The Distressed Restaurant Handbook: Debt, Cash Flow, and the Decisions Nobody Prepared You For — A Survival Guide for Independent Restaurant Owners

Product Description

It's 1 a.m., the restaurant is closed, and you're doing math in your head that doesn't work.Maybe it's a merchant cash advance pulling money out of your account every morning. Maybe it's a letter from the state with the word "warrant" on it. Maybe it's just month after month of working harder than you ever have while the numbers quietly get worse.Nobody prepares restaurant owners for this part. This book does.Chris Simone has owned an independent pizzeria with his family since 2003 — through the 2008 crash, the Great Recession, a pandemic, and Chapter 11 reorganizations that ended with every creditor paid in full. This is the book he needed twenty years ago: the mechanics of restaurant distress, explained plainly by someone who has lived every page.Inside, using real numbers from a real restaurant's books:PART ONE — KNOW YOUR REAL NUMBERS. The five P&L numbers that matter and the order to read them in. The POS report that inflated a +2% year into +13%. The labor percentage that read 29.8% when the truth was 24.8%. How to raise prices under inflation without losing your regulars. What third-party delivery actually takes (hint: it isn't the commission rate — one real statement showed 46%).PART TWO — THE DEBT TRAPS. The real math behind merchant cash advances and why stacking them is the classic death spiral. What a sales tax warrant actually means and what happens next. The one category of debt that follows you personally — and why paying the loudest creditor first is usually backwards.PART THREE — THE WAY THROUGH. How to talk to your landlord before you're behind, and why timing is most of the leverage. The labor lever nobody talks about: automation that cuts costs without cutting service. What your restaurant is actually worth — all three numbers. And a plain, first-person description of what a small-business reorganization actually looks like from the inside, from an owner whose restaurant kept operating, kept its people, and came out the other side.This book explains; it doesn't give legal or financial advice. Its job is to make you the most informed, most organized, least ashamed owner in the room — while you still have options.The owners who make it aren't the ones who never got in trouble. They're the ones who looked at it straight, early, with the lights on. Read more