I took a nearly $90,000 pay cut to work in food—now my restaurant brings in more than $1.8 million per year

This is a special Gen X installment of CNBC Make It's Millennial Money series, which profiles people across the globe and details how they earn, spend and save their money.

Ji Hye Kim never considered a career in food. The 46-year-old's family immigrated from South Korea to New Jersey when she was 13, and she spent her early adulthood looking for ways to stay in the U.S.

Every decision she made revolved around one question: "What is it that I have to do to keep the legal status?" she says. Getting into college meant getting to extend her student visa, for example. And any job she got after would need to sponsor a green card.

Kim attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and got a job in hospital administration in New Jersey after graduating in 2002. Though the job sponsored her green card, she ultimately got her citizenship through marriage. Her husband was working at her alma mater, which brought Kim back to Ann Arbor in 2007.

"This was the first time in my life that I was able to ask myself, 'What is it that I want to do with my life?'" she says.

While considering her next move, she saw a job posting for a cheesemonger at Zingerman's Delicatessen. The job would mean taking a significant pay cut, from her previous salary of about $105,000 per year to one that paid about $16,800 per year. Still, she had a good feeling about it.

Indeed, at Zingerman's she found a passion for the business of food, and in 2016, she partnered with the deli to open her Korean restaurant, Miss Kim, in Ann Arbor.

It took a few years for the restaurant to find its footing, including figuring out how to pivot its indoor dining activities during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, but Kim stayed persistent. Miss Kim brought in $1.89 million in sales in 2023 and made a net profit of $101,553 for the fiscal year from August 2022 to July 2023. Kim also paid herself $70,000 in 2023.

Here's what it took to build the business.

Kim was originally hired to work in the specialty department at Zingerman's, which sold artisanal foods like sourdough bread and freshly pressed olive oil. While there, she learned the stories of where the food she was selling came from: families that have been making balsamic vinegar for generations, cheesemongers whose cheese is aged in caves by monks.

"I started wondering, if I had Korean food or Asian food and I was able to tell this story…what would that look like?" she says.

Kim also started to miss her mom's homecooked Korean meals. When Kim was growing up, after a full day of working at the nail salon she owned, her mom "still found time to make her own kimchi from scratch," she says. The Korean food in Michigan didn't quite feed her home-cooked food cravings.

But in 2010, Kim learned about Zingerman's Path to Partnership program, an "entrepreneurial program where any staff or non-staff can apply to become a partner at an existing business or create a brand new Zingerman's business," she says. She and a fellow Zingerman's employee decided to pitch a pan-Asian restaurant.

Kim and her partner met with Zingerman's founders Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig to present their idea in 2011. "They responded very positively," she says, and told the two to write a vision for their business.

Kim and her partner decided to start with a street food cart, called San Street, selling dishes like soft tofu and avocado and bibim gooksoo. Zingerman's provided various types of support, including human resources and the physical cart itself, which Kim describes as a "tiny hotdog cart" rather than a "super fancy food truck."

It was located outside in a downtown parking lot dedicated to food carts, with their kitchen a block away. Kim's partner left the business after the first season, but Kim continued operating the cart for four seasons altogether, from April to October. She worked 80 hours per week, "broke even and had a very, very small profit by the end," she says.

In between seasons, Kim designed a sort of food business "curriculum" for herself, she says. She worked at different restaurants, beginning as a line and prep cook at Zingerman's and including stages at Korean restaurants like Hanjan in New York.

Throughout the process, she decided she wanted her business to sell Korean food, specifically. "That's where I felt that I had the most familiarity and passion," she says.

By 2015, Kim felt she'd learned everything she could from operating the cart and working back of house in various establishments. It was time to open her restaurant.  

Funding came from several places: She went with Zingerman's line of credit to get a small business loan of $480,000 from a local bank, got a few hundred thousand-dollar loans from Saginaw and Weinzweig's holding company, Dancing Sandwich Enterprises, and management consulting company ZingTrain, and put in her own investment of $150,000. Altogether, construction and early operating costs equaled just over $1 million.

Miss Kim opened in November 2016. Kim owned 50% of the business and the Zingerman's founders owned 25% each (during the pandemic, she bought another 1%). The idea was to make Korean dishes with local Michigan ingredients such as beets, asparagus and corn.

In Korea, the food is highly dependent on the region of the country it comes from, sometimes even on the season. "Being true to where I am in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in southeast Michigan, is kind of following the philosophy of Korean cuisine," Kim says.

Despite the success of the food cart, opening a restaurant came with its own set of challenges.

For one, customers didn't always connect with Miss Kim's menu, which initially served Korean dishes from Kim's own childhood like tteokbokki with gochujang and napa cabbage kimchi. But Kim realized it was "only one section of Korean food, and it's incredibly subjective and personal."

Kim started doing in-depth research about her homeland's cuisine, going back as far as 150 years. That led to introducing new dishes like five spice braised pork shank and tteokbokki with cheese, which she believes helped with sales.

In the fiscal year from August 2016 to July 2017, Miss Kim brought in $699,877 in sales, according to Kim. By 2022, the restaurant was turning a profit, and during the fiscal year from August 2022 to July 2023, it brought in $1,833,096.

Getting used to the influx of staff and customers at certain times of the year was another challenge, since Ann Arbor is a college town. "Our turnover is really dependent on the semester schedule," Kim says.

The pandemic presented its own set of hurdles, with indoor dining shutting down in March 2020. Kim had to get creative to keep the business going.

"It took us less than a week to reopen, and we reopened as a takeout restaurant only," she says, adding that "we tried meal kits, we tried takeout cocktails, we tried big, family-sized meals instead of individual dishes."

Miss Kim stayed a mostly takeout restaurant until the vaccine was available to ensure it wouldn't have to shut down again. It's now back to offering indoor dining.

Today, Miss Kim is profitable and thriving, with total sales of $1.89 million in 2023.

Here's a look at the restaurant's expenses in 2023:

The largest expense is labor, which totaled more than $570,000 in 2023. Figuring out labor costs was also an early challenge for the business.

While the U.S. minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, the tipped minimum wage for servers who also earn tips is $2.13 per hour. If a worker's tipped minimum plus their tips equal their local regular minimum wage, their employer only owes them that small tipped minimum. This can differ in each state. The tipped minimum wage in Michigan is $3.93 per hour, for example, and the regular minimum wage is $10.33 per hour.

But Kim didn't want her employees to rely on "weather or customers' mood," she says. When Miss Kim first opened, "we decided that we're going to do away with tipped credit and pay people living wage." Everyone got $14 per hour and there was no tipping at the restaurant.

However, customers complained. "They wanted to leave tips because the tip culture is so prevalent in the United States," Kim says.

Ultimately, the restaurant landed on a hybrid model: Everyone's starting salary is now $12 per hour with various opportunities for raises, and everyone pools the tips.

A "stressed out staff is less likely to provide excellent service to our customers," Kim says of the philosophy. "And staff happiness and longevity has a direct positive financial impact on our business."

Kim looks forward to continuing to grow the business. "We are really excited to be breaking the $2 million [in sales] point this year," she says.

Miss Kim's unique dishes have also garnered recognition. In 2024, Kim received her fourth James Beard nomination for best chef, and in 2021, she was named one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs.  

"When I get these accolades, it's a little bit disorienting and I'm grateful," she says. "And it is an affirmation that maybe we're on the right path."

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