There are too many details that depend on who you deal with.

Sometimes it feels like a Korean soap opera or a Chinese “xiao pin”.

The best one for me is a guy from the UK. It’s difficult for me to secure a prime location for a restaurant with the help of friends. I chose the UK guy who lost his first restaurant due to its wrong location and other factors. We have obviously defined job responsibilities, with him handling operations and me taking care of part of the back office and government inspections.

His cunning designer identifies the right location who just closes his own restaurant, he smells the business, then he wants to use his fee to switch our shares. I refused, he continues to ponder in secrecy which he claims free design at the beginning.

When our business got a million income. Our Korean soap starts.

He asks me to switch the company’s licenses to an overseas company, which I believe is planned by his designer and lawyer brother etc. When I ask for a shareholder contract, he either questions why I need it or writes something for me as a contract.

Later, he used company money to buy the loyalty of key staff by overpaying their salaries. One day, he started sending me monthly payment requests for 25,000 without discussing it with me, in addition to his salary.

His loyal staff members are starting to push away those who choose neutrality and keep saying “I did nothing” during secret staff dinners without the bosses, even though the company pays for the bill and their salaries. Currently, I own half of the company.

Next, he invites another middle friend from the UK to join the company as a manager. He quickly shows me a share plan for this new UK colleague on his laptop without having any legal meetings with lawyers.

The new UK manager started collaborating with his loyal staff to confront HR on payday by calling her about salary questions at the same time. I didn’t see that until years later.

The new manager then apologizes to me for that and invites me for a drink. During the drinking, he starts asking about how many rooms my parents have, etc. This guy had previously deposited the revenue from his last concept into his personal bank account to avoid taxes, but now he claims that he needs to return the personal tax back to our concept in order to show how clean of a river he is. He’s really the best actor I’ve ever seen.

It is very common for employees to pretend to be dogs in order to earn the high salary they need. In public, they claim it’s about pursuing their dreams without money.

After 4 years, I have to sell my shares because there is no dividend, which the UK guy claims is all his salary. It’s very interesting.

The solution would be much easier if I knew it from the beginning, such as splitting shares into legal and dividend parts, and then distributing more of the dividend part as a bonus system. Perhaps there are other ways to consider as well.

In the end, they are my life teachers. I prefer them but I won’t become them. I appreciate meeting them in my youth. I have had time to ask myself why I have learned this lesson and what I can learn from it.