Cousins Maine Lobster Will Keep Lobster Mania Alive in West Hollywood
Lobster rolls are seriously trending
By Crystal Coser, Eater LA
March 18, 2015—The West Hollywood stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard seems to be the place where restaurant concepts go to die. In this month alone we’ve seen The Horn and Gangnam Pocha bite the dust, and now comes word that Bite Mi Café hasn’t fared any better.
The good news is denizens of West Hollywood won’t have to wait long for a new restaurant to take its place. Toddrickallen reports that ABC’s Shark Tank favorites Jim Tselikis and Sabin Lomac will be expanding their lobster truck business Cousins Maine Lobster into another full-fledged brick and mortar.
The cousins attempted their first brick and mortar within [a] Pasadena drinking lounge … but quickly closed the place back in December 2013. Hopefully the new West Hollywood location will survive better, but it’s a tough bet considering the history of the neighborhood.
Cousins Maine Lobster will carry on the current lobster roll trend in LA that’s been solidified by the recent opening of [another lobster restaurant]. Hopefully the concept sticks around so West Hollywood’s restaurant row can finally find some stability.22
Yes, our little restaurant is in the same location that once housed a place called Bite Mi Café, a Vietnamese sandwich joint. In any case, there’s a lot to unpack in those few paragraphs. But the reason we included this short news clip from an LA culinary website is because of the article’s inherent warning: our restaurant wasn’t just risky, it was probably going to fail. Read between the lines and you’ll see the red flags.
First, our choice of location was basically doomed. Forget the place that was there before us, we couldn’t have picked a worse spot to build our immovable lobster shack. It’s “where restaurant concepts go to die” apparently, like it’s cursed.
Two, our new restaurant would be our second attempt. Our first shot at a brick-and-mortar “quickly closed,” suggesting to readers that the food truck guys should probably stick with what they know best.
Finally, there’s the competition mentioned at the end, which also sells lobster rolls and was about six miles away. There’s a hint that we were chasing another restaurant, which had “solidified” the lobster-roll trend, and that perhaps LA wasn’t big enough for both of us.
It’s a good thing we don’t listen to what others say. It’s also a good thing we like a challenge, because we got one.
MANY DIRECTIONS, ONE FOCUS
Of course it wasn’t just alternative media writers basically saying we were making a huge mistake. Barbara hated our restaurant idea, too, if for an entirely different reason. Let’s go back to summer 2012, right around the time we went on Shark Tank. Our goals at the time were fairly small. We wanted to put another truck on the road and we went on the show to get the funding to do that. Simple.
But then we thought about maximizing the Shark Tank opportunity. This led us to develop our e-commerce business, which we hoped would get its first big boost after our episode aired. You now know how that went. Then later in the summer we were approached with another opportunity, from the owner of a local lounge. We jumped at that, too, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.
Obviously, we didn’t consider these to be mistakes at the time. Only when we look back now, knowing what we know, do we cringe at our impulsiveness. Some might say we were reckless, although that suggests we didn’t approach these opportunities in a smart, disciplined way. We did, even if we probably should’ve passed on them. Rather, we were aimless. We hadn’t decided what kind of business we wanted Cousins Maine Lobster to be, so we chased opportunities.
Clearly, from a very early stage in our business, we wanted to go beyond food trucks. Heck, not six months after launch, we were already pursuing two separate ventures, the lounge and the e-commerce business. At the time, we thought these were too-good-to-pass-up opportunities, mostly because we were inexperienced. We couldn’t tell a good opportunity from a bad one back then. If we didn’t jump on them, we feared, they would disappear.
We had a common ailment that affects a lot of young entrepreneurs: we were more afraid of losing out on opportunities than we were of taking an opportunity that wasn’t right for us. It’s how amateur investors get themselves in trouble, by chasing crappy investments and throwing good money after bad. This is what happens when exuberance combines with inexperience.
Moreover, we saw ourselves riding the wave—and waves eventually crash. We had to pursue these opportunities, because they might not be there a year from now. And what if we weren’t as popular? What if lobster prices went through the roof? What if Southern Californians suddenly decided they hate food trucks?! These are the questions that go through your head when you haven’t been in business for six months.
Which is why we say that Barbara came along at just the right time, or close enough. From a very early stage in our partnership with her, she emphasized one lesson above all others: not every opportunity is the right opportunity. She saw that we were grasping, particularly with the lounge restaurant, although she wasn’t a big fan of the e-commerce business either. She also noticed that we had the right instincts, and certainly enough ambition, but that we suffered from an identity crisis.
We did, and it was this: Where do you go from food trucks? E-commerce, restaurant, franchising—these were all viable options and none was necessarily better than the rest. So, why not do all three, we thought. It’s a decision that might seem like overconfidence or arrogance. But it was the opposite of arrogance: it was a lack of confidence that drove us into this frenzied state of business development. We wanted to strike while the iron was hot, as they say, because we weren’t sure if we’d be around in a year. What if eating lobster from a food truck was just a passing fad, like swing music’s comeback in the 1990s? (Remember that? No? Moving on…) We were terrified our luck would run out, and we’d be begging for our old jobs back.
Barbara taught us how to breathe. There are certainly some businesses that depend on the popularity of a concept or trend—in other words, things outside of the business’s control. Lobster isn’t one of them. We were purveyors of one of the planet’s most delicious delicacies, one that has been selling for more than a hundred years. In 2007, before the economy crashed, lobster landings from the Gulf of Maine totaled about 70 million pounds, certainly down from 2004’s historic high of 80 million pounds. By 2013, the industry had rebounded by 60 million pounds to a total of 140 million pounds.23 No, people weren’t suddenly going to stop wanting lobster. We had found a successful niche in a popular market.
But what would happen if the food truck craze dies? We’d need another revenue stream!
This was a more realistic concern, but also very unlikely. One of the ways we were lucky early on is that we were on the leading edge of the food truck insurgency. Although food trucks have been around for decades, the idea of a gourmet food truck, as opposed to a corndog vendor, is relatively new. Most industry analysts pinpoint the economic crash of 2008 as the spark that started the fire. With the economy tanking and restaurants taking a huge hit, professional chefs and restauranteurs saw the food truck as an ideal solution. Compared to a brick-and-mortar restaurant, food trucks are cheap to start and operate. And with the limited kitchen, the menu must be simple but also distinctive—food that attracts the restaurantgoers without breaking their wallets.
And then there was the fact that Sabin lived in LA, where the gourmet food truck was basically born. As a March 2012 article in Smithsonian Magazine noted:
At a time in America when finances are shaky, yet even modest big-city restaurant spaces involve multimillion-dollar build-outs, when consumers have wearied of giant chains but still demand food that is novel, inexpensive and fast, food trucks are the new incubators of culinary innovation. The food-truck phenomenon exploded in cities across the United States last year thanks largely to the success of Kogi, and before that to the mobile fleet of taqueros spread out across L.A. Who knew that the cult of tacos al pastor would become a nationwide sensation?
The intersection between food and wheels has driven culture in L.A. since at least the 1930s, when the city was already famous for its drive-ins and roadside hash houses designed to look like coffee pots. Food trucks may be nothing new in the U.S.—every Hawaiian can tell you her favorite plate-lunch wagon, and Portland, Oregon, can seem like a locavore food-truck plantation—but in L.A., where on some afternoons they can be as thick on the freeway as taxicabs are on New York’s Sixth Avenue, they define the landscape.24
Put simply, the idea for a food truck wasn’t divine inspiration. Sabin worked in a city inundated with them. This article, tracing the start of the whole food truck thing to LA, came out one month before the first Cousins Maine Lobster truck hit the road. We didn’t invent the food truck craze, nor were we even early pioneers. That credit belongs to those trucks selling upscale Mexican street food and other ethnic dishes, like Kogi BBQ, which sells Korean short-rib tacos. These early trucks exposed Americans to the pleasures of simple yet delicious street fare.
But was it a fad? Had we inadvertently joined a craze long after its heyday?
Between 2007 and 2012, when we jumped in, the industry grew 8.4 percent, a nice bright spot in an economy that was otherwise falling apart. Of course, there was concern that after the economic recovery, food trucks would lose their market. The chefs would go back to the brick-and-mortars, and the customers, now with a little more money in their back pockets, would follow. Except that’s not what’s happened. Between 2010 and 2015, the industry grew at a rate of 9.3 percent.25 Turns out that what had been a cheap alternative to a brick-and-mortar during an economic downturn exposed an underlying demand that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
So, no, food trucks aren’t a fad.
Which isn’t to say that the industry has nothing to worry about. LA distinguished itself early as being a city particularly friendly to food trucks, but not every city is as welcoming. Much like the difficulty ride-sharing services like Uber discover when they attempt to enter a new market, food trucks disrupt the natural order of things. Brick-and-mortar restaurants—and we’re talking about big corporations—hate food trucks, because we steal their business with a product that is just as fast as fast food and way more delicious. Some cities have enacted onerous regulations that all but keep food trucks off their streets. For example, Chicago prohibits food trucks from setting up within two hundred feet of a restaurant, which basically explains why you can’t find any food trucks in downtown Chicago.
These fights are normal for any nascent, disruptive industry. They confirm that the food truck industry is entering a period of maturity, after a very wild and fun adolescence. Regulatory battles with individual cities will be fought; some will be won, others lost. But the industry isn’t going anywhere. If anything, these obstacles are the clearest sign yet that we’ve established ourselves as a mainstay in American cuisine. The fact remains that some of the best, most exciting, and most creative food in the country is coming out of food trucks. Let’s hope it remains that way for a long time to come.
The point is, if we fail, it won’t be because the food truck industry suddenly became unpopular. No, if we fail, it will likely be our own damn fault. We’re only wasting time worrying about these uncontrollable forces and trends. Barbara taught us that the one thing we can control is our business and that’s the only thing we should worry about. We can’t make decisions because we’re afraid something beyond our control might happen. We should make decisions because it’s the right thing to do for our company.
And at that moment, late 2012, we were doing well with our small fleet of food trucks. Barbara’s message to us: focus on that! Focus on what you’re already doing well, and stop with all the other nonsense. It was time to channel our efforts in a single direction and stick with it. It was time to manage our business with the confidence that comes from knowing what it was and where we wanted it to go. Man, but it was a good whack upside the head.
You’re probably wondering at this moment: So why the heck did you start a restaurant then?
Because we’re really bad at following Barbara’s advice—or our own.
THE LOUNGE EXPERIMENT
To better understand how we started our second restaurant, we should talk about the first. Now, using the word “restaurant” is giving our first brick-and-mortar too much credit. It wasn’t a restaurant in a strict sense of the term. We never owned the location and we didn’t have any control of the operation. Basically, the owner of a nightclub lounge in Pasadena approached us with an opportunity to serve our food to his customers. He even allowed us to put our logo over the entrance. It was summer 2012, right after we had filmed our episode of Shark Tank, and we were in the mood for new opportunities. Much like the e-commerce business, we thought having a permanent location would be a great way to take advantage of the influx of demand we expected after the episode aired.
What also appealed to us about this particular opportunity was that it seemed to us to be a kind of “pop-up” restaurant. If you’re unaware of this trend, a pop-up is a temporary restaurant that usually runs out of a nontraditional location, sometimes a residence, a former storefront, or just a stand on the side of the road. They’ve become a popular way for younger chefs and restauranteurs to make a name for themselves among a certain group of hard-core foodies.
Of course, the best thing about the pop-up is that it’s not supposed to last. The whole marketing strategy behind one is based on word of its existence going viral on social media. If that happens, the pop-up experiences a massive explosion of popularity, operates for a few days, then disappears—leaving its fan base wanting more. That’s their appeal. They’re here, then they’re not. “Where’s the next one going to be?”
We knew the lounge wasn’t a true pop-up, but we believed we could still hope for some similar social media buzz. We envisioned a line of late-night customers, ravenous after a night out and about, hitting up our “pop-up” for some great food and community. Was it the kind of atmosphere we would want to have today? Probably not, although we do make a point of hitting locations with our trucks where we know there will be some late-night revelers. But in these cases, we’re not second billing.
In any event, our service at the lounge began in September 2012, one month before our Shark Tank episode aired. Almost immediately, we realized that this wasn’t the best idea. For starters, there’s a problem with any establishment that is trying to be both restaurant and nightclub. Some can pull this off if they clearly delineate when the restaurant ends and the nightclub begins. But we were supposed to be serving our food during the nightclub phase. Customers who came just for the lobster rolls had to pass through bouncers.
In general, you don’t want to be carding your customers if all they want to do is eat a lobster roll.
Moreover, a lounge isn’t particularly well suited to the type of experience we loved to sell: when you eat our lobster, we want you to visualize and share in the memories of our childhoods growing up on the Maine coast. That’s what we do best. But how can you do that in a place which primarily caters to partiers who might get hungry during their late-night revelry?
Gone was the joy of us talking to our customers about the food, about lobstering, and about Maine. Gone was the sense of community and family which had been our primary motives for starting the business in the first place. In the end, all the lounge provided us was a place to serve our food, and only the food. Whatever else it was, it wasn’t Cousins Maine Lobster.
That said, we weren’t losing money—but we weren’t making money either. The customers appreciated our unique dishes enough to keep buying them, even if they might have wondered what a lobster shack was doing in the middle of a nightclub. And that was the problem. We had no place in a world of fancy drinks and undistinguished club music, where people came to be seen but not engage in the age-old tradition of family and friends. Our place is where they eat off picnic tables, wrangle the kids, and laugh with a mouthful of lobster. We understand this all too well now, but we didn’t back then. Remember, we were suffering from an identity crisis.
So, although we didn’t lose much, we stayed in far too long. Our stubbornness is one trait we share that is both a virtue and a vice. We saw that the lounge wasn’t right for us very early on, but stuck it out. We didn’t want to admit we had a made a mistake. Moreover, we thought we could turn a mistake into a success if we just gave it some time. But that’s one of those tough entrepreneurial lessons that you can only learn by experience. Now that we know a lot of entrepreneurs, we know we aren’t the only ones who have tried to make lemonade out of lemons. There seems to be a universal tendency in all young business owners that says if you give a mistake enough time, it will magically become a not-a-mistake.
Part of that is just you protecting your ego. If you close up shop, then you’re admitting you made a mistake—and you can’t do that! Mistakes are for amateurs! You’re a real, bona fide businessman who crosses all the t’s and dots all the i’s. If you make a mistake, then it means you probably aren’t any good at business and you should just get out now.
Every entrepreneur has these thoughts. They’re as normal as they are wrong. But we have to go through them because we have to make our first mistakes sometime. Making mistakes is how you learn. Mistakes don’t mean you’ve failed. And even if your mistake does lead to failure, that’s not always a bad thing. We had to make this mistake with the lounge experiment to learn what we wanted from a restaurant. Almost everything about our experience there showed us what we didn’t want. Here are few highlights:
• We didn’t want our lobster to be a sideshow, an afterthought.
• We didn’t want our location to be anything other than 100 percent devoted to our brand.
• We didn’t want our restaurant to take away from the experience that we provide to our food truck customers.
Turn all those things around and you’ll see what we did want in our next restaurant:
• Our Maine lobster would be the star, the main event.
• Our location would be 100 percent based on our brand of community and family.
• Our restaurant would be part of the experience, from the tables you sit at to the people who serve the food.
When we finally closed the doors on our first restaurant in December 2013, a little more than a year after opening, we put an end to one of the worst mistakes in the history of Cousins Maine Lobster. But we don’t regret it. Not for a minute do we regret it, because without that experience, we would never have taken advantage of one of the great opportunities in the history of Cousins Maine Lobster.
WELCOME TO WEST HOLLYWOOD
Like many moments in our history, the one that led to us opening our own restaurant happened quite by accident. We were familiar with this particular stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, especially Sabin, who happened to live nearby. It’s a pleasant mix of family-friendly restaurants and more foodie-oriented cafés and bistros. Just what you’d expect to find in a neighborhood that caters to both sets. While the Eater LA article makes it sound like no one in their right mind would open a restaurant there, several have done quite well. Like Starbucks.
Seriously, extreme cases excluded, a restaurant’s location is only part of what makes it a success or failure. A place in the heart of the action could fail just as easily as one out in the boondocks could succeed. Too often, a great location produces laziness in the restauranteurs, who think they can skimp when it comes to food, service, or experience. That said, if you can snag a great spot and run one heck of a restaurant, then you’re sitting pretty.
Which is why Sabin, while walking along this stretch one day, suddenly got the idea that we should open our own restaurant. Sabin had found out that a location was available for lease just blocks from his apartment in West Hollywood, and the wheels began to turn. It was December 2014 and we had been out of the brick-and-mortar game for a year, having left the lounge spot in December 2013. In fact, we were knee-deep in starting our franchising business and working fifteen-hour days.
So, of course it’s time to open a restaurant.
Now, we likely would have started a restaurant eventually, but the opportunity of landing a prime spot in a neighborhood we knew well certainly expedited matters. We were so excited about the prospect that we put in a bid even before talking to Barbara about it. Not surprisingly, Barbara didn’t think it was a great idea, for reasons we explained above. And as the days ticked by with our offer on the table, we started to wonder if it wouldn’t be an act of divine mercy to have our offer rejected. We were simply overwhelmed with our franchising efforts.
But then, in January 2015, it was approved. Oh, shit.
So, before we move on, the burning question: Why, after going through the lounge experiment, and now in the middle of franchising, did we suddenly decide to start a restaurant? First, we don’t make decisions based off how much work will be required. We’re young, healthy, and ambitious. We love this stuff, the whole art of building our business and growing our brand. We don’t believe in the idea that we don’t have time for something. We’ll always make time for the right opportunity.
And, frankly, so should all entrepreneurs. If you start a business thinking it will give you the right work-life balance, you’re going to be sorely mistaken. There is no “life” in entrepreneurism. There is only work. We were lucky in our early days because we didn’t have families—the “life” we gave up was wasting time with our friends, dating, or watching sports. The trade-off we made was spending time working on a business or spending time with friends. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice.
But if you do have a family, we can see how starting a business would get in the way of fulfilling your obligations at home. Whether your office is at home or work, you will live there. You will be up late and at your desk early. We only hope you have a supportive partner who will carry the load while you pursue your entrepreneurial dreams. Remember to get them something nice when the frenzy dies down.
In any case, the idea that we couldn’t fit a restaurant into our workday was never much of a consideration. The real dilemma was entirely business related. Could we open a restaurant? Meaning, could we get all of our ducks in a row to open a place that we would be proud to add to our growing Cousins Maine Lobster family? Let’s face it, anyone can open a restaurant, which is why so many fail. But we didn’t just want a restaurant; we wanted an extension of our brand that would be a stand-alone success in its own right.
And to be honest, the idea of owning our own restaurant always greatly appealed to us—the type of appeal that goes beyond sound business or financial sense. The reason we passed on it when deciding on our first business in 2012 was because the up-front capital and overhead were just too daunting for a couple of guys who didn’t have any restaurant experience other than what Sabin had gleaned working in them growing up. With Jim on the opposite coast, a restaurant was just a bridge too far. But that doesn’t mean we gave up the idea altogether.
Quite the opposite. What was our venture at the lounge but us trying to force our restaurant dreams? We could try to rationalize it to you, but what’s the point? We suppose it’s the same irrational desire some people have to make art, climb a mountain, or visit all fifty states. There’s no good logical reason to do it; but the desire inside you runs so deep that you know you must do it or be left unfulfilled. That’s the best way we can answer the question about why we opened a restaurant when we probably shouldn’t have: because we wanted to and we could.
That said, we also knew that we shouldn’t be the ones leading the project. As previously mentioned, we were already stretched to capacity. But the more practical reason is that neither of us had opened a restaurant before. We had acquired enough business wisdom to know that we shouldn’t make this, our first real brick-and-mortar, our trial by fire. Steve’s advice, given long ago, came back to us: if you can’t do something right or don’t want to do it, then hire someone else to do it. We did with our finances; we had no problem doing it with our restaurant.
And that’s what we did. Fortunately, one of Sabin’s cousins, Aaron, happened to work in the restaurant industry in San Diego. His specialty was opening up new joints. So, we brought him up to LA and hired him as a contractor to oversee the restaurant opening. Looking back, hiring Aaron wasn’t just a good decision, it was a sign of our growing business maturity. Learning to hand some tasks over is part of growing a business, but it’s extremely difficult for young entrepreneurs. The reason why is because when we’re inexperienced in management, we don’t trust anyone else to do it.
But as you expand and bring on more people, you learn to let go. You have to, or nothing will get done. So, slowly the fear of giving control to someone else recedes. Two years previous, we probably would’ve tried to open the place ourselves. But in that winter of 2015, we had to give the project to someone else. Here’s what we want, we told him. Get it done.
And Aaron did.
Of course it wasn’t without difficulties. Major, headache-inducing difficulties. We gutted most of the interior of the space only to uncover massive problems—which is what usually happens when you gut a place. Our scheduled grand opening in the spring was scrapped for some unspecified date in the summer. The drip, drip, drip was more than the sound of flooding we had discovered: it was our money leaking into the money pit beneath Santa Monica Boulevard. And our location was small—we’re talking less than a thousand square feet of eating area that could only seat sixteen people inside.
Gradually, progress was made and we solidified an opening date for July. We were thrilled at what Aaron had been able to accomplish. From the beginning, our designs had a specific image in mind: “A little bit of Maine,” is what we called it. Really, we saw the restaurant as an opportunity to do something for our brand that a food truck simply couldn’t: create the ambiance of a lobster shack. The food truck has the people, the sense of family and fun, and, of course, the food. But no one mistakes a food truck for a wharf-side shack, no matter how much we want to pretend they do.
But with a permanent space? You better believe we carved up Bite Mi Café to look just like you pulled your dinghy up to the wharf: inside is small and cozy, with no individual tables. It’s all communal seating by design. We want you to talk to the stranger gobbling his lobster next to you. Our brick walls are reminiscent of the iconic Maine lighthouses back home, as if at any moment our customers will feel the spray of the surf on their faces. We threw in some cool props, like buoys and a white picket fence outside, to complete the picture. But it’s what you experience inside that matters: community, family, and a good dose of the wharf. Trust us, if we wouldn’t be written up by the health-code inspector, we would’ve found a way to make the place smell like a wharf. Outside is LA, with its palm trees, traffic, and smog, but inside, it’s a little bit of Maine.
Our plan for the opening was to have a soft launch the day before the big one. We invited some local celebrities we knew in town, as well as some of the kids and volunteers from Big Brothers Big Sisters. Remember, the restaurant isn’t large, so there’s only so much we could do with having a big party. It was more like our way of introducing the restaurant to the neighborhood. There was certainly some buzz—the Eater LA article and others helped with that—and folks in the area, of course, knew about Shark Tank. Still, we kept things relatively intimate and neighborly. Our mothers were there, doing the things that mothers do, like cleaning up after the patrons. We spent as much time shooing them away as we did conversing with our guests.
In fact, an hour or so before we opened the doors, Sabin wasn’t even at the restaurant yet. Jim was down there, putting the finishing touches inside while a line slowly grew outside. The place looked great and Jim couldn’t have been happier with what we saw in the staff. Then he peeked outside and nearly fell over. He fumbled for his phone and called Sabin.
“Get down here now!” Jim said in a loud whisper.
“I’m coming,” said Sabin impatiently.
“Dude, now! You’ll never guess who the first person in line is…”
“Who?” asked Sabin.
“Daymond.”
LESSON
NOT EVERY OPPORTUNITY IS THE RIGHT OPPORTUNITY
Shark Tank Favorite Cousins Maine Lobster Opens Shop in West Hollywood
By Mike Glazer, The Wrap
July 1, 2015—Cousins Maine Lobster, a food truck delivering lobster from Maine to the streets of Los Angeles via overnight UPS, is opening its first brick-and-mortar shop in the heart of West Hollywood.
The company first gained local and national prominence as two likeable, hungry guppy cousins pled their case on ABC’s Shark Tank, securing a deal back in 2012.
On the eve of the July 2 store opening, select VIPs, friends, and family filled the Santa Monica Boulevard location, neighboring the Starbucks and Trader Joes in “boys’ town.” They will be serving up lobster rolls ($15), lobster tacos, lobster BLT’s, and a very dry lobster martini. (It’s just lobster chunks in a glass, no booze.) …
At the time they closed their deal on the Mark Burnett and Clay Newbill produced Tank, they had one food truck in Los Angeles. Now, they have 14 trucks roaming 10 cities and franchisees across the country. The WeHo shop though, is the first brick-and-mortar under the Cousins Maine Lobster name.
Fellow “Shark” Daymond John, who passed on the opportunity to invest three years ago, stopped in on Monday night during a pre-pre opening.26
It’s always amusing to us what the press finds interesting and what we find interesting. The article didn’t end with the Daymond John nugget; it continues for another hundred words or so. The writer slides it in there like it was the most normal thing in the world for another shark to show support for the business ventures of former contestants. It’s not.
Daymond’s appearance outside the restaurant for the soft launch floored us. We’re not kidding: he was first in line. That’s why Jim yelled at Sabin to get down to the restaurant immediately. Even though we didn’t know why Daymond was there, we were going to roll out the red carpet—though, of course, we didn’t have a red carpet. We didn’t have much of anything.
It turns out we didn’t have to worry. Daymond came to our soft launch just to show support. He had heard about the restaurant through Barbara and wanted to see how were doing. That was about it. Nothing too dramatic or fancy. But to us? It was one of the kindest gestures we had ever been privileged to receive as entrepreneurs. We admire Daymond for the same reason all entrepreneurs and business folk should admire him: he’s brilliant. But he’s also incredibly warm and supportive, even of those in whom he didn’t invest the first time around. That’s why he showed up that day. He just wanted to show his support—and probably also get some damn good lobster.
But Daymond’s appearance that day told us something else, something he clearly never intended. We had made the right choice. Opening a restaurant, while perhaps not the best thing we could have done while in the middle of franchising, had been the right opportunity. Even if we didn’t know it then, we do now. The doubts and debates we had between us and with others, including Barbara, had played havoc with our confidence. Even in the week leading up the grand opening, which you’ll read about in the next chapter, we weren’t entirely sure we had made the right decision.
Then Daymond showed up and, just like that, we felt all was right in the world. When someone with Daymond’s stature stands outside your door like everyone else, patiently waiting for a chance to enjoy the best lobster in West Hollywood, then you’ve done something right.
Without fear of sentimentality, we can say we love our restaurant. It’s cozy, quaint, and the closest we can get in LA to back home. But that’s the thing: we can say that it reminds us of our home. Even though we’re smack-dab in the middle of Los Angeles, which is about as far away from Maine as one can get, both geographically and symbolically, we had built something that tugged on those childhood memories. In that way, it was an authentic representation of where we came from. And we love our regulars—from Maine transplants to the most California kid in the state; from the blue-collar worker to the celebrities, like Mariah Carey, Doc Rivers, and Dane Cook. Wherever they come from and whoever they are, they are our customers.
We now know that having a permanent place besides the business office, where our great customers know they can enjoy the Cousins Maine Lobster experience every single day, is one of the greatest joys to be had in business. This, of course, takes nothing away from our food trucks, which will always form the foundation of our company. They are its beating heart. But there’s also something to be said for walking into your restaurant whenever the mood strikes you, greeting your customers, hearing about their days, that makes this feel like a bigger accomplishment than the trucks.
There’s no formula we can share that lets you know which opportunity is the right one. All we can say is that not every opportunity is right. You’ll have to make some bad decisions to learn that for yourself. And you will. We had to make the mistake of rushing the e-commerce business and jumping into a bad situation with the lounge to even begin to understand what the right opportunities are for us. But we also had to learn damn fast. Shark Tank launched us into the realm of minor food celebrity, which has its own rewards to be sure. But it’s also a status fraught with peril if you’re not careful. We were offered dozens of opportunities in those weeks and months after the episode. Crazy, ridiculous ideas from crazy, ridiculous people. But we have to tell you: some sounded pretty damn good at the time. Thank God for Barbara, who has nerves of steel and knows how to say no so that the Ponzi schemers stay away for good.
Of course, you don’t need to be on Shark Tank to be offered bad opportunities. You don’t even need to be all that successful. You just need to be in business, and the opportunities will start to present themselves. How to decide? As we said, you will make mistakes. That’s fine. You will learn from them. Mistakes also help you hone your idea of what your business should be, and thus, what the right opportunities are. But you can also help yourself by sticking with your values and your ideals. Remember why you started a business and what you want that business to be, what you want it to say to others, how you want that business to be the best reflection of who you are. If you know the answers to those questions, then you will be able to discern the good opportunities from the bad. Even better, you will be able to say no to the bad ones with the confidence that you are making the right decision for your company, your employees, and your brand.