You'll See Why...
So here we are on the eve of Columbia’s Stay-At-Home order that starts tomorrow and goes until April 24th. GOODNESS. That sounds so very far away, doesn’t it?
After a thorough read thru of the city’s order, I was relieved to find that PJP is exempted from a full closure since we offer both carryout and curbside pickup options. And so nothing really changes for PJP moving forward…(except really, everything changes for everyone because nothing is normal for anyone right now).
So let’s talk honestly about all the tough business decisions that entrepreneurs are going through right now. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can tell you a bit about how it went down at PJP this morning:
Once we were cleared to stay open, we made a list of all of our current monthly expenses over the past three months and averaged those to get a good idea of what April might look like with expected expenses. And then we divided that by the number of days in April to figure out just how much we need to make per day to breakeven in April and keep everyone employed.
And then I texted every person on our payroll (and at this point, it isn’t many) to see who would be willing to continue to work in light of the stay-at-home announcement. We immediately lost three employees, cutting us down to eight for the April schedule. Gah. Is hiring during a pandemic weird? Feels weird.
Next we did the math of the things that would be due if we closed for the next month, removing food cost and payroll cost. This gave us a good sense of how much we would lose by just laying low and waiting for the stay-at-home order to expire.
All of that helped us decide that PJP will stay open, with our daily breakeven number foremost in everyone’s minds. And if we hit a trend of several days where that breakeven number is impossible to meet, then we will have a team meeting and figure out what to do next. I realize that this all sounds like it was an easy decision making process, but I promise it wasn’t. My left eye has twitched all day from stress. (Also, Sonic took their diet green tea off the menu and I get diet green tea every single day. WHAT ELSE, WORLD?)
And then we tried to just be our normal selves, just extra handsanitized and markedly less caffeinated. In case you are curious, we cleared the hurdle for today and met our goal. There’s one day down…30 to go.
On the upside, while our closest Starbucks is closed, we created PJPBucks and Emma and Anna decorated me a cup so it felt authentic and I de-stressed a bit. I didn’t pass up the opportunity and you’ll see why…(so cute!)
