Contradictions!

Ok, so my last blog in March claimed that I wouldn't "do my dirty washing in public" but is that not the whole point of a blog? An opportunity to get things off of one's chest which is only really likely to be read by one's closest friends and by those that actually give a stuff?
Since October '09 I have known that my business was in a pretty desperate state and have put up with so many other things that many would have given up long ago.
But that's not my style. Instead, I buckled down and did my best to make things better. I took someone on to put my paperwork in order and have tolerated their sporadic visits in return for a huge amount of positive work being done. I coped with my chef quitting with 24 hours' notice and so, became a chef myself overnight, albeit with a huge amount of support from the excellent Mick Poole.
I culled my staffing levels at the same time and commited myself to a vast number of hours over the busy Christmas period during which I had to sack two key staff members for giving away my stock to their friends. I won't mention the cash thing as I cannot categorically prove it but I know.
The slight boost of a busy two weeks was immediately swallowed up by the coldest, snowiest January of a generation and it cost me £200 a week to heat the pub for the few hardy punters that dared step out in the conditions.
As the weather eased the stress levels didn't. Another chef came and went, this time with a weeks' notice which at least enabled me time to breathe.
Throw in the fact that my body decided to tell me what my head wouldn't listen to and an ankle that decided to become so inflamed as to not allow me to walk on it and you might have thought that it was time to raise the white flag!


In amongst, and despite of, all of these difficulties I was actually receiving some excellent feedback from those that WERE coming including a huge double sitting of 69 people on Mothers Day which was entirely repeat custom and achieved without advertising. So a place on the "Best of Oswestry" website was earned and some excellent new friends made via Twitter including a "TweetUp" that I was able to host at the Punch.
Too little too late to save my business one suspects. I'm spinning around the plug hole so to speak but will continue to maintain the standards I have set myself until it is no longer possible to do so.

The company that owns the pub and from whom I rent it for the princely sum of £32k + vat p/a have put it on the pub leasehold market as I am wholly unable to meet their rental demands. Let's not even discuss the other debts :( Needless to say, the public marketing of the pub has had it's own negative effect on business.
On top of this I have had to put up with a small group of small minded people who have no idea about the concept of running a business. All they can see is what they want to see and think they can do what they want to do. In my pub. A two year battle of wills has culminated in a couple of them being barred. So they took it upon themselves to tell a whole rafe of other people that they were barred too.... They waited until they new I wouldn't be in the pub to really up the ante of their disrespectful behaviour and involved a whole bunch of other people too. Police got called, people got arrested, all entirely unnecesarily.
Even now, I still can't help but hold up a hand of responsibility. The ringleaders should have been barred a long time ago and that is down to me. Hey ho, one can only live and learn as I have from all of my mistakes.

So the long and the short of it is, I won't be the "landlord" of the Punch for all that much longer. Trust Inns must find a new tenant and assuming my creditors don't "call me in" before then I will remain here up until that point, doing my best to reduce those debts in the meantime.
I don't regret anything save my blind belief in the general "goodness" of people. I treat people with respect and trust and expect the same in return. To be so repeatedly let down has been a disappointment that certainly my business won't recover from. As for the pubcos, theirs is a broken model for as long as they remain unable or unwilling to alter the way they go about their business. I don't dispute that bad housekeeping has been one of my biggest problems. But £723/week rent has always been the biggest problem and that could have been changed to reflect the market as a whole.

Now I must use my creative and imaginative skills to carve out a new niche for myself, to find a "proper" job and to find a sensible route into the future. See you along the way.....