Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
Welcome to this Classic episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past 10 years, published once a month. These are end-of-one conversations with end-of-one people. Sean Feeney makes you want to be a better person, friend, and leader. His story never gets old and is out-of-the-box thinking. We'll have you questioning the rule book. I hope you enjoy it.
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:40)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUMVC.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:09)
My guest today is Sean Feeney. Sean is the co-founder of Grove House Hospitality Group and the owner of Lilia and Missy, two of New York City's most sought after restaurants. He left his job in trading to chase down a dream with Michelin star chef, Missy Robbins. Sean leveraged his finance background, he was actually introduced to me through past guest Scott Goodwin, to write his own rule book for the restaurant industry, crafting several establishments that now boast several thousand people on the wait list on any given night. His story is as entertaining as it is inspiring. As we go step by step through his business endeavors, he points out all the times he was told, it's just always been done this way, and how that revealed to him where he could innovate. Sean's restaurants are the perfect example of building a business into the fabric of a community, collaborating with other brands in authentic ways, and staying true to oneself along the way. Please enjoy this awesome conversation with Sean Feeney.
All right, Sean, so you have one of the most interesting stories that I've encountered in a long time, and I'm especially interested because I love the category of people that had a long successful career in finance, and then do something completely different, but approach the new business, restaurants and food and hospitality, in your case, with all the lessons and what they've learned in finance applied to the new place, and I find that it just sometimes leads to these fantastic outcomes. Because people will be familiar with some of the restaurants, but maybe not with your story, maybe you could just start with that transition, like bring us to the end of your finance career and kind of what you were doing, and the story of seeing this window of opportunity in restaurants to do something wholly different. And maybe even how you process that psychologically, like it's a big switch, it's hard to leave finance, not many people do, but you've done it with spectacular success, so maybe just bring us into that moment of transitioning from one to the other.

**Sean Feeney** (4:02)
In 2003, I started in finance. 2009, I was married and moved into an apartment in the West Village, in a townhouse where there was three apartments in that building. My wife and I lived on the top floor, and right below us, a chef moved in. And I was a massive food fanatic. I think the best I was ever at in finance was at restaurants every single night. And I had just read an article about chef Missy Robbins moving back from Chicago to New York to take over a restaurant called the Voce. And when I saw her the first time in our building, I was like, Oh, my God, you're Missy Robbins? Aren't you opening a Voce in a couple weeks? And she said yes. And it's like, Wow, like, I'm going to come all the time. And sure enough, I did. So for the next three years, I would go a lot with my finance colleagues, my parents when they would come in from Jersey, my wife, our friends, and I would flex. But also be embarrassed to be a bit of a fanboy of hers. And she would come out to our table and do the whole spiel of shaving truffles on the pasta. And that's all we really were. We were just neighbors at that point. And she probably thought I was just a finance dork with my trader vest on. But she was really nice and I liked her, but we were always ships like passing in the wind. And then the night that Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, I was at Anchorage Capitol at that point. I just got home from work and saw her in the hallway and I invited her up to our apartment for dinner. She had told me that she closed her restaurants down because Hurricane Sandy that night. And she said, okay, what are we having? I said, I'm gonna cook. And she said, you're gonna cook for me? I said, yeah. And she was like, well, what are you gonna make? And I said, I'm actually gonna make bolognese, which is pasta. And she's like, you're gonna make bolognese for me? And Missy Robbins at that point was two Michelin stars and known for pasta. And she said, you got a lot of balls making pasta for me. And I said, trust me, I can't do much, but I love bolognese. I obsess about it. And that night she came up, we had bolognese, and I guess it was good because she stayed almost all night. And my wife, Marie and I told each other our life stories to her. She told hers to us. And my daughter was about one years old then. That night she told my wife and I that she was gonna be leaving her restaurant in 2013 And I couldn't understand why. Because she's at this point in her career and life that she always worked for. She was 42 years old then. And she had been working in restaurants since she graduated Georgetown when she was 22 And over those 20 years of being in the kitchens, she worked from the very start and the lowest ranking position to the very highest executive chef position. She had two Michelin stars. She was getting good reviews. She was being nominated for all these great awards and got great acclaim. She sat there and said, I need to leave. I'm taking a year off. And I'm going to essentially deplete my entire bank account to build myself back up. And I learned she was broken physically, mentally.