Kay:

Okay. So, what’s the business? Now we’re not talking about just the secret business. We’re talking about our practical business and some of the things that we’ve learned along the way.

Shi:

 I feel like the answer to the question what’s the business.

Kay & Shi:

Yes.

Shi:

We are what we lovingly refer to as multi-passionate entrepreneurs and if you’re long-time listeners then you already know we have a multitude of businesses and we want to take this episode and segment here and address our different businesses and some of our lessons that we’ve learned. There’s no way we could start with anything but restaurants.

Kay:

Well, of course, as you know, the story goes when I, Kay here, was 10 and Shi was 17 our parents took over a single-unit restaurant up in Truckee, California, a little mountain ski town, and overnight we became an entrepreneurial family.

Shi:

You guys know we baked biscuits and washed aprons and served tables and bussed tables and fixed ice machines as a family of course. 10-year-old Kay and 17-year-old Shi weren’t fixing the ice machines, but we were definitely doing all of the other things. Mom was working on the books and the marketing and credit card processing and taxes, and all of the things and it was a really amazing thing. So, I feel like our restaurant advice is also really applicable and practical for family business and small business in general because whether you’re selling tires or selling flowers or selling omelets there are some fundamentals of that brick-and-mortar space business that don’t change.

Kay:

Well, over the course of the last 19 years that the restaurant has been in our lives we’ve had the opportunity to go through a lot of ups and downs to learn a lot of lessons and most importantly, to gain a vantage point from a lot of different seats on the bus. We started out, like Shila said, wiping down tables and serving within the restaurants and eventually that led to managing in restaurants. And then it led us being the ones to balance the books and do the marketing. And then it led to growing the company and growing the franchise company. And so, we’ve had a lot of seats and a lot of vantage points that have given some unique perspective onto what works and what doesn’t.

Shi:

So, some of the things that work in the restaurant we know for sure or in the small business brick and mortar family business space are valuing your community, being able to be a positive impact on whatever your region is. Now, if you are brick and mortar, or you sell widgets from a shop, that’s going to be your physical region. But if you’re an online shop or professional services, it might be a little bit more. But you’ll want to know what that community is and when we mean to serve your community, serve it in being seen, serve it in giving obviously. Serve it in partnerships with schools and charities and nonprofits. We’ve really seen that be a strategy that’s helped our restaurants grow.

Kay:

Well, when you’re an integral part of a community as a small business you’ll find that that community seeks to support you as well. Now, as you move up into that next level of then kind of working on this business instead of in the business where you might not be out there boots on the ground, making contact with your community you start making contacts with people in your community who you can partner with in order to do better. So, the next piece that we’ve learned within the restaurant realm is that networking and who you know really matters, and who you get to know over time can really benefit you in the long run.

Shi:

That’s right and building those meaningful connections has really helped our business both in big deal senses and PR senses and in the everyday transaction of people visiting the restaurant more often and thinking of it more often and recommending it more often. Those things have really been really dimensional in the way we’ve been able to receive from networking. But networking and connections don’t happen overnight. When the pandemic hit, for our restaurants, we were able to go to our community partners, go to our email list for the restaurant chain, go to those influencers around our town, our region, and tell them what was going on and how they could help and so many of them did. We would not have survived those first eight to 12 weeks of pandemic without the incredible community support that we received, and it was because we’d been investing and pouring into that community for so long.

Kay:

Now, you can’t get to a place of investing and pouring into a community if your business is not at least doing well enough to have some basic systems in place. Now you’ve probably heard in business that systems are important. If you are an independent entrepreneur or maybe not a brick and mortar, your systems look like email automation and calendar hookups. If you’re a brick and mortar, your systems look like a schedule and how to do the register at night, right? So, having certain sets of instructions or things that can be put on autopilot so you don’t have to be responsible for them is the only way to elevate as an entrepreneur.

Shi:

Adding systems to the business was something our mom knew was extremely important when our family first came into the Squeeze In. When we first bought the Squeeze there was no schedule. There were no credit cards. There was no phone line. There was no soda machine. There was no fryer for French fries. There were barely any systems and many upgrades needed. But those systems began to get into play and get used and they helped us build and scale, as we did. Now, our journey of building and scaling is a little bit harrowing. It was like we continued to double down and invest in really creative ways during economic challenging times and it almost broke our family, the pace.

In fact, recently, Kay and I put together our timeline of events, our just general life timeline. Side note, super fun exercise for you to do if you’ve never done it. Draw a line on a piece of paper and put all your significant events on there. But we realized this explosion of growth and it was like, no wonder there was all of this pressure because we just kept pushing the chips in and betting it all. We wouldn’t have even been able to do that though without the systems and without the community support.

Kay:

Yep. So, those two things have become incredibly important in building the business. But one aspect of every business that’s really important that we’re going to elaborate further on in the next segment is marketing, and we discovered the power of marketing in the Squeeze In so effectively that we actually created another business out of it, and we look forward to talking with you about that soon.