The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – San Pedro Fish Market: From Family Business to Media Brand

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

San Pedro Fish Market: From Family Business to Media Brand Sanpedrofish.com KingsOfFishTv.com Show Notes About the Guest(s): Michael Ungaro is the CEO visionary of the San Pedro Fish Market and Kings of Fish TV. He is the driving force behind the family business, which was originally started by his grandfather in 1956. With over six decades of operation, the San Pedro Fish Market has grown from a small 200-square-foot fish market to the third highest-grossing independent restaurant in the USA in 2022. Michael has transformed the business into a media brand, using social media channels and the Kings of Fish Reality series to tell the story of the San Pedro Fish Market. Episode Summary: In this episode, host Chris Voss interviews Michael Ungaro, the CEO visionary of the San Pedro Fish Market and Kings of Fish TV. Michael shares the story of his family's business, which was started by his grandfather in 1956. He discusses how they have grown from a small fish market to becoming the third highest grossing independent restaurant in the USA. Michael also talks about the importance of storytelling in business and how they have used social media and web series to build their brand. He shares their plans for expansion and the challenges of working in a family business. Key Takeaways: The San Pedro Fish Market has grown from a small fish market to the third highest-grossing independent restaurant in the USA. Michael Ungaro has transformed the business into a media brand, using social media and their web series to tell their story. The power of storytelling in business cannot be underestimated, as it helps to shape the narrative and control the brand image. The San Pedro Fish Market has become a tourist attraction, drawing in visitors from all over the country. The future vision for the business includes expanding to new locations, such as Las Vegas and Phoenix. Notable Quotes: "One of the things that I noticed over the years was how important your narrative or your story is in your business." - Michael Ungaro "If you don't tell your story, someone else will, and it might not be the one you want them to tell." - Michael Ungaro "We realized we'd become a tourist attraction with this experiential offering." - Michael Ungaro "We're looking for help, we're looking for money, we're looking for locations." - Michael Ungaro

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Oaks Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. As always, we bring you the most amazing guests on the show.

And as always, we have the best today. All the CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, the Pulitzer Prize winning authors, the amazing people with amazing minds that share you their journeys of life and all the times they went through the things that they went through in life. Today we have Michael Angaro on the show with us today. He's the CEO visionary of the San Pedro Fish Market and kingsoffishtv.com. He is the visionary behind the family business of the San Pedro Fish family,

and originally started by his grandfather in 1956. The business is still family owned and operated and transitioning to the fourth generation. And in six decades, they've grown from a small 200 square foot fish market to the third highest grossing independent restaurant in the USA in 2022, serving over 2 million guests at their legacy locations on the Los Angeles waterfront.

Michael doesn't think of the business as a restaurant, but rather as a media brand. It tells a story through social media channels with the family's Kings of Fish reality series. Welcome to the show, Michael. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Thanks for coming.

We really appreciate it. Give us any dot coms or websites you want people to go to to find out more about you guys. Sure. You can always visit SanPedroFish.com. That'll give you all of the information on our e-com, our locations, restaurant, menu, specials, etc. And you can watch our web series. It's now being produced as a television series. It's at KingsoffishTV.com.

There you go. All the social networks are at San Pedro Fish. And this is pretty interesting. You know, there's a lot of people over the last decade who've talked about how if you're a company, you need to, if they're a business, you need to think of yourself as a brand. And it sounds like you've been the proponent for converting, you know, your family's business in the fish market to becoming an online brand and influence brand, et cetera, et cetera. Is that about right?

Yeah, that's true. One of the things that I noticed over the years was how important your narrative or your story is in your business. And what I started to notice is we weren't talking about it. We were head down, butt up working all the time. And as I started to look into social media, I would see people had created these stories about us that were not true swap me to seafood and owned by somebody else and i i thought you know we're missing a we're missing something here because we never cared about that and it became it sort of took on a life of its own yeah i think i saw some of those things online i think i think they're blaming you for taylor swift taking over the super bowl is that true too that's one of them yeah i think

and she owns the fish market i think evidently or something it's a plot i don't know what it is there was something like that there was one where there was an actual fbi report that was done on my grandfather i guess really because he was a bookie back in the day. And what the story was is that we had this hidden vault under the business. And if somebody could get in there, it's all sand and dirt and oil. Because we're not an old oil well at the time. So it was interesting that that one got out of control. You bring up a good point because if you don't tell your story, someone else will. And it might not be the one you want them to tell or it might be incorrect of some type. Absolutely. You know, you bring up a good point because if you don't tell your story, someone else will.

And it might not be the one you want them to tell or it might be incorrect of some type. Absolutely. That's absolutely 100% correct. So own your story. Yeah. And we had, you know, we had had this production company that came up to us. And at the time we were planning to set three Guinness World Records in a single day for a lobster festival that we used to do. Wow.

And we did it for 20 20 20 some years at least and so they're like we think you know you guys we've done a couple things with you on different shows the production company we'd like to see what your family's like outside of just you and your brother with the cameras rolling while you're setting these three guinness world records and they turned it into a sizzle reel and tried to shop it around and it was kind of marketed as Duck Dynasty with seafood. Yeah, there you go. At the time, Duck Dynasty kind of hit a wall in the media right when they were trying to sell it. So nobody wanted to touch it. But I looked at that and I'm like, this is really cool.

I hadn't thought about doing this before. So we ended up just doing it on our own. There you go. It was like Duck Dynasty, only you guys all have your teeth and don't don't date your relatives yeah we gotta throw some shit at duck dynasty they're gonna be we just had to use them for a joke there so thanks to them send them a check people so kings of fish oh the award-winning web series now made for tv so you guys just decided to do your own then yeah so we we started looking around and at this particular time, which I think was 2017, streaming channels were taking over studios. There was some, and I'm not an expert

in this, I didn't know, but some of the people in my network of friends were like, you know, you're going to find that a lot of these guys that are in production and editing and doing things, they're looking for extra work because they're getting cut. The viewership's shutting down and there's a lot of disruption. So we were able to find some people that were willing to help us in that exact same situation. And they do shows like Bar Rescue and Below Deck and some of the different food shows.

So, you know, we made an offer. We think we have a great story. We'd like to tell it on social media. We want to control it on our own. I don't want it to get into TV and where we lose control of the story. And I think there's a lot of value to that, and there was. We won a bunch of awards. We had millions of views. I think we hit 50 million views at one point. Holy crap. Just managing it on our own. So now we're working with a distributor who came to us during COVID

when everything was shut down and everyone was watching TV. And we had switched over to Pepsi, which is a different story. But Pepsi says, listen, we'd like to pay you to produce episodes that have our name in it. 22-minute episodes, like an actual TV series, not these little five-minute ones you're doing. So they're done. They're 99.9% done and in the can and ready to go.

Now we're just kind of waiting on the coordination around. I think it's going to be an Amazon prime, but there's those little details keep changing. Cause it's taking a while to get it done. This is exciting. You know, we had Carol Baskin on for the tiger King years ago. And I think when them and the,

and the tiger King dude himself went to jail, I think they both thought that it was going to be, you know, exemplary sort of like, Hey, these are some really cool people helping tigers. And when saw the final edit they were like wait we're all the bad guys here let's try how this turned out you know that's kind of how reality tv works sometimes so i think it's cool you guys are controlling the narrative and getting it out there let me let's get to the the

backbone of this business how did it start and tell us about some of the characters that built it and what their vision was. Yeah, sure. So originally by my grandfather in 1956. And as the story goes, my dad and his best friend were 15. And he gave him the choice. He goes, you guys can go to school. I'll pay for it. I'll go to college.

I'll pay for the whole thing. Or you can go to work. And they didn't like school, so they went to work. It was 200 square feet. It was just a little local store in the waterfront, like Harbor Community, the city of San Pedro. And, you know, the real backstories of my grandfather needed a way to show his income because he was a bookie.

So this was prevalent in town at the time. So the FBI wasn't far off on that one. Yeah, yeah. So they ran this business, and tommy who's my uncle my dad's best friend he's just he's just a machine he just pushed through with all these ideas and you know some of his friends had told me years years ago and we had career day when we're age 15 at high school and everybody went around said what wanted to do and tommy's i want to have the biggest fish market in town that was his ambition as a kid, as a teenager. And so he pushed and pushed

and eventually relocated down to the waterfront, took over a different location. And the short version is that it went from 200 square feet to 55,000 square feet with 3,000 seats, serving 2 million people in 2022. And so we broke a lot of milestones and the series really took us to a whole nother level. But the early vision was to have this, have the seafood brand. And what was interesting is that I would look at what we did because I, you know, I was born when I came into work, it was like 1982 and we had to just been torn down, evicted and had to rebuild the entire restaurant. And we reopened out of work. We were working in a parking lot for a year wow reopened in 1982 on good friday at san peter fish market ironically that's happening right now we got evicted

torn down and we're rebuilding and working at a parking lot for the whole last year as i speak holy crap so it's like we were prepared this time yeah but as this was happening you know they opened good friday 1982 we had one of the worst El Ninos, which might be happening again today, based on the rain that's going on in LA right now. And freeways and roads are closed. It's crazy. So, so they reopened, it rains the whole summer. Everybody mortgaged their house to build this business. It's all outdoor seating and they can't function. So what was happening is my uncle, Tommy was like just doing everything. He was throwing everything against the wall to see what would stick. So he's, you know, it's funny. I go to these Mexican

food restaurants. They have this thing on the menu now called fajitas. Never seen it before. So he goes, we can do that with seafood. We'll contract out. We'll buy bell pepper, tomato, onion. We'll make our own Cajun sort of spice. And we have all this frozen seafood we were using for smoked fish at the time.

We'll cut it up. We'll throw it on the grill with the veggies. We'll add red potatoes, maybe some garlic bread and tortillas and see what happens. And it evolved into this phenomenon for us where we were selling 2,000 pounds of tomatoes, 2,000 pounds of onions, 2,000 pounds of bell pepper, potatoes, 12,000 garlic breads. And we got to the point where we're selling 200 tons of shrimp. Like those numbers were in the week the shrimp within the year you know and so was this part of the big shrimp tray i see on the on the web on the website the world famous exactly so as that evolved people would say hey can i add lobster to this can i put

so over the years we just gave people the the choice to pick anything they wanted out of our fresh case and we would cook it that way for them and it just evolved into this experiential situation where people were coming with two and three generations of family driving from so we're in la right they're driving from phoenix they're driving from las vegas for the day that's a five-hour drive and then going back the same day spending the day with us so we realized we'd become a tourist attraction with this experiential offering and that's what we built off of in our media, social media. And that's what the series talks about, Kings of Fish. There you go.

You guys have multiple locations and you also ship. So if people around the nation want to order it, they can have a ship to them? Yeah, you can have a world-famous shrimp tray. There's a whole bunch of different choices on our website and also on goldbelly.com. And I think Amazon is still as active as well. And they're fresh fresh so they need to be cooked within a day or two i wouldn't they're not freezable because it's fresh vegetables they'll get ruined and then you know you could plan around a party super bowl event for example

we have special for that right now you can cook it cooks in 10 minutes 12 minutes super simple it's all pre-mixed ready to go just put in the frying pan or on an aluminum pan on your barbecue grill for a tailgate situation it's great real simple oh wow yeah you can get order some for the super bowl real quick if you can get it i think is that this sunday or next one it's next sunday right and we have time yeah as long as you order but i guess wednesday wednesday before order order up now for your super bowl tailgate party or whatever you're doing for for the thing so this is really great and you guys are really expanding this whose idea was? It was your idea to take this to the next level and develop all this brand building? Yeah, because you know, I'm the only one in the family for the most part that left to do

something else. I've worked, I actually did go to college. I didn't stay there to work. I went, I worked in banking. I worked in insurance, hated all of it. I've tried to open my own restaurant, disaster failure, like all these terrible things happen. Right. all of it. I've tried to open my own restaurant. Disaster, failure. Like all these terrible things happen, right? And I come back and I'm like, I got to come back. You know, I need a job. I got a family. I got three daughters. What am I doing?

And when I came back, my aunt, who was essentially our CFO, she got pancreatic cancer and died like very suddenly. No, it was only 10 years older than me, 11 years older than me. So I'm sitting there and with my sister and she didn't, she was her assistant, but she mostly was filing paperwork. She didn't really know what to do. So I'm sitting there going, okay, I work in an insurance company. This is an insurance issue. This is paperwork. We have to do that. I used to be a state farm adjuster. I know what to do there. Oh, all this, I used to be a banker. We got to do the bank. I opened my own restaurant. We need

the software for accounting. And all those failures came into play. and I was able to say, oh, shit, I know. Excuse my language. I know what to do here. I know what to do here with the business in a way that I never thought I'd be. It was a goosebump moment. It's like all those failures were meant to happen. So from that point forward, what I was really looking at, we have plenty of people in the family running the business. They're going to need another operator.

But there's a lot of opportunity outside the four walls, and let's look and see what that is and what we can create there. And that's where I want us. Expand the real vision. I love it. I think with the – I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the great thing about reality TV when it's not too stupid, I never thought very highly of pawn shops. I think more highly of fish markets because they're tasty

and they have fish and lobster. But, you know, I never really thought very highly of pawn shops. I think when I was younger, I lost a few things to a pawn shop or two in my 20s. But, you know, that pawn series they had on TV, the pawn shop in Vegas, you know, that's fun to watch. And it's interesting because you get sold on maybe some of the different characters. You like one of the characters, one of the others, and it brings kind of a humanity to, to a business and helps tell the story better. And, you know, people, it's a great way to amplify your message, I think. Yeah. That's worked out really well for us.

Yeah. Because, you know, one of the things that was happening is in the last year, so where we're located in the LA waterfront, there's been a move to redevelop it. And there was always this question of, do we need to move? Are we part of it? Like, how do we coexist around this? And it went in a bunch of different directions over the decade with economic turns and political changes. So now, you know, as what I had been doing for the last 10 to 12 years is trying to figure out how if people don't know who we are and what we do, why would they want us in this project? So I built our brand specifically so that we would be irreplaceable to the development,

which is essentially what had happened. Because in the course of 10 years, we went from $10 million to $30 million. We were drawing in more people. And there's the only entity that isn't subsidized, like the aquariums are subsidized, as an example, right? The government's sending the kids in there. So there's no, you don't have to pay for your own money when the school bus shows up. We don't have that luxury. We have to talk people into saying, I know you don't have so much money, spend it with us.

So when you compare us to those sort of businesses, only SeaWorld draws in people than we do the entire western seaboard but we didn't know that you know so as we were testing that and we're talking about it we're like okay those numbers we you know we did parking studies and counted cars we polled people we checked in to our credit card company at the time was giving us data on where customers live not not an address but just a dot on a map so you can see there's a hundred mile radius before it drops off. And then we released the first episode of our web series and it went viral. We were Instagram at the same time, Instagram recognized us as one of the top 10 most Instagram restaurants in the country because our customers were hating themselves.

They had nothing to do with us. You know, who's on there is Cat's Deli and Cafe Du Monde and all these major brands around the country. I'm like, wow, we're in this category, like Nobu. It's like, I don't belong there. And these things really started to take off. And then one of the companies that we were developing a relationship with, Food Beast was their name.

They were kind of like the food channel for millennials. And they said, listen, we're producing our own content. We're trying to make shows. And if you give us your series to put on, we'll do a promotion for you. And I didn't know what any of that meant because I wasn't following them. But they created this video. And you can search it. It's called the Super Tray.

If you search Food Beast and Super super tray, it should come up. This thing got 30 million views in the matter of two weeks. And people flew in from every country in the United States and other countries in a matter of, we went from a rainy day where we normally have a few hundred customers to where we had something like 30,000 customers in a week. Holy crap. where we normally have a few hundred customers, where we had something like 30,000 customers in a week. Holy crap. So it really showed me the story of power, the power of storytelling, of the trailer story, the Instagram. All these things converged at the same time, so we just continued to build off of that, build relationships that way.

It's really worked out well for us. There you go. Meet the Super Tray XXXL, San Pedro Fish Market. That's the second one we did, actually. Oh, there you go. Mastiff 100-pound seafood mountain. Yeah. That was...

It's going to take me a couple meals to complete that one. That's going to... That was... That was... $1,200. You can order it. Or let's see. Depending on the fish, it can cost up to $3,000.

Yeah. It depends on where you're paying it. You definitely want the lobster there. I'm a big lobster fan. I love lobster. Yeah. I could eat it all day long. Yeah, it's funny.

That used to be prison food because they look like that. If you look in the history of lobsters, Maine, they were mostly served to prisoners because no one wanted to touch these. I don't know how it changed to become like the delicacy it it is now because it's so expensive it's so good too you know i i was in denver once and i was really hungry and i really wanted lobster and we closed some big deal and i'd driven all over town to find this lobster place and this is before gps i couldn't find it and i go in and they had a giant this giant 10 pound lobster on the wall it's crazy and and i i go in and they were all out of lobster and the only thing they had was a three or four pound lobster and they were all under the ones and twos and i'm like fuck it just give me one i think it was a four pounder i was just that hungry man huge

and they brought it to me and i saw it and i just went how the hell am i gonna put this down and like by that halfway through the meal like the whole place was like cheering me on go one more bite one more bite yeah so it's a bit much but yeah i love the lobster so you built this business you got all the locations what's the future vision of what you see your brand doing do you guys want to expand maybe nationwide maybe or i think that's long term that's what we're looking to do for sure one of the things that was interesting so if we're going back to this this eviction situation which wasn't i mean it sounds terrible it was really us trying to work around the port of los angeles and developers to make sure we didn't stall their development because they're building a premier

thing and we'll be part of it but we didn't want to close down and reopen so we moved into this parking lot situation and you know as as this was happening, I had friends that are in real estate, commercial real estate, they're calling me going, for the amount of money you produce, the rent that you pay, the amount of customers, I don't understand why you don't have every broker in the country knocking your door down to give you some sort of an offer. That is weird. I thought I was doing a pretty good job telling our story. So now what we started doing is we started kind of putting ourselves out there because we're, although this is funny, right? We move into this parking lot again, you know, since 1982, we're now in a parking lot again.

And this time we were ready. We rented FEMA trailers that work as kitchens. We rented bathrooms. We rented generators. We're in a parking lot and we put a thousand seats in there instead of 3,000. All we could fit is a thousand. And we're still producing one to $1.2 million a month in sales. So it's like, we're still in the top 50 restaurants and the top 1% in the country out of a parking lot, running a temporary business at a fraction of the cost of opening

a new restaurant. We're sitting there going, should this be the model? Because you spent $10 million to build a restaurant from the ground up. And we're kind of going, should this be the model? Because you spent $10 million to build a restaurant from the ground up. And we're kind of going back and forth. And in the interim, like kind of in between before and after this, the city of Monterey, which is where the aquarium is, California, they had put out a request for proposal for a restaurant space. And we submitted and we won the bid. And I'm like, I can't do this because I don't know what's going to happen with this parking lot eviction situation. And they're like, no, we really want you here. So that might be a new opportunity. We're working with them to see if we can make that work. I reached out to

the city of Redondo Beach and they're like, we'd love to have you. We just talked to San Diego. We just had a meeting with Anaheim on prospective locations. So I'm finding now that when people find out what we're able to do and produce, they're open to working with us, coordinating with us, helping us. And that's really what I'm after right now is we're looking at locations. We're looking at financial opportunities to help finance these. And I'm thinking the farthest we'll go, we want to stay on the waterfront for the first phase of this expansion. And then ultimately Las Vegas and Phoenix, because we have huge customer base in both cities. Dude, Las Vegas? Yeah. Las Vegas? There's so many restaurants and chefs that they're killing it in Las Vegas or California or New York. They go to Las Vegas, and the stupid money that people pay for a bottle of champagne or an upgrade,

and the stupid stuff they'll pay. They're just like everybody moves. I lived in Vegas for 20 years every every chef and restaurant that moves to vegas you know there's different ways to to make it to to to kind of target high rollers and stuff and the amount of money they'll pay they're like nobody will jack up buying extra crazy stuff like vegas it's just you know there was a customer of ours and lived lived locally, came to me one day and goes, my family's moving to Vegas and we're going to open a seafood restaurant. It's going to be more kind of

a Mexican style seafood. He goes, I want to put your shrimp tray on the menu. If that's okay with you, I'll sign whatever, but I want to buy your seasoning so that I can make sure it's authentic. And I go, whatever. I don't think much of it. I don't have time to figure out the contract. I just give him the seasoning. And he's buying like, you know, whatever. I don't think much of it. I don't have time to figure out the contract. I just give him the seasoning and he's buying like 200 pound

barrels of it. Holy crap. And I'm like, what the hell is going on out there? So my brother's went out there with some employees to check it out. I walk in and got like a standing ovation from the customer base. It was like, we drive out there all the time. It's so convenient to have this in our area. So I know we have a market there for it. I just haven't figured out exactly the logistics. So one of the things that we're doing is, you know, it's not. So I'm third generation going on the fourth generation. Most businesses don't survive that.

And that's part of my plan. You asked me before is how do we remove ourselves from the operation side and just focus on being owners and start to replace ourselves with professionals and up our game. So that's what we've been doing. We brought in a COO, Greg Rinaldi, great guy. He was with Del Frisco's and Ruth Chris and a local steakhouse and seafood chain here in LA area called King's Fish House and 555. So he's come in right in time because he's a former baseball player too. So he's very much like team oriented. It's right here cheering everybody on, building up the team, really transformed the culture. So between him and I working together, we've been able to make some really amazing things happen, especially

making that parking lot function. Matter of fact, not only is the parking lot in a miracle, we found out three days ago, we had to move out of it to do another parking lot, lot 100 yards away because they realized they got to tear it up to pull utilities for the project. My entire team in three days has moved this thing 100 yards to a different parking lot. Wow. Wow. They're doing a real revision down there. I haven't been down there for a while. I used to go to Long Beach usually to go to Catalina Island and stuff.

Yeah. They're doing some work there. It's called West Harbor. You can search it. They have all their own sites, and we're about to sign a lease with them for the – so what we're doing there is they have – the building, the space inside of the West Harbor development

is just basically going to be a ground lease, and we'll have to build our own building. But they have to finish all their infrastructure work first. So they have a North Park area area and the plans for that are kind of way off in the future so what we're designing and it's going to cost us about a million dollars but it will be done by april will be a semi-permanent location that's going to be built out of customized like shipping containers where they're fabricating them to our specs so we can fill them with kitchen equipment dishwashing equipment we'll have a deck built we're a core events. They do Coachella and a bunch of other big concert venues

and they're local. And so between them and the contractor we've hired, we're breaking ground now to build, hook into utilities and actually have a semi-permanent location with 2000 seats on over 30,000. Now then we'll start building our permanent location about a hundred yards, but basically where we started, you know, a year ago, we may keep them both, or we'll start building our permanent location about 100 yards, basically where we started a year ago. We may keep them both, or we may just say, hey, let's unplug this thing and move it to Vegas and see if it works somewhere out there. Let's move it to Phoenix and see if it works somewhere out there. So we're still kind of playing around with what the ideal situation is, but we're looking for help. We're looking for money.

We're looking for locations. And so, yeah, this helps me get the word out, so I do appreciate that. Thank you. I wonder if a casino would be interested in bringing you on board, but then you might have to, you know, give them a cut of the action. And they like to kind of have their own restaurants. But I know there's a lot of them that brought in, what's that one guy, Flay, Bobby Flay, and different things and stuff.

But, you know, the prices they charge at these places are just extraordinary man i added a seafood concept in caesars i think it's really similar what we do but it's a little more mediterranean based it was really good but yeah i'm like i know that fish cost two dollars but i just paid 50 for it you know you know you could do i i've been seeing how they built the the stadium and they've got like crazy shit in there i just saw the million that they have a they have a wing or the ground floor for the wind people and it like it'll cost you like a million bucks to be in the front row on the ground in the wind suite i guess or something to be in the front row a million bucks a pop then there's 10 or 15 people that can be there

and then from there it kind of goes down if you want to be in the back rows but they have their like they have their own suite their own restaurants and shit so i know the oakland a's are supposed to tear down the tropicana and then go there but even a standalone restaurant i mean vegas has great standalone restaurants everywhere all over over the place. We love to eat. There you go. I went to Mastroianni's. Mastroianni's? Yeah.

Is it an Italian place, I think it is? Yeah. Their son married my best friend's daughter. I was actually super impressed. Really, really good food. I went to the wedding at a reservation right outside of town. Yeah. It's wild, the stuff they have there.

But yeah, the amount of money, especially in the casinos, that they charge people is just stupid and insane. You can't be in the casino and not spend $25 to $50 for eating anything in there. There's no McDonald's in the casinos. There might be one at Circus Circus. I spend way too much time in Vegas that I do know who you are. There you go. How did you guys survive working with family all these years?

It's really tough to work with family, especially when you get down the line of multi-generations, in and out burger. They had a lot of infighting there. How have you guys survived that? You know, it's been a challenge. There have been some issues. You know, I get along really well with my brothers and sisters.

We have our differences and there's been fights, but I brought in help. Actually, I brought in a lot of help. And I think that's, that's switched. That's made a big transition. One of the things that I learned in study is people really only listen to what they care about. Everything else just kind of goes around. It's learning to speak to those things. Like, hey, do you want to be able to feed your family?

Because if we fight, that might go away. We had one family member that, because we've had people that have died and sometimes the people that are inheriting those shares aren't always part of the business. And we've had some that have gone really south. We've had multiple lawsuits that we've had to settle. That's been a learning experience for me. So it sounds like you have had some fun, yeah. Yeah, we've had some that have gone really south. We've had multiple lawsuits that we've had to settle. That's been a learning experience for me.

So it sounds like you have had some fun, yeah. Yeah, we've had some fun. But what we've done is we've settled all of it. We've changed operating agreements to prevent issues in the future. We've given people a way out. You don't want to be part of it. There's buyout options now. And I had to kind of upgrade this because, again, head down, butt up.

Nobody worries about this. Oh, that'll never happen. Just stay busy. Everything's going to be fine. i'll talk to my uncle sometimes he's you know he's worked seven days a week for the most part since he's 15 and i'll say like how did you get to this point because this stuff's driving me crazy these are some of these arguments are dumb there's no reason for them and he goes i just went down there and worked i go okay so you just let you just let it fester till me have to do it.

Now it's your problem. We fixed it, and I don't want to undersell what he created. He was really – I have one consultant I work with who helps a lot with political stuff. He goes, you know what I've noticed with you guys is you're like the seafood diplomat. You're friends with everybody. You barely choose a side. You try to keep everybody happy,

and it's served you well up to this point. You don't have any enemies. It's weird. There you go. You like bill clinton getting asserifat and calisthenia guy together getting them together my house lawn shaking hands the yeah i mean it's it's a tough thing to navigate you know i mean the one thing we always say about partnerships is everyone loves each other and friendly when you're starting the business oh yeah, yeah, we're going to be millionaires. I love you, man. But when that money gets on the table, man, money and power, people change.

Then you find out who you really do business with. I imagine. Well, I say it's there's this in family businesses the distinctions are usually missing is fair and equal. They should be the same.

But I work 100 hours and you work 10 and everything's equal. There's a problem with that. So you either have to be willing to accept it and put a value on the peace on the holidays or you fight and try to work it out. You had a friend of mine on not too long ago, Ron Macklin. He has this book, Everybody's Afraid, that came out. Yeah. I've known Ron for many, many years, and we brought him in to help everybody. Really?

Because I'm like, I got a lot of problems here. I know people that aren't getting along. We're fighting. When we tried to open new restaurants, because I was looking at what we were doing, and I'm like, oh, this is actually – we will open a kitchen inside of our existing restaurant and within a week and everyone knows how to run it. How hard would it be to put it in a different city instead of inside the four walls? Because we had a lot of space. I was so wrong when we did that because what I didn't do is ask everybody, who do you think we

are? What's our brand? What's our core values? Who are we as a company? Everybody had a different opinion and they still do by the way so what was happening is we'd open these things and and we ultimately closed two of them because the smaller model doesn't work for us the bigger one we kept it does work well but 10,000 square feet is great for us 2,000 is different because you can't screw up there's no room for air in 2,000 square feet restaurant because the margins are so small so when you have five different family members that go in and tell them, you know what?

Throw some ramen on the menu. That's a good idea. Let's try it. And the cooks are like, what? I thought we were doing shrimp trays. What are we doing here? So they don't know who to listen to. And it creates chaos in operations.

So I had to really move other people in. Yeah. That's helped because now people can see, okay, I'm better off having somebody else do this. But the challenge is when all you've ever done is one thing your whole life. And I'm different that way because I've worked in other places. In my family, this is all they've done. So you're really messing with their identity at their core.

And where Ron's system was helpful is they're just scared. It's just figuring out how to lower their shields and really feel feel valued it's not always about how much money they're making it's just they want to be able to contribute and be heard and give them a voice i'm like oh it's so genius yeah it's really what we've worked on and it's helpful his book everyone is afraid a fable of fear friendship and flourishing yeah yeah it's a great example of so so he offers his 18-week program this is a g i'll give you an example i'm thinking there's nobody in here because i've known these guys that work for some of them since high school and i could never see an opportunity where they wanted to take on extra responsibility and learn and do something they just want to show up get a check go home

but they really loved working there it wasn't like they weren't soldiers if you will we're here to stick down if we're getting evicted, we'll move everything. No problem. But hey, I'm not going back to school. Don't try to teach me something. That's hard. I just want to work. I just want to be a machine. So Ron's offering this 18-week program, and there's reading, and there's videos, and there's calls.

I'm like, no one's going to do this shit. I'm in my mind. I'm in the story that this is a waste. But I still want to help everybody. And I know Ron's going to. I'm like, let's try it. I mean, I'm willing to try anything. And they said, wants it. I'm like, let's try it. I mean, I'm willing to try anything. And they said, hey, there's a completion dinner.

You should go. You're the CEO. I'm like, completion of what? The 18 weeks. A bunch of people did it. Shut up. So I go to this dinner. And there's this table of all of our chefs and cooks and managers and security guards.

And they're sharing these stories about how the 18 weeks changed their freaking life. Saved their marriages. They're better team members in the kitchen. They didn't understand how they were being, like, it was so transformational to see. I'm almost crying, you know, and I'm like, Ron, what the hell did you do? I better take the 18 weeks myself. I didn't even do it. I'm like, this is awesome. I didn't see. And then the book came out afterwards as kind of a supplemental to that. So yeah. So that has been a huge, huge difference because people that were working for us were stuck.

Are you owners or operators? I don't have to take orders from. And so this helped align it. Then we use something else called the Entrepreneur Operating System or EOS, which is I had a friend, another friend that was teaching it. They call it an implementer. They come in and help you implement it. And so between these two things, they work together really well because EOS is essentially around self-led teams being self-accountable. And Ron's

system is teaching people how to do that with each other. Kind of like a Ted Lasso thing. If you ever watch Ted Lasso, Ron's offering it. What Ron's teaching is basically what Ted Lasso is doing as a fun thing in the series. So when you take that and you mix it with EOS, you're like, oh my God, everybody believes in one another. They can get their own stuff done. And then you have the structure of EOS to know what their role is in the company and keep it going on a quarterly basis. So those two things have been really transformational for our company. I don't know what I would have done if I had to come across both of them. That is awesome. Getting people heard, dealing with their fears. I know, I think the in and out invites were pretty destructive

to the family. And I think if somebody wrote a book, we're still trying to get on on them. But yeah, it can be hard because people do the thing. And then you have, you know, I've been in businesses where I do most of the work. And somehow people are taking home half because we didn't structure the partnership right. And you're just like, this doesn't seem fair anymore. Something's wrong here. Something's wrong here. In the city we grew up in, like San Pedro, people are like, why don't you say San Pedro?

You can pronounce it Pedro, but I'll know you're not from there. That's the trick. So it's San Pedro then. So it's Pedro, but I'll know you're not from there. That's the trick. So it's San Pedro then. So it's Pedro, yeah. And I've heard different reasons for that. One of them is because in Portuguese, the pronunciation is a little different. There's a big Portuguese population that originally started the town. But what I was going to say is the majority of seafood came through our town for a long, long time.

And it was owned by specific Croatian, Italian families. And as we were working with them, we were doing the retail part of it. They were doing the wholesale. Actually, some of these families set up distribution across the country for squid and octopus and tuna and different things. And what my uncle had watched growing up around these guys, because these were his mentors, is how the families eventually started to fight one another and the businesses fall apart. And we had all these terrible stories. It was like his fear that this could happen. So when it started to happen to us,

we were able to put a stop to it, solve it, and fix it to not happen again. Yeah. Yeah, everybody will fight over the baby and kill the baby or whatever. Throw the baby out with the bathwater sort of thing and kill the golden goose. You guys at Gross Sales making you guys your third highest grossing independent restaurant in the U.S. in 2022.

You sold more Modelo than Angel Stadium. And attract more visitors than anyone in the West Coast. Second only to SeaWorld. And you have four Guinness Book of World Records. So congratulations. Give us your final thoughts. Tell people where to check you out four Guinness Book of World Records. So congratulations. Give us your final thoughts. Tell people where to check you out on the Internet as we go out. Right.

So check out, go to www.sanpedrofish.com, or you can go to Instagram and Facebook. We're at San Pedro Fish. TikTok as well. It's all at San Pedro Fish. And if you want to check out the web series, you can go to kingsoffishtv.com, where we have a trailer for the new season.

There you go. Yeah, this would be fun to watch on TV. I like how you guys control it. You can't have any of that. There was some shows with that Burnett guy who created reality TV where if they ended up with a mess, they'd have to go back and just make people the bad guy. They didn't have to find videos

that made them look bad throughout their videotaping uh yeah just throw them under the bus it didn't work out you know the the unexpected eviction situation created an entire background storyline oh really yeah because we had a different idea for the season and then it's like crap we gotta leave they're tearing our building down so we were able to to re-edit what we were doing as if it's happening as we're being evicted and actually much better so you have all these we're trying to open a new restaurant we're trying to do this we were doing all those things but it gave us the opportunity to really have the eviction as the bat and we were doing them all because we didn't know if we're going to get evicted so oh wow when it actually happened we're like okay i could just put all the stuff

together now and it would actually be more symmetrical and more timeline and actually much more dramatic i love it maybe we should create a reality show for the chris voss show we should we can film the behind the scenes i'll be there no one wants to see that just give me a gopher role i'll be like the the guy that's like breaking something and ruining this audio in the back. Yeah, I'd have to come up with some people I can blame for stuff. I need a staff that I can yell at and berate. I don't know. What's that one?

There's some people doing TikTok with their things. It's kind of like Howard Stern where, you know, Howard Stern always, if he didn't have a guest or an interviewer, you'd be like, hey, there must be not a good guest on today because they're infighting at the show. It has to be something like that. It was wonderful to have you on, Michael. Great to hear that your family has survived all the troibles of family businesses and you guys are just kicking ass. I'll look forward to you coming to Vegas soon. Hopefully I'll just put that on you. So thank you very much. Give us the dot coms one more time as

we go out. SanPedroFish.com KingsOfFishTV.com And you can order it around the nation, folks. Order up your own shrimp tray. Sounds like fun. There you go. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, FortressCrispFoss, LinkedIn.com, FortressCrispFoss, all those crazy places we're on the internet. audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, fortuneschristmas, linkedin.com, fortuneschristmas,

all those crazy places we're on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.