Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Nick Kokonas
[00:00:00] S0: And yet, so much of that makes the whole artistic expression and creative part of this more possible. By running it successfully like a business you create more opportunity to do more of the thing they want to do. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, yeah. I mean, at the end of the day you can't operate if you're losing money. And there are restaurants out there by the way that have run for decades nonprofits essentially. And they don't mind. And that's fine. That's totally valid for them. But that's not what I wanted to do. And I think a lot of times people say, "Well, you guys can do that because you're Alinea. You can charge ahead because you're Alinea or you could sell your own books because you're Alinea." And I always say, "No, no, no. We're Alinea because we do those things. You're getting the order wrong." It's hard to do. It sucks. There's been many times we've done stupid things that haven't worked. And then you junk them and you move on. [00:00:00] S0: Any other lessons that you've learned from publishing? You mentioned that earlier as something that you do and you enjoy doing. You mentioned the higher margins. Any other thoughts on publishing? Which I think, again, like restaurants, many would knee jerk reaction say is a bad business.
· Nick Kokonas
[00:00:00] S1: If you ask questions of an industry and they won't tell you the answer, that's always a good sign that someone's getting very wealthy. In publishing, if you ask an author, ask any author, how much did it cost to print the book? What are your COGS? They will not know. Ask any literary agent that question and they'll think you're off your rocker. Ask any publisher to give you that information transparently and they will rip up your contract. So call the printers in China, pick your favorite book, find out some print brokers here in the US, and say, "What did the printing of those books cost? Send me a spreadsheet." And when they do and you find out that a $50 retail book cost about $2 to print, and you're going to get 10% of cover price, they're requiring that you order 5,000 for your own list and they're going to give you a quarter of a million dollar advance, you realize that there's no way they've taken no risk at all. I wrote up a long Medium for those who are interested. If you google my name and look on my Medium there's Why We Are Self-Publishing the Aviary Book. I posted up the contracts that we were offered. They're all terrible. Certain kinds of books I think you're much better off going with a publisher for it. Like if you're going to write an academic book and you have no built in audience, chances are you're not going to sell a ton of them on your own. But if you have an audience already in whatever business you're doing, or a large social media following or any of that, doing a book and publishing it yourself is not hard. It takes a lot of effort. Allen Hemberger and Sarah Hemberger came from Pixar Industrial Light and Magic. We hired them both to do all of our media and books. We gave them equity in the thing so that they own part of it. Three years later we have six books out and they produce millions of dollars of revenue every year.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Fascinating. What are a few of the other things that people already knew but do nothing about? What are the top two or three that you haven't talked about that come to mind?
· Nick Kokonas
[00:00:00] S1: Food costs money, so that's one of them. But the way that everyone looks at food costs and paying for food is very weird in that every restaurant ... And this happened when COVID started so it's a good segue to that, every famous chef that went on TV said, "This is the kind of business where this week's revenues pay for bills from a month ago." And when we started to bring in money through deposits and prepaid reservations, tickets, I suddenly looked and had a bank account that had a couple million dollars in it of forward money. Like a lot of other businesses. Like the computer business. If you buy a computer then they ship it to you five days later kind of thing. So you have a float. So I started calling up some of our big vendors for big expensive items. Proteins, meat, fish. Luxury items like caviar, foie gras, that sort of stuff. And wine and liquor. And just said, "I don't want net 120 anymore. I want to prepay you for the next three months." And they had never had that phone call from a restaurant before. So basic economic theory would say well, how much should they discount it? Let's say we're going to buy steaks and they were $34 a pound wholesale for dry aged ribeye. We're going to pay $34 a pound wholesale, get net 120. And I called the guy and said, "I'm going to use 400 pounds of your beef a week for the next four months for our menu, which is about $300,000 of beef. What do we got if I prepay you?" And he was like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "I want to write you a check tomorrow for all of it for four months." And he was like, "Well, no one's ever said that." So he called me the next day. He said, "$18 a pop." Half. Half price.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Nick Kokonas
[00:00:00] S0: Wow. [00:00:00] S1: That's what I said. I went, "I'll pay you 20 if you tell me why." And he said, "Well, it's very simple. I have to slaughter the cows. Then I put the beef to dry. And for the first 35 days I can sell it. After 35 days there's only a handful of places that sell it for more than 35 days. Dry aged. And at 60 days I sell it for a dollar a pound for dog food. Literally." So his waste on the slaughter and these animals’ lives and the ethics of all of that are because of net 120. Seems like someone should have figured this out. As soon as he said that, everything clicked and I just went, "We need to call every one of our vendors every time and say we will prepay them." Now, I know huge restaurant groups, huge restaurant groups that look at their float as more valuable to have that money in the bank and to pay their vendors net 90, net 120, whatever. What are you earning in interest these days? 1% a year or something like that? It makes no sense to do that. It makes sense to get ahead of that curve, estimate your next month's sales, and prepay for the food. Now, there's risk involved in that, but you've mitigated that risk by much, much better food prices. At the Michelin three star level we've been able to take our food costs down to a level that honestly our chefs never thought was possible. But we've done that partly through the efficiency of not having no shows, but then the other flip side of it is that we've also worked on creating forwards contracts for all of our big vendors.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: You have to do at least one more. This list is amazing. What's one more thing? And then we'll move on.