eat local

In celebration of Eat Local Month we are sharing this post from Olive – an urban dive (originally posted on their Facebook page).

it’s a sunny day to share some stats! 2012 Olive financial report! Olive runs on a strictly cash basis, all our farmers/bakers/purveyors are paid COD, cash on delivery (or check) and our larger suppliers are paid once a week, also COD. We will be debt free by August if not before!!!!

we do local and here are some ballpark numbers to prove it!
of the $142,000 we spent on food/beverage products in 2012, $76,400 went directly to local farmers and purveyors pockets, that grew or made the product here, another $46,000 went to local, independent shops and purveyors that purchased import products (fish accounts for almost half of that, veggies and fruits we can’t get here, or produce grown by others that we can’t prove without a doubt was grown locally, though we know a good portion of it was)

we paid our staff over $170,000 (and another $42,000 in matching taxes) and since most of our staff buy and support local too, most of that went right back into our local economy! Over $4000 in donations of gift certificates, food or services were given to local charities and events, and we gave just under $4,000 in cash discounts back to our guests for not using credit cards! (we lost over $9,000 to credit card fees!)

we spent over $15,000 with local service companies (Morgans/MegaCity/Progressive Refrigeration/various local hood cleaning/etc.) and $12,000 with local, independent equipment and smallwares suppliers (Bushongs/Gem City Key Shop/Arrow Wine/Belmont Party Supply)

and… drumroll please… we paid off $22,000 in promissory notes, put $6,000 back into our building and made a 4.8% net return all told!

From our research, successful restaurants in Ohio from $100k-$1M in sales typically return 3-5% (and for us there’s no alcohol sales to save us any errors!!) so we’re really running tight (that profit would practically all be gone if we didn’t do all our own social media, marketing, website building, ad design, printing, accounting, farm wrangling, most of our own maintenance and spent more than we had to on anything or bought fun stuff before we had the cash and therefore added interest payments).

it’s a ‘by the seat of our pants and sweat of our brow’ win! Of course, Kimberly will now have to pay income taxes on that small net gain, and it never really leaves Olive so it’s a tight game! yes… think twice before opening a restaurant people! if you don’t love it, don’t do it! … but we do love it and we’re pretty proud of the amount we’ve been able to put into our farmer’s pockets, so they in turn could buy more cows, turn some more land over, buy some more chickens, or just buy something locally made for themselves or go out to dinner at a local restaurant… oh, and pay more taxes. 😉

so thank you!!! to everyone who has supported our little dive by dining with us, sharing posts, spreading the word, writing a nice blog or review on yelp, urbanspoon or trip advisor, for bringing new guests to experience our little dive, to every old and new independent business that chose downtown to plant their business, to all the employees that work and then play downtown, and to everyone that supports anything downtown or independent anywhere… it takes the impact of all of us dreaming, jumping, investing and spending our money here, separately and as a community, to make even one little 28 seat diner actually work! have an awesome day out there and remember it’s First Friday so enjoy downtown tonight!!! and thanks again!

Editors Note:  You can visit Olive at the corner of Third and Wayne downtown, but you’ll want to make a reservation- this place is packed most of the time!  Call 937-222-DIVE (3483).  And yes, they offer gluten free, paleo, vegetarian and vegan meals!