Yann de Rochefort thought he wouldn’t have to quit his day job. When he and a partner started designing the space that became Suba, a trendy Spanish restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he was working in marketing for Allied Domecq. But after he put together a business plan detailing what the space and menu would look like and how the returns would be structured, convinced 20 investors to give $10,000-$100,000 towards the $1m needed to create the space and actually opened the restaurant, he concluded it was not a part-time job.
“I realised if I didn’t quit the odds of us making it were slim,” he says.
