I love the romance of starting and ending my day with locally made skincare products. I love the smell of freshly brewed coffee with locally roasted beans. I love going on dates with my partner to the farmers market to curate every corner of my life. Life is how you curate it.

I started my career in a recession. I graduated from UCLA as an Art History major. I knew a career in the arts was not going to be lucrative. I was ok with that. However, the uphill battle of trying to find a job in the arts in LA in 2009 was impossible. Art institutions were cutting budgets while ½ the galleries in the city closed or moved online. I worked three jobs busing between Hollywood and Santa Monica. I spent my days working for an art collector while moonlighting at an accounting company on the westside. At night, I was slinging salads in Culver City at an up and coming restaurant chain called Tender Greens.

I needed full-time sustainable employment. My foster parents were pressuring me to move home, and I didn’t want to! My financial projections were questionable. I went further into debt. The prospects of finding a career felt impossible and I was scrambling for hours. I offered to help Tender Greens founder and then CFO, David Dressler, with the A/R (accounts receivable) for the Culver City location. They recently finished opening their third location in West Hollywood and were starting construction on a fourth in Hollywood.

Tender Greens was where I began to understand the power of micro-economics.

Every time a Tender Greens opened up, they supported 60-70 different vendors and local farmers. While this was great for the community, it also created a lot of invoices. After spending hours entering invoices every week; I saw an opportunity I couldn’t miss. They needed administrative help, and I needed a career. I pitched them for a full-time job. In just under six months of working on the floor (two weeks before my foster parent’s deadline to move home) I became Tender Greens’ first official corporate employee.

In many ways, the company was still in start-up mode. It was projected to double in size in under a year. We went from three to seven restaurants in 12 months. I sat in on every board meeting they had, taking notes feverishly as the three founders ironed out their growth plan. Honestly, it was a mini MBA. This was before they had a corporate office; the owners still worked on the floor when employees called out sick. Hell, my desk was upstairs with the CFO at our Culver City location in a storeroom amongst boxes of wine and napkins.

It was formative, and it still shapes a lot of the decisions I make today in my career in healthcare technology. The core value of community never escaped me. At the time, every Tender Greens' reflected the community they opened in. Artwork in West Hollywood paid homage to the fight for LGBTQ rights with huge black and white photos of the Castro from the ’70s. Our Hollywood location mirrored the famous Hollywood sign with larger than life letters across the breadth of the dining area, all reclaimed from a local salvage yard. The restaurants were designed by founder Matt Lyman, and former COO, to be eco friendly all the way down to the toilets and lightbulbs. Tender Greens was trailblazing in sustainability.

Each location serviced a daily average of 1,000 patrons a lunch rush. That was the model, take a cut on the overhead to bring quality food to the masses, with cafeteria-style service so what is lost in overhead you make up by mass. The reason I point out this model is that I started this part of my journey in 2009. Tender Greens was founded in a recession. I started my career in an industry that has supported me through the hardest times of my life. When I started my social media business, I worked as a waitress hustling in my off-hours. It breaks my heart to watch the restaurant industry suffer so drastically during this pandemic.

Restaurant margins are slim as it is, even in the finest of dining.

I’ll never forget when Erik Oberholtzer, founder and former CEO, who is now doing amazing stuff in Philadelphia with branding agency Cohere (this is a whole other blog post), made a call across all seven of our locations to help save a goat cheese farm. The farm was in the red, and in one-month Tender Greens was able to bring them into the green with the sheer buying power of their community.

I don’t know what the next decade is going to look like but there is power in our dollars. The Pandemic has us re-thinking what a well curated life is. We have the power to redistribute our dollars equitably. Micro-economics is the key to creating sustainable communities that are diverse, vibrant, and thriving.

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