Piet Wanted to Retire, and Suddenly We Had to Put a Price on Twelve Years

The morning he told me

We had been proofing dough side by side for twelve years when Piet said it, and he said it the way you say something you have rehearsed in the car. It was a Tuesday, quarter past four, the ovens still cold, and he had flour on his forearms already because he never waited for me to start. He said, Andries, I think this is my last winter here.

I did not answer straight away. I remember I kept scoring the top of a sourdough with the little blade, three lines, the way I always do, and I watched the cuts open slightly the way they do, and only then did I put the blade down.

We started the bakery in a rented double garage in Hermanus, back when the two of us had one secondhand deck oven between us and a handshake instead of a contract. Twelve years later we owned the building on the corner, a proper shopfront with a green awning, three ovens, a walk-in fridge, a coffee machine that cost more than my first car, and a queue on Saturday mornings that ran past the hardware shop next door. We had built the whole thing on the idea that a handshake was enough between us.

Now Piet wanted out, and a handshake could not tell me what half of all that was worth.

The awkward part nobody warns you about

Here is the thing they do not tell you when two friends go into business. The friendship works because you never have to put a number on anything. You cover for each other, you take turns doing the bank run, you do not count who worked the public holiday. Money moves between you like water and nobody keeps a jug.

The day one of you wants to leave, all of that has to become a figure. And the figure has to be fair to the man leaving and survivable for the man staying, and those two things pull in opposite directions, and the friendship is standing right there in the middle watching you argue about it.

I offered him a number the first week. I sat at the kitchen table with a calculator and my own rough sums, added up what I thought the building was worth from what houses were going for down the road, guessed at the ovens, and I wrote it on a piece of paper and slid it across the counter to him between customers.

He looked at it. He did not say it was too low. He said something worse. He said, Where did you get that.

And I could not really answer, because I had made it up. Not dishonestly. I had made it up the way you make up the value of your own house, from feeling and hope and a bit of what the neighbour said his cousin got. Piet had done the same thing in his head and landed somewhere higher, also from feeling, and now our two feelings were sitting a few hundred thousand rand apart and starting to sour.

The night I nearly damaged something

It got tense for about ten days. Not shouting. Worse than shouting. Short sentences. Him doing the morning shift and leaving before I arrived so we would not overlap. Me finding reasons to be in the front while he was in the back.

My wife watched me stew over it one evening and she said the thing that turned it around. She said, You are trying to be the baker and the referee at the same time. You cannot be both. Get someone whose whole job is the number, so the two of you can go back to being friends.

I did not love the idea at first. It felt like admitting we could not sort out our own business. But the alternative was watching twelve years curdle over a made-up figure, so I phoned around and asked how you get a proper, defensible set of valuations done on a commercial property and the equipment inside it, the kind of number a bank would accept and a friend could not argue with.

What the outside eye actually did

Two people came out on a Thursday. They were not estate agents and they were not there to sell anything. They were valuators, and I had honestly never thought about the fact that this was a real profession with its own rules until they were standing in my bakery measuring things.

They were thorough in a way that quietly embarrassed my calculator. They looked at the building, yes, but also at the road it sat on, the parking, what similar commercial units in the area had actually changed hands for rather than what people hoped for. They wrote down the ovens by make and age, the fridge, even the shelving. They asked about the lease history, the zoning, whether the awning and the signage were ours or the landlord's from before we bought. They asked things I did not know the answer to about my own building.

What struck me most was that they did not seem to care whether the number came out high or low. They were not on my side and they were not on Piet's side. They were on the side of the number being correct. When you have spent ten days quietly assuming your friend is trying to get one over on you, watching two people be completely indifferent to who wins is strangely calming.

They explained, without making me feel stupid, that certified valuators sign their name to a figure and stand behind it, and that this is the whole point. A number you invent at your kitchen table protects nobody. A number that a professional will defend, in writing, that both a bank and a court would accept, protects everybody, including the friendship.

The number, and what it did

The report came a couple of weeks later. It was longer than I expected and drier than I expected, full of comparisons and adjustments and a methodology section I read twice.

The figure landed between Piet's number and mine. Closer to his than to mine, if I am honest, which told me something about my own wishful arithmetic. But that is not the part that mattered.

The part that mattered was that when I showed it to Piet, he read it slowly, and then he put it down and said, Okay. Just that. Okay. Not, where did you get that. Because he could see exactly where it came from. Every rand was accounted for. There was nothing to argue with, and so we did not argue.

We restructured the buyout over three years off that figure. He still comes in on Saturdays, not to work, just to stand at the end of the counter with a coffee and watch the queue he helped build. Last week he told a customer, with obvious pride, that he used to own half of the place. Used to. He said it lightly. He could only say it lightly because the leaving had been clean.

What I tell people now

When someone tells me they are going into business with a friend, I do not warn them about the friend. I tell them to decide, early, that the day money has to have a number on it, they will not be the ones to invent it.

A handshake is a beautiful way to start something. It is a terrible way to end it. Somewhere between the two you need a figure that neither of you made up, so that the friendship survives the accounting.

Piet and I are still friends. We are friends partly because, when it mattered most, we were both humble enough to admit that the one thing we could not bake ourselves was an honest number.