@myschae When we were looking at properties we had a spreadsheet we used to determine at what point a particular property ‘broke.’ If we lost 10% of the business, could we survive? 20%? Etc. If they have a strong repeat business, you will lose some of that. It’s ok. Unless you really do egregious things in your business that causes everyone to bail, you’ll lose some of the old crowd just by virtue of not being the previous owner (PO). Guests get attached to you.
We had a paper and pencil database when we started. (There was an actual database, but the PO’s didn’t hand it over.) We had guests arrive and ask, ‘who the hell are you?’ as we had no way to get in touch with guests in advance of their arrival to explain the change of ownership. Some of them made their next reservation on the way out the door, some did not. We also heard from some people that they didn’t want to ‘break in another set of owners,’ so they waited a couple of years before coming back.
Come back with a separate question about due diligence. Ask straight out what everyone missed and you’ll then have a list of what to check