Help Royal Oak Coffee Overcome a Devastating Financial Hit

You may have noticed we’ve been uncharacteristically closed several days this past week. Aside from some classic equipment malfunctions after a busy weekend with the eclipse, the closures are mostly due to several other factors, mainly finance and health-related. The tipping point was an unprecedented issue with our Point of Sale system, Square, which has now taken over a week to resolve, with the result that our income from recent sales is inaccessible.

The extent of misfortune and inability to access the support we’ve needed for a long time has reached critical mass and we can no longer scramble enough to make everything work sustainably. As we sit here, contemplating how we can make things work in light of recent and more long-term setbacks, we have decided it’s finally time to reach out and publicly ask for help.

First, a sincere thank you:

In our nearly 5 years here in Middlebury at Royal Oak Coffee, we’ve been so fortunate to have become part of this vibrant community. We are so grateful for both the ever essential, tight-knit battalion of daily regulars as well as a sprawling, interconnected network of beloved friends and devotees around the world.

Given the amount of praise and support we’ve received in those 5 years, we know it seems absurd to find ourselves in the position of having to ask for help. Our struggles since the beginning of the pandemic combined with bad luck with professional financial services have had us in a chokehold, and it has become clear that making a recovery without the help of our community is not going to happen. So, humbly, we have decided to turn to you to ask for direct support.

The shop, employees, and our place in the community, mean everything to us. We obviously don’t want to have to close, but we’re at a point where we can’t keep moving forward without this fundraiser being successful. We have a very difficult time asking for help and always thought one avenue or another would pan out, but we have exhausted our other options and we need to turn things around quickly, so here it goes!

Here’s some background on our long-term struggles:

As we were starting to gain traction in our first year of business, the pandemic hit. This was devastating for many reasons, but we managed to push through with the promise of government grants, small business funding, and loan forgiveness in sight. The cost of doing business began to rise with supply chain issues and inflation and we had to drastically change how we did business to make it all work while keeping our pricing as inclusive and affordable as we could manage.

Additionally, the lockdowns began only a few months after opening our smaller, second location, Lost Monarch (which as many of you know, we had to close last year for financial and health reasons), located within the public market of The Stone Mill downtown. By March 2020, we already had to put that location on hold until it was safer to re-open the market and serve the public face-to-face again. Needless to say, being unable to generate revenue at a location we had just poured money into, plus the obvious challenges of moving to a completely socially distanced ordering/window pick-up model was a huge financial hit in addition to the big changes and overwhelm that came with welcoming our daughter at the end of 2020.

After being essentially abandoned by the financial wing of our operation, things really started to pile up. We worked with a trusted financial professional for a number of years who ended up letting us down, accepting payment for services but then not following through or providing us with enough support to even understand what we could have done differently. When we caught on to the severity of the situation, we reached out to remedy the issue only to find out they had retired and left the state.

Ultimately, we didn’t understand just how much they weren’t actually following through on until it was too late and now we owe a substantial amount in penalties and back taxes. We have subsequently become locked out of several financial programs and opportunities that we should have been able to take advantage of while they were available for things like utilities, property taxes, home repairs, childcare, etc, leading to more debt. We have a new professional we are working with now so we’re ready to move forward but the financial hole this has left us in is now insurmountable.

Looking forward:

Recently, we did a big overhaul of our income and expenses, and can clearly see that the business should be making us enough money to keep going on. However, due to late fees, compounding interest, returned payment/overdraft fees, and recurring payments being constantly deducted daily from our account from loans and repayment plans, we are just falling further behind.

It has become very clear that we’re not going to be able to keep the business running without repairing the damage first. We’ve reduced our business and personal expenses as much as possible, picked up more work where we can, and we have a solid plan to not get into this situation again in the future.

On a personal note, this will also help relieve some of the enormous amount of stress we’re under due to this financial predicament. As many of you know, we are also expecting baby number two any day now, which is only compounding the stress and uncertainty of these times. To say we feel ashamed and terribly embarrassed is the understatement of the century, but we’re completely out of options and just need some help. We know the shop means a lot to so many others, and we know that with your help, we can turn this around and keep operating for years to come.

While we’re completely restructuring everything, we figured this is as good a time as any to ask that anyone who would be interested in facilitating broader changes to our company to please reach out to us. We’ve operated completely independently until now, having invested everything we had into this business, but have always acknowledged that Middlebury is in need of many things we haven’t been able to offer due to lack of funding and our very small physical location. If given the opportunity, we would be honored to prove that we can do even more for our community with some extra help.

We’d also like to extend the warmest and most thorough ‘thank you’ to all our suppliers for being the best at what they do and being so generous and patient with us through the years as we’ve tried to navigate all of this. We may serve the delicious final product, but it’s all of the people we work with behind the scenes making that possible, and it’s much appreciated.

Thank you so much for reading our story and considering offering us some extra support in our time of need. You, as part of our community of customers, supporters, and friends, as well as the shop, mean absolutely everything to us. We want more than anything to keep the shop open; we know it means a lot to many others just as it does for our family. Even if you can’t donate, we’d be grateful if you could help in another way.

You can help us by:

Thanks again and much love always,

Matt & Aless