Month: April 2025

Over the past week and change, I’ve had two dinners with friends. They’ve been quite a salve during a time when I’ve needed it. The meals themselves were very different. One was at my apartment. I cooked venison, roasted cauliflower, and used my fancy new rice cooker. Since I added sour cherries to the rice, that was the hit of the evening. It was a calm meal with relaxed conversation. The other was at a new small plates restaurant aiming for a Miami feel—art deco décor, Latin food, and tropical plants. Everything was close but not quite there. They have, however, definitely nailed the way-too-loud music element that is quintessential Miami.

This morning, too, I had breakfast at Chick-fil-A with most of the group from my men’s bible study where I had a regular chicken biscuit. Even though the sessions have concluded for the spring semester, it was nice to get together with those guys as that has been one of the few consistent places where I’ve been around men who are further along the journey of life than I am. Since I own my own business and we work from our apartments, I don’t get that from work as might have happened in an alternate universe.

None of these three meals was really about the food. They were about the conversation, the jokes, and the what-did-you-just-say moments. These are the sorts of things I haven’t done enough, the sort of things I’ll need to do even more as spring turns to summer and I have more free evenings. One of the reasons I chose Durham when I came back to the Triangle was because it has better and more varied restaurants than Raleigh. I even have a spreadsheet of places that I update occasionally and share with people who want local inspiration. Maybe I’ll finally start filling in more of the rows in the notes column of that spreadsheet.

Spring is always a time of change. I felt this in many positive ways during a nice long hike on Saturday through a mix of hardwoods, loblolly pines, and prairie meadows at a nearby nature reserve that I hadn’t visited before. It was a lovely walk, the weather was great, and there weren’t many people around. My allergies even held off until the very end.

There seem to be even more transitions than I expected this spring. I knew curling was wrapping up (Monday after I played one of my best games of the season), that my morning bible study was ending, and that there would be a lot of work travel that has really only just started, but there is more. Yesterday, the SBA announced new rules governing the 7(a) program that rein in some of the flexibility that was introduced into the system last year. We’re still processing the changes, but I don’t expect the net result to be positive. I could say the same about a number of other things. These collective changes make our 2025 growth initiatives even more important and those are focused on adding different types of customers, a planned transition but on an accelerated timeline.

I’m also coming towards the end of my current lease, which is always a time that causes a little pause. Following my historical pattern, now is about the time to move somewhere else. That isn’t necessarily a pattern I intend to perpetuate, but I can’t help thinking about possibilities in ways that I wasn’t even in March. I can’t be the only one who has these sorts of thoughts every couple years.

There were lots of meetings and plenty of work at the back end of last week as we only returned from Las Vegas late on Wednesday night. It is part of the process and we’ve made things better by clustering meetings, but meeting days can turn into exhausting days quickly. This is especially true when my sleep is disjointed as a result of being between time zones.

When the normal workweek finally ended, I walked to and ate dinner at my favorite Thai spot. At this point, the waitresses definitely recognize me. I had my usual pad see ew with chicken.  Then I had mango sticky rice for dessert as a nod to the passage of time. Mango sticky rice is one of my more recent culinary discoveries, but boy oh boy is it good. I’ve even purchased sticky rice at an Asian grocery store so that I can make it at home though I cheat and buy precut mango when I do so.

After dinner, I went to a gathering at one of the many downtown taprooms that I can walk to but hardly ever visit. It was organized by my church small group as an extracurricular group activity. I wasn’t planning to attend as birthdays are something I stopped looking forward to several years ago. But I also received a text message that people from my men’s bible study were also going and I decided the social costs of no showing two groups were more than I wanted to pay. I arrived late as the restaurant was busier than I’d expected, but I’m glad I did. It was a great chance to get out of my own head and a welcome reminder that I do have a little bit of community here.

I don’t gamble in casinos. That is a decision I made several years ago and so don’t need to revisit when I walk through the casinos when I’m in Las Vegas for work, a situation that has arisen at least once per year for a few years now. It saves mental energy not to have to think about it, not that I’m attracted by the slot machines anyway with all their light and motion and noise.

I am gambling in Las Vegas this week, though. We have a limited budget of time, energy, and money for business growth. When we made our plans for the first half of 2025, DealMax was an event we circled. It marks a different path, an attempt to press more into a different client avatar and to diversify our client origination mix. That is largely the theme of the events we’ve chosen for this season as we probe different ways to evolve the business. This builds on the exploration of 2024 and hopefully will benefit from the lessons learned through those efforts.

Some of our prior initiatives have been grand slams. More have been strikeouts, with a smattering of singles and doubles and one or two I might describe as balks. With each we search for the potential of leverage or nonlinear success, the opportunity for one talk, program, or sale to result in multiple transactions or clients. This event brings together private equity funds and investment bankers in a manner that might be unreplicated elsewhere. A single success here could mean multiple transactions for us, so we made the trip.

We may not know if this gamble will pay off for six months or longer. But our growth budget is about making bets and we liked the potential asymmetry of this one. Will we approach things differently if we come back next year? Sure, but overall we’ve accomplished what we came to accomplish. Now we will win the follow up and open some of the metaphorical doors that we’ve cracked ajar.

In the last six months, my brother has moved back to Kentucky from south Florida and a new nonstop service has launched from Raleigh/Durham to Louisville. It is one of the new air carriers and so only offers a couple of flights per week, but it allows for a Friday to Monday stay. This helped create momentum for a short family bourbon trail trip. Illness again affected the plans as a few members of the family had to stay home. That wasn’t good, but everyone else decided to proceed with the trip given that tickets had been purchased and reservations made. It did lead to a few tweaks though, as I suspect we would not have gone to a brewery on Friday for dinner had everyone been there.

Saturday was the big tour day as we visited two of the major distilleries in the central part of the state. All distilleries have similarities, but these two showed different sides of the industry as Woodford Reserve is a much smaller facility than Buffalo Trace. Since it was the weekend, neither was actively bottling and as many of the warehouses aren’t on site with the distilleries, we didn’t get the full scale of how large the operations really are during either visit. I’d toured both facilities before, but the smell of the angels’ share is always pleasant in short bursts. The tastings aren’t bad either. I prefer the standards more than the variations that were on offer, but that isn’t likely a surprise. We then drove back into Louisville for dinner and a calm evening, followed by a lazy Sunday with brunch and a pleasant walk on a pedestrian bridge over the Ohio River (and a fast-moving squall line storm that took out the power for a while during the night while I was working to finalize a transaction).

On the descent during my return flight, we came down into a yellow-green fog as it is the time of year when the trees release all of their pollen in central North Carolina. Carwash owners rejoice. I haven’t been outside enough for any allergies to flare up, but it will happen at some point during the spring. It always does.