I owned a bar in Augusta Georgia many years ago.
What happened to the bar? Was it sold? Why? Just curious.
As it likely is with many such ventures. There were 4 of us owners. The 3 original owners thought they had a great idea...let's bring some awesome live bands to the downtown bar scene (like Athens, GA...like 6th street in Austin, etc.). One was in the music business, the other worked for the newspaper and the other owned the restaurant right next door to the place they purchased. They fixed it up, put about $150k into it and made it very cool (turned a Goodwill into a bar).
The restaurant owner's franchise had a problem with him owning a business right next door selling drinks so he had to sell his shares. A buddy of mine and myself came in as silent owners for $25k each.
The main problem is that we just didn't have the revenue to keep the bar going. The reason for that is manyfold.
The bands we could get were bands passing from Atlanta to Columbia, SC...stopping in our little shithole town during the week as a cheap gig.
To pay for the bands we let them charge a cover at the door and keep all of the money from the door while we made money on drinks.
No other bar downtown charged a cover, so coming to the door and someone asking for $5 to come inside the bar tended to result in people just moving on to the bar a few doors down with cheaper drinks and no cover.
The bands we could get were from every style. Country one night, goth the next night, rock the next night...it made it difficult to have a core group of people that would come to the bar all the time. We had to take what we could get.
The bar was situated in such a way that the front room and the back room had a bar, the back room had the live music but if you passed by the place it looked empty even if there was a band with a lot of people watching. Nobody wants to go out and party and sit in an empty bar.
The owners couldn't spend as much time watching over the bar any more. The newspaper guy got a promotion to editor, the other guy had a baby and was home with his wife all the time.
We didn't really have a bar manager as the owners had been filling that role early on. We just had a head bartender and she was robbing us blind.
I was in Iraq, doing what I could for the bar by maintaining the website.
But ya, in the end we had a $2000 per month rent bill due, a $2,000 per month power bill (mainly for the A/C) and hardly any revenue.
We got big funds when we had big bands like Buckcherry and such but those were few and far between, they would bring in a few thousand dollars for the night but that was it. Most nights were about $20-$100.
In the end we were happy to sell the whole bar for $10,000 because we were bleeding money and likely would not have been able to afford the next rent bill.
I think a wise business practice would be to buy a business that just started about 2 years prior. The founders had an idea, they raised some funds and executed the idea, they got the high of finally having their dream business...then that's it. You have other dreams, life moves on with different things. Your dream isn't as great as you thought it would be. Everyone's ready to sell. At that point, buy them out and get it on the cheap. I believe Mitt Romney's business was based around that but at a bigger scale.
It worked out for me though, I met my first wife thanks to owning the bar (we met right before I went out to Iraq).
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