I'm a bit ocd, so it's taken me a month to read the entire diary before making a comment....
Congrats is the best I can do for now. WP Eso & Petra!
Hi Phil (I assume this is you?) and Thanks very much.
Happy New Year to all, I hope it brings great health and happiness to all Blonde Folk, friends and family with mine being a quiet one with the kids asleep and Petra lasting till 11.15 leaving just me to see the London fireworks and then keep up my late Nan's tradition of opening the back door to let the past year out and then going to the front door and let the New Year in.
The last month or so has been pretty manic all around with me really working hard to put some effort into finishing this business plan and also looking at different locations to launch in 2016.
I wont go into too much detail at the moment of what I hope to be launching in a few months time as all will become apparent over the next few weeks but I may need a favour with a few FB likes etc once we do get up and running but it is pretty exciting times ahead and I will either knock in a years salary (or in Arbboy terms 6months property price growth
) or will have a scaleable business that can be replicated in other affluent towns that we will be launching our first one in.
The thing I have probably enjoyed most about this is that even though you are starting with just one venue at the start as we need to prove the concept, I have had to think about "Brand" from day one so have already instructed a branding and marketing company who I am working with on name,logo positioning etc as its not just like naming it "Eso Estates" (its not an estate agent btw)
Hopefully in the first 2 weeks of this year I will have a name and then can crack on and I should be seeing a premises in Chelmsford in the next week that I hope is the right size for what I want to do as it's the perfect location in terms of demographic, location to get this off the ground even though it's pretty scary with leases coming in at £50-65k per annum for 1500-2000sq ft and then rates on top of that!
This does need to be right and I have a certain amount of DD to complete before committing any real funds to this and am not worried about walking away if I dont get the right vibe over the next few weeks but so far it all looks good.
What is does mean though is that we will be putting back our move to Malta to August 2017 now as combined with an Easter launch and the baby being due in May it will put too much pressure on us to get it done this August and Petra would like to have a year where she knows where everything is in medical terms etc so I can just concentrate on this business and crack on!
With Max and Ivy we chose not to find out the sex and had home births with Max being born in our bedroom and Ivy in the Lounge and if all goes well we will have a home birth again this time however Petra being the organised one out of us wanted to find out the sex so she can keep Max or Ivy's newborn clothes prior to leaving here in 18 months and we have already started the de-cluttering so on Friday we headed for our 20+ week scan and found out
Click to see full-size image. |
It's a BOY!!! Here is his head shot where you can see the nose and mouth etc and it is pretty incredible what they show you even though the baby is literally 12cm at this stage.
So now we have a few months of
argueing agreeing on a name and we always wanted Rory which was name 1 on the list when Max was born but he just looked more like a Maxwell (name 2) than a Rory and unfortunately he has a bit of difficulty with his "R"s at the moment so we are in two minds.
In bed this morning the conversation went something like this
Petra - What about Vince or Vincent
Me - No way
Petra - Why not? You like Vinny
Me - I can just see it now, all the jokes about naming him after his Dad blah blah blah!
Anyway thanks to everyone who posted in here or read in the past year and hopefully I will post some updates over the next few months and a big thanks to anyone who was confident/crazy enough to buy a piece in me in the events I played last year which just happened to be my best year in terms of cashes with 15 cashes from 38 events for about £32k when you include the value of the WPT seats won so thanks for letting me play some of the events that I would never have been able to without you guys.
HNY everyone may all your dreams and wishes come true!