Ep. 53: Prevent the sabotage series: the eyore - a podcast by Iva

“It’s never going to work out. I have failed so many times.”

It’s  February 2017. I have just opened, a couple months ago, a restaurant in Chandler Arizona. The first restaurant was doing pretty okay, self-managed, I thought okay - it’s time to open a second gluten free-paleo restaurant down here.

Except, it was the worst idea ever. Just a couple months into opening, people weren’t coming. I am on a 10 year lease, and I am very, very scared.

A typical day in my life looks like this:

I’m at the new restaurant, keeping myself busy. The customers aren’t coming. Some days we have $150 in sales.

Our rent is $8000, month, i have to pay the suppliers, food that’s going bad, all kinds of constant repairs, my staff, utilities, and an endless list of other bills. Our losses every month are more than $10,000.

A typical day… I am walking into a restaurant for the brunch opening. I am feeling anxious, often shaking. But I am smiling. I don’t want my employees to know just how I feel.

I am hoping for a miracle. Customers will start showing up.

But deep down I fear the worst. Everyone who comes in seems to be put off by our high prices. And I am stuck, not knowing what to do about it.

More than anything, I am committed to healthy eating and the quality of the food. We fry  in 100% cold-pressed avocado oil, cook with organic ingredients, and our waffles are made of cashews instead of wheat flour.

We are leaking money by the buckets, but the guilt of ‘overcharging’ is eating me but there’s just no way we can charge even less.

It’s a sunny February afternoon, and  I am sitting there, behind the restaurant, shaking in fear because yet another team member just quit.

Again. She wasn’t making enough tips.

‘I  totally get it, I’m sorry, I wish it was different’, I said.

As the staff is thinning, I find myself going back to the beginnings, and doing a lot of cooking and serving.

This February afternoon, I’m sitting behind the restaurant in fear, an an email pops up from my accountant: “you don’t have enough on your account to pay the paychecks”. I can feel the pit in the stomach. That can’t be.

Sure enough, it is true. All credit cards are maxed out, lines of credit exhausted, I am again scrambling moving money around to make the paychecks happen.

I feel completely trapped, and the certainty downs on me. There isn’t going to be a happy ending to this.

...

This is not a story I enjoy sharing. It’s a story of failing very, very hard. But I am sharing this so that you understand that your past failures and attempts to succeed, however real they are, aren’t predictive of your future. I am succeeding in a huge way and our business is widely profitable now.

But I want you to listen to this, because I want you to get how little your past failures mean about your business. 

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