another business in food distribution to grocery stores with some of our popular recipes from the catering.  We just didn’t have enough time in the day for everything.  God brought just the right person to buy the catering part of the business, and He helped orchestrate all of the details.

However, back to the life principle of “If you aren’t growing, you are dying.”  God had more in store for us after the sale of Perfect Catering, and it involved self-storage.  What?!?!  No, we are not crazy.  It may seem like it, but we just follow where God leads.  And there is never a dull or boring moment in the story of our lives…