Tag: pay

Some Employees Need to Go

Even though I’ve been fat most of my life, I’ve always been very active. I used to work full-time, and then go home and participate in all sorts of activities – tennis, softball, bowling, camping, horseback riding, etc. I was only home long enough to eat and sleep. It was great!

So, it’s no surprise I thought I could open a restaurant. I’m no stranger to hard work and was ready to give it my all. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize my all was somewhat less than it used to be. Getting old is hell. Your brain feels the same as when you were younger, but your body takes hard work a little more personally and punishes you if you do too much. I worked all day, 7 days a week. Some nights, I could hardly walk when I got home and still hurt when I got up in the morning.

We hired people of all ages and in the beginning we paid them way too much. The pay rates were set by Pierre and Robbie and I trusted them to know. With more experience, I learned our pay was way out of line. And the people we overpaid didn’t even appreciate it. Some that we overpaid even stole from us. I could tell you a million stories about employees. Once I figured it out, the starting pay was a lot lower. It was still good money compared to other restaurants because we paid regular minimum wage. Customers don’t tend to tip in a snack bar type environment and we compensated for that.

I lost 35 pounds while eating pizza everyday. So you know I was literally working my a** off. I needed employees I could trust to give me time off, as a snack bar can often be run easily by 1 person. It was very hard to find people like that and sadly I trusted the wrong person more than once. And I kept employees longer than I should have just so I could go home. My recommendation is to let people go as soon as you see they are not going to respond to your personal improvement talks. Keep everything in writing and count the money and inventory often.

Pre-Contract Discussions

I would like to tell you this story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t. At least not for me. Even now as I share my story, my heart aches and I have bad dreams from all the feelings that come to the surface as I type. I still truly believe if Pierre had engaged and done the things he said, we would have been successful and made some money. You’ll hear more about that in future chapters. Right now, it’s important for me to share a conversation with Todd, the general manager of the building.

Once Robbie and I had a copy of the contract and were deciding whether to sign, I was looking at the space one more time. Todd and I were walking across the lobby towards the snack bar. He encouraged me to follow the instructions in the contract about how to pay our rent. Todd explained that it was best to mail a check to Damon at the corporate office as the contract stated, rather than handing our check to Todd as some tenants had done. Todd went on to say that paying him was an inconvenience as he would have to carry the check over to the corporate offices himself and he preferred not to do that. It made sense. Why wouldn’t you follow the instructions in the contract?

Once again, I brought up adding exclusive food rights to our contract. Todd adamantly refused. I wasn’t happy, but Pierre had assured us he had talked to a lot of skaters and they would buy from us if we carried healthier food. So I felt we could win over the skaters to buy food from us. It’s my understanding the rinks enforced ‘no outside food or drink’ when they were in charge of the snack bars, but once they contracted out the food space they didn’t want to be bothered with policing the food situation. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds likely. Continuing with the cafe without exclusivity was probably the biggest mistake I made and you will hear more about it later as we continue with the story.

Todd also told me that he would add our cafe to his letters to the hockey teams when they were coming for a tournament. He said some teams might want to schedule a party or team lunch while they were here. Todd also said once we got our liquor license we should offer a deal to the adult teams to have pizza and beer in the locker rooms at the end of their games. These sounded like great ideas and good support from our landlord.

Pierre warned Robbie and me over and over that Todd was not to be trusted. I believed Pierre, but I wasn’t overly concerned because I didn’t think we would have to deal with Todd much as long as we paid our rent on time. Another huge mistake on my part. That will become quite clear as we continue on with the story. I lost so much in this endeavor – money, dignity, friends, confidence, time, health, etc. To this day, it takes everything I’ve got just to walk into that building. Thank goodness I no longer have any reason to go there.