Saturday, August 16, 2008

plotting the future of the family business

It's just another chaotic day. Wow that mall has a lot of issues. I'm only just discovering the extent to which maintenance has been neglected on the air conditioning units. It's also drastically under insured. Right now coverage is about half what it should be. The record keeping is also incredibly poor. It's something I would like to change. We were recently approached with a hand written note, something that supposedly resulted from a lease renewal negotiation that nobody knew about. I don't have a copy of anything. Things seem to be very old school.
If things were entirely up to me, I'd run the company more formally. Heck, I'd go wit three mandates, running more formally, expanding the business holdings and providing actual shareholder return. Right now we've been ignoring all the shareholders and well, it's been running at very modest gains, a lot of it going into repaying the mortgage. If things were entirely up to me, I'd expand first. Probably either get a franchise or a second property. Right now there's been little incentive to repay debts outstanding to shareholders. We're not on any repayment schedule and there hasn't been any interest payments. If we had to pay that at the same rate as the mortgage we'd have never made a profit. Taking more control would come second. I'd offer to exchange some of the outstanding foreign held shares into an interest bearing debt with a repayment schedule. Then if I think the company will support it, I'll try to clear the balance sheet of the zero interest, zero repayment share holder debt. It just doesn't feel right having that and not providing any return.

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