London Cocktail Club launches £750,000 crowdfunding drive as part of plans to treble estate in next three years: The London Cocktail Club has launched a £750,000 fund-raise on crowdfunding platform Crowdcube as part of plans to treble the size of its estate in the next three years. The company, founded in 2008 by JJ Goodman and James Hopkins and includes “dragon” Sarah Willingham from the BBC television series and Raymond Blanc on its board of directors, is offering a 7.50% equity stake in return for the investment. The pitch states: “The London Cocktail Club comprises of five (soon to be six) London cocktail bars, each with its own distinctive identity, atmosphere and spirit speciality. Unlike big chains, our bars are siblings rather than clones. These sites are already delivering operating Ebitda of over £600,000. Our most mature bar has produced an Ebitda of £130,000 in the first six months of this financial year, which demonstrates the potential scale of this business. We’re now looking to raise £750,000 to finance the roll-out of three further bars before the end of the year. After that we will use operating cash flow and debt to build the chain to 19 bars by 2019. Each bar typically has a capital cost of £260,000 (excluding any lease premium) and reaches maturity in under two years. At that point a typical bar would have sales of £600,000 with a typical profit of 25%. Some bars (e.g. Oxford Circus) are larger and cost more but offer higher cash profits. After this fund-raising and with three new mature bars, annual cash generation is forecast to be around £1.1m, which would be available to finance further expansion. We plan to acquire new premises in areas of London where millennials tend to work and where dead spaces and old buildings are rapidly being converted to new uses. These changes often create relatively affordable commercial space in basements and ground floors. Places like the City, Old Street, Soho, Covent Garden, Farringdon, and King’s Cross. Further afield, we’re also targeting the high streets in areas where millennials tend to live, and where older pubs and bars are giving way to new experiences that better suit their tastes: think Kentish Town, Camden, Stoke Newington, Bethnal Green, London Bridge, Brixton, Clapham, Shepherds Bush and Ladbroke Grove.” The company is forecasting a pre-tax profit of £179,113 at the end of June, dropping to £107,146 in June 2017 before increasing to £210,481 in 2018. The official campaign cocktail “Show Me The Money” is available in all its venues throughout the campaign, which closes at the end of the month.