We recently connected with Jarrett Stieber and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Jarrett thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What do you think it takes to be successful?
One of the most important aspects of being successful is to trust your gut instincts. Stay true to yourself. What makes you a good person will make you a good business person, so long as you don’t stray away from your morals and principals. Find a way to take what you think are your redemptive qualities as a human being and build a business that reflects that, a place that treats it’s customers and employees with the respect and consideration you treat those in your personal life with. Life’s too short to be an asshole.
Jarrett, 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?
I started cooking professionally when I was fifteen years old and never looked back. After working through high school, I went to culinary school and pursued a full time career in the restaurant industry. My whole life has been dedicated to this profession, to learning my trade and honing in the craft to be the best possible cook I can be. Over the years, my focus shifted to learning the hospitality side, too, as well as wine and beverage. And of course since starting a pop up restaurant, Eat Me Speak Me, which led to opening my brick and mortar, Little Bear, I’ve gone through a crash course in business and management. At this point, I not only run and manage the kitchen at Little Bear, from ordering and menu development to scheduling and prep and everything in between, I also manage the front of house, handle most of our correspondence, run the restaurant’s social media, do the book keeping, order the wine, etc etc. In order to successfully run a small business, and in my case, a very small restaurant (30 seats), you have to wear all of the hats. Every day, it’s about rolling up your sleeves, putting on your work boots and getting shit done.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Well, we opened on February 26th of 2020, so…. definitely a big pivot point there! We had two weeks of dinner service before the state of emergency was declared due to COVID, then one more week of being open since none of us knew what that meant, before immediately pivoting to takeout only starting during our fourth week of operation. Never intended to do takeout at all, let alone ONLY takeout, so that was a big adjustment. After opening with $286 in the bank before night one, I had to decide if spending the few thousand dollars we’d made after our few weeks on takeout supplies was a good risk to take, but I know that if we stood a chance of selling enough takeout to be successful, we needed to have the goods to be able to do so. Turned out it was the right call and we thankfully were able. to find decent success as a takeout only restaurant for a few months, largely from changing the genre of the menu every single week to a new country’s cuisine. Kept people coming back every week to try the new type of food we were cooking. I think it also helped that we made sure to menu plan dishes that were not only good, but good to go more importantly, and people appreciated the quality and care that went into packing up takeout. After 15 months of to go only business, we finally reopened our dining room in May of 2021 once our whole staff was vaccinated and thankfully have been stable and busy ever since!
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Funding a restaurant is a nightmare. They are extremely expensive to build out and open, and extremely high risk from an investor’s standpoint, making money hard to come by. Honestly, most restaurants fail because the majority of people who open them have no business doing so; if you have enough money to open a restaurant, you mostly likely have not been working in restaurants your whole life! Traditional banks won’t finances non franchise restaurants. The SBA will fund a restaurant but you need at least 10-20% of fluid cash to put down in order to procure a loan, which isn’t reasonable for most people, and the SBA has to be the primary lender so if you have other investors who already signed promissory agreements, they won’t fund you. Another issue with the SBA is that they won’t give you a loan unless you already have a lease in place so you have to sign an enormous commercial lease without even being guaranteed a loan, just in hopes you qualify for said long. It’s a huge risk! As for private investors, they want enormous percentages of equity in your business to provide funding, yet do basically nothing to help your day to day operations, so that’s a major issue. I don’t want to part with 10, 20, 30, 50% of ownership in my business, maybe even more, just to get start up capital. It totally handcuffs your ability to grown down the road. For Little Bear, it took me about six years of trying to fund raise before I finally found two private investors who each agreed to do a basic loan deal without equity in the restaurant. The longer I take to pay them back, the more interest they ear, so it benefits them. If I pay them back sooner, I spend less on interest so it incentivizes me to pay them back quickly. Win win!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.littlebearatl.com
- Instagram: @littlebearatl
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/littlebearatl
- Twitter: @littlebearatl
- Yelp: www.yelp.com/littlebearatl
Image Credits
Headshot credit: Kate Blohm Food Photo credit: Ginger & Carrot Productions