The Profit on CNBC

Cafe Society
1

Anybody else watching this thing? I’ve only seen one episode so far (the flower shop) but I’ve got a bunch lined up on my TiVo.

It’s kinda of like Kitchen Nightmares, except instead of restaurants it’s miscellaneous unprofitable businesses, and our hero (Marcus Lemonis) goes to each one in turn to invest some capital in exchange for the right to take over and turn around the business.

One thing I’m not clear on is the structure of the deals. In the flower shop episode he says he’ll give them $100,000 in exchange for “25% of the profits.” But is this a 25% equity investment or some kind-of royalty arrangement? Because I’m interested in exactly what his incentive is.

In this episode he apparently spent more like $140,000 or his own money before the owner decided to reneg on the deal. I want to find out what happened.

2

Well I just watched two more episodes. The first one was a carnie popcorn operation where our hero finds out that $300,000 a year is mysteriously disappearing and nobody seems to want to find out why. That didn’t end well.

The other one was an eco-friendly cleaning supply company with terrible branding and no automation in their production. After some necessary reality-show drama he was able to turn that one around with a brand new production line and redesigned labels and marketing.