Almost a month has past since my last entry. You may wonder what we’ve been up to… First, we’ve been visiting as many craft breweries as possible and are of course return customers to our favorites. In the past two weeks, we’ve been to King Street, Midnight Sun and Seward Brewing Company. We’ve had some great tips from the owners and have had the pleasure of sharing some really good beer. While not drinking good beer, we’ve been working fulltime day jobs and working the brewery plans at night.
Here’s where we are… our business plan is being modified again for submission to the SBA. Our banker put us in touch with a great service through the LSBDC Greater New Orleans and Bayou Region. This non-profit helps small businesses and banks alike get their ducks in a row for paperwork submission to the SBA free of charge. There are some pay for service programs out there that do the same; I recommend starting with your local organization. Of interest, we only found out about this service through our bank, the SBA people failed to mention this to us when we spoke with them.
Outside of the business plan and financing, Mark has put together a rather extensive list of permits that we need to obtain and we’re working our way through them one at a time. Our first win was with the Louisiana Department of Revenue approval so now we’re waiting on the TTB and working with the City of New Orleans to get our occupancy approval.
Our architect is working on the engineering design for the taproom and brewhouse layout and associated mechanical work. We has originally thought we were going to have to tunnel through the building’s existing slab but we’ve talked with several brewery owners and have decided to build our brewing platform / sump area on top of the existing slab. We believe that this will save us some big dollars without impacting our operations.
There are some hurdles ahead but we think we’ve got a pretty good plan in place to work through them or work around them. All in all, we’re making progress but it’s slower than we expected. It will be great when we’ve finally resolved all of our design and engineer work and begin construction.
That’s all for now y’all and cheers to that,
Karen
