2 · Taking over

The morning everything became mine

We were standing in the restaurant when he told me. Thirteen years we'd worked together by that point — not here, but going back to the place before this one, the one he'd pulled me out of to come build this with him. So when he said he was leaving and I was taking over, it didn't land like news from a boss. It landed like something closer to family telling you they're not going to be there anymore. I don't remember the exact words. I remember the floor we were standing on, and the specific, physical feeling of every piece of this place suddenly being mine to hold.

What I inherited wasn't a business that needed fine-tuning. It was a business in genuine trouble. Suppliers hadn't been paid in a while. We were badly behind on rent — not a missed month, a real backlog. Taxes hadn't been paid for months. There wasn't one fire. There were several, all burning at once, and no order of operations handed to me along with the keys.

There was a financial advisor in the picture, someone who was supposed to be helping. In one of our sessions he walked me through how to build the staff schedule — take last year's revenue for that same week, apply a 35% budget against it, account for tax and pension on top. I already did this. I'd been doing it since before he sat down to explain it to me. Sitting there, listening to him teach me something I was already living, I understood exactly what these meetings were worth to me: nothing added, nothing gained. That was the moment I stopped waiting for help that wasn't going to arrive, and started trusting that I already knew how to do this.

So we went at all of it at once, starting with whoever could hurt us fastest. I got in touch with the contractor who'd built out part of the space — he still needed paying, and that wasn't a relationship I could afford to lose. I called the landlord and worked out a payment arrangement for the rent, in installments we could actually keep. I sat down with the tax office and did the same. The bookkeeper had a stack of open invoices, and I went through them one by one, deciding who needed paying first and who could wait without the relationship breaking.

Underneath all of that, I changed how I ran the place day to day. I worked more hours myself so we could bring staff costs down without gutting the team. I took over ordering completely and got strict about it — nothing we didn't need, stock as lean as it could go without running out mid-service. None of it was clever. It was paying attention to every euro, every day, for months.

It took two to three months before we could see it working. Liquidity improved. We started making real profit for the first time in a long while. And then, slowly, over the following weeks, I noticed something I hadn't expected: the profit wasn't really landing anywhere. Almost everything we made went straight back out the door to the suppliers we still owed. We were profitable and empty-handed at the same time — proof it was working, with nothing yet to show for the fact that it was.

There wasn't a single day I could point to and call the turning point. It built up slowly, the way the realization about the profit did — one supplier paid off, one installment cleared, a few weeks later noticing the number was a little less bad than before. That's probably the most honest way to describe it: not a moment where it flips, just enough weeks stacked on top of each other that eventually you look back and see that it moved.