The other day I opened my fridge and suffered an olfactory assault. It wasn't the worst mystery odor I’d ever smelled, but it was pretty bad. I hadn’t noticed anything the day before, so it seemed to have come on fast and strong. 

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me what was causing the smell, but it could have been a couple things — all of which I’ll blame on my husband, since he’s the only one who cooks for a family of six when there are only three of us at the table. So the only thing to do was to proceed with the unpleasant #adulting task of sniffing everything until you find the culprit. It was the leftovers in the Dutch oven.

I won’t attempt to pathologize why my brain doe...

Top on the list of New Business Misconceptions is “you should never sign a personal guaranty.” It sits right up there with “I can’t make a budget until I find the space” and “I won’t need to pull permits.” The personal guaranty has a bad reputation partly because it is, in fact, a little scary; but for small businesses, it’s incredibly common and often inevitable, no matter what the local celeb chef told you in between bench presses.

⚖️ Quick reminder here — although Abby grew up with two attorneys as parents, and I’m deeply familiar with the South Carolina justice system thanks to the Murdaugh Murders Podcast, we’re not actually attorneys, and this is not legal advice. 

Okay, consid...

We all know that Ben Franklin was right about death and taxes, but there’s another certainty of life that he left out. If I could Bill and Ted my way back to the 1790’s (no thanks), I think he’d agree that when you want something is rarely when you can have it...if you can have it at all. 

Obviously I’m not talking about anything money can buy, since you can buy anything on the internet and have it within 2-3 business days. But for the big stuff that really matters --  security, health, relationships -- as hard as we will something into existence, we have limited control. 

All we can do is dig deep and have hope and patience. Well, that’s exactly what Cara and Travis Loving did.

 ...

Percentage rent has a PR problem. It’s right up there with the personal guaranty on the list of concepts retailers love to hate... but should it be? The initial feeling of “oh haaaale no” is tough to overcome, but just like colonoscopies and unmedicated childbirth, once you learn how it really works, it’s not as bad as it sounds…in fact, a lot of people do it willingly.

💡 ICYMI there are two types of percentage rent. One is where the rent payment is a set percentage of revenues each month instead of a fixed base rent. Tenants love this, and they should. We’re talking about the other percentage rent – where above a certain threshold, a tenant pays some additional rent on top of their r...

If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ll know that there’s a solid 50% chance that I’ll have written this on a train, and a 10% chance that I’m going to use one of my favorite podcasts to make a point about real estate. Well, today’s no exception. 

I actually only have three true favorite podcasts. I already wrote Acquired a month ago. The second is about the Murdaugh murders*, and I haven’t yet found a not-completely-inappropriate way to relate that topic to real estate. But the third one continues to deliver gems.

So the moment I listened to episode #2 of The Rest is History’s four-part series on Greek myths, this newsletter was bursting fully-formed like Athena from Zeus...

I’m sure I’ve told you before about my favorite podcast Acquired. I won’t bore you with all the reasons I love it, but I will say this – I am a superfan. I listen to old episodes (IKEA, Costco and Rolex are some of my faves), and I listen to new ones as soon as they drop. I own the merch, and I belong to their Slack channel where other nerds fans like me discuss the show and all sorts of related topics. 

So you can bet that when the (second, ever) live event at Radio City Music Hall was announced for July 15th, I blocked off the date in my calendar. And when tickets went on sale in early May, your girl snagged front row seats. I was so excited to go, and when Abby wasn’t available to join m...

What did we all do before memes? How did we express ourselves so pointedly? I suppose we’ve always been doing this, and I have a vague recollection from Latin 2 that people were etching sick burns on columns in the Roman forum.

Anyhow, I saw a perfect small business meme the other day:

EBITDA: Earnings before insomnia, therapy, depression and anxiety.

Lollllll. 

No shade if you don’t get the joke. EBITDA really stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, and it’s basically a calculation of profitability before all the complicated tax and accounting finagling. 

If you DO get the joke, it feels spot on.

When my restaurant closed in 20...