The first job I ever had was working in a diner. I was 13---in 1964 the rules were different---and I learned how to wash dishes and cook on a flattop.
Yesterday my wife and I closed a deal to buy a diner. Its absentee owner thought he could run it as an investment, visiting once a week, and despite an excellent location it's only doing about $400 a day in sales.
My wife has been doing restaurant/diner work for 10 years, so she knows operations, and my best friend---the guy who turned us on to this deal---has owned more than a dozen restaurants, bars, etc.
Before we closed my wife and I spent five whole days in the diner (on 12 different occasions) watching customers and talking with them. The place is located about a mile south of The Villages---remember Sarah Palin's first post-convention appearance, 30,000 old people?
We're about to show them a little Obama-style economic miracle.
The clientele is almost all white, working class, male---guys with their names on their shirts and signs on their pickup trucks.
That's not the target market we were hoping for when we first started saving our pennies to buy into a cafe. We were hoping for the sort of hip cool grunge coffee house where we met (I was a dishwasher, and, on poetry night, the doorguy and emcee).
Our plan is to retool the business, increase sales and sell it so we'll have the capital to do what we want, perhaps near our home but maybe in another state (we both like cold weather, despite our lifetime Florida residency).
Those of you who know more about business than we do (that would be almost everyone) will note that the national economy is in the dumper, and this might be the worst time ever to invest in a business. On the other hand, we're going to open up December 1 without owing a penny for anything but rent, utilities and products.
We've already linked up with two local farms that will supply veggies, and we've already purchased a couple of pieces of equipment that will allow us to serve home-cooked meals rather than fry-o-lator crap from the regional purveyor that serves every restaurant for miles around.
We're planning to price our meals (it's a diner, remember) at the cost of one hour's labor at minimum wage, $6.79. We're planning on working our asses off knowing that both our employees will be taking home more cash than the two of us. My job will be washing dishes and cleaning the toilets (it's a Zen thing) and my wife will be making soups, subs, her patented pulled pork sandwiches and all the rest of the goodies.
We're both nervous as hell about this, but we're also in good shape---we bought the already-operating business for what it would cost us to replace the equipment. Restaurant operations are typically valued at somewhere between one to three times gross profits or one year of gross sales, and there ae so many variables that these are just rough rules-of-thumb. We bought in at about one-third the going rate, and the landlord even gave us a deal on the lease, with 12 years worth of extensions and no personal guarantee.
Okay, most of this is writing aloud, so let me get to the part that pleases us the most. Later today we're meeting with our two employees and their families (two husbands, two children). We're going to start off the meeting by reading our mission statement:
We propose to operate a food service business that respects its customers by providing the healthiest, most nutritious and tastiest foods and beverages in a safe, comfortable environment at the best prices possible.
We will earn sufficient profit to enable us to operate, but we will earn a fair, reasonable and honorable profit that reflects the genuine appreciation of our customers.
We believe that food is love and that good food is a blessing. We will endeavor to bless our customers in the belief that those blessings will be returned a hundredfold.
We believe that our approach will make us wealthy in friends, family and quality of life, and we believe it will make our customers just as wealthy. We will work hard, and we will seek the joy to be found in labor. We hope our approach will be emulated often and frequently.
We will ‘mark’ our approach---demonstrate our ideals---by pricing our food so that a healthy, nutritious, tasty meal will cost the equivalent of one hour’s work at minimum wage. We will never price according to "what the market will bear." We will always price according to the dictates of honor and respect.
We will share our bounty with our workers by affording them a share of our profits, in addition to a just wage and the highest benefits we can afford.
We will share our bounty with our customers by continually re-investing in our business to provide better service, a safer, more comfortable environment and the best food we can afford.
We will share our bounty with our community by spreading community pride and supporting community endeavors, by reducing our wastefulness and eliminating, to the best of our ability, our impacts on our environment.
About 40,000 cars a day pass by this place, most of them headed to or from The Villages.
So if Sarah Palin ever comes back to The Villages, she'll have to drive by our place to get there from the airport. Hah.