Renewed sensibilities! January 20, 2007
Happy New Year! It is the year of the pig for the Chinese. It is the Year of Gelato for the gelato girls of 303 View Court in Apopka, Florida. Melinda sold her house in November of 2006 meaning that we finally had the means to think about our gelato business. Christmas craziness hit in December in which 16 people, 5 cats, and two dogs slept under our new-to-us roof. We had housewarming parties, birthday parties, holiday events, and cookie creations to keep us too busy to get gelato going. But here we are, two and a half weeks into 2007 and we are officially Catori Arts dba Trio (Gelato & Desserts)! How is it possible? Two words: money and Domenico.
Here’s a quick recap of January 1-20th in the life of Catori Arts, Inc.:
-We called Domenico Piscioneri, the Carpigiani equipment distributor assigned to Central Florida. He set up a meeting for the next day. We met with him and he told us the space right next door to him had just been left vacant by a 90 year old accountant named Gertrude Johnson who has been in that space since 1967 and only left because the department of motor vehicles took away her driver’s license. We also discuss our wholesale ideas, our equipment needs, and many other details of Domenico’s life and how he came to be in Orlando. Three hours later we left his office confident that our business dreams were about to become reality.
-We contacted Melinda’s old friend, Sue Aiken, who is a paralegal in Central Florida. She recommended a CPA, Patrick Burns, (he looks just like the lead singer of Rascal Flatts which makes Melanie and I smile) and an attorney, William Dietz, who talks really loudly and reminds us of a sitcom character but we can’t think of who. They both turn out to be great. They agreed that we should be an S-Corp and we went ahead and filed for our incorporation as Catori Arts, Inc. and, after a couple hours discussion, Melanie burst out with the name Trio which seemed like the perfect name for us because 1. There are three of us…duh 2. It works in English and Italian 3. It is classy sounding, for all our hoity toity clientele, but doesn’t sound too, too snooty 4. We like the musical connotations 5. We can do all sorts of fun marketing of things in threes.
-We contacted Chris Stiles who agreed to work up a logo for us.
-We researched restaurant equipment, decide on what equipment we need, and ordered the pasteurizer and batch freezer from Carpigiani which will arrive in a few weeks!
-We filled out and sent our lease application to Iris Moore at Dr. Phillips and, so far, it seems promising that Domenico will be our next door neighbor at 2316 North Orange Blossom Trail in Orlando. They said they “really, really liked us.” So that is a good sign.
-We are currently researching health department code and zoning laws to make sure we can do what we want to do, where we want to do it, the way we want to do it without getting into trouble.
-We met with a Venezuelan, salsa-dancing electrician who is going to put in phase 3 electric into our space, among lots of other handy-man type services he’s going to do for us.
-We figured out a starting set of offerings (flavors for cream-based, fruit and cream-based, and fruit only gelati and sorbetti as well as desserts) and we will start to try them out with Domenico next Thursday.
Luciano, our Gelato University instructor will be coming to see us in our space (hopefully!) at the end of February and we can’t wait to be in our freshly painted, clean, gelato-filled space by then. It has been such a long time in the making that it hardly seems real that we are actually going to need to get to actual work soon. I can’t wait!
We’ll update as we go so we can look back on this in 20 years and think…remember when we didn’t know how to start a business and now we do?