“You know, I do business on handshakes and I try to help people, and I do it to make money.”
That’s a quote from Marcus Lemonis, the star of CNBC’s hit show The Profit. Each week on the show Lemonis tries to help a failing business get back on its feet. Sound familiar? Well, it should (especially if you have read this blog).
Reality shows like Hotel lmpossible, Restaurant Impossible, and Bar Rescue feature industry experts visiting foundering businesses, addressing problems big and small, and within a week, transforming former money pits into profit machines.
But The Profit is a little different. Lemonis isn’t necessarily an expert the type of business, like hotels or restaurants, that he’s trying to rescue. He’s an expert in business. (For more on his background, check out his Wikipedia page.) His oft-repeated mantra is People, Process, Product. In each episode he examines all three and determines if the business has any hope for a turnaround.
And here’s the kicker: Lemonis isn’t just a hired gun, like Hotel’s Anthony Melchiorri or Restaurant’s Robert Irvine. Lemonis is putting up his own money, a la Shark Tank, to revive these businesses but also make a profit for himself. (The name of the show is just one big spoiler, isn’t it?)
Lemonis’ financial contribution is typically enough to pay off the business’s debt, plus some money for some upgrades to equipment that will have an impact on the bottom line. In exchange for his cash—it’s always such a baller move on when he whips out his checkbook and writes a million dollar check to a business owner—he asks for a large chunk of equity, often as high as 50%. He also requires full operational control of the business.
Like the “Impossible” shows, most of the time Lemonis business proposal and management style are met with some initial resistance from the owners, but eventually they realize that what’s good for him is what’s good for them. Happy ending, right?
Not quite. Sometimes, and this is much rarer on the various Impossibles, Lemonis can’t come to an agreement with the business, and he backs out. (While the check presentation is a big moment on the show, in reality I’m sure there are lawyers and accountants digging into the company’s financials and the owners’ credit histories to make sure the business isn’t a lemon.)
On the episode I caught last night, featuring Swanson’s Fish Market in Fairfield, Connecticut, Lemonis wrote the business a million dollar check to temporarily buy the building in which the market resides and clear up its debt, which he believed would be the pecuniary boost they needed to get back on track.
But as Lemonis (or his lawyers, off camera) dug deeper he discovered that the mortgage on the building was not, in fact, “in good shape” as the business co-owner Gary had said it was. It was in foreclosure.
Besides that, Lemonis couldn’t get past the fact that Gary owned a boat while some of his employees were covering the costs of the fish out of their own pockets. He also couldn’t get through to the other co-owner, Sue, about why her owning a BMW with $500 a month payments was sending the wrong message to her employees. Neither were willing to sell off their toys in order to take a little pressure off the business and, ya know, pay their frickin’ employees. (Unlike many struggling businesses I’ve seen on shows like this, these two had no guilt over paying themselves.) The icing on the cake was that when Lemonis came back a few weeks later to check in, he found out the owners were doing renovations on their home.
In the end Lemonis walked. There was no text at the end, like you’d see at the end of Hotel Impossible (“Occupancy is up 75% since Anthony’s visit. The hotel has plans to upgrade all rooms within the next six months.”) It was Lemonis’ quote (from the beginning of this post), and then the episode just kind of ends.
In a previous post I wondered why this didn’t happen more often, as it did in an episode of Hotel Impossible last season. If these people aren’t willing to do what it takes to run a successful business, why does the show still insist on helping them? I imagine there are so many American businesses doing things the right way (or at least what they believe is the right way) and still struggling. Why not help them instead?
(Here’s an idea for a show: when one small business is too stubborn or foolish to accept the free help of an expert—who, by the way, they called!—that expert goes across the street and helps their biggest rival. Or better yet, the expert starts his own business just to crush them. Too much? Watch the Hotel Impossible episode about the Thunderbird Motel–or read my post about it–and tell me those people deserve to stay in business.)
The only regrettable aspect of Lemonis walking away from Swanson’s was that the owners’ 24-year-old daughter, Larissa, was apparently working the hardest of any of them to keep the company afloat. She also seemed to be the only one who saw the value of Lemonis’ involvement and potential investment. Maybe somewhere in the near future she’ll open her own fish market and put her parents out of business? Or at least buy them out? After all, what better way to learn how to run a successful business than seeing first-hand all the ways not to run one?
***UPDATE*** I’m not sure about the sequence of events here but Larissa Swanson, the daughter of the owners of Swanson’s Fish Market, wrote a treatise on the company’s website in response to the way their episode of The Profit was edited and the deal that Lemonis ultimately walked away from. You can read the whole thing here, but the her key points are quoted or paraphrased below (with my own thoughts in italics).
- “When we sat down for the deal they told us before hand that if he writes us a check, it is only for show purposes and we have to hand it right back.” That sounds about right.
- “We also did not film for 4 weeks, the filming process started at the beginning of June and ended in September! We were strung along for 4 months. They don’t add that my mom had a contractor at the house painting bc we are fixing it up right now to SELL and put it on the market. We never even did a building deal with him, where he said he would buy It for one million. We did not see a penny for the entire 4 months.” This was not clear at all on the episode. In terms of timing Lemonis mentioned that he went back four weeks later, and that’s when he discovered the property was in foreclosure. More on that…
- “On August 26th I was served papers by a sheriff on the building for kasowitz (the guy who did a mortgage for it) I notified Marcus immediately via text..we were not aware that a foreclosure process even started. Our building is fine now and we are taking care of it. Our building also had a contractor Lien put on it 3 years ago and we had the lien removal paper but our mortgager never brought it to city hall to be taken care of and of course they never aired that either!” It’s starting to sound like a he said-she said thing, but ultimately if Swanson’s was even close to foreclosure Gary shouldn’t have said it was “in good shape.” Or was that creative editing, too?
- “When the boat happened he moved it from the marina and put it in someone’s backyard before hurricane Sandy hit and the motors became ruined and it turned into a salvaged project. He bought that boat 15 years ago.” The fact remains that he’s apparently paying marina fees on a boat, but Marcus made it out to be a luxury yacht.
- “Marcus even asked me to negotiate with people and had me promise to pay them the next day certified check and never even came through. Those people are so angry now that they are sueing us.” Um…
- “They also didn’t add how my little brother has a serious mental illness that he was diagnosed with 3 years ago of schizophrenia and it’s so severe that we are constantly in and out of hospitals and have paid over 100k in medical,hospital,ambulance bills and medications.” The show easily could have gone the other way with this and played up this angle, a la Restaurant Impossible, but they chose to go in the direction of villainizing the Swansons instead.
- Sue had three deaths in her family around the time of the taping, explaining her disconnected, erratic behavior.
- “Halfway through filming [Sue] agreed to sell the BMW and we filmed a cute scene where we taped for sale signs on her car windows to show we would sacrifice for the deal but they didnt show that either of course.” It’s starting to sound like the producers made the call to cut this into one episode’s worth of content, even though they clearly needed more time to tell the story completely.
- “I also wanted to touch base on our employees chipping in for product- that i agree was not right but it was a total of only two times and they got their money back right at the end of the day only because we had vendors who wanted cashiers checks in the morning for product and my mother or father were not there to get to the bank and there was not enough to cover it with cash in the register.” Again, they really played up this angle as if it was all the time. That said, it’s no way to run a business.
- Larissa addresses the circumstances around the fires that destroyed their property and imputes them to a former employee with a drug problem. I’m not sure this is relevant except that it casts doubt for those who may have thought the Swansons may have set the fires themselves for the insurance money.
- There are also some images on the site including Larissa’s text to Lemonis about the foreclosure and some other critical documents that the show glossed over.
So, what are we as fans of The Profit to make of all this? Well, we all know reality shows edit their footage in order to tell a succinct, compelling story in their allotted amount of time, usually about 44 minutes for an hour-long program. Some edits don’t matter as much, like the exact phrasing of a quote, but others can be specious, like some of what Larissa alleges above.
While I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of Lemonis and The Profit so far, at this point I’ll really need to take what he and the show are saying with a grain of salt. And I won’t be so quick to write a blog post that paints these small businesses featured on these shows in such a negative light, at least not until hearing both sides of the story.
As for you, I suggest you watch at your own risk.
