Brendan and Bianca Shah: Collaborate, Don’t Compete

**Josh Kopel** (0:00)
What are you doing this month to make sure your business grows? Do you mind if I make a suggestion? This month's free Restaurant Marketing Master Class is about one thing, using AI to create an unfair advantage. And not by replacing what makes your restaurant special, but by helping you move faster on the work that actually drives growth. I'm taking my proven tactics, tools, and strategies and showing you how to use AI to sharpen your marketing, speed up execution, and turn good ideas into action without getting buried in the details. You'll be working with me personally to build these strategies into your business in real time. And because of that, space is limited. But you can sign up for free today by going to restaurantbusinessschool.com.
Again, you can sign up for free today just by going to restaurantbusinessschool.com. I'll see you there. Now here we go.

**Brendan Shah** (0:53)
Tea in Chado's setting is just a social lubricant. If you view Chado as a place that fosters relationships, then you can turn Chado into basically anything. Because as long as you build some place where people feel free to grow their relationships, then you can use those relationships to accomplish bigger things.

**Josh Kopel** (1:13)
Welcome to FULL COMP, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders and innovators, served up on the house.
What if the smartest thing you can do with your single biggest advantage is handed to the competition? Brendan and Bianca Shah run Chado Tea Room in the wholesale arm International Tea Importers. The family business their father Devan built in one of the engines of America's specialty tea culture. When he died in 2016, the two of them inherited a company that lived entirely in their father's head, and they rebuilt it from first principles. In today's conversation, we get into why selling their best tea to direct competitors grew the entire category, how the wholesale and resale sides of this business power a single flywheel, and why pairing a 300 tea catalog down to its essentials is what is unlocking growth. If you're competing on product alone, this episode is going to show you what it looks like to build something that nobody can copy.

**Brendan Shah** (2:22)
Chado is a family business. It was founded by our parents, Devan and Rina Shah, in early 90s. I was born in 92, Bianca was born in 93

**Josh Kopel** (2:30)
That doesn't make me like you anymore. I was born in 1979, the 70s.

**Brendan Shah** (2:38)
Our parents, they worked really hard for the business. They started with one shop on 3rd Street in La Cienega, and they grew that into what became 5 different restaurants, afternoon tea shops all over the LA area. One of the things that our parents are known for is their influence on the tea industry. That's what has gotten Chado to where it is today, is we've helped establish the specialty tea culture here in the US over the last 30 years.
Our journey, maybe I'll have Bianca talk a little bit about how we got involved.

**Bianca Shah** (3:12)
Obviously, we were little tykes when our parents first purchased Chado and acquired it. I can go back to when I was 12 years old and this one summer where I think all the employees quit at our 3rd Street location and my mom said, You're here, I'm here, we're going to go. Me and her ran the store that summer.
I was 12 years old. This is like labor laws. I don't know if we should talk about that, but when it's your family's business, you do it. That was my first year of actually working in the tea room and I loved it. When I was 16, I went in to manage the store one summer.
This is such a family business.
Brendan came in one day as a busser, bussing the tables, the dishwasher. My grandma came in, she was making the tea. My mom was the cook and I was the waitress outside. That's how much of a family business this is. Meanwhile, I'm calling my dad, asking him questions about tea. I'm getting questions about tea. I'm 12 I don't know. So I'm calling him like, Hey dad, what is this about green teas and black teas? And it was a mess, but it was our mess. It was a fun chaos looking back, obviously.

**Brendan Shah** (4:16)
We've been selling tea online since like the early 2000s. So I was during that same summer, I was packing teas and sending them out to customers. More recently though, our father passed in 2016
And one of the things that we had to do was step into his wholesale business was a wholesale tea business, which supported the tea rooms as well. So one of the benefits of having the two companies that we did was that we would support the tea industry with the specialty tea wholesale business, and then Chado would be our playground to try and to figure out what customers want in the different types of teas that they want. And we found that there's this really big niche for afternoon tea, which has only been growing since we started Chado 36 years ago.