sharing ownership/proprietorship

[drewmo]

My wife and I recently moved to France with the goal of purchasing a hotel bureau. However, we have determined that there are additional goals in our lives that we want to pursue - family, music, non-profits. The list seems to grow daily. We believe owning/operating a hotel would prohibit us from realizing some or all of these other goals. One way, we believe, that all goals could be met would be through shared ownership or shared proprietorship of the business with another couple. Of course, the business would then need to support two couples instead of just one, but working only half the year at the hotel business would allow many other pursuits to be, well, pursued for the other six months. The biggest concern would be finding that "perfect partnership." Going into business with family can be a good idea, but also a bad one. Likewise with friends, colleagues or other acquaintances. Does anyone have any experience in such a partnership? What do you think?

[Coco]

First question:  presuming that you mean you would like to work 6 months then have six months off; where are you going to find a mug prepared to work the busy six months and let you have the easy 6 months and then let you have half the income?   Unless you've got pots of money and plan to buy in somewhere like Paris, the Cote d'azure or one of the larger tourist towns I think you'll find that for a large part of the year it will be quiet enough to allow you to close for several months anyway.  Sharing the work (and profits) with another couple sounds a bit like a non-starter to me!!!

[drewmo]

Actually, we would probably prefer to work the busiest 6 (possibly up to 8) months for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, if we are sole owners of the business, we would want to make sure everything goes smoothly. Second, plans for family would benefit us to have the winter off. You're right that having a year-round place would be necessary for such a relationship to work. Considering we don't have buckets of money, we would need to stay open year-round to make ends meet. If done right, I still believe the banks and government can take their shares, with hopefully enough left over to put a little aside and a little in our pockets. It's still early in our planning, and we'd love to hear what others think. Thanks for your thoughts, Coco.

[Quillan]

For what it's worth I think you need to look at what is involved in buying and running a hotel before you start making any plans on how much time you personally want to put in to it. Most people buying a hotel for the first time really have no idea what to look for and what to ask for with regards to their decision on if it's a good buy or not. In the private hotel industry the failure rate is very, very high here in France. I have recently attended a most excellent course on this subject and was amazed at what is involved in running a hotel and what to look for when buying. I currently own and run a four bedroomed B&B here in France and had assumed that the step up to buying and running a small hotel (18 bedrooms) would be simple, how wrong I was. It's a bit like going from owning a rowing boat to owning a cross channel ferry.

A direction that you might look at is to franchise/rent out the resteraunt and bar side on a 5 year contract which will then leave you with just the room side to deal with and then employ a manage who can run the hotel in your absence. This is quite an acceptable practice even here in France.

[mascamps.com]

Depends on the size of the hotel Chris, but even our 12 room place is run quite differently from say, a 3 or 4 room place. The sheer scale of purchases is completely different for a start: when we buy the little bottles of water for the rooms we fill the trailer and that lasts 3 or 4 weeks in the Summer yet for a 4 room place the same volume could easily last a year. Occupancy too is quite different: I see that it's relatively common for B&B's to hit 100% capacity in summer and run to 60% plus in September but even 30% for us is 3 rooms a day vs 2.4 for a 4 room place at 60%.

Even if you had another couple to share with, you would need both couples running the place in the summer. Perhaps if one of you ran the hotel (ie accommodation) and the other the restaurant it could work very well. To my mind, that combination could be very strong if you had a good chef in the other couple. We find that chefs aren't great at running the hotel side if our experience locally is anything to go by.

I don't think dividing up the duties over the course of a year would work very well as the work that you do changes substantially in the different seasons. In our case, we basically drop everything but the day to day running of the place from June to September. October, we collapse and after that through to February it's updating the website and other marketing, adding more marketing, maintenance (don't underestimate the maintenance required!).

There would also be legal issues for things like the drinks license although those can always be overcome.

 

Arnold