Charleys Philly Steaks | A Great Experience Every Time

Agree and one of the lessons learned and why I dumped it. However it was distressed for that reason, the owner before me was putting in that amount of time and did not have time to market the business, expand to catering (60% of any Sub Shops business is catering vs walk-ins and he had zero catering). Expand to Internet Ordering and delivery (Also not existant). So my plan was to expand catering and bring in more money. We had some success there, one catering engagement was worth almost a whole day's operation of the restaurant in revenue. Attempted Internet Ordering but the franchise point of sale system would not accept it and the Franchise HQ was not even interested in fixing that...........said their philosophy was I should market and bring people into the location (yeah right). I was naive in two areas: #1 Amount of effort it would take to land new business in catering (slow slog upwards in sales and lots of flyers and knocking on doors). #2 Internet Ordering and Delivery which I thought I could pull off myself but found you needed significant support from Franchise HQ because they supported the IT portion of the point of sale terminal and without their help it was going nowhere fast. I would say #3 was naivete at the commercial mall lease. Stupidly I thought it would be like an apartment lease. Noway, they wanted a portion of my gross sales, profits and to have veto power over hours of operation (or they would fine me). Additionally they wanted other financial extractions I won't get into here as it is confidential. So I learned from my naivete, will be better positioned with a future business startup.

Blessings on you next efforts. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with the RP forum.

Thats good to know and congrats to you, one thing I did not like with my startup was attempting it just on savings alone and no other income. It's a little less pressure when your not counting down towards zero and have an additional side income, in my view. I also because of my financing arrangement had to structure it by using a C Corp and what a pain in the azz that was. LLC is definitely a better and more flexible structure for a small business. Still if I had to live life over again, I would probably do the same thing over just for the experience alone. In my case financially it is going to be a wash and not impact my retirement at all because having the small business attempt on my resume has actually benefitted me financially, believe it or not, with prospective employers and HR. They view it very positively regardless of the fact it was so short term. That was an unexpected positive from the whole experience.

SPC Erich Guenther - I'm having brunch after performing an exam at the jail. I'm going to write this meal off on taxes. Because, we discussed business.
M. Morris RVT