A Perfectly Good Accounting Practice
I sold a perfectly good accounting practice so I could open a restaurant, which is one of those decisions that acquires a somewhat different complexion when you reach eighty-four and have enough time to examine it.
The accounting business was working. Celeste and I had built practices, learned how to attract clients, developed systems, hired people, made mistakes, corrected some of them, and reached the generally desirable business condition in which people were willing to give us money for something we knew how to do. Celeste liked the stability. I didn’t particularly like the business.
Actually, I hated much of it. I didn’t especially like the work, didn’t have much affection for many of my peers, and discovered that accounting clients weren’t always delighted to see you. Unless I had gotten somebody out of tax trouble, my appearance tended to remind them that taxes existed and that I was somehow involved in the unpleasantness.
Celeste and I were also very different kinds of workers. When I first asked her to help me, she wanted me to teach her accounting as steps one, two and three. I wanted to teach her the rules and procedures so she could figure out steps one, two and three for herself. We had some fairly enthusiastic disagreements over that distinction, but eventually she learned the accounting model and the procedures behind it. Then her extraordinary attention to detail took over.
I don’t think she has ever completely understood how important that was. Without her, my accounting practices might have survived until the first quarterly returns were due. After that, God would have had to intervene.
Celeste made the operation work while I wandered around selling, thinking about expansion, developing educational ideas and wondering whether the accounting operation could become a franchise. Even while I was running an accounting business, apparently I wasn’t satisfied just running an accounting business. I kept asking what else I could make out of it.
Gnarly Red’s Seemed Like a Good Idea
Then the restaurant business started looking attractive again. I had been in restaurants before, and apparently enough time had passed for the scars to heal and common sense to fade. Celeste and I sold the accounting practices and decided to have another go at it.
We called the new venture Gnarly Red’s, a fast-food concept built around jerk chicken and other Caribbean-style food. We opened near Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, which seemed like a pretty sensible place to put a restaurant. There were tens of thousands of Marines nearby, Marines eat, and we had food. This was approximately the level of sophisticated market analysis upon which my next fortune was based.
Then Celeste noticed something rather important. About 40,000 of our prospective customers were sitting in the backs of trucks headed toward the port at Wilmington. They were being deployed to Bosnia. You can calculate food cost to three decimal places if it pleases you, but it doesn’t help much when 40,000 customers leave the country.
The local economy got clobbered. Established businesses suffered, and Gnarly Red’s had the additional disadvantage of being brand new, with no established customer base to fall back on. We failed almost immediately.
A sensible person might have taken this as information. We took the equipment and concept to Wilmington.
There we found a drive-through location and negotiated one of the best restaurant leases I had ever had, a pure percentage lease with no guaranteed minimum rent. I’d had that arrangement work for me years before in Texas, and it removed one of the nastiest fixed expenses from a restaurant. Better yet, the food worked. People drove across Wilmington to buy our jerk chicken by the bucket, and pharmaceutical representatives came in for lunches they could carry to doctors’ offices.
Unfortunately, the location was terrible, which introduces another useful restaurant principle: customers have to be able to find the damned restaurant. Our capital was limited, and eventually Gnarly Red’s reached the end of the road for the second time.
What If I Had Stayed Put?
That left me with a fairly uncomplicated accounting of the adventure. I had owned a business that worked, sold it, gone into a business that failed, and then moved the failed business so it could fail again.
From this end of my life, the obvious question is: What if I hadn’t sold the accounting practice?
We knew that business. We had learned how to build practices. I was already interested in systems, selling, education, expansion and ways of reproducing what worked. Perhaps we could have expanded it. Perhaps we could have franchised it. Perhaps it could have become considerably larger than anything we actually built, and perhaps I could have made a lot more money.
Of course, there is another possibility. I might have hated every damned minute of it, because even while I was in accounting I was trying to turn accounting into something other than sitting there doing accounting. I don’t know whether I could have remained satisfied with the stable business Celeste quite reasonably valued.
Then George Walked In
Then something happened inside the wreckage of Gnarly Red’s that I couldn’t possibly have included in the business plan. A Russian immigrant named George Paziuk liked our chicken. George had built Disc Brake Continental into a major remanufacturer of automotive brake products, became a regular customer, and when he came in we talked. At first there was chicken between us. Eventually there were businesses, systems and ideas.
George became more valuable to my education than Gnarly Red’s ever became to my bank account. Eventually he learned that I was an Enrolled Agent and had owned accounting practices. His longtime accountant was preparing to retire, so George asked whether I would be interested in taking over his accounting.
That produced a rather peculiar circle. I had sold the accounting business to get back into restaurants, the restaurant failed, and a customer from the failed restaurant brought me back into accounting.
Well, I’ll be damned.
You Don’t Get to Remove Just One Piece
That is where my original What If begins causing trouble. If I ask what would have happened had I kept the accounting practice, I naturally start imagining the things that might have gone better. That’s how these questions tend to work. We stand in the present, identify something in the past that looks suspiciously like a mistake, remove it, and then construct a nicer life in the empty space.
Don’t marry that person. Take the other job. Buy that property. Don’t sell that stock. Stay in accounting. Everything afterward improves because we have quietly given ourselves control of all the other variables.
Except we don’t get to remove only one piece.
If I don’t sell the accounting practice, I don’t open Gnarly Red’s. If I don’t open Gnarly Red’s, perhaps George Paziuk never walks through my door. If George doesn’t walk through my door, I don’t know what else disappears with him.
I am not trying to turn two failed restaurants into secret successes. They failed. Money disappeared, and I would have preferred that it travel in the other direction. Nor am I suggesting that every bad decision contains a marvelous hidden gift placed there by the universe. That sounds suspiciously like something printed over a sunset and sold in a frame.
I’m wondering about something smaller and much more troublesome: How much of your life can you change without changing the rest of it?
You probably have a decision you still prosecute occasionally, something you are reasonably certain you got wrong. If you had only done this instead of that, you tell yourself, everything afterward would have been better. Maybe you’re right, but before you acquit the imaginary life and convict the one you actually lived, try removing everything that happened because of the mistake. Remove the people you met, the places you went, the things you learned and the next decision you made because the first one went wrong. Keep pulling on that thread and see how much of your present life comes loose with it.
So, Was It a Mistake?
I sold a successful accounting practice to pursue Gnarly Red’s. Was that a mistake? Financially, I can make a pretty good case for the prosecution. But after all these years, I still can’t tell you what would have happened had I stayed where I was, because the man who would have lived that alternative life would still have been me, and I was already trying to turn a perfectly respectable accounting practice into something else.
So I’ll leave you with the question that has now replaced the one I started with. Pick one mistake from your own life and erase it completely—not just the bad consequence, but every encounter that followed because it happened.
How much of the life you have now are you willing to erase with it?