The 16-year crash course that became SEOD.
I started washing dishes at sixteen. By twenty-five I was running multi-unit F&B operations. By thirty-five I had BCD Tofu House, Gen Korean Barbecue, Sake2Me Sushi, and Obaba Fresh on my resume and more than $54 million in annual P&L under my signature. I have managed teams that spoke five languages on one shift and sold inventory systems to distributors that were still using fax machines.
Every year I watched owners buy marketing and get back reports full of impressions and brand lift while rent came due and payroll taxes stacked up.
The gap was never marketing talent. It was that nobody was reading the business underneath it. A campaign cannot tell you your labor cost is six points too high, or see the walk-outs happening at the hostess station. Run ads for a restaurant whose ticket average is $8 lower than it should be and you get more orders, each one losing money.
Marketing without operations is filling a leaky bucket.
So I built SEOD. The agency I wished I could hire when I was in the chair: one operator who can run your Google Ads and audit your COGS. Who can write the SEO content and walk your floor during Saturday dinner. Who speaks your BOH language, who knows what a 6% variance on food cost means to your month, who picks up the phone when the POS crashes on a Friday night.
Trilingual, English, Korean, Spanish, which has mattered in every kitchen, every vendor call, every BOH briefing. Based in San Mateo. Reachable 7 AM to 11 PM Pacific for the businesses SEOD serves, which are, almost without exception, the kind of places I would eat at, shop at, or donate to myself.