We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Marina Lang a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Marina thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How do you feel about asking friends and family to support your business? What’s appropriate, what’s not? Where do you draw the line?

Starting a new business is tough. When anyone decides to start a new business, they often don’t fully anticipate the challenges that come with it. Sometimes inevitable emergencies happen and a new business isn’t prepared for that. We faced one such hurdle as we were 3 months in to opening our business and had to be shut down due to circumstances external to our business. That was a time when we needed our friends and family the most. Sometimes people feel shame or are uncertain about how their friends of family would react to help in a situation like that. We learned with our experience that friends and family are often the most biggest support system and mechanism to help us get through these hurdles and build us and support our business moving forward. They may even have several creative ideas how to improve our business. Never be afraid to ask for support.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am the owner of a Indian/ Indian fusion restaurant called No Worries Curry. I also have a independent production company which produces music videos, shorts and ads- MMM Productions & Talent.

How I got in to both of these was actually the same source. Prior to these two ventures I used to be a soap actor/ reality tv personality. I worked in media for 10 years. Then one day a director spotted my mom cooking (she is a former restaurant owner and chef). He saw my mothers and my friendship, as well as her experience and my lack of experience with food and suggested we make a cooking show. Next thing we knew we were in a cooking show, cast and were part of the production process. The show became fairly popular. We did a lot of workshops and classes. A lot of our customers suggested that we should open our own restaurant. We worked on the idea for 3-4 years and finally opened.

In the mean time I started producing right after the show. I started off with music videos, producing several of them. Then found myself producing a few short films. There was one very special short film I produced named Invisible Flags, which won 24 awards and was something I was extremely proud of.

My major support in everything and partner in both my businesses is my mother. Without her and our team work. None of this would be possible. I think that’s our unique angle. Having created two businesses based on our vision, drive and teamwork is our biggest asset.

In terms of a unique product for both. Our restaurant serves Indo- Chinese, Indo- Mexican/Italian fusion, vegan, amongst regular Indian food. Our food is pretty popular as our food caters to different audiences.

Our production company is unique in that we work with all budgets and production sizes. We’ve been able to pull off high quality projects with the smallest of budgets. It’s our drive and love for the arts that has often made difficult projects possible.

I think the biggest thing we’ve learned our entire journey is no matter what obstacles and challenges come with running a business, if you have faith, passion, love, patience and determination, you will see results.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

Our clients/ customers mean the world to us. Since we are a mother-daughter business, we like to bring an essence of warmth and family to everything we do. We encourage our customers to join us on social media and offer incentives wherever we can by providing discounts or samples of new dishes. We try to provide a warm and personal touch to each and every one of our customers, which we believe brings our customers back. A warm and great experience served with great food goes a long way.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

Word of mouth has been a major source of business for us. Whether it’s for production or food.

Whilst external marketing like online promotions and google searches have helped us create a presence, word of mouth adds a certain legitimacy to a business. For example, we often come up with interesting dishes on our menus at our restaurant, if somebody endorses it to their friends, it brings a lot more people.

The same applies for our production company, a lot of our clients have seen us power through the projects they’ve given us and when their friends are in need of these services, a recommendation goes a long way.

We also believe in today’s world online marketing regardless of the business you have is key. The bigger the online presence of the business the more legitimate it appears in the eyes of a potential customer. The minute we look for any service or product, we log on to Google and look it up, so why not use that as a key tool for appealing to new clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: noworriescurry.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imarinalang
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@noworriescurry
• Yelp: https://m.yelp.com/biz/no-worries-curry-los-angeles