On Your Ninth Birthday...
Dear Sweet PJP,
By the time the world reads this, you’ll officially be NINE YEARS OLD. We’ve been at this together for 3,285 days…can you even believe it? And look, if there is anything I’ve learned in this past 3,285 days, it is that entrepreneurship is a TERRIBLY TENUOUS GAME. For the most part, I am just thankful and humbled that we have gotten you to this milestone. (The other part of me is amazed that we actually did it, because we certainly gave ourselves enough opportunities to go terribly wrong.) This year we set a very specific goal for PJP that we considered almost impossible. And when we celebrated that goal three weeks before our scheduled deadline, we took a minute and drank a toast out of glass measuring cups in your honor. I’ll think about that day with a full heart for years to come.
More than anything this year, we’ve really endeavored to learn how to be a two store company. It takes a tremendous amount of work to figure out how to do this in one location, much less two. And the plan has always been for multiple PJPs, hence World Pie Domination. We’re interested in a pie based empire, so with every single thing we do now, we wonder how that fits into the empire business model. There’s not a lot of guidance available on building pie empires, so we are making it up as we go and that sounds a lot like how we started on Buttonwood. Dreams are delicate, whether they are in Year One or Year Nine.
In the weeks leading to our open date in 2014, we listened to The Avett Brothers on repeat while we painted and cleaned PJP Buttonwood. And on this past Saturday, I started really early at PJP Nifong with really loud music since I was alone. When I asked Alexa to play music, she queued up The Avett Brothers “Magpie and the Dandelion” from 2013 completely on her own. Forever I’m tied to that album from those days in 2014 when Jeanne and I were so excited to open, but had no clue what we were doing or how this would all work out. I appreciate the universe brought it back full circle for me early Saturday morning.
In Year Nine, we’ve got some big moves to make to empire status. We are lucky, lucky, lucky people to be here with you through it. Thanks for holding on to us through it all.
