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BUSINESS PULSE : SMALL BUSINESS IN ORANGE COUNTY : SMALL BUSINESSES, BIG DREAMS : Restaurateur’s Goal Was to ‘Make It on My Own’

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Times Staff Writer

Jose Franco is at no loss for words when asked why, with no previous experience, he decided to become a restaurateur one day in 1974:

“Having your own business is everyone’s dream, isn’t it? When the opportunity came, I took it.”

Today, Franco and his wife, Molly, are owners of a neighborhood Mexican restaurant in Laguna Niguel. It is a business that provides the couple and their five children with a good living. In fact, it probably could serve as the base for a small chain of restaurants should the Francos, both 38, want to take the plunge.

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But they don’t.

“I don’t want to get bigger,” Franco said, “because the reason I’m successful is that I am always here to make decisions. With a chain, I can’t do that, and I’d lose control of quality and service. Besides, I’ve always said that if I have enough to live a good life, then that’s enough.”

Operating a small family business, however, can have its drawbacks. The number of paid non-family staff members is kept to a minimum, and Franco considers a 70-hour workweek to be a short one.

“You just forget about weekends, evenings and holidays,” Franco said, “because you are here, working. That’s when the demand is. You still have time to spend with your family, it’s just at different hours than most people. And there’s less of it.”

But the trade-offs, Franco said, are worth it.

He figures that he will be able to seriously consider retirement in about 15 years, when he will be 53.

It wasn’t just a desire for wealth that transformed Franco from a telephone company worker into the proprietor of a tiny takeout restaurant in Venice 15 years ago. It was also “the satisfaction that I could make it on my own. I was tired of working for others and getting nowhere.”

Franco said he had been thinking of opening something like a shoe shop when his father-in-law, the owner of a Mexican restaurant in Santa Monica, told him that the Venice establishment was for sale.

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“I knew nothing about the business, but my wife did, and my in-laws said they’d help. So I borrowed $4,000 from my family, and we bought it.”

The Francos ran the takeout stand for 6 years, until their lease expired and the landlord decided to demolish the building.

“I didn’t want to go back to working in a factory, so we went looking for another restaurant and found one in a shopping center in Santa Monica,” he said. The new place, named Casa Franco, was profitable from the start. Four years ago, however, as their eldest child prepared to enter high school, the Francos decided that the Santa Monica school system did not offer enough. “We decided to move south, to Orange County,” he said.

They sold the restaurant, bought a house in Laguna Hills and began looking for another restaurant to buy. But there was nothing available.

That is when Franco made a difficult decision, but one that “has turned out to be the best thing I’ve done.” He decided to build a new restaurant in a shopping center planned for the busy intersection of Crown Valley Parkway and Street of the Golden Lantern in Laguna Niguel. At that time the Laguna Niguel segment of Street of the Golden Lantern extended only about a mile south of Crown Valley Parkway. Last year the thoroughfare was opened all the way through to Dana Point, greatly increasing the traffic passing by Franco’s El Cortez restaurant each day.

It took a while for Franco to realize that he had been smart, however.

It was 14 months from the time he signed the lease to the restaurant’s grand opening--14 months of no income, of living off the proceeds from the sale of the Santa Monica restaurant and of working 10-hour days to build the new restaurant.

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The Francos ultimately invested about $125,000 in the restaurant, which opened in 1986. Most of that money consisted of profits from the Santa Monica sale, but some came from a second mortgage they took out on their home.

Originally, the restaurant could seat 60, but business has been so good that Franco recently added a glass sun room onto the front and side of the restaurant, increasing the capacity to 85.

If there is a secret to success in what is one of the most competitive businesses around, Franco said, it is “that the customer is always the boss, and you have to do all you can to please him.”

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