Three locations, and an owner who no longer has to be in any of them.

Liron founded Temakasi in 2019, a sushi hand roll bar where each roll is served fresh, one at a time. When he joined The Scaling Engine in January, he expected the work to be about sales and opening more locations. What he got, he says, was better than that.

His first reaction to the pitch was skepticism. He wanted to see what this was about. What moved him was a question: if you have never scaled a restaurant concept, how would you know how to do it? Working with someone who had done it was the reason he said yes. In his words, he had never met anyone with full knowledge of what it takes to scale a restaurant concept until he met Alex.

The change started with the organizational chart: the key people in top management, then everything that trickles down to the specialists. Then came the daily M1 reports. Instead of walking into each restaurant to see what happened, he sees it from other people's eyes, every day, in a report. Then he coaches the managers on what the reports show, and the managers coach the team.

The effect on his role was total. He used to be every role in the restaurant. Now he manages from afar and describes it as a more enjoyable and far more efficient way to run the business. The business comes to him instead of him chasing it.

Two months before the interview he opened the third Temakasi in Williamsburg. He is direct about the connection: there would have been no way to scale into multiple locations without the right systems and the proper management structure in place first.

He also credits the group. Bouncing ideas off the other owners, hearing their businesses and their pain points, was as valuable as anything else. His advice to an owner watching: if you have never done it before, working with someone who has will pay off tenfold.