Friday Fails: Hiran Patel Explores Failure As his Fast Food Restaurant Grows too Fast
Dusty Weis:
Greetings innovators, and welcome to Back of the Napkin, where we explore big journeys in the world of small business with the personalities who make it happen, and welcome back to another one of these bonus segments that we like to call Friday Fails. I'm Dusty Weis, along with Stephanie Davis. And Steph, I think when most people think about failure, they consider a business closing or a deal that didn't work out, a moment where they lost something in a way.
Stephanie Davis:
That's right Dusty. And those are experiences that can provide valuable lessons, which is why we're doing these segments. Well, one type of failure that doesn't always spring to mind is the kind of failure that happens as a result of too much success too early in the process.
Dusty Weis:
When we talked to Hiran Patel, the owner of Naansense Indian Cuisine in Chicago, that's exactly the sort of failure that knocked his business into crisis mode really early on in his journey as a restauranteur and food brand.
Hiran Patel:
Yeah one of the failures, well it was a failure at the time which I think we recovered from, was growing too fast. When we first started Naansense back in 2013, we were blessed with having hundreds of customers come through our doors every day. And those are all good things to see as a business owner, you're just thinking, "Wow, we just served 300 customers during a two hour lunch and we're doing this day in and day out." So we were thinking a lot of the thoughts that we had before we started the business is involved we're going to get 200 locations in no problem, no time. A year goes down the road and my partner was going to another section of the loop of Chicago, and just canvassing other businesses, and looking at other things that are going on, concepts and other food businesses, and he saw a FOR RENT sign of a restaurant space and he called the individual, it's available. He had really low terms for the space and we're like, "Let's do it, we're ready for this, this is going to be fantastic. Already at two stores within a year, wow we're growing."
Hiran Patel:
Until we opened the store, we started selling more food and seeing customers, where we realized, our food's not that consistent no more. When you grow so fast, one of the things that we realized is consistency issues of food and flavor profiles so this was something that went down three, four months of problem solving, and it costs us a little bit of money to fix. We ended up finding a commissary kitchen out in Pilsen that we use to make all of the base flavor profiles, and then we were sending them to the two stores in the city to fix that problem that we faced.
Hiran Patel:
Because mind you, when we were close to making four to five tons, no we were using two to three tons of sauce a month, so that's roughly around 6,000 pounds of sauce a month, and not having any manufacturing skills or not having any mass production skills really effected our business the first three months when we had the first two stores open off the bat. So, that was probably one of our biggest failures is growing too fast, when sometimes things are working really well, you got to just let them work for a while to making sure that things are well-oiled before you take the next steps of growing multiple locations.
Dusty Weis:
How did you find out that the food consistency was not there? Was that something that you heard from a customer? Or did you actually bite into a bowl of one of your favorite dishes and it just wasn't what you were expecting?
Hiran Patel:
It was both, it was us and customers. We noticed this off the bat, and we were doing small steps in the restaurant to mitigate some of the problems as we were making large batches of sauce as we had portioned them off into smaller portions, we would reduce the sauce more to get them to the consistency wanted more so, but it just became one of those things that when we realized how important it was to making sure our flavors were consistent, is when we took a major pause in the business, we waited several years to even think about doing a third store until we address some of these problems.
Hiran Patel:
And I think these are some of the problems why we haven't really seen any national Indian brands out there, because Indian food is very hard to do consistently, it's really spice driven, there's a lot of spices that go into the food and one cook from another, depending on how they use that flame could really alter the flavor profile of the sauce. So that's what I've been working on the past four or five years is working with the teams around that we had and resources that we've had and fix some of these problems and address some of the situations before we even start to really think about going into four or five, six, seven, eight, nine units.
Hiran Patel:
But I'm glad to say that we are in a position now of fixing this supply chain consistency issue that with the right funding, if we wanted to open a hundred Naansense's next year, I wouldn't be scared to do it.
Dusty Weis:
That's really wild to hear. Now that you have that sort of manufacturing process in place, how scalable is it? How easy is it for you to dial up the production and what goes into that? Is it just a matter of finding the inputs that you need and throwing money at it? Or is it more complex than that?
Hiran Patel:
It's just a little bit of both, obviously it's going to take a little bit of money to do certain things, and there's also just following all the regulations and laws out there. And someone's put work behind making sure that we food service providers have to follow a certain protocol to making sure our guests and customers have safe food, so making sure that we follow all the rules and also sticking to some of our own ethos, and making sure that we want to make sure we offer clean and healthy and foods that come with a clean label.
Hiran Patel:
It's not as easy to just dial up and dial down, and add new things because everything that you really do when it comes from a scalable mindset is, it has to go through FDA regulations and testing and every change costs money. I want to say work with people that can really guide you to the finish line, because these are certain things that I wasn't familiar with, but now it's one of those things that you have to reach out to people, because we don't know everything, and having the right team around you, who can really help you find the finish line opposed to finishing out your bank account.
Dusty Weis:
How did it feel in the moment when you realized that the consistency wasn't there? Was that hard to accept for you?
Hiran Patel:
Yeah, it was really hard to accept because once you're in business, you can't turn off the clock unless you get into a pandemic situation, the business doesn't stop, time doesn't stop. And just knowing that we had the flavors that we wanted to give customers, there's just wasn't the overall quality wanting to give, it hurt, it just wasn't a good feeling, and it was one of those things that we knew that we were going to solve one way or another.
Hiran Patel:
So we were working frantically and working with the right people around us to make it happen, and one thing led to us was we had to put money towards a separate kitchen that we hired and leased out for us to making sure that these flavor profiles were consistent because that's one of the things that we're really, I think, affect any business, whether you're going to get a hair cut at a Great Clips for example, or going to a Naansense for a Curry bowl, is that if you have that one bad experience, you're really not going to go back or give people a second shot because there's so many other providers out there that can give you that service again.
Stephanie Davis:
So did you see any financial impacts from this consistency? You mentioned having to get a new kitchen space or did sales decline? Were there any impacts like that?
Hiran Patel:
Funny enough, we did see some financial impacts because we had to now go and seek out some additional space to run the business that was a whole new expense that wasn't part of the plan before. So we did have to adjust for that. But to be honest, outside of our regular customers that were coming to Naansense once or twice a week, they noticed it right away, but many of the people didn't notice it and business was still going up, we were still seeing the same amount of customers, and I'm not sure how I can say this, but I think one of the reasons why the consistency wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be in terms of maybe customers not coming back, was also because of the fact that it was really, it was a foreign cuisine to many people, and a lot of people didn't really know what a Vindaloo was supposed to taste like. This is how a Tikka sauce tastes like or a Kormo sauce.
Hiran Patel:
I knew this in my heart, and some of our regulars, or some of our people that was really familiar with Indian food knew those issues that we were facing, but for 95% of our customers, they would have never have noticed, because it was such a foreign or new cuisine that they've just experienced, if that makes sense. But we knew inside that we couldn't allow that, we knew that we have a gold standard that we have to abide by, and we have to at least achieve that before we even think about going to the next, or future growth of Naansense.
Dusty Weis:
Well in that way it sounds like it at least saved you a little bit of grief and maybe it was a little bit easier to recover than it would have been if it would've been a more familiar cuisine, but it's a relief to hear that that worked out all right for you. Well, Hiran Patel, the owner of Naansense, Indian cuisine, three locations now, at least very soon in the Chicago area. Thank you so much for revisiting this Friday Fail with us and allowing our listeners to learn a little bit from your hard earned lessons.
Hiran Patel:
Definitely. Don't grow too fast, embrace the success in the beginning and just take it easy.
Stephanie Davis:
I've got to say Dusty, I never thought we would be hearing from an entrepreneur whose biggest failure was rooting too much success, too early.
Dusty Weis:
Steph, certainly as an entrepreneur, I can say there are times that I wish I had those kind of problems, but I think as Hiran showed us, growing too fast poses just as much of an existential threat to a business as growing too slowly. If you want to hear the full story of how Hiran came up in the cuisine scene and started his own restaurant, check out the full episode in the podcast feed and make sure that you check in with us again soon, we'll have more full episodes and more Friday Fails coming out on a regular basis.
Stephanie Davis:
Please make sure that you're subscribed in your favorite podcast app, and if you enjoyed the show, leave us a five-star rating or even a review. We would love to hear from you about any ideas you have for small business owners who we should be featuring on the show.
Dusty Weis:
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Stephanie Davis:
You're on Back of the Napkin, our co-producers are Carey Straetz and Dave Pappa. In addition to co-hosting, I'm the executive producer and our production partners, our Podcamp Media.
Dusty Weis:
Where we provide branded podcast production services for businesses, our editor and producer is Larry Kilgore III. So thanks for tuning in to Back of the Napkin, I'm Dusty Weis.
Stephanie Davis:
And I'm Stephanie Davis.
