Ariel Arce: The Spreadsheet Came Before the Concept

0:00Ariel Arce: I'm going to ask you a question that might sting a bit. How many holiday parties do you have booked for the month of December? Not like how many do you expect? It's how many are on the books right now with the deposits collected and the contracts signed. And for many of you, I worry that the answer is not enough. And here's why that matters. I think that the companies that are going to throw those parties are picking their venues right now. This is a sweet spot between August and September. And by the time you start thinking about December, the decision's already been made. You're not losing those parties in November.

0:34Ariel Arce: You're going to lose them this month. And that's why I built the Private Events Engine. It's a simple three-part system that leverages AI to do most of the work for you. And this month in the Marketing Masterclass, I'm going to walk you through it. It's going to show you how to package events, how to get in front of the people that are booking them, and how to close them without discounting. And you get the whole thing for free. So show up to this month's Marketing Masterclass. Go to restaurantbusinessschool.com today to sign up. Now here we go. I really think you have to have a why for your what.

1:13I mean, if you're not asking why you're doing something, then I don't think you're doing something with intention. and there's no real success to doing something without intention.

1:28Ariel Arce: Welcome to Full Calm, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators, served up on the house.

1:42Ariel Arce: What if your entire restaurant concept should have been designed backwards, starting from the check average that you need and building from there? Today's guest had 16 seats and no way to predict what anyone was going to spend. So she solved for that number first. $65 a head, two turns a night, and then she designed an entire guest experience to deliver exactly that, down to a rule that every song has to be at least three minutes long. In this conversation, we get into why she refused to change what the market would pay for for nearly 10 years, why she now plans the closing date of a business before it opens, and how the real asset in her Soho townhouse turned out to be the three floors themselves.

2:23Ariel Arce: If you built your concept first and hoped the numbers would follow, this one's going to give you a better blueprint.

2:36My career had been in Champaign up until this moment. So I was in a basement at 127 McDougal Street, working with a man named Robbie DeRossi, who owns a whole bunch of independent restaurants all over New York City, claim to fame, Death & Co. He opens a champagne bar called Riddling Widow, and he calls me at some point and said, I have this place. It's doing abysmal numbers. I feel like maybe the person who's running it is drinking me under the table. I don't know what's going on, but I need somebody to come in here who knows a thing or two about the economics of champagne and tell me how to run this place.

3:16So to paint a picture, it's a 16-seat basement bordello of a space that is shelling champagne at pretty much close to cost. And I had spent about eight years up until that point really focused on champagne specifically. I had gotten to work for really great people like Chef Grant Ackett's and Pops for Champagne, which was this place in Chicago that was the largest family owned and operated champagne company. And I understood the economics of how to sell a bottle of champagne, whether it was how to keep it, how to store it, how to sell it, how to market it, and so on. So I go to work in this place.

3:56I work four days a week. It is closed the other three days. It did not make sense for anyone to work there besides me. I spent two years pretty much like pouring my heart and soul into this project. And halfway through it, Robbie says to me, this business, I don't really care about it that much. I want to move it. I want to sell it. I'm going to explore what that looks like. And I said, what does it look like for me to buy it from you? And he said, throw me out a number. So I got one of the best pieces of advice I think I ever got was I called a friend of mine who had been working in the business.

4:34He had a couple of restaurants at the time, fast, casual things. And he said, you're going to have to do three things at the exact same time. You're going to have to raise the money. You're going to have to convince somebody to give you this lease. And you're also going to have to build the model for this. And you're going to have to tell everybody at each stage or at each phase that you know exactly what you're doing and you've got it all under control. And then you have to go pitch it to this person to sell it to him. And hopefully he'll buy it at that price. There was no valuation. There was no whatever.

5:07He was kind of like, here's the asset. Here's how much I want for it. And I went to town. So about six months later, I raised the money to do it. I took over the lease and I knew that I wanted to raise this champagne bar that had been in the basement upstairs. It was a two-level restaurant. And that left me with a downstairs space that was totally operable for food and beverage, but didn't have a concept in it. And while I had been operating this little bar, which was called Briddling Widow, on Thursdays, I would invite in a friend who would DJ records and I would pour champagne. We called it champagne omakase.

5:48It was 40 bucks. I would basically pour you like$400 worth of champagne and he would play records. And during that time, it was like the most fun night of the week. All of these friends would come out. We had this like return customer that would be there, you know, week to week. And one of the things that was so amazing was everyone would always want to engage with the DJ. They would want to look through the records. They would want to talk about it. This is 11 years ago, mind you. And records and record bars and all of the trends that we're seeing in the musical space was not popping at the time.

6:24So this was very novelty. So cut to when we moved Ayers upstairs, which was the champagne bar, I was like, wouldn't it be cool to open a little Japanese record bar down here? It's perfect, it's tiny, it's intimate. They could set up a nice music system and kind of play homage to these small hole in the walls in Japan, the Kisas, and open Tokyo record bar. And at that time, I had never really built a restaurant model before. So I was really lucky. I called another friend and I said, how am I supposed to do this? And he sent me a pretty detailed spreadsheet and he said, fill this all out. And when you do that, you'll start to see kind of like what your business model will look like.

7:09And it became very clear very quickly to me that there was no way I was ever going to be able to create a true check average for this downstairs space because in Japan and these record bars, like you're not really serving a lot of food. People are having some drinks, but like they could be on any spectrum of drinking an expensive whiskey to cheap beers. There's normally snacks on the table, but it's not like you're developing a super cohesive check average. And I started to freak out where I was just like, how am I supposed to know how much money we're going to do down here. So I have a history in the theater.

7:47I was a child actor. I went to school for film and television and theater, graduated with a degree in basically producing. And I started to look at it from a theatrical perspective. I was like, well, what do I need? I need people to sit here for two hours. I want them to spend roughly$65 a person. I have 16 seats. And what could I do to be able to turn this room twice so that I could get the track average that I need? And what that inevitably led me to was creating the concept of Tokyo Record Bar, which was a listening room experience where the guests participated in choosing the music. And by doing that, I never had to have a proper DJ.

8:33I never had to be judged on the musical stylings of the room. I had to figure out how to keep them there for two hours. And I did that through food. So we developed, you know, a prefix menu that cost$55. You got seven courses of small bites. And, you know, I was like, they're going to get a drink. So we'll get to$65 a person. And I'll get my two hours. And how am I going to get them for two hours? Okay, all the songs that they choose have to be three minutes a piece. because three times 16, maybe there's a little time before or after when they're getting settled. And voila, it was the concept.

9:07And we opened Labor Day weekend 2017. And I was like, nobody's going to come. Nobody's in the city. Nobody knows about this. And we got one great press piece in Grub Street. And we opened, you know, we did a little friends and family. I opened the reservation books. And, you know, the piece came out and I looked at the book the next day and we were booked for three months. And let me tell you, that is not how I've ever opened a restaurant again afterwards. Maybe how I've concepted afterwards. But, you know, it was a true example of you create something that's so necessary. You create something that's really like a concept from your mind based on your needs.

9:57And you kind of give it your own twist and spin. And I think there's people out there in the world that are interested in that. Now we're almost 10 years old.

10:05Ariel Arce: Product market fit. It's an amazing thing. And it's one of those things where like I've interviewed hundreds of people and it's the people that find product market fit. And then that's all they do. The interviews are very different because you learn almost nothing from success. So like people that have achieved product market fit, when you ask them like, why are you successful? They're like, well, you know, it really just comes down to great food, great beverage, consistent service. And then that's it because they had product market fit. So they didn't know that there were all of these other things that you would have to figure out if you didn't have product market fit.

10:42Ariel Arce: What I think is interesting about the concept is the age of it, right? That as the city has evolved over time, this has been this thing that is standard, that is static. But the economics around it, I'm sure, have changed dramatically over the last 10 years, right? Like if you were still making the same money today, you wouldn't be making any money. So talk to me about that and how the economics have changed for a thing that has been around for over a decade. Yeah. I mean, talking about economics and experience is kind of like the most heartbreaking thing because I think some of the best work that we do is when we're naive and we don't know any better and we are just like, I want to build something that I want to go to.

11:28I'm a person who loves value. I want to build something that has value. And I think a customer really, your average customer, not somebody who is a massively sophisticated diner or somebody who wants to spend a premium on ingredient or experience, but somebody who likes to go out, multiple times a week and they have a little bit of expendable income to do so, those people really want to feel like when they pay the check that it was worth the money. And so I think the economics for that space was not greedy. It was, I want to create something that I want to be at. I want to create something that I can see has longevity if it works for people.

12:11And over the last 10 years, the price of the menu has only gone up$20 over 10 years. And we've checked ourselves at every moment of why we've done that. And for most of the reason, it's because of the cost of everything going up or it's the cost of labor going up. We've never done it. And like, we've had opportunities to do it because there was demand in the marketplace and we could, You know, so I'm pretty proud of that. And I and I do, unfortunately, like if it was still me, we'd still be doing this at 65 bucks. Right. And everyone would be like, this is too good of a deal. And then that's a total different form of perception that you have to work with.

12:55When you make something not a good deal, then that's another form of perception you have to deal with. So to me, I always like to stay in a place where I can't get the feedback that this wasn't worth the experience or it wasn't. It didn't meet the expectations of the diner.

13:09Ariel Arce: How much of that do you think is tied up in price? Because as a marketer by trade these days, there's this great line which says, you know, value is not what you pay, it's what you get. There's an argument that if you charge$125 a person, you could offer an experience that is 50 % better. You still don't have to make any money on the back end. The question is, can you, right? Like you have to check yourself of can you deliver a$50 more experience. And what do you have to do? So that space is like a perfect kind of test conversation, right? Because it is 150 year old building. We have a kitchen that's about 200 square feet.

13:52We have an electrical panel that's had to be upgraded three times just to be able to keep up with the type of work that we're doing in there. There is absolutely no space to breathe outside of what's happening in the physical dining rooms. We have a very small storage space. And so you can up your level of hospitality. Hospitality is expensive. Hospitality can also be free. So you can decide how you want to invest in your hospitality. But for us, the only way that we could continuously raise that price and I think match the value is in the physical product, the actual things that you eat. And there are limitations in that space of what we can do.

14:37And also like this is the ethos of it was not that we're flying fishing from the market, right? The ethos was it's an izakaya and an izakaya has roles as well too. So when you see the evolution of what's happened in that, we've had four chefs over almost 10 years. We are on probably our most sophisticated chef yet. And she is pushing the boundaries of that room, but there's still limitations. And so we kind of feel like the price point at which we're at, we're talking from the menu, not beverages, not included. So it puts us now at a check average of about$110 a person where we started at 65 because we've raised the level of quality of the beverage, we've played the quality of the food.

15:25The experience for the most part has stayed exactly the same because the experience is great. The experience is the experience. And I think that's the part that people resonate with. Music is such a connector and it feels very different in that room because you're a participant in it. And that is something that we don't have to capitalize on. That is what it is. And we want that to always feel worth it.

15:48Ariel Arce: Let's talk about growth beyond that. So I'll sit across from an owner operator and I'll be like, you know, I was in multiple tiers of dining with multiple concepts and one of the most competitive dining markets in the world. And they're like, cool. And I'm like, it's because you didn't do it. Like doing it is horrible. You know, if I could do it all over again and I was to do it the easy way, what I would have done is that 900 square foot bar I am that absolutely crushed from the day I open, I would have just opened 10 of those. And had I just opened 10 of those, I would have probably made more, spent less and slept more.

16:24Ariel Arce: But it's again, you learn so little from success that I needed to try new things. I needed to struggle through those things. And you're someone that could have taken what was obviously a winning model. You could have dropped it into every hotel bar in the country internationally as well. You could have built out dives similar to Death & Co. in major markets nationally. Why didn't you choose that route? It's not that we didn't choose it. It's I don't think the time has been right yet. I think for the first five years, especially because, you know, we went through COVID with this and that was its own fun challenge.

17:02But for the most part, I always believed it was the people that made the concept successful. and I still of course do believe that the personalities in the room and the way that people make you feel and the type of hospitality and the people that are in there is invaluable to the experience but it took me a long time to truly realize that actually the model works and you can train people and you could replicate this and so we actually now 10 years later for the first time are thinking about the scalability of that concept. And let me tell you, there's a million different directions you can go with it because it is so unique where it is and how it functions and operates.

17:50It would be quite rare to be able to just pick that up and do that over and over again. So I guess there's part of me that's very protective of it having its soul and its energy wherever it goes and not fully selling it out. On the other hand, I do believe that it's a concept that will take on like a bigger life than itself by being in other markets and having its own individual flair in those markets. So I guess I am a person that has always been in a rush. I have moved very fast in my career. And this is one of the few things that I've taken my time with. And I'm seeing the reward of that. And I think now is the time that we actually think about its growth and its expansion.

18:36Ariel Arce: So our careers are kind of polar opposite in the way that every entrepreneurial venture I've had in my life, with the exception of the latest iterations of my career, they were partnerships. Because what I wanted to do is I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it with someone. Like I thought there was inherent value in that. And by and large, what I did was I chose people I liked, not people that were diligent, not people that would actually add value to the business, which is a mistake that I've delved into deeply with my therapist, into why I would make such a foolish decision. Right? Yes, ma 'am.

19:08Ariel Arce: I ask that because yours is opposite, right? So you started and it was yours. And so you were able to maintain absolute control, which does a couple of things. One, it may or may not make it easier to learn, right? But number two, like there's no one to blame, right? Like it's, I was always able to turn to my partners and say, well, they're slowing me down or they don't understand the process, right? or we're not aligned on the thing. And in a shocking turn of events, Errol, I always think I'm right. So they were all, you know, it was tumultuous as a result. And so talk to me about the pros and the cons of being completely independent and how you had to adjust when you began to bring on partners to do subsequent ventures.

19:52Sure, yeah. I mean, I wanted partners. I wanted them so badly. I didn't want to do it on my own. And then I have these little pieces of wisdom that people gave me where the thing that I wanted, someone had said to me, yeah, that's kind of a thing you can pay for. If you weren't creative and you couldn't come up with it and you didn't understand the economics of how it worked, then you did need somebody to help you. But all I couldn't really figure out was like how to do the ops every day. And you can hire somebody to do that. So that's kind of how my process started was I didn't want to get held up on not doing it when the opportunity presented itself.

20:37I wanted to say yes. And I may not have had everything that I wanted, but I had enough. So I got to work. And I think by doing that, I worked every single job, every single role. A piece about how my restaurants also come together is I tend to build them as well too. So we've done everything from building from soup to nuts from the studs. We've been our own general contractors. My dad used to build my restaurant. So that had its own form of therapy, let me tell you. And I think like, when you don't have any other options, and you have to figure it all out, you're gonna do a lot of things incorrectly, but you will find your way you will find kind of the style of how you work and you by default kind of lead by example, good or bad.

21:28And I think through that process, I was really able to build a team of people who saw my vision and were excited about what I wasn't going to take no for an answer to do. And so we were able to build really cool stuff. And now my current business partner is somebody who hired me for one of my first jobs when I moved back to New York City. He had gone off and opened his own restaurants and had his own partners. And we found our way back to each other about three years ago. And I think one of the most important things that I can say about having a business partner is being with somebody who you can be vulnerable with when you're in the thick of it, when you're in the shit.

22:12I never want to be in a position of blaming my business partners. I've been in a situation like that before and it was terrible and we've righted that situation and cleaned it up. So I've had to deal with some really terrible stuff, some real intense things and you move on and you get through it. You move on, you learn from it. I hate the word failure because I think everything is just a learning opportunity. It may be difficult, but the universe is great and it sends us all these things to learn from and it's kind of been my process. So now I do have partners and most of my partners are people that I've been friends with before who I worked with and built friendships with and now I have business partners who are that and we have new people that are coming into the mix who we want to invest in their future projects and I don't like thinking about restaurants as a family because that's a little too like boundaryless but I do think that like you should only work with people that you feel like you can be yourself with and you can be vulnerable with and you want to like laugh with because like this is a huge part of your life and it should be joyful.

23:22And this is like a very positive me. There's been negative me's at times, but this is how I feel 10 years later.

23:28Ariel Arce: Let me ask you something else. Do you care about money? And if so, how much? Yes, I care about money. When I've done things for money, it's always been the worst same been the worst same the worst project the worst yes the worst worst for sure worse like emotion like it's yes so i try not to do that anymore i do like the economics to make sense we're smart enough now we've had enough experience we have way too many tech stacks we have so many ways to know how to optimize our businesses and to do them smartly. But I think the money comes when you do what you love. And there was definitely a period of my career where I felt very burnt out and I felt like I didn't like what I was doing.

24:23And the problem, like when you're at the top of the food chain and you don't like what you're doing, there's a lot of guilt and resentment and things that go on there. And you have to really evaluate that. So I think now my goal is to only do things and really, really check myself of what am I doing this for? Why am I doing it? And only do them because they're things that I actually want to do. And then the money comes.

24:50Ariel Arce: Well, but doesn't the money come through the right vehicle? The reason I say that is because like, you know, I opened and closed a bunch of things for other people. I did it for myself. And you learn over time. And for me, at least, there's this confluence between this is something I'm really interested in that I'm super passionate about. And this is a model that I know makes money. And when I look at the architecture of your career, the evolution of your career over time, what I see is that you were iterating models. It was always you. It was always your concepts, but that you were moving towards progressively more profitable, sustainable, consistent models with time.

25:30Ariel Arce: Is that how you see your career? No, no. I mean, there's been no plan, just opportunity. And I think I feel that I'm a very lucky person. And when opportunities present themselves. I'm also a creative. I am not a restaurant operator. I didn't set off to be in this business. I am a creative at heart. And so I get really excited about things. When I can visually see something, when I can see the future of it, I can explore it in my mind, I can get excited about anything. What's that saying? I could sell shit to the manure company. Like I can see it. It makes sense. So let's explore it. And that's led me to do all sorts of things that weren't necessarily like the most financially smart decisions.

26:26But I knew that there was a purpose to do them. For example, I had opened a restaurant called Niche Niche, which was open for just shy of five years, four years and change. And it was quite possibly the coolest thing I'll ever have done in my career. And it was a total springboard for everything that has come afterwards. And I've met the most amazing people through it. It was a very collaborative project. Two of my current business partners are people that worked for me at Niche Niche. But I also knew that the economics of it were complicated and it may not have a long run. And my feeling is like not everything has to be a long run.

27:13You really have to look at what it is you want to create and how it exists in the world. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't take the 10-year lease because you're going to get better options there, but it doesn't necessarily have to last the 10 years. So when the opportunity came to pivot that business into what is now Risholi, it was the smart economical move. And it also had intention behind it, which is the opportunity to get to shepherd a blue chip brand to the United States and potentially grow and evolve that brand as well was something that we couldn't pass up. So there hasn't been a, I have to do this.

27:51This is the next step. I think for me, it's like for us to say yes or for me to say yes to something, like it has to make sense that there's a next step for why we're doing it. So our next phase is really about what are our brands that are scalable? What if we take on new projects or something that really we feel connected to and excited about? Or if someone wants to hire me to consult on something, you know, I have to be able to see the creative vision and really be able to develop that and enjoy the process of the people that you're working with to do it.

28:24Ariel Arce: But when you look at Nishnish, right, four or five years versus Risholi, right, same space, new partners, they had done a residency there, which is how you guys initially hit engaged. When you look at that model today, do you see more sustainability in it? And if so, why? What is the difference? You know, because like that's an apples to apples comparison because it's the same space, comparable operators, you're involved. You know what I mean? What did you learn through that? Completely different concepts, right? And the thing that took down Niche Niche was COVID. And if COVID hadn't happened, I'd probably still be running Niche Niche.

29:02And it would be wild to be running it now. Risholi is an a la carte restaurant model. Nish Nish was a prefix model. Nish Nish had a music club underneath it called Special Club. They mix modeled with their food. They played off their different seating times. You know, we had the economics of musicians. We had the economics of changing our wine every night at Nish Nish. It was an ever-changing concept. Risholi is we pretty much cook the same thing every day except for specials or, you know, seasonal menu changes. It is a full a la carte house. It has a private dining room that is a beast. Like it is a very modelable, standardized concept versus niche, niche and special club, which were so conceptual, so theatrical.

29:56And while I feel like you can see a little bit of like my touch in all three of the concepts, what I think like I'm very good at is looking at what are the North Stars of business? Like, what are we trying to achieve here? How do we keep pushing forward on those dreams? And how do we make people feel like they can separate themselves? They are, you know, ignoring the fourth wall when they walk into the restaurant. And that I think we do well in all three of those. and the economics, that's now my business partner, Max, who, you know, is in this P &L every single day and we're operating that business on such a smarter level.

30:41If I had had him when we did Niche Niche, who knows? You know, Niche Niche could be in 20 markets right now. But I didn't have that at the time.

30:49Ariel Arce: You said something that I'm sure kind of struck everybody listening, myself included, which is, I think very rarely do we open something with the intention of it ultimately closing. Kind of like when you get a puppy, you get a puppy, you're like, this is great. This is going to last forever. They live forever. This dog will live forever. And then you're shocked when it doesn't, despite all of the data and the statistics and the realities and your lived experience. And the same is true for restaurants. And so for you to say that like restaurants have an expiration date, which is something we all know to be true.

31:27Ariel Arce: It's like saying the quiet part out loud. How do you reconcile that with like, this is worth my time for this amount of time? I've reverse engineered that I'll be able to reimburse investor capital. Does that play into it? But like if you're not trying to create a perennial brand, is it that you're tied to the location and you'll just keep iterating in the same location? How do you think about all that? Two things. First, I like to think that I'm a fair person in business. So I would never let something fail, quote unquote, where somebody doesn't get their money back. So if it were a situation where the concept wasn't working, but we still had a continued lease, my job is to make sure that somebody is made whole and that the financials have been cleaned up.

32:24Maybe this wasn't the best investment where you didn't have a return indefinitely. This wasn't a runaway train, but you didn't lose money on it. And so that's really important to me. So with Niche Niche, we had a lease that was continuous and we hadn't fully paid. We had paid back our capital, but I didn't feel like I had really gotten what my investors deserved. And so when Risholi presented itself as an opportunity, it was a way for us to kind of continue the business, to reorg kind of how the initial agreement was, and to give, you know, a second life to this space and to give back to these people that had given me money and invested in my dream.

33:12And that was the first time that I ever did that.

33:15Ariel Arce: Hopefully it'll be the last time that I ever do that. But I also think, like, again, I look at businesses from a theatrical perspective where you can have short runs, medium runs, or you could be cats and run for 100 years. And I think now I kind of look at a business from that perspective from the start rather than being in the midst of it and having to figure out how to pivot. flexibility, being flexible as an operator in the restaurant business should be your number one priority if you are not an egomaniac chef, right? Like then there's nothing I can do for you. That's your problem. Like you deal with that, how you deal with that.

33:59But if you are a person who is in charge of that business and how that business operates, you know, you should be willing to be flexible to a degree to make it optimize itself.

34:12Ariel Arce: So I want to talk about Pearl Block's townhouse. I think we love the businesses that love us back. And this seems like the confluence of a bunch of really interesting things all at the same time. We've got three floors, private events. That's a contrarian, a lifelong contrarian. I think that every restaurant I ever opened was actually a corporate catering or private events business because that's good business to be in right that's what paid the bills you know what i figured out was i watched a bunch of professional caterers and event planners open restaurants and go bankrupt but i saw a bunch of restaurants get into catering and private events and thrive just a better margin work in catering we owned a fast casual concept but did you ever work in catering like what before you owned anything no no great time.

35:02It was a great time.

35:03Ariel Arce: It was a pivot. It was like, uh, right. It's once I figured out that it was as much effort to convince you to come in for a$16 fried chicken sandwich as it was to book a$1 ,600 catering gig, my whole life changed. That became the focus of the business. And then you look at Pearlbox and you say, this is the confluence of everything I think you love, right? You're working with Versace and Ralph Lauren and Condonese, right? And Fenty. And You're able to host these amazing, creative, interesting events at a high profit margin. And it's a creative endeavor that is wildly profitable. Find me something better in this industry.

35:45Ariel Arce: I dare you. So I would ask you, was that a realization for you? Like it was for me when you were like, oh my God, like they just paid us$80 ,000 and we kept 55 of it, you know? Oh, it's crazy. Yeah, it's a great business model if it makes sense for your space. When I got the opportunity to take that building, the lovely people who own it were just so generous and were like, we have this property and we would like to put F &B in it. And we started that conversation in 2020, 2021. And we did not open it until 2024. And I built that building from the ground up. And it was one of the most naive, dumbass shit I've ever done in my life.

36:48I will never do that again. And I didn't pay myself to do it. So that's something that people should know. But it was such a learning lesson. And during that time, so many of the initial ideas that I had started with changed by the time that we opened something three and a half years later. And the landscape in New York specifically has changed so much in the private events world. We're doing so many more, just even at our restaurants, we're doing so many more activations. We're doing so many more brand partnerships. We're doing so many more collaborations. And what I didn't look at 357 West Broadway from the perspective of was this is an incredible asset.

37:38We have a townhouse. Instead, I looked at it as here is a space where I can put multiple concepts in and I can do what I do best, which is like mixed model. And I can create all these special rooms and go from there. But the real asset was that we had three stories that could fit up to 150 people in it. And that is a rare thing to have in New York. And a year into the business, we as partners, because we live in a modern world where you can use incredible technology and brilliant people's brains to build models and look at different scenarios. You no longer have to make decisions just based on emotion, which I think is a huge part of what we do in the beginning of our careers.

38:28We get, things are very personal and you start weighing options of what to do, but you're not basing them on data. You're not basing them on the landscape of what's going on around you. And it was kind of this aha moment for us of being like, wow, this is the asset. What does it take for us to explore this asset to the best of our ability? And we really came up with this mixed model of Pearlbox being this kind of little jewel that if we do Pearlbox really well, it'll make people want to book the space. And if we do really cool events in the space, then people will come in and want to go to Pearl Box.

39:11And it kind of just works as this really nice synergy. You know, naturally, this is our real first year. We're only a year in this mixed model. Before that, it was, you know, different. It was an a la carte restaurant on the first floor and a cocktail bar on the second floor and a private dining in the middle. So this is our real first year to judge the model. And there are seasons for events, obviously. And so it really changes how you evaluate how you're doing business. You kind of have to look at it more quarterly, more yearly than monthly or weekly, which is how you look at a restaurant. So it's a whole new world in which we kind of we analyze and assess how we're doing business there.

40:02But I can tell you that like by making that change, we immediately impacted our business for the better. And we get to do really cool stuff. So win-win.

40:15Ariel Arce: Last question for you. What should we steal from you? If we believe that success is just this endless series of great decisions, right? That it's, if we just do the right things consistently, what are the tactics, tools, and strategies that have served you well and led to your success? I really think you have to have a why for your what. I mean, if you're not asking why you're doing something, then I don't think you're doing something with intention and there's no real success to doing something without intention. And that's, you know, a lot of the, again, the theater kid in me, which is like, what is my intention here?

41:01But it's important because again, I don't want to live to work. I like to work. So I want my work to be meaningful and I like to enjoy the people that I work with. And I think when you have intention behind what you do, you enjoy it more, and you create a better product. I also think it gives you a roadmap where in this business, you can do anything you want to do. There's no rules, which is totally scary. And so if you don't have a roadmap for yourself, you're going to make some bad decisions. I've definitely done that. And I think it's really important. It's important as an entrepreneur to give yourself the guide that you want.

41:45And it's up to you to follow it.

41:49Ariel Arce: That's Ariel. To learn more about Tokyo Record Bar, visit tokyorecordbar.com. 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. Also, if you want to 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.

42:28Ariel Arce: I know you're busy and so I don't take your time for granted. Thank you again for listening and I'll see you on the next episode.