We did not lose money in those final years.
The café was busy right up until we closed. The customers kept coming. The team kept showing up. We kept the standards where they needed to be and we did not let anyone see what was happening underneath.
We just kept going. Because that was what we knew how to do.
What it cost us was not on the profit and loss statement. It never is.
The kids were young.
There were moments I missed that I will not get back. Not dramatic ones. The ordinary ones. Dinner at the table without my mind already running through tomorrow's prep. Weekends that were actually weekends. Being present in a way that physical presence alone does not cover.
We could not go anywhere far in case the café needed us. Trips that did not happen. Plans that did not get made because making plans felt irresponsible when the business depended on us being available.
Friends and family learned not to expect too much. Not because we did not want to be there. Because we were always somewhere else even when we were in the room.
The body keeps score whether you pay attention to it or not.
Customers started recommending their physios and chiropractors. Lovely gesture. We never got the chance to go. There was no time to get the injuries properly checked, no space in the week for a specialist appointment, no version of stepping away for an afternoon that did not cost something somewhere else.
We started fixing the physical damage after we closed. One appointment at a time. Appointments that had been put off for years finally happening because we finally had the hours to go to them.
That is what running a business on borrowed energy actually looks like at the end of it. Not a dramatic collapse. Just a very long list of things you did not take care of because the business always came first.
Mentally it was draining in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has not been inside it.
We did not want to let anyone down. Not the customers. Not the staff. Not the suppliers who depended on our orders. Not the regulars who had made us part of their routine. So we kept showing up with the same energy and the same warmth and the same standards, carrying everything underneath without showing it.
I do not regret that. I still miss the place. I miss the customers and the team and the work itself. Looking back now the feeling is not bitterness. It is something closer to grief for what it could have been if we had known then what we know now.
Because here is the truth that took me years to understand.
We were not in the wrong business. We were in the right business with the wrong plan.
If we had understood from the beginning how to build something transferable, how to document what we knew, how to structure the finances for a sale rather than a tax return, how to read a lease before signing it, how to build systems that did not depend on us never stopping, the story might have ended differently.
We might still be there, running a business that worked without taking everything from us. Or we might have walked away from it on our own terms with something real to show for all those years of work..
Instead we learned all of it afterwards. Through closed doors and specialist appointments and courses and hours of research and conversations with people who had been through it.
The lessons came. They were just expensive ones.
Every year you run a business without building toward something better is a year the window gets smaller.
Not always because the revenue drops. Sometimes the business keeps performing right up until it cannot anymore. But the lease gets shorter. The fit out gets older. The owner gets more tired. The staff who have been there longest start to wonder what comes next. The energy that held everything together starts to cost more than it used to.
The cost of waiting is not always visible on a spreadsheet. Sometimes it shows up in the body. Sometimes it shows up in the relationships that quietly suffered. Sometimes it shows up in the moment you realise you could have left two years earlier with something to show for it, and instead you are closing the door with nothing except the lessons.
Those lessons are valuable. I would not trade them.
But I would rather you learned them from reading this than from living it.
Next edition: You own the venue. Why can’t you switch off?
If any part of this felt familiar, if you recognised the cost in your own life before you saw it on paper, hit reply. That conversation is exactly why this newsletter exists.