Questions

Pierre seemed interested in buying me out. I was shocked. Why would he even want this restaurant? He never helped do the work. In fact, as I found out later, he never got his TABC certification, never got his Food Manager certification, never even got his Food Handler certification. Clearly, he had no intention of being involved. Pierre never put in his seed money, never stood up to protect our profits, never fully engaged in marketing our bar. Why in the world would he want to take over ownership and management?

Millions of questions started bouncing through my brain. Was Pierre a con man? Did he lure me in with the idea of having me front the startup costs of the cafe and bar? Was Todd actually his partner in a good cop/bad cop game to get as much money from me as possible as they pushed me to quit? Was Max in on it, too? Am I the biggest idiot on the planet? Do I have an ‘idiot’ sign taped to my forehead?

Cyber Monday, I went to the bank and took Pierre off of the cafe checking account. After all my stupidity, I didn’t want my story to end, ‘then Pierre emptied the bank account and disappeared.’ For once in my life, I did something right.

Drinking Alcohol in a Public Place

The City of McKinney owns the building and property where the McKinney rink resides. So we were always aware of being on publicly owned property rather than private property. The local hockey team leased the property from the City and we subleased our space from the local hockey team.

There are laws preventing the consumption of alcohol in public places. While many exceptions to the laws exist, the McKinney arena was not in one of the ‘excepted’ areas. So the adult hockey leagues could not legally drink alcohol in the parking lot. Since our liquor license didn’t cover the entire building, they couldn’t legally drink in the lobby or locker rooms either. The only place they could legally drink was in our bar.

You’d think that would be good for business. However Todd, our self-proclaimed food service expert, refused to enforce the law. To our faces, he said he wouldn’t allow people to break the law and he said he would help us be successful, but behind the scenes he was sabotaging our very existence. We could lose our liquor license if TABC came in and found alcohol in the locker rooms. Yet, Todd and Pierre did nothing.

The front desk was supposed to enforce ‘no alcohol’, but adult leagues brought in big coolers of beer and alcohol. Conveniently, the rink employees didn’t notice the coolers. So I started contacting Todd every time I saw a cooler come in, regardless of time of day. Still the employees let the coolers go right into the locker rooms. They also refused to enforce ‘no consumption of alcohol’ in the parking lot. So we had to start calling the police to break up the tailgate parties, making us the bad guys. We didn’t tell anyone we were calling the cops, but some adults figured it out and decided to boycott our bar. I guess we really didn’t lose anything since they weren’t drinking with us before, but still, this wasn’t the kind of business or relationships we wanted to build. It was a horrible situation.

Turns out Todd, the man who repeatedly said he was going to help us be successful, only made a big deal about the City owning our building when he thought he could hurt our business. If enforcing the law would help our business, Todd and his people were not the least bit interested in honoring our commitment to preserving the sanctity of public property. And once again, Pierre did nothing. As a former employee of the local hockey team, Pierre certainly had a lot more clout than the rest of us and could bring these issues to the surface to be resolved.

Liquor License

Getting a liquor license is very precise and time consuming. TABC is great about guiding you through the process. You have to get just the right signatures in just the right order and everything has to be notarized. I took far too long to complete this process. I’m not making any excuses. Yes, it’s hard to run a business, work the counter, do your partner’s job, and work on a liquor license, but I should have made it a higher priority. Oh, and I sold my house, bought a new house, and moved all during the same period.

You may wonder why I was still building the business after all the crap I’ve told you about so far. Well, the liquor license was that one ray of hope that the business would make a complete turn around for the better and all the torture I had endured so far would just melt away. Pierre, Todd, and Kyle all said it would make a difference and I believed them. During this process, I learned that Todd had lied about helping us set up pizza and beer in the locker rooms for the adult league. Once we got the liquor license it became a violation to have liquor on the premises outside of our space. We would have to change the liquor license to cover the entire building and Todd said he would never agree to that.

The liquor license did double our business almost immediately, but it didn’t turn the world around. Sadly, things continued to get worse. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about it as the saga continues. One thing I want to say here, I couldn’t have done any of this without Kyle. He is a hard worker and honest person. Even though Kyle no longer speaks to me, I will always be grateful to have worked with him.