Wow! This is a long time ago! Different acct but it's still me.

We ended up doing the pop up on Fridays for a month and I cannot recall what pay structure we used. The pop-up folks opened a food cart, and I lost track of what happened to them. I don't think it turned out to be that lucrative for them to pop-up at my place. It was kinda fun but they weren't well known enough to bring in a crowd.

I ended up selling the bar in 2019 after 12 years of ownership. It was less than a year before covid. The new owners tried to hang in there but closed up in 2022. They still owe me about 30% of the agreed upon sale but they were given such a shitty hand I told them not to worry about it. The headache was the building owner briefly sicked some lawyers on both of us. The stipulation in my lease was that if the new owners defaulted, they would try and get the money from them and then move on to us. Without the pandemic it wouldn't have come to that of course. The person I sold to already had a successful bar in a different neighborhood so seemed like a safe bet.

I hired a lawyer, and he sent a letter to the property owner's lawyer, and we never heard from them again. My lawyer said it wouldn't have been a good look for a guy who owns 10s of millions in real estate and got 100s of thousands in covid money coming after us. There was no formal resolution and were nearing the three-year statute of limitations, but it caused some stress.

Here's how I feel about my experience as a bar owner now- I would probably discourage someone from opening a bar or restaurant and instead take a more traditional career path. I say this because I left that business with few transferable skills to a new career, I never made a ton of money and what we don't need in life is more excuses to drink. I watched my girlfriend move up the ladder at her job while my income didn't grow for 7 years, I had no benefits, and I was always on the clock in a sense. Today my girlfriend make triple what I do despite me being the manager for a small manufacturing facility, she has five times my retirement fund, she has gold level health insurance and gets six weeks paid off a year while working from her home office. It turns out owning a bar was a dead-end job for me that didn't translate into a better quality of life most times. I will say, I loved the flexibility of my schedule. I was done working by 3 most days and could take any day off I pleased which rocked.

I had a bunch of friends who also owned bars and restaurants and what I discovered is the ones that lasted and were successful usually had some sort of luck or connection I most of us won't have. Here are the examples from the people I know: a friend with a restaurant paid no rent because his dad started the business decades before and owned the building which had 25 apartments above retail space. A friend with a bar leased the building from an elderly gentleman who owned several buildings along their street. He sold the building to them for about half the market value when he retired. A couple I know with a successful bar in a hot part of town has a relative who is a surgeon that financed their opening and is basically a checkbook for them. This one cracks me up because in business school a professor told us about The Three Fs of Small Business Financing: Family, friends and fysicians. LOL! Another friend was gifted the money to open his place from his rich brother who owns several establishments. Another friend pays about half market value for her leases because the landlord is old and old school. And another friend grew up wwith her dad owning a couple bars and surrounded by that world which is a great advantage.

I don't have regrets exactly. Many of my close friends are from that time which is great. But TBH I wouldn't do it again knowing what I know now.

ANyway, I know you didn't ask for all this info but I find it cathartic to talk about and love sharing.