Intro

This is a page that I’ve chosen to have as a permanent spot on the web site. It marks a very significant part of my life (about 6 years long) and there were many, many lessons learned from it. Lessons in human nature, all the way to financial lessons.

Certain people may not be thrilled when they read this. I can’t control how other people feel. Having said all that, everything that will be chronicled here, did happen and are my personal feelings about those things.

I will be posting here as I remember things that happened around the bar and because of the bar.

“Rose & Shamrock Cafe” Changes to “Hunny’s Bar & Eatery”

Hunny’s was a bar that we owned for about 5 and a half years. When we bought the bar it was called the “Rose & Shamrock Cafe” with the tag line “Home of Country Music”. Duhh…where’s the congruency? Rose & Shamrock is Irish.  There was little country music being played in this establishment. Needless to say, we changed the name to a more generic, one size fits all, kind of name…”Hunny’s Bar & Eatery”.  The truth is that when we were choosing the new name we decided to mildly copycat the name of a very, very successful hamburger joint, Sonny’s. Thinking that maybe the universe would share some of their good fortune with us because we sounded like them, ha ha.

The universe did not agree with our rationale.

Firs things first. The owner of the bar was a client of mine. I’ve been selling real estate for over 26 years near Toronto, Canada.  I had bought and sold a number of properties for the bar owner. To make a long story short, we ended up buying the bar off of her, gave a certain number of shares to a friend of ours, who became the manager of the bar, as she had experience in that particular bar. So, it’s like we bought her experience by giving her 25% of the company. There is a problem with doing this, though. Unless people put in their own cash that they earned with their sweat, they don’t realize the true seriousness of things. Also, when the doors close and they’ve put nothing in, who loses the investment? Only those who put the cash in, lose. But I can assure you, if there is profit, they will be waiting anxiously for their share. Pretty good deal eh?

So, the bar business started out quite well. We worked like rented mules and grew the sales by roughly 40% in the first year. Everyone was shocked at how well we were doing. Great bands, good food (I mostly ran the kitchen and was experimenting like crazy, especially with chicken.  Trying to duplicate the KFC recipe, which we came pretty close. I also did a lot of chicken wing experimenting. I felt like a scientist in a food lab. Awesome times! ) at that time. We had a great and loyal customer base. A lot of East Coasters would come to Hunny’s. We had a fair number of Newfoundland bands, like Moosestew and Derek Pilgrim. Good times!

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Bar Loses 20K a Month Contract

As I sit down to add more to the Hunny’s Chronicles, I am starting to realize that I could probably write a decent size book about those days. We were green, idealistic and never dreamed of the way it would all turn out.

As I mentioned already we grew the numbers well and that was in spite of losing a very serious source of revenue. Hunny’s was located in a hotel called the Rosetown Inn. This hotel’s reputation stretched all the way from here in Ontario, all the way to Newfoundland. Yup, this was the typical small town hotel with the roughest bar in town. You want hookers, no problem, you want drugs, no problem, you want to meet some bikers, no problem, you want to do some fighting and probably get your butt handed to you, no problem there either.  The Rosetown had everything going for it. Including, everyone that was part of the hotel made money and lots of it!

The hotel owner was/is a shrewd business man. He had a contract with the local social services people (they dealt with the homeless and families who were in domestic strife). When the regular shelter was full, the hotel was the back-up shelter. At any time, there were between 20 & 40 families living in the hotel. Part of the contract meant that they had to be fed. Guess who was sub-contracted to feed these families? You guessed it. The bar (at the time it was still the Rose & Shamrock Cafe). So we took over the bar and were feeding these families for a few weeks, when the hotel lost the contract. We were averaging about 20K per month. It was wiped out over night.

We decided to concentrate on the bar business. Maximizing sales of alcohol and food. We brought in good bands, lots of karaoke and re-vamped the food menu. It was all working pretty well. During this initial period, I was working about 100 hours a week. I loved it! It was truly a labor of love. We all worked hard and tried to make things different to the way things had been ran for the previous 35 years.  The majority of customers liked it, but then of course there was always the handful of nay-sayers that tried to resist change. They would say things like “That’s not the way xxxxx used to do it” or “This is ridiculous, we’re not gonna come back here any more…” They always came back. They ended up liking the new changes. Our changes were good for business. There were people eating there who had never eaten there before. We did some drastic changes to the inside bar menu (we had takeout too) like this platter we called “The Mother of All Platters”  (Thanks Saddam). This thing was a monster of an order, with so much stuff on it, like wings, fries, jalapeno poppers, nachos & salsa, deep fried mushrooms, onion rings, garlic bread and other things that I don’t remember any more, that people did a double-take when a waitress walked by, delivering it to a customer. Regular customers who drank there 7 days a week, who would normally stop off at Sonny’s Hamburgers on their meandering walk home, ended up starting to buy food at Hunny’s.

I felt victorious!

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The Old Hunnys Website

Have a look at our old Hunny’s website. This is just a snap shot of the front page. Boy have websites changed since we started that one in 2002. It is stored at the internet’s website warehouse, archive.org. If you want, go to archive.org and type in hunnys.net. You will get a live working version of the old Hunny’s site

<—————- Click on the picture

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Got Motivated Again!

I’ve just hit another moment of inspiration, where I wanted to share something about Hunny’s. Just remember, this isn’t necessarily chronological. As a matter of fact, it will end up being far from that. I know, I know…it will be hard to follow, bla bla bla. I know the routine. This is the way it is. Hit the back button if you don’t like it….or stick around and have some laughs and learn a thing or two, because I’m going to share with you some of the lessons I learned through the whole Hunny’s Episode.

Greco Pizza comes-a-knockin’

So the manager tells me that this guy Daniel stopped in and was telling her about this franchise sort of deal with an East Coast company called Greco Pizza. I’m thinking to myself…shit…more money to think about spending. But…it made sense. She was pushing for it and I was aware that the demographic that we had at the bar would enjoy it, so I said let’s go for it. For the record, Jacquie and I talked about everything together. So, all decisions were based on me and Jacquie discussing things and having the final say (because it was our money that made things happen, nobody else’s).

So Greco arrives, the ovens get hooked up (no small feat, electricians, 220V, beefing up the electric panel etc. etc..) the pizza table (refrigerated), all the stock, seemed like a thousand different products; almost ran out of refrigeration room. The trainer arrived, to teach us how it all works. We called him Sergeant Bilko. Big guy named Gord. We ended up really liking him (even though he seemed like a hard-ass, at the time. Later, we realized that he was actually a softy…just doing his job). We remain friends today.

The biggest attraction to the Greco name is, DONAIRS. Very similar to the Greek Gyro. Apparently, Donairs are a huge fast-food in the East Coast of Canada…Nova Scotia; New Brunswick and Newfoundland. Not sure about Prince Edward Island.  So, when it was official, we were selling small to large  donairs like crazy. Not to mention, donair pizzas and donair subs. We kept our original menu going too. Once the word got out, we had a fair number of people taking out the Greco food.

We decided to supply a delivery service. I ended up doing most of the deliveries during this time. Later on, we hired other people to deliver. However, during the early days, we were selling over one thousand dollars a night on the weekends. Not bad for a secondary focus…right? Our primary focus was the bar. The problem with the bar was that we paid out so much to people. On a good weekend night (Friday or a Saturday) we would make three thousand dollars. We had to pay bouncers, wait-staff and the band…guess what, we barely broke even. We also had to pay for all the booze and the rent. When you put it all together very little. The manager was paid and me and Jacquie took almost nothing. We lived on my real estate income, primarily (this was all in the first year and a half).

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Non Smoking Bullshit Hits Ontario!

So, here we are, working like hell and pulling in some decent numbers. Everything is looking promising and definitely like we made the right decision. Now, we knew about the non-smoking thing coming down the pike. Everyone was talking about it and speculating about when it would officially kick in. I didn’t want to speculate, so I made some phone calls. For me, it made sense to call the my local health unit. Which, for me, was the Region of Peel Health Unit. I had a lengthy chat with them about the new rules which would be coming into effect and how long it would be before all this became a law. Based on the info I received, it was definitely a few years away before smoking would be banned permanently. On the short term, the date was something like July 1, unless you had a DSR (Designated Smoking Room).

So, we weighed things out and decided to build a DSR for our customers. A few of us guys got together and built the room, itself. I had engineers come in and an architect (because the Region of Peel Health Unit needed special drawings) to approve what we were doing. Finally, they said we could proceed.  Once we had the approval, we worked like hell and built the room. It was over 1000 square feet big. I had a specialty hvac company create the air ventilation system. The hvac company alone, cost me $35,000, no joke. Then I had to get an electrician to create hook up the 600 Volt heater (my close buddy Ken is an electrician and he hooked me up, no pun intended). Many thousands were spent on this heating system, because of the transformer, miles of electric cabling, extra panel, etc. etc. Then there was the materials to build the room, the pay for the people to build the room and the shut down period (huge loss of revenue) while we built the room.

The whole episode cost $110,000 (CDN), which is really ridiculous, when you think about it. The guidelines for the smoking room were beyond necessary. My engineer, who had to adhere to the specs, said that the machinery required to match the required numbers, was going to be unnecessarily expensive. However, we did what we were told and followed their requirements and had the best DSR in town (in my humble opinion).

Rip Down The Room In Ten Months!