We recently connected with Corinne Ryan and have shared our conversation below.

Corinne, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

There are two things that we do differently compared to others. Firstly, we are obsessed with traditional business etiquette, which is slowly dwindling away in our industry. We prioritize customer service over the phone, addressing by last name, using formal email structure and strict grooming and uniform standards. We add warmth to the highest level of traditional service standards that is welcoming, so that all of our guests feel at home.

Secondly, however, we take a very different non-traditional approach to our training. Our ‘Points Advancement Program’ was developed to encourage continuous growth of our team, reward true top performers and encourage longevity. Our culture is high performance – we reward those with a thirst of knowledge, which ultimately builds confidence and really transforms the experience for our guests.

Corinne, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

With Naples being a very small, yet affluent town, culinary and service excellence on the level that my husband and I are so passionate about is very difficult. With a strong business background in the meat and seafood business combined with my husbands knowledge of service from spending nine years at the Ritz Carlton Naples Beach, we decided to create a place where we would want to bring special friends, family and business partners from out of town. A place with integrity surrounding the ingredients. In the beginning, many locals thought that a restaurant of this caliber and price in Naples would never survive. However, we like to say that excellence is not expensive, it is costly. We have developed such a loyal following from our regular guests who truly value quality ingredients, traditional service and overall, an appreciation for the finer things in life that give them a reason to dress up!

It was always our plan to build a luxury restaurant empire and Butcher Private is our second concept, further elevating service and product excellence in a private business club. We are now embarking on two new concepts Omasava, a Japanese Omakase Restaurant and Sava, an elegant farm to table concept with a focus on healthy ingredients.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Opening Sails Restaurant was the first challenge. The buildout of the restaurant doubled our budget and with the lease already signed, we had no choice but to continue. We sold all of our property and cars, putting absolutely everything we had into our first restaurant. With no extra reserves and constant failing inspections that delayed the opening, we really wondered how we were going to continue to pay the opening team to stand around waiting to open. I remember crying at the local city council and fire department, begging them to help us open the doors.

I use to think that I worked hard in my career prior to being a restauranteur, always being extremely dedicated to my work. The truth is, I did not have any idea what hard work was until we embarked on the journey of being restauranteurs. To achieve what we have today, it has taken seven days a week, 14-16 hours every single day for seven years, constantly improving little by little every single day. However, the hard work was the easy and fun part for two very driven individuals with big dreams and aspirations. The biggest challenges after opening was summer. Naples is a very seasonal town and we were lucky to survive as we didn’t understand that summers would be quite as challenging as they were. Opening a luxury restaurant in the middle of season in a town with severe employment challenges due to a high percentage of our customers leaving the area during the summer definitely created a challenge. Yet with every challenge there is an opportunity – it led us to starting an international visa program and creating a culture of perfection, excellence and positivity in an industry that often struggles in that area.

Then, we were hit with COVID. We had the police walk in and ask for all guests to pack their food to-go and leave the restaurant – it was a horrifying experience. We didn’t know how long we would be closed for or if restaurants would ever be re-opened. We decided not to close the doors and our number one goal was to keep our team busy and employed as we knew without our team that we had worked so hard to build there would be no chance of re-opening! Everyday, seven days a week we continued, making between 100-500 hot meals for the local hospital to support our community and keep our team busy. The day that restaurants re-opened six-weeks later, we were the first restaurant to open our doors with a team so excited to welcome guests back to the dining room.

Today, almost all of our international recruiting comes through employee referrals, however in the beginning, we naively trusted to hire from many different countries. We endured horror stories of sabotage to the business with setbacks to all of our hard work that would frighten the toughest of entrepreneurs, but today, we are focused on the future and are so proud of our hardworking team.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

My husband and I met through our previous industries. A customer of mine in South Korea was looking to import a very specific car from the United States for one of her best clients and was very persistent for me to help her. As this was not in my realm of importing and exporting proteins all over the world, a friend of a friend recommended that Veljko would be a great person to assist me with this. Veljko, always an entrepreneur at heart, had a small business on the side of his hospitality career to import and export cars.

We never ended up doing any business with cars, however connected through our mutual strong passion for business. Within a year of knowing each other, we started to conceptualize Sails Restaurant together. Opening the restaurant was an extreme level of stress to go through as a newly engaged couple and there were definitely many days that if we were not fully invested with everything that we had, we would not make it together. We both have very strong personalities and finding the highest level of trust and respect for each other that was needed to take the business to the next level was challenging. All wedding plans went away as there was not even time to think about this for five years.

Today, I can honestly say that all my dreams have come true in a business partner and husband. After all of the enormous stress and challenges that we have been through, to know that we built this together and overcame everything that was thrown at us has created an incredible bond. We both know each other so well and have completely different strengths that we now focus on separate areas of the business. Any spare time we have, we truly enjoy discussing the future of the business and improvements while taking a stroll on the beach or short walks to check new commercial real-estate offerings.

Contact Info:

• Website: sailsrestaurants.com butcherprivate.com savanaples.com omasava.com
• Instagram: @sailsnaples @omasavanaples @sava.naples
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sailsrestaurants
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corinne-ryan-29784478/

Image Credits

n/a