In 2017, two bright-eyed cousins bought a restaurant together.
We’ve referenced it before in our other posts, in our heated blog posts against inedible garnishes, in our recipes and lists of recommended kitchen equipment, but we’ve never told our entire story about how we became owners of the Bear’s Paw Café in Wells, BC.
The year: 2016. I (Jen) had just flown out to Toronto to interview for a midwifery program. Amber was selling Chrysler cars on Vancouver Island. While we were close growing up, different paths separated us for most of our twenties. Something (fate, destiny, a very persuasive and relentless family member) was about to push us back together.
I remember being in the Big Smoke, walking to my interview in new shoes that tore at my heels and wondering why on earth I was going to spend four years in this god-awful zoo. My gut screamed no. By the time I had cleaned the blood from my feet in the bathroom at the University, I had made up my mind. And when they asked me that quintessential interview question, “Why do you want to be a midwife?”, I had no good answer.
By the time I had flown back to British Columbia, Amber was on board and plans were in place. We were buying the Bear’s Paw Café, a seasonal summer restaurant in Amber’s hometown of Wells. Her parents (my aunt and uncle) had owned the place for the previous 15 years and were looking to sell. We both threw together our life savings and all my school money as a deposit, and took out a sizeable loan from an alternative lender who we managed to convince to trust us. Then we spent the summer of 2016 learning how to run the business from the two people who had built it from scratch.
I’ll spare you the struggle of trying to work with family members for another day.
2017: Open for Business
In 2017, we officially became the new owners of the Bear’s Paw Café. We were nervous, excited, naïve, and so eager to make it our own. The Wells summer tourism seasons were usually short and sweet, bursting with visitors coming to visit the nearby heritage site, paddle the Bowron Lake Park chain of lakes, or hike our mountains.
We re-painted and reorganized the space during the day and spent evenings developing new menu items to make it truly our own.
Looking back, those four years feel like a fever dream.
Our first summer flew by in a haze of wildfire smoke and late nights. Our naïveté was quickly staunched when wildfires consumed the Cariboo in our second month of business, pushing our region into a darkness of wildfire smoke, highway closures, and zero tourists coming in. Sales plummeted by 80% overnight. We swept ash off our patio before dinner service each night, packed our cars with emergency kits, and checked the wildfire maps six times a shift. We watched as lightening storms struck the town and lit the mountainside on fire. It was a struggle to give our staff the hours they needed, and we slowly cut back our service to a skeleton crew to provide food to the community.
By the time we closed in September, we were physically and emotionally done. We closed for the season and went back to our homes, working multiple jobs to scrape up enough money to cover our losses from the summer.
2018
Here’s something I learned in retrospect: don’t say “the province can’t burn down a second year in a row”. It definitely can. 2018 brought another year of record heat, no rain, and more wildfires. We watched in horror as communities around us burned. People lost their homes, their businesses, their livestock. It was devastating to watch. We limped through another season, using the knowledge from the previous year to guide our decisions. We pivoted, we cut, we budgeted every penny, we did some creative marketing. When we didn’t go bankrupt, it felt like a large achievement.
Tourism is a fickle beast. The experts we connected to through our business estimated it would be a five year recovery to our tourism-based economy from the effects of the wildfires in our region. People were scared to visit, and the loss of surrounding supporting businesses impacted us all.
It sounds so dire in retrospect, but there was good that happened in those two years. Amber and I got some intense hands-on experience in how to continuously adapt our business with the changes in traffic. We learned to be resourceful, flexible, and resilient. We felt the support and care of our community, and we grew our ties with other businesses in the area.
2019: The Bear’s Paw Café Pivots
Big changes came in 2019 when we bought a tiny food truck and parked it beside our restaurant. We transitioned from doing a full dinner service every night to quick service burgers and fries out of the truck. Then we turned the inside of the restaurant into a café with fresh baking, sandwiches and espresso.
We wanted to make these changes, but also we had to. We didn’t have the staff to continue to run a full dinner service every night, and even if we did find any, we didn’t know if we could afford to pay them. Treating our staff well was always a number one priority for us, and during those wildfire years it killed us to cut their hours as business dwindled. We often overstaffed the restaurant as to not have an impact our employee’s hours, at our own expense. But after two years of it, we needed to start making a wage ourselves.
Amber and I worked 14 hours a day that summer of 2019. We cooked, we served customers, we mopped and we did town runs and prep on our “day off”. It was the hardest we’d ever worked and it felt great. We were making amazing loaded burgers and hand-cut fries out at the food truck. Inside, our lunch business was soaring, and we were selling paninis and lattes faster than we could make them. We were exhausted and exhilarated.
Winter in Wells
Coming off the high of that summer, I chose to stay in Wells for the winter and see what business would be like in the off season. I opened the café on weekends by myself. On Saturday mornings, I would get up way too early to bake cinnamon buns. I made homemade soups, sandwiches and cakes. The pellet stove and hot coffee was so inviting as the northern winter set in, and I loved having the slower pace to really get to know the people who called Wells home year-round. Locals would drop by to chat with me, and it became a place you knew you could visit and find your friends curled up with a latte by the fire. It was everything I dreamt the place could be.
The Bear’s Paw Café did some pretty neat things that winter, including a four-course dinner at Christmas, catering two weddings, and building an igloo on the patio to dine in, complete with cocktails and charcuterie.
And as I sat with Amber on New Year’s Eve and the clock hit midnight, we cheers-ed to 2020 being the best year ever coming for our little café.
2020
I don’t need to get into the details of what 2020 brought for our business.
But as I looked at Amber at the end of August 2020, as she struggled to climb up into the food truck carrying a large cambro cube of fries while navigating a six-month pregnant belly in the small space, I just knew we couldn’t keep at it. We were broke and tired, and didn’t know how long the pandemic was going to last. She had some big life changes happening with her new baby, and I knew in my gut that it was time to call it quits. We weren’t eligible for a lot of the financial help coming out at the time, and by the time we were, it was too late. We could have taken on more debt to get by, but to what end?
The food service industry is tough. On average, restaurants make a 5% profit after expenses. It is very easy for that profit margin to swing into the negative with sudden steep fluctuations in revenue or without a tight rein on expenses. Most restaurants don’t last five years, and during the pandemic they closed in record numbers. We are lucky we didn’t have to declare bankruptcy, but it was a serious consideration for us for awhile.
I will always be proud of what we did with the Bear’s Paw Café with the cards we were dealt. We made some really great food and served a lot of happy customers. I will always value the lessons we learned, and I’m thankful I was able to put them to use when I opened my next food truck and coffee shop.
It’s okay to fail, and it’s okay to say, “this isn’t working for me” and to let it go. Coming to terms with that has been the most comforting lesson learned from the Paw. I mean, I’m also happy I learned to install an ignitor on my stove, and plumb in a dishwasher, and use a fire extinguisher, and build a pergola, but the best experience was learning how to fail.
If this is interesting subject matter to you, read more of our thoughts and advice about running a small business here.
Thanks for reading about our journey!
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