Turns Out… I Was in Training

The restaurant job I hated that quietly prepared me for my career as an EA

I hated working in my mom’s restaurant. It was one of those small neighborhood restaurants that sold Asian food along with fried chicken and burgers.

After school in junior high and high school, and even on the weekends, I had to head over there and man the register, peel pounds and pounds of boiled potatoes, scrub and clean sticky, crusty ketchup bottles that never felt clean enough, and refill salt shakers with grains stuck to my hands.

I didn’t understand. Where was my freedom? I was a teen! I wanted to have fun, hang with friends, have sleepovers, talk about boys. I rarely got to watch movies at a movie theater back when that was a cool and fun thing to do with friends. I knew zero pop-culture references (including the ones about Friends!!!). And I basically had the social life of an excel spreadsheet. I was always working (and studying) while everyone was just being a kid.

But you know what? Sometimes, I wish I ran a coffee shop or small restaurant right now where I could have my kids work there a few hours a day. Why? Because the experience at my mom’s restaurant is where I learned the skills no one teaches you in school.

I hated it at the time, but in retrospect, I’m so glad I went through that experience. It built me. So much of who I am now is because of the things I’ve done and experienced in the past, and this was a huge part.

Cleaning ketchup bottles and salt shakers and refilling them seemed tedious and dumb at the time, but the devil is in the details. Everything about the customer experience at a restaurant comes down to the details. Imagine eating your meal, grabbing for the ketchup, the bottle is oily, and there’s old ketchup crust around the rim. You’d lose your appetite. You’d think, if a restaurant can’t keep little things like these clean, what else are they not keeping clean?

Interacting with so many different types of customers (nice, mean, generous, funny) at the register helped me learn about people. It taught me how to anticipate needs, remember names and orders, make people feel seen, and solve problems before they even asked. It also made me realize that everyone is so very different from each other. And even the same person can be different on a day to day basis!

Peeling potatoes taught me about patience and prepping properly before executing. The end result for anything and everything we do requires preparation and setting up the scene and carefully thought out methods.

Plating the food and making it “pretty” helped me learn about presentation. My mom always said people eat with their eyes first, and we must always have red, green, and yellow/orange on the plate to make it look appetizing.

And funny enough, these are all things I still do now as an EA.

When making a salad for Condoleezza Rice for our board meeting, I had to think about colors, variety, presentation, flavor combinations.

When dealing with frustrated or angry executives, I know how to keep my cool and know when to talk, when to stay quiet, and how to read the room. I also know how to listen first, de-escalate, and solve the problem without adding fuel to the fire. The customer is always right, so how do you deal with it and have them leaving happy?

When putting together an event, I know that the little details and preparation are what matter. So depending on the type of event and purpose, I focus on florals, food choices, lighting, colors of linen, types of chairs, ambience, room, views, etc. No one really notices the details when they’re there, they think that’s just how the room came or that’s just how the tables look, but they do notice when they’re not there.

At the time, it felt like I was stuck in a restaurant.

Turns out… I was in training.

Training for reading people.
Training for anticipating needs.
Training for handling chaos with a smile.
Training for a career built entirely on details.

I didn’t know it then, but my first EA job started behind a cash register at the ripe old age of 12… 32 years ago today! :)