The Story of Fiona: a Mission of Saving Her Restaurant from Covid-19

Fiona Li, who originally came from China and moved to the United States a couple of years ago, opened a restaurant in Tucson, Arizona. Before she came to the U.S., as a management major student in college, Fiona has also had a passion for cooking. Based on her management skills and her love for cooking, she has always had the dream of managing her own Chinese restaurant in a foreign country. While she initially arrived in the U.S., she didn’t speak English fluently. In order to make a living and learn more about the experience of managing a restaurant, Fiona worked for a midsize Chinese restaurant in Dallas, Texas, for one year before she had her own restaurant. During this time, she learned how to speak English and some basic knowledge of owning a restaurant in the U.S. in terms of renting, filing tax forms, managing the staff, and promoting the restaurant. In 2019, She decided to move to Arizona to pursue her dream of opening her own restaurant.

Covid Created Adversity for Restaurants

As the owner of Fish Wok Restaurant, Fiona oversees a team of five employees, including a food preparer, dishwasher, cook, waiters, etc. Besides the overall management of the restaurant, she is mainly in charge of the promotion and marketing strategy planning and new recipe research. The restaurant was going well until Covid-19. From the beginning of the spread of Covid-19 in March 2020, Fiona had to cut down employees due to a lower customer volume and take-out only model that led to decreased monthly revenues. The great economic pressure that Covid created on small-to-midsize restaurants has caused a lot of close-down around Fiona’s area. The rental rate also went up. While hiring fewer employees to reduce wage expenses, Fiona herself had to stay at the restaurant all day to do what lay-off employees normally did. She also has two young children that need to be taken care of at home. Fiona needed to sterilize the whole restaurant several times a day following the Covid-19 requirements to ensure the disinfection measurements were well implemented for the health of employees, customers, and her family. As the risk of Covid-19 and the expenses went up, Fiona confronted the greatest obstacle ever in her life.

Facing Adversity

In order to overcome this adversity, Fiona shifted from a negative mood of worries to a strong psychological state of positiveness quickly as she understood that though she couldn’t control the spread of the virus, she could at least do her best to self-care and implement strict cleaning process in her restaurant to protect people around her. Her management skills also made her closer to her employees in this hardship by giving more trust and understanding. Fiona indicated that the support she obtained from her employees was very important for her to get through the adversity both emotionally and restaurant-wise while this was based on her belief in her employees first. At the beginning of the crisis, Fiona also listed the support she may need and the possible resources for these supports to understand the size and the scope of the situation so that she could have a plan that looked forward to the best actions given new realities. Fiona was passionate about what she does and she strategically used this optimistic attitude to influence her employees, which fostered a positive emotional state and the morale in the restaurant. She insisted on a transparent communication style in the restaurant in terms of talking actual solutions, plans, and strategies with her employees to build more trust and provided more motivation for employees by giving higher incentives. Fiona also mentioned she received a lot of support from families and friends not just financially but psychologically. This is important as we all need someone we love to stand beside us while facing adversity. In the process of getting through the hardship, she found the importance of appreciating the giving of others and controlling emotions by avoiding the tendency to fear, anger, or assign blame.

As you can see, confronting Fiona’s adversity wasn’t easy as her restaurant almost went down due to Covid-19. However, she overcame it by strategically giving trust to her employees, having a strong belief and passion for what she is doing, controlling negative emotions, and constantly looking for help and resources that can solve her current problems. And this is what we can learn from her adversity.