“Nearly Going Bankrupt Was The Best Thing That Happened To Me”
Her mother was a pioneer of vegan food, launching Sydney’s Bodhi restaurant 30 years ago, but Heaven Leigh never planned a career in hospitality. When the family business was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, however, she was determined to save it. Twenty years later, her business is thriving, and Heaven says it is thanks to the lessons she learned from the crisis.
Your mother built a food empire. When did you decide to follow in her footsteps?
I started working in my family’s restaurant after school when I was young but I never saw myself in hospitality. My dream was to work in film production. I stayed in hospitality because around 2002 my family fell into financial strife. They had done what a lot of restaurants do: become incredibly popular, and they mushroomed out. There were seven businesses, all plant-based, everything from restaurants to convenience food. They over-expanded. I was in my 20s and planning to move to London but I said, ‘I’ll give it two years and try and get the family business out of debt.’
How close did the business come to failing?
I came to work one morning at the Bodhi restaurant near [Sydney’s] Hyde Park and I was locked out of my own restaurant, with a security guard at the door. I was blindsided. My family owed millions of dollars: in rent, to suppliers and in taxes. It was incredibly scary, but I was committed to helping fix the problems – to get my family out of debt and trade our way out to save the business. I had to cut everything right back and sell all of those other businesses. It took two years but we paid back every creditor and the tax office. It was 10 years till we were fully profitable and debt free.
Did you and your mum agree on that plan?
No, we fought over it for six months. Part of it was that we had to take a mortgage on her house and she was afraid of being left destitute. Part of it was pride. In Asian culture in particular, we are supposed to listen to our elders, so it was hard to stand up to her. You see it a lot in family businesses: often it’s quite hard for the older generation to let go. One day my kids are going to supersede me and I’m going to hate it, but I have to learn how to bow out gracefully.
What did that do to your relationship with your mother?
It took several years for our relationship to recover. And it was a hard thing to go through. My mother is a tiger – she could be quite terrifying when I was growing up. That moment that you realise your fierce parent is a little more fragile than you realised, that’s a big adjustment.
How does saving a business compare with launching a business
It’s much harder to save a business. Everyone loves a new restaurant, but to take something that has had its peak and has dived, and to turn that around … you have to win back the hearts and minds of people who have written you off, and that’s really hard. I didn’t have any money to put into the business so all I could do was focus on the basics, the small things I could manage. Make sure the service levels are right up there, not just meeting expectations but exceeding them. Then as money starts to come in you can pay off bits of your debt, then you can start improving your venue, and you tick-tack between the two, year after year.
That’s a lot of pressure. How did you cope?
You keep putting one foot in front of the other, but you also need to build good coping mechanisms. For me, retreats give me time to clear my mind and to see things with a lot more clarity. I do a 20-day yoga and detox retreat every year and do a lot of journalling. It’s my way of expressing the problems I’m going through. It’s very hard for a lot of women to give themselves permission to look after themselves – it feels selfish. But when you clear that head space, new things bubble up.
Did going through that put you off expansion for good?
I have taken a more conservative tack. Rather than opening more restaurants and venues, we are looking at diversifying our portfolio and investing in start-ups within the wellness and plant-based space. It’s working with the same community and lifestyle but looking beyond food to see what else is out there: in wellness, in beauty, in fashion. We have been offered opportunities, including doing a range of supermarket dumplings, which would have been fantastic financially, but that would have involved compromising on the product and being detrimental to our brand. Everything here is handcrafted, based on dim sum tradition passed from generation to generation. Going from that to a factory-based product was too big a leap for me.
Looking back now at that time, what strikes you the most?
It was one of the hardest but also one of the best experiences I’ve ever had – and I would never have believed I’d say that. But during COVID I realised that my threshold for panic is very, very high. I have a lot of younger people working for me and I saw them floundering but I was like, “It’s not as bad as it was in 2002.”
Twenty years ago, vegan food was niche; now it’s pretty mainstream. Does that make it easier or harder for you?
It’s a double-edged sword. When you have cornered the market, when you are the biggest fish in small pond, you can coast along for a while. But I really love to see new venues come up. It brings out my competitive nature. In this business you always have to evolve – whether it’s the ingredients you use, the chefs’ techniques, or the systems and ways of working. And that’s what drives me.
Interview with Heaven Leigh by Ute Junker
Photos_ Supplied + Alamy