If it isn’t employee management, it's malfunctioning equipment! Here's our latest challenge.

Our store manager called this morning to say that our bread baking oven wasn't operating correctly. Our oven is our source of income, since we bake our bread fresh every day, and it's difficult to make sandwiches without bread. Faced with losing revenue for the day, we were caught in a dilemma: do we call the local restaurant equipment repair company whom we despise because of their horrid attitude coupled with their inability to do a good job, or do we call in the restaurant repair company from 40 miles away who will tack on an extra $100 for the trip? We'd love to buy a brand new oven, but it costs about $4,000, and we just don't make enough money to be able to afford it right now. In the end, the oven started working again just in time to bake bread for lunch, but we're still going to have the remote service company come out and do a preventive service tomorrow. Ouch, probably another $500 "investment".

This malfunction got me to thinking about something I wish we had done differently when we bought this existing restaurant. We knew some of the equipment was old when we bought the store. In retrospect, we should have negotiated replacing the oven, and the Air Conditioning, at the time of closing. We financed the acquisition, and we could have added this in, or ideally negotiated the price down to include the cost of replacing the equipment.

The lesson: when buying an existing restaurant, negotiate replacing older equipment as part of the deal. Otherwise, you'll be getting those dreaded calls from your store that cause your stomach to move into your throat!