Great Q&A session with a self-made restaurant/bar owner

This guy worked his way up from being a dishwasher to owning multiple restaurants and bars. It's a great story and he has some really interesting answers and insights.

I Own a Chain of Restaurants and Bars - I Started Out 10 Years Ago Washing Dishes - AMA : IAmA

Great read. Lots of really good info (brought back memories).

-Russ H.

Bingo! It seems whenever you read about someone's success, "hard work" is always part of the foundation.

There's a book worth of information here! Thank you for posting.

The only thing that stuck out to me was when he said he works a minimum of 50 hours a week. Although he's a successful business owner, this isn't exactly fastlane. Perhaps he should read the E-Myth and assign every responsibility to a position so he knows who's accountable. Giving up the oversight of each bar would be tough, but if he could have someone doing the oversight duties the money lost for salary expenses could be made up if he spent that time expanding the business.

Have you've ever seen Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares?


Almost every restraunt that needs saving has an owner who lacked oversight and had delegated all the work, when you're delegating to highly paid engineers, designers, managers of some sort it might work but when you attempt to delegate to chefs on $30-40k per year the restaurants seem to turn nasty quickly so I'm sure he does spend lots of time expanding and managing his finances but I'd guess having oversight is important to him and takes up much of that time.

I'm speaking specifically about his bars and nightclubs, but even for the restaurant situation, I doubt the owner is the only person who can manage his restaurant effectively. And the chef doesn't need to be the person doing the oversight either.

It's vital for the owner to instill his message into his employees so they understand what the company's purpose is. Then each employee is assigned responsibilities and if something doesn't get done, you know exactly who to go to in order to solve the problem.

Robert Kiyosaki once said a business owner is someone who can leave their business for a year and come back to see it as profitable if not more. The person your describing is not a business owner but rather is self-employed.

Sheldon Adelson doesn't manage his hotels and casinos and Donald Trump isn't a property manager. Yet both of these men are quite successful. The goal is to put a system into place so as a business owner you can remove yourself from being apart of it. This is the difference between the Trumps and the Bransons compared to local small business owners. If you don't create a system you are still in the rat race just without an employer. I don't think this type of goal or mindset is unattainable, and afterall, this is the fastlane.

Actually, if you read the whole thing-- he says over and over: SYSTEMS.

(Gerber's E-Myth is all about systems)

And he's looking at franchising right now.

(which is *very* fastlane).

Did you happen to note how much income he makes? He only mentions it once.

He's a workaholic. Lots of fastlane businesses need this kind of attention at the start.

And he's scaled/grown his businesses.

While he's not trying to be fastlane, in many ways, I think he is.

Ten years to go from dishwasher to owning more than a dozen high-profit venues?

And making 7 figures a year?

I think that's pretty fastlane.

Again, a long read-- but really worth it.

Thanks again, John!

-Russ H.