 Welcome to Keys To Success, which is live on Think Tech Live Streaming Network series weekly on Thursdays at 11am. We are your hosts. My name is Danelia, D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm on behalf of the duo, John Newman. Welcome to today's show. The goal of this show is to provide professional and personal developments tools and profound insights on how to achieve success in life, career and or business. We are very grateful for all the wonderful feedback we receive from our viewers. Enthusiasts have dropped by Newman Consulting Services to meet us personally and to let us know how the show has impacted their lives in a positive way. Kaolani Cowell, owner of Kaolani Spices, was our guest on our last show and her words of wisdom can be accessed on Newman Consulting Services website, NewmanConsultingServices.com or our landing page, Danelia.org. Our theme for today is change requires taking a leap of faith. Joining us today is not in the studio, but is our honest guest, Jason Kimmel, CEO of Glacier City Foods in Anchorage, Alaska. Mahalo for joining us today, Jason. Thank you, John. Appreciate you having me. Hello, Danelia. Hi, Jason. Jason, how about sharing with our viewers what motivated you to start your daily catering business? Well, in my mid-40s, and I've worked my whole life in the restaurant business from the time I was a kid running around my parents' restaurant, went and got a degree in college and hotel restaurant management, and it's all I know. So that being said, about 2005, I was a Chili's franchisee. We'd had a Chili's Open, a second one under development. We were only the fourth or fifth Chili's franchisee at that time, back in the early 2000s. Almost all the stores were corporately owned or owned by these huge conglomerate groups. So myself and two partners got the franchise. We had a Chili's Open in Anchorage here, very successful, the second busiest in the system, only behind LAX, which was 24 hours, and a second one in Fairbanks under development being built. And I realized, and my wife and I had a baby, and I realized that my life was brutal. I was working 24-7, there was no downtime. We were doing huge revenues, over $500,000 per month in sales, 115 employees, blah, blah, blah, but we were making no money, and my quality of life was in the toilet. So I started a concept that I thought did well in the lower 48, that was an under-served market here in Alaska, and just kind of took it and ran with it. So what made you decide on the location of the business? Is it business? Is it because you were already in Anchorage? I mean, there's so many similarities between Alaska and Hawaii as far as doing business. Yeah, we get island fever here up in Alaska. We're very isolated. To drive to Seattle, for example, is two and a half days of solid driving. So I spent my whole life in Anchorage since the time I was a kid, with the exception of leaving state for college, so it was a natural. It's also the biggest city, half the population of the state lives in Anchorage. And the demographics are just really, really well situated for the business here. Yeah. Okay, what was your approaches that you used to build your customer base? Well, one advantage that I had, I'm sure to be this very similar situation in Honolulu or Oahu or maybe all the islands, is growing up here, I knew a vast number of people. And you know, I was either, oh, you're so-and-so's brother, or oh, you're Renee's son, or... Yes, we understand that concept. Right. Very, very similar. We call it Ohana here in Hawaii. Right. And so, you know, if I just moved to Waikiki right now and tried to open up the same business, there would be a much bigger struggle than it was here in Anchorage. Having the day we opened without doing a lick of advertising or really telling anybody what we're doing, just, you know, the word of mouth, we did about $3,000 in sales at, you know, $8, $9 per person. Very, very busy. Wow. So that springboarded us initially. So how important have... Because you've... How many employees do you have right now? Currently, last month, 33. So how important have having good employees been to your business? It's either number one or number 1A. To me, it's paramount. And it's easy to say it because everybody in business does say it, but... And you and I have talked about it in the past quite extensively, actually. But to me, systems maybe edges out people just a little bit. So in my industry, in the restaurant and hospitality business, systems in place, because people are going to come and go, especially in the restaurant business. So systems in place followed very closely with people and lots and lots of them. You can never have too many good people. Absolutely. And you know, one of the things about business, as you just said, systems in place, systems are extremely important to have that foundational business model. But also understand that in order to have success in your business, you need to have great employees and you need to have a great communication with those employees. Absolutely. Yep. Yep. Now, what has been your most successful experience to date doing your business? Well, aside from the financial gains, which have been really good, I've been very blessed that this business generates quite a bit of revenue. Aside from that part of it, which is kind of the obvious side of why a lot of people go into business, there's not a week that goes by where I'm not at Costco or the grocery store or the golf course or the ski hill or whatever, where I don't run to somebody. I'm wearing a pepper chinis shirt or jacket or hat. They'll tell me, you know, I love pepper chinis. I hear that myself, my management team, my delivery drivers, my staff in the restaurant, we hear it all the time. And that's a constant reminder that we're doing a good job and it drives you to be your best. Yes. Okay. What are some of the biggest mistakes you've made and how did you learn from them? Well, I was thinking about that question a lot this past week, a week and a half. There's a lot of good chunk examples, like for example, I just opened up a second restaurant on the military installation. We didn't do the numbers I thought we were going to do. But more importantly to me, John Danelia, it's a matter of tons, every single hour of every single day, small mistakes that you make and just not repeating them. Having the foresight to look at it from, instead of a day to day, I'm buried in this. What am I going to do to fix this right now? Taking a different approach. Okay. It's a problem now. When I'm organized and I'm with my team, what are we going to do to fix this so it doesn't recur? You know, one of the things I really admire about you, Jason, is the way you handle setbacks. You just really just focus on the next step. You know, it's like you let that go, learn from that experience. Don't let it, like don't let it become your life and that you're stressed and worried about it. You just let it go and move forward. I mean, that's a very, very admirable quality that you have. Thank you. Yeah. Jason, what are some of your methods to generate new ideas? I'm a big believer in immersing yourself in your industry or your location or your geography or your segment entirely. So I get a lot of industry publications. You know, I have a couple of magazines I'm going to read on the flight tomorrow. I participate in a couple of networking groups, Chamber of Commerce, Business After Hours type groups. I'm a very big believer in soliciting feedback from your customers and your team. And we have a policy, our restaurant catering service, every order that goes out the door that's over $500, which there's at least a few of those every day, myself or one of the two key management people contacts the customer after the fact and solicits feedback every single time, even if they're a weekly customer. That's great. And you listen to that feedback and you evaluate it and you implement solutions. Yeah. Yeah. Take it constructively, like not taking it personally. Right. Very important. So how long do you stick with an idea before giving it up? I have an easier time with this than most people I think. When I think something is not working, I pull the cord on the parachute way quicker than a lot of people. For example, that military-based restaurant that we just opened, we signed a one-year contract. There was no penalty for bailing early and it could have gone on indefinitely, but we closed it after eight months. I had seen what I needed to see. They gave me information that I didn't find to be true once the push came to shove, so the summer numbers were supposed to be greatly increased and by, for example, by June 30th of this year, I saw enough that I was able to just make the decision to close that operation. The tough part was laying off employees, I was able to absorb three or four good people and a couple of kids were high schoolers that lived with their parents, but I lay off three or four good employees because it was the right thing to do for the business. What are some of the sacrifices that you've made to become a successful entrepreneur? I think you too and anybody else watching this show can answer this with about the same answer. But we want to hear that tweetable advice from you. I don't see any of it as a sacrifice because I love what I do. My daughter knows when she wants to come hang out with me some Saturdays, it means setting up for a wedding. And my boys know that if they want to throw a ball, sometimes it has to wait till after we clean up from a big barbecue at the State Fair, for example, whatever. It's a lot of sacrifices, but in my opinion and my mentality and what I try to teach my staff is it becomes your lifestyle and as long as the lifestyle is conducive to your personality, then it's not a negative. It is what it is and you run with it. There's lots of times, for example, next weekend we're closed for three days. The whole staff gets three days off for the holiday. A lot of people are working in our industry. That's true. So going back a little to the business model, one of the things that when you talked about the military project that you did, you were consistently looking at the numbers, the bottom line, the financial aspects of it. And I think that that's really good advice for business owners because a lot of business owners get so caught up in everything else that they forget that the bottom line is very, very important. You've got to judge your business by the bottom line and going month to month is not a good idea because you are going to have highs and lows. You do have to go over a period of time. So in our consulting work, that's one of the things that we recommend is to not just operate your emotional state, the emotional state of your business off of your month to month, but to really look at the trends, graph the trends, be very aware of what is working and what is not working. Could you give us some more insights in this area? Yeah, it's really something that, in my opinion, is very appreciated undervalued by business owners. And there's so many parts to this question. We could spend the next part of this, the whole show really, just talking about that because to me, it's everything. I look at myself and my management team. We look at our sales every week and our projected labor and our projected costs. We look at them every month. We look at them every quarter and we look at them every year. And then on top of what we're all, as a team, looking at four different ways, I'm looking at them every day, different ways, spreadsheets, QuickBooks reports, industry standards versus ours, year after year comparisons, month to month comparisons, customer comparisons. So I spend a lot of time looking at numbers and manipulating numbers and trying to figure out ways to make things smoother, better, more efficient, more profitable. We just initiated a new menu print and we're sending new menus out. We're eliminating a couple menu items. We look at the numbers. There's a lot of customers that like these items. They're going to be upset. It's the best for the business. Right. Thanks, Jason. So what we're going to do, we're going to take a short break and come back to this really important topic. This is key to success on the ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series. We're talking with Jason Kimmel, CEO of Glacier City Foods, located in Anchorage, Alaska, regarding our theme today. Change requires taking a leap of faith. I'm Danelia D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm now the half of the duo, John Newman. We'll be returning in a minute, so please stay tuned for more. Hey, Standard Energy Man here. Make sure you tune in on my lunch hour every Friday from noon until 12.30 at least. Maybe I'll go a little long if you've got good stuff to share with you. But we'll talk about energy, all kinds of energy. My favorite is hydrogen and my other favorite is transportation and hydrogen. But we'll talk about all kinds of energy. Be with us every Friday at noon, Standard Energy Man. Aloha. Hello. I'm Marianne Sasaki. Welcome to ThinkTech Hawaii, where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law, where we discuss legal issues, politics, governmental topics, and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. Hi, I'm Chris Leitham with The Economy in You, and I'd like to invite you each week to come watch my show each Wednesday at 3 p.m. Welcome back. This is Keys to Success on the ThinkTech Livestreaming Network series. We encourage you to call our hotline at 415-871-2474 to join our conversation, or tweet us at ThinkTechHI if you have any questions or comments. We've been talking with Jason Kimmel, CEO of Glacier City Foods located in Anchorage, Alaska. Regarding our theme today, change requires taking a leap of faith. I'm Danelia D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm the other half of the duo, John Newman. Welcome back to the show. Jason, I've got a long question for you this time, okay? And I didn't design this question, it was designed by my lovely wife. Okay. Knowing that you've owned several businesses, share with our viewers, why do you decided to become an entrepreneur and how you found the strength to stay the course after having so a plethora of challenges? Well, every job everybody has, whether you're 15 years old and you're working your first job as a high school student or you're 65 and you're doing something you love and ready to retire, every job has things that people dislike, love, dislike, hate. You know, everyone wants to make more money, that's a given. But other than that, the actual day-to-day drudgery of working a job, it's really, to me, life is about just finding something that you really enjoy doing and then it doesn't really become work. So I never, even though I just got done saying how much time I spend looking at numbers, looking at financials, looking at spreadsheets and reports, I don't make it about the money when we make decisions. We do when it comes to purchasing, if I'm buying bottled water, you know, I'm looking for the best price if it's the same product. But when it comes to customers, you can't take that approach. You have to take the approach of we're in the service industry, just like you, two are in the service industry, and we take care of our customers, the financials fall into place. Right. So true. So do you believe there's some sort of pattern or formula to becoming a successful entrepreneur? I definitely feel like there's a formula. But before I say that, let me just say something I'll take just a minute that I feel like it's more important than anything in business because I see that over and over and over with colleagues, friends, people that I know in the industry, people fall in love with their idea and they don't do their homework and their research in making decisions. They make decisions based on emotion. I know this is going to be a grand slam. It's going to make a million dollars. And really, you know, what I try to do is remove emotion until after. Once the decision is made, heck, yeah, get emotional, get fired up, spend your, be the biggest cheerleader, but don't get emotional until you've made that decision that this is the right course, this is the right plan, this is the right business, this is the right whatever decision and run with it. It is hard to remove emotion. That being said, the formula for me that's work in business is just making sure that I'm servicing my customers and that foremost in my mind and my staff's mind and my management team's mind is doesn't matter what our policies are, it doesn't matter what we're supposed to do. If it means taking care of a customer, you take care of that customer. And then everything else down the road can be repaired. So true. So true. All right. So, Jason, what's your favorite aspect of being an entrepreneur? The freedom, I think, you know, to some degree, I'm dictated on what we have to do. In July, we had seven weddings that we catered. Obviously, weddings are something you can't take lightly, you know, people are only getting married once and it's a stressful day for people involved. So, for example, the weekends in July, I didn't do much that I wanted to do from fourth to July weekend all the way through this past weekend. There's a couple weddings every weekend. So that being said, I really do enjoy the freedom because I know now after 10 years of being open with pepperoncinis and prior to that, you know, many years with Chili's Grill and Bar, I know when we're going to have lulls and when we're going to have peaks. And so I'm able to plan around that so I can take a lot of vacations. We do a lot of traveling and they're mostly domestic trips and they're fairly short. But, you know, try to leave at least once a month, especially in the wintertime up here. Right, I don't blame you. We don't need to go anywhere. We're quite happy quite probably. We don't want to go there. I think I'll share this with you a little TMI. The first time I went to Alaska and I got off the airplane and it was about 20, 20 degrees. I didn't take my bags off the plane. I decided to get back on the plane and I think I came to the people. I think I came through coming from Thailand. Wow. Yeah, it's a different lifestyle. It is. So to what do you most attribute your success? So what would you say the three key elements for starting and running a successful business and what do you what do you attribute most to your success? Finding for me personally and for my advice to anybody watching, find something that you enjoy to do more so than you enjoy doing because that's going to change over the years. What you enjoy doing at 25 is going to be different than what you enjoy doing at 45. But some of that fits your personality and your lifestyle. If you don't ever want to work on weekends, don't go get a job in the hospitality industry or, you know, find something that fits your personality, your lifestyle, what you like in life, and then find something that excites you and drives you and makes you passionate. Passion is extremely important. Yeah, you answer my next question. I was going to ask you, you know, what are your three top advice that you would you would give someone that wanted to become an entrepreneur, but I think that covers it. But so I'll ask you this, what are your top three success habits? Well, I do actually have one other thing for advice that I think is important to say as somebody that's opened a few businesses other than finding that emotional spark and that drive is being yourself. And if you try to fit a mold or fake it, eventually it's going to fizzle out. You won't be able to sustain it. And so do your business the way you want to do your business and take what everybody tells you and filter it. I have so many mentors and people that I have the utmost faith in and honestly believe what they tell me is gospel almost. But I still filter what they tell me and, you know, extrapolate what I want and can out of it. Yeah, so I really have to go with your gut. Yeah, yeah, your gut. You really have to listen to what what you what your mind and your body and your heart is telling you to do despite what anybody else says. But we were always open to all suggestions. But you make your own decisions. Right. And if it was and if it was easy, everybody would own a business. Absolutely. But you said this earlier, you have to really look at what's going on. And if it's not working, you you have to be committed to change. You you just don't keep doing what you're doing. And we call that insanity that you do the same thing over and over. And you think you're going to get a different result. You're not you're going to get the same results. So well said, John. Yeah, it's so hard to remove emotion when you're in your business all day every day and you see your bank account drop down to just, you know, or you have an employee quit because they their husband got laid off and they need to go get a job with insurance. Or, you know, it's so hard to stay emotionally removed from your business. But you have to. You have to make business decisions based on not just being callous. You don't want to be callous towards your customers or your loved ones, your employees or family, but you have to remove the emotion. Absolutely. And you have to have the faith that it's going to be OK. You know, and again, go back to your gut, go back to, you know, is this am I on the right path? The answer will come to you. It absolutely will. I can't tell you how many times in, you know, our life that, you know, John's and my with our business and everything that we just, you know, took a little breather, thought about it, you know, and the answer came to us. And it was always the right answer. So listen, listen to yourself. And as you said earlier, you know, when it comes to letting an employee, a dear employee go, it's hard, but we still have to look at while we're here. We're here. We have a business to run. And those type of decisions are going to have to be made, but hopefully fewer than many. Yeah. Yeah. And a small and a small community like Oahu or like Anchorage, Alaska, you're going to run into those people and you have to be able to look at them when you run into them at the gym and the grocery store, you know, have respect for them and then have respect for you. Right. Right. Right. It's got to be done professionally. You do the best you can. Sometimes people get upset. But, you know, if you if you it actually is interesting because whenever, you know, because we manage businesses and we do have to let people go sometimes. And one of the things that we tell our staff when they're in that position, our consultants is, you know, I always tell them is, is, you know, it hurts you more than it hurts them. Actually, because you sit up at night and you're so worried because you're thinking about them, their family, you know, and everything else, but you have to have the strength to make that decision based on the based on whatever's occurred. And it's just like being a parent. I, you know, I really relate business to being a parent. Wasting a child is not easy. You know, sometimes you've you've got to implement consequences. And that's the same thing as a business or you have to implement consequences and you know yourself that when you are chastising your child, it hurts you more than it hurts them, you know, so it's the same thing in business. Yes, I couldn't agree more. Yeah. So, Jason, what council would you give our viewers and listeners at this time that are looking at becoming an entrepreneur? There's a person that I have a lot of respect for. He calls himself the restaurant doctor doctor. I've seen him speak once in person at a restaurant convention in Chicago. And then I get a weekly email from him. His name is Bill Marvin. And what he says every single week in his newsletter in a different way, but always the same message is do the work. And I really it resonates and it rings home with me because there's a thousand different ways to do the work. You don't have to bust your excuse my language. You have to bust your pump all day, every day, 20 hours a day. That's not necessarily the best way to do the work. But having the business at the forefront of your mind and making decisions. And, you know, if you're going to be I'm going to be out of town this weekend and we're going to go eat at a couple restaurants that are potentially going to be in Alaska someday. And, you know, I'm going to get a little bit of information out of that. To me, that's doing the work. It's fun. I get to go try different food in a different place. See something that's a different trend in our industry. But that's doing work and comparing it and taking ideas back and sharing it with your team and then using those to better your business. Right. OK. OK. Well, we're out of time. We'll have to wrap it up. Jason Kimmel's Words of Wisdom with regards to Kisa's success can be found on Newman Consulting Services webpage. NewmanConsultingServices.com and landing page. Danelia.org. Thanks to you, our viewers and listeners for tuning in. Thanks to our broadcast engineers, Uri Bender, our floor manager, Nick Sexton and to Jay Fidel, our executive producer, who pulls it all together. Thank you, Jason, for joining us today and sharing your insights to success. My pleasure. Think that Kisa's success will be back Thursday at 11 a.m. So we ask that you please tune in again and ask your friends and family to do so as well. My name is Danelia, D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm the other half of the duo, John Newman.