The Profit: Which Businesses Survived?

The surprising thing about The Profit where are they now is how well the businesses held up. Of the 105 companies Marcus Lemonis featured across eight seasons on The Profit, we can verify a current status on 91, and of those, 68 are still open under their original name. That is a 74.7 percent survival rate for the businesses we can confirm, and once you fold in the ones that were renamed or relocated but kept trading, 78 of the 91 are still operating, which is 85.7 percent. For a genre where the norm is closure, those are the strongest numbers of any show we track.

There is a simple reason, and it is baked into the format. The Profit was never a rescue show in the Kitchen Nightmares sense.

Why The Profit survives where rescue shows fail

Gordon Ramsay walks into a failing restaurant with two days and a camera crew. Marcus Lemonis walks into a business with a checkbook. The whole premise of The Profit is that Lemonis, running Camping World and a portfolio of other companies, invests his own money in exchange for equity and control. He is not fixing a business for a weekend of television. He is buying a stake in it and then, in many cases, folding it into his own retail network, which is why so many of these companies are still around.

That difference shows up everywhere in the data. A rescue show picks the most desperate cases it can find, because desperation makes television. An investment show has to pick businesses that could plausibly return money, because the investor is the one exposed. Lemonis was choosing companies with something worth saving, and then he was putting capital, supply chains, and distribution behind them. The survival rate reflects the selection as much as the intervention.

It is worth being honest about a second thing the survival number hides. Plenty of the on-camera handshakes fell apart after the cameras left. Owners have said publicly that the deal shown on air never closed, or unwound later, and Lemonis has been through his share of disputes with former partners. But a deal collapsing is not the same as a business closing. In many cases the company kept operating on its own after the Lemonis chapter ended, which is exactly why we separate "is the business still open" from "did the televised deal hold." This post answers the first question, because that is the one our directory can verify.

The full status board

We set the 14 unverifiable companies aside before computing any rate, because a status directory that pads its success number with businesses it cannot actually confirm is not worth trusting. That leaves 91 verified companies as the denominator for every percentage here.

The survivors

The open column is deep, and it includes several of the businesses Lemonis is still associated with years later. Sweet Pete's in Jacksonville, the candy company from Season 2, is still open, and it became one of the show's signature investments. Key West Key Lime Pie Co. in Key West is still running. Shuler's Bar-B-Que in Latta, South Carolina, the small-town barbecue restaurant from the same season, is still open and still serving.

The pattern in the survivors is not glamour. It is a real product with a real market and an owner who could execute once the capital and the systems arrived. Lemonis talks constantly on the show about people, process, and product, and the companies that stuck were usually the ones where the product was already good and the process was the only thing broken. Give a genuinely good candy shop or pie company the distribution it lacked and it tends to keep going.

The open column runs well beyond the candy shops. Mr. Green Tea in Keyport, New Jersey, the ice-cream maker from the first season, is still open. Coopersburg Sports in Pennsylvania is still operating, and Jacob Maarse Florists in Pasadena is still open. The consistency matters most at the end of the run: every one of the eight businesses featured in the final season, Season 8, is still operating, because they are the most recent and have had the least time to fail. The open column stretches across all eight seasons, which is exactly what you would expect from a show that invested in viable companies rather than rescuing hopeless ones.

The renamed: same business, new sign

Eight companies kept operating but under a different name, and several of those renames are Lemonis absorbing the business into his own brands. Bentley's Corner Barkery in Chicago became Bentley's Pet Stuff and expanded well beyond its original footprint. Tea2Go in Dallas continued as The American Tea and Spice Shop. Skullduggery in Anaheim carried on as SD Toyz. In each case the entity the show visited changed its banner but never went dark, which is why we count these as still operating rather than filing them with the closures. A rename is a business decision, not a death.

The closures

Thirteen companies genuinely closed, which is 14.3 percent of the verified group, and even the strongest investment show cannot beat that number down to zero. Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour in Southern California, the nostalgia chain Lemonis tried to revive, is closed. Detroit Denim in Detroit is closed. These were not businesses without merit. They were businesses whose economics never quite closed the gap, and an investment plus a television spotlight was not enough to change that. The closures are a useful corrective to the idea that Lemonis had a magic touch. He had capital and a good eye, and even that fails about one time in seven.

The companies we will not score

The 14 unverifiable businesses sit outside every percentage above, and they are worth naming as a category because several of them ran into a specific problem. A number of these companies lapsed, and their old web domains were later recaptured by unrelated operators, which means the trail that would normally confirm a status has gone cold or misleading. Da Lobsta in Chicago is one we hold in the unverifiable column rather than guess about. We publish a last-confirmed snapshot for cases like this and refuse to assert a current status we cannot stand behind, because the discipline of leaving them out is exactly what makes the 74.7 percent figure above credible.

What the record means

The Profit posts the best survival numbers in the rescue-and-turnaround genre, and the reason is structural rather than magical. Lemonis was investing in businesses that could plausibly pay him back, not rescuing the most hopeless cases for drama, and he backed his picks with money and distribution rather than a two-day makeover. Read the two rates together: 74.7 percent still open as themselves and 85.7 percent still operating in some form once you count renames and relocations. Both are real, and the gap between them is simply the businesses Lemonis folded into his own brands.

Every status here is a snapshot with a date attached, because companies change hands and names shift, and a rate computed today will drift as we re-check. For the current status of any single business Lemonis backed, start at the The Profit hub, where every company carries its own dated status.