Adam Weisblatt: How Smaller Restaurants Win

0:00This is crazy. Right now, most restaurant owners are using AI to write Instagram captions. That's like hiring a Michelin chef to microwave a Hot Pocket. You've got the most powerful marketing tool ever built, and you're using it to punch up a post that nobody even asked for. Stop underutilizing AI. It could become a full marketing machine for your restaurant. And in this month's five-day restaurant marketing masterclass, I'm going to show you exactly how, step by step. I'm going to show you how to use AI to bring in guests on schedule. I'm going to show you how to turn a first visit into a fourth and how to fill seats on repeat without living inside of your phone.

0:41We're going to use the same tools you already have and create a completely different result. It's going to be five days. There is zero cost associated with it, but seating is limited. So I want you to go to restaurantbusinessschool.com to register your free spot today. Now here we go. We want Last Word to act more like a record company than a restaurant. If there's no one to build it around, I'm not particularly interested in just producing like a commercial record. Being able to grow around those people and give them an opportunity to be an owner, to be creative themselves and to make a better life for themselves.

1:18That's where our motivation really comes from. Welcome to Full Comp, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators served up on the house.

1:35What if the smartest way to grow in a market full of restaurant closures is to keep every restaurant very, very small? Adam Weisblatt co-founded Last Word Hospitality and turned Found Oyster, a 777-square-foot oyster bar, into a seven-restaurant group that keeps expanding while the famous names around it are closing every day. In today's conversation, we get into why a tiny footprint takes the pressure off your rent and your margins, why he builds every concept around talented people instead of clever ideas, and why making your operators into owners is the only way to grow without burning out.

2:13If you're convinced you need a bigger room to make real money, this one's gonna change how you think about scale.

2:25I've been in restaurants my whole life. I grew up in mostly chain restaurants and turn and burn tourist traps and like everything aside from a good restaurant where you'd learn the right way of doing things is where I work. To be honest, I always loved that work. It wasn't high pressure. It was fun. I loved the people and I knew how to sell stuff and I found out how to make a living making tips, you know, so that was how I grew up. And many years later, I had worked with a group of proprietors that own the Death & Co brand in New York and had done consulting work with them. And they were doing mostly bar stuff.

2:55And I wanted to go back to restaurants. And I had met Holly Fox, who's my partner to this day. You know, we founded Last Word together in 2014. And essentially, it was like, I have belief that the two of us are strong enough that we can help people be successful. And I think, you know, her background was really in the back end of restaurants and building them, designing them and overseeing like kind of the huge amount of investment that goes in up front. and my responsibility had been operating, which is to say once that investment is made, who's responsible for where it goes from there and getting it back out the door.

3:26And they're equally important. I think it's where so many restaurants do still get lost is it's how much you put in versus how much you get out. Not like any one number. It's just a simple puzzle that you have to figure out. And consulting allowed us to do that at scale. We learned a lot from helping people in lots of different situations, from luxury hotels to quick service and to mom and pops. And all of it in between is where we, I think, developed our understanding of how complex the business really was and how our approach was going to be formed. So we had been consulting for a few years.

3:57I mean, I guess probably five years before we were able to raise money for Found Oyster, which was our first restaurant and really what allowed us to grow as a company and show that we knew how to create stores that had an identity and a real personal story. And it was in part by partnering with Joe Luraya and Art Collender, a chef and GM and working them in rather than just in the background, but is the forefront of what that restaurant became. And I think being able to adopt not just their skill set, but also their stories is what we really learned was kind of the whole way we wanted to do restaurants and have since then, which is find talent first, make sure they're lovely and people you want to be around a lot, but also know what they're doing.

4:37And then find a great space. A great space can mean a million different things, but usually a good deal in a neighborhood you love, that you think is charming and that you think you can serve. And then build that identity around the people and that neighborhood and that space. And I think that allows for a really broad palette because humanity is really diverse. And so our approach to restaurants is diverse in what I think you see and feel and touch. And we're up to seven places now. We have three or four more that will open the next year, year and a half. And they'll always be unique because it's hard to have unique ideas.

5:11It's not as hard to find people. That's kind of what we built our business around. I want to go back to Death & Co. for a minute because I've known Alex and Dave for years. And you talk to them. And I mean, like in your first conversation with them, and I don't know what it was like for you. But for me, I was like, these guys are not bar owners. Their approach to the business of hospitality is just very different from EOS implementation to just the way that they have structured their brand and their business. is just, it's the reason it's a category of one. It's the reason that like, when you utter the name Death & Co, there just aren't a lot of other names that go alongside it.

5:54When you left the organization, what were the things you stole? I think organized creativity, especially, and a massive emphasis on creativity. The restaurants I grew up working in, it was about operations and charm. And again, you work at Turn & Burns. I had restaurants where it was like, what's good? It was like, The View. It's never my favorite thing to do, but it's what I did. And it's how I made a living. And I didn't mind it all the time. But working with proprietors was this absolute dedication to creativity. And I think that mixed with kind of my background and just ops, right? And just the straight running of a restaurant, what it takes and how to be set up on time.

6:29And like, we have little things that we should stick to. It's like, you can always open early, but you can never open late. That mixed with this extreme, real just like dedication to finding who's creative on the team, how to get the most out of them, how to integrate all that into something that becomes something much larger and greater was what I took away more than anything. And then, you know, organization. I had never been in a place where everything was so properly organized, both in the front end that like a guest would see from like bottles and the well and everything else, but also the back end and how files were stored and how things were actually kept together.

7:03I was used to like stacks of paper, P &Ls I would burn so I didn't look like an idiot in front of my boss and be like, oh, I never saw it. And learning how to do both of those things at the same time to find kind of where the art is in this business without losing the trade of running a restaurant. Before you opened the doors of the first location, what was the mathematical equation that you believed guaranteed the success of Found Oyster? I think scale. Honestly, Found Oyster is 777 square feet. It was 26 seats when we opened it. What we felt like was Los Angeles is a seafood town, but you wouldn't know it necessarily if you didn't use the word sushi or mariscos, right?

7:42Like if you miss those things, you may not realize how much seafood this town's actually eating. But like I grew up in Boston and so like the oyster bar was just something really close to my heart. And obviously San Francisco has like swan oyster and great examples. And we just felt like that was an opening and that our best chance to be successful was to not make it too big. So just kind of hedge our bet by trying to hit a single and knock it out of the park and just do it really, really well. And that goes so deep, too, because the other part was we just didn't know how much money we could raise and we didn't think we could raise a lot.

8:12We didn't raise a lot. I mean, every city, every locale is going to be subject. Right. It's very subjective. But yes, for Los Angeles, it was a light rise. We felt like that wasn't a ton of money to raise, but we did so, which was still to say we successfully completed a raise. We were able to build out a restaurant that looked and felt the way we wanted it to. And part of that is because when you have less square feet, you have just more budget to figure out what is a seat, what is the bar top, what equipment can you actually get. And I think keeping our scale really lowered and making such a small space allowed us to be successful out of the gate.

8:47And that more than anything, along with, again, a huge amount of talent in a really small space. You know, it's a lot of experience, a lot of talent, a lot of passion, and then in a tiny room where people were able to feel that very directly. For me, I never felt like I was limited by the capacity because standing room only and people are always again, like they were visiting me on their way to the next place. The people that were going to spend all the night were going to come later in the evening and say, you know, we were able to generate thousands a night and millions a year off of that turn.

9:20But when I look at Found Oyster, one operator to another, my concern was like, are you able to turn it enough in a given night across any week to really generate the top line that you need? Because we see these Michelin awarded three star 12 seed omakase places that win every award right before they go out of business. Right. Because there's a cost in doing business. So how did you make the numbers work? Or was the volume there? I think casual in LA especially works great. This is a casual and informal city. I'm an incasual, informal person. And so I love that informality and it works. And I think that a big part of what we did there was your shuckers or your bartenders, right?

10:05And that means like they're not necessarily going to like give you a fresh set of forks every course or every dish, but they are making a lot of the food that you're getting right in front of you. And they can speak to what those ingredients really are and what it felt like to pull them out of like the chest that came in from the fishermen, you know. And that closeness, I think, really just it's familiar, but it's not a place you can sit for four hours. You're sitting on a bar stool. You're hanging out. We're trying to get you oysters and beer or wine quickly and now cocktails. But I think sometimes you have to look back to hours.

10:37We were always afraid to do lunch during the week, but we opened at noon on Saturday and Sunday where people eat oysters and hang all day. And it's like, is it an operational difficult thing to run something from 12 to 10 with only that square foot? Yes, it's hard as hell. And the team to this day that does it are like masters of square inches. Right. But it lets you do it. Right. It lets you do it. And when the month is over, you're only paying 777 square feet of rent. Right. And that takes a lot of pressure off. Again, I think so often there's like people try to find what number or what secret it is that's going to make them successful.

11:12And really, it all matters. All of it, right? Every part of it matters. And if you really focus on the efficiency and the quality of service, if you focus on the food, if you focus on the deal, the rent, like it is a lot to take in. But once you can, and you can start to factor those things in, you can start to work on a broader equation that just works for you, right? It's like, there's no one puzzle, as long as you understand there's a puzzle, and you're going to need to solve it. And let's talk about the sheer scale. So right now you've got seven, you've got more opening in a town where, I mean, the headlines are just riddled with closures.

11:47And not just like this mom and pop closed, like very famous chefs, I would say in LA and New York are choosing to hang up their hats, right? Like this just isn't going to work. From Colicchio closing its flagship restaurant last month to Suzanne going. And I guess as a Los Angeles restauranteur myself, like you think to yourself, no matter how successful you are, like, my God, like if Suzanne going is closing AOC, is it that the shoe just hasn't dropped on my head yet? What do you see in Los Angeles that other people don't? Where do you see the opportunity to continue growing? Whereas everyone else is contracting.

12:28I mean, first of all, I'm eternally hopeful. Right. Like just. Sure. Right. Like in nature, I don't see any opinion to be otherwise. Right. Like if it's going to turn out to suck, like I don't need to worry about it before going down the toilet. Like we'll get there when we get there. So I think a general optimism that this city is big and very supportive of restaurants is the key of everything we do. We grew quite a bit during COVID. We just felt like once COVID started to settle, the market was going to come back and there were opportunities to sign leases when people weren't signing. And we did.

12:58And I think this is such a big city and it has so many wonderful reasons to live in. here. And I think like the strikes were terrible, the fire unimaginable. And we lost a restaurant in Malibu. We had a restaurant that was two months from opening that Chez René never opened its doors, right? Burned down. So we've seen about as bad as the city has to offer, which is natural disasters and all this awful shit. But it's a huge place. It's a super diverse place. It's a place that loves food and loves restaurants, right? And I think some of what is often impersonal about LA, which is to say you're stuck in your car, is mitigated by these places, right?

13:35These places that people go to and they do drive across the city for and they spread out for. Holly and I and all of our partners really have to stay committed to this idea of like, we want to do neighborhood places that are worth traveling for. That may be a bar and grill, it may be an oyster bar, it may be a Southeast Asian spot. But still the fundamental truth to what we're trying to create is a spot that we think will blend in where we're at while also standing out enough to get you to cross town for it. And, you know, that along again with everything I said before with scale, which is the largest for restaurants are, I think, 3 ,000 square feet, 80 seats, which compared to a restaurant that opened 20 years ago would have been that would have been considered really small.

14:13Sure. Oh, absolutely. That'd be like the kiosk for the primary restaurant. Yeah, exactly. So the scale has helped us. Right. And so instead of growing by these larger restaurants with a lot also of, you know, if you have a bigger restaurant, it's there are fewer people that can do it. It's just like you have 100 employees that's that much harder to manage than 25. And our ability to just keep going and finding, again, chefs and managers, really both sides, right, to build around in an equity position where their owners are in the room every day, they're also getting their salary, they're also getting benefits, it lets them put their heart and soul into it without worrying every day about whether they're going to survive.

14:50It's like that's on us to do it. And it's an equation that I think has allowed us to just keep creating places that that have unique identities. And if there's anything else that's doing it, it's a mix of unique identities with unique people and then restaurants that just aren't too big. Like, I hate to say that it's not. Well, look, I think it's a beautiful model. But the other side of that equation is that like half of your projects have been like gut restorations of historic buildings. So even though it's got a small footprint, it's a 1946 saloon. It's a 1957 airport bar. Like you renovated a church, Adam.

15:25That's not to say that these are all second gens where you slapped a fresh coat of paint on the wall and you hung a new sign on the door. So you are investing. And I'm curious to know about the price versus benefit. How do you decide whether to deeply invest in these spaces? Because there's charm to so many of them, right? But it also comes with an associated cost. Yeah. So I love that question, Josh, because it lets me talk about my partner, Holly, which I love to do because without her, I would be completely lost. So I wrote a book, right? It's called For the Love of Restaurants. It's going to come out in August.

16:02And a lot of it, when you read it, is about Polly. And it's because one thing that Last Word is able to do that other groups can't is we self-design and self-manage. And when I say we, I mean her and a team right around her. But there's a huge difference between an operator designing a restaurant and a designer designing a restaurant, which has nothing to say against designers. We've worked with amazing designers before, too. including in the desert, including renovating these places who understand how to just really add soul, but also integrate kind of our ideas of physical space is the operation.

16:34And once you've built it, the realities of operating it are already set. So the more Holly and I and our partners are in the room in these places at the beginning, the more the heart of that venture is going to be an operational advantage in terms of just making that space work. So the puzzle for us really comes down to, we're looking at these things in a lot of different forms, but charm and love for them is definitely the heart of all. If it's not charming and something that we would want to go to a lot, we will not, we won't even go see it. That is primary. And once that's there, it starts to be like, well, how do we find a way to take the risk?

17:10Like we want to do this. Now we have to convince ourselves to actually do it. And then you start breaking down all of these realities of like, what is the space and how much does it cost? and then how much is it going to cost for us to build it out and how much time is it going to take for us to do that, which we got to pay for that. And then really, how are we going to then invest as much money as possible at the beginning into people, into a lot of people, not just the crew that we're going to hire and bring in, but in our case, especially now, a secondary group, usually our existing partners that we bring in just to add additional mentorship on the floor when we're getting these places open, in the kitchen, in the front, everywhere we can, as much people with experience as we can.

17:51And once we wrap that all up into an equation, we know what the risk is. In the book, I talk about that. It's basically, those are your chips. First, you just got to figure out how many chips you're going to put on the table. And then you start working on a model, right? Which is how are we going to make this idea then function? And once you do that, we do it really simply, which is how many covers do we think we can actually really do every day and how much do you think they will actually really spend? then reduce that number by 25 % and see how you're doing. And if you're doing okay, you're probably starting to get to some kind of puzzle that's going to work for you.

18:24And then I think the last part is just, is your heart all the way in it, right? Because if it is, we've had restaurants fail. You know, we have, and I don't regret them for a second because we learned a ton and I was passionate about them at the beginning. And it was worth the risk when we took it, even if we turned out to be wrong. And I think, you know, especially in our world now of AI and all this stuff, what gets missed is that like failure teaches people so much and they become so much more valuable once they fall on their faces a few times and stop being afraid of it and going through these openings with more people lets us feel more confident when we do a new one we've been with these people now for a bunch of openings we're going to bring in a new chef and a new gm maybe coming up through the company ideally which is often the case but then we're backing them up with all these other people and if we can do that and the math works if your heart's all the way in it like it's worth it for the places that you push through when times were hard what was the equation there and then for the places you decided to close what did you inventory before making that decision because we look at it and we can always see it as a learning lesson but it's always incredibly difficult and painful when we're doing it right yeah i mean i think one of the hardest parts for people and getting into restaurants and once they start right turning them on is that whatever amount you think you can lose starts to multiply if your losses leak.

19:47Because you want to keep going on something that hasn't totally objectively failed, right? Like, you want to feed it and give it time. And it's so important to be able to do that. And certainly, when we were earlier in our careers, and Last Word was a smaller, more limited company without as many brands to kind of like lean into in tough times, that was always the scariest part is that like, if it doesn't work now, how are we going to make it? Because we don't have the capital. So the equation, again, is definitely half financial and certainly half instinct. You know, I don't know how else to put it.

20:26I don't think you can look at like your P &L and know necessarily like this one metric that means it's definitely dead. So I think what we've found in the past is the places we've closed, we found some huge fundamental flaw that we felt like couldn't be solved. And in some cases, it was like, hey, we're too dependent on delivery. We're paying too much in delivery fees. And like there's nowhere near enough foot traffic or parking for this concept. And like, no matter what we do, we're always going to pay those fees and there's never going to be more foot traffic. So the space is great. This neighborhood is great.

20:56We need to just go in a different direction entirely. But we had a fundamental asset there because we had predicated on getting a good lease in a neighborhood that we loved in a space that we loved. The places that we push through, really, it's like there's a mixture of like they're close, which is to say like their operating margin is losing, but not at a massive scale. So we can afford to continue to bet. And two is the dedication of the people that are there. If everyone there is super dedicated and just we feel like they're doing everything in their power to make this work, you've got to find a way to feed it as long as long as you can, you know.

21:34And to your point of bankruptcy, like there is again, these are chips and there is a point where you run out and you have no choice. And we have been there, too. Right. And it's like you do not go and take out a crazy high interest loan from a loan shark and risk your livelihood and your whatever, everything, your future. You can't write. You have to eventually say my dream might be like this thing is still not an actual person and you're not letting a human being die. You're letting a business die. And sometimes you have to let them go rather than fuck up the rest of your life and make horrible decisions.

22:05And we've seen, especially on the consulting side, people lose relationships, lose families, lose homes, things that really suck to go backwards from for a restaurant where the losses start to really exceed what I think people were willing to lose at the beginning. You do, if you're going to be in this business, have to be willing to lose money, right? You do. But you don't when you lose. It doesn't mean you lose your self-respect. It doesn't mean you lose your confidence. It doesn't mean you lose your ability to succeed in the future. It just means you lose money. And time is massively about learning more than it is about making money.

22:42And if you go through a loss and you don't learn anything, then that was a waste of everything. But as long as you learn and you're able to grow from that, your future will be brighter because you were willing to take that risk and willing to learn from your failure. How do you approach growth and how does it thread to what you want for your life personally? You know, again, I think time is invaluable, right? It's the only thing that you can't get back. Everything else comes and goes, but the time is only fading away from us. So I think if you have that mindset and you're living for the day, which I really try to do, that helps really like at the core of it all, that helps.

23:19And then I think I was really fortunate in that I think I I never expected to succeed in the way that we have. I never had any like dream of doing what we did. I wanted to be in restaurants because it's kind of how I like to spend my time. And it was the people that I liked being around. And the way things have turned out are so much better than I had ever anticipated. And that I think is because of a commitment to being around great people. You know, it's like there's a lot of bullshit I'm totally happy to put up with in restaurants. Like there's no getting around that, right? Like you're going to sometimes you're going to get broken into and shit's going to catch on fire.

23:51and like all these things are going to happen. And that's true. But if you're doing it with people you like genuinely love spending time with, right, you really love working on the puzzle with them, then that's the joy that you get out of this. And then really, it's like, enough is always enough to me, you're ever trying to figure out your own life, what's enough, it's like, enough, you don't have to think about it anymore. Like if you can go and fill up at the gas tank, and not deeply worry about the fact that gas in LA is over six bucks, you're doing really well, That's a real joy to be able to not worry about those little things.

24:24And I think certainly I really try to notice those things all the time. I've been coming up in an industry where the vast majority of people working are hourly employees, and that's the way it's always been, to take pride, not even pride, to take joy in the little moments of doing well enough and not worrying more about that. And so where does growth come from? It comes from a creative outlet. At this point, we want Last Word to act more like a record company than a restaurant group. Right. Which is if there's no one to build it around, I'm not particularly interested in just producing like a commercial record just for the point of making it.

24:59Right. But if there's someone who is coming up and whom we really believe is special and has worked their ass off, no doubt. There's no getting ahead in this industry without working your ass off. but who has all those things and that we believe is a true good leader. Being able to grow around those people and give them an opportunity to be an owner, to be creative themselves and to make a better life for themselves, and then hopefully to pass that on and keep doing it, that's where our motivation really comes from. We love making restaurants. There are days deep in a restaurant's life where it is undeniably insufferable.

25:33It can be an absolute drag. And to deny that, I think, is really not fair to restaurant people everywhere. work. There are days where the work is really hard. It sucks, but it's always important, right? Like these are always places that are valuable to people. And in making them, which more and more my life now is driven towards being able to create them. There's so much fun and joy and there is an end line, right? So I know I'm handing these things to people who are going to be in there year after year, year enough to make it, but the opportunity to like have a start and have a finish is much more in development than it is in operations.

26:05And so part of the purpose of growing is that it gives you an endless opportunity to do that. And to be opening means to be making. And the operating is to learn, get it right, and then nail it day after day after day, which is really, really challenging. And why we think making people owners is so important to being able to fulfill that obligation year after year. What does that look like? And the reason that I ask, and I'm not trying to delve too deeply, but I'm definitely trying to delve too deeply. I think everybody likes that idea, right? But then you bring on a chef that's incredibly talented.

26:38I've got clients that have done this a million times. You have too. I brought on a chef with a great aesthetic. It's incredibly talented, who, as it turns out, has a raging cocaine problem that I didn't find out about six months into this. And so like, if that's your partner, right, if you've already given that individual all of the equity, I mean, you don't really know until you know, Seth Godin has this quote, right? They're like, I can't work with you until I've worked with you. How do you structure an equity agreement? And you don't need to get granular, but high level in a way that it gives somebody the right incentive while still protecting everyone that came before the chef that earned the money that's being invested in the business, right, that created the group that is verging on this endeavor.

27:23How do you structure it in a way that's like cool and exciting for everyone, but truly fair? Well, I think on one side, like in most situations we have grown around people, we really personally know. We've come up within the ranks of our own group and that familiarity is personality. It's like they've been with us for years. We've seen them and know them. That's huge. I would definitely not advise just like creating a partnership with someone you've not met because you like the way their food looks at someone else's restaurant. It's so personal. And so I would prioritize that. There is a human there always that you love and love being around.

27:59Two is how to structure deals, right? And restaurant deals, I think, get oversimplified. The way I think is most fair, right, is if you're doing an equity position with someone that you don't know, certainly I would say do it on some kind of vesting schedule. And I think the fair way to say is like, let's say someone is going to get 5 % of equity, 10 % equity over a period of three years. and if they don't own it until they've been there three years, if they leave or get fired beforehand, they don't need to keep it. Well, then what I would say is pay them the full amount of their equity, the full amount from the first day that they're there.

28:35And if they leave, at least it was like a bonus that was there the whole time. And that was, as long as everyone has agreed to that at the beginning, I think that's a way you can enter or into an agreement with someone you really don't know and have some kind of out. The agreements that we usually do, there's always gonna be some amount of risk, which is to say that restaurants that fail aren't worth anything. It's not work at all. There's no risk because it's not our shit. We're not going to sell anything. But on the side of that, it does work. It'll be because of these people. And so the way we've always tried to incentivize both investors previously and any deal that we did was what is known as a preferred return, which is just the money is paid back to the cash investment first, but we would never do that at like 100%.

29:21So if a deal was at 50-50, let's say 50 % to ops, 50 % to money, then I would say that 75 % of the cash will go to the cash till they're paid back and 25 goes to the ops, right? Once that money has been repaid or even repaid plus 10%, right? Now it goes to 50-50 or whatever that split may be. And I think for operators, your ability to control that split in your future with cash will be based on your experience and how much you can prove that you deserve more in the end. Because preferred return both protects cash investment, but it also allows operators to make more in the end. And there's no doubt about it, these are not companies that will suddenly be worth$50 million.

30:04At some point, you have to, as an operator, get more of the cash flow because you're not going to sell it for$50 million and go to a beach and chill. It isn't going to happen. So finding a way from the beginning to be fair to everyone in these deals really comes from, I don't want to say a complicated deal, but having some level of thought in how you both incentivize someone to put in cash and how you also incentivize operators to stay for the long run and get something more out of it once that risk has been reduced. Let's talk about the book. So you open seven places, you got three more in the hopper and you think to yourself, well, I mean, you got like 15 minutes a day, right?

30:45So instead of meditating, I'm going to write a full on book. I would assume, and you seem like a man that's well-read. You seem like somebody that studied the science of the industry. What did you want to say that you felt like hadn't been said? First of all, I was energized to do it. I lost my best friend when I was a kid from this awful cancer and it was terrible. And I was with him for five months and his wife and family and all our friends were together. And it was just like a really intense thing to go through. And at the end of it, I just felt immense energy to do and make something new and to dedicate something to him.

31:18And I'd also lost my other friend, Jeff, the year before. So two friends in a year. And that gave me the energy of like, you can't do this in 15 minutes a day. Right. So I did it in six hours a day. And it would be like three early in the morning and three at night. And that's what I think it took to write something that I was proud of and to come up with a book that I think is worth reading. But from the beginning, and this goes way beyond time and energy to actually put in this, I felt like there had been a missing gap of a book speaking directly to people who spend their lives working in restaurants, waiting tables or washing dishes or cooking.

31:49And that the purpose of the book was to help you understand how to go from where you are to opening and owning your own place. Right. And that those people know a lot about cooking and they know a lot about service and they know a lot about hospitality because it's what they do every single day. And it's how they survive. But in the course of even working your way up to being a general manager and executive chef, that doesn't mean you're going to learn how to negotiate and find a lease or how to write and sign a deal and how to raise money and how to kind of create, really how to design, how to build, how to do all these other things that are the foundation of which this industry is built upon before you get to do the restaurant work.

32:27And without that stuff, failure is inevitable. So with that, it was like, I knew what the curriculum would be, right? Which is start from finding a space and end with opening day. And I played around a lot with like different examples from different restaurants that we had. And a friend of mine, Baxter Holt, is actually a writer for ESPN as a journalist. And a dear friend looked at what I had written and liked it. He's like, you can write. He's like, but you're trying to tell me how to open one restaurant by using multiple examples of yours. So what if you just picked one? And like literally the second he said it, I knew it was just suddenly I had a new narrative, which was found oyster.

33:03Just start at the beginning and go to the end. And so the book is really the tale found oyster and how we built it. But all the while, it's illustrated my good friend, Davin Sanchez, an amazing job illustrate with like really fun, just almost political cartoon type pieces of which I turn the narrative to us, to you, and do say things like, listen, when you're signing your own lease, everyone's going to tell you it's a great deal. It's priced per square foot, right? And that's a real estate reality. And sure, that's true to real estate people. But to you, all that's going to matter is how many seats you have and are they full.

33:36Assless seats cost you money and are a problem. Full ones are really valuable. So that was what I wanted to share, which was you can't just give one mathematical equation or one hospitality idea or one cooking idea and say, this will be the way you're going to be successful. It is starting to comprehend how complicated the business really is. That to be really great, you're going to have to learn cooking and service and hospitality and building and permitting and at least a topical version of all of them, enough to know they exist and how to work with a team that maybe is a specialist in those areas, which you are not.

34:13And that was really the purpose behind all of it is for restaurant people who I loved. I can't say I loved restaurant work necessarily for the work as much as I loved it for the people that I worked with. And I tried other careers and just found myself in environments that I was not used to and have always been drawn to just the environment of working in a restaurant. And I wrote it for anybody who was going to wake up tomorrow and, you know, clock in. And that's my hope is that like people who really love this business, not necessarily because they're drawn to it forever, but for any reason, right, whether they love to dine or whether they love to work in it, find something in there that builds empathy towards what we do.

34:53But this is hard as hell, but it's important. A lot was said about third spaces and a lot have been said about all these different stuff. But I know that without a doubt, restaurants are where people celebrate and where they mourn. And those are immensely important occasions for people to have a place to go. And if this country looks more and more like a place where more and more mom and pops are able to like thrive and succeed and your town looks like a town or your city looks like a city, it'll be because in large part, the restaurants that are there are independent and owned by people who live there and reflect that community.

35:28And I think restaurants are hard no matter what, whether you're working franchise or corporate or independent, but I've always been drawn to the independent side and I love watching people make their own places. And that was really my goal is to help them try to do that. That's Adam Winesblatt. You can pre-order his upcoming book for the love of restaurants on amazon.com today. Hey, it's Josh. I wanted to take a hot minute to thank you for listening to today's episode and to ask that if you are getting value from FullConf, please like and subscribe and be sure to leave a review. Those reviews matter and they help other independent owners and operators find the show.

36:05Also, if you wanna take the stuff that we're talking about in these episodes from idea to execution, head to joshcopal.com. There you will find a ton of free templates and tools and all of the details on upcoming learning events so you can keep building momentum. I know you're busy, and so don't take your time for granted. Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode.