This is so devastating.
I just returned from checking a potential location for Piecraft.
It’s an existing cafe in a trendy area, built and maintained with love.
Vintage La Marzocco coffee machine. Great secondary equipment. Stylish black and white walls. Wood. One of the co-founder’s paintings on the walls…
You can tell the owners poured their souls in it.
And less than two years after opening, they are already closing it — and putting it up for sale.
Why?
The founders’ personal circumstances changed. Plus it wasn’t performing well enough, to put it mildly.
Every other review on Google Maps mentions good coffee — and the lack of customers as a great advantage (“you can always find a table”, “it’s quiet” and “nobody bothers you” 🙈).
So the cafe isn’t operational anymore.
The owners are eager to find someone who would take it over so they can stop paying rent every month (contracts usually lock you in for 5 years).
Getting back at least SOME of their investment via a takeover deal would be a bonus.
I guess it happens often in foodservice, or maybe too often.
For many operators, opening a cafe or bar is not just about making money. It’s more about identity, romanticism, adventures, and lifestyle changes…
And when it fails, it’s not just a failed investment. It’s a failed dream.
Maybe this is the problem: with all these dreams, the business side of the venture is sometimes neglected.
Piecraft is also an adventure for us. But I try to keep a cool head — studying traffic, investigating sales of nearby cafes, putting together projected P&Ls, etc. More on that later. A fascinating task by the way, when you have to assess locations and make decisions that will determine your fate for the next five years.
So…. I do my best to leverage the experience gathered in foodservice within the last 7 years. But now and then I ask myself: is this our future too?
It might be so that we also will be putting the shop up for sale in less than two years…
Scary! Yet…. we’re moving forward.
You never know unless you try, right?
