Selling a Thriving Bar to Fund a Shabu-Shabu Chain: STARBAR Okinawa's 'Strategic Fundraising' M&A
STARBAR, an upscale bar in Okinawa City catering to U.S. military personnel, was transferred to Aichi-based trading company Pembroke while still a thriving business with healthy finances and high margins. The goal was not retreat but securing funds to expand a new shabu-shabu restaurant concept into multiple locations — a real example of strategic fundraising: sell the profitable store and bet on the next one.
This is a translation of the Japanese original. The Japanese version and cited primary sources are authoritative for all figures.
The Business’s Journey
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Venue | STARBAR Okinawa (opened 2021, on Gate Street in Okinawa City). An upscale bar targeting U.S. military personnel, with a full shisha and food menu and high Google Maps ratings |
| Finances | “An extremely sound business with healthy finances and high profit margins” (broker’s assessment) |
| Buyer | Pembroke Co., Ltd. (an Aichi-based trading company with no restaurant experience). The deal worked because the existing store manager stayed on to run operations |
| Post-transfer | Seller Okihisa Takahashi provides backup through a 3-year consulting contract |
| Price | Undisclosed |
The Reason for Selling Was Not Retreat
Takahashi sold the bar to concentrate money and time on multi-location expansion of his new concept, “Shabu-shabu Hajimemashita.” He learned about M&A after watching an acquaintance successfully transfer a bar, and used a business sale — rather than a loan — as his fundraising method.
The groundwork for multi-location expansion is concrete, too. At the shabu-shabu restaurants, broth production is outsourced to a partner factory so staff only need to “pour it” — a system designed from day one to run without the owner. In other words, he is building this business to be sellable someday as well.
What This Case Teaches
A rare example of executing the obvious: a store sells for the most when it is at its very best. Most restaurant sales happen out of exhaustion or decline, and prices get beaten down. This is the restaurant version of Onichan’s principle that sites still on the rise command the highest multiples — if you treat a sale as fundraising, the time to sell becomes “when things are at their best.”
Even a buyer with no restaurant experience can close the deal if the store manager stays. Detach the person-dependency from the owner and embed it in the frontline operation, and the pool of potential buyers widens from “industry peers” to “investors and companies from other industries.”
The serial-entrepreneur playbook has arrived at the level of the independent restaurant. Build → systematize → sell → next concept — the same thinking behind Ben Stokes’s mass production of micro-services being practiced at a bar in Okinawa is, for this publication, the biggest discovery here.
Further Reading
Sources
This article summarizes and analyzes the public sources above. Please refer to the primary sources for details.