#buildingPLR Restaurants need longer soft openings

Plus, why we got rid of chefs in our store

Hope this makes you laugh.

All right, let’s speed through this.

If you have any questions, ask them! Happy to answer them in future issues.

January 30, 2025: Our first of three Family + Friends events, where we gave our new staff real-life practice, to get feedback, and to start spreading the word about our February 7th grand opening.

It was very cool to see it come alive. We were slammed every day between 4p-8p.

Thankful that the Irvine Company dropped off stanchions for us to manage the line. We’ll find out later how critical that is.

February 1, 2025: On the last day of the Friends + Family event, we had a massive fire to put out.

Power going to our induction cookers did not work. At all.

Friends and family - among them also influencers and restaurant industry executives - had to wait in line for over an hour before we had to send them away.

Some drove for hours. Some flew in.

Not good.

But this is why we have these openings - to troubleshoot problems and engineer redundancies and back-up plans.

And this is also a testament to my support team. Big ups to our landlord the Irvine Company for sending their in-house engineers to help us with this matter (thanks, Chris Ayo!); Pepper Lunch corporate - our CEO Troy Hooper and COO Mark Bailey were also in attendance to help us through this; and dear friends, like Chris Torrijos - who is also an engineer by trade.

My biggest advice to any restaurant operator is to have a long soft-opening period. This is where you can make all of the mistakes, and learn new things you couldn’t possibly have ever figured out - had you not opened.

This is the time when people do not complain; they’ll give you more grace; and you can set yourself up for success.

I’ve been running restaurants for 20 years and still have these issues. We don’t get a pass because we’ve done it before (you just need new problems or a nice little reminder).

February 3, 2025: Our TVs and TV mounts are installed, thanks to GRUBBRR (I talk about them here).

The menus and their prices are managed remotely - kinda like Rockbot - so that we don’t have to worry about it (thanks to corporate).

One less thing to worry about.