Smashed it.............

February is generally a pretty bad month for the food and beverage industry so I'm told but that didn't stop us exceeding our target, in fact it didn't stop us exceeding our final turnover target figure! By that I mean the figure we'd ourselves by the end of March. Massive pats on the backs all round and personally I feel relieved that all the hours I've out in have proved that in our business plan we have a product that works, even under difficult circumstances.

I fear however that it still may have come too late. Lets hope this performance urges the brewery to think long term rather than short for the sake of all involved, it'd be a shame to have made this progress only to be stopped in our tracks by the lack of decent business management prior to our involvement. It became pretty obvious only a week or two into the project that the situation was pretty grave but we'd made a choice and a commitment to achieve certain things which we've been successful at.

Currently we've had to close the kitchen while maintenance work is carried out. With business picking up we need it in a condition where we can have full confidence in it's layout and equipment, when we have our full time chef in place he or she needs to be reliant on that to be able to offer a consistently good offering. If we delay this essential work now it'll come back to bite us later so I think it's a good decision on our part. Not sure others think the same way but again short term loss for long term gain is necessary here.

The whole situation is a bit frustrating for me because readers of the blog will know that we've been looking at a few pubs in recent times and what has really baffled us is the valuation some people put on their (all of them) failing business. People want to claw back what they've put in using your skill set and enthusiasm as a benchmark for projected takings, they don't see it as them failing and you willing to offer what the business is actually worth so us being unwilling to pay out money held us back then and now it's money coming the other way that's holding back this venture.

It's certainly a lifestyle running a pub, you need to put a lot in and the financial rewards are not great considering that effort but the job satisfaction is the gain and I'm more than satisfied with the job we've done so far :-)