Thursday, October 12, 2006
Getting worried
Well we're opening in less than 5 days. I'm going over my Quickbooks accounting software just looking at where I am and I'm not in a good spot. I'm running way over budget, like 20%-25% over budget. There have been a lot of things that have cost a lot of money that were unforeseen in the beginning. For example, I've basically had to outfit the entire kitchen with new (used) equipment. When I signed the lease the existing equipment that was there was included in the lease. It was the same equipment that the previous restaurant was using. Come to find out they weren’t using much of it because it didn’t work. I don’t know what they were doing and/or how they got away with it. They had no real refrigeration to speak of, the oven did not work (the burners and the griddle did though), and I could go on and on. Yesterday the plumber fixed yet even more of the plumbing problems. Get this; they had the sewage back fill backing into the ice machine! That’s right, which means that if the drain gets backed up, part of the sewage backed into the ice machine where it made little doo-doo ice cubes that they were using for customer usage. When it’s all said and done I will have spent around $20,000 just fixing or replacing equipment that I did not foresee doing. To make matters even worse the majority of all this has taken place within the past couple weeks or so. We got into the kitchen to start practicing and prepping and literally 75% of the equipment started breaking down on us, such as the oven on the Wolf stove. What does all this mean, it means that I may not have enough funds to survive longer than a couple of months. I will either have to sell some personal things to add equity to the business, or the first month or two will need to do about double the cash flow I anticipated it doing. I've said all along that if I can just get to March we should be o.k. As of right now I don’t know if we can get to Christmas. All I can do is pray to the good Lord above that a lot of people come eat there right out of the gates, because if they don’t I'll be done before I even get a chance to get started. Keep us in your prayers!
Buddy, I'm going to keep you in my prayers. I hope and think that things will work out for you. If they food on Saturday night's party was any indication, you're going to be fine. Keep that chin up and have a good one.
ReplyDeleteHang in there my friend....
ReplyDeletefor what it's worth, we pray for you every day (and so does my mama, who loves you and martha!) keep smilin, and know we're here for ya! you're gonna do GREAT!
ReplyDelete