Restoran Lan Heong Yuan

I participated in a restaurant co-venture as a minority shareholder (12.5%), responsible for managing the restaurant’s core profit center — the Roasted Delights stall.
The project was eventually liquidated by mutual agreement among partners due to several structural weaknesses, including a lack of governance systems, poor budget planning, and insufficient product quality control.

While the project failed commercially, it provided significant professional learning value. I gained firsthand experience in governance versus personal trust, financial planning in partnerships, and the critical link between product quality and customer trust — lessons that became a foundation for my later entrepreneurial work.

Project Background:
After leaving my previous role, I joined a new restaurant project initiated by a former hotel manager whom I trusted. The venture’s total preparation period lasted around four months, covering site selection, renovation, and team formation.

My Role & Responsibilities:
I joined as a minority equity partner (12.5% stake) without direct control over the project’s overall strategy. Within the partnership, I was assigned to manage the Roasted Delights stall, overseeing daily production, sales, and quality tracking.

Key Challenges:

• Team Composition: The team consisted of three couples, which blurred the boundaries between personal and professional relationships and made governance and communication highly inefficient.

• Unclear Market Positioning: The coffee shop lacked a distinct concept, resulting in frequent shifts in operational strategy.

• Limited Technical Preparedness: As the person in charge of the core product line, I received only three days of technical instruction from an external chef, followed by roughly ten days of self-directed trial runs before the shop officially opened. Product consistency and flavor stability were therefore not yet secured at launch.

• • Controlled Actions:
    Within my scope, I concentrated on stabilizing the stall’s product quality through structured trial-and-error. Each day I recorded roasting parameters and customer feedback, attempting to build a repeatable process despite limited guidance.

  • Structural Constraints:
    Broader project issues — budget allocation, layout efficiency, and inconsistent strategic direction — were outside my authority. The store’s workflow design prioritized aesthetics (“feng shui” considerations) over practicality, creating inefficiencies that affected daily output.

  • Team Friction:
    Overlapping personal relationships frequently disrupted objective decision-making. Emotional disputes interfered with operations, ultimately eroding collaboration and execution discipline.

1. Systems Over Trust:
   Personal trust cannot replace transparent governance. Clear rules and defined accountability are essential when partners share both personal and business relationships.

2. Professional Budget Planning:
   The “one salary per couple” model distorted actual labor costs, masking cash-flow risk and limiting reinvestment capacity.

3. Product Quality as Foundation:
   Launching before product maturity severely damaged early reputation. Customer trust depends on consistent quality, not marketing effort.

4. Time Allocation Matters:
   The overall project had sufficient calendar time but poor allocation — months for renovation, only days for core product readiness.

5. Expert Involvement and Readiness Gates:
   Early engagement of experienced professionals and pre-defined maturity checkpoints could have prevented premature launch and reduced market risk.

1. PMP-Informed Retrospective:

   • Abstract: If I were to redo this with a PMP framework, I would insist on a thorough Stakeholder Analysis and Risk Management plan before launch. This would have identified the "chaotic team structure," "lack of core technical skills," and "inadequate budget" as critical, high-priority risks, making them key decision criteria for whether to even start the project, rather than problems to be reactively managed after launch.

   • Link to Article: Pre-Mortem for Startups: Why "Team, Tech, and Budget" Are the Top Risks to Address Before Day One

2. Thematic Deep Dive:

   • Abstract: The failure of this single-focus restaurant led me to rethink the business model towards one with more resilience and synergy. If I were to do it again, I would adopt a "Multi-Stall Ecosystem" model: we would operate 2-3 core stalls ourselves while leasing the others to external vendors. This model not only mitigates financial risk by sharing core costs like rent but also creates a symbiotic ecosystem by attracting diverse customer flows