The deal
Cleo lays out the terms.
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And Marco’s looking art the twins like he thinks they have a hand in this. Read the contract, Dad! She’s making you pay for your own supplies, the 10% is just a little something for herself.
Also, as a underaged child, the IRS might frown upon her taking too much (Not sure how the American tax system works for the underaged).
considering that she´ll do basically nothing for those 10%, i´d say its a damn good deal…..and yeah, reading the contract should happen, stat! because i´ve got the feeling that this snake is a business shark in the making 😉
She owns and provides the truck. Not many restaurants can succeed when the lease on their facilities is as high as 10% of income. Is she paying for vehicle maintenance out of her 10%?
I expect she also has the account with the food service supplier (e.g. in the United States: Sysco, Gordon Foods, etc.) so she will arrange for delivery of raw materials. That is hardly doing nothing, especially when she has to do her homework too.
While it is always good to read what you’re going to sign, I doubt Cleo, even business snek Cleo, would do anything untowards to the father of her best friend.
I suspect she ran this through her dad first before bringing it to the twins. After all, being underage she would need his signature backing and approving hers on any contract.
Well, Marco isn’t too experienced with the business side of things, since this is his first business. He’ll learn :p
OOOh, business Snek really got ready for this one. If business fails her, she might make a good lawyer.
the millionaire lawyer xD
Cleo learned the trade from Rip Haywire,
particularly with the ker-contracts.
Now she’s laid it out for them all to see,
let’s see how Mr Romero reacts.
You may also have to cater parties
up at Cleo’s little place in the town.
Kai can come in his best dinner suit
and I take it Kaya’s got a ballgown?
Bring along Benji if you really want,
And mighty Rex will make up the table.
They could go where they want, around the house
but keep Kaya away from the stable?
Suit and ballgown might not be the best dress code for a food festival, though :p
True but it’s all for a high class restaurant, is it not?
You know, Marco’s complaining, but this is a legitimate thing in business. It’s called a “peppercorn”. Basically, in order for a contract to exist, both sides must give something, but there’s no real limit to how small that something must be. It happens all the time; the Freemasons of Bermuda literally pay for their meeting hall with one grain of black pepper.
Given that his 90% includes supplies, fuel, insurance, hygiene tickets and business registration etc
Given takings, he could end up with 10% himself on a bad day or 50-70% on a good day. (Estimated as i havent experience with food vans.)
If they are after 50k and fake numbers assume roughly 100k turn over to get that would mean she gets her 10%=10k.
Less of a peppercorn than it looks.
What are “supplies”. No chef would allow someone else to buy the food. Even large restaurants with a number of cooks buy their own food, or at least verify them for acceptability.
EG, 10% of gross vs 10% of net. Sounds like 10% of net, which would be a very good deal.
Yeah, Cleo is giving him a pretty sweet deal as well 😀
I love the mischievous smiles on the twins in the background.
Thanks 😀 Spur of the moment thing, but I liked it xD
Marco seems to not understand that companies are not expected to make profits day 1. At least Cleo does.
I’m sure the 10% goes way up once they get past the initial startup pains part. Since she’s trying to be friendly, that’ll probably hit after they have the restaurant itself up and running. But at this early stage, pulling 50% of the gross income (Cleo says profit, but she *clearly* means gross income, because the profit is really after those expenses.) would basically be sabotage.
What Cleo is really saying is she gets her 10% off the gross. Ongoing supplies are deducted, and probably any other business costs that she’s taking care of and not bothering him with yet because he’s clearly clueless. We’re still not down to profit yet, but now Marco finally gets access to the income. There’s probably still maintenance costs that he needs to take care of, like I’d bet he’s going to have to cover the gas for the food truck. Although the food truck drives to a location and then stays put all day, that gas isn’t cheap, because it probably also covers all of their electrical needs, and there’s possibly other stuff hooked up to the truck’s systems as well.
It’s not actually profit until we take care of all of the business expenses, and that includes taxes. Company income tax could be defined in terms of profit, depending on jurisdiction, but it’s only *actually* profit if it’s money that the business can use to grow. Which, btw, means that Marco’s take home pay comes out of it first, too. But he’s probably going to grossly underpay himself, because pretty much all successful start up owners do.
Cleo is probably hand-waving a lot of stuff she’ll be covering, and that can be bad for friendship long term. But it can be necessary in the short term. One key here is to know when to start explaining more of what she’s handling, and how much to do at once. The tricky part is, it’s Marco that determines how much can be conveyed without problems, but he’s fundamentally not going to be able to communicate that.
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer or business executive. Most of the above spew comes from being the son of someone with a *lot* of failed sideline businesses. To be fair, he got one to work. But he went through a lot more than the American average number of failed businesses before that happened, and while I was growing up, it was all failed businesses. Some had partners, some had “partners”, but most didn’t, because business partners make things complicated. (The quoted partners bit is, if you just call someone your business partner, but there’s no signed agreement, they’re not involved in the business planning, and they’re not funding the business, they’re not really partners. They’re most likely just workers who aren’t going to be paid ever because this business is going to not survive long enough for that to happen.)
Oh, forgot to add in, Marco’s going to find out at some point that 10% Cleo’s taking out is bigger than he realized, because of how it’s coming out up front. There’s a time at the start of just about every new restaurant when word hasn’t really gotten out about them, so they’ll have much more overhead costs than their income is properly covering. Meanwhile, Cleo’s taking out 10%, while Marco’s having difficulties making it day to day.
To be fair, a food truck will be less likely to have that problem. They go to where there’s a lot of foot traffic. Sure, there’s limited places for those food trucks to set up, and there’s almost certainly an official registry that tracks who is allowed to set up where, but it’s my impression from having talked to a number of people who’ve run food trucks that it’s rare for cities to have official registry food truck locations that are actively bad for business. There will be a demand for some kind of food in their food truck slot. So long as their food has a broad enough appeal and they can be ready for business for most of their time slot, they’ll at least be able to break even most of the time. But when you’re doing $20,000 of business in a day, and usually ranging $17,000 to $19,000 in business expenses, it can be very frustrating to see your partner taking $2,000 off the top every day.
Just to be clear: I’m not meaning to be on your case that Cleo called the money she’s taking her 10% from ‘profit’, and then talked about how expenses would be removed from it. It may not be technically correct terminology, but I’ve heard my father’s former business partners basically confusing the terms in that same fashion, and they weren’t 14 year olds. My father did eventually start calling them snakes, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily the vibe you’re trying to give off here.
This is an area where she is probably ahead of the game in that she has a business tycoon for a father who has probably been educating her in the ways of business whereas this is the twins’ first business and he is likely learning things as he goes.
Both official education and education by observation. Don’t under estimate that.
I read all of that. You seem to know your way around business ^^
You did what.
What I like most about this page are the twins’ expressions. XD
Thanks 😀
Let the negotiations begin! This however is something I’ll have to leave to others (as I see they are doing already) as I’m out of my depth here.
Don’t worry, business negotiation is a war zone not for the faint of heart xD
I love the transition of the twins’ facial expression from :3 to :<
😂😂😍
Hard to believe, but the twins are even more adorable as chibis.
Haha, thanks xD
Cleo is acting so grown up that Kay and Kaya turned chibi o.O
gotta balance it out xD
The tennis fight is on , and the tiny twins counts the points XD
Next up, they hold a cardboard with the points xD
If she wanted him to be less suspicious of the deal, she should set it to 40%
Yeah, but that’s not her aim ^^
Cleo; you’re 14. That is “Mr. Romero” you are talking tom regardless of whether or not you are going to be business partners, until he invites you to call him Marco.
Oh, but he did tell her to call him Marco in the previous page (Or the one before that :p )
Two pages ago, but yes. She is calling him Marco by his own request, so no disrespect being shown. Actually, if she insisted on calling him Mr. Romero, that would actually be MORE disrespectful.
Also depend on culture, I’m not sure if it’s uniform across the US that children are to call adults by their last name prefaced with a Mr/Miss, but it’s not the rule everywhere, here in Denmark it’s rare to call people by their last names at least in my experience, and that include children addressing adults.
Marco is so busy looking for what is the suspect to be a hand out that he was going to be poking at the Shadows seen what he expects rather than what is
Yeah, he’s keeping an eye out for that xD
That “10% of the profit” is actually a thing. Only here, it’s being used in the reverse of how it’s normally used.
A lot of first-timers in the movie industry get conned this way. The contract will say something like you’ll get x percentage of the production company’s profits. The trouble is, on paper, the production company is separate from the box office company, even though both are owned by the same parent company. So what happens is the production company reports no profits, or even reports a loss, for a major motion picture. So by signing a contract promising a percentage of the profits, the actor is actually being conned into taking less money than he/she would get if he/signed a flat-rate contract.
All that to say, Cleo could be offering a contract where she only profits IF Marco’s food truck turns a profit. To me, that seems fair.
Oof, didn’t know about that trick in movie business. Good to know, though. Might come in handy when Twin Dragons ever gets picked up for a movie production xD
If Twin Dragons gets turned into a movie, I will buy a ticket and PayPal you the price of the ticket to be 150% sure you don’t get ripped off.
Thought that was common knowledge. NEVER take a percentage of the net, there is no net.
The looks on the Twins faces in the last 2 panels……..ROFLMAO
Yeah, haha xD thanks ^^
KER-CONTRACT! XD Robin you really know how to keep a comic funny. if you just add custom sound effects it makes everything better, and i AM being serious. thank you so much for keeping this comic going for as long as you have, and I’ll just keep reading it! -YP
Thank you 😀
Nice to hear my custom sound effects are appreciated xD
Are you still working on gamer dragons?
The problem with entering a contract with a minor is that they can kill it at any time they’re a minor, so you could provide your end of the contract and then they provide nothing beyond thanking you for being a sucker at worst or see everything undone at the best.
Chloe is basically a snake oil saleswoman now, isn’t she.
Good one! LOL
i love the twins faces in panel 5. the most devious face. exept for the time kaya made her evil cat grin. 🙂
Cleo: “I’ll also be taking Kai as collateral.”
Kai: “Wait, what?”
Kaya: “You know, I had a feeling that was coming…”
KER-CONTRACT!
Ker-contract! I love it!
Also Kai and Kaya in panels 5&6 :}