How to run a Restaurant: Clueless Edition | Dr. Navneet Gill | TEDxPDEU

[Applause] that's a picture of me ever since i was a kid all i wanted to do was cook i grew up watching my mom turn simple fresh ingredients into delicious meals and i was blown away by the power a great meal had over people that's when i knew that i was passionate about food and i started dreaming about opening this cute little place of my own but then life happened and i went on to pursue dentistry i met my husband ankit and we instantly connected over a common love for food that's when i realized that

deep down my dream of opening this cute little place hadn't really died down so one fine day i just went and quit my safe job as a senior lecturer at a dental college and together we started our dream restaurant pretty soon word got out and people started flocking our place and we became one of the best restaurants of ahmedabad and here i am giving you guys a tedx on how to never stop chasing your dreams even if it means letting go of your safe job i don't know about you guys but most of the motivational

food talks that i have heard start like this you know with an inspiring mom or a grandmom who likes to cook and a childhood dream of a cafe how i wish that this was also the story that i was here to tell you today because honestly if this was my narrative my life would have been completely different and i would still have something that resembled a social life but it's not that's not even me i could never be this cool that's just some random kids picture that i found in our family photo album this is

me and my i hate cooking face that i still walk around with because i'm a terrible terrible cook like so bad that if you sent me to kitchen i would end up burning water like me my mother is also a horrible cook but that's because she was a single mom bringing up two kids on her own while also being an officer in the indian army so most of our meals so most of our meals were either reheated stuff or takeouts i guess the point that i'm trying to make here is that food was never an

important part of my life for me it was just something you needed to stay alive and that brings me to the first point that i want to highlight running a restaurant business is like running any other business you don't have to be a foodie or passionate about food or a great cook to run a restaurant what you do have to be however is 100 invested in it for better or for worse in sickness and in health and i know these are sounding like wedding vows but the fact is that you are going to be married

to your restaurant unpopular opinion but serving great food is just 40 of what you should be doing right in a restaurant there is so much more to it than what meets the eye my name is dr navid gill i'm a professor at college of dental sciences and research center remember that safe job that i told you that i'd quit yeah so i never did that and thank god because it saved me so it's been 10 glorious years of teaching dentistry and loving every minute of it i am also the co-founder of nene's kitchen and baked

by nines from a tiny 42 seater in 2014 to now being the proud owner of five restaurants and eight bakery outlets across gujarat it's been thank you it's been quite a journey was it tough uh very would be an understatement why then did i do it no inspiring story here just a girl madly in love with a boy who wanted to break away from his failing family business now after bollywood the second most glamorous thing which many people think they can easily pull off is opening a restaurant we were one of those many people and

we were told that the easiest way to go about it is to take a franchise because that's like buying stuff off ikea they will give you the nuts mold screws and the instruction manuals and all you will have to do is assemble and enjoy so i took a loan on the only thing that i had going for me at that moment which was my salary and we settled for this small unknown bombay based brand because that was the only brand that we could afford at that time and we were all set that's me on the

day of the opening tired but excited and expecting a huge waiting about to hit our restaurant any minute now because who wouldn't want to dine at this gorgeous gorgeous place that we had built with so much of love right and that is us the next day the day after the next week the next month and pretty much every month after that you see what had happened was that the franchise owner had stopped picking our calls and the staff that he had sent over for the opening had disappeared overnight and we realized that we had been

conned so here we were two clueless people with 42 tables and chairs some random kitchen equipment a cook and a waiter and absolutely no idea with what to do with them you know what's worse than having no experience having no money to even hire someone who has that experience you see every penny that we had we had blown it up in trying to set up the restaurant without keeping aside what we now know is called as the cash buffer that's the money you need to keep your restaurant running for the first six months when your

restaurant will not make any money like not even enough to pay your rent and salaries which means that you will have to keep on pumping more money in addition to what you've already invested and no one absolutely no one had told us this forget six months we didn't have enough to sustain us for the next six hours now we had started this journey in april 2004 by may we had got rid of this brand but instead of shutting shop we decided to do everything all over again and by september we were ready to launch our

own brand we called it nene's kitchen because nini is my mother-in-law and the only one in the family who had some idea about cooking now because we couldn't afford a trained chef nini sat down with a cook and she taught him how to make home style less spicy less oily not indian food and for that we were beyond grateful that's the day we put up the sign board of our brand and if you see carefully the boat just says ninis even though the name is nini's kitchen and that's because putting a board with just five

alphabets was way cheaper for us at that time than putting a board which had all the twelve alphabets of the word nemi's kitchen so you can imagine the state of our finances at that time to top it all nobody even knew that we existed because again no marketing budget so after my day job i would go door-to-door distributing pamphlets across all the corporate offices for a socially awkward person like me that activity was as enjoyable as having your soul sucked by lamenters in a harry potter movie but i had no choice i had to be

pushed out of my comfort zone because they were literally zero walk-ins like i remember there was this day when this lady accidentally stumbled inside the restaurant calmly looked around and then goes san diego yoga like right on my face and then walked out so nene my mother-in-law decided to take matters in her own hands and she would approach these unsuspecting couples sitting in the parking lot minding their own sweet business and you know she would be like bitter pretended to be guests in our own restaurant and we would sit on this table next to the

glass door so that if someone walked in the restaurant wouldn't look as dead as it really was but despite whatever we were doing things were not working out and there was this day when the total billing amount of the entire day was 156 rupees 156 for a restaurant with a 10 membered staff that amount was lesser than what my auto had charged me to drop me from my college to the restaurant that was also the day five of our 10 member team quit and i don't blame them because honestly nobody would want to be part

of a sinking ship so i was already the order taker and the manager but after these guys quit i also became the table cleaner the dishwasher and the toilet scrubber so when people my age were getting high on life and wonderlusting here i was getting high on finale heartbeat lysol and pitambri shining powder which by the way is an amazing product but we we were going through a footy kismoth phase and finances were like really really tight there was this one time we could not pay our electricity bill on time and they cut off a

power supply now that really hurt us because it was a weekend and we used to look forward to weekends because on weekends our neighboring restaurant would have this huge waiting and sometimes when people would get tired they'd be like and that is exactly what we wanted for people to just step inside once and us we knew that we would do everything in our power to make sure that it wasn't their last visit so when they cut off our electricity my only option was to do what nirupa roy used to do in every 80s movie ever

which was to sell off the only piece of jewelry i had which was a pair of gold earrings but at least we got our electricity back now by this time things were so bad that if we had a plan b we would have definitely quit and taken up knitting or pottery or whatever it is that you do to get over trauma but we didn't have a plan b not out of choice but because we were so broke so broke that even a reality check had bounced on us so for us not having a plan b

kind of work because sometimes when you don't have a plan b you tend to focus on finding solutions to make your plan a work no matter how entangled it may be so we started spending every waking minute in trying to build strategies to make a plan a work and the thing that kept us going was the fact that we truly genuinely believed in our food and we had decided but there was this another lady that we were also fighting internally with our staff you see we believed that even if we got one person that person

deserved to be served the freshest food they'd had with the service they were not likely to forget for a very long time but our kitchen guys would get visibly upset every time we threw away something that wasn't fresh and they'd be like and our service guys would look shocked every time we gave something complimentary to a guest and you know they would look at us with this expression of wow so we had to make them unlearn whatever they had learned at their previous workplaces and make them understand our beliefs and create our own culture gradually

they did start uh warming up to our ideas that is me minding my cute little cash counter and also looking like michael jackson in this picture while ankit was in the kitchen and i see this lady looking furious okay walking up to me and she started yelling at me now the strange thing was the louder she yelled the wider my smile grew and i couldn't believe what she was saying and i will quote her she said what kind of a cheela chalu restaurant is this that you guys don't have a waiting chair a waiting chair

that's when i looked up and i realized that for the first time in eight months since we had started we had had a full house and a furious lady yelling for a chair so she could wait outside for her turn to dine with us she ultimately walked out saying i'm so disappointed and i'm gonna let this know to the friend who recommended this place to me took me a while to let that sink in that there were people out there talking about us and recommending us to other people clearly we were doing something right you

see what was happening was that everyone who was dining at minis was acting as our own influencer influencing their friends and family to dine with us so this was a case of organic influencer marketing done right back in 2014 when there weren't even any influences around and we were too busy focusing on giving an impeccable experience to realize that people were choosing to listen to their friends and family over believing some massive billboards or front-page newspaper ads that other restaurant owners could afford and we could not that month for the first time i did not

have to wait for my college to pay my salary so i could in turn pay my restaurant staff we had achieved decorated break even back in 2014 when we started at the end of the first month a total of only 350 people had dined with us today we have more than 350 people working with us as a part of team nils [Applause] on an average 35 000 people dine with us every single month across our five outlets this journey from 350 to 35 000 was possible because of a lot of things but patience truly tops

that list because anything that's worth fighting for will never come in a shiny yellow dominant metayar packet like warren buffett says you cannot produce a baby in a month by making nine women pregnant so yeah it's gonna take its own sweet time that's a picture of me and ankit really it is me and ankit at the times food awards now the times food awards are a big deal okay because these are like the oscars of the food scenes and i remember being so star struck because sitting right across us were these legendary restaurant founders like

literally the restaurants and kid grew up eating at and we were so nervous we couldn't even hold each other's hands because our palms were like so sweaty so when they called out a name on the stage both of us turned into these two deers transfixed to the spot by some blinding headlights and there to literally push us so after the award people were like oh you've grown so much in such a short time congratulations so thanks to the award and the recognition there were people discovering us now and to them our story was like an

overnight success story and i cannot emphasize this enough that there is nothing called an overnight success story you have got to dress up show up and give your best every single day and we chose to do that we chose to deal with rent staff salaries accounts authorities licensing health official wastage food cost dirty diapers choke drains burst pipes cops otp purchase vendor payment and a zillion other things day after day year after year and it took us 8 years and 26 days to become an overnight success did we do it alone absolutely not nothing nothing

without a team in fact if we could we would give them all superhero capes but they would end up using that also as a barton wiping a duster because apparently you can never have enough kitchen dusters in a restaurant especially this guy vipin has been pestering me for kitchen duster since 2014 when he was a waiter at minis today he is the manager of our chantheda outlet he doesn't have any professional hotel management degree but we chose to train him to be the manager over hiring someone more qualified from the outside because we wanted our

team to grow with us and that's why all our current managers and chefs are people who joined us at junior post and were promoted over the years because these are our people so from holding their hands in vaccination cues to dancing in their weddings we've done it all together because these are the people who gave us the luxury of time to dream big and grow but when you're trying to grow you need to remember that you cannot make everyone happy and we learned it the hard way because initially when people would leave us bad reviews

we would wonder what we did wrong even though we knew that we had done everything right it was much later that we understood that not everyone is going to be happy high on you all the time as long as 90 percent of your guests are happy you are good because there's always going to be that 10 percent who would rather go for oreo pakade andrew of zamagi and gulab jamun paratha and what not so yeah that is us getting the times food awards for the next consecutive five years now just when you thought things were

nice and shiny and rosy and bright hit us now the logical thing would have been to lay low and let the storm pass but when your personality type is okay you go and open another brand in the middle of the pandemic so we opened our bakery division in the middle of the first wave and i'm not gonna lie there are days when we wonder kya rathi but then i remember that we are the la navi so we are gonna keep working on it day after day year after year till we make this venture also an

overnight success now this was supposed to be the original ending of this talk but is it even a ted talk if i don't end it with a profound life-changing motivational quote by a famous really really wise guy so here goes like michael scott says in the office you miss you miss 100 of the shots that you don't take so go ahead shoot your shot if you miss it try again because ultimately it is the courage to continue that's the real game changer here thank you so much [Applause]