Help the O'Brien Family Rebuild and Thrive

Hello to all of my friends and family, new and old, adopted, by-marriage, by blood, or by choice! My name is Justin O’Brien and probably the absolute most important thing in the world to me is my family - my wife Jennifer, and our children Victoria, Ember, Hawk, Aidan, Logan, and Reagan. That’s all of us in the cover photo!

Many of you have followed the journey that our family has taken since December of 2022, through our successes and failures, trials and accomplishments, beginnings and unfortunate endings of trying to get a family business built and off the ground.

For those of you who have heard the story and want me to get to the point, sure - that's fair. For any others who journeyed with us, who want the updates, or would just like to journey anew while I spin the yard - I will acquiesce with a story fit for an O'Brien (for those of you that know the family) once the point is made.

Our family business, OB3B Deli, closed at the end of June of this year. We threw all of our hearts, souls, and unfortunately, assets into the business - always believing that we would “turn that corner” and gain the traction that we needed. We did not, and as of our last day of operation, ceased to bring in any sort of income as we most assuredly went all-in, in this endeavor.

Since that time, we have made our living by delivering through DoorDash and UberEats and recently, I began work on what I feel is another great service for humanity, substitute teaching for our local schools. However now, as things have tended to go on this adventure, our only vehicle and current source of income needs, among other things, repairs to stay on the road. These vehicle issues have made us unable to deliver as we had been to supplement, as well as forced me to call off desperately needed days in our local schools.

We are out of assets, money, time, and options. We need help. We have bills that we desperately need to catch up on to just keep the lights on and a roof over our head. We need a hand “up” so that we can regain footing as we have put ourselves SO far behind by trying to keep our family business afloat. We have no other way of bringing in what is necessary, in the timeframe that we need to. Once we get all of this behind us, we have absolutely set ourselves up to regain steam and once again flourish as a family as we had before.

Everything counts - $1, $5, $10… we have been living “delivery-to-delivery” at sometimes $2.25 at a time in order to try to just sustain and survive another day but without even being able to repair our vehicle to ensure we can still do that… we need help and absolutely appreciate anything that can be done, including sharing our story with your friends and lots of prayer.

So now… what happened?

I spent almost 20 years in the manufacturing industry, working and learning hard every day to better myself and the business while trying to secure a future for my family and live the “American Dream”, as we interpreted it. Jennifer and I sold her house while we were renting to purchase our future “estate” in beautiful Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, a gorgeous lot where we were going to build our first, and last house together and move for the very last time after an adventuresome life. The trajectory, as it often does, changed when the company that I worked for was purchased by private equity. Long story short, it became obvious that a job change, if nothing else, was necessary because the stability once provided was going to go away.

Jennifer has the consummate entrepreneurial mind and spirit with a big dose of creativity, so when trying to figure out what our next step was, we finally settled on combining our passions for humanity and family - and O’Brien’s Brew, Bits, and Bytes was born (OB3B, for short). It took us over 11 months to learn, to build, to get the equipment, certifications, inspections - for us to finally swing the doors open on December 1st, 2023. That 11 months proved to be mistake-filled, however, as we sold most of what we had and spent all of what we had saved not understanding what a large undertaking that putting this restaurant together. We had people along the way that could see that we needed help and made sure to take advantage of that situation. The day that we opened, we borrowed money from a friend of ours in order to be able to make change in the register.

The first couple of months were great - we were adding things to the menu left and right, people seemed to really enjoy our product as well as our “vibe” and we were starting to dig ourselves out of the hole that we had created while building. Then, as we came to find out, the bottom was about to drop out. Whether it was the location, the season, our prices, our speed, the local restaurant environment or the regular pains of a new business or restaurant, we never regained the original flow. We just knew, however, that we would be able to turn it around - our amazing customers would send their friends and so on, and with our hearts and soul poured into our food we just needed folks to come in and try. The rest of the story would have been different if we had just thrown in the towel at that point, but we believed in it so much - we ended up unknowingly getting ourselves into a “new business advance” financial trap that ended up causing ourselves to get more and more in the hole. Some of the last weeks that we were open for business we would use the lunch rush funds to bring in the ingredients for the evening.

And then at the end of June, some major deadlines came up at the same time that finally forced our hand to close the doors for good.

Since then, we had to split our time between trying to keep income coming in looking for new employment and figuring out our new phase in life and tearing down the very business that we mistakenly poured too much into, including at least a consultation with a business attorney to address some of the sharks that we swam with. So that brings us to now - we have major deadlines in our family’s life without enough hours in the day to cover those payments. And now, potentially without a vehicle to do any of it. We may never be able to repay your kindness, in kind but we appreciate you at least taking the time to read this and helping if you can.