Death of a Coffee Shop

[bfreebern]

Sounds fishy to me. Did someone from the church, do the renovations or was it an outside contractor?

 

[MNBrian]

How the hell did that ever look good on paper? I'm looking at about 130K and that includes about six months of operating costs.

Yeah, I'm mad now. I would have been a lot more mad had I sat in on the finance team meetings in the planning. A lot of this info was given to me a year after being open.

Our church is known for some pretty lucrative giving. In four months, we raised 1.5 million for a building project to add a huge addition to the church. Part of that money (400k) was meant to be the nest egg for Mugshots build out and start up. No one really knew that it was overspent.

What surprises me more is how they were able to do enough business to only be 5-10k per month in the hole. The place was very busy during normal business hours. People were ecstatic with the product and the space. Regardless of their idiocy in build-out debt, all of that "debt" was meant to be from giving and thus not-recouped.

Sounds fishy to me. Did someone from the church, do the renovations or was it an outside contractor?

Outside renovations. I actually witnessed the renovation project. That part of it didn't seem crazy. There was a reason the space sat vacant for 3 years prior. We had to tear out the whole ceiling, most of the walls, build two new bathrooms, all new electrical, a brand new kitchen, a bar, and that's just building materials. I was not happy with the location until after the renovations were finished. It was practically a whole new space.

 

[mmburtch]

If this was built out of the coffers, there shouldn't be a debt repayment. How do you post those numbers with no debt payment? No tax bill either? Where did the gross receipts go? All I see is inventory, rent, utilities, insurance and wages.

 

[Scap]

This is getting interesting....

I sure hope no one was helping themselves to someone else's money in all of this....

 

[MNBrian]

If this was built out of the coffers, there shouldn't be a debt repayment. How do you post those numbers with no debt payment? No tax bill either? Where did the gross receipts go? All I see is inventory, rent, utilities, insurance and wages.

I'm no expert on church finances, but I think funding is built off quoted giving. I say I'll be giving x dollars over the course of 18 months, and this acts as collateral or some kind of underwriting assurance that the funding will be paid back? I'm not totally certain. The more you take away from the same information I heard, the more I think I should have been on the stupid finance team to help them get their s@#% together too.

Maybe I'm disproportionally placing the blame on the church when the finance team effed us from the start.

 

[MNBrian]

I'm no expert on church finances, but I think funding is built off quoted giving. I say I'll be giving x dollars over the course of 18 months, and this acts as collateral or some kind of underwriting assurance that the funding will be paid back? I'm not totally certain. The more you take away from the same information I heard, the more I think I should have been on the stupid finance team to help them get their s@#% together too.

Maybe I'm disproportionally placing the blame on the church when the finance team effed us from the start.

Also I'm unclear as to whether the "nest egg" was actual giving or loaned money against future giving. This also seems to be shrouded in uncertainty.

I guess my point is a loss isn't really a loss for a NP when the loss is based on giving, which might be part of the reason they lack business sense. When using other peoples' money, it sure seems easier to make bad decisions sometimes and write them off as simple mistakes.