Kurt Cummings spent most of his adult life serving in law enforcement.
After seven years as public safety chief at A Pocono Country Place in Tobyhanna, Cummings retired his badge to fulfill a life-long dream: opening his own chicken wing restaurant called Wingz And A Prayer.
A 2015 Cornell study on restaurant failure rates found that 30% of all restaurants go out of business within their first year. When it comes to independently-owned restaurants (versus corporate-owned chains), the odds of making it past the first year of business are only 10%.
Minority business owners have even lower success rates. According to a CNBC report, eight out of 10 Black-owned businesses fail within the first 18 months.