When will the Chairs come down and the Doors open again?

My interview with Rich Moore, Owner of Shanahan’s Food & Spirits

Question: What is the name of your business and what do you offer to our community?
Answer: My name is Rich Moore owner and founder of Corner Clubhouse Bar & Grill Inc., DBA Shanahan’s Food & Spirits. We are a full service restaurant, bar with 6 video gaming machines. We are located at 1999 W. 7th Street, Woodridge, Illinois. We are located on the Southeast corner of 75th St and Woodward Avenue. We have been in business for 20 years and just celebrated our anniversary. We have 10 employees and like many restaurants in our area have experienced the best year we have ever had in 2019. Things have really changed in 2020!

Question: May I ask you how the corona virus has impacted your business?
Answer: We are an Irish Pub and had to cancel our St. Patricks’ Day celebration which is our biggest day of the year. Since that time we had to furlough 7 of our 10 employees and rely upon carry out and curbside pick up to support our monthly expenses. It is difficult to compete against fast food carry out, therefore we have seen minimal sales which does not offset our fixed expenses.

Question: Please tell me what is your biggest struggle at this time?
Answer: Our biggest struggle is that we have fixed expenses which occur every month and not enough revenue to pay the routine bills. Another struggle is that our local bank did not process our Payment Protection Program (PPP) application on the "first-come, first-serve" basis. Even though we had an 18 year banking relationship with our bank. I can further elaborate on this during our interview.

Question: What makes your restaurant different from others in our community?
Answer: We are known as a community gathering place. Over the years we have served our community by holding various fundraisers for residents and organizations in need of financial assistance. We also host monthly meetings for the VFW Post 1578 and the Woodridge Rotary Club. We have a great relationship with the Village of Woodridge and many other charitable organizations. These organizations have kindly supported our business recently by ordering food and making donations to our staff. Our business has played a very important role in the Woodridge community for over 20 years. We sincerely hope that we can continue our family business for another generation led by my daughter, Amanda Pappas, President of Shanahan’s Food & Spirits.

Question: What is your business best known for?
Answer: We are widely recognized for serving the best burgers in town, broasted chicken and BBQ ribs. In addition, we have a lot of activities taking place every week. We host Trivia Contests on Mondays, every Thursday we host a Pro Jam session for musicians and every weekend we have live entertainment including a piano bar. Our customers are currently viewing rebroadcasts of many of our concerts and some of our musician friends are also doing online live broadcasts on our website: www.Shanahanspub.com and Facebook live. As you can imagine, things have been very quiet recently as we are all quarantined. We sit by the phone waiting for our customers to call us at 630-985-5945. We are offering carry out and curbside pick up as well as Grub-Hub. This whole shut-in process is very frustrating as we are used to being very busy.

Question: Have you applied for the Payment Protection Program?
Answer: Yes. We thought help was on the way when the Federal government announced the Payment Protection Program. We began this process on March 31st with our Woodridge bank. They were not very helpful and seemed to know very little about how to apply for the PPP. Therefore we went directly to the SBA to download the application, completely filled it out and brought it to our bank on April 1st. They told us that they were not accepting applications at this time. They told us we would have to apply online (on their website) at some future time. The application never showed up on their website. Then they told us to file the application with their local bank which we already had done. We communicated with them several times each week and our application was never accepted until April 16th when the SBA had run out of money. We later discovered that this bank had processed thousands of PPP applications and never processed ours. So much for the first-come, first-served basis.

Question: Do you think other small businesses have experienced the same thing?
Answer: Yes. I have reached out to many small restaurant owners in the area and many of them have said that they have experienced the same situation. It appears that many of the larger banks have made PPP loans to a preferred customer list. Primarily to larger companies and larger loan amounts and unfortunately overlooked smaller businesses needing help in our community. What do you think can be done to remedy this situation? I believe we need to analyze the marketplace to evaluate how many small businesses in our community applied for the PPP, what banks they used and whether or not they were approved for the PPP. I think the records will show that many of the small businesses in need of help did not get it from many of the local banks. I’m encouraging the state and local government to produce a survey analysis which will provide this information to our community. I think small businesses should ban together to support the banks that support small business. I think it is important to keep in mind that we bailed these banks out back in 2008-09, now we, the small businesses in our community, need their help and our request for help is falling upon deaf ears.

Question: Is help on the way?
Answer: According to the news the Federal government is approving a new batch of PPP funds through the SBA this week. $484 Billion will be made available. It will be interesting to see whether or not many of the small businesses like mine will get funded the second time around. I’m guardedly optimistic. What we have heard is that small community banks were processing these loans on a first come first served basis if you had a business account with them. Larger banks said they were going to process these loans for small businesses but were very selective and not using the first in first out application process. It didn’t seem to matter if you had a long term or short term relationship with the bank. We had an 18 year relationship with our bank and it didn’t seem to matter we did not get funded. I guess we will take a wait and see approach as new funds are being made available this week.

Question: What are your plans as the economy begins to reopen?
Answer: Our staff is cleaning and painting and doing various upgrades as we have much time to do these projects. It is our plan to reduce the number of seats in our establishment in order to facilitate social distancing. It is our intention to continue to provide great food and music at reasonable prices in a healthy and trusted environment. We look forward to reopening with great optimism that we will endure and thrive as we go forward.

My thanks to Mr. Moore for his insight into the difficulties facing our community small business owners.