Marty called me this afternoon to tell me that Rob and the gentlemen we met with Thursday night would like to present an offer to us. At first I was pretty excited, and also impressed by their turnaround time, but Marty also told me that he doesn't know anything about the offer, that the men want to present it to all of us at the same time. I'm taking this as a bad sign, because if they have to meet with us to present their offer it's probably going to be a sales pitch of some sort. Think about it this way: Whenever you've sold a house, did a potential buyer ever request a meeting to present their offer, or did their realtor just tell your realtor what their offer was? I would have expected them to at least ask Marty if he thought we would take "X" for the company, just to test the water.
On the good news front, this time of year is usually pretty open for meetings, as we usually spend a lot of time going to holiday parties and delivering gifts to our clients, so setting up a meeting time is pretty simple. We'll meet this Tuesday, again at the CPA's office.
I've relayed this information to Jack and David, and as usual, Jack will be coming to the meeting with me while David won't be. (At this point, even if David wanted to come to the meeting I'd have to say no to him, as I don't want to introduce anyone new into the process right now.) They both share the same concern that I do, that not getting a written offer before a meeting is probably a bad sign.
In other news, if I didn't mention it before, all the partners are now using personal email addresses for our communications. After one of our clients had a recent email gaffe, we decided it would be better not to use the company's email system for these email conversations any more.