Blaze Your Own Trail - From Rodeo to Restaurant: Leigh Angman's Journey

Episode Date: February 15, 2026

In this episode of the Blaze Your Own Trail podcast, host Jordan Mendoza interviews Leigh Angman, an entrepreneur with a rich background in the restaurant industry and consulting. Leigh shares his journey from a young boy with ADHD to a successful business owner, discussing the lessons learned from his early experiences, the challenges faced in the restaurant business, and the importance of mentorship and integrity in entrepreneurship. He also provides valuable insights and tips for business owners looking to improve their profitability and operational efficiency.TakeawaysLeigh Angman has had a diverse career, including tech exits and restaurant ownership.ADHD can be leveraged as a superpower in entrepreneurship.Early experiences in life shape entrepreneurial journeys.Mentorship and surrounding oneself with smarter people is crucial for success.The restaurant business requires a strong understanding of profitability.Traveling can provide valuable life lessons and personal growth.The transition from a struggling restaurant to a successful one involves learning from past mistakes.Consulting allows Lee to help other businesses improve their operations.Integrity and communication are key components of a successful business.Tracking sales and understanding financial health is essential for any business.  Chapters00:00 Intoduction to Leigh Angman01:58 Early Life and ADHD Superpowers05:54 First Taste of Entrepreneurship08:23 High School Experiences and Influences11:35 College Decisions and Life Lessons15:13 Travel Adventures and Personal Growth17:29 Entering the Restaurant Business19:08 Lessons from the First Restaurant20:37 Transition to a Successful Second Restaurant27:32 Consulting Journey and Helping Others33:17 Key Tips for Business OwnersConnect with Leigh:Website: https://app.mondofi.com/Book: https://spructis.com/ Join Jordan's Weekly Group Coaching Community here: https://byotgroupcoaching.com/    Are you an entrepreneur?Join my FREE Group Coaching Community where we have live calls, Q&A and more! Our Trailblazer Ecosystem also enables you to network with other entrepreneurs and creator hub eliminates multiple subscriptions and logins creating a one stop shop to take action!Use code: FOUNDING100 for 12 months access FREE and Founding pricing for life! (While Supplies Last)Join now! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Blaze Your Own Trail podcast. My name is Jordan Mendoza. I'm your host, and I've got a very special guest today. His name is Lee Angman, and I'm going to have him tell you a little bit about who he is and what he does today. Hi, Jordan. Thanks very much for having me on your show. I've listened to quite a few episodes, and it's fantastic, so I don't take this for granted, and I really appreciate the opportunity.

So thank you so much for that. My pleasure. As you mentioned, my name is Lee Angman. I guess I'm a pushing 30-year entrepreneur and have had a couple of tech exits in the last 15 years. I've owned pubs and restaurants in the Vancouver, British Columbia area and also have been heavily involved in the technology industry here for the past 25 years. I have a company called MondoFi, which is a property technology access control company. And I have recently had published a book called Spructus, which is from Insight to Action, which lays out a framework for entrepreneurs in understanding exactly why or why not they may

be succeeding or failing in their businesses. I love it. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that context. And we will definitely have a lot of conversation around the property management space. I spent 15 years with the company called Gables Residential. They're a real estate investment trust and I think managed 50,000 units. And so I got a chance to spend five years on site. And then I spent the next time in corporate as a training and development manager.

So building learning management systems, facilitating all the instructional design of content, facilitating leadership programs. It was a ton of fun. Very cool. I'm excited to learn about that later in the show. But as you know, Lee, you've heard the content. So we're going to take a rewind. which is my favorite part. I want to get deep context into your story, your journey. So for the audience, you know, where were you born and raised? If it's the same place, that's fine. But then what kind

of kid were you back in the day? What'd you get into? Were you into sports? Were you into academics? Let's get some context into Littley. I was always Littalie. In fact, that was like five foot four when I graduated high school. But that's a whole other story. Thank God I grew. I was actually born in Ontario in a place called Oshawa near Toronto. My parents had, my dad, got transferred out there just for a short period of time. And my entire family is from British Columbia on the west coast of Canada. And at age six months, he got transferred back to Vancouver. And I grew up in a little suburb, just about an hour east of Vancouver. And I have spent my entire life apart from my addiction to travel out in the Vancouver area. I've lived in the downtown

core of Vancouver for 27 years now. And I love it. We say for five months of the year, it's the most beautiful place on Earth. It's the other seven that it rains so much that I don't love it. But that's what airplanes are for. So as a youngster, I guess, you know, the best way to kind of give you an idea about that is I skipped the back half of grade one and the front half of grade two. They put me forward a year because I guess I was bored and exhibiting some of these ADHD tendencies that I have since learned a lot of, you know, type A entrepreneurial-minded. people have. I just couldn't focus with the lessons that were being offered at the time. So they decided to put me forward. And yeah, I was always small and I was always trying to prove something

to people because I was the youngest one, the shortest one in the class every single time. And it's funny, Jordan, I haven't really thought or talked about this in a very long time because nobody ever asked me about elementary school. But that's where I came from. And I realize, you know, 40 plus years later that it really had a lot to do with forming my mindset and how I went about achieving things in my, in my entrepreneurial life and journey. Yeah, I love it. I appreciate that context and, you know, fellow ADHD guy here. And when you can figure out how to leverage it, it just becomes a big superpower, you know. And people always ask me, they're like, man, you've got six kids, you got multiple businesses, you got podcast books,

You're traveling all over the place. How the heck you do it? I'm like, ADHD is a superpower. If you know how to harness it and leverage it for the gift that it really is, man, you can just go, you know, and the capacity to learn, the capacity to move and not look behind and just keep going. You're going to get bumps and bruises, but you just keep churning the legs. So I don't know if that's been your experience.

but I'd love your take on that. Can you pause for a second? Did you say six kids, man? Yeah, sorry, I casually just threw six kids. Yeah, right? Our kids are from almost 18 months as our youngest, and our oldest is 21. So, and then everything in between.

So I was telling somebody the other day, I was like, hey, maybe my new book, my next book should be called from diapers to the workforce. It's like how to raise sick as kids with ADHD. You know, that'd be a pretty fun book title. the lessons you must have learned over the last two decades. I still don't know what I'm doing, by the way. Still haven't figured it out.

I guess I always say there are no books, but there's lots of books. Either way, there's nothing that can prepare you for even. I have one. I can't even understand how you have six. Man, respect. That is insane. It's wild. Enough about me.

Let's go back. You're basically getting bumped forward, your bored, you're figuring this thing out. So what does that lead to? Does that lead to, because you've been an entrepreneur for so long, I have to imagine there were some entrepreneurial stuff you got into an elementary or middle school or even high school. Yeah, it's funny. And, you know, I'm not specifically talking about my book on this podcast, but obviously it's been a big part of my life for the last few years writing it. The first chapter, the first full chapter in the book is called How a Canadian Rodeo made me an entrepreneur

for life. And I remember the first time that I got a taste of entrepreneurialism, I was at a rodeo, you know, six, seven hours north of Vancouver, just out in the middle of nowhere. And we're watching these events. And I was like, it's pretty cool. I was six years old. And my daddy goes, hey, take a look over there. And I look and I see there's a couple of beer bottles sitting near the feet of some of the spectators in the crowd.

He goes, you know, that if you round those up and take them back to the, you know, the place that they were purchased, they'll give you 25 cents. And I was like, are you kidding? So I went over and I was like, can I have those? bottles and I picked up, you know, by the time I got a dozen or whatever it was, I take them back and they gave me 25 cents. And I immediately forgot about the rodeo. And for the next like six hours, all I did was try to figure out how to do this quicker and quicker and quicker. And I remember thinking about that day so many times when I was in my early teens, my mid-teens, when I was,

I worked at a gas station and I worked at a fast food restaurant. And I was like, it doesn't matter how hard I work, It doesn't matter how good I am, as long as I don't get fired. I get paid the same. Whereas in this scenario, I was like, okay, the harder I work or the smarter I work, i.e, I started to get other little kids to help me and, you know, sort out things and I would be the middleman and that kind of thing. It was like, there's other ways to think about things. And obviously I didn't have the wherewithal or the perspective at that time to realize

that I was getting my first taste of entrepreneurialism. But as I said, in my teens, I looked back at it and reflected fondly about it and realized this is the path that I want for sure. So, yeah. Yeah, when you can have something that's performance base, right? You don't, there is no ceiling, you know. It is how are you going to work? Or like you said, how smart are you going to work? You know, what systems can you build to figure this out?

Or in your case where you're not having to do the actual work anymore, you got to. other people running it in and you're supervised and making sure it's done and building a team to do it. And yeah, that's what good entrepreneurs do. So that's awesome. So let's talk a little bit about high school. Were you someone that got into any types of sports? I know hockey's a big thing in Canada. I'm not sure if that's something that you dove into or were you more on the academic side focusing on studies. Definitely on the academic side. I was, as I mentioned, like 5-4, when I graduated high school, I was much shorter than that in my years and probably weighed 60 pounds soaking wet. Hockey is not a sport that favors the lightman, particularly in those days. It's become a little more finesse and beautiful and skill base these

days, but you still have to be, have a solid frame. So my two passions in high school were academics and I played in the band, but I had, I not just a concert band, I played in a jazz band as well and played drums and really found a love for drums that I play in a cover band to this day in Vancouver. It's my passion. It definitely has helped me through stressful situations in my life. So not sports, but definitely academics. I was always really good and did well. And then drums, for sure. So what are, so I'm assuming playing drums wanted to get better at that. You probably had to have a teacher or a coach. Can you talk a little bit about someone that maybe helped you develop your skills and then, you know, what, what do coaches and mentors mean to you?

It's really interesting. I'm grown a lot in my mindset and in the, and you're 100% right. Coaches and mentors and people that I always like to say, you know, the only way that I have found success in the last 25, 30 years of being an entrepreneur is to surround myself with people that are smarter than me and can do things that I can't. And that's very easy to find, you know. but in those early days, I didn't, I didn't think that way. I also say you don't know what you don't know. And so I don't beat myself up over it, but I just, I just didn't. And I, you know, I think to my high school band teacher, Mr. Kovolinko, big influence,

wonderful guy, you know what I mean? But I never had any kind of a teacher or a mentor for business or for music or anything like that. Everything that I did in those early days was self-taught, and that was well before the internet. So it was, you know, learned by doing. Yeah. Yeah, I was the same way. You know, I learned breakdancing by watching Beat Street about a thousand times and watching break in one and two. So that was in, yeah, on VHS, and I would have to rewind it, and then I would pause it, you know, and I would practice the moves. And that's really literally how I learned. I moved to a new school in eighth grade and a song came on and I just started busting out moves

and that's kind of how I met my first friends. You know, they're like, amazing. What was this guy doing? And again, I didn't know. All I knew was I was just going to do the exact same thing that was on the video. And apparently no one had seen that before. So it was kind of my in at the school. I can only imagine going into a new school intimidating as heck.

And to come in and actually have these skills, that is a nice. break or extraordinary for you. That is amazing. Yeah, it definitely created a circle. So, you know, that was the- Literally and figured. That was the goal. Yeah, for sure. So let's talk after high school. Was college, like, was it kind of a done deal? Like, you're going to go to college? Was it something that? It absolutely was a done deal that I was going to go. That came for my parents because my dad did the same thing. My dad went to University of British Columbia. Got his what is a business degree, what it's what is called now. And it's so funny because the concept of school to me in high school was almost laughable. You literally did your work. As long as you did it and you put your effort in

and you put it in on time, I got good grades, you know. I didn't learn how to learn. I learned how to memorize. And I got a very strong slap of reality when I got into university and the first couple of years, taking some calculus classes. And I found out very quickly that I gravitated towards business and economics as opposed to calculus or physics or some of the things that I took in high school. But I dropped out of university because it just, it was a time where it was at kind of almost a coming of age. I was working at a, I talk about this in my book as well. I tell you how cool I am in my, you know, my years after high school, I was living in my parents basement working at IHOP, the International House of Pancakes, where the average age of

the waitress was about 900 years old. And it wasn't exactly a hotbed of social interaction for a young person at that time. And there was a restaurant that opened up in Langley, this city that I lived in at the time in the kind of early to mid 90s that catered to hiring younger, you know, attractive girls. And it was that young kind of cool vibe and the food was different and the environment was different and it changed my life. So here I was getting a taste also of backpacking around the world for the first time, you know, finally coming into my own, playing in a band. You talk about breakdancing, right, to meet people playing in a jazz band in high school, not exactly conducive to meeting girls, but getting out of high school and playing in like a real rock band. And I grew

my hair and I was traveling around the world and working at this cool restaurant and trying to balance the idea that university was teaching me something when I hated every minute of it, I just gave it up. And I was like, no, I'm not doing this. I ended up getting various different kind of jobs floating me through that period of time until we opened our first restaurant. So that, you know, it was certainly a lot of learning that occurred during that time. And again, when you're going through that and you have no perspective on the world, like I had no understanding that all of these things that kept happening to me, A, were of my own creation, so i.e. my responsibility.

And at the same time, though, I was learning things from them. I'm filled with cliches, but I also say you either win or you learn. There's no lose unless you manage to not learn a lesson from some of the mistakes that you've made. And Lord knows I've made my fair share of them. So yeah, it was definitely an informative and fun time. I had an amazing amount of fun and meant a lot of amazing people. But yeah, when I look back on it now, I'm thankful that it was more about the lessons learned,

the mistakes made than the fun that I had. Make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about where you traveled to. So if you had to just pick a place, where was your most favorite place that you visited? I talk to people about travel all the time because it is my drug. I was talking to my girlfriend this morning about it.

It just, it just is. I've been to, I think, 58 countries now. So it's tough to pick one. But as a 19-year-old, I put a backpack on and backpacked to Australia. And I was, I ended up booking this trip with my buddy Brad. And I was scared. But here, I had a buddy. And we were going to go together and we're going to learn all this stuff and have fun and drink beer and meet girls.

And it's a recurring theme here. I'm sure you can see. And he couldn't end up selling his car. So like 10 days before we were supposed to leave, he tells me I can't go. I'm like, oh my God. So I ended up going myself, spent a year backpacking around Australia myself

and talk about life lessons, just being on my own for the first time, really, and being responsible for everything, from my accommodation to my food, to my earning, to figuring everything out in the relationships and everything along. the way. So I have a soft spot in my heart for Australia and I hope my 15, now 15 year old son

puts a backpack on in a few years and starts there because I've been to some crazy, crazy places in the middle of the night in dodgy countries and dodgy cities that had I not had that initial foundation kind of backpacking in what I call an easy country, I don't think I would have fared as well. So I have a very soft spot for Australia in general. That's great. Yeah, I've been going to Europe a lot over the last three plus years. I've co-founded a tech startup. And I've really grown a fond appreciation for Belgium. That's where the startup is.

Have you been to Belgium? I've not been to Belgium. I've been very close. Yeah, put it on a list of places to visit some really, really beautiful places. And it's so close to so many spots like the Netherlands and France and, you know, everything's really close. So it's a good kind of centralized spot to check out. All right, perfect.

And so now you go through this process and you end up getting into the restaurant game. So where did the idea? Was it someone in family? Was it an influence? Was it just kind of like, hey, let's try something out? Like, how did the restaurant business come to play? It was stupidity in this idea that we thought we could do it. It was myself, my brother, and three other partners, all of which I had lived.

with and worked with at various points, lived with or worked with. And we all kind of had cut our chops at this restaurant. It was called Earls, so I don't keep calling it that restaurant. But in Langley, that was quite different and very cool to work for. In 2004, we opened up this restaurant that we called Relish, and it was a monstrous restaurant, like 7,000 plus square feet. And it was just in a notorious challenging, notoriously challenging part of town, not a bad part, but just, you know, the wrong way two one-way streets and just tough to see and not a lot of foot traffic at all. And yeah, I remember, you know, the morning after our first night, our opening night, we all knew so many people in the industry and so many people in media.

And we had a killer first night. It was packed. And of course, we thought, oh, owning restaurants is about giving away free wine and this and that and the next thing. I wake up the next morning and I'm like, oh, my God, we need to do that amount of sales without giving half of it away for the next five years to survive our lease. And we managed to do it, but that's another big story. But that's how it started.

It was a bunch of 20-somethings guys that thought they knew how to own a restaurant because they'd worked in restaurants for the last 10 years. Yeah, so I'm sure lots of lessons learned. And that brought you to another restaurant. Yeah, but that's, I mean, fast forward so much. 2014, we opened another restaurant successfully called the Vancouver Fish Company on Granville Island. And it's about, it does about six times the sales as Relish ever did. And it's a grind.

I don't know. Anyone out there who owns restaurants, they know it's never easy. You can never take your foot off the gas and your opportunity to lose money very, very quickly. is quite easy. But yeah, relish was a hotbed of learning. And at the end of our first five years, we were over half a million dollars in debt. And it was a terrifying time because I don't care whether it's $50,000, $500,000, $5 million or $50 million. It's economies of scale. Any entrepreneur that owns a business that, say, has a burn rate of $250,000 a month, it's terrifying where you are. And to have a bunch of guys that were in this place after our first five-year restaurant experience,

taking us to 2009, it was a lot to be learned. But there's a very interesting success story that came from it that I talk about in my book that really set the foundation for everything else that came from there. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. So what would you say was maybe the two biggest shifts from the first restaurant to the second one that's having way more success? Well, I'll tell you exactly what it is.

They have a background in corporate finance. That's what I focus on as part of my duties at the restaurant. We all kind of wear different hats, but I am responsible for the business. And we've driven almost $55 million through our restaurant in Vancouver, the one that we have now. And every single penny of that has traveled through my desk. And I know, say this to my partners, I know where every penny came from, I know where it is today, and I know where it's going tomorrow. And we know what our profitability is every 8 to 14 days.

And as part of my consulting business, that's the first question that I ask potential clients. And a lot of restaurant people have become my clients over the years because if they're being honest with themselves, and I ask them that question, do you know your profitability every 8 to 14 days? And if you say no, how are you operating? You're flying blind.

How do you make decisions even every month? You'd be surprised how many restaurateurs have no idea what their profitability is until they get their tax returns back and their accountant tells them, oh, you lost 8,000 or 80 or 800 or you made 10 grand this year, whatever it happens to be. So, you know, I have created a framework that I talk about extensively in my book, Spructus, that outlines exactly how using free tools available online. you can track your profitability and manage your entire business for small to medium businesses.

And we did almost $6 million last year in revenue at the restaurant. I know we could double or triple that and still have it fit within the framework that we use to manage that process. That's great. Yeah. It was that lack of that framework back in the early days of relish that left us blind. Yeah. Yeah. So you didn't know your profitability back then.

I'm assuming. And you didn't have things dialed in. You guys were just basically like, hey, we can figure this out. And it just, and you at least, it sounds like we're able to exit it. Was it unscathed? Would you say when you kind of wrapped everything up at the end? Or did it hurt? Wildly.

Wildly. I might as well tell you that story because it does fashion into things that happened. In 2009, I guess I guess I could. backing up a little bit, we'd managed to get what's called a liquor primary, so a pub license. So we had one half of the restaurant that was about 1900, 2,000 square feet. The other side that we called the food primary was 5,000 square feet. And of course, these sleepless nights that we had coming into 2009, realizing that things were not going well and stressful, we'd got this liquor primary that allowed us to have, you know, dancing and DJs and stuff in the pub side of things.

and of course I'm starting to do the math and going hey you know guys anyone else notice that 85% of our revenue is coming from 2,000 square feet I have an idea and I let it percolate for a while and presented it to my partners at the time I said we need to downsize relish to 2,000 square feet I have to convince the landlord we have to gut the place we have to renovate it and we have to start from scratch. This is in kind of mid-2009. The Olympics were coming to Vancouver in February of 2010. So it kind of gave me this target to shoot for

that would allow us to say, okay, this is going to be our rebirth and what have you. And so I really had to step up to the plate and it was the beginning of ruining of my personal relationship with my ex-wife and I lost a good friend in this because I said, I'm going to remortgage my house.

I'm going to put up another 300. And I will take over the majority of the shares. And one of the guys who is a very, very good friend of mine, he voted no. So he signed a letter that said if this didn't work out, he didn't owe his, say, $110,000. Because let's say we owed $550,000. But I was very confident that we were going to do this. But of course, it was terrifying. My brother believed in me because he always believes in me.

And I love him for that. And the other two guys were kind of like, well, we're screwed anyways. so what do we got to lose? Let's go for this. So long story short, I remorgeted my house, refinanced it. We managed to convince the landlord that we're going to do this. We closed down for several months over the holidays of 2009, going to New Year's 2010, gave up the big side, gutted the small side, rebuilt it from scratch, and through a miracle of bureaucracy and navigating the waves of all of that,

we opened the Monday before the Olympics. We had an eight-year plan to pay off this debt based on what these numbers were telling us and the new rent and, you know, the new labor and the new ability to manage this thing. And believe it or not, in just over 16 months, the entire debt was paid off because we opened that Monday before the Olympics and we were one of the busiest little venues in the entire city. It was insane. And as terrifying as it was, it's one of the things that certainly not the biggest financial win that I've ever made, but from the perspective of where my mind was at the time and what kind of economies I was thinking of at the time, it is something that I am the most proud of in my entire career and managed to surf on that wave of good, if you will, for the next nine years.

And some guy came to us with a handwritten letter in the summer of 2019 and said, want to buy your pub. I said it's not for sale, but thanks so much. This was in June. He sent another letter in July. He said, I want to buy your pub. Here's a little more money. And I said, hmm, well, let's see where this goes. It's not for sale. And he basically sent another letter in August of 2019, quite gruff language that said, dear, bleep, bleep, bleep, this is my last offer, you idiots. So we said, okay, let's do this. The deal closed on December 2019. We handed over the keys, and that was about six weeks before COVID hit and decimated the hospitality industry in Vancouver. He made it, thank God, and we were very busy with our much, much bigger restaurant on Granville Island.

But yeah, the timing of that is pretty insane because I certainly wouldn't want to have been to have owned two hospitality venues during COVID. So I know I packed a lot in there, but that's the story of where it came from, how it made it and how we exit it. Yeah, it sounds like it definitely was a lot of risk, a great reward, definitely some sacrifices and things that occurred, right? But at the end of the day, you got to keep moving forward. You can't go backwards. You know, we can reflect but not dwell on the past. And looking at it, like you said, from the context of where you were and in the moment, yeah, what an awesome victory to have that type of turnaround. And then, you know, still have another successful restaurant. And then you're also consulting. So when did the consulting start? Was it after, hey, I've been through this a couple times.

You know, there's lots of people out there that you get value out of what I bring to the table and you want to maybe start creating more impact. I'd love just to see where that was sparked from. It was sparked from in the early days of the rebirth of relish. One of the conditions, now I was the majority shareholder. One of the conditions of it is that I would do the books exclusively. And I, as a, I'm sure you can relate to this, even though I have had a, more, you know, 20-hour days than I would like to admit to.

I believe I'm a pretty lazy guy. I'm always looking for easier and faster ways to do things. And so started to create this efficient tool at the time using Microsoft Excel that would allow us to track sales every day and it would allow us to track our invoices and it would allow us to track our labor and it would allow us to track our cost of goods sold and everything else. We use that and we use that successfully from 2010 to 2019. We knew what our profitability was all the time.

And of course, those tools were refined and they became better and better as we went. But when we opened our seafood restaurant in 2014, it was around the time, just around the time when Google Drive and Google Sheets were coming of age. And I thought, okay, well, this, we're going to do it right from scratch. We started on Google Drive and the ability to interlink an infinite number of sheets just allows us to run. our entire operation. And I know, I know very well, there's, there's naysayers out there that like, you're running your business on spreadsheets. Let me tell you about X, Y, blah, blah, blah, there's no piece of software that I have found that is bespoke enough to do everything that we need as easily and as cost efficiently as we do it. And so after we'd open it up in 2014 and started to

move towards, you know, the latter half of that decade, I started to just reach out to people. It's like, hey, do you know what your profitability is? And that answer, of course, everyone initially always says, yes, of course I do. And I'm efficient at my stuff. And if you dig a little deeper, peel back the layers of the onion, you realize that a lot of people really don't. So it's a soft onboarding of clients that started to happen in the mid-2010s, and it's just kind of rolled softly from there. And it's just part of the personal revenue streams that I have now. And I really, really enjoy it.

because seeing someone's face when you show them really how easy it is to set up systems and processes, to allow them to track their businesses, super rewarding for me. I love that. Yeah, I love it. And how much of your service and your consulting is like a white glove approach, meaning they hire you, you come in, you plug the system in, you teach them how to use it, and they're off to the races, or is it something to where you have to tell them how to do it and then they do it on their own. It's a mixture of both of those things. You know, there's been instances where someone has said,

I want to do this, but I don't have time to do it. I'm like, one of the most important things about businesses is that you've got a personal connection to the financial health and the financial heartbeat of your business. And if you say to me, for example, I want to open a restaurant, okay, tell me why. Okay, it's because I like pouring wine for my friends on a Friday night. I'm like, okay, don't open a restaurant.

Okay, I want to open a restaurant. Okay, I want to open a restaurant because I'm passionate about food and I'm really focused on turning it into a profitable business. I'm like, all right, that sounds like a pretty good place to move off from the original comment. But if they then say something like, but I really don't like numbers, I'm really good at baking bread or I'm really good at cooking seafood. You have to, you have to have a connection with your business. Whether you like it or not, you have to have a connection. The idea that you're really, really great at baking strudel, it doesn't mean that your business is going to be successful. It's like the guy that's, you know, say, good at books and he doesn't have a chef.

You need all these various pieces, and I'm very, very blessed, as I said to you earlier on in this call, the only way I've found success is to surround myself with people that do things that I don't and are smarter than me. And obviously, you have to bring something to the table in that equation. But I have two partners now. One is that brother that I referred to earlier, who's always been with me. One of the best operations guys, one of the best bartenders, one of the best bar setup guys, one of the best numbers guys that exists that I've ever met. I'm doing this for a long time. And another guy named Steve Dizer, who is an amazing operations guy, former Red Seal chef, former GM at some of the finest restaurants in Vancouver.

And he actually worked at that Earl's restaurant in Langley back in the mid-90s as well. So I've known him for 30 years. And we've always been friends. we just never opened a business together until 2014. So, yeah, the team is important for sure. Yeah. That's awesome. Very cool.

Well, you know, you've added a ton of value through your story and through your journey. And I love that you've really taken your craft. You've honed it. And now you're being able to spread that to other businesses. Is there a target demographic you're looking for, you know, hey, business has got to be at least a million to 10 million, 10 million plus? That's a great question. I'd love just to know that because there might be folks that are listening that

have restaurants or no folks in their circle that have restaurants and maybe they're in a position where they're stagnant, they're stuck at a growth point. And maybe a big piece of that is they don't understand the profitability side as much as they could. So I'd love for you just to give some context there. Yeah, fair. I am happy to work with anyone. But if you're doing, you know, 10 grand a month in revenue, I would hope that you can track that as it is. If you're starting to get into the 100 to 200 to 200, thousand dollars a month in revenue a million bucks a year that is the that's the start of the sweet spot and it doesn't matter if it's restaurants if it's uh you know a dry cleaner if it's um you know it doesn't have to be bricks and mortar either the idea that there's a lot of ecom businesses the

tools are there more so i find online to assist especially things like built in with shopify and and and stripe and the payment processor integrations it has and all those kinds of things it's so we do when I think about the percentage of clients that I have, the majority of them are not online. But definitely, you know, we are, we are perfect for that business that's doing, I don't know, half a million to a million dollars a year up to $10 million a year in revenue. And there's no question that there's value in understanding the precise health of your business at any given time. And quite sincerely, we provide that. Love it. Love it. So just to make it more universal for listeners that might not have a restaurant or no folks with restaurants, what three tips could you give to any business owner if they want to really make sure that their profitability is dialed in?

Yeah. I would say, first of all, track your sales every day. I spend five to ten minutes every morning in my business is just jotting down the sales, checking in on sales. And there's a level of redundancy that occurs in a lot of, lot of the things that I do. And I have been scoffed at before for that when it comes to, you know, why don't you just look at your POS to export this or it will tell you what your sales are? But if you take five minutes and you enter your data into a structured format, I don't even care if you import it. It takes you 30 seconds. If you just lay it into a structured format that allows you to use your sales as a denominator for any kind of analysis that you do, whether it's, you know, the cost of your liquor wine and beer, the cost of your dry cleaner materials. I'll go back to that as an example. You know, your cost of labor, none of it matters unless you

divide it by your sales. So the vast majority of things that you would do, you would divide by sales. So number one would be definitely detract sales. Number two is have a strong sense of communication with your managers and your management team. There are things that can go wrong in a business. and if you're not aware of them until three weeks from Tuesday or whatever it happens to be, you just don't have the capacity to react to them in a positive way that you should. There's a ton more on the accounting side, but I won't focus on that. I'm just trying to think of things that break out of that. And then I guess, you know, the last one I would say is just have integrity.

Do what you say you're going to do and expect that from your employees and your employees and your managers as well. If you set a culture of honesty and integrity, there's certain examples, particularly in the U.S. right now, that shows that if you're not filled with integrity, perhaps you can rise to lofty places. However, I have found in my history that being someone who simply does what they say they're going to do,

it has led to more long-term, less friction, full, sustainable success. My father, who is my hero, always beat it in, not Pete, it's literally, but beat it into me and my brother. It said, if a man doesn't have his word, he's got nothing. So that's something that I live by from a philosophical perspective. And there's lots of things that a business owner should know about kind of getting into profitability. But those three things, knowing what your sales are and having a picture of your financial health, understanding that you have to communicate in a healthy and consistent manner with your staff,

and then simply doing what you say you're going to do. They are certainly not going to hurt your ability to understand your business. Love it. Appreciate that. The tips, make sure folks, you write that down and start implementing that in your business. I really appreciate you coming on the show today. I know people are going to want to know where to find your book. So I'm going to make sure I get that info from you.

We will plug that in the show notes. So folks, make sure you run to the show notes and check out the book. Grab a copy of that. Where's the best place you want people to go, Lee, after the episode to find you? you can you could certainly find in reach out it's just lee angman leig h a n g m a n easy to search for them the only one in the world with that name the website for the book is spructus dot com s p r u c t i s a com and you can also go to amazon and search for for spructus and by the way because we haven't talked about it yet spructus stands for systems processes redundancy urgency communication

technology integrity and sales and they are the eight pillars of any successful business that I have observed over the past 30 years. And if one becomes very strong in executing their, you know, each one of those pillars, it's very difficult to see how they could fail. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I'm definitely going to be grabbing a copy of that book. Make sure you guys grab the book, Spruptus, if you want to grow your business, you know, in all areas. It's got eight core areas that are going to help you. Thank you so much, Lee, for coming on the Blaz Your Own Trail podcast. You've definitely been blazing trails for quite a while.

Any parting words for the audience? Listen, it's not for the audience. It's for you. I know I've listened to a bunch of podcasts. People who listen to this are obviously getting a myriad different stories from a diverse background, you know, a diverse group of entrepreneurs with varying backgrounds. So thank you so much for the opportunity. And to anyone that's out there listening, thank you for taking the time.

I am excited to meet anyone that wants to reach out and chat. Always love to meet fellow entrepreneurs and share battle stories. So, yeah, thanks again. Really appreciate it. Don't take it for granted, Jordan. Appreciate the opportunity. My pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on the show and have an amazing day.