Jim Van Blaricum answers questions concerning Lightning Burgers. Signal Oil and Gas

 

“I was intrigued by the fast food business in the late 90s and started a hamburger chain,” states Van Blaricum.  “I had hired some other people from another chain that I highly respected.  In the course of developing our chain we wanted to make sure we weren’t copying them and made the appropriate efforts to make the business changes that we needed to protect ourselves from a legal point of view.  In spite of that, the other chain, which I respect highly to this day, took us to task, and we got caught in the downturn of 9/11 and lost all of our financing and subsequently ended up having to close the business down.  In the course of this, one of the local newspapers got a hold of some information from a former employee that was fired that was pretty much negatively one-sided and published a report that had a lot of information in it that I thought was incorrect.” James Van Blaricum
Van Blaricum invited the local journal to hear his side but they never came out or put forth an effort to interview Jim Van Blaricum.

“They never did contact me. I called them afterwards, and said in all fairness of hearing both sides of the story, why didn’t you contact me?  They said that they did try, but I suspect that there wasn’t a lot of effort put forth because I was in the phone book.  They said that they were going to publish my side of the story, so to speak, but they never called back. We never had any opportunity to correct what I saw as erroneous information.”