On this first episode of season 3, Leela and Lisa chat about the great work Chef Mike and his brother Ahmad are doing with their sandwich truck/shop Detroit 75 Kitchen: taking good care of their people, growing their business, making strategic choices and more

Learn more at:

Detroit 75 Kitchen, Detroit75Kitchen.com

Leela Sinha, aleixianoconsulting.com

Lisa Robbin Young, lisarobbinyoung.com

Leela's Patreon: patreon.com/LeelaS

more details for Detroit 75 Kitchen

https://detroit75kitchen.com/

original location at

4800 West Fort Street, Detroit, MI, 48209

and eat-in dining at

32275 Stephenson Hwy, Madison Heights, MI 48071

like the moving into Madison Heights because that's where the money's at.

But it also means that in order to make those choices,

other choices had to be made.

So that's why I'm like,

I think it's important that we at least point that out.

So.

Absolutely.

In the world of business,

there are a lot of choices.

There are a lot of lies,

there are a lot of shortcuts,

there are a lot of people taking those shortcuts and telling those lies.

And then there are the people who choose to do it right.

At a time when so often profit is king,

those people are increasingly rare.

But when those people are in charge,

good things happen.

Fortunately, some of those people are business owners,

some of those people are bosses,

and we are here to showcase the best ones.

I'm your host, Lela Sinha,

with co-host Lisa Robin Young.

Let's get started.

Hi, everyone.

Welcome.

This is really exciting because it is the third season

of my Power Pivot podcast.

This is episode one,

so we're just getting started again.

And the season theme is best bosses.

So I just keep seeing all these businesses online

that are doing things right and I want to lift them up.

Today's topic is Detroit 75 Kitchen,

which I came across on Facebook Reels.

And I'm delighted to have you all joining us.

This is also a new era for us because,

one, I am video recording, which I have not done before.

This is our first run at a video option for the podcast,

although we will also be publishing it, as usual,

in podcast places if you, like me,

tend to just lean into the audio.

And this is the third season of this podcast

where we talk about using our power for good.

When I started this, I was thinking about

how everybody talks about power is evil, power is bad.

And I was like, "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah."

We have to talk about how we could use power well.

Otherwise, when we get power, we don't handle it well.

We mishandle it or we shy away from it.

Or we do bad things because that's the only model of power

that we've seen or thought about up until that moment.

So instead of allowing ourselves to do that,

let's imagine forward and let's take a look at the world

and find people who are good examples

of already doing that well.

So especially and specifically in the business world,

the financial, but especially the business world,

I'm really interested in these questions

because I don't think we're gonna get out

of capitalism this week.

I just don't.

For better, I know some people who are like,

"Yes, I'm a proud capitalist, but not proud of all

the things that capitalism does."

And I know other people who are like,

"Burn it all to the ground."

But one way or the other,

we have to deal with the fact that here we are right now

and what can we do to make the best

of the situation we're in.

So in each episode, we'll be highlighting

a different business that I have run across

or Lisa's run across or that you all have sent to us

that has been really doing things well

in one of a number of different axes

or ideally all of them, like taking good care of your people,

taking good care of your founders,

taking good care of the communities that you interact with

or something else that I haven't thought of.

Why not all of it?

Making good moves for the world, maybe all three.

So I'm super excited because I get to do this

with a co-host, which I've also never done.

This is Lisa Robin Young.

She is from Detroit, is that correct?

I'm actually from Flint about an hour north of Detroit,

but Michigan's my home state.

Okay, and she has experience in all kinds of things.

We do similar kinds of work with businesses,

helping them with their internal infrastructure and systems,

helping create those systems that maybe support

that goodness in the world through the business.

And she and I have known each other

for a number of years online,

and then she had the good grace to move to my town.

And so now we're both in the same place

and we got to meet up in person a bit ago

and had such great chemistry

that when she said she was interested in co-hosting,

I said, absolutely, this is gonna be great.

So I'll give you the floor

to introduce yourself a little more,

and then we'll move on.

Cool, so my background is twofold.

One is performing arts, so creative entrepreneurship,

but also business.

I have been a consultant for businesses

of all shapes and sizes.

Coming up on 20 plus years now,

been in the online world for more than 30 years.

And in that time, seen a lot, done a lot,

helped a lot of people.

My goal has always been profitable, sustainable business,

building a business that works for how you're wired to work

and supporting organizations to have strategies

that work with the capacities that they have, right?

So that they can grow in healthy ways.

And I don't know what else I need to say.

I've written a couple of books.

You can find all of those details on the interwebs.

I'm an internet dinosaur, I've been around forever.

But I'm really excited to be able to talk shop,

as it were, about these different businesses

that you've brought forward.

When you put out the call for potential co-hosts,

I've never done the co-hosting gig either.

I've always done a solo show.

My show ran for 10 years, and it was just me

talking into the camera about this, that, and everything else.

And so to be able to have a conversation

with another person on a regular basis

about the things that we're seeing,

the patterns that we're finding,

because that's really who I am.

I'm a pattern finder.

And deconstructing some of that

so that our audience can then say,

okay, here's how I can apply that to my business.

Or here's what I can take away from that

that's gonna be impactful for me.

That's the stuff that really gets my Jesus way.

That's the stuff that really gets me excited.

And I love that we are starting with a business

that's brightened my hometown backyard.

So thanks for having me.

I'm so delighted you're here.

And when we were trying to pick which business

to highlight first, because I have,

I've been thinking about this since like December,

I have a list.

But I said to Lisa, hey, so what do you think?

And she's like, well, I'm from Michigan.

And so I said, great, that's, there we go.

That's the thing.

So Detroit 75 Kitchen, they build themselves

like their online presence is very down to earth.

Their line on their homepage is a proper sandwich shop

owned by two brothers.

It doesn't get much more basic than that.

But I think that's where the basic ends.

Indeed.

For sure.

I mean, just scouring the media about this business,

you can tell that Mike's in the kitchen and,

what's the other brothers name?

Ahmad.

Ahmad is the business guy, right?

He went to Wharton School.

He went to U of M's Ross School.

He is very, very business savvy.

And you look at the stories that they're telling online,

and you look at the original starting history.

So this company actually started as a food truck

in the parking lot of the truck stop

that their family owned.

And it's kind of grown from there,

but they still have the flagship store situated

beautifully between the Ambassador Bridge

and the new Gordie Howe Bridge that's almost built

to take care of the people in that community

and to serve that traffic.

So you've got a lot of truckers coming in.

You've got, they're right next door to the police station.

So they've got good security, right?

Like there's a lot of really smart business decisions

that were made in getting this company off the ground.

And once it got off the ground,

they did some really neat things

that have now positioned them to be way more

than just a basic sandwich shop,

even though they're still serving out of the same,

you know, food truck business model that they've been doing,

they have branched into some other things.

So I'm excited that we're gonna get to talk

about some of that too.

Yeah, and you can hire that food truck

to come to your location now

if you want the whole food truck experience,

which is one of those really smart things

that I think they've done is they've looked

at what the market needs.

And they've said, how can we leverage the cache

of this particular business?

Because they've gotten a lot of attention.

You know, they say they had some

just great lucky breaks early on.

And so people, at least in the area,

know about Detroit 75 Kitchen.

Like they know, they built a name for themselves.

They're not just another food truck.

Right, and if you look at a map, right?

If you pull up Google Maps and you look at

where this establishment is located,

it is a somewhat industrial space,

but there are food joints populated around this area, right?

So there are other sandwich shops.

There are other burger joints.

There are other types of food

in and around this establishment.

But they have done something that's not only allowed them

to become a recognized name in Michigan,

they've become a recognized name across the country, right?

One of the top, I think the number three food truck

in America, like one of the top 50 restaurants in America.

I mean, like really good food, a really great reputation,

but they're also doing good for their employees.

Right, so what they say is, from the beginning,

this is a quote from their website,

from the beginning, we built Detroit 75 Kitchen

around one belief, none of the growth matters

if the food is not good enough

to make people go out of their way for it.

Mike's at the standard in the kitchen,

Ahmad helped shape the direction of the brand

and the business behind it.

No shortcuts, no gimmicks, just real work,

consistency and respect for the craft.

Yeah, yeah.

And it really shows in, I think the thing

that was most telling for me in the videos

that you sent me to watch,

you're talking about employees in food service

who've been there 10 years, 12 years.

That is pretty unprecedented in the food services industry

where the turnover is like two to three months.

I get goosebumps when you say, I'm like,

oh, 12 years, and they don't sound mad about it.

Right, yeah, they're happy to be there

and it's just another day in close quarters

in their tiny little food truck kitchen.

And this isn't like a one or a two man operation.

There are four or five people, six people

inside that truck moving around, working the line,

doing the things that they need to do

to keep the business happening.

And when you have employees that are there

for five years, 10 years, 12 years,

that's institutional knowledge.

And sometimes you don't think about,

well, it's a food truck,

what do you mean institutional knowledge?

Okay, all those recipes become body memory.

All of the settings become body memory.

All of the faces that you see regularly

when they're coming to the counter to order

and you build those relationships with those buyers,

but that's body memory.

Oh yeah, you always order this sandwich.

And that's an efficiency that you can't duplicate

when you have to hire new people into your organization

every two to four months because people are quitting

because these--

Because you're actually in the right.

Right, you're not treating them right, yeah, essentially.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Yeah, and what's interesting to me too

is that most people don't think about it,

I won't say most people,

most people when they think about

sort of food truck level food service,

don't think about the need to build a tight team.

But if you've ever worked back of house

in a higher end kitchen,

you know how important the relationships in the kitchen

are to the quality of the food that comes out of the kitchen.

And if you can keep your food truck people

in the food truck for eight years, 12 years,

then you get that same level of intricate mesh

that produces quality, that produces,

oh, I know what you're gonna need and we're in the weeds

and I'm just gonna throw this down the counter at you

and you're gonna catch it and we're gonna keep going.

You can't do that with people who are brand new, you can't.

Right, right.

Yeah, the chemistry's not there,

the institutional knowledge isn't there,

the rapport is not there.

The loyalty's not there.

The loyalty's not there.

And I think that's the thing that's the most telling.

You don't stay at a job for eight to 12 years

just because you need a job.

I mean, you do, you have to, but--

Well, I mean, not in food service.

Not food service.

There are plenty of other places to go.

Right.

Like even on that street, even on Ford Street,

there are plenty of other restaurants

that they could go work at.

Why are they choosing Detroit 75 over Smashburger

or one of the other joints up and down that strip

is because of the living wage.

It's because of the way they treat their employees.

It's because of knowing they're gonna get their weekends off

for the most part.

I mean, those kinds of quality of life issues,

especially when you're working in food service,

are as important as the pay in a lot of respects

because food service joints are all over the place, right?

Like there's plenty of supply.

You know, how hard you can take care of them.

The mechanics of working in food service,

the mechanics of like cooking something

are not that different place to place to place.

That's why you can go to culinary school

and then go work somewhere.

But the skills are maybe a little bit more detailed

or refined if you go to culinary school,

but you can learn them on the job just as well.

And people do just as well.

And so you have a highly mobile workforce.

Yes.

And when you have a highly,

sort of like during the dot com boom

when you had like a whole bunch of coders,

that's less true now,

but during the dot com boom

when they were like all these coders

and they were highly mobile

and companies were not as good as chef Mike

at figuring out how to hang on to their people.

Well, I think too,

a lot can be said for just the ethos of these owners, right?

Right.

Mike's whole management style in the kitchen

speaks volumes to why these people are so loyal

in the first place.

Yes, they're being paid a living wage, sure.

But what are some of the other things

that they're doing well

that make this a standout business

compared to some of the other joints,

even just right in their own vicinity?

I mean, I think fundamentally,

chef Mike, at least from his social,

obviously we don't know.

We're not in his kitchen.

Right, we're looking at the highlight reels,

but from the highlight reels,

here's what we're seeing, right?

Yeah, but from the reels,

literally the Facebook reels that he's posting,

what we're seeing is that fundamentally,

he thinks of his staff as people

and he treats them as people.

He treats them the way you would want to be treated.

He treats them the way he would presumably want

his relatives to be treated,

the way he would want to be treated.

And so, for example, he has one real where he's like,

why are you charging your staff to eat

while they're on the job

if they're in a restaurant?

That is absurd, don't do that.

Just let them eat food off the menu.

Which it seems obvious to me,

but I know from my own experience

and from talking to other people in food service

that it absolutely is not normal.

No, especially if you're looking at large food services.

So there is someone in my family

who's currently working for a major fast food retail chain

and they have a cap.

You can order X dollars worth of food off the menu

and we'll cover it, but beyond that,

you have to pay for it yourself.

And I understand you shrink and loss

and you don't want somebody coming in

and ordering food for 25 people

and then taking it out of the kitchen.

I get that, but I'm sorry, if I want a hamburger today

and I don't want to eat the same hamburger

I've always eaten, maybe today I want it

a couple of extra somethings

or maybe a different kind of meat on my sandwich

and you're like, well, that's gonna cost you $2 more.

That's ridiculous.

Especially when you're paying someone

somewhere between 7.25 and 10 bucks an hour.

Absolutely.

Yeah, you're already driving a revenue up

by keeping employee costs down,

continuing to drive that down even further

and making them take it out of their already small paycheck

to cover the difference on their food

does not instill loyalty,

does not make them want to come back to work the next day.

It doesn't make them feel cared for.

I mean, it's two bucks out of the entire revenue

of the entire day, let's say you have 15 employees.

That's 30 bucks.

Right.

That's 30 bucks.

Right.

Just pay them.

You're probably gonna go out to dinner

and spend 30 bucks on one entree somewhere this month.

Like just pay them and feed them.

And it's amazing to me, my mom used to say,

dropping dollars to pick up dimes, right?

And we see that so often and I get that,

especially in the food industry,

margins can be super, super tight.

I get it.

And if you're looking at this through the lens

that Chef Mike is looking at it through,

like you get the money on the back end

because you get the value on the front end, right?

From the people that are working with you.

And I think the other thing that I really appreciated was

Mike's in the kitchen too, right?

Mike, like he's like, this is my kitchen.

I run this kitchen, but I work in this kitchen.

I'm making sandwiches too.

I am training people too.

I am doing, my elbows are right there

rubbing alongside yours as we work together.

And I think that's also a very important piece

that gets overlooked because when your founder owner

steps out of the day to day of the business,

things can change, right?

The energy can change in the space.

And sometimes that will prevent a business

from growing the way that it otherwise could

because now he's an overseer and now he becomes

like slave driver or whatever.

I mean, that kind of energy, right?

I've heard that term used.

And here he's just another one of the guys,

another one of the crew on the line

working another Tuesday, making sandwiches

for the truckers that are coming up on the freeway.

And you see it in the face of his employees.

They all know they're in this together.

They all know they've got each other's facts

and you can see it on their faces.

There's nobody in those videos who's like,

I just wanna keep my head down

and get to the end of my shit.

And don't talk about me.

Right, like I don't wanna.

They're all like, we love it here, it's great.

And yes, maybe that's the highlight reel,

but my senses and all the footage that we've looked at,

that is the norm, not the exception.

Yeah, I don't think he would be able to throw on this

camera and just film if that weren't the norm.

Because I can tell you how much adjusting I have to do

in my house, in my door with a door shut office, right?

Just to get ready to film.

I can't imagine trying to film in a kitchen

if there was something I was trying to hide.

Right, exactly, exactly.

A food truck does not give you a lot of room

to hide much of anything.

That is the truth.

It's a long skinny galley kitchen

and everything has to be cheek by jowl.

It's like cooking in a boat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they've done a really great job

of expanding the outside area

to really transform a gas station parking lot.

I mean, that's really what it is.

Like they've really, and this goes to a mod skill set,

right?

He's all about the brand experience.

How are people gonna talk about this?

I was reading some older press where he was like,

we wanna do merchandising and we wanna do all these things.

And like fast forward five or six years,

I'm like they're doing those things, right?

All of the things that they said they wanted to do,

they're rolling out.

And the thing that I like most is

they're taking these small bets, right?

Like they're doing these small experiments.

They started and they were like,

we are not open on the weekends.

Which historically for a company like that

would be like the busiest time.

Saturdays and Sundays, everybody's out,

let's go get some food.

And they're like, nope, our people need the time off.

And they've done pop-up locations in a couple of places.

Not a permanent place,

not a we're gonna be here from eight to five every day.

It's like, we're gonna show up for a while

and see how it goes.

And those kinds of experiments have allowed them to go,

okay, we can open up a real brick and mortar location here

based on the data that we've collected

from these experiments.

And in an era where we have a lot of people

who are coming into entrepreneurship,

throwing out their shingle and the stakes are so high,

they've gotta make it work like right now,

Yeah.

Being able to see other companies say,

let's experiment, let's not rush this.

Let's take our time and do it well.

Allows these people coming into business to go,

there is a different way to do this.

One that doesn't have to put a lot of pressure on us.

One that doesn't have to create a lot.

I mean, they started it in their parents parking lot

for crying out loud, right?

That was an experiment to just see what can we do.

And it snowballed into something bigger

because quality was at the foundation of it from the start.

Right.

I think that that speaks to the way

that the DNA of a company impacts the company's culture

and behavior going forward.

So I talk in my work a lot about systems theory,

which basically says that when a system,

which is just a bunch of people doing something together,

when a system is impacted in some way,

that impact carries forward

unless something happens to actually change it.

So the classic in psychology is of course,

the alcoholic family system where you have,

somebody was alcoholic in 1853

and it affected everyone's behavior.

And one of the things it did was it made everybody not drink

like we are just not a family that drinks after that.

So through the 1800s into the 1900s

and then into the 2000s, right?

This family doesn't drink.

They don't really know why anymore.

They don't remember the behavior,

but they're all still shaping their behavior

according to that thing that happened

to the system in 1853.

And in this case, they started as an experiment.

And so the beauty is that they are continuing

as experimenters because that's how they started.

And so it's in their DNA.

It's in the way that the system knows how to move

and understands itself.

And that's gorgeous.

Yeah.

And from a perspective of capacity, right?

It allows them to stress test without collapsing

the health and wellbeing of the business itself.

And I think as a culture, a business culture,

we hear a lot about fail fast and fail often.

And it's like, can we just avoid some of the failure

because there's a lot of cost involved in failing.

Right, you could fail, but you don't have to.

Yeah, if going a little bit slower means we don't fail,

why don't we do that instead?

Why don't we take the time to step back and go,

what's really going to serve us?

What's really going to serve our right audience?

What's really going to serve our people?

And how do we find the nexus point for all of those things

instead of let's just throw something out there

and see what comes of it.

And then we gotta iterate again and again and again.

And then we're in this anxious energy

of we've gotta find something that works instead of,

we've got the breathing room to make some decisions

and try something without it causing collapse.

Right, and I just want to take a brief detour here

that I didn't put in our notes, I'm sorry.

But as we're talking, I'm thinking about,

both of us live in Portland, Oregon.

And here in Portland, specifically around food trucks,

we have this thing that I haven't really seen anywhere else.

There may exist somewhere else,

but here instead of having food trucks

just willy nilly wherever on the street,

what we have is these things called food truck pods

where somebody will build out a parking lot

with often, more often now than it used to be

because of regulations, a little bit of drainage

and a little bit of sort of infrastructure

for each food truck.

And then they all park side by side

in this what is essentially a souped up parking lot.

And then people can come and sit and eat.

Usually they put out some tables.

Sometimes now there's a building that has washrooms

and sometimes alcohol being served

because it can't be served outdoors.

And it gives restaurants exactly that kind of flexibility.

So if you have a restaurant idea,

you don't have to get up all of the funding

and it's a lot of funding to like rent

and build out an actual brick and mortar space.

You need to get yourself a truck and they're always for sale

and fit it out with your stuff, get some latex paint,

paint the outside and go.

Yeah.

That agility in experimentation, especially right now,

especially in the midst of all the changes

that we're experiencing right now economically,

those agile companies are the ones that have the ability

to weather these storms because they have some flex, right?

Because they're equipped to say,

well, we're not gonna try all the things.

And one of the things that I talk about

when a company is trying to grow

is something called the expansion reflex.

Do something, anything, everything, let's go, right?

And when you have a lot of resources,

that's a thing that you can do.

You can throw a lot of spaghetti.

But when you don't have a lot of resources,

there's still this urge to do something,

fix something, anything, oh my God, let's try that.

Let's try this, let's try.

And then what ends up happening is

you're diluting the resources

and you're spreading yourself so thin

that your system is going to collapse.

Right.

And baking experimentation into the business model

allows you to have a budget for R&D,

for lack of a better way to describe it, right?

We've got a budget to try some things,

but we're gonna protect the golden goose

that is the core business model.

And we're not gonna drain our resources from there

because that's the thing that keeps the ship afloat.

Right, and it can be something as simple,

again, going back to the concrete example we're working with,

it can be something as simple as,

Chef Mike has another video where he's like,

"You don't need a huge menu.

You just do a few things well."

Yeah.

And when you're a food truck,

you almost have permission to do that

because you're operating small and lean

and everybody knows that.

It's obvious from looking at your setup.

So if you don't have 85 things on the menu,

of course you don't.

Where are you gonna store all that food?

It's a food truck.

It all has to fit in there somewhere.

That's right, that's right.

And the thing that's really super smart

about streamlining the menu

and proof that he's speaking from experience,

and again, for those of you who are in the audience,

we don't know these folks.

No.

Everything we're talking about is stuff

that we have seen from the outside.

I did a ton of Googling when I was researching this company.

If you go to their Google page

and you look at the pictures of the menu,

you can see that the menu has changed over the years.

They had more items and they started

to whittle some of them away.

They bring something out.

They take it away.

This is the value of experimentation

because it allows you to get feedback in real time

from the people who are trying out what's on the menu,

but it also allows you to cut the stuff

that isn't giving you the return on investment

that you need.

Whereas maybe three doors down

at the restaurant down the street,

it sells like gangbusters.

It's not selling for you.

You can cut it and let them go buy it over there

and know that your core audience

of the things that you do well

that you've become known for,

like there's shawarma wrap.

Nobody else around there's doing that.

And it sells well, so it's still on the menu after 10 years.

Right, and it probably doesn't sell that well.

Like if somebody else nearby tried to do it,

everybody who knows the restaurant knows the location.

Be like, why are you doing that?

Go to Detroit 75, they're the best one on the block.

End story.

And so I think letting specialization happen

is also a really important thing for us,

especially when we feel like we're in a tight market, right?

When you feel like you're in competition with other people.

Part of it is just vibes,

especially in businesses like your business and my business.

It's just who's the best fit.

But some of it is people become known

for a particular kind of thing

or particular piece of the pie.

And it's much better to be like, oh, we sell shawarma,

but that guy down the street makes the best donuts.

We're not even gonna, like we don't have a fryer.

We're not starting that up.

Go down and get your donut over there

where the donuts are excellent because that's all they do.

Yeah, and that is the opportunity

to take advantage of the long tail, right?

Like there are diehard fans of vinyl records

who will never buy audio in another format

if they can avoid it, right?

And there's a long tail audience for vinyl,

so much so that vinyl's making a comeback, right?

And in an environment like this

where there's all kinds of food

and you're into Detroit for crying out loud,

so there's really all kinds of food

because it is a multicultural melting pot

of deliciousness, right?

So why are we going to try and make something for everyone

because we're not gonna be able to compete well.

Instead, let's look at what are some things

that we can do uniquely,

like everybody's got chicken sandwich,

how do we do ours differently?

What makes ours worth coming back for?

And that was one of the things that I saw

on their website was we wanna do things

that make people want to come back, right?

Make people want to be here for the long haul.

So you get people coming off an airplane,

coming straight from the airport to the kitchen

so that they can have a sandwich

with their luggage in tow, right?

Truckers are coming off the freeway,

pulling up to get gas and they're walking over

to get a sandwich, and now they make this the stop

when they come off the freeway coming over from Canada

because they want that sandwich.

They want that food, they wanna be there.

Right, they're thinking about that sandwich

as they're sitting in line at customs.

That's right, that's right, that's right.

And that doesn't happen when you have food that's fine.

Right, and it doesn't happen

when you have food that's generic, right?

It has to be excellent, but it also has to be interesting

or specific enough.

And I think that that's true across businesses, right?

If you have something that's interesting and specific enough,

then people will come to you

for that interesting, specific enough thing.

Let me tell you a story about a notebook I saw online

just the other day.

I have a sort of a growing fountain pen thing.

And I'm trying to find the right notebook

for me to really get in my groove about it.

And that's a little tricky

because fountain pen ink is a little finicky.

And I saw the other day an ad for a notebook

that instead of having printed ruled lines,

it had watermarked lines.

So when you're writing, you can see them,

but as the writing goes onto the page,

the contrast changes in such a way

that your eyes don't really perceive the lines anymore.

So you get the advantage of the lines

for keeping your writing organized.

And then when you're looking back at it,

if you have diagrams or whatever,

like it doesn't interfere with your viewing of the,

and I thought that sounds like the perfect solution.

So it sold at like 10 shops, including SF MoMA,

the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art gift shop.

And I was like, oh, well,

that's not a hopeful sign for the pricing.

And then I, so I finally called a stationery shop in Seattle

that has it because that was the nearest place.

And they were like, we do have one.

I'm double checking because it's marked $79.

And I was like, yeah, that's not an amount of money.

I like, I wouldn't want to write in a notebook.

If I spent $79 on it, I think I wouldn't be able

to bring myself to write in it.

Oh, see, I would have to like go someplace special

to write in that book.

It was like my ceremonial writing book, right?

But I would also have stuff like ceremonial brain

that these days I don't really achieve.

I feel that, I feel that, I feel that.

But that brings up a good question

or a good point about pricing.

Because in my research around this company,

their pricing is significantly higher

than what you're finding in the neighborhood around them.

And I think they can get away with that

for a couple of reasons.

One, because they've made it a destination location,

they've made it an attraction in and of itself

so people are willing to pay a little more

for the branding and the prestige of being in their space

and ordering their food.

The other thing that I think is because of the quality

of the ingredients that they're using,

that's gonna cost more.

Because they're paying their people a living wage,

it's gonna cost more.

I think it may even feel-- Because they're halal,

that's gonna cost more.

Right, and I think I said to you in the email

that I sent to you, they're charging Portland prices

in Detroit.

And that is not a small difference.

And you're talking about, and I gotta pull up,

I gotta pull up my charts now, my charts and my diagrams,

because I looked at the median income households

just for comparison's sake, right?

So you're talking about the median household income

in Detroit is about 40 grand.

In Portland, it's more than double that, like 90 grand.

The per capita income in Detroit, about 24,000.

In Portland, 57,000.

Persons in poverty, 32% in Detroit, 12% in Portland.

So that also tells me that they earn as much as they want

to be serving their community, there's a portion

of their community that they have priced out.

They have made an intentional choice to price out.

Now, that's not right or wrong, good or bad

in the context of I have a business, these are the goals

and objectives that I want to achieve, right?

And we also have to acknowledge that

because we are in capitalism, we have to make trade offs

and choices, right?

Do I charge what everybody else around me is charging,

but then that means I have to lower the rate of pay

for my people, which means I'm gonna have the kind

of turnover that they're having at their places.

And I'm not gonna be an integrity as a business owner,

like I'm not, I'm gonna feel out of integrity there.

Or do I raise those prices, create a quality experience

for everyone connected to it, me, my staff,

our customers, et cetera, and recognize that that means

there are going to be some people who can't afford

to come to us, even in our own community, right?

We have to make those decisions as business owners.

And one of the things that I think I would applaud them

for is they've also, when they open up their new

brick and mortar location, they opened up

in Madison Heights.

Madison Heights has substantially higher incomes

and still has the same kind of traffic that they would get.

And now Madison Heights is just a Detroit suburb,

so it's not like they've gone so far away

that it's forever away, but it's a strategic move

to go where the money's at for the audience

that they want to attract.

So I think you get to have both in that respect, right?

Like we get to continue to serve the people

that we built this company for, and we can take advantage

of an audience that has more disposable income

so that we can have a brick and mortar location

that's open year round and is open for one shift

on Saturdays and still lets our people

be well taken care of.

Right, and when he did open on Saturdays, he said,

"First of all, this is an experiment.

"If it doesn't work out, we're gonna stop.

"And secondly, I'm still gonna give people two days off.

"Consecutively, it just won't be Saturday, right?

"It'll be some other day of the week."

Which I think is A, staying in integrity,

but B, really smart to communicate clearly

about your principles.

He has all these videos about,

"My people don't work on weekends.

"My people get two days off like everybody else

"'cause that's what we need to be okay."

And then we come in and we're happy to be there.

So if you've made such a stand on a principle

and then you decide to change your choices

around that principle, it's important to A,

maintain those principles, and B,

explain to people what you're doing.

Yeah, because business doesn't exist in a vacuum

and we don't exist in a vacuum, right?

Like when the pandemic hit, lots of choices were made.

Lots of decisions were had to decide what we're gonna do

and what we're not gonna do and what we're gonna keep

and what we're gonna cut.

And how are we gonna, especially in food service,

how are we going to continue to be able to do anything

when people can't come into our space?

You know, that would be easy to say food trucks had it

easier because they didn't have some of those things,

but that's not necessarily true either.

What is true is that being in those environments

where you have to make those kinds of decisions

and knowing that things are gonna change

because we're not in a vacuum,

that's when you're really put to the test

as a business owner.

That's when you're really put to the test.

Well, you said that this is what you value.

How are you gonna walk that talk?

And now that circumstances in the world have changed,

how has that changed your perspective

on that talk you wanted to walk?

Because maybe it's the same and maybe it's not.

Maybe it's, hey, I really wanted to be able to give people

two days off in a row and we're not getting the employees

to make that possible.

We don't have the demand for people to work,

so I have to call somebody in.

Now, the nice thing is when you've got a company that has,

and we're gonna talk about another company later this year

who has, I don't know, 14,000 people on the wait list

who wanna work for them, right?

When you have that kind of spaciousness around the people

who are coming in, this isn't a question of,

do I give them two days off on a Saturday or not?

It's, who am I gonna put in the right spot?

When you don't have that volume of people waiting

and chomping at the bit to be in your space,

you do have to make more strategic decisions.

You do have to make trade off sometimes.

You do have to think differently about what you said

you wanted versus what the reality of having

is going to look like.

And sometimes it's just about finding the people

who want what you can offer.

Because a lot of people are like, well,

I don't wanna be open nights and weekends

because who wants to work nights and weekends.

In fact, there are a bunch of people

who would rather just work nights or just work weekends.

A lot of times the biggest need,

so I'm working on a new book about best business practices

and one of the things that I keep thinking,

like I keep being like, I need to write that down.

I already wrote it down.

Is that you just, you need to make sure

that you're thinking broadly about what people want

because just because you don't want it

doesn't mean that there isn't someone

whose natural wake up time is 10 o'clock or noon

and who would love to work a night shift,

a second or third shift shift,

if they could get consistent work hours.

If they knew that they were on night shift five days a week

like everybody else just late,

they would be happy as a little clam at high tide.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Finding the right people,

putting the right people in the right roles,

that makes a huge difference.

And it feels to me from what we've seen

that Mike and Amman have really done a good job

of putting the right people in the right roles

because they have that longevity of their employees.

And that also gives them

because they've got that stability,

the opportunity to experiment in ways of,

okay, we're gonna try being open on Saturdays

for one shift, 11 to six, who wants to do that?

Let's see how that goes.

No promises that this is forever,

but if it sticks, it sticks

and we'll work it out on the other end

and see if there's another set of days

that you can have off.

Or maybe you have some kind of other thing in your life

and it's actually convenient for you

to have discontinuous days off.

Right.

Sometimes the right person falls into the right spot

and it's the right thing for their life at that moment.

The key is not forcing people to work shifts

that don't work for them.

Yeah, and I think that's the banner

that you could slap on just about anything.

The key is to just not force people.

Yes.

Like let's not force people to show up

in all these different ways

and do all these different things

and have to tow a line that they were never designed

to tow in the first place.

Right.

And when we can look at,

oh, this is how I'm wired

and so this is what works for me.

That's great when you're a solopreneur

or a very micro business owner,

but when you start bringing other people

into the organization, you have to blow that lens up.

Yes, this is what works for me.

We're not gonna totally disregard that.

And what works for the staff?

What works for the customers?

What works, where is the Venn diagram

where the most people can be the happiest?

How close can we get this to a circle?

Right, right, exactly.

And like let's keep moving in that direction.

And I think this is a great example of an organization

that is trying to do that in all of,

many of the right ways.

Right, right.

And like you said, there's no 100% perfect company.

Like we're just, there's no way to hit all of the marks,

but we can work really hard

and make it a really high priority.

And I think we should be.

I think that we're in this moment right now

where we move from move fast and break things

to move fast and break people.

And that has become,

just saying that I'm just like,

oh, oh, you're not wrong.

Oh, God, in my soul, yeah.

And that's painful and it causes moral injury

to everybody involved in the system,

including the consumers who are kind of only half

willingly being, yes, we're buying the stuff,

but maybe you just really need

to buy groceries from someone.

And so we can't just extract ourselves from everything.

And yet we know that the systems that we're participating

in are increasingly immoral and increasingly inhumane.

And so when you wanna make a standout company,

especially when you're starting out,

you wanna build a standout company,

one of the best things you can do in this market

is exactly what Mike and Amad have done

and build a standout example of a company

that treats its people like people.

And when I say it's people, I mean, it's audience,

it's social media audience,

like the greater group of people that affiliate themselves

and the customers and the staff and the founders,

like everybody, let's treat everybody like people.

Well, in the community,

one of the things that really struck me

was how involved in Detroit Metro Civics they are, right?

Not just in, well, we're gonna bring the food truck

and we're gonna serve food,

but there are plenty of articles and posts of Amad

being in the community as a community leader,

cutting a ribbon somewhere

or talking about this project here

and having his fingers in the pies

that are shaping the community that is Detroit,

not just, hey, we own a sandwich shop, come check us out.

Right, and then I'm gonna commute to my house,

like maybe he does live outside of Detroit, I don't know,

but he doesn't feel like he's disinterested

or disconnected from Detroit.

Right, exactly, exactly.

Yeah.

One more thing I just wanna,

two more things I wanna highlight before we finish up.

One is that they really have this ethos of generosity

that I appreciate, like not just pay your people well,

not just make sure your people are eating on shift

and therefore are familiar with your menu,

which is another side bonus

of having people eat the food on the menu.

Because otherwise, if it's too expensive,

they'll just bring food from home

and they won't even know what stuff tastes like.

But also, on his social media site,

he spends a bunch of time explaining recipes.

He runs a restaurant.

Do you know how rare it is for restaurants

to share the recipes that are actually making them famous?

But he's aware that he has a much larger audience

than the people that can actually come

to his restaurant in Detroit.

And I think his belief is that if you see

how good the food is and you see how he makes it,

you'll want to come.

Next time I'm in Detroit, well, I try to go,

yes, I will.

I don't know when the next time I'll be in Detroit will be.

But I used to fly through Detroit all the time.

And before that, I was living in Canada

and commuting back and forth through Detroit.

If I had run across them at a different time in my life,

they might have become my border crossing stop.

So this generosity, and then

he's giving away business strategy.

Now, does it let him be a little opinionated

and create maybe a little friction, a little controversy

and stand up for himself?

The other thing I wanted to mention

is that nobody is confused about what he believes.

It's that Hamilton line, if you stand for nothing,

what'll you fall for?

He stands for things.

He stands on what he believes,

and he says it out loud with his whole chest on the internet.

And if you don't like it, don't shop here.

But this ethos of not being stingy,

of giving away the business advice

that has made his business strong,

and also the recipes that have made his business strong

and allowing people to get a taste

and see how complicated it is.

But he's like, no, this is easy.

You can do it at home.

Here's how you do it.

Like that welcoming, come on in, sit down feeling

makes people feel welcome.

And that's good for business.

Yeah, and I think that's also a really great way

to give back, I don't wanna say vicariously,

but that's the word that's coming to mind right now,

give back vicariously to the community

that can't afford to buy from him right now, right?

Hey, if you're in the area and you love our food

and you can't, like here's the recipe,

you can make it at home, right?

Like that is, and this is something that I talk about a lot

is like when you have a financial accessibility policy,

right, especially when you are a smaller organization,

you're not gonna be able to serve everybody,

you're just not, right?

And there are going to be people who traditionally

can't afford you and you may still wanna work with them.

And what are the ways that you can bake

into your business model that allow you to do that, right?

For me, for many years, I had a straight cat fund

and it was like, all right, I have full pay clients

and then I have some clients that I work with pro bono

that are subsidized by the revenue that I get

from those other people.

And I would be able to take in a couple of straight cats

and tend to their needs for a little while

and then send them on their way, right?

And that for me was what I could do

to be financially accessible with the constraints

that I had around my life and my financial needs

and still wanting to be of service.

And so I think there's always an opportunity for us,

if we're willing to look for it,

to say, how do we be of greater service

in the things that we're already doing, right?

That allow us to leave the world a little better off

than it was when we found it.

Right, and often it's just having,

so the extreme of that is here to coffee,

here in PDX where when the SNAP benefits got cut,

they started a SNAP meal program.

So if you walk in and you say, I need a SNAP meal,

there's a standard meal, it's not fancy, but it's food

and you can just have it for the asking.

And they post on their Facebook feed every day,

like, this is how many people didn't go hungry today

because they came in and got a SNAP meal.

And so that's kind of the extreme of that

is having something that's free that people can access.

Some of us do it by having YouTube material

that people can just access.

Some of us do it by having podcasts

or by having pamphlets or free downloads.

And then the next notch up is in the business coaching world

is having a book or a PDF that's like 25 bucks.

Okay, you can't afford to coach with me, I get it.

There have been times in my life

where I certainly couldn't afford my own rates.

And, but I've written a lot of this stuff down.

So here's the $20 access point.

And then maybe you'll have a question

and you want to hire me for an hour.

And then the next step up is to have some kind

of sliding fee scale or a stray cap fund

or some combination of those things.

I think there are all these things that we can do.

And I haven't, I should have, I haven't combed

through their menu to see if there's like a couple

of low priced things, but that's what I would do.

If I were pricing out a lot of my community

is I would be like, here's the, here's a basic food

that you can come in and be treated

like every other customer and order

that's not as expensive as everything else.

I wouldn't point it out.

I would just stick it on the menu

along with everything else.

Sure, sure.

Well, and I think, so you said a couple of things there

that I think are important to acknowledge.

One, I think in, especially in the online world

where cynicism runs high, it's really easy to look

at all of the free content in the form of podcasts

and videos and those kinds of things and go,

well, it's just marketing.

And it is marketing to some degree, sure.

But it's also that level of support for those people

who would not otherwise be able to reach out to us.

So the invitation is there for us to remember

that not everything is a cash grab, even if it's free,

right?

Like there are people trying to do good work

in the world here and just give,

and the benefit on the other side is sometimes

it turns out to be good marketing too.

But then the other piece that you said

that I thought was really important

just flew out of my brain.

So it's gone, but it was important.

I don't remember what it was.

Well, it's in the recording, we'll find it.

We'll find it, yeah.

But I think one of the things about the freebies too

is that we tend to devalue certain kinds of free material

and then expect other kinds.

So for example, the number of crafts I have learned

just from watching YouTube videos,

like straight up the entire,

everything I know about sewing, I learned off of YouTube.

Almost everything, I learned how to thread a sewing machine

from the instruction book.

But like, and we kind of expect that crafters

will provide detailed tutorials and detailed information

about how to do their craft and that we can go to YouTube

and learn that for free, which you used to have to

at least buy a book, if not take a class

or find an apprenticeship.

And yet when somebody provides something similar

and say the business world, we're like, oh, well,

you know, it's just a cash grip.

No, it's free learning, it's free teaching.

You can take it or leave it, that's fine.

But it's here because somebody has something

they're so passionate about that they wanna share it.

There used to be a guy who unfortunately died of brain cancer

but his name, his handle on YouTube was the puppet nerd.

He was an elementary school teacher who made puppets

and I mean puppets, like Muppet level puppets

for all kinds of like professionally as a side gig.

But instead of just doing it, he taught it

and he had classes for kids because he was a teacher

and he loved working with kids.

And he had some classes for adults

but he had like the free stuff on YouTube

and you could download the pattern for his free kids

like fuzzy puppet like this for, I don't know, 10 bucks.

And then there was the next notch up

which was like a Skillshare class

or something you could pay for.

And then, you know, if you really wanted to,

at one point he was teaching workshops

that you could go attend.

But like the whole range was right there

because he loved it and he was like,

there was no arguing about the level of professionalism

he offered but also he was like, this is really simple.

Get yourself some fuzzy fabric.

You don't even need a sewing machine

because it doesn't even go through,

fuzzy fabric doesn't go through the sewing machine that well.

Just get yourself a needle and thread, some fuzzy fabric

and we're gonna make a puppet.

Yeah, oh, that's the other thing that I wanted to say.

It doesn't matter what of those options you choose.

Right.

Like the goal here is not to be like,

I'm gonna have a sliding scale with 55 different offers

at 35 different price points.

No, the invitation here is to look at the bigger picture

and remember that Venn diagram, what works for me,

what works for them, what works for us

and find the places that are a logical step

for you to step into and go,

oh, I could do a straight cat funder.

Oh, I could do a reduced price or a free meal

or I could do, like we could do this in our business.

It's not, I am a very firm believer

that if we want to change a system,

change only comes from inside this.

You have to be in the system in order to make the changes

that then radiate out into the world.

Now, if you're outside the system,

you can influence actors inside the system,

but the change happens from inside the system

or we have to burn it all down.

I'm not one to want to burn it all down.

I'm one of those people that you were talking about earlier

is like, I'm here, I'm kind of liking some of the things