Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in food and beverage but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Jeff Hancock, owner, and CEO of Kuai Asian Kitchen, located in Dallas, TX, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Kuai Asian Kitchen is a quick-service restaurant concept that provides flavorful Asian rice bowls, dumplings, soups, salads, sides, and iced teas at a reasonable price. In an environment where consumers are looking for healthier alternatives to traditional fast food while not sacrificing the convenience of speedy service, Kuai provides a delicious alternative!

We believe that making and serving great food depends on a few key ingredients, which we refer to as the “Kuai Way.” The Kuai Way is the foundation on which the company is built and drives all aspects of daily operations. This includes Respect, Teamwork, Safety, Service, Pride, and Fun! In an industry plagued with employee turnover, we are blessed with team members that have been with us for over 15 years!

The easiest way to describe Kuai is to break it down to the three things that make our restaurant great.

The Food

We feature popular Asian-inspired fare from 6 countries: Japan, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, India. We try to pick the “best of” menu items from each country. We prepare our food in healthy ways: Steamed, Baked, or Boiled. There are no fryers or microwaves on-premises. These preparation methods, in conjunction with the great flavors of our food, generate a high rate of repeat business.

Consumers are increasingly becoming “Have-it-my-way-guests.” This is fine for us at Kuai as our menu is highly customizable. We are usually able to meet our customer’s needs in terms of tastes, allergies, or nutritional needs. Our orders are made on-demand, so our ability to create a meal tailored to each customer is easy.

The Service

The word “Kuai” literally means “Fast” or “Quick” in Mandarin Chinese. Our entire operation is designed for speedy service without compromising on the quality of our food. With increasing pressure to find time to eat a healthy meal these days, we have found the answer. And while we are quick, we have always tried to provide excellent service in our restaurants and know that it is a meaningful part of why we have such loyal customers.

The Value

Our goal is to offer reasonable prices. This is the final piece of our Value Proposition: (Quality + Speed)/Price. Serving high-quality ingredients with healthy preparation methods and speedy service does not prevent us from giving our customers a great deal.

The Kuai Trifecta

What really makes Kuai so special, and what I am most proud of, is our ability to deliver the combination of great food, speedy service, and reasonable prices. This is what I refer to as the Kuai trifecta, which sets us apart from other restaurants.

Tell us about yourself

I was blessed to grow up with two great parents and a brother that has become one of my best friends. My family moved to Saudi Arabia when I was two years old, and we lived there for ten years. We were able to travel the world together and experience many foreign countries and cultures. This experience allowed me to appreciate the gifts that I was given in life and unknowingly, perhaps, influenced a lot of my decision-making. After moving back to the United States, I attended high school in Spring, Texas. I then moved to New York for college to create another new experience at Cornell University.

I remember hearing the late Herman Cain speak at Cornell during my undergraduate studies. He was one of the most engaging speakers I had/have ever heard. He claimed that success is a journey, not a destination, and described how he had hopped on and off his “destination bus” throughout his career. While I had no intent on being in the restaurant industry, this is the story of my “destination bus” so far. My career began after graduating from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. I had focused on finance and marketing, with zero intentions of ever being in the restaurant business. I moved to Los Angeles to start my consulting position at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. After a couple of years, I found that sitting in an office all day was not the right path.

Through a professor at Cornell, I was introduced to a small business owner that also graduated from Cornell and went to work at his airline catering company in New York and Rhode Island. I viewed this as a great opportunity to truly understand how a business operates, not necessarily changing into the foodservice business. After a couple of very tough and very educational years working over 80 hours a week, I decided to move back to the state of Texas and earn my MBA from the University of Texas. I focused on entrepreneurship and operations and planned for this to restart my professional career and have the freedom to do something completely new!

Upon graduation, I interviewed with a few companies. All roads were pointing back to an office job, something I could not seem to accept. So, with two of my classmates, we decided that in 2004 we were going to get into the food truck business. I was reluctant to take such a risky move, and again I never had plans to be in the foodservice industry. But here we go…

We went to Houston to meet with the city planners and discovered that what we wanted to do was not possible. It was early in the food truck business for what we were trying to do, and the regulations were not in place to support it yet. Discouraged, we went to lunch at a place that my brother (who worked in downtown Houston at the time) recommended. It was an Asian restaurant, and it was inspirational!

The place had a line 50 people deep, and they were churning through really fast. We went to Academy, bought click counters, and spent the next several days counting people and order by category. We got kicked out by security a couple of times, but not before we had gathered the data we needed.

Back to the numbers, we built a financial model, and it looked pretty good. We decided that this was worth pursuing and moved to Dallas to make it happen. We scouted locations with the goal of being in the underground tunnel system downtown, where we would expect to generate a lot of repeat customers from people working in the surrounding buildings. But, we would need to have a menu first…

We created a menu (at least in print), designed some marketing materials, and began our location search. You can imagine how these conversations went. We would pick a space and meet with their leasing representatives to discuss our plans. They would ask about our experience in opening restaurants, and we would tell them that we are building our experience now… Maybe not the most compelling statement.

Finally, somebody really believed in us and what we were trying to create. We leased space in the Republic Tower downtown to build our first Kuai restaurant. There was a lot of work between the signing of the lease and opening day. But we pressed on, often until the early hours in the morning, to get the restaurant open. On October 27th of 2006, we opened for business. My path from Cornell to here was quite turbulent and unexpected. There were some great times and some very tough and sad times. But now, as I look back on almost a third of my life with this restaurant company, I am so proud of where we are and what we have been able to accomplish. Now, I do what I love and love what I do. What a blessing!

We hope to refine our model given the drastic changes to everything because of the pandemic. Once we feel that we have adapted our model to our new environment, we hope to begin a more rapid path of growth and expansion!

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

In a word, Survival. The restaurant business is known to be a highly competitive industry. Under normal circumstances, most restaurants live for about 4.5 years, with approximately 60% of them failing in the first year and 80% shuttering within the first five years. This was all well known to me when this venture began. Yet, this concept is different, special (says every independent restaurant owner!). Being a small fish in a large pond is also a challenge. Large restaurant operators have the advantage of their scale to negotiate better prices and lower rates. I was aware of these things yet pressed on with opening a quick-service restaurant.

We opened our first location in 2006, our second in 2008, and our third in 2018. There were a lot of challenges and struggles along the way, but by 2020 we had still survived. Then COVID 19 happened, and everything changed. Two of our locations were in high-rise office towers in downtown Dallas. The third was 80 percent dependent upon the offices in the surrounding area. But with the pandemic setting in, everyone could be working from home. But for how long, nobody knew. Was it two weeks to “slow the spread” or two years “fighting not to be dead”? Well, it was the latter for one of my restaurants as we closed our Renaissance Tower location at the beginning of 2021.

We spent months waiting for the situation to change. However, nothing changed other than the date. I kept as many people employed as I could, but it was just a fraction of the team we once had. But I was determined to keep going. Surely, I hadn’t dedicated 14 years of my life to a business that was just going to disappear overnight. That was not an option for me. We struggled but never gave up.

In fact, rather than give up, we were challenging ourselves to figure out how we could change our situation. Through a series of events and eating a lot of tacos, we decided to launch Community Tacos. Our current menu and brand served lunch and dinner, so we saw breakfast as an opportunity. It may be crazy, but we have been selling breakfast tacos since February 2021. It hasn’t solved all our problems, but it certainly helped mitigate them.

Being determined and able to adapt has allowed us to survive. I am hoping for bigger achievements ahead!

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

The two most difficult things for me are being responsible for other people’s lives/livelihood and living a balanced life. I am blessed to have some great people on my restaurant teams. They are like family to me. I have been to quinceaneras, funerals, celebrations, and times of great sadness. We spend a lot of time together, so I know them well and want the very best for them. I express this with my sincere gratitude, raises, bonuses, and paid vacations. Knowing that I have such an impact on them is another great blessing of mine.

However, that comes with a cost. I work as hard as I can to make sure I am doing all I can to succeed in our business. When I opened our third restaurant, I worked 386 days straight without a full day off. While I hope never to do that again in my life, I still have a seven-day workweek unless I leave town or take a vacation. As we grow our business, I hope that I will be able to hire people to take responsibility for a lot of the roles that I assume in our company. My wish is to find a balance in my life, and I will not stop working until I make that happen! 😊

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Create a comprehensive and detailed business plan. Take the time to ask and answer hard questions. Do the research and spend as much time as it takes to complete this process. It should help you work through a lot of problems before you start to build your business. Determine what your roles and responsibilities will be in the venture. Once you have done this, set it aside for a week. Then read it again and decide if this business is something you think you want to pursue with a clear mind.
  2. Make an honest assessment of your skills, abilities, and time. Ensure that this is a good fit for you and what elements you may need help with. Determine if you have the time in your life to do this. Try to understand what sacrifices might be necessary and if they are acceptable. Is this worth the effort and commitment?
  3. Capitalize your business. Ensure that you have enough money to start this venture and working capital to continue your operations. Be very realistic with the estimate for your needs.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.kuaiasiankitchen.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kuaiAsianKitchen/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kuaiasiankitchen/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KuaiDumplings

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solopreneur that you'd like to share, then email community@subkit.com; we'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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