Telly Justice & Camille Lindsley: Repel the Right People

0:00Telly Justice: 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.

0:41Telly Justice: 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.

1:01Camille Lindsley: In that, something that we talk about frequently is if there are things that other restaurants on your block, in your neighborhood, in your city, whatever, all typically and traditionally say no to, and you're the one that says yes, you immediately build a through line to clientele.

1:17Telly Justice: Welcome to Full Calm, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators served up on the house.

1:31Telly Justice: What if the customers you're driving away are exactly why your restaurant works? Telly and Camille built hags into one of New York's most talked about restaurants by refusing to be like everyone. An 18-seat queer fine dining room in the East Village, a tasting menu-only model, pay what you can on Sundays, and a point of view sharp enough to repel anyone who doesn't belong there. In today's conversation, we get into why planting a flag makes you more distinct than your neighbors, why you need eight reasons to be different instead of just one, and why scaling a concept means getting out of your own head and into the people you train.

2:08Telly Justice: If you're afraid a strong opinion is going to cost you customers, this one's going to change how you think about who you're actually serving.

2:21Camille Lindsley: Tully had lived in New York City prior to us moving here together in 2019. And when we did move here together in 2019, I was really eager to cut my teeth in more traditional fine dining settings as a newly minted sommelier. We did not have plans or ambitions or an idea that opening a restaurant in New York City was at all a possibility. And then the pandemic happened. Yeah. And that changed a lot for us. And I think speaking to what you were saying previously, Josh, about the existential spiral that the pandemic induced in so very many of us in restaurants, we were asking ourselves, why are we doing this?

3:05Camille Lindsley: Why are we working this hard? What are we working for? How can we use the skills that we have done? And, you know, the other job that I've had is like selling used guitars, not really eager to go work at a guitar center or anything like that. But how can we use the skills that we have in fine dining to make the world a better place, to make the industry a better place? And that's really kind of the idea that Germany did hags. That was the spark. Yeah. Yeah.

3:38Telly Justice: Which I mean, taking the entrepreneurial leap in theory sounds great. But I mean, you guys have been in the industry long enough to know that you were going to go from working 50 to 60 hours a week for someone else to working 80 to 100 for yourself. But you also had the time, you know, because, you know, you think the pandemic era, your two friends are able to sort it out. When you decided to embark, when you decided to pull the trigger on this thing, to actually do it, do it for real. What did winning look like for you?

4:07Camille Lindsley: I mean, for me, speaking just like personally, winning looked like opening the doors. And I think like speaking as a queer person, a trans person, ultimately having this like far flung dream or goal of opening a fancy restaurant in Manhattan, it sounded so unattainable for me. And so success looked like doing it at all. So I ultimately like attribute a lot of what became the hallmark features of our brand and our business as being rooted in like a deep naivety and like a brashness and a feeling that like this will never actually happen. This will never materialize. And so we're just going to throw the book at it and see what sticks.

4:54Camille Lindsley: And then we did open and then it was day two and day three and then month two and then year two. And yeah, there was a learning curve to how do we. integrate and sustain these like lofty ideas and goals with a business that is material and continues to exist. And we needed to thrive and we needed to like provide jobs, sustainable jobs for our staff. And that's really been like the proving ground of HAGS for us. But for me, yeah, success looked like just opening. I think we've been talking a lot just within ourselves recently about the tangible and intangible, quantifiable and not quantifiable aspects of hospitality.

5:39Camille Lindsley: And I think one of the defining differences between front of house and back of house is with front of house, oftentimes there is this kind of like chasing of something that is inquantifiable, which you can quantify in a lot of ways, the feeling of hospitality, like what is a hospitable dining room. What is good service? There are things that you can do to progress that. There are things that you can do to make people not feel welcome in your dining room, for sure. There are things you can do to give bad service. I've experienced them plenty of time. I've done them also before. But I think for me, thinking about imbuing the spirit and the idea of what HAGS is in terms of a service and service style, service philosophy has been a really long road and journey.

6:29And I only feel like recently we've gotten to a place where I feel like it is

6:35Camille Lindsley: something really different from service and other restaurants in New York, different from service and other restaurants around the world. That to me is really what success looks like is a definitively distinct style of hospitality that makes many different kinds of people feel seen and cared for and spoiled. Let's talk about that.

6:59Telly Justice: So this is going to come as a total shock to the two of you, but I am older than you by a lot. And I come from a very different generation of restaurateur where, you know, it's best in class service. And I think that we can, And like, there's a lot we can align on. But I come from a generation where like, you don't have opinions, especially like political or lifestyle based opinions. People will come into my bar and they would complain about Republicans and I'd be like, me too. And then someone will walk in and they complain about Democrats. I'd be like, me too. I am what you are because that is the culture of the restaurant industry.

7:41Telly Justice: It is hospitable to kind of mirror whoever you're sitting in front of. I am a bastion of the past. I think the two of you are very representative of where the world is going. And I think what the younger generations want, and I know I sound like I'm ancient and I'm not, but I also think the world moves much faster today than it did. I was just having an interview the other day and he was like, you know, the world just moves slower in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, even into the 2000s. people want restaurants that have an opinion. And there's a lot of benefit to that, but also a lot of drawbacks.

8:17Telly Justice: So that means people are going to have opinions about your opinions.

8:21Camille Lindsley: Yeah. To plant a flag in the ground is going to elicit a response, but to not do that is

8:26Telly Justice: safer. It's also going to put a target on you, right? Can you explain the culture that you built, the community that you built, the intentional way that you did it? And we'll talk about the impacts of that?

8:38Camille Lindsley: My perspective on it and why we did this in the first place, number one, there is like such a heritage, like a legacy of queer restaurants, queer bars, like gay bars. Queer is obviously like current and modern nomenclature, but like gay bars have existed for decades and generations. And it was like safe haven. It was a watering hole And all kinds of people felt called to those spaces for all kinds of reasons. When we started HAGs as a pop up with the idea that this would be a brick and mortar, we were reflective of that. But also, I think at the time, and this continues to be true, it felt really essential to own this thing about ourselves so that it wouldn't be thrown at us.

9:23Camille Lindsley: We could throw it at the receivers. Like we are queer people. I am a trans chef. This is not something that you see frequently. You should. You should see it more frequently, but you don't. And I'm reflective of that. I'm going to own it and I'm going to say it out loud and I'm going to call to it so that like the barrier to entry into this space isn't limited by the words that are thrown about in public or in secret about us that we're not owning for ourselves. We wanted to be proud of the space that we claimed as the people that we are. And we wanted people to feel proud coming into the space as whoever they were.

9:58Camille Lindsley: We know whatever space we create, that's space for our diners, that's space for our workers, and everybody can use it equally. We just didn't know that it was going to become such a zeitgeist thing for us that we would be, in a manner of speaking, capturing lightning in a bottle. But coming out as a queer restaurant in 2022, it just really hit the ground in a way that I think people were ready to receive it. But that wasn't like our brilliance. That was more of our like naivety. You know, we were excited to do this thing for ourselves. And it was a happy accident that it really landed with the community.

10:39Camille Lindsley: I think New York City is also a place that is so incredibly saturated as a market. that having a flag to plant in the ground will make you more distinct than your neighbors or a similar concept. There is, I think in New York City, both a necessity as well as like an eagerness for people to embrace concepts that are a bit more niche. And that is something that just Kelly and I, both as individuals, are individuals with weird niche interests. And so, of course, the restaurant that we built is going to be an extension of that. We named this restaurant Hags. It's going to call to a specific kind of person.

11:23Camille Lindsley: It's going to repel a certain kind of person. And that's all by design.

11:28Telly Justice: But it's so many flags. You planted so many flags. Like the next one that comes to mind for me is like the prefix menu. I got to tell you, I would be way more likely to open a place called Hags than I would be

11:40Camille Lindsley: to launch with a prefix menu and that's it um looking like a true tour for sure man like that's

11:49Telly Justice: right i don't even know if the cultural stuff would piss people off as much as mandating a

11:55Camille Lindsley: prefix menu you know no i mean listen i think you're right about that for sure we have always had our pay what you can sundays where we do offer an a la carte menu and we do for the reason that one, the food is pay what you want, and two, that it's an a la carte menu, and three, everyone loves brunch, volume as much as we can in an 18-seat restaurant on those days. But so much of why we're doing prefix, why we started doing prefix is one, because of our experience, two, because there is not really a space that is so explicitly queer that is specifically a tasting menu, and And three, because of the physical existing conditions of this tiny restaurant, really does lend itself much better to a tasting menu.

12:45Camille Lindsley: We are, in the coming months, moving to a larger space, which we're really, really excited about. And we will be doing still a tasting menu. We'll have a chef's counter for tasting, but we're going to do a la carte seven days a week. We found that that is a flag we planned in the ground that we don't feel so precious about standing by. It's not a dogma of ours. It's something that we've done out of necessity of this restaurant is so tiny. The kitchen is the size of a food truck. It's teeny tiny. Yeah. And we knew in opening this space that to have a tight, concise seven dish menu versus what the expectation for a la carte menus would have to be.

13:26Camille Lindsley: It just made more sense to do lower volume, higher price point and just have the food be really, really exceptional. So tasting menu made sense on paper. And I think, too, like in a very roundabout way, I wonder if people would feel scandalized enough by our brand to talk about us for years. and whether we'd be here talking with you if we didn't do something just like so audaciously outside of the realm of the normal. And in New York City in the 2020s, you really do have to be a little audacious to stand out and stay relevant for a significant amount of time. So it worked for us in a way. But again, so many of these decisions were made as like happy accidents through like first timer naivety, like, you know, luck of the first in a way.

14:16Telly Justice: you said that, you know, the goal was just to open. And I remember that I would have said that that was true for me too, until I fucking opened. And then I was like, now the goal is to not die or end up in bankruptcy court. Yes. I think that things change really quick. And you spoke to it earlier when you said like, you know, it's about providing a sustainable living for the people that you work with. And I think one of the biggest surprises for me and for a lot of entrepreneurs, I ran businesses for other people for a really long time and I was very successful at it, which is why I think I got the opportunity to open my own places.

14:52Telly Justice: But like as good as I was at running other people's places, like I never laid awake at night worried about whether they were going to make payroll or not. Yeah. I worried about everything else, but I didn't worry about that. And then when I opened my own place, I worried about everything else and I worried about that. And it was a very unpleasant feeling. Yeah. And so behind the culture in the prefix menu and all of this has to be an engine that makes money. I was just reading this statistic that 41 percent of all restaurants in America are at breakeven or losing money, which to a certain degree, being as deeply steeped as I am in the industry and you are too, that could be an optimistic number, you know?

15:37Camille Lindsley: I was going to say that number seems low. Yeah. Depends on the year. Depends on the year.

15:42Telly Justice: For sure it does. And so you guys started small, which I think gives you a lot of control. Right. But it also limits your ability to generate revenue. You look at these like sushi concepts, these omakase concepts that have like 10 seats. Right. And three Michelin stars. And And they can only run it for a year, two years, because eventually the dollars just don't make sense. So I would ask, I would assume over the years, you've really refined this to be as profitable as it possibly can be. But then all of those dynamics are going to change when you move to a new space. So what are you going to double down on?

16:22Telly Justice: What's worked really well for you in the current space? And how do you think that translates to a larger space?

16:27Camille Lindsley: Well, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head and like highlighted our motivation for making this big change is like, we do have so much control over our business model. And that's been lovely in a way. But it does really kind of like cap you in this plus or minus 1 % range of like, how much maneuverability do we really have in terms of like generating greater success for ourselves. And we can book out every night of the week and still stay within that little like, pretty menial cap of profit. the idea of moving to the larger space is in a lot of ways fleshing out a more robust business model that has different entry points, different price points.

17:08Camille Lindsley: We can have different sections of the restaurant with different turn times so we can like open the floodgates on the volume that we're able to do. We've traditionally only operated with a beer and wine license so we'll be moving into a full liquor license and having a full beverage program which will change things for us as well. Yeah. I mean, I was going to say the two things that I am immediately thinking of that are other than just volume motivators for us moving is that we've really struggled to have events and buyouts be viable. And buyouts are such essential, easy money streams of revenue for any restaurant.

17:49Camille Lindsley: And having an 18 seat restaurant where you can't just have like one big long table for your corporate buyout. You have four tables. They're all different shapes. And then a four seat bar. And then another, like, just the layout doesn't make sense for buyouts and buyouts are so crucial. But I think that there is a lot that we have figured out in terms of leadership style, in terms of culinary vision. And we're not going to choose those, but we're going to expand on them in the new space, but really to have the opportunity to have a PDR, to have the opportunity to have a more robust buyout package, to have the opportunity to have the full cocktail program, to have what I think is going to be a smaller ask of guests coming in is really important because we do have a big ask.

18:40Camille Lindsley: We have a huge ask for guests who are coming in to visit us. It's a high barrier to entry. It's two hours plus of your time, hundreds of dollars just to come in and eat, let alone drinking anything ever than tap water. So being able to offer more avenues of ways to enjoy hags, ways to experience hags is going to, we hope, create more streams of revenue.

19:05Telly Justice: And what translates? So like, I can think of like a handful of places in LA that were in a situation, not exactly like yours, but similar where either they lost the lease or they had to move to somewhere else or they wanted to move to a bigger spot or, and like the magic didn't move with them, whatever that thing is. So I think it's hard to articulate, but what do you think that magic is and how are you making sure that it moves with you? Yeah.

19:33Camille Lindsley: I mean, one of the magical elements of hags is how deeply intentional the space is. We made so many choices based on like our own personal tastes and predilections and they're unique and they're weird and we're weird people. And so we really imbued the space with like a lot of personality. In the years that we've been running this space, we've changed a lot and we're ready to imagine a new intent for the space that is more forward thinking, that's more like futuristic in its own way. And so we feel like a great excitement to bring this restaurant, this brand that I think is pretty identifiable at this point in New York into like its adolescence, into its teenage years and watch it grow into itself in a new way.

20:21Camille Lindsley: I think that to expect for ourselves to remain the same is never something that we've expected ourselves even maintaining hags within these four walls. I think that we've changed so many times, evolved so many times in the four years that we've been open here at this address, that in some ways we have afforded ourselves the fact that like that magic is going to change period, no matter where we are, if we're moving or if we're not. And the magic is going to change. Like we'll have to embrace that. I think that to try to cling on to what the magic is, is to misunderstand what the magic is. Well, there's also like a really hidden benefit to being such a small restaurant, which is we do have like a great cult following and a very like involved community.

21:08Camille Lindsley: Our regulars are fantastic and I know they'll follow us to the new space. But ultimately, with such a small restaurant, not many people have eaten here. So there are not going to be that many people that even know what the original version was. But I know there are so many people in the city and in the neighborhood that are like, I wish I could go to Hags, but it's cost prohibitive or it's too small. And when we open the new space, I think we'll be able to invite a lot of first time diners that have been really hungry for their first tags experience. And that's really exciting.

21:40Telly Justice: I want to talk about your evolution as restaurateurs. So I joined this group called EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization, and it was the first time that I was ever exposed to entrepreneurs outside of our industry. And I can remember I was having a conversation with a format that ultimately led to like my third midlife crisis earlier than midlife. And he was like, oh, I mean, yeah, you're an entrepreneur, but like you really just bought yourself a job. I kind of sat with that because it really kind of felt like a kick in the nuts only because it was true. I hadn't really thought of it that way. And I think that like for so many of us that didn't graduate from the top of our class from Cornell University, right?

22:22Telly Justice: Not that there's anything wrong with that, right? Yay for those fucking people. But I, you know, I think that most of us get the opportunity to own restaurants because we were great managers. We were great leaders within an organization. So when you do get the keys and it's your turn to be a restaurateur, at least for me, I didn't step into the role of a restaurateur. I stepped into the role of a manager because that's what I was fucking great at. That's what gave me the ability to get my own place. And then it led to this whole crisis of, you know, well, like what is a restaurateur? What does a restaurateur do that I'm not doing?

23:04Telly Justice: And that, I mean, that was a years long journey. And so you look at this like massive turning point in your evolution is entrepreneurs. like it is a reset and like you know in a reset anything can change everything can change so as you re-envision the brand are you re-envisioning your roles within the brand absolutely definitely

23:27Camille Lindsley: for sure yeah i mean we were just having a conversation and we've had this conversation numerous times recently as we're like looking ahead to what the future of the brand is as it grows and we start to scale thinking about what does it look like to build a manager How do you take these unquantifiable characteristics that we just kind of, we feel like we embody them? You know, how do we take these characteristics and put them on paper and codify them and train people into them? How do we pass that torch effectively? And I think that's a journey that we're still on right now, being in such a small space.

24:05Camille Lindsley: It's hard not to be like a fingers deep operational manager. we're both very involved with the running of the business and I think pragmatically we see scaling this as a necessity for us to create space between us and operations like daily operations and so this is kind of a new journey for us to go on and we're still feeling our way through it but we're both lucky to have worked for some really great operational geniuses at other larger restaurants like you working for Aldo Som and myself working for restaurants in the South that I think gave us good models and blueprints for how to scale. But yeah, I think to your point, Josh, it's so comfortable to step into the role of what it is that you know and to do the job of the managers who you hire.

24:55Camille Lindsley: And I think that that's a mistake that I personally made big time. And one of the pieces of advice that we got from folks who were operators before we opened was when you're opening, don't hire a sous chef, don't hire a GM, because you're going to be doing those jobs. And it's crazy advice when you're thinking about opening and you're like, oh, well, we need this team. Like it needs to look like every restaurant that I've worked in. And when you're building a restaurant, when you're opening, you really are, as we at least were, wearing so many different hats. And our instinct is to manage people.

25:30Camille Lindsley: And I think that one of the the biggest lessons that we've learned is that we as restaurateurs are not only in the business of building a brand, building a concept, building a vision, but also having that be something that we can point to as tools for mentoring managers who then use those as North Stars and how they manage the rest of the team as a manager your job is to the sort of like traditional hierarchy in a restaurant is you learn how to do the job of serving or cooking and then you graduate to training people how to do that managing people to do those things and then you train people how to train people how to do those things yeah and that's really what a restaurateur's job is and it's i am so tickled by that person saying that you just bought yourself a job because I think that if you don't have that North Star, if you don't have that concept or you don't have that vision, then yes, you really just have kind of by yourself a job as managing managers.

26:35Camille Lindsley: But if you have a vision and a reason and a purpose for those jobs to exist, then I think that that differentiates you as an entrepreneur versus just a manager of managers.

26:47Telly Justice: also as we grew one of my struggles was is that the brands were so inextricably tied to me i owned a bar in hollywood for well over a decade and like when i walked into that bar it got busier every time without exception and i gotta tell you guys that felt really fucking good until it didn't and then people would come in and they would say is josh here and they would say no and then they would walk out. They weren't going to 504. They were going to Josh's bar. And what I needed was I needed them to go to 504, right? Have you guys given any thought to that as you expand?

27:28Camille Lindsley: We're thinking, I mean, I'm thinking about it at an existential level every day lately, because we really did build something so deeply personal. And I think it being such a small space, people do have this expectation that we will be here. Over the past year, I think we've done some good work in building separation and boundaries around that. But we are like a chef driven restaurant. And we have built a lot of the brand around. This is the executive chef, you're expected to be there to be present to be a face to the brand. And we were just at a design meeting today where we were like, and then we need to build a chef's counter here with a galley walkway so you can stand there and everybody in the dining room can see you.

28:13Camille Lindsley: And so like we are still falling prey to like the traps of how do we juice this business and get like dollars into the bank? Like how do we put gas into the tank and using ourselves as like the fulcrum of that? But I know like pragmatically it's not sustainable. It is just kind of like a cheat code. And when you have it, it feels like, Why wouldn't I just press it every single time like money, money, money. And, you know, obviously we're in the opening stages of our first scale project. And so we want to throw every little tool that we've got at it. But I do think it's part of the conversation that we're having.

28:50Camille Lindsley: How do we build like sustainable relationships with this, not only for ourselves or for our guests, where they feel like they're not building like a parasocial relationship with us, but they're really loving the restaurant. and enjoying the food and the cocktails, and that's why they're showing up. And this, again, I think goes into training managers is, I think, because this,

29:10Telly Justice: maybe you experienced this similarly with 504. If it's a mistake, I probably experienced it coming up.

29:21Telly Justice: If it costs you a gratuitous amount of money, I'm sure it's on my list.

29:26Camille Lindsley: We'll have to get a drink about all those mistakes some other time, but man, So much of, I think, how we have operated in the first couple of years is so much of this how we want things to be run lives within us. And building those SOPs that are more external so that anyone can do them the way that you want them to be done is something that I feel like I should have realized day one, before day one, of this is how to lead. But I think so much of opening a restaurant, and this being our first restaurant that we ever opened, is that we were paving the road while driving on it. We didn't know exactly how it is that we wanted things because there are ideas you can have when you're opening.

30:09Camille Lindsley: And then to continue the car metaphor, when rubber hits the road, it's like, oh, well, actually, this is the way that things need to be done. And I'm the person who is holding both the concept of the vision in my head and also understanding the best way in which I want for things to be done operationally for service. And then it's all kind of within me how it is that I want for things to be done. And building that into something that is not just living within us is so hard, so challenging. and it's something that I feel like excited to not have exclusively living within us and can be something that we can pass on to other people because that I think is actually more rewarding if you're a manager to be mentored to think about work like that as opposed to like, hey, will you make sure that the solar servers are doing 35 roll-ups per person every day?

31:04Camille Lindsley: Like that's so mundane, so unstimulating, so unengaging.

31:09Telly Justice: But they better do those fucking roll-ups, Camille. We don't do those. Mundane. Mundane. But you're going to do those roll-ups so your hands bleed.

31:17Camille Lindsley: Yeah, like there's always going to be, it's work, you know, like there's always going to be a mundane aspect to it. But the way in which you like keep people engaged and I think like the way in which at least I want to be engaged is to have a reason of why we're doing things. Why we're doing things the way that we're doing things and why we're doing things at all.

31:35Telly Justice: I think you bring up a great point, like this idea of why, right? And the ethos and the culture. And we're having these parallel conversations about SOPs and ops and compliance and all of these things to put labels on them. But then it's also mission and vision and values and all of these things. And I can only speak for myself. But my businesses started doing much better when I stopped because I was objectively a terrible manager. I think most visionaries are like I can't manage myself in my own life. Right. The best chefs I have ever known are talented culinarily to the exclusion of almost every other skill that a human could possibly acquire.

32:21Telly Justice: you know that's it you don't want to go bowling with a chef like it's just it's a thing right and it's that's but I think that's how we create excellence in a specific category and so I spent years beating my head against the wall creating these ops plans and these SOPs when like I couldn't show up to a meeting on time and I'm like how are we going to get everybody to be punctual would work well for me was acquiring that skill through hiring someone that was a better restaurant manager than me because I was an objectively shitty restaurant manager.

32:59Camille Lindsley: I'm a solidly type B individual. I need to delegate those like, okay, this is what I want to be done. Right. How do you do that? Right. Whatever. They just get it done. I don't really, I don't really care how it gets done as long as you're not doing it like an asshole. And as long as the reason and the ethos of like why we're doing this at all is respected and honored in the way that the way in which things are done and how is it being done? Period.

33:27Telly Justice: Well, and that's really the root of the question that I'm asking is like, there are people listening that have been sitting in a single unit independent restaurant for 20 years who have been unable to get themselves out of day-to-day operations. But like, you're going to be in like a new place is a new person. And like, it's this opportunity to really set yourself up for success. And so, you know, what we had talked about was like training trainers, but like, you know, you're at this crossroads where you really do have the opportunity to either like nurture talent or acquire talent. And I think that that decision is so rooted in where you are in the life cycle of the business and knowing where you are in the life cycle of the business.

34:07Telly Justice: So how are you guys approaching? Is it that you want to bring a GM up through the ranks or you just want to bring like fucking killer from Union Square Hospitality Group over to do it for you?

34:19Camille Lindsley: Yeah, well, I think we have traditionally been like a promote from within kind of operation. And we really see the entry level possessions in this restaurant as like building a farm team. Like how do we bring in somebody with this vein of wine experience? How do we bring in this cook with this kind of cooking experience and give them the other tools to become this promotable, internally experienced manager? Because we really have built something so unique in this space that when we do hire a manager from outside, we tend to have a steeper learning curve for them to get to success. And their success is inextricably linked to the success of our services, our hourly team.

35:06Camille Lindsley: If their trust and their respect is disrupted, then our outside hire managers, their confidence drops, then they're less successful. And so we've just found that promoting from within and having a long learning curve, like a long trajectory from bottom to top, but having it be a pretty simple through line has been our greatest success in bringing management along. Would you agree? Yeah, because I think that it's harder in some ways to teach people to embody a concept than it is to teach someone a skill. And that's something that I really learned from Aldo. He would always say that he hires based on personality, which how in which he's doing that is kind of, that's maybe something that was at least living within him or he at least wasn't sharing with me.

35:58But he, I think, would build his teams around what it was those individuals

36:05Camille Lindsley: they were bringing to the team, how they were internalizing the work, and then the knowledge and the skills are things that you can teach people. Personality, values, and the reason why people show up to work are things that you can't teach people. Yeah. I do think the goal of training somebody into management and bringing a team up, growing from the bottom and like always having this vertical conveyor belt to the top, the goal should always be to replace yourself. If you are like deep in operations as an owner, then like your number one goal should be, how do I get somebody to like get to the top of this conveyor belt and then step into my shoes and promise success so that like I can go and generate attention, relevance, cash flow off property elsewhere.

37:00Camille Lindsley: And then if you can like have this space to this maneuverability to move outside of the physical location, your ability to like secure cash flow just compounds. And I think that's where people get really stuck is this idea that to replace yourself is to damage your brand, the brand identity, or like maybe these unquantifiable aspects of ourselves, these characteristics that are so inherent and special to why we are owners in these like special relevant spaces that can't be embodied in somebody else. And that's just kind of like an egotism, maybe a narcissism. You have to quantify it. You have to sit down with yourself, look in the mirror, take out a piece of paper and like write out everything that you do in a day in a week in a month and figure out where the ingredients of that special sauce are and hand them over to somebody so that you can take your special sauce and like spread it around and like act like you've got a butterfly net out in the world just catching opportunities that otherwise are passing you by

38:04Telly Justice: if you're locked in your restaurant let's talk about that special sauce my last question for you really comes down to what should we steal from you? You think about the tactics, the tools, the strategies that are taking you as far as you've gone. The average restaurant lifespan, 80 % of our restaurants closed within five years. And here you are approaching your fifth year and you're growing, you're expanding. Then I've also caught you at a really interesting time in your lives where like in choosing to expand, you've probably thought a lot about, right? Not just like what would we change, but like what's working for us?

38:42Telly Justice: What are the things that we should double down on? I think restaurants are fucking problem factories, right? We could talk about problems all day long, but if we all just focused on the things that we were doing well, the things that we were working on and we just 10X that, magic happens. So what are those things we should steal from you?

39:01Camille Lindsley: I think if we were to boil down for me, what I think is like quintessential to hags and why we're special at all, why anybody comes and why they come back is because foremost to us, what our greatest priority is as like a restaurant group is how a person feels at all stages of their relationship to us. We care about how they feel when they find out about us. When they first hear our name, we want to have a feeling emanating from our brand that like we are proud, we are ready to include and accept and celebrate. We want people to feel in the space like they are living their best life. They're being fully celebrated.

39:48Camille Lindsley: They're so comfortable. The lighting makes them look sexy. The food is like meeting their expectations and their perception of value. And I think what's essential also from my standpoint, and also with beverage in this space too. But like we write our menus and we build our recipes, like the actual materials that we sell that people put in their mouths and digest and stuff. We put a lot of focus on how it makes you feel after. And I think a lot of restaurants today, there's like this revivalism, this like new nostalgia thing going on, like cafe food, bistro food, 90s aesthetics. And a lot of that food is very heavy.

40:30Camille Lindsley: It sits heavily with you. You know, steak frites, I'm looking in your direction. I love you, but you make people feel like shits. And we want to do the things that people want to eat. We want to cook food that like is of the moment and feels appropriate for what kind of dinners people are looking for today. But we use ingredients that we know will leave anybody that comes into the space feeling really, really good in their bodies. And we feed them the appropriate amounts. Obviously, we are more controlling of that now because we're a tasting menu. So I can be very like granular about how much a person eats.

41:04Camille Lindsley: We'll have to give up a lot of that control. And we'll share that control with the diners when we're a la carte. But ultimately, like we use really fresh ingredients that we get from the farmer's market. We cook with like almost exclusively domestic olive oil in the space. We're dairy free, we're gluten free. And we just are really conscientious about what we're putting on the plate in front of people. And then we're also really quiet about it because those things are not sexy to talk about. I shouldn't be talking about them right now, actually. When people find out that we're a gluten-free restaurant, I hope that it's always after they've eaten and they go, oh, that's cool.

41:43Camille Lindsley: Great. How wonderful. But yeah, we think very conscientiously about how a person feels at all stages of interacting with our brand. That feeling is definitely, I think, really paramount. And I think about how to show care, how to engineer that within how we're running the business. I think as operators, as restaurateurs, entrepreneurs, maybe the thing that I'm thinking about for other people listening to this to steal from us is find a way to distinguish yourself. And I think that is something that we are always looking to do. And we have, I will tutor and horn, I think that we have that in spades in so many different aspects of how the by the glass list is to what the menu is like to us being incredibly accommodating of allergies and dietary restrictions.

42:35Camille Lindsley: We have found many ways in which to distinguish ourselves from other people. And this is not to say that you need to have every single idea be totally original, or that, you know, if I go out to a place and see that they have the same white wine by the glass, then I'm going to immediately pull it off, which I've done before. But also, it isn't going to be my reaction 100 % of the time. Because if there are many ways in which you have distinguished yourselves as being different from other restaurants, there's a reason for people to come to you. And if there's a diversity of those distinctions, if you have one idea that turns out to be not as original as you thought it's going to be, it's not going to feel like as big of a deal.

43:13Camille Lindsley: And you're going to have another idea. Yeah. Find ways to make yourself be like, oh, Hags is so different for eight reasons, not just like one, you know. Yeah. I think, you know, in that something that we talk about frequently is if there are things that other restaurants on your block, in your neighborhood, in your city, whatever, all typically and traditionally say no to. And you're the one that says yes, you immediately build a through line to clientele. we have always led with the fact that we have a fully vegan menu so that's like one of many things that distinguish us but i think that's where you can have a lot of fun and a lot of creativity as someone who's developing the concept find those things that feel like exciting ways for you just to distinguish yourself as a brand and lean into them that's telly and camille to learn more about

44:05Telly Justice: hags, visit hagsnyc.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. I know you're busy, and so I don't take your time for granted.

44:45Telly Justice: Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode.