I don’t like our floors but I am stuck with them and we make it work. (Nice places spend about twice my budget for a similar size space.) We have vinyl floors because I had no money to rip up the floors and rebuild them. I had to make a lot of compromises to build and open my store because I had a relatively small budget. Ask me how much I paid for my hood alone, I could have bought a brand-new car.) Building a restaurant costs a lot more than $27,000. People see you succeed and just want to tear you down at any cost. People on the Internet are jerks and also really stupid. (Some Internet trolls like to throw our Kickstarter campaign back in my face and say I didn’t grind it and sweat it out to start this business, that I asked for handouts and I don’t have any merit as a businesswoman. We pieced together that amount through selling off stocks to liquidate some brokerage accounts, Darcy loaning the business some money (I was hell-bent on owning 100% of the company and not taking investors), me opening and maxing out a business credit card, help from our landlords and $27,000 raised through Kickstarter. But there were a lot of compromises made to stick to that budget. Looking at our books today, we pretty much nailed it down to the cent. That had to include everything, down to paper napkins. We came up with $135,000 as our budget for building and opening this store. We put accounts in “buckets”: money we feel very comfortable gambling on this money we’d rather not lose but we’ll survive if we do money we can’t afford to lose under any circumstances. We wondered if you could build a store for that much money. Darcy (then my boyfriend, now my husband) and I sat at the kitchen table before we signed the lease, tallying up how much money each of us had in various accounts. In April 2017, I signed my lease for the Doyle Ave space and drew up a budget for a buildout. I used this money when it came time to build our storefront. Maybe I’d need an escape hatch out of my life. Maybe I’d decide I really needed to travel and see the world, and I had this pool of money. Don’t try picking stocks.) I wasn’t saving with a goal in mind I just didn’t see a reason to spend the money and I knew one day I could use it for something, I just needed to find the right “something”. After 2 years, I had about $70,000 in a savings account, plus various other smaller amounts scattered among brokerage accounts. When I had my corporate job, I was saving about 40% of my take-home pay every month. I only started buying clothes at full price recently. We drive “normal” cars and didn’t buy new ones when the old ones were paid off. We eat out regularly but don’t have expensive taste. Let’s get over this icky feeling when talking about money.) I have never had a lifestyle to match that salary. (Ugh it feels really gauche to put this so openly. I had $3,376 because of my prior job, where I made a salary that is still to me a lot of money, over $100,000 per year. I know this because I tracked it all religiously on a Google sheet. According to my early records, it cost me $3,376 to start Rebelle, spent from the time I started testing recipes (my first expense was a baking stone from Amazon) to our first pop-up on January 22, 2017.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |