Nick Wong & Lisa Lee: We Opened at 40 on Purpose

0:00Nick Wong: This 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.

0:41Nick Wong: We'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. My metric of success is if we can make it to the end of our lease and not close our doors, and maybe the reason we have to close up is like, oh, we've done too well. Now we've priced ourselves out on the lease renewal, and now we can't afford the rent because we did so well. That's worth more to me than almost anything, that we can make it to the end and do it on our own terms.

1:22Nick Wong: Welcome to Full Comp, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators. Served up on the house.

1:36Nick Wong: What if the smartest thing you can do for your restaurant is refuse to rush it? Nick Wong spent 20 years in kitchens like Momofoku and UB Preserve while peers opened their own places at age 28. He waited until 40 and his partner, Lisa, left a tech career at companies like DoorDash and Facebook to build it with him. And together, they opened Agnes & Sherman, an Asian American diner in Houston, on their own terms. Two days off a week and staff benefits from day one. And in today's conversation, we're going to get into why their patience beats FOMO in a fear-driven industry. How they engineered product market fit for a category of one.

2:14Nick Wong: And why they invested in their team before profitability made it easy to do so. If you're rushing to prove something, this one is going to make you slow down.

2:30Nick Wong: I have kind of been working in the industry my whole adult life. It's always been something I've kind of worked toward. I knew that when I started cooking as a career, this was going to be my eventual, I guess one of my eventual endpoints was my own establishment. What that restaurant looked like, what it would be named, that was all kind of up in the air. I'll figure out over the next few years, which ended up being 20 years. and just wanted to open my own spot. And then she has a very different journey.

3:00Lisa Lee: Yeah, I think you'll get the contrast here. So Nick and I actually met in undergrad in college. We were a part of an Asian American student theater group full of just awkward kids kind of trying to figure themselves out at UC Berkeley. And I always described him as somebody who had a very sort of like singularly focused, like I'm going to go cook, I'm going to become a chef, if I'm going to open a restaurant, whereas I was a little bit more flighty. I majored in theater and really wanted to work in arts. Recession happened. Nobody was hiring kids out of college. And I ended up in Silicon Valley.

3:38Lisa Lee: There was a Silicon Valley boom at the time. I ended up working in high growth tech. I started my career at Facebook. And then 20 years later, I decided that I wanted to get off the ride. I wanted to do something that was much more value-based, much more community-focused, kind of getting back into the roots of what I cared about. And so over that 20 years, I feel like I've always harassed him continuously to see when he might be building something exciting and when I could get on the bandwagon. That really led us to opening the restaurant, Agnes and Sherman, today.

4:15Nick Wong: So I have a question about that. You come up with a concept, which is a contrarian premise, which I absolutely love. And I want to get into the concept as well, because I think that it's so hard to make old things new again. And I think that's what you did in a really interesting way. The thing that I didn't care about when I opened my first place was money. All I cared about was that I had enough money to open it. I didn't. I mean, I kind of had financial projections, but it was very, very back of the napkin, right? It was this whole thing, right? A bottle of well vodka costs$6. Our cheapest drink is eight.

4:51Nick Wong: I think we'll be okay. But I never thought about it from the perspective of this is how many hours I want to work. This is how much money I want to make. This is how I want to spend that time. And it's not like I was new to it. I spent my whole life in the industry. Right. And I just feel like I would have been better served throughout my entire career. Had I asked myself, how much money do you want to make? How do you want to make that money? And when and where do you want to spend that time doing it? As you guys were beginning to approach Agnes and Sherman as an idea, was there any of that? I think the kind of approach to Agnes and Sherman, for me, was on such a long time scale that it really gave us the luxury of, hey, I'm not in any rush to open this restaurant in the next six months.

5:39Nick Wong: I would like to get open maybe the next two, three years. so let's really take our time looking for real estate let's take the time to make sure like our business model makes sense let's take the time to figure out what things are important to us maybe even the non-financial intangibles of we're closed two days a week we have the privilege of living in Houston where restaurants can be closed two days a week as opposed like a New York or an LA where it's 14 shifts a week seven days a week or maybe it's you're open breakfast too and So having the luxury of time really informed how we wanted to spend our money and how much money we thought we would need to execute this, at least as how I think of it.

6:21Lisa Lee: Yeah, I think the short answer is absolutely yes, because I think the privilege of opening a restaurant now in our 40s is we get to ask ourselves those questions. And Nick, having worked the kind of schedule that he has worked in New York, me working as an executive at some of the largest tech companies, we knew that this venture, we wanted it to look different. And that means not just from a fulfillment standpoint, but lifestyle as well. And so we really went into it asking ourselves a couple of fundamental questions. One, we want to have two days off a week. Can we do that? And if we can't, then we need to rejigger things on the concept or the food or the pricing to make that happen because that's so important to us.

7:08Lisa Lee: The second is building a sustainable workforce. And that means benefits to our employees, medical, vision, dental, even pay time off. So what does that look like? And I have a lot of experience in human resources. And so really growing a very sort of healthy workforce was very important to both of us. And I think so many of these like questions that we were asking ourselves intertwining a really nice way to then help us inform service style, location, how much money would we want to spend on rent? How much money do we want to spend on buying equipment? All of these things then gave us kind of the runway to figure out, okay, it's not just about the money that you start with, but then the money that you continue to make over time.

7:53Nick Wong: Well, and as it relates to the money that you make over time, so many of the assumptions are built around product market fit. Are you going to sell a thing that people want? I see it in Latin cuisine. I see it in Asian cuisine, that there is this cultural bias towards it needs to be cheap. So I think that it's hard to do something that is elevated or hard to do something that is innovative when these bias exists. Talk to me about your approach to creating what I would argue is like a truly like new and different concept, which really had a binary outcome, right? Either you were going to be geniuses or you're going to be fools when you make something that just doesn't exist in the world yet.

8:36Nick Wong: After there have been restaurants for 2000 years, you've got to ask yourself, like, which one is this going to be? So how did you know that this new concept that you had created would have product market fit i think you tapped into one of my existential crises i had before opening the restaurant sure this is going to be a one-of-one there's no real comp for this kind of concepts not just in houston but across the country it's hard to find anything that's kind of like really like what we're trying to do and i think the kind of answer that is like again having the time to fix all the rest of the variables really is like at some point you can't control the variables and it really does become like a leap of faith you just have to have that kind of commitment and that conviction to all right we're going to do this we're going to throw to the wall see if it sticks and if it doesn't stick this is kind of me having to okay let me chef my way out of this let me see what i can do to pivot i think having that also in the back of our heads, the humility of if this doesn't work, do we have other options that we can try?

9:43Nick Wong: Of course we do. We can always change and stuff like that, but we definitely want to stick with this as far as we can to really say we gave it a good shot. And thank goodness it has been successful so far. But I also think that one of the other things for us is the, at least for me, when I think about many creation and that kind of stuff, I don't want us to have to compete with x restaurant serving y dish at z price like oh i can go get this bowl of pho for four dollars cheaper over in chinatown and it's so much better or just the same why would i go here my kind of creative process is what can i offer to someone that they can't get anywhere else so that the price point that we can charge is justified not that we're gouging people but you're paying a little bit more for fried rice and you're okay with that because you can't get this fried rice somewhere else.

10:35Nick Wong: We want to be standing out as being unique and not trying to really say, oh, hey, this is comparable at this other place. Can we talk about being unique for just a second? Because I talk to my clients about this all the time. I say that like what people want is they want the familiar in an unfamiliar way. When you give them the unfamiliar in an unfamiliar way, it terrifies them. And that usually leads to really gross shit. But the familiar in an unfamiliar way is a really exciting thing, which is a mixture of not just the recipes that you create, but also like the naming conventions, right? Like, how are you going to present this to someone the way that they go, oh, I get it.

11:19Nick Wong: And so again, you've got this category of one concept, but like, what did you guys do in terms of branding and menu engineering and naming conventions to make sure that it was something that people could get? I will say, so even just in terms of the name of the restaurant, Agnes and Sherman, you think, oh, diners, 50, nostalgia. And there's still another layer. There's no level to that because that's my parents' names. And anybody I've met have never come up, I've told them my parents' names and they're like, oh, I would have never expected your parents' names to be Agnes and Sherman Wong. So there's a little bit of a subversive kind of a feel to it.

11:58Nick Wong: But also like once you kind of learn a little bit more, you think like this is familiar yet also unfamiliar. Sometimes there's a little bit of a cognitive dissonance, I guess. And I think that kind of through line is in the restaurant, both from design and from menu. A lot of that we like to play with the context of a certain flavor profile but just repackaged in maybe a different format or the kind of nostalgia of certain drinks or things we'd find in a diner but but instead it's a milkshake made with soy milk and coconut whipped cream so it's like a dairy-free kind of milkshake kind of thing but it still has the visual of the tall glass straw sticking out of it the whipped cream coming out so it's not really trying to mess with people's, I guess, tastes and palate too much.

12:47Nick Wong: Like it doesn't take it totally out of the left field. Like actually this milkshake is made with all fish sauce and shrimp paste. It's just like a slight degree that we turn. We don't go a full 180 on it. It's still being able to present people with this comfort and this nostalgia, but just kind of tweaking this a little bit. We don't want to play too hard with people's kind of feelings about food and comfort.

13:11Lisa Lee: Yeah, I love what you laid out. It's almost like the formula of a little bit of unfamiliarity in a familiarity way. I think we actually do that really well with a number of different elements at the restaurant. For people who find some of the ingredients to be familiar, they're finding that the core and the way that we have designed the diner to be unfamiliar and cool. For people who are familiar with a diner aesthetic, they may not be as familiar with the ingredients. And even just like the art that we have on the wall, people might be really familiar with a gallery wall layout, but they're not familiar with how a lot of the images are actually of Asian families and Asian American history.

14:00Lisa Lee: So I think we kind of constantly play with those things, even though it's been unconscious on our part. But I think that that is something that I think Nick and I have both learned in our respective careers, which is that moderation works, subtlety works. We don't ever want to be hammering people over the head with we're an Asian American, whatever, and we stand for this, this and that, even though we have very strong opinions about name, whatever topic. But I think bottom line is we want people to come into our restaurant, feel really welcome, feel like they can try something new and walk out feeling like they've had this like unique experience.

14:41Nick Wong: And I don't know how much of that is rooted in food and beverage. I scraped your online reviews. Thank you, AI. I was really curious about one thing, which is it's really hard to offer something different, like a category of one experience without ambassadors, ambassadors of culture. And so I talk with my clients about the fact that like 80 % of the people sitting in your restaurant on any given night, they're first timers. They don't know anything about anything. They have no idea what to get. They have no idea what's good. They typically come in, they order the wrong shit for them, and then they leave disappointed, which is why the statistics are like 70 % of people never come back after their first time.

15:21Nick Wong: You have bred a culture within the restaurant where it feels like your sales team, They're ambassadors of culture. What they're trying to do is guide people in the direction that they need to go in order to have the best imaginable experience for them, which is hard to do. The quips that you hear today are all around, you know, restaurant employees have never cared less. So how do you make them care about you and your food and the guests and the guest experience? And how do you marry those things together in a way that's like good for you? It's good for the restaurant. It's good for the team and it's good for the guests.

15:58Nick Wong: I think, you know, we've all read setting the table at this point. You know, it's always game hire staff first. They'll take care of your guests. So, I mean, I feel like that's a pretty pervasive kind of thought that's in our industry currently. I think something that kind of helps us out more specifically with our team is that we try to be as transparent as we can with them, whether things go well or whether things go poorly. We have tried to be as fully accountable as possible to our team and we try to make sure that they understand every step that we're taking that they're understanding and coming along with us, whether that's from our tipping system or the style of service or why we're closing on a certain day or why we're staying open later on a certain day.

16:46Nick Wong: instead of us just like barking orders and commands at our staff, we're still telling them like, this is still what's happening. Like, this is not necessarily like a democracy. You don't get to choose which days we're open, right? But hey, here's as much information as we can give to you that we think is relevant to you so that you understand how and why we're making this decision. And I think that gives them a lot of confidence in the decisions that we're making. And it gives them a little bit more agency to speak up to us if they feel like there is something that they want to get off their chest, they're not just going to hold it in, let it ferment, and they resent.

17:21Nick Wong: And then it comes out in a big burst. We encourage this conversation, this dialogue between management owners and staff. So I think there's a layer of transparency that helps us out.

17:32Lisa Lee: Yeah, I think that we, first and foremost, as Nick said, try to really foster a culture in which people have a lot of pride in working at Agnes and I know probably every restaurant says that, but we really develop and retain talent that we feel like you're not just here to clock in and clock out. You're really here because you feel like this is also your restaurant. And I think along with that comes candid feedback. Like we'll put up testers during pre-shifts, testers as things are getting R &D'd along the way. And our staff is not afraid to tell us they really like something or something's not really hitting for them.

18:11Lisa Lee: And I think that we're also learning with each other when their recommendations don't go well. Right. So we've all had that experience where a server is like, oh, my gosh, I love this pasta. You should absolutely get it. And the person who gets it are like, I didn't really like that or it's too spicy. So I think we are also learning and teaching our staff that, hey, it's not about what you like. It's about kind of understanding what your party is here to experience. So it may be, OK, well, have you ever tried this thing? Do you know what gochujang is or what is your favorite cuisine to eat? And then from there, I think our team then can make some really good recommendations about what is on the menu.

18:53Lisa Lee: And then, of course, you always get the questions of like, what are your favorites? It's like, what's the signature here? And we do have those answers as well. But I think that you saw from the reviews that our staff is really good at kind of guiding people through, okay, if you don't like spicy, absolutely do not get these things. If you like fruity and floral, try these drinks. So kind of really that personalized experience, I think, has been evident in why our guests are choosing to come back.

19:21Nick Wong: I mean, you guys are a year in-ish and things are going well. by all accounts, which is typically not the story. I can't imagine how many people have started a conversation with the greatest business person I ever knew was a chef and his name was whatever. Just not what I have found is people that are incredibly talented in one thing, it's usually to the exclusion of almost everything else. Right. And so like, I don't think that you became a chef to become a businessman. And then you look at Lisa and I mean, Lisa, like this is the story people see on the news. Someone from outside the industry decides to jump in and mayhem ensues because everyone thinks, well, I want to own a restaurant.

20:02Nick Wong: I need some restaurants. How hard could it possibly be? I'm sure it'll be great. I'll take this wealth of knowledge from working with professionals for a number of years and I'll drop into a restaurant. How hard could it be? And despite all that, you guys are really making it work. I'm wondering when you look back on the success that you've enjoyed thus far, certainly not to say that it hasn't been difficult. I'm sure that every inch of the way it's been difficult, but you've already achieved a level of success. And I would argue like a level of awareness and brand authority in what is a very competitive market where restaurants go out of business every single day, where there is price sensitivity within your market more so than in other major markets.

20:44Nick Wong: And you guys seem to be thriving. And so there's always this moment when things are going poorly, where we're like, why God, why? But like in this moment where things are going well, like, have you asked the same question? Have you taken inventory of the reasons and the choices that you made that have ultimately resulted in the success that you've gotten?

21:04Lisa Lee: We ask ourselves that question all the time. That's a good question to ask. You don't know when you're going to fall off, right? I think that's always like the fear. You know, you wake up in cold sweat and you're like, oh my God, I had a dream that nobody showed up to eat at my restaurant. The first thing that I'll say is I think we came into this project sufficiently scared. And I think that's just another way of saying having the humility to know that this could go very badly. And we don't know. But at the same time, we're going to come into it with the courage, the curiosity, and the confidence to also know that we have done really hard things in our career before.

21:42Lisa Lee: I think for me personally, I've always been in roles that are kind of like the first of its kind. So I've had the reps of going into something and really figuring it out. So like the figure it out ability is what I think young people call it nowadays. Like that was the most, I think, precious thing that I had to offer, which is like, you know what? I don't know jack shit, but I'm here. Like I'm here. I'm going to figure it out with you. And then I think like, again, going back to the planning, really like not rushing it. I think so many of the sort of Instagram memes that we see nowadays is don't wait, rage quit.

22:25Lisa Lee: If you hate something, why stay? And there is something to be said about not wasting time. But I think that for us, we really, again, took the time to ask ourselves all the questions, worst case scenario, if we have to pivot.

22:44Nick Wong: Nick, can I dig in just a little bit deeper on that? Because everything she said makes total sense. But then like you think about your time at like the French Culinary Institute, right? And then Momofuku and with that restaurant group, and then you work with Underbelly, you staged at Noma. You look at your career, right? From let's say 20 to 40, And you saw counterparts opening their own restaurants, right? This guy that you fucking stashed with, this thing over here, now he has his own place on Instagram and he's just crushing life. And yet there you are just honing your craft, being patient, right?

23:20Nick Wong: In a world, in an industry that is so heavily driven by the fear of missing out. How were you able to be so patient when I feel like impatience and is just baked into the cake? So what is it about you that gave you the ability to wait until it was right? Probably just being really stubborn, honestly. I know it's a cliche that everyone has their own path and it's not always linear and people get to different heights at different times. And I think for me, I just wanted to work as a cook and work my way up the ranks and really feel like I had some solid ground to stand on. there are definitely peers of mine that got there way faster than i did but it's just kind of like a i gotta like have blinders on almost and just be stubborn like this is the path that i'm gonna walk i'm gonna do this i'm gonna learn as much as i can about these different skills and abilities just because someone else learned them faster than i did doesn't mean that i'm not still worthy that my time has passed and just really understanding that i'm in it for the long game like i don't need to open a restaurant at 28 and be some sort of wunderkind and whatever.

24:34Nick Wong: I'm okay to open place at 40. And maybe we don't have the highest of the highs. But at the very least, I know that I can close my restaurant two days a week and get two days off, not just burn myself out in those other places I worked where you had to produce and excel and be at that level all the time. And then even having had the experience of being that burnt out person and understands like, this is not what I want to go through again. I don't want to go through the cycle of extreme production and then burnout and extreme production and burnout. I want to have a life where I can feel sustainable and stable.

25:06Nick Wong: And maybe my highs aren't as high, but my lows won't be as low as well. And it's just what's important to me. And I think for where we're at a little bit over a year in, I think our future looks really great. And it's again, I don't need to get all those things done in the next year, but the next four, five, eight years, that's it. And I've always told Lisa, like my metric of success is if we can make it to the end of our lease and not close our doors, and maybe the reason we have to close up is like, oh, we've done too well. Now we've priced ourselves out on the lease renewal and now we can't afford the rent because we did so well.

25:41Nick Wong: That's worth more to me than almost anything that we can make it to the end and do it on our own terms. Let's talk about your own terms. So Lisa, you brought this up earlier, but you do have not just a higher standard of care for the guests, but also for your team. I think it's really easy to go back and read setting the table and then say, I'm going to do all of that shit for my team once I'm making$3 million a year. And until then, everybody's going to eat shit because that's the nature of the business. I mean, Nick, you and I came up generationally in kind of the same window. Owners and operators didn't really care about health and wellbeing because they weren't healthy and well either.

26:19Nick Wong: And that's just generationally, I think that's this divide. And so, you know, you look at a diner format and I don't know the numbers behind your business, but generally diners run on high volume and low margins. And so, and that's also kind of the nature of the industry at large, but especially in that particular tier of dining. And you guys are very generous with your teams. You're very mindful as it relates to the benefits that they get. It seems like you're trying to run a professional team by treating them like professionals, which is a new idea in this industry. But you also have to make the dollars make sense.

26:55Nick Wong: And so out the gate, assuming that the numbers held or held to a certain degree where this seemed like something you could do. Have you questioned it at any point? Have you doubled down on it? How important do you think it is that you started this way as opposed to evolved into it when profitability allowed for it?

27:14Lisa Lee: I love that question because I think that it is always easy to say we're going to do X by this time. And my experience in corporate America is the goalpost move for people. And you're not combating the actual dollar amount. You're combating people's mindset of scarcity. The answer, I think, is twofold. I think one is it was absolutely important for us to have a couple of stakes in the ground when we started. It would have been so easy to say, you know what, we're a new restaurant. We don't know anything about anything. We don't know if there's product market fit. We could fail literally a month from now.

27:58Lisa Lee: And therefore, we don't subsidize any health benefit until we're making money. That would have been so easy to do. And nobody would have questioned it because it makes so much sense. but knowing the kind of company that we want to be and again making it to the end of our lease is our metric of success and knowing that we can't do that without a team we decided to just go for it and say okay we're going to start with 50 and if we can't make it on subsidizing 50 of held benefit then maybe this is we're not in the right business maybe we don't have the right concepts Maybe we don't have the right parameters of whatever it is that we're operating.

28:37Lisa Lee: But it shouldn't come down to a couple of thousand dollars. Like if we're really hurting that badly for a couple of thousand dollars, then we're not doing something right. However, I will also say that since we opened the restaurant, I've changed my mind about a lot of things. And it's not because employee benefits are not important to me. It's more so because of my lack of knowledge around the hospitality industry bar. You know, I told Nick actually a few months ago, we used to kind of like bump heads a little bit where I'm like, 100 % health insurance is the way to go. That's the North Star.

29:13Lisa Lee: Like, that's what we're going to get to. And he would just be like, OK, all right. And now, especially.

29:18Nick Wong: To be clear, I want people to have health insurance. Everybody does. It's just very fucking expensive. Not to pay me in a bad way. No one's right. But like somebody, it does. But it does. In all fairness, it does feel very pie in the sky. When like, what was the statistic that just came out? Like, what is it? 42 % of all restaurants in America make no money or lose money. Yeah. So like, it does seem, you do sound like an outsider with this Pollyannish view for sure.

29:51Lisa Lee: And it's not that Nick was not aligned. He just thought the way that I wanted to approach it was interesting. And so I changed my mind because I have come to see firsthand being in Houston, Texas, hiring people, going along this journey of revolving door with him. How do you get 100 % health insurance to everybody if half of your staff don't speak any English? And they don't know where to go and whether or not it would be a safe place for them to go. Can they get the kind of care that they need when they're all of these barriers in the way? Right. So now I have changed my mind. I'm not saying that 100 % health care insurance is not the goal, but how do we actually onboard benefits that will, in fact, be used by not just your front of house people who are more knowledgeable and can navigate the systems, but also your back of house folks who might be immigrants.

30:57Lisa Lee: people who don't speak any English, and who are having to exist in a system that they don't know anything about. So I've sufficiently changed my mind as well. And I'm looking at things from a whole different lens. But the goal now, it's about how do we increase the safety net for our employees? And that could look so different from we want to give our employees 100 % benefit. You're fundamentally asking yourself a very different question.

31:26Nick Wong: When I opened my full service restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, we didn't aspire to be included in the Michelin Guide or to win a star or anything because it didn't exist. It wasn't in California at the time. And then we heard the announcement that they were coming to California. We didn't even think about it. It wasn't a thing. And then one day I got an email from like a Michelin email address and they were like, hey, we need all of this information because you're being considered for this thing. So then I took an hour Googling like spam emails from Michelin. Is this a thing? Because like, what are the chances that they're just going to like fucking email you asking for a bunch of shit?

32:07Nick Wong: But they do. That's the thing. And so then six months later, we found out that we won, which was great. But I want to walk you through the mental process, which was this is never going to happen because it doesn't exist to, oh, this would be interesting to, oh, you know what? It would be kind of cool if we won to, you know, the win would do a lot for this business to ultimately like, I'm going to kill myself if we don't win.

32:32Lisa Lee: Wow. Have you been inside our house?

32:35Nick Wong: That is what I'm saying, right? Like that was the whole thing. Cause like you look at your awards and your accolades from Bon Appetit and James Beard and Eater and the Michelin, like everything, right? Like you guys have been written up across the board, but I can't imagine when you started this diner concept, you were like, we are going to fucking crush award season. And yet here you are. And so I'm sure that it was a pleasant surprise to begin with, but like, once you're kind of in it, it's nice. It's nice to be in it. It's nice to enjoy the pops. And so if the goal initially was like, let's just make it to the end of the lease.

33:13Nick Wong: and then like you open and it's working and then all of a sudden there's all this industry and earned media attention has it changed the goal has it informed how you define success in any way i still think that at least for me the goal is still the same we make it to the end and then we get to close the doors on our own terms is kind of where my head is at with all the industry accolades and all these best new such and such. I'm not going to lie and say I'd never thought of that before we opened. I've been in the industry long enough. I have enough of a pedigree that I think we probably just get to impress organically anyways.

33:52Nick Wong: But I think for me, framing it as these are good marketing things. This is a good thing to get butts and teats and trying to separate my ego from it as much. But it's, again, in service of getting butts and teats, not in service of me needing to stroke my ego and feel better about myself. I think that has been a really good mind shift just to help with the, okay, we don't win this, but we still get the windfall of being on a list. We still get the butts in seats, which is my goal anyway. So we got the butts in seats. Maybe instead of it being 50 % more butts in seats, maybe it's 35 % more or 40 % more, but it's still achieving the goal that I want for it.

34:35Nick Wong: And for me, winning anything specific, it really, it's all just in service of making sure that we can get people into the restaurant, that we keep our staff employed, that we keep them paid and we keep everybody relatively happy and healthy. You guys had done a lot of business together before the business actually opened and so much planning went into all of this. How did you make sure that you were aligned? How did you make sure that you stayed in the same lane? And how has the project brought you closer together and not further apart?

35:07Lisa Lee: I mean, we were best friends before we started this whole venture. And I think that one of the things that is really special and unique about our relationship is I feel like I can talk to him about anything. There is an inherent trust and safety that something unhinged can come out of my mouth. But I know that at the end of the day, he's going to love me for who I am. And he may try to help me see a different perspective. And I hope that I do the same thing for him. So I think that as part of our business relationship, there is a very natural ease in which we feel like we can talk about just anything that comes up.

35:47Lisa Lee: One thing that I've had to be more mindful of is maybe this is just years of just working in tech. There's never a day off. like you're always constantly working. I feel like that's the same way that I approach the restaurant. Now, whether it's 9pm at night or 9am in the morning, my mind is always thinking about stuff. Not saying that his is not but during a day off, when he's not at the restaurant, he's like today is my day off. Like I don't necessarily want to think about this thing right now. So I think even just introducing some basic like starter language, like, hey, I have a question about our tipping model.

36:25Lisa Lee: Are you in a headspace to talk about it right now? Or can this wait? Or I don't have the headspace to think about this particular topic. Can we revisit it later? I think even just introducing kind of sentences like that into our working relationship has been very helpful.

36:40Nick Wong: I want to talk about resentment. And the reason that I do, it's about me. This whole interview, I hope you know it's about me and my shit that I'm trying to unpack in my own life. When I look at my most successful restaurant ventures, what they ultimately led to was probably one of the least successful partnerships. And the reason was my business partner, who's my best friend in the world, and we loved each other deeply, like best friends do because of that love. There were many conversations along the years that we never had, that we should have had, and resentment built, I think on his part and on mine, that led to us going from being best friends to friends.

37:23Nick Wong: It's because I didn't want to hurt his feelings. I know he didn't want to hurt mine. He just wanted me to be happy and fulfilled, and I just wanted the same thing for him. I wanted him to be really happy with the things that we had built. And the net of that result was that neither one of us were particularly happy. There are small things and small conversations that either happen or don't happen. And the results of that compound over time. And so for those difficult conversations, is there a framework? How do you have them in a way that like you're not laying awake at night or avoiding each other like the plague at the restaurant?

38:01Lisa Lee: You just go to raves together.

38:03Nick Wong: Yeah. eat a bunch of ecstasy, tell each other that, yeah.

38:10Lisa Lee: I mean, this is a great question. Because resentment, I certainly don't want to paint an image on your podcast that everything is great and rosy with Nick and I. Like, we certainly have had to have some tough conversations. And I think that we are very aware that resentment can build really quickly with things that are not said. that I feel like I always, I try to make an effort to have those tough conversations. And, you know, maybe it is with the lead in of like, hey, I don't know if it's okay to say this or, hey, I've been feeling this way and I want to just come out with something. Whatever it is that you need to do to make your system feel like you can say the thing, you ultimately have to be accountable to say the thing, right?

39:01Lisa Lee: And so I think we're old enough to know that when you really love somebody, that is when you have to do the difficult stuff. I also will say that now that we've worked together for two years now, pre and post opening a restaurant, the greatest thing that love can do is to actually help you understand the person so that you are then helping them to plan. So knowing that Nick, for example, his whole entire career has been very like service to service and then break service to service to break right there sometimes when he is unable to get himself out of a rut to then be able to make decisions that we need to know to anticipate what might happen a month or two months down the line and instead of having the conversation of like hey i'm starting to feel this resentment that you are not doing this long-term planning with me.

39:55Lisa Lee: We're not thinking about Q4 together. I just tried to sort of like sprinkle these like micro decisions into our day to day. Hey, I know we still have some time. But one thing that I want us to start thinking about is X. So like the love that you have for each other rather than the love leading to avoidance, the love can maybe help you plan for the things that you know, where they have shortcomings.

40:21Nick Wong: It's never easy to have those tough conversations. Like that's why there's just tough conversations. But I think regardless of what the actual conversation is about, I know that the end result is going to be whether I get my way or whether it's Lisa's way, if it's that binary, like great. It's just one small thing I didn't get my way on or she didn't get my way on. But in the grand scheme of things, we're still headed in the same direction, right? It's not like I'm turning around and walking exact opposite on this thing. It's like, well, it's a logistical, it's a pragmatic decision. We'll get it done.

40:58Nick Wong: If there's an issue, we both then will solve it together. And if there's no issue, we'll reap the benefits of the thing together. And so it's just having this kind of zoomed out view of, okay, this one very specific thing is kind of a pain point, but we already know that the industry is full of pain points all over the place. But is this person going to continue to walk and have these pain points with me as we go forward? And as long as we don't go backward, I think for my head, it's just, yeah, the bigger picture is that we get to win together. So whether these small bumps in the road or anything, I don't really care.

41:34Lisa Lee: I like to use this framework with people is like, you don't resolve conflicts without going through the grown zone. I don't know if you've ever heard that. I think they use it in kind of nonprofit facilitation a lot because in nonprofit, the idea is that you're usually with like very passionate, mission driven people, right? People that have very strong feelings about things. And when you disagree, there's always a zone called the grown zone, which just feels really hard. But if you can stay in that zone with the person or with the group, then ultimately you come out better on the other side because then you start to get to the solutions.

42:11Lisa Lee: but there is going to be that painful part where you get to say your piece. I get to say my piece where maybe like slightly raising our voices at each other. We just need to vent. And as long as one or both people don't like Nick said, turn around and walk the other way. If you stick with that, then you're going to be like, okay, I'm tired of venting. Now let's get to the solution. Right now that you've said your piece, now that I've said my piece, what are we going to do about it? Because we're still on the same team. We have to figure it out.

42:41Nick Wong: That's Nick and Lisa. To learn more about Agnes and Sherman, visit agnesandsherman.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.

43:21Nick Wong: 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.