Sean Feeney

I found the best way to make the biggest impact on some of these bigger challenges in the industry was when I was asking questions and I would get back, well, this is just the way it is.

And to me, I loved hearing that because to me, it was people stopped looking for better ideas.

I remember Missy saying, OK, we're going to be partners.

What do we do next?

We're going to start looking at spaces.

And when we decided to be partners, we already, in those four months of her saying no to me every single night, we wrote our partnership agreement.

We knew our roles.

We also agreed to finding the balance between art and commerce.

I was obsessed with 20% EBITDA, net income for a restaurant.

And the average profitability of restaurants at that time in New York City was 8%.

She thought I was crazy, but she did say like...

I want that.

That would be awesome.

In order to get that, it had to be a very strict financial formula.

You have two sales mechanisms in restaurants.

It's food and beverage.

And then you have a bunch of expenses.

Some are fixed.

Most are variable.

And I thought if we had a certain amount of sales, attributing each expense a percentage of sales so that you could back into a 20% net income at the end of the year, I thought that was the easiest way to do it, to keep it extremely simple.