Daniel Jimenez

00:00Hello, Music City, and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll, and I am your host. We're actually co-hosted today by Mr. Vince Lanni. Very excited to have him today. We are powered by Gordon Food Service. Welcome in to the show. We have our guest today, sorry, I don't even know where to begin. Our guest today is Daniel Jimenez. Daniel and his wife, Megan, are the owners of Above and Beyond Cakes, and this is going to be a fun conversation. He's not the guy that everybody knows, but you know what? Hopefully, he will be soon. Above and Beyond Cakes, if you are a special event coordinator, if you're getting married, if you have kids that are getting married, if you want to throw birthdays, super specialty cakes, think the show is a cake. They are amazing with what they do with cakes, and they are making cakes for you.

01:05Pay attention, because you're going to want to have this knowledge. You're going to want to know about these people, because they're amazing, but it has come to my attention that there's a bunch of new listeners out there. I'm not a big, I don't follow a lot of the demographics, and I've never really done this show to be the big, gigantic show, so I'm going to give you a little bit of the backstory on who we are, what we're here to do, and why Nashville Restaurant Radio exists. We are here to create community. This started in 2020 when the pandemic began, and there was no way for restaurant owners to really communicate with each other, so I wanted to create something where everybody could listen about everybody's shared experience. That started, it happened, people started listening, it was pretty cool, and I love it. This is made for restaurant people. There's a little bit inside baseball, so that everybody out there, when you work in a restaurant, you're within the four walls of your building all the time, and you don't really know what everybody else is doing.

02:08I worked in sales for 17 years, and I've been in every kitchen in the city, and I knew what everybody else is doing, and I knew that nobody shared that information, so I wanted to share that information somewhere. This is where it landed. Welcome. We are really excited to have you. You will hear sponsors on this podcast. These people are people that I know, that I trust, that I personally endorse. We turn down as many partnership opportunities and sponsors as we actually accept. It's a five-meeting, I got to know about you, it's a big deal to become a sponsor on this show. It is not just a, oh, you want to pay money, great. These are people, if you hear a sponsor on the show, these are people that I endorse and I love. With that being said, we have a little bit of a change in sponsorship. We have been working with Christine Miles Hospitality Marketing for a little while now, and Christine is shifting her business.

03:11Shifting is a lot of different things. One of the things that Christine does best is she owns your guest data. She will take your guest data, the actual people that are coming into your restaurant and tell you what you need to do with that data. That's probably the biggest area that local restaurants do not take advantage of. Everybody feels like they need to do social media and have campaigns, and that is important, but what she does is she looks at your Toast data, your Resi data, your OpenTable data, and tells you what to do with the guests that you currently have, how to strategically market. Her new company is called The Repeat Guest, and it is so fantastic. I am so excited for Christine that she is going to be doing that. If you want to learn more about that, you can call her, 615-424-5318. That is her cell phone number. You can call Christine Miles and really get a 60-minute meeting with her and learn about what you can be doing because this is the biggest area to continue to get those guests being repeat guests.

04:21I have always said it. The most important thing that we do in the service industry is making every guest a repeat guest. That is what it looks like for you, and that is different in every position. My former restaurants, we would always say, what can I do to make every guest a repeat guest? If every employee in your building asks themselves that question every day, you are going to be just fine as far as execution and service goes. There is another side to marketing, which is creating a strategy on social media, taking great pictures, creating a calendar, getting all that stuff out there, which is why we are now partnering with a company called Pliny Crane, that is P-L-I-N-Y-C-R-A-N-E. Carter, Drew, Carey over there, they are, not Drew Carey, Drew and Carey, they are doing such amazing things and such high quality work. They were at our last NARA Connect taking pictures of everybody on the bull at Shotgun Willie's.

05:22Just amazing, energetic team full of ideas, and they are willing. They build out websites, they do all kinds of things, and I would love to have you reach out to them. So find them on the website and tell them that you heard about them on Nashville Restaurant Radio. We have exclusive pricing for NARA members. That is our spinoff of the podcast. That is our main business, is the Nashville Area Restaurant Alliance. So through all of this, through these amazing partners, through everybody, we have created the Nashville Area Restaurant Alliance, which is a group, we have about 65 restaurants right now. There are local restaurants who are banding together so we can leverage our size to get better deals. So Pliny Crane is a vendor member of NARA. We've done lots of work with them. We've vetted them. They are doing amazing stuff. They'll build out your website. They'll create a good social media strategy for you. I highly recommend them. We have one other marketing group that we work with, and it is Distillworks.

06:23Distillworks is an amazing company that works really with your SEO, search engine optimization. So they go through your website and make sure that you have all of the keywords that are getting you the most visits. Right? So this is another area that local restaurants really fall back on, is they just, they don't have enough time for marketing, and we want to be laser focused with how we're competing with all of these chains who are coming in, who have somebody who's sitting at a desk in Chicago making sure all this stuff gets done on staff, which is something that local restaurants don't really have the ability to do. They are NARA members. She is absolutely amazing. Her name is Christine as well, over at Distillworks. If you are somebody who wants to make sure that your Google profile is being seen, you need to contact Distillworks. Let me tell you their email address. You can email them at team at distillworks.com.

07:27That's D-I-S-T-I-L-L-W-O-R-K-S dot com. You're talking about Adam or Christine over at Distillworks. They will help you with something. They also do website development, and they are literally here just to help local restaurants. I love them. I love our mission. I love everything. We have so many synergies on how we are going to help local restaurants. That's what we do around here. We want to see this local community continue to thrive. I got to see a little bit of it at the Music City Food and Wine Festival. The Nashville scene invited me out to host a first-generation American conversation. Shivani Darcino, she's the owner of Cafe Babu. We had Ana Aguilar, who is one of the owners at Tantissimo, and we had Vivek Surti, who's the owner at Taylor. Aness Saba from, what is his website? He has a big Nashville website, Hidden Gems, Nashville Hidden Gems.

08:30He was our moderator. We had so much fun. Chef Junior Vo was doing a nigiri class in front of the stage, and we had so much fun. It was great to see all the people from Acme and Sapphire. Our good friends over at Cletus were there. NoCo was there. The line for NoCo was out of control. Then, of course, Julio Hernandez over at Maiz De La Vida was creating some of the most amazing flavor profiles. I don't even know what the dish was called, but it was the best damn thing I'd ever had. The nigiri from NoCo was out of this world as well. Limu Peruvian Cuisine was there. Our friends over at CMB Lennon, so it was a great time at the Nashville Food and Wine Festival. I do have thoughts on this that we're going to talk about on another episode when I can have Vince here with me for the intro, but Vince, my managing partner over at NARA, he is going to be a co-host on this episode, and others when he's around, we do episodes. I'd love to have him on, but thank you, all of our new listeners, for being here. We love having you, and I hope that you enjoy this conversation with Daniel Jimenez.

09:34You are listening to Nashville Restaurant Radio. Super excited today to welcome in Daniel Jimenez. Yeah, thank you. Daniel is the owner, him and his wife, Megan, own Above and Beyond Cakes. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. Thank you very much, guys. I really appreciate coming out and doing this with me. Coming out? You came out. Well, I've been having me out and sitting and talking with you folks. It's been a neat journey being here in Nashville and the surrounding areas and getting into business. Originally, we're from California. Northern California, right? Northern California, correct. Sacramento, Bay Area, for folks that are more familiar with that region, but yeah, we've owned a custom wedding cake and birthday cake business for roughly 16 years now. Now, you guys had a bakery in Northern California. You were a top three bakery in Northern California for five years, and then you decided, let's close it and let's restart in Middle Tennessee.

10:42Correct. Yeah. Tell me the thought process behind that. Oh, wow. It was a lot of factors. First of all, well, things start with our family, our kids, their future, their education. We have four sons. Four boys? Four boys. Did you just keep going for the girl and it never happened? No, no. We had the first two, decided we were done with the third. We're almost two years deep into the business, and then one day my wife says, Daniel, I think I'm pregnant. I'm like, no. Quattro. And number three came along. For all you young guys out there, keep in mind that birth control can be canceled out by antibiotics. That's good to know. Hey, see, the more you know. Word of caution, that 0.1% and the liability is there for a reason, people. So then number four came along and well, yeah, it just happened by the grace of God, and the last two were just great.

11:46So my oldest will be 21 in June. My second will be 19 in a few days here on the 16th, and then my one just turned 13 and my youngest is 11. Wow. So yeah, we were knee deep in custom wedding cakes and birthday cakes and all the other stuff that goes along with that. For your own family. Yeah. And then two kids came along at the same time. There's a photograph of my wife in the back decorating a cake with her leg crossed with, I don't know which one it is, maybe three or number four in her lap. And she's got a bottle in one hand, she's decorating with the other, and she's just gangbusters. I mean, that's a family business. We are the definition of family business. My kids were raised in the bakery. I probably cooked more meals in my kitchen for them dinner-wise than I have at home over the years, just because we've had it for so long. Like I said, it's been 16 years since we've had the business, and since my wife has actually been decorating cakes. She started when I first met her, which is this December, it'll be 26 years together.

12:50Have you guys been on any of the shows? Is it cake? Or any of those type, like Cake Boss or anything like that? We have been invited several times. We turned down Food Network four years in a row. We turned down Netflix a couple years. The reason being is they want to go and take cake artists during peak wedding season. I have $25,000, $30,000 on the books in the month of April, May. Well, not here, not currently, but out in California I did. My wife can't just walk away for two weeks at a time, three weeks at a time. She does all the... She is the skilled hand. She's the artist. Yeah, she is a skilled hand. The way we broke up responsibilities was I handled the networking, the marketing, 95% of the designing. So when brides would make inquiries or folks would make inquiries for their custom birthday cakes, I'm the one they'd actually sit down with and I'd sit down and design everything with them. Go to my wife afterwards and say, hey, hope that's not too hard.

13:51Have you ever had anything that she was like, there's no freaking way? No. Have you ever given her a challenge? She was just like, not happening? She made the comment, it's not happening, but it happened. But it happened? Oh yeah, for sure. What was that scenario? What could challenge your wife to a point where she was like, no, and how did she overcome it? Oh, wow. Not just to the point where she's like, no, to the point where she's in tears and like, I don't know if I can do this kind of deal. There's been a few. What was that one, really? What's an example of what somebody could dream of that is that difficult? We had a client in California. It was one of the tribal families from one of the casinos and money was no object. They wanted a standing three and a half foot tall Ninja Turtle. We did that. That's cool. A three and a half foot. How do you? Okay. Which Ninja Turtle? It was Leonardo. Okay. Yeah, it was Leonardo.

14:51Then the following year, that same family wanted a four foot tall Lego Ninjago. Also with that, they wanted a minion. They wanted the minion to be about three feet tall. We've done stuff like that, brought it all together. Majority of it's edible. Somewhere between cake, filling, buttercream, fondant, and Rice Krispie Treats. Chocolate. Chocolate goes a long way in those kinds of things, especially structurally. Building frames. You really have to research how the body works, like the movement, the bones, that kind of thing in order to get the pieces correct. Okay. Thank you. You had a bunch of ... This has just started a whirlwind here. You were in California. You had this amazing bakery. You're doing all these things. Yeah. You have your fourth child. Yeah. You say, Tennessee. Well- We need to go to Tennessee. That is the place we need to be. We had been looking at moving out of state in general at some point, but we were waiting until my two oldest sons finished high school.

15:52But COVID came along and we saw the minimum wage starting to go up. That's when California mandated it was going to go to $20 an hour. I sat down and I did the math. I did the projections for the next five to 10 years, and it just was not a profitable business at that point. We actually broke it down September 2018, just before the COVID happened, to where we decided to go to the higher end cakes and more money, less projects, but definitely better quality. COVID comes around and my grandmother actually passed during COVID. Because of COVID? No, she had a stroke during that time, but getting her into a doctor to see a doctor during COVID was just not very friendly. She passed and I looked at my wife and I said, well, COVID's here, market's changing. We already knew what we were planning to do. Let's just leave early. We started looking at Texas, Oklahoma, a little bit at different places, and my wife wakes me up.

16:58I'll never forget. It was July 13th. Kids are out of school. We don't got to be up until 7 a.m. really. She wakes me up at 4 a.m. and says, Daniel, I had a dream. I said, cool, me too. I'm going back to it. She's like, no, wake up. I had a dream. God said, we're going to Nashville. She said, we're going to go to Tennessee. I said, all right, are you sure? She's like, yeah. I said, okay, well, we'll take a look. We'll see what's going on. Just out of the blue, there was nothing else about Nashville. It was your wife wakes you up at 4 a.m. with a dream? Yeah, with a dream. She's not the type to ever have those kinds of premonitions or just instincts. I was like, okay, well, I'll trust this and we'll go with it. It's a team effort. We'll see what we find out. Was Nashville even on the table before that? No, not at all. Not at all. Not even close. I was really gunning for Texas or Arizona is where I was. I do love Arizona. Yeah. Arizona is a whole other planet, man. I loved it.

17:58It was great. What do you think of Nashville now that you're here? You've spent COVID here, right? We moved just after COVID. All that situation happened about four years ago in July is when we moved out here finally. That was just the process. What part of town did you settle in? We actually moved up further north. We're in Westmoreland, just above Gallatin. We're in the country. We're in eight acres. I got a pond, man. I fish bass fish out of it. My kids catch like 14, 15 inch bass. It's great because it already has its own population, repopulates and everything. Got some goats and chickens and we use all the natural chicken feed and natural eggs for our baking and that kind of stuff. When you bake these cakes, you have chickens that make eggs and those are the eggs you use for your cake? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We come from that California perspective that we try to make it as natural and organic as we possibly can, like with scratch ingredients, which is kind of a different concept for a lot of folks out here, is what I've discovered.

19:00On above and beyond cakes, you guys don't have a storefront. We do. You do? I could just walk up and buy a cake? Well, not anymore. This past January, we went to appointment only. Again, we're gearing towards the high-end weddings and birthdays and that kind of thing, which is starting to pay off right now. Thank God. Word's getting out finally. Also, we are open one week out of the month, so typically a holiday or the third week of the month, that kind of thing. We're just open for Easter, which is great for us. We'll be open again for Mother's Day. Do you work with a lot of event coordinators for restaurants and people that host a lot of events? Are you on a preferred vendor list for people? Do you offer discounts or anything like that? We are on preferred vendor list now. Word is getting out. It's a different business climate out here, so it's been a little slower going to get onto those preferred vendor lists. Once people are really seeing the product, they're tasting the product, the word of mouth has just spread this year. That's one of the reasons why we went to being mainly weddings and birthdays this year again.

20:03How do you market this sort of thing? Do you go to the Brides and Bubbly or whatever the different events are? How do you market to these people? We'll do a trade show. Of course, I don't think you can avoid it, especially when you're just trying to get your name out there. I'm not so much as concerned about meeting brides as much as I'm meeting other coordinators and venues. That's really, really how I gear things, so we'll try at least once a month to get out and meet a couple of different venues, a couple of different coordinators. For us, it's really something that I take seriously because we don't want to be just associated with just anybody. We want to be the best of the best because that's what we are. In California, we honestly didn't really market very much. If you were in a demographic where you wanted a six-foot tall wedding cake that looked like something out of a princess movie, we were the ones you talked to and everyone knew that. We did the impossible. The motto is, if you can dream it, we can create it, and we truly mean that.

21:07We've made, for one particular family there in California and Sacramento area, they were having a 1,000-person wedding. The bride wanted six different wedding cakes, each one unique in itself, and we did that with no problem. We fed 1,000 people. Each six different wedding cakes was between two and a half feet tall. The tallest one was six foot tall. I would love to know what the budget was for that wedding, more than the budget for my wedding. Yeah. The budget was something else. 1,000 people, six wedding cakes, that's a billion-dollar wedding. I'll put it to you this way. Just the cakes alone, we came in just under 18 grand. Wow. Yeah. I think that's around my entire wedding budget. Yeah. Yeah. For anyone who's listening, if you're really looking for the unique of the unique, that's what we're creating for you. While we're on this topic, if you have an event venue or you're a wedding coordinator or one of these people and you want to get a hold of Above & Beyond Cakes, what's the best way to get a hold of it?

22:10Because you do the sales, marketing, Dream It, We Can Do It. Your wife is the one who does it. Producing, yeah. She gets me high. You're the dream weaver. She's the dream maker. Yeah, absolutely. It's a team effort. I'm washing dishes and yes, ma'am, right away, ma'am, whatever I can do to make this a picture-perfect situation, that's it. So how do people get it? Do you have an email address? How do people get a hold of you? The best way to get a hold of us is my name, Daniel, D-A-N-I-E-L, and then at the name of the business, all spelled out, lowercase, danielataboveandbeyondcakes.com. You can find us online, of course, go to our website, check out our work. I guarantee if you go to Instagram, Facebook, you just start sifting through pictures, even the website, you're going to be there for a good couple hours looking. Okay, so Above and Beyond Cakes. Now what I love, when I first heard this story, and you guys do like THC stuff too, right?

23:11Yes, yes, we're getting into the cannabis products. Actually, I'm waiting on my labels to be done, hopefully today, actually. Our first product is coming out, Brownie Bites. So a little bit of espresso in there for you also, it's a little pick-me-up while you're going. And that's my personal favorite, like I'll just be honest with you. 15 milligrams a piece is what we're looking at, and you won't even have any idea there's any kind of like cannabis product in it whatsoever. Like flavor-wise? Flavor-wise. I'm like, you will find out there's cannabis product in about an hour later, right? Oh, well, if not sooner, but yeah, everybody's a little different. I would like to say thank you for bringing us a sample of that. You brought me and Vince here both a sample of the Brownie Bite. And there's another one. Yeah, the other ones, the second product we'll be coming out with also is a Carmelita. So it's really good, actually. So it's chocolate chip cookie base is what it is, filled with caramel and then topped off, capped off with chocolate.

24:12He brought us, like the best guests in the world bring us samples, and I love it. Yes, sir. Like if you own a donut shop, bring donuts when you come. We had Emi Rod Bakery in here, and he brought me a sourdough bread, and I loved it. What are we looking at right here? What is this guy? Hold that up in front of the camera so people can... Yeah, absolutely. So right there, we are looking at a coffee Kahlua cake with a caramel buttercream mousse. Caramel buttercream and a caramel mousse filling with a caramel drizzle on top. And this one? And this one right here is the toasted coconut with the buttercream filling. Toasted coconut? Yeah, toasted coconut. That is my flavor right there. Well, that is yours. I love... Oh, nice. You can have... I have to... My wife is the cake boss of our house. She'll be the... I think every cake is amazing. I'm eating cake. I'm just happy. Life is good in general. She's like, oh, the moisture in this. She's like the actual cake sommelier of the house. I'm just like a mutt.

25:12I just eat it. And she's like, did you even taste that? I'm like, I don't know. It was cake. I'm eating cake. You're going to have one of those edibles and then save it for the night. You're the edible one first and then the glitter. I will eat that edible in six different settings. It will not be one. I'm like a two milligram nothing. I don't... Fifteen's a lot. Yeah. Fifteen will last me like days. It's crazy. Some people are laughing at me going, oh, what is this? And I don't get... I don't like to get like high. I like just like... I pair it with my ADHD medicine. Hey, if you run a restaurant, you already know. Nothing is simple. You've got uniforms going from one place, merch from another, signage somewhere else, and somehow it's your job to keep it all straight. That's where Twine Graphics changes the game. They don't just print shirts. They handle everything in-house, design, production, apparel, drinkware, decals, all of it. So instead of juggling five vendors, you're getting one partner who actually understands restaurants. And here's the kicker. They will build your custom ordering site for your team.

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27:16Lower energy bills, less strain on your equipment. And here's the best part. Installation takes minutes. No disruption, no training. It just works in the background. If you care about food quality and protecting your margins, this is one of the easiest wins you can make. Cooler Control Systems, simple fix, real impact. You can contact them at R, the letter R, the number 4, humidity.com. So back into what you do. Have you read the book Unreasonable Hospitality? I have not. Okay. You need to go read the book Unreasonable Hospitality. It's by a guy named Will Godera, and the whole book is based around going above and beyond for your guests, listening to what they want. Maybe not even asking them what they want, but watching, observing, recognizing how to make individual experiences a real experience.

28:18For example, in his book, and they did this on The Bear too, Will Godera was at his restaurant 11 Madison Park, and there was people, the four-top sitting there, and they're like, man, he overheard, he was bussing a table next to him, he overheard them say, we've been to all the best restaurants in New York, this is our last place to go eat, but we never got a New York City hot dog, we didn't get a hot dog in New York City. So he hears this, runs down the street, buys a hot dog, cuts the hot dog into quarters, and for their next course, bam, you guessed it, right there, we have a New York City street dog. He hears that, what, how did you know, and they're blown away. It's the details. But it's that, just, that's a spirit of service and hospitality. Absolutely. You, I imagine, get to do that every single day. Yes, and you know, that is one of the best parts of our business. I have to say, hands down, especially what we do, it could start out, well, a lot of our clients start out with just a boyfriend buying a cake for a girlfriend, or vice versa.

29:24Then it turns into, hey, Daniel, we're getting engaged, cool, engagement cake. Then it turns into a wedding cake, great. So we've already built these memories, we've built this history with so many of our clients. We get to know them inside and out, you know, what they like, what they don't like, favorite sports teams, movies, that kind of stuff. And like, for example, with wedding cakes, what we'll do for the grooms, because a lot of times you find the grooms have different tastes than the bride and everybody else. So we'll make them a small five-inch round dessert grooms cake for the day of the wedding. I don't even charge them for it, to be honest with you. We're just trying to help them out with the happy wife, happy life for that day. You know, I know it's happy house, happy spouse, but let's be clear, that day, if I can make your wife's day amazing on my end, that's going to help your night and it's going to help the rest of your life with a memory. We'll do something like the small dessert grooms cake, put a logo on there, if their favorite team is Tennessee Titans or whatever, and go from there, it's a service. What do you do, since you're the one who does the main sales, let's just say that I come in to you and I have a terrible idea.

30:31Okay. Okay, I want to make a cake that tastes like garbage and I want it to look like Oscar the Grouch because my wife is a real grouch and I want to make a cake for her bridal shower that looks like garbage and tastes like garbage. That's a terrible idea. That is a terrible idea. How do you handle something like that? Do you have any of those? I mean, obviously not that bad. He's a reference to marriage counselors and preferred vendors. So are you sure you're doing the right thing here, sir? I would first ask him what the motivation is, kind of get an idea and softly be like, well... That's a nice way to put it. What's your motivation? What's your motivation? Because there's always a motivation. Let me tell you, just doing this for as many years as I have, there's always a motivation behind something. And so, you try to understand, you sympathize, and in that particular case, if he wanted it to taste bad, I'd say, well, you know, I have a bit of a reputation for putting out things that taste amazing.

31:33I always want to give the client what they want, but at the same time, you know, we got to think about this from that perspective, and I'd rather not be dragged into divorce court later. So, you know, let's rethink that portion. We can do the Oscar the Grouch all day long, like it's not a problem, but... But you're not going to compromise your values or your integrity? No, no, no, not in that sense. What separates a cake? Like, if I buy a $500 cake versus a $5,000 cake? Oh, wow. What makes a cake a $5,000 cake? Is it the ingredients? Is it the detail? Is it the customization? What is the most expensive part of making a cake? The labor. The labor, and now the materials, especially because for us, we do not just stick to chocolate, vanilla, red velvet. That in my mind doesn't make any sense. We've been in the culinary industry for so long now, and some of my friends are restaurant owners.

32:33Like, I want to taste things. We grew up with a very diverse palate. So like, for example, I brought you the coffee Kahlua cake, right? No one else in town has a coffee Kahlua cake. We're the only ones that do it. We've made lychee flavored cakes. We've made, of course, peach, strawberry, chocolate, chocolate Nutella. You can dream it. Yeah, you can dream it. We can do it. It's funny because a lot of times my kids and I will sit around and we're just brainstorming stuff together. I mean, kids are great for that kind of thing. They want to taste different kinds of candy. Okay. Well, that's your favorite kind of candy. Let's see what kind of cake we can make out of this. I got a fun challenge. You get like the jelly beans, jelly belly things, and then whatever random flavor you get, that's the kind of cake you got to make that day. Yeah, we can do it. For sure. We can make a prickly pear cake today or juicy pear popcorn or the puree prickly, prickly pear puree works well in the juice itself. But sometimes it doesn't always work.

33:34I'm not going to lie, man. We've had a couple of things where it's just like, you know, the flavor is just not right. So yeah, starting off, like back to your question, what separates a $500 cake from a 5,000? It starts with the flavor. It starts with the quality of ingredients. If you're paying that much money, any kind of money, the cake better be moist. Like I'm sorry if you need to dry out your cake in order to get it to be stable enough to decorate. Like that's not the sign of a true baker. Like you need to be able to produce and it needs to be done correctly. We want your guests to come away from your wedding or your event and say, not only was it gorgeous, it tasted amazing. Now we have a lot of restauranteurs that come on this show and a lot of husband and wife. Yes. A lot of couples who own restaurants. I think you heard Nick and Audra Guidry. We've had just had Caroline and Tony Galzon. There's a risk. What's the hardest part about working with your spouse? Who's the alpha? Who's in charge?

34:36I would imagine she is the alpha. She's going to listen to this. Oh, she can. It's good. It's good with me. It's good with me. You know, the person who controls the gold makes the rules. Oh, that's, that's how that works. The person who controls the gold makes the rules. And so in our particular situation, of course we talk about everything and I need to make sure that she understands the finances. So if I'm not really what comes down to is communication. If I'm not communicating my portion of the business clearly and showing what's going on, then I'm not doing my job as a responsible partner, not only a business partner, but as a responsible husband in life. So are there rules that you've had to put in place to protect like the business and the relationship? Is there a point to where you guys go, all right, timeout. Oh yeah, you have to. We're getting into, is this personal? Is this business?

35:37Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. You have to, especially like having babies the way we have had them during the course of business. And for example, like I said earlier, you know, there's a picture of her sitting with her legs crossed with a baby in her lap, drinking a bottle while she's decorating a cake, you know? And I'm out there taking orders and doing consults with a baby over my shoulder. You know, people are pretty receptive. It's cool. It works. But you know, you want to stay as professional as you can. So just having those boundaries in terms of, okay, we're both tired. We're both at our wits end with things. Are we okay? Are we healthy? Number one. Are we supporting each other in that sense? Number two. Yes. Okay. Do you need extra time to breathe? Yes. Okay. As long as we're taking that time to communicate and build the partnership and maintain the partnership, then, you know, business, business comes, business goes.

36:37And I'm not going to lie. There have been times where it's like something happened, maybe somebody hit the brakes and a cake slid forward and had to be brought back and redone in a record amount of time and taken out. And those types of situations are stressful, but you have to separate the emotion as much as you can from the business. Running a restaurant is tough. Staff turnover, rising costs, and the endless tasks that bog you down and take you away from what you love. Let Adams Keegan lighten that load. Their privately held Tennessee-based restaurant and hospitality focused outsourced HR, payroll, and benefits firm. The team at Adams Keegan removes the administrative burdens of HR administration, payroll benefits management, garnishments, unemployment claims, compliance, 401k, and so much more. From their proprietary HRIS platform to seamless payroll and competitive benefits that keep your team smiling, they've got you covered.

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41:50I think that's a really real-time stuff that probably every single day you're still getting better at. Oh, absolutely. I don't think at any point you fully conquer that and own that. My wife has no part of this side of it. I mean, she helps with some different things, but we have our roles, and I'm constantly saying, great job with that. You did great. And I'm always trying to be positive and supportive. I couldn't imagine working with her full-time on this job with what I currently do. It's something, to say the least. There's been times where we spent years, a good two, three years, where I was homeschooling the kids during COVID. I was homeschooling the kids, running the business from home. She'd be at work during the day producing, doing what she needed to do on her end. And then she'd come home around four or five or whatever, and we'd switch roles. I'd go to the shop, take care of whatever I needed to do in the shop for three, four, five hours.

42:52But while I was homeschooling, taking care of the business, I was also cooking, cleaning, doing laundry. It's just one of those things. Whatever we can do to help each other make each other's life better and easier, then that's just what you do. I'm sorry. I don't know if you had something to say, but I would say the motivation behind this, you kind of got to go, if it's a regular job, hey, look, we have to prioritize all these things. But when it's somebody's wedding cake, it can't be late. It can't be wrong. It can't be half-assed. You have to put ... The clock is ticking on every single one, and the timing of that. You can't be like, oh, I'll put it on ... If I have a podcast I record, and I'm like, oh, it's Sunday, I want to be outside, I'll put it out tomorrow. You can't do that when the wedding is this day. We have spent, and I will wholeheartedly admit, she is way better at staying awake for 24 hours than I am. We have burned the midnight oil, the candle, whatever you want to call it, for more than a few nights.

43:58Especially with four kids. Oh, yeah. Dude, they would ... The couch in the lobby folded out to a bed. They had clothes there. I mean, like, all right, kids, bedtime, go to the living room, and it's the lobby. Wow. You know, you catch yourself. So they'd go crash, and I'd help with what I could. I'm not the skilled hand, and she has her own way of doing things. So I really try to stay out of her way as much as I can when she's actually in the thick of it, and she's producing, and she's fine-tuning and detailed. My washing dishes, am I sweeping the floor, am I making sure all the delivery times are set up correctly? Do we know where we're going? Things like that. But without a doubt, the pressure is on her to produce things correctly and on time. That's an understatement. If you really get a chance to check out our website and take a look at Instagram and all that stuff, a good example is the animals. Go take a look at the sculpted dog or the sculpted little dog or cat that's inside the purses, the different kinds of designer purses that she's made out of cake before.

45:07I mean, they're absolutely amazing. You will not even know that it's cake. There's no way you could guess. Like we put- Is it cake? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. We had a guest recently, or a client recently, who's in the music industry here in Nashville, and his daughter loves that show, Is It Cake? And she had a particular ice cream that she wanted or she loves, and so we reproduced that ice cream container, and that's exactly what he did. He took four different containers, put them next to the cake, and it took her until the third try to even figure out which one was cake. That's pretty cool. That's fun. Now, earlier you mentioned the hitting the brakes and then something happens to the cake. Have you ever had anything, was that a personal story? Do you have- Yeah. Oh, yeah. Have you ever had anything happen to a cake and have it go wrong, and then what you do in there? Like dropped a wedding cake, like you see in the movies where they're walking- No. Like, yeah. Like, yeah. Like, yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah, we've had that, but we have had them shift to the point where like a bottom tier wasn't usable kind of thing, and we had to...

46:11We would usually keep like one or two backup cakes anyways, just a simple vanilla flavor. Fillings are easy to reproduce quickly. It's the baking portion that, of course, takes time, but we have done it also to where... Well, we've been doing it for so long, we always try to have the cakes done at least eight hours in advance, at the very, very least. And so, worst case scenario, something does happen and we're delivering, we still have four hours till the wedding starts. Something happened, call whoever's at the shop, throw it in the oven, get it done now. How do you transport these things? Carefully. I mean, like, do you have like a van and you set each layer up, and then when you get to the venue, you set it up, or do you- It's all built. So, you've seen many a wedding cake, I'm sure, over the years, so the way it breaks down is there's dowels in each tier. Each cake is on its own board, its own cake board, and so the board sits right on the cake, on the dowels, so at no point in time does a cake ever actually sit on top of cake.

47:15So let's say it's a three-tier structure, the middle and the bottom tier have dowels on the inside. If you use half-inch pipe straw dowels, just because there's more surface area on the inside, it's more stable. Think like a car overpass, freeway overpass, you know? So pretty structurally secure. Absolutely, and there is one long dowel that goes from the bottom all the way to the top, so it keeps it from shifting. Yeah, we, knock on wood again, we haven't had an incident of any kind in, after the first year. We learned the hard way with a couple things. Yeah, especially heat. The sun is what'll get you. The sun and humidity is the biggest enemy. So we use specific kind of transport boxes to where it'll hold the coolness on the inside, it's protected from the sun. We wrap it again in plastic bags to keep the moisture and humidity out. There's a lot of details that go into it to make it not fall apart on you.

48:15Well, man, I wish we could've had Megan here today. I know she's super busy. I'm so excited to learn more about what you do. We have a local family that's making the best damn cakes. So if you out there are a wedding coordinator, you do special events and you have weddings and you need to recommend, somebody says, hey, we need to make a cake, where do we go? Above and Beyond Cakes. You can email Daniel at danielataboveandbeyondcakes.com, and you can Google him. Find him on Instagram, look at their photos, I think you're going to absolutely love what they do. Anything else you want to say as we wrap this up? Just thank you once again for having us out here. I look forward to working with more folks in Nashville. We've done a lot of celebrity work where we're from in Sacramento and California, so very familiar with catering to that particular demographic, NDAs, those kinds of things. So give us a call, let us know what you like, what you need, we're here to help.

49:17We really want to become a part of this community in a much, much deeper way, so thank you very much. I love that. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for bringing us samples. Yeah, absolutely. Very kind of you. And go visit Above and Beyond Cakes, and go check them on Instagram. Thank you. Daniel, thanks for coming. Thanks, guys. All right, thank you so much to Daniel Jimenez for joining us on the show, Above and Beyond Cakes. And now it is time for the Gordon Food Service Final Thought. And my final thought is this, people like Daniel and his wife, Megan, are amazing. And we need to shout them out from the rooftops. We need to find more local businesses like this, and we need to not stay silent. We need to share their posts, we need to like their posts, we need to comment on their posts. I mentioned earlier that SEO is very important, and one of the ways we can help with algorithms is by liking. Don't just scroll past something. If you see a local business, like their post.

50:21Share their post. When you see conversations like this, comment on them, share, share, share. Because what they're doing is really amazing work, and they're creating incredibly special occasions for people. You just don't know about them yet. And hopefully this is a way in which we can. But go find them on Instagram and follow them. A lot of people will find someone on Instagram and they'll see, oh, they only have 700 followers. Now follow them. Find their stuff. Like it. Share it. Any local restaurant that you see, we want you to do that. Also for us, Selfishly, at NARA Nashville. Go follow us. And one of the things that we do on NARA Nashville is we share other people's stories. That's like the main thing. If you follow our stories, you're going to see a lot of our members' content. We like. We share. Go leave five-star reviews. Whatever you're doing, when you get done with this podcast, go to Yelp or go to Google and leave a five-star review for one of your favorite restaurants right now.

51:22Take three minutes and go do it. It helps them more than you know. That's what I got today. I hope you guys are staying safe out there. Love you guys. Bye.