Hi Guys,
I don't want to get into a Q & A / debate about this, but I'll post once to put everyone in the picture. Nick is away for a week and we both agreed that we would get last week's "festival of doom" out of the way and look at things objectively when he get's back, with all the facts and figures on the table.
Things are always up and down in business and noone forces anyone to invest their money, also the government cannot make specific laws for
Dusk Till Dawn, we are the only one of our kind and we made the decision to put our money and time into
Dusk Till Dawn - so we must take any subsequent conseqences "on the chin".
However, it does look like the Nottingham Evening Post have jumped the gun, there is no chance we will be closing in the next few weeks but it is true that the medium and long term future of
Dusk Till Dawn is now in question, and one of these options is "shutting the doors", as it would be far cheaper to do this and just pay off the remainder of our 15 year lease, than keep
Dusk Till Dawn open.
When we budgeted this project, we knew that we would have to carry the additional running costs of a casino, such as licencing fees and compliance procedures, but we do seem to have been caught in the middle of other issues between the Government and the Casino industry, people have been debating the recent "poker tax" , but this is actually our 3rd major problem (AKA 3rd kick in the balls) since we started trading 18 months ago;
Problem 1: The VAT hit us with additional costs categorising our "gaming area" ie. 50 poker tables and the associated space that they take, which is effectively the same as having 50 roulette tables, therefore we could not claim VAT back on almost all of our start up/re-fit investment and on any ongoing future running costs, this is why I said in an interview that "last weeks £71k in overlay was loose change" compared to our other increased costs
Problem 2: Our business rates have recently been tripled by the local Council, we are now paying the same rates as a full casino with 50 casino/blackjack tables, I have been told this review of our business rates was caused my another Casino objecting to the difference to what they were actually paying compared to our rates bill
Problem 3: Obviously, the recent "poker tax" legislation on all MTT/STT registration fees and all cash game rake or table charges has brought things to a head.
DTD has been more successful that we budgeted in terms of revenues, we never expected a 1300 average footfall on a regular week and the monthly/third party events have exceeded all our expectations, this has been partly due to a lot of hard work by the
DTD staff, however, I know some of us feel like we are just "flogging a dead horse", due to the additional 3 points above ie. every time we take a step forward - something else goes wrong to take us 2 steps backwards.
Following the successfull Norwegian Championships, we had just "got our noses in front" proftwise for 2009 and were looking on target to at least breakeven in only our second year of trading, which would have been a tremendous achivement for a fledgling business.
We all like challenges, but the fight to even open the place took a lot out of everyone, including me, and getting hit with more bad news - which is out of our control, is very frustrating. We all feel a bit disheartened, so we need some time out to do some logical thinking, there will be no knee jerks reactions over the coming weeks and there is no chance that we will consider anything that is not 100% legal, it is time to take stock after a whirlwind few years and whatever happens in the future, I am especially proud of everyone that helped us to open the doors in the first place, that alone, was a huge achievement against the odds.
Thanks for your comments, feel free to use the contents of this post to answer any other questions that anyone may have.
Cheers Rob
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