Here I am on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the office. But at least it IS an office and it's my new office. I've been working for the past 2 months on setting up a new business, and well it's set up. This must be the fastest european business ever set up. In 6 weeks we incorporated, found office space, installed the network, phones, painted, carpeted, bought furniture. We then hired seven people, pulled together benefits, salaries/payroll, autos, insurance. Then we found customers, put in place financials, accounting and billing. We billed our first customers, and found that we were pretty close to being profitable. We found a few more customers. We put together a website, found recruiters and opened another 6 jobs. We just made offers to 5 people, 3 of whom accepted. We have about 7 more very qualified candidates. I tell you the market here for people is said to be difficult. But we have excellent prospects... it's funny because there seems to be no shortage of people for us.Anyway, there are tons of more things that we did do that I didn't mention here, but the short comments are that we have an excellent team and a superb outlook. We're all very excited. Now for some pictures. My digital camera is nearly dead so I was actually quite surprised to even get these. Time to buy a new one.
Here are some pictures of our offices, before and after:
You can't really see it but we've chosen an unusual color of yellow for the office interior, which at first in the words of our financial controller seemed 'shocking'. It actually has a very nice feel and adds to a very cheerful and unusual feeling in our offices. Especially with the furniture, it seems quite fine.
Here is Faris and Fabio (my two partners) with one of our customers in the UK called iLangua:
Nice view of our kitchen (before renovation):
Here's an EARLY picture of Faris at our first offices, which were at our home in De Meern:
Another De Meern picture, doing some early business planning on a Saturday night. That's Fabio and Faris, plus an early potential employee Chris, who declined to join:
More pictures of our new offices and how we're settling in to come. But I must say it has been quite a lot of fun so far!
I have taken a couple weekends of holiday. First I should say that I sent my Porsche back to the US recently, which was sad. On the way to drop off the car in Stuttgart, however, I raced a Ferrari. I had always wanted to do it, and this was my chance... needless to say the Porsche put the Ferrari to shame. Here is a last photo of the baby, plus if you are interested in purchasing the car, you can go here.
So here are some pictures of my visit to Monaco. First are Uncle Jerry and Aunt Barb. They rented a house in La Turbie, just above Monaco, for 3 months. It was quite a house:
Here's a view from the house balcony. It was quite a drive getting up there from Monaco:
Here's a pic of my aunt and uncle with me in Monaco:
And of course, here's a pic of Vanessa in front of the casino:
