Donald Burns warns aspiring restaurant owners that building a restaurant can cost them their family relationships. Speaking from personal experience, he lists missed dinners, canceled family plans, and broken promises as consequences of relentless ambition and urges viewers to consider whether the business is worth that price.
Are you willing to lose your family? To really build your restaurant, you have to ask yourself this question. Are you really willing to go that far? Do you want to lose your family? Are you okay with your spouse, with your kids, paying the price for your ambition? Because here's the thing. If you keep going down this path, that's exactly what is going to happen. I tell you from personal experience. The missed dinners, the canceled family plans, the empty promises, they all add up. And then one day, you're going to look up and you're going to realize that while you were building a future, trying to build your brand, trying to build your restaurant, you lost the people that you were building it for. And that sucks.
If your restaurant only works because you work 80 hours a week, it doesn't work.
