We were lucky to catch up with Jenny Chen and Jeffrey Brown recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jenny and Jeffrey thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?

We’ve learned a lot along the way and continue to learn more each and every day about building a high performance team. But some key lessons have been:

– Invest the time in finding the right people. Being in the service industry means that it can feel painful to not fill an open position on our front of house team right away, but it’s more important to not hire because we “need” to fill that position now, rather hiring someone because they are the right fit. It’s also important to invite folks to leave who don’t end up being a good fit, even if that means we’ll be short staffed in the short term.

– Set the bar high and people will rise to the occasion. Provide encouragement, tools, support and feedback to help get them there, but we’re capable of much more than we think we are.

– We’ve been able to structure our business to hire for the values that someone brings to the table and not necessarily the experience. You don’t need to have a culinary degree to work on our croissant production team, in fact, the woman who leads our croissant department never made a croissant before she started here at IZOLA. This allows us to build a team around people who are hard working, passionate about their work, compassionate about those around them, curious, etc.

– As part of our justice-based mission, we hire folks who may be overcoming addiction, are unhoused, formerly incarcerated, or have faced any number of significant challenges in life. 17% of our team and 10% of our leadership team is part of this restorative justice segment.

Jenny, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We launched IZOLA in June 2020. We didn’t have a background in the service industry or in baking professionally, it was just in response to what we were all facing at that time – Covid. It was a lonely, scary time and we just wanted to reconnect with our community. So Jeffrey started baking and we’d lower our croissants and sourdough out our 3rd story window in a picnic basket, down to folks on the street (since we were all isolating at that time). And to see the joy that bread and butter brought in such a difficult time – that’s why we are still doing what we’re doing today.

IZOLA is all about 3 things:
– Hot from the oven: If you come in and order a croissant, you’ll get one that is hot from the oven, not one that has been sitting on the counter for hours. It’s how we serve our loved ones when they come for dinner, so it only made sense to us that we’d serve our guests with hot croissants and sourdough.
– Hospitality: IZOLA is named after Jeffrey’s grandmother Izola. She was the type of woman where anyone could show up on her doorstep and she’d welcome them in with open arms, sit you down in the kitchen with a homemade cherry pie and a cup of hot coffee, and compliment it with great conversation. At IZOLA, no matter who you are, what you look like, who you love, you’re welcome here.
– Justice-based mission: We make our business decisions around how it impacts the guest experience, as well as how it serves our justice-based mission. What that means is what impact does it have on environmental justice, economic justice, racial justice, LGBTQIA+ justice and gender justice. For example, currently 70% of our leadership team identify as women, 40% BIPOC, 20% LGBTQIA+, and 10% Restorative Justice Re-Entry (formerly incarcerated).

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Our business was shut down in October 2023. We had outgrown our existing food service license and had been working with the County to meet the requirements for our new permit, so the closure was unexpected and in the course of 24 hours we had a healthy, beloved business with about 30 employees, then the next day we had to layoff our team. We had reached an inflection point and had a choice on how to handle such a difficult time. We decided to utilize the time during our closure to strengthen our business – from a human capital standpoint, to testing new flavors and developing 27 new recipes, to securing and moving to new location that is actually quite wonderful.

It was a difficult time, a long haul (8 months!) and there were many days we wouldn’t reopen.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

We identified early on that building a social media presence and collecting the contact information of our guests would be very valuable for engagement. It has allowed us to keep our community engaged and connected even while we were closed for 8 months, and so when we reopened we reopened to even stronger sales than before.

In terms of how we’ve built our presence, it’s simply been a reflection of who we truly are – we’re transparent and open with our community, we speak to them honestly – from telling folks we’re raising our prices again and why, to showing them how we make our croissants. We take the time to capture engaging, beautiful content and in fact our team very much contributes to this as well. We are consistent with engaging our community – even during our closure we would send weekly updates.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.izolabakery.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/izolabakery/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/izolabakery/
• Yelp: https://www.facebook.com/izolabakery/

Image Credits

IZOLA Bakery