I’m leaning toward selling Alive Juice Bar sometime in late 2015, assuming I can find a buyer — ideally an employee — I trust.  The business should be running smoothly by then, with all equipment in place, bookkeeping in order, employees trained, and the brand reputable and established. If shouldn’t be too difficult to operate. To ensure continuity of service and values, I’ll do my best to sell to an employee, I’ll be prepared to provide financing. I won’t sell to anyone without retail experience in restaurant setting. I’m not going to let someone fuck it up.

I think by 2015, Alive Juice Bar will do better under the direction of someone with a different personality and temperament from mine.  I’m better suited to starting than running a business.  I’m rough, I have little patience with refinement, and established businesses should always be refining practices and products.  I’m hoping to find someone with a softer presence, someone with a gentler touch.  I tend to produce aggressive, tenacious, uninhibited and controlling employees, which is what we need when we’re trying to establish ourselves. There soon won’t be a need for this kind of style. We should become more subtle, gentler.

I’ll probably move on and open a small bistro (really want a space with high ceilings) and concentrate on dinner service.  Ideally, the bistro would operate as a juice bar for breakfast and lunch. That service, if it happens, would be outsourced to someone — ideally someone who has worked with me for at least a year.  Bistro offerings will be simple and modest, mostly peasant food from around the world, experienced in a blue collar intellectual setting.  Not sure if I’m willing to take investor money to start such a business.  We have two years to think about it.

Those interested in purchasing Alive Juice Bar or operating a business (juice bar) within a business (bistro) should keep in mind that while I prefer to sell to someone with a different personality from mine — someone more refined and subtle — the person I sell to should have similar values to mine. To those who are interested: do your research and then we’ll talk.