On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:18:49 GMT, "John Emmons"
A major motivator to find a simpler life was a fire that destroyed the business and almost got me. I can recognize a wake-up call when it slaps me in the face! I had some savings and the rest came from (literally) a rich uncle :-)
I did something I was told would be impossible. I started with an essentially empty building, built out the restaurant and opened up for just about $20k. I scavenged old air conditioners from the scrap metal yard (took 6 to make 3 operating ones), bought broken restaurant equipment for its scrap metal value, repaired it and made it work and did all the construction work myself (major decorating effort from my wife at the time.) I built other equipment from scratch using scrap metal. You can see the results on my web page. Some of the more scuzzy looking equipment has been replaced but the dining room layout and accoutrements are the same. The tables have tablecloths because the tables are a mix'n'match combo of raw lumber and discarded table tops that I dug out of the dumpster behind the used restaurant equipment place.
I did replace the cobbled-together air conditioners last year with a very nice Trane 10 ton three phase heat pump that I bought from a freight salvage place for $700 because it looked like it had been run over by a freight train. I had to hammer out a bunch of dents and fabricate a couple of panels from new sheet metal but I got a unit installed and running for under a kilobuck total. Two hundred of that was the minimum fee for the crane rental to set it on the roof. I was told that this unit would have cost around $7k had I bought it from a Trane dealer. The energy savings from this move has paid for the unit already in just one summer.
After having been badly pinched by what I though was a small amount of debt before the fire that turned crippling once my source of revenue was gone, I was bound and determined to start this business with the cash on hand and to never use any sort of debt again. Mission accomplished. It was very difficult in the beginning (I can't tell you how much food we processed by hand because we had no appliances. I can think of one instance where I chopped 600 lbs of BBQ with a chinese meat cleaver....) but that hard work has paid off.
One of the funnier aspects of this was the reaction my food vendors had to my paying COD. Most small operators want all the credit they can get. Not me. The first thing the salesman for a prospective vendor would do would be to stick a credit app under my nose. "I don't want any credit, I'm going to pay cash". "Well, we can't take your check unless you fill out this life history and anal probe form." "What part about 'CASH' do you not understand?" After a few weeks of their drivers having to carry around a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in cash, they'd tell me that they really would prefer I write checks and not to worry about that silly ole credit app :-)
The virtue of being debt free has really shown itself over the last few weeks. I got hit with a triple-whammy of the hurricanes, the gas price run-up and the city closing the road in front of my place to piddle around with re-doing the courthouse square a block or so up. For several days you could have fired a machine gun through my dining room and not hit a soul!
Instead of panicking and shutting down like a couple of restaurants uptown did (no doubt because of the mortgage-rent and debt), I just hunkered down and rode it through. I closed off all but one dining room, turned the thermostat up a little, moved all refrigerated inventory into one reefer and one freezer and let my shelves get a little bare. This is the 4th week and people seem to be getting used to the gas prices and the closed road, as business is picking back up. If business keeps picking up I'll have been able to have ridden through this one without touching my savings or my reserves.
John
--- John De Armond See my website for my current email address Cleveland, Occupied TN
