Making appointments, making choices

For Rebecca and I, that's what being bookstore proprietors (or partners or LLC managers or principals or what have you) is all about these days.

Appointments with lawyers. Appointments with bankers. Appointments with potential investors. Appointments with building owners or development corporations or real estate agents.

And then the choices. Choosing whether this space is worth pursuing or too far off the beaten path. Choosing the language of a promissory note that will give the best benefits to both our community lenders and the business. Choosing the many, many details of the LLC operating agreement (from what we'll use for the address, to how we'll split equity, to who gets our shares if we die, to what kinds of decisions will be made individually or jointly, and on and on).

And before all that, choosing a name.

Those of you who know me know that I've struggled with choosing a bookstore name since I first conceived of the venture. I have lists of dozens, maybe hundreds of potential names and parts of names, and I've fallen in love with one or the other at various times. But I wasn't sure enough to put any of them on legal stationary -- I thought maybe I needed to wait until I saw the space the bookstore would be in, or some other moment of clarity.

When Rebecca and I started talking about partnership, I passed along my lists of names, but she wasn't in love with any of them either. We tossed around some ideas for coming up with a name: something based on a book we both love, or some combination of our names; something alluding to the neighborhood, or something more universal. Nothing quite clicked.

Then, rather unexpectedly as it often does, a name presented itself. A friend might have mentioned it, then we heard the word again, then we started talking about why it might work.

Then it was time to put down a name for the LLC. And we realized we had already chosen.

No, I'm not gonna tell you what it is just yet. We're saving that fun announcement for our first big email blast (sign up for the mailing list at the top right if you don't want to miss it!) Rebecca and I have joked that finding out we had the bookstore name is kind of like finding out that you're going to have a baby: you want to wait to be sure before you make it public.

Like all of our other choices, choosing a name seemed daunting until it came down to it. I think it arose organically from our partnership, and from our vision for the store -- as have all our decisions about corporate structure, spaces, finances. It takes some concentration to sit down and make the choice, but the tools and the seeds are there in our shared philosophy of the kind of bookstore we want to create.

Now we've just got to sit down in those appointments and put our choices on paper.