Chapter 11: 6 Weeks, 12 Staff, and the Decision That Built Town Hall
From Tanegashima to the World — Chapter 11. The journey continues.
← Chapter 10: The Day Otogo Opened · Series overview
Chapter 11: 6 Weeks, 12 Staff, and the Decision That Built Town Hall
After the chaos of 1,000 onigiri on opening day, we did not pause.
We went into improvement mode.
Then I made the bigger call.
And almost lost everything.
This is the story of the decision that built Town Hall.
Small Fixes, Big Confidence
The Ultimo store taught us, in real time, what we had not yet built well enough.
So we kept fixing things.
The nori. We cooled the rice slightly, and the crispness came back.
The fillings. We made them bigger, and we raised the price by a small amount. A Japanese convenience store portion is calibrated for Japanese mouths and Japanese hands — it does not fit Sydney.
The soba. We added 5% of a gluten-free super-grain as a binder. The noodles now held their bite without breaking the gluten-free promise.
Small fixes. Big confidence.
If a model can survive the chaos of an opening day and improve from there, the model is real. Not perfect — but real.
So I made the next call.
The Decision: A Brand Shop in the Heart of the Sydney CBD
If the model worked at one store, it would work at scale.
The next move had to be a brand-defining Otogo in the heart of the Sydney CBD. Not a second location to spread sales — a flagship to tell the world what this brand was actually about.
I negotiated the lease. I paid the agent. I transferred the bank deposit.
The plan was clean: close my two Yachiyo restaurants in December, move every single staff member into the new Otogo without a single layoff, open before Christmas.
In 17 years of opening restaurants in Sydney, I had never been late to open. Not once.
The longest fitout I had ever run was eight weeks. And the reason was simple: I paint the walls myself. I build the tables myself. Whenever a contractor was slow, I picked up the brush.
I was confident. The plan was clean.
Then the plan met a Council.
When the Landlord Signs on a Different Clock
The landlord on this site was not a private owner. It was a Council.
And Councils sign on a different clock.
My signature was on the contract from day one. The keys were in my hand. The fitout team was on standby.
The only thing missing was a single signature from the Council’s top officer.
Without it, the bank would not release the equipment loan I had budgeted my entire cash plan around.
November ended. The signature did not come.
December started. The signature did not come.
Mid-December — three weeks before Christmas — finally, the signature arrived.
I sent the documents to the bank that same day, expecting a fast turnaround.
The reply came back, polite and final:
“The banker has already left for Christmas. We cannot process this until the second week of January.”
I sat with that sentence for a long time.
The Night the Numbers Started Speaking
This is the part of building a company most people do not talk about.
You sit at your desk late at night, with cash flow projections in one column and a list of names in another.
And you realise the numbers are telling you to let some of those names go.
I had two options.
Option 1. Cut staff. Protect the cash. Reopen smaller in January.
Option 2. Hold the line. Pay people who do not have a kitchen to work in for a month. Hope.
Most spreadsheets would have chosen Option 1.
The math is clean. The math is honest.
But there are some lessons you do not learn from spreadsheets.
You learn them from being the apprentice in a Kyoto kitchen at 18, being told by your master that your work is “not slow — just rough.”
You learn them from running Yachiyo through COVID, with one customer in the dining room and two staff in the kitchen who came in anyway because they trusted you would find a way through.
You learn them from the times when you had nothing left to give people, and they stayed.
When you have built things with people, the spreadsheet stops being the right input.
I told myself one month was survivable.
I chose to protect the people.
Twelve staff. Six weeks of cash. One promise to myself.
What I Already Knew, Even Then
I did not know yet what one month would actually feel like.
The next chapter is the part where the plan met reality. Where the second banker on the file left for Chinese New Year. Where lunch became a Woolworths croissant cut into three days. Where a friend slid an envelope across a table.
That story is Chapter 12.
But before any of that — before the month even began — I think I already knew something quietly, the way founders sometimes know things before they can say them.
A brand is not your logo. It is not your menu. It is not your storefront.
A brand is what the people around you choose to stay for.
The flagship at Town Hall — the one with the 4.8 Google rating today, the one Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Food featured as a CBD lunch worth heading into the office for — exists because twelve people, in December, chose to wait for it.
The decision in the office that night was not really about cash flow.
It was about what kind of brand Otogo would become.
The Last Word, For This Chapter
I have made many decisions in 17 years.
The decision to keep the people that month is not the one that looks best on a spreadsheet.
It is the one I am proudest of.
If you have ever been the person in the office at 2am, cash flow on one screen and a list of names on the other, you know the feeling.
You know the choice is never as clean as the math wants it to be.
Build with people. Then protect them. Even when the numbers say otherwise. Especially then.
That is the only way I know to build a brand that lasts.
What Comes Next
Town Hall did open.
But the month between the decision and the opening day broke harder than I expected.
In Chapter 12, I write about the Chinese New Year delay nobody warned me about, the croissant cut into three days, the envelope from Toshi-san that I almost cried over, the seven leaks on opening day, and the Sunday morning my wife woke me to show me the bank account.
That month is the reason Otogo exists in its current form.
→ Chapter 12: Croissants, an Envelope, and the Sunday My Account Turned Red
A Note on Why Otogo Now Looks for Founder Partners — Not Employees
The flagship at Town Hall stands today because twelve people chose to wait for it.
That is also why we now structure Otogo’s expansion through Founder Partners, not standard franchisees and not employees. We are looking for people who will build the next stores the way we built this one — with their hands, their savings, their people, and their willingness to choose what is right over what is easy.
Three Founder Partner seats are open for 2026.
→ View the Founder Partner program
→ Read Mitsu’s full chapter on Substack
← Chapter 10: The Day Otogo Opened — and Everything Broke at Once