Something to Read While Waiting on Dinner
What else you gonna do, set the table?
Happy Thanksgiving!
I hope you have some good friends and food plans for today. I happen to be one of those lucky souls that are being taken care of this year, so I haven’t had to deal with any of the turkey shortages stuff. Though, it feels to me like this shouldn’t really be a problem considering how many wild turkey troublemarkers this country has roaming around.
In any case, I’m trusting that you all have found something good to eat. Will you be watching football? Maybe you’ll be watching The National Dog Show boasting America’s greatest sport. Or, maybe you plan to watch the Thanksgiving Day parade? I was about to say that I loved watching it as a kid, but I’m not sure that I did “love” it. But I watched it. There are a lot of commercials, and they always tease some balloon that they won’t actually show for another hour. But the weather is sometimes epic, which is fun because that can cause the balloons to get a little out of control.
I ask because we recently went to Mexico and were there for Zihuatanejo’s Dia de los Muertos celebrations and, of course, it involved a big parade. Prior to going, I looked into traveling to more remote areas of Mexico where the celebrations would be more traditional, but it sounds like many of those destinations become very overcrowded, leaving folks no choice but do things like walk on decorated graves. So we decided to see what Zihua does.
Halloween is turning into a very big deal in Mexico. Everybody dresses up, dogs too, and goes trick-or-treating around the little shops all over town. The costumes were great, and mostly traditional Halloween themed like devils and witches, and for some reason Raggedy Anne and Andy.
The next night was the big parade. There’s something about night parades that makes the whole thing look better I think. There were tons of giant moving Catrinas (lady skeletons) and dance groups doing traditional dances and often holding candles. It was pretty neat and really huge, it lasted for a number of hours. It was also very muggy and as always in Mexico, there were mosquitoes. Oh! Also, the music. There’s this really popular song for the holiday that they blasted a recording of from stereos on repeat the entire night. For your pleasure this is the one:
(By the way, this is a traditional Mexican folk song that tells the story of a woman who drowned her kids in order to be with her lover.)
Business Plan
Just wrapped up the “key assumptions” section of the financial forecast. Phew, this section was heavy. Not only is it possibly the only part of the plan that will be read (some folks are skimmers, you know?) but it describes the method we used to make all our projects and why we think this is a project that deserves investment. I ended up being pretty long-winded, which I always try to avoid. My instructions were to “craft the story behind the numbers” because readers will be able to review all the financial tables themselves, but the examples the program provided didn’t do that. I wrote the whole thing up first with lots of wordy explanations and with next to no hard numbers, before I looked at those examples. (I’ve been trying to look at the examples only after I’ve already written something up, in order to avoid sounding exactly like them.) The examples were devoid of any explanation as to how they came up with their revenue assumptions, and what they did include were gross margins and revenue calculations. So I decided to do both, and I think I found a way to sneak in all our gross margins and production estimates without it being too awkward. I won’t be surprised if a reviewer says it should be condensed, but we’ll see. Our method for creating revenue estimates is possibly pretty unique and so a thorough explanation might be warranted.
Our estimates are based off of Google’s “Popular Times” graph. If you don’t already use it, you might want to, I find it really helpful. When you search for a business on Google, it comes up on the right hand side of the screen under the businesses open hours. It shows you the average length of a visit, how busy the place currently is, as well as how busy it typically is at any hour of the week. This is done using everyone’s cell phone data; if you have a cell phone on you and you enter a business, Google immediately “knows” that you’re there and how long you stay. By searching businesses like what Jötunn Ciderhouse will be, (and visiting and discretely counting chairs), we were able to get an idea of how busy theses places tend to be. This was so incredibly helpful this year, because I could quickly see that all our original projections would now be way off, especially in our area. As our friend said, it’s starting to feel a bit a like New York around here.
I also included what our biggest expense will be. That’s easy. The build-out. That’s plumbing, electrical, getting the flooring right, I mean it’s gotta be able to withstand some real heavy equipment and lots of liquids (no carpet please!). Any guesses on the price tag? $110 a square foot, plus everyone says if you don’t overestimate by bit, it’ll be an underestimation, so grand total it’ll cost us $440,000. This doesn’t include any equipment, tables and chairs, shelving, lighting, or what I really care about, sound buffers so everyone doesn’t go deaf. This price tag could really go down though if we manage to find a space that has some of the components we need, so it really depends. I think we have to assume though that we won’t be starting with much of a ciderhouse.
The potential for all of it to be quickly paid back however is real. All of Seattle’s new apartments and condos seem impossibly small. There’s hardly room in many of these spaces for a closet let alone a friend or two. That, combined with the fact that a lot of folks are working from home, means that spaces to chill are in demand right now. Plus, our ciders taste great, obviously, they’ll be affordable, and one of the only organic ciders. Besides, the margins look good.
Next I have just a little more to write. Mostly on financing. Shouldn’t take too long, and then I can start revisions! Yay!
Homebrew
We started a new batch of cider! I am so excited, I’ve been waiting to do this. Normally the weather is cool enough that we can make cider in our apartment by mid-September. This year it was way too hot. It only became cool enough this month and then we had to wait for our yeast to arrive in the mail. Now it’s happily fermenting. I’ve been thinking of new recipes I want to try, and we’re also going to try leaving out an ingredient that may not be necessary with this yeast strain.
We’ll keep you up to date with how that goes in the next newsletter. Thanks as always for staying and following along with us. We really appreciate it. Have a great holiday and take care.
I know it’s late, but this is an excellent Day of the Dead song:
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