Back To What I Love Best

To get into China, I need a visa.

To get a Chinese Visa, I need a round-trip airplane ticket. 

Do I want to buy a ticket from the U.S. to China hoping to get the visa?

We are going to meet Grandchildren 2.2 and 2.3 in Taiwan for a make up trip with them that was cut down by the pandemic. What if we purchase a round-trip refundable from Taipei to Shanghai? Will that fulfill the requirement?

But when we are done with China, we are on to Thailand. Is Taipei the best place to do that? Once we have our visa for China, we can change our plans without it affecting our visa status. I think.

And what do we want in Thailand? A pool? A view? Access to the beach?

We're going to Ghana to take Wife there for the first time as our next stop. Do we do this in stages to ease the wear and tear from a long flight? 

How do I organize Wife in Ghana. So many people want to meet her. But she wants a vacation.

Travel planning.

BLISS.

Maybe Transition Is Not An Event But A Constant State?

I wrote last February about being in a weirdly consistent state of joy. As I have contemplated the latest bizarre twist in my post working full-time life, I have asked myself, "How many transitions can a person have?" Shouldn't one or two be about right?

Evidently not. The latest shift of Wife and I deciding finally to not relocate out of the country has provoked other changes. It has had me getting a bit more focused on the stub of my consulting practice. Not that I'm going back to working full-time (God Forbid!) but I do need to feed that lie-flat business class seat habit and fund the remodel. For crying out loud, I am even giving a talk/workshop in a couple of weeks to a major family business succession forum (It's on Applying Human Centered Design to Business Exit/Succession Planning. Thanks for asking.). I haven't given public presentation in over a decade!

And, Theodora is continuing to grow and develop. I made a decision to start another major fund raise to support its growth (despite having said just 4-months ago I would do nothing of the sort). Add to this, two major trips planned for this year and it seems like I've transitioned back to where I was in 2015-17. 

After all this change, one would be foolish to make even the slightest statement that one has 'finally' transitioned. In fact, as the title of this post posits, maybe there isn't 'A' transition at all? Maybe there is only a constant state of transitioning?

Wine Tsunami

 With the decision to stay where we are, I had a rather horrible realization a number of months ago. My wine inventory had dropped to distress levels! 😵‍💫 (Of course, everything is relative. My 'distress level' is very likely most people's over inventoried level!) I had been consciously working my inventory down over a couple of year period on the idea that we'd be moving out of country. But with that off the table, I realized I could go back to my rather expansive wine purchasing addiction levels. So that's what I did.

I started acting on the various wine offers that fit my profiles as good deals. As a reminder, I buy virtually all my wine from two online retailers who send tens of offers to me daily. I have very specific types of wines I like. When I see an offer that meets my criteria, and I have space to put it, I buy. 

However, the location I buy from most, doesn't like to ship the wine if it is too hot. So they will hold on to it unless you are willing to pay for faster shipping or take the risk of the wine getting damaged by heat. I opted to wait. Except I started to forget how much I ordered. When I made another purchase a couple of weeks ago it came back to my consciousness. It was cool enough now so I authorized the wine to be shipped. 

Thus last week three cases of wine, 36 bottles, showed up. Good thing I didn't keep buying, I only have room now for another case. I bought some very interesting wines. They need to rest about a week after shipping so this weekend I can start sampling them.

FREEDOM

 BEHOLD

I am again travel enabled. 

My renewed passport was received today after a miracle 5 weeks and 4 days despite being warned it would take 7 to 9 weeks. I have dodged the bullet of my passport renewal trapped due to the pending government shutdown. 

Now it is on to the next steps of getting a new Ghana visa and a visa for a visit to China next year. 

As I joked to a friend, I can't believe I am not already on a plane out of the country.

 

More Slow Grilling - Boneless Leg of Lamb

I am fully in the cooking battle lust these days. That is leading me to trying all kinds of different things. On Friday, I had some leftover Great Northern Beans and was inspired to make some Middle East flavor inspired patties. The idea was to have something crisp like falafel. Sadly, I didn't get the binding right and ended up with the patties melting. Then when I turned up the heat to hopefully crisp them, they burnt. So I ended up with bean pudding with crispy burnt bits. Wife was game and ate them all though. She is reluctant to complain about my failures as I might stop cooking all the meals and her having to cook. And that would be A DISASTER! (for her).   

On to more cheerful cooking, my slow grilling of a boneless leg of lamb. I haven't done this in ages and I wanted to try it with my new passion, the yogurt based marinade. 

The Marinade - I decided to go with the SE Asian flavor version with Fish Sauce, Miso, Curry Paste, Spicy Crab Paste, and Soy Sauce.

Then I use good Bulgarian Style Yogurt

That's right Bulgarian, not Greek. It is much looser and tangier, better for marinading.

You slightly saute the SE Asian flavorings. Let them cool and add the yogurt

And PLEASE Stop asking me for the amounts of things. I don't measure. I'm a Grandparent. It's traditional. Grandparents don't measure. We just add things by eye or feel. Because we know how much is enough. What? You want to know how much is ENOUGH? Easy, if it didn't turn out good, it wasn't enough or was too much.

Now we prepare our lamb - One boneless leg piece

You put a number of cuts along the width. This allows the whole to spread out. This will greatly reduce the cooking time and will allow the marinade to penetrate deeper into the meat.

Our meat in marinade ready to rest overnight in the fridge.

I used the same indirect grilling technique I used with the chicken a few weeks ago.

My accompaniment was a cabbage slaw with a dressing of mayonnaise, yogurt and a lot of fresh tarragon.

The finished product

In truth, it was a tad overcooked. The cutting technique really reduces the time it needs. But the flavor was crazy good.

But What If (Part 2)...

 So let's say that J is right. Let's say we suddenly are getting all kinds of leads, are closing them, and holding on to the clients we close. We would go pretty darn quick from having our small staff of 8 being underutilized to their being used to the max. We could double the clients and revenue we're doing now with our existing resources and we'd be more than breakeven, but if we continue growing beyond that it will require a bunch of additional resources such as:

• More space...and better space!
  

• More computers

• A more sophisticated recruitment program

• A training staff (when we thought we'd grow incrementally, we assumed our existing people would train. they won't have time to because they will be too busy working. Thank goodness I've already been investing into training programs)

• A more sophisticated onboarding process

• More robust management and quality control systems

 And that's just the business stuff for starters. Then we get into the social impact stuff to aid our women in truly transforming their lives. 

• A housing unit so we get the program starters out of the slums they are living in when they join us

• A transportation capability so our people don't spend 2 to 3 hours commuting each way!

• A lending capability so we can front part of the money our new people need to get an apartment (one has to pay a year's rent in advance to get an apartment)

• A regular programs of trauma counseling because there is not a one of our participants who hasn't gone through significant trauma

• Following through on our promise to create a participant owned business
  

•  Building a succession management team so the project is not dependent on de-I
  

All this implies money...a lot of money. But there is a big difference between where we were a couple of years ago and now. Then we were just a wild idea, a very interesting idea for sure, but just an idea. Now we are building a track record. Feedback that I'm getting from people who have worked in the social impact investing space tell me that there aren't that many projects out there that have even achieved as much as we have. So maybe it is time to go for broke and search for serious money? 

That's what I am thinking. And that's what I am working on. Let the Ecstasy / Terror roller coaster roll on!

But What If...

When I left Ghana a month ago, I wrote how I felt we'd made a breakthrough. I still feel that way. But the ebb and flow of business in any small start-up sometimes has you doubting. I was talking to my fractional CFO today that I alternate between being ecstatic and terrified as we navigate trying to get over the hump (in terms of getting to breakeven and being able to cover all our expenses without donations). I joked there is the couple of minutes between the high (we're going to break through big) and the low (we're going to crash and burn) where you are in perfect balance. I just need to keep my consciousness in that gap!

But that's not why I'm writing this post. It is more a realization that IF we do get to the goal of breaking even, it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY we are going to stop there. Let me explain with a bit of background. 

I've mentioned frequently how this process has been unreal, unlike any business endeavor I've ever experienced. Throughout, volunteers and unlikely donors have shown up exactly when they were needed. This hasn't happened just once or a couple of times. It happens all the time and is continuing. Right after I got back from Ghana another volunteer showed up. This gentleman, let's call him J, was met (as so many have) through a virtual networking group I belong to called Lunchclub. It was a strange call because he was totally focused on Theodora and wanted lots of detail information about how we did things. Turns out he has been using VA's for decades and has a very refined system for using, training, managing, and getting business for them. He proposes to help us. 

This seems a bit too good to be true. I have numerous members of my Ghana group interview him. I check his references. We all agree we have nothing to lose by giving this a try. Fast forward a month later, everything he has told us he was going to teach and show us, has come to pass. We are now starting to work on the key piece...for us the missing link...building a sophisticated lead generation system (not dependent of de-I). I've been watching all the training and I'm thinking, "I think this is the real deal."

Now here is where the terror starts to creep back in. But what if this guy is right. What if we suddenly start generating a LOT of new business. Are we prepared to grow rapidly? The answer would be a big NO.  We'd need a ton of thing put in place. So now I find myself having to balance my thinking between how we manage through our tight cash flow and what do I do if we suddenly have so much business that we must expand rapidly. 

I will continue this discourse in my next post.