 Welcome to Adventures in Small Business. This is a collaboration of the Small Business Administration, Hawaii District Office and its partners, where we showcase the stories of local entrepreneurs in small businesses. My name is Victoria. I will be talking to our guest, Jason Kalani, who is an owner of two businesses here, Kapolei Karaoke and Kavailoa Tavern. Hello, Jason. Welcome to our show. Thank you. Thank you for being here. So before we jump into business questions, can you just please tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. So I was born and raised in Oahuwa. My family's from North Shore. I went to high school in Lahuwa. I went to college at the University of Hawaii. I got a degree in political science. I have a master's in business. I've also served in the military. I was enlisted for about four years, went to officer candidate school. I got my commission as a field artillery officer deployed. I've served as a platoon leader, battery commander, operations officer, executive officer, brigade fire support officer. So I've done all the echelons and currently own two businesses, like you said, and I'm still in the military. I'm in the army reserves at this time. So still in military and two businesses, how do you manage that? I have no life. Yeah, it's very difficult. I don't have a lot of personal time to do things, but it's definitely rewarding. It's rewarding. I can kind of make my own schedule and it's exciting to see people consume my product and they definitely like it. So it's kind of nice. It's rewarding. It is, for sure, yeah. So you've been in military for how many years? For about 20 years now, since 1996. So you feel like skills and experience in military helped you somehow in business? Yeah, for sure. I think that the military, you learn a lot of intangible things that you learn from the military. You learn about resilience. And I've seen a lot of service members, when they go into small businesses, they have resilience. So if there's an obstacle, they're not going to quit, they're going to go and fight through that obstacle, right? In the military, you can't just take off your ruck sack into your commander. I quit. I'm too tired. Or if there's barbed wire, you can't just say, I'm not going to go through that, sir. So it's the same with a small business. It's all obstacles. And I think that the military teaches you to have resilience, to be innovative, and just to fight through some of the tough times. Military does give you a lot of tools that you could use, especially for planning. One of the things that we have in the military is called troop leading procedures. So it's like a seven-step process of things you've got to do before an operation. You can use that same checklist for your business, which I do all the time. Military also has a tool called the one-third, two-third rule. Have you heard of it? No? Basically, all it is is just that you spend one-third of your time planning, two-thirds doing operations, right? So you don't want to spend too much time planning. On the other hand, you do want to do some planning. You want to give yourself enough time to actually execute. And it's the same thing with a small business. If you spend too much time planning there, you don't have time to do anything, right? So too many people get bogged down with trying to plan, overplan too much, and like I said earlier, you make that plan, it goes out the window as soon as you start your business. It's in the operation. So, yes, it's definitely helped me. So military helped you to start your businesses, right? Yes, absolutely. So what do you think? What's harder, military or business? I would say business is harder, yeah. With the military, you can easily just kind of go back to your commander or you say, I need more money. I need to have, I need to get this thing fixed, there's a work order for it. For a small business, you have to generate your own revenue, right? You can't go and submit a request to the government and say, give me money because you're not going to do it. If something is broken, you have to fix it. You've got to do all the, like for me in the military as a commander, I actually had a S1 shop that was in charge of personnel and paperwork and things like that. So they would do all my paperwork. Now I do all my paperwork myself. I've got to do all the documentation myself. I've got to fix everything myself. If something is not funded, I have to find the money for it to pay for it. So I would say, yeah, small business is way harder than the military, for sure. Which is interesting because a lot of people believe that once they start a business, they will have so much free time and it will be so much easier, right? But you think it's not true. Oh, no, I mean, I'd say for the military, if I could contrast it, I'd wake up at maybe 5.30, I'd spend like two hours during PT, come back, take a shower, drink my coffee, check my emails, we'd do some work, go to some meetings, then you had your lunch, then you'd come back and you're pretty much done by like 7 o'clock unless you're in the field. As an entrepreneur, it's like I'm up at 7 o'clock and I'm just like picking up deliveries, I'm working on the website, doing SEO content management with the website, emails, dealing with construction, fixing things. I still got to cook at one of the restaurants, I have to go and cover down on maybe someone's shift and it doesn't stop till 10 o'clock and I wake up and do it all over again. So there's less time in a small business than you would in the military. So how do you manage your time? So many things to do on a day. Do you have some kind of software, time management software, anyone's helping you? I try to, well, I have a really good staff, right? So my staff will remind me of stuff I have to do because I definitely forget. So I'll tell my, the important stuff, my staff will call me up and say, don't forget to put this order in, don't forget to fix this thing. But for the most part, I just try to do, I mean, I try to manage it. So like every day, like my, my rhythm is I try to, like Mondays, I try to work on deliveries, do all the orders I have to do. Maybe Tuesdays, I might do content management on our website, on our, you know, do like Google searches, Yelp searches. But yeah, it's difficult because you're putting up fires a lot too, you know. Constantly, there's something that happens in the restaurant or the bar that I have to fix. So it's pretty disorganized, I guess. It can be disorganized for sure. It can be, right? So let's go back to your businesses. So can you tell us a little bit more about your business concept? When did you start it? Okay. How did you start it? Well, I started Kapolei Karaoke back in 2015. I kind of knew I wanted to transition from active duty to being a business owner. And I was driving down South Road, going towards Kamakana Lee. And I saw the amount of cars that I realized, wow, there's a lot of people that I can market a product to. And Karaoke just seemed like the easiest thing to do. That's something that I like doing, that local people love doing, and there's nothing in the area. So I think that day I went home, called the broker up, and said, I want to do, I want you to find a property for me. So they found the property, I got the price, and based on that, I had the business plan. So that was like November 2015. And we signed a lease like mid-November. I brought in a contractor to build everything out while I was building the website, while I was building the concept up. I was doing all the legal things and stuff like that. And then, again, VBock helped us out with that too. Opened the doors in January 1st. So initially, we started off with four rooms, four Karaoke rooms. It was a bring your own alcohol. Eventually, we added another room. So we had five rooms. Then we added another room, the space next to us. They went out of business, so we took over their lease. And then we expanded, within a year, we expanded to having six rooms. The smallest room fits like four people. The biggest one probably fits about like 60 people. And then we got our liquor license this year. So now we do like bottle service, so alcohol in the rooms as well. And then after I got the liquor license, I kind of saw that, OK, well, I can probably do another business. Because the Coppola Karaoke was profitable. So I was like, I want to challenge myself. So I heard there was a property for lease over in Haleva. It used to be a bar before. So I got the numbers, the same thing. I think I opened the place up in a month. We got the concept down, got the team together. And within a month, we had the doors open there as well. We've been operational for that other place for about six months. It's a restaurant. We do mostly Hawaiian food, smoke meats, fish, full bar. And we try to perpetuate Hawaiian culture through music, through dance. But yeah, it was like a pretty fast process, actually. Yeah, it does seem like it was really fast. So we have a lot of clients coming in who are dreaming of starting a business, planning, but never actually starting a business. So what made you react so fast? And get into the business, jump into the business so fast. I'm a very compulsive person. I guess I just believe that if you have an idea, you have to do something, right? You can't just have an idea and just talk about it. I'm just a man of action. That's basically it. If you have an idea, you have to do something within the first five minutes of having that idea or else you're not going to do it. So when I had the idea for Kapolei Karaoke, like when it came into my mind, immediately I called up the broker. Within five minutes, I called the broker up. It was like, find me a piece of property. It was the same thing with Quilo, a tavern. It was like, idea popped in my mind. I was like, OK, put the pencil to paper, call to the broker, let's make this happen. So you just have to be a person of action, I guess. And I don't really know why, but I guess it's just the way I've always been. That's great because, as I mentioned, a lot of people just get stuck in that planning phase and just hesitate too much. And sometimes it's really hard to move from there. Yeah, they're focused on the small details. And I think the details are important, but you want to look at the big picture, right? I've always been a big picture, strategic thinker. But yeah, I've seen it, people, my partners, I mean, they're kind of, I love the guys, but they get stuck in the small details. Like, well, we can't open up yet because we don't have this particular beer brand yet. It doesn't matter. Just do it. You have to take action, right? But I get business plans from friends all the time, and they'll keep working on the business plan and business plan and business plan, but they never actually do anything. But that's what separates us, I guess. That's what separates dreamers from doers, right? Exactly, yeah. So what about your business planning process? Did you have a business plan or you just actually decided to jump in? No, I had a, well, I had a business, it was a general business plan, right? So I'm not, again, if you can't tell, I don't believe that you should spend too much time planning, but you definitely had a plan. So I had a business plan. To me, the most important thing is, how much is it gonna cost for the space? I see a lot of people that have a business plan that they don't answer the first question, which is, how much does that space cost? They have a plan, but it's like, okay, well, how do you know how much your product costs, right? So you have to know how much that space is, how much at least is your fixed cost, how much is your fixed cost gonna be? And the second thing is, what's your competition like? And I have those, once I get those two general ideas together, then I can kind of plan based off that, but I don't get two in the details of the plans, because I found that, like I said, once you open the business up, the details are gonna go out the window, and the markets are gonna dictate the details, and you're gonna find that your staff, if they're good enough, they're gonna actually fill in those details for you. You just wanna make sure that you're going in the right direction. So for Kapolei, it was like, I knew how much at least was gonna cost. I knew there was no competition in the area, and I built a plan based off that. And like I said, it took about a year for the plan to actually, I mean, it took about a year for us to come up with the product that we have now, because it was always like revising itself. But I definitely had a plan. And for Kauai Loa Tavern, same thing too, I had a plan, I kinda knew what the product was gonna be, I knew what the fixed costs were gonna be, and yeah, I just developed a plan and we just executed. What are the things that you wish you knew before you actually started the business? Well, I'll say that I didn't understand the leasing process, commercial leasing process for the first business. I remember that we did the negotiations, I found out how much it would cost per square foot, that the math, I was like, oh, I can make that in one week and it's easy. And then I got the first bill and there was this thing called CanFees on there. And I was like, it took my rent and doubled my rent, so my heart dropped. So I wish I had known at the beginning, it doesn't matter now, but I wish I had known at the beginning the leasing process, to have a lawyer go through your lease and explain those things to you. So you have that plan, so you can account for those costs, right? And the other thing too is just human resources. I wish I had known, could I definitely wasted a lot of time with C-team players, hiring people that wasn't right for the brand. And you have to kind of trust your instincts with people, especially in the service industry. Obviously, if they're flying an airplane, you want them to have experience, right? But in the service industry, you just wanna have that connection. You have to be emotionally intelligent. And unfortunately, I tried to hire people that had a lot of experience, but a very poor attitude. And as a result, we definitely lost a lot of money based off that. The military teaches you that you have to be mentors to soldiers, you've gotta coach them, train them, because you can't fire a soldier, right? You're in combat, you have to use that soldier. And I tried to use those same principles for my business, and I found that, when you try to do that in the civilian world, in a small business, you're just wasting money. And, but yeah, I wish I'd known how to hire people better, I guess, at the beginning of the process. So what advice do you have right now for people who are looking for staff to hire for their small businesses? I would say, trust your instincts. You're gonna know, yeah, trust your instincts. There's a lot of people in the service industry that say, well, I have 10 years of experience bartending. But how hard is bartending, right? It's like, you're taking drink A and drink B, and you pour it together, and okay, here's your drink, right? You wanna find people that have a really good attitude that can project your brand, not people that are experienced in bartending or serving. You'll know that. I think you'll know that within the first five minutes of meeting somebody. You can meet them, talk to them. If you like them, then you know, okay, the customers are gonna like them. And that's important. You can train them to do everything else, right? So I would say, definitely trust your instincts when you're hiring people. And if they're not performing, there's a saying that I go by, right? If you can't change people, but if you can't change people, then change people. Does that make sense? So basically like, try to change them for your brand. But if they can't change for your brand, then change them out and find the right person. So I would say, yeah, my advice is don't rely on people's resume too much. Just go off that instinct feeling. Go off that connection you have with the potential employee. Go with your gut feeling. Go with your gut feeling, yeah, absolutely. It's like, yeah, and I guess for me, when I first started, I felt like, well, I should go off their resume. This person, they've had all these years bartending or serving or cooking and I don't have any experience. But I had a feeling in my gut that this person's, we don't have that connection. And sure enough, when they started the customer interaction, it diminished or ran. And then I kept them around too long when I should have gotten rid of them a lot faster. And as a result, we definitely lost some money off in the beginning. But now I know, it's a lesson learned. So hopefully other people can learn from my mistakes. Hopefully. Thank you for sharing. We're taking a little break and see you in a minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii, Raising Public Awareness. When I was growing up, I was among the one in six American kids who struggle with hunger and hungry mornings make tired days. Grumpy days. That kind of days. But with the power of breakfast, the kids in your neighborhood can think big and be more. When we're not hungry for breakfast, we're hungry for more. More ideas. More dreams. More fun. When kids aren't hungry for breakfast, they can be hungry for more. Go to hungarees.org and lend your time or your voice to make breakfast happen for kids in your neighborhood. Aloha and mabuhay. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii. With Think Tech Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch. For our mission of empowerment, we aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, mabuhay and aloha. Welcome back to Adventures in Small Business. Today I'm talking to Jason Kalani, owner of two businesses here in Hawaii. So Jason, we talked a lot about your first business, Capolei, Karaoke, what about your second business? Can you tell us more about it? Yeah, again, I found out that the space was available. Got into the broker, ran the numbers, I was like, okay, we can make this thing work out. But I had to develop a brand for us, right? So right about that time, my grandmother passed away. So we looked at her pictures and we kind of saw a lot of the old pictures from Kualoa Camp, which is where she's from, and my dad's from there. When my mom first came to America, my dad brought her there, so she had a lot of memories of that area too, right? So I decided to build a brand based off preserving the heritage of Kualoa Camp. Haliva is very tourist-oriented now, not a lot of place for locals. I knew that, I knew that locals were going to Milani if they wanna eat dinner, if they wanna have a beer, or they go to Milani or Waihou, but they stay out of Haliva because there's no place for locals to go to because the prices are all for, the prices in the food are for tourists, right? A lot of pizzas, a lot of hamburgers, a lot of Thai food now there, so based off that, I knew there was a void for local culture, local food, so yeah, we developed a menu based off of some of the recipes that my family had, and we brought in Hawaiian bands, Hawaiian music, just did everything we could to perpetuate the Hawaiian culture, and I think now it's catching on to Haliva for sure. A lot of locals are coming out to Haliva again. We try to do live music every night. We try to showcase like a different Hawaiian singer at night, on the weekends, we're starting to do live bands on the weekends, mostly Hawaiian and reggae bands, but yeah, that's what we have going on in Haliva. So Kapolei and Haliva, you have to be in both places every day? It's tough because, no, you're right, it's tough. The labor market in Haliva is hard, it's hard to find people in Haliva to work, so I find myself cooking a lot, or bartending, or serving, or whatever I have to do, but I still have to go to Kapolei, and I'm fortunate because in Kapolei, I had enough time to train the staff, but I still have to be there to see what's going on, so typical night for me is I'll probably get to the restaurant at about two o'clock, I'll start the prep work, we'll start cooking, close the kitchen down at maybe 10 o'clock, and then, this is like a Friday night, now I'll have to drive from Haliva to Kapolei at about 10 o'clock just to make sure they're doing their job, just check out the inventory, make sure all the systems work, just making sure they're doing what they're supposed to do, and I'll probably stay there until about 12 o'clock or one o'clock, and then I'll drive back from Haliva, from Kapolei back to Haliva to check up on that spot, so I'm just going back and forth, back and forth, it's hard, if we miss the delivery, I've got to pick up all the supplies and deliver it to Kapolei and Haliva, which is a nightmare sometimes, it's very time consuming, but yeah, I wish I had opened up another business in Kapolei, closer, that would have been nicer, but yeah, it's definitely rewarding though. And it's working out so far, right? Yeah. Seems like it's successful. Yeah, it depends how you define success, but Kapolei is definitely generating a profit for sure. That's the one thing I've found, is that Kapolei, it's doing well because A, I trust in my instincts, I brought in the right people, in fact, the first guy I hired in Kapolei, he just sent me an email, I put the ad out before we even had the business up and running, he sent me an email, like, I want to work for you, I want to work in this, so I brought him in, and he had no concept of what we're doing, he was like, what's the job? I was like, I don't know what the job is, I have no idea, we'll figure it out together, but he had a really good personality, a lot of Instagram followers, and he's been very instrumental in bringing the people in. So great staff there, very excited staff, because we're not dealing with food, I don't have a lot of fixed costs, right? My fixed cost is pretty much just the overhead for electricity, insurance, and the rent, right, that's about it, and then of course I do licensing fees for the music, so labor. So I have very set fixed costs there, not a lot of variable costs, so that's why it's done really well. Great staff, easy costs. Haliva has been a little different, I tried a different approach in Haliva, I tried to hire people based off their resumes, so again, it definitely diminished the brand, and when you're dealing with food, yeah, the food is like, you have to push out a lot of volume for the food to work, you have to kind of understand how much it costs, portions is important, and I think the first chef I hired, he was a good chef, but he didn't understand the business portion of it, right? So he would buy like a $10 per pound prime rib and resell it for about $10 a plate without actually measuring the stakes. So I went back and did it around the numbers, see how much we're losing, okay, we're not making any money off the stake, right? So, but we fixed that though, it's a lot of it's because I was naive and I wasn't prepared for the restaurant industry, but it's doing really well now though, we've got that figured out, so. Yeah, so from our experience, restaurant industry is one of the riskiest, right? Yeah. So many challenges, how do you make sure that you are protected from those challenges? How do you stay ahead of the game? Oh man, I'm just, I'm doing research all the time, constantly looking at, constantly listening to podcasts about running a restaurant, I'm constantly reading the trade magazines, always looking at prices, just trying to understand the food costs, looking at the competitors, if I make something, is anybody else making it? But you're right, it's incredibly difficult and I'm still learning today as we go on. Definitely gonna reach out to the VBock and check in with you guys to see if I can find a mentor to help me make sure I have the right prices for the food. But yeah, I think the important thing is just, you wanna make sure that you have the right portion size and that everything is accounted for. You can't just throw rice in there and say, oh, it's just free rice, right? You have to pick that into account because if you're going through like, two bags a week, that's 40 bucks, it adds up, right? So you wanna make sure that that's accounted for. But we have a handle on it now. And my advice to anybody opening a restaurant is that you wanna have a hand on all costs. You don't wanna, A, I would say, you don't have to hire a chef. A cook is good enough for most restaurants. You don't have to hire a five-star chef. And B, I would say, no, it goes in the recipes just because you have a cook. Don't think that they understand the business side of it because a lot of them don't, right? They're just gonna buy whatever they need and try to make it taste good. You wanna have your hand and the recipes know exactly what goes in there, know exactly how much everything costs. And then with that knowledge, you could actually build a profit, right? You can start controlling costs and develop your own profit. So great staff, a lot of research, education, mentoring. What else is important in running with it? Oh, okay. Math? We mentioned the law. What about financial planning, accounting? Did you have any of that experience knowledge? So I have an MBA. So with my MBA, I focused on accounting. So I know about financials, understand ratios, and yeah, I would say that math is extremely, extremely important. A lot of entrepreneurs are like, I hate math or whatever. I build pretty detailed planning sheets. I run ratios almost every week to see exactly where we're profitable or not profitable at. In fact, just yesterday, I built a balance sheet, a projected balance sheet, right? Where it's like, how much money's coming in per day? What's going out by day? I did that for about six months out just to make sure that we're going to be profitable. But yes, you have to have, accounting is good, but I think that you have to know how to do everything for an entrepreneur because I knew how to do accounting. Plumbing, I've never done before. I have to learn how to be a plumber. Website management, SEO, content, search engine optimization. I've had to learn how to do that as well because as you know, in today's business, for brick and mortar, you're not gonna win by just having the best looking restaurant on the street, right? It's based off of the digital landscape. You wanna beat them in that Google search. When they Google restaurants, Hollywood, you wanna be the first one to pop up, right? So you have to understand SEO management as well. Laws, city and county laws, state laws, you have to understand, yeah. It's just, there's a lot of stuff you have to learn about, cooking, bartending, serving, just psychology, just, this goes on. You have to be an expert at everything. Yeah, and we always say that you have to have a good bail team, which is banker, accountant, insurance agent, lawyer, right? Did you have all of those? Yeah, I have a great lawyer. His name is Mike Sweetman, actually, and he's actually a veteran as well. I'm gonna have him talk to you guys too. We actually won an exercise in Singapore together, me and my lawyer, about three years ago. So we're in a bus in Singapore. He was a JAG officer. I was a fire support officer and we just started talking about business. I was like, I wanna start my own business one day. He was like, oh, if you do it, you should give me a call. Cause I wanna be like a small business lawyer or something. So two years later, I give him a call and he helped me start the business. But yeah, we got a really good, really good law. I got a really good guy that does law from a really good lawyer that I have. The accounting, I think with QuickBooks, you can do most of the accounting yourself if you're savvy with that. But you definitely wanna have someone that's gonna help you with projections. If you don't know how to do projections, then it's very difficult to make decisions. You're kind of just flying by the seat of your pants. But all in all, I think I have a pretty good team. Great. So we are about to finish. So can we find you somewhere on social media? Where do we find you? Yeah, you can find us on my, for Kapolei Karaoke, if you're looking to rent a room for a party, you can book online at www.kapoleikaraoke.net. 24 seven bookings. Again, we have rooms that range from four people to 60 people. For Kauai Loa Tavern, if you're looking for, if you're in Haleva, you wanna have a drink. We have our pineapple soju, which is really, really popular. Try some of our smoked briskets. Our website there is www.kauailoatavern.com and we're located next to Longs in Haleva. Thank you very much, Jason. Looking forward to visit your businesses. And thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more adventures in small business every Thursday, 11 a.m. Have a great day.