We caught up with the brilliant and insightful David Bober a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi David , thanks for joining us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
At least for us, the seeds of the idea of opening a small, creative and locally sourced restaurant were planted in odd places; my mother was an art historian who was an amazing cook. She wrote about art history, culture and the intersection of these with cuisine. She taught me early on about local, responsible, no-corporate agriculture and sourcing of ingredients, as well as creative utilization of these. Many years later, living in lower Manhattan I developed friendships with a number of chefs and restaurant owners, viewing operations from the ‘back of house’ perspective. I was a contractor and often assisted these friends with necessary kitchen renovations and equipment repairs. By that time, I had my own love of creatively prepared and presented food. Meeting my future wife, Jessenia, who had an interesting culinary background from her Cuban and Chinese parents presented a horizon of possibilities in that regard. We began imagining what our idea of opening our own restaurant might look like. This process of visualization, so necessary to any creative endeavor, occupied us up until our move to Texas Hill Country in 2013. We stumbled on an old building in a wooded property that was for sale, nicer than what we had ever envisioned but sorely in need of extensive renovations. After a year of doing the work that I knew well, we opened Jobell Cafe & Bistro (with the help of a dear friend, a Brazilian chef from New York, Apollo Andrade). Those early days were full of challenges; menu design, staffing, developing an identity and presence in our small community and fine tuning our culinary concepts to meet the reality of actually running a business without compromising our principles. We’ve been at it for 8 years now, well seasoned by triumphs and failures alike. What has come from all of this, and I think this applies to other art forms as well, is that what ultimately emerges from such careful plans and hard work may sometimes look different from one’s original idea, and could never really be anticipated but in many ways is so much better.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
We founded Jobell Cafe & Bistro on simple concepts; namely respect for the ingredients we use and the guests that we will be offering our cuisine to, this tied to a passion for what we do that goes beyond just marketing and a business plan. We believe, especially with such a fundamental human construct as serving food to guests, that one must approach it with love and honesty. We named Jobell after our children (Josh and Bell) who were 6 and 3 when we opened and the restaurant. I designed and renovated the restaurant while my wife Jessenia and our lovely friend, Apollo Andrade, produced our first menus. My culinary ideas were incorporated (I ate a lot of wonderful test kitchen dishes!), but what we started was founded in this loving and hard working, creative effort between all of us. What we do, each and every day, is try to remain true to this spirit, in the care and respect for our team members, for our guests and for the food we bring to table. We believe in a world that champions individual human values above corporate constructs and try to reflect this without pretense or falsehood. What we actually do, and is what drew us to choose this as a career, is to provide a space, a context, for conviviality…the sharing of stories and special moments over good food and wine, the face to face exchanges that bind us as human beings. That is what Jobell is and what we are so proud of.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Micromanaging! Often owners who invest so much care and attention to detail in their businesses have trouble relinquishing control. At the start of Jobell both my wife and I had to monitor and participate in (or take over) tasks just to make sure they were done correctly, rather than taking the time to supervise and train properly. We did this in an attempt to ‘lead by doing’ in the hope that our team members would notice how these tasks should be performed and emulate our efforts. This approach has merit, but when overdone actually has a reverse effect, namely employees start expecting these things to be done by ownership and reduce their efforts in those regards. It is hard for passionate and hardworking owners to encounter something done incorrectly and not want to ‘fix it’ in the moment. What we’ve learned is establishing systems, communicating clearly, and lots of written instructions (lol) go a long way in having the team take ‘agency’ in the way that they look at the job holistically.
Sometimes you have to trust and let go.
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
Small restaurants with ambitions to ‘do it right’ are an ‘iffy’ business to begin with. Establishing a name and client base, riding the vagueries of demographics, taste trends, product and fixed cost price fluctuation, not to mention employee retention, all make for a roller coaster financially. We have been extremely blessed in many regards but there have been a number of moments where we were close to ‘pulling the plug’. Our first year and a half saw two major flood events here in Wimberely. We are in a rural community and well outside of the town ‘square’, a lovely wooded property but one easy to drive right by if you weren’t looking. We ran through the initial capital remaining after extensive renovations, and operations were increasingly week to week. We had a private investor who came to our rescue and 2 years later when the term of that loan was up a random sales call resulted in a ‘bank statement loan’ from a group of private investors (forget about loans from major institutions when you are self employed operating less than 5 years in this business). We struggled but always made payroll, sometimes living personally very close to the wire. Then, just as we ramped up significantly in our 5th year, COVID hit. This was the closest we had been to closing our doors for good. We were saved, amazingly, by the PPP and EIDL loan programs and the forgiveness clauses which we qualified for handily. Since then, we’ve been busier than ever but challenges keep coming, the current one being staffing. I guess the lesson is somewhat cliche but never give up. Keep believing in what you do and putting in the work to make it happen. Sometimes the universe will open doors if you do.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jobellcafe.com
- Instagram: jobellcafebistro
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JobellCafeBistro
Image Credits
Food – James Williams Jess and I (portrait) – Eileen Llorente Building and grounds – David Bober