The next step in preparing Fenster for the crisis was working with our suppliers. To start, we eliminated every single expense except the truly essential ones—the ones without which we simply could not operate. Everything else that could be postponed into the future—we postponed, like the new printer.
All obligations whose payments could be delayed were renegotiated, and the payments pushed forward—coffee beans and so on.
Another huge help—we reached an agreement with our landlord that we would not pay rent for two months, and instead spread that amount out evenly across the rest of the year in monthly installments. This worked. It saved us about €12,000 in total.
Of course, we still had to pay all invoices for construction and renovation work, as well as for the installation of pipes at the roasting facility (and those were not cheap—they were very expensive). Those had to be paid. If an invoice was issued, it needed to be paid—there was no discussion. The hard part was that some suppliers issued their annual invoices, which meant several very large lump sums of €10,000–12,000 at once. Painful. But we paid them.
At the same time, we were almost at the final stage of manufacturing two new machines for the roasting facility, for packaging coffee. The project cost: many tens of thousands of euros. Under normal circumstances, this would not have been a problem. We had expected to accumulate the required sum over several months. But now, that looked very uncertain.
What to do was unclear. Especially since we had already paid 30% of the equipment’s cost. In the end, the problem solved itself almost by accident: long holidays in China and the need for some final modifications to the machines before shipping delayed everything long enough for us to catch up and manage it.
It is worth noting that almost every day we made lists of our obligations, reviewed them, thought about how to postpone, restructure, or cancel certain contracts, and so on. Every day we tried to resolve things as quickly and painlessly as possible.
In the end, this taught us a lot. But almost immediately, we made similar mistakes again. Well—some lessons you need to go through twice.
And of course—salaries, taxes, leasing payments, and ingredients for drink preparation were always paid immediately. Yes, you can negotiate even these if necessary, but those are the very last things you want to touch.
Of course, we understood that eventually we would have to pay everything. And of course, we were somewhat prepared for it. But there are reasons why it all still became such a problem. And those reasons—we will talk about in the final episode that sums up this whole situation.
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