Recent restaurateur La Kisha McNeil cooked up a career switch that had her learning on the job

For the past 20 years, La Kisha McNeil has worked the numbers. After graduating from Long Island University, she was employed as an accountant, plying her trade for a range of different customers in a variety of industries. About five years ago, she says she met a friend who turned her on to the mortgage industry.

"I watched him earn a ton of money in an industry that, to me, was fairly easy and well-regulated, so I tried it myself," says McNeil. Eventually, she grew bored with accounting and spent more of her time making mortgages—enough time to build a nest egg of her own. And she had big, long-standing plans for those funds.

"Ever since I was a little girl, I dreamed of owning a restaurant of my own," she says. "I come from a long line of cooks. My grandmother was the best in the world. She never purchased a jar of anything; everything was made from scratch. I have four aunts who cook. I know how to cook, but it’s not my passion. I'm a backroom person and a people person, so a restaurant combines my love of eating, operations and people."

So, in November 2007, McNeil opened Josephine's Table, a 33-seat soul food place in the borough of Queens, New York. She and a partner—a prior owner of the building in which Josephine's is now located—put up the start-up capital. Fortunately, the location was already a restaurant, so they already had much of the necessary equipment (McNeil, a majority owner, put up more cash, while her partner offered some funds and the existing equipment).

Dreams are fine, but reality often presents us with problems we may not have anticipated. McNeil had some experience with day-to-day food operations, having done some accounting work for a well-known New York City catering firm.

"Even with that experience, we still had some trouble with inventory and receivables up front, because the staff didn’t get it,” she notes. “We had some kinks to work out, but we did that quickly."

While she was able to meet the financial challenges head on, what surprised McNeil was the need to rebuild the reputation of the restaurant on a local level. She relates that her hurdle was overcoming the poor reputation of the soul food eatery that existed in Josephine’s space before she took it over. Over the years, the level of its cuisine and status had gone steadily down hill among the locals—perhaps any restaurant’s best customers in a crowded city.

"We had to gain back the trust of our neighbors," says McNeil. "We visited all the local businesses to let them know who we were and ask them for the opportunity to prove ourselves. We did a lot of walking. But once they came in and saw that the environment and food had changed, almost everyone was receptive to us."

A lot of that is the food, but she also attributes the restaurant’s increasing popularity to the atmosphere, which McNeil calls a "casual place with a comfortable atmosphere." There are four flat-screen TVs, on which she plays classic movies most of the day. "Our staff is like family, and we work to make customers happy while they’re here," she says.

Currently, Josephine’s eight employees serve Southern cooking—barbecued chicken, beef and pork ribs, catfish, cornbread and other mouth-watering fare—to about 100 hungry customers every day, excluding Mondays. The weekends, featuring an all-you-can-eat Sunday gospel brunch, bring in the most traffic. The entrees, which average about $9 apiece and include two sides and a big slice of cornbread, are the foundation for an average weekly take of about $7,500 to $10,000, which McNeil says is on the upswing.

If she was bored with her previous work, McNeil has no such opportunity now. She spends about 18 hours a day at Josephine’s Table, and still works on mortgages out of her office there.

McNeil is working as hard as she is as much for her future as she is for her present. "My plan is to create a franchise of restaurants and catering halls under the Josephine’s Table name," she affirms. "I also want to grow our corporate-owned locations. Five years from now, I envision having already started franchising with at least four more corporate-owned locations. I think my model can work well beyond this location."