We were lucky to catch up with Samantha Phelps recently and have shared our conversation below.

Samantha, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you take vacations? Why or why not?

Having JUST (as in yesterday) come off a vacation, this one seems the most relevant! Since purchasing our business in late 2021, I haven’t taken a true, clock-out vacation since my honeymoon in January 2022. Little weekends here and there, but never totally disconnected and not checking in.

This past week I really tried to disconnect (made all the easier by visiting a very remote part of the country with little cell service and no internet) and I know it did a world of good for my mental health. However, not being able to touch base and support my business partner while she covered my tasks on top of her own left me with feelings of tremendous guilt and anxiety. Every time I did finally manage to get online and update group chats and emails, I saw the mountain of work piling up for me back home, employees pulling fast ones that they would never have tried if I had been around, and fires come up that I couldn’t put out. Having been a very hands-on owner since we bought the business, it was next to impossible to totally turn my brain off and enjoy my time away, but I did my best.

The truth is, burnout is inevitable if you don’t step away from time to time. My only advice is that you’re lucky enough to have a partner you trust implicitly to act on your behalf and that they respect your time away enough to only keep you posted on the most important developments or reach out in an emergency. I’m very fortunate in my business partner, Sara. And know that she has my back when I take time off as I have hers. If you don’t have a partner, you better trust your employee(s) to keep the ship right and disclose any issues with you while you’re gone. While it’s true that nobody will care about your business as much as you will, it will only suffer if you don’t focus on your physical, mental, and emotional needs outside of work.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Samantha Strahan and together with my business partner Sara Chavez, we operate a 7500 sq ft restaurant/bar/live music venue, The Taproom & The Porch, located on San Marcos, TX, historic town square. We’re a full service location that has been serving high end burgers and over 30 draft beers since 1994. Our businesses are Texas State University (TXST) institutions and we offer bingo, trivia, drag shows, live music, open mics, karaoke, and profit-share nights with local non-profits and university student organizations. I fondly like to call the two entities a “two headed dog”, as they share programming, staff, food offerings, and are only separated by a short breezeway in the same building. We purchased the business in late 2021 and have been working to re-introduce the restaurant post-Covid to locals and to university students (TXST is a stone’s throw away from our doors). As new owners, our biggest operational goals were to establish a live music program, and to elevate the offerings the food and beverage offerings to reflect current trends and tastes, but to hold on to the main menu features and atmosphere that people have loved for 30 years.

Sara and I have roughly a combined 30 years of bar, restaurant, and event production under our belts and have worked together numerous times on various projects. In 2020, right before all the lockdowns, we started discussing what it would look like to operate a bar together and began looking for a location. Purchasing a legacy business was never part of our plan (actually, operating a restaurant wasn’t our initial goal), and it certainly has come with unexpected difficulties. Yet, it is rewarding to know that we really are making a proper go of it. Each quarter the business starts to feel more like a reflection of our tastes and goals and less like we’re running someone else’s business.

I’m most proud of the fact that we’re still here! Purchasing a restaurant/bar during Covid was wildly ambitious and we probably might not have gone through with it had we known what was coming our way. Rebranding issues, inflation, wickedly high overhead… we’ve had to jump a lot of hurdles so far, but as we come to a close on year 3 of operating I like to think that we’re starting to hit our stride.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Oh gosh… there are so many, if I’m being honest. The biggest one is probably the idea that money will just start pouring in – ha! We did believe that we might be the industry “exception to the rule” that assumes it takes bars and restaurants 3-5 years to start turning a profit on average. Naively we assumed that since we were purchasing an existing business, we could get into the black within a matter of months. But then inflation. And then a heat wave. And then employee theft. And then a gas line repair… lol, it just doesn’t end.

Now we know that there is NEVER enough money and you can’t always count on previous trends and sales records. If you think you have enough money for a repair, a build out, even just purchasing the business, think again and double it. Triple it! Everything in this high-inflation world costs so much more than we could have imagined.

We purchased this business by the skin of our teeth and truly had no operational runway for getting things going after the sale. We had just enough money to purchase the entity and assets and not a penny more. We’re not independently wealthy and couldn’t dig into our own savings to invest in the necessary updates and repairs that were needed after purchase. So in addition to needing to double our estimate on every project, we also realized we had to double the amount of TIME it takes to execute an update or repair. We’re only two people and hiring “professionals” to do all the handy work is often not financially possible — we’ve had to watch a lot of YouTube videos, figure out how to be our own plumbers, our own A/V techs, our own everything (except for electrical — we don’t mess with that!). And since we’re just two people, sometimes it takes us months to complete a project because other fires need to be put out first. It is hard to get it all done and Sara likes to remind me that the To-Do list is never going to be finished, so don’t try to take it all on at once.

Let’s move on to buying businesses – can you talk to us about your experience with business acquisitions?

We purchased a legacy business, a bar and restaurant operation in a historic downtown, that was initially established in 1994. We are the third ownership group to manage the business. We first viewed the property in early March 2020, due to Covid, it took us several months to sign a contract and drop funds into escrow, and then almost another two years to secure the purchase in November 2021.

There was little to no commercial lender that was willing to work with us giving that this was our first time owning a business, Covid froze most commercial investments, so we were forced to find private funding, which took time and a lot of convincing.

We had a business lawyer look over the sales contract but our big regret now is that we did not have a real-estate lawyer also review our lease and contracts.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.taproomsanmarcos.com
• Instagram: @taproom78666 @theporchsmtx
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/taproom78666, www.facebook.com/theporchsmtx

Image Credits

Photo of band playing, couple toasting with food, and pool players attributable to Christopher Paul Cardoza