Ep 31: Small Business Lessons: How One Woman Built a Houston Breakfast Empire

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In this episode of Small Business Success Stories at SCORE Houston, host and SCORE Mentor PV Bala sits down with Sarah Lieberman, founder of Dandelion Cafe — Houston's beloved breakfast and brunch destination with three locations across the city. Sarah shares how she left a career in oil and gas to follow her passion for hospitality, launched her first cafe with just $40,000, no collateral, and a lot of grit, and grew it into a thriving small business that survived two hurricanes and a global pandemic.

You'll hear the real story behind securing startup funding with no bank loan, the pivot that took her from coffee shop to restaurant, how SCORE mentorship shaped her business plan, and what it takes to reach break even, scale to multiple locations, and land a spot on Good Morning America. Sarah is the 2026 SBA Houston District Small Business Person of the Year — and her story is proof that drive, flexibility, and community are the real ingredients for success.

🎙️ Host: PV Bala, SCORE Mentor, SCORE Houston 🍳 Guest: Sarah Lieberman, Founder, Dandelion Cafe Houston

Topics covered: how to start a restaurant, small business funding, SBA loans, micro-lenders, restaurant startup costs, coffee shop vs. restaurant profit, scaling a small business, small business mentorship, SCORE Houston, Houston entrepreneurs, breakfast restaurant business, women in business, small business success stories.

Give your comments at https://scorehoustonpodcast.blogspot.com or write to pv.bala@scorevolunteer.org. Let us know what you like of this episode and suggest subjects on which you wish to know more. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, and welcome to Small Business Success Stories at Score Houston. This is where we bring insights, experiences, and the journey of successful small business entrepreneurs. Score mentors volunteer their time to guide small businesses. Score is America's largest network of volunteer business mentors supported by the U.S. Small Business Administration. Here in Houston, we provide free confidential mentoring and education to help entrepreneurs start, grow, and succeed. Now let's dive into today's small business success story.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

I am Pivi Balas, co-mentor and host of today's podcast. Our guest today is Sarah Lieberman, founder of Dandelion Cafe, a Houston breakfast and brunch institution that has grown from a single neighborhood coffee shop in Bel Air to three locations across the city. Sara came to Houston from Philadelphia, left a carrier in oil and gas to follow her passion for hospitality, and built a cafe that has not only survived two hurricanes, a global pandemic, but emerged stronger after each one. She's 2000 SBA Houston District, small business person of the year, and her story is one of deliberate resilience, strategic growth, and the power of knowing when to ask for help. Lovely. Of course, the first question I had to ask is you came to Houston for oil and gas, not for restaurants. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:44

Correct?

SPEAKER_01 1:45

And then what made you walk away from that and into starting this cafe?

SPEAKER_02 1:50

So I grew up in the restaurant industry up in the northeast, and my parents had a pizza place. So from the time I was 12, I was raised in hospitality. Basically, I moved to moved to Philadelphia. That was in Delaware. I moved to Philadelphia, went to school for product management, basically. I have an industrial design degree. And I was working in hospitality at a coffee shop while I was in college. And then I got out for a little while. And I was a product manager. I got out of hospitality for a little bit. I was a product manager for a bicycle company actually for a few years and travel around the world. I was in Asia a lot, actually, quite a bit. And that was a great experience too, just traveling around. And then I got laid off in 2009 when the economy took a downturn.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 2:43

And the Houston economy stays pretty steady when the rest of the economy takes a downturn. And so it's very hard in the product management field to get back into it, especially in a niche area, the bicycle community is very small. And so it's hard to get back into that. And I was able to find a job here in 2012 in oil as a quality assurance manager. Since I had been a product manager, I was able to move down here and work for a small product company and doing quality insurance. And I did that for about a year and a half. And I am just not a desk job kind of person. Growing up in hospitality, growing up in a restaurant, running around, traveling the world. I like to stay on the move. And so it was really tough for me when I moved here to just sit at a desk, work nine to five Monday through Friday. And so I had decided about a year and a half in, I just thought this just isn't the right position for me. And I went back to my roots, which was hospitality, and started working for a couple different catering companies, that type of thing. And then in gosh, 2014, 2015, I really was like, I really want to do something on my own. I had hit my mid-30s, and I had this idea about starting a coffee shop because I really love the coffee shop that I worked at when I was in college. I wanted something small. And a friend of mine had been to score, and she said, Hey, there's this organization called Score. You should go check them out. And literally the first day that I went to score, I walked in with the idea and nothing else. That was it. I walked in with the idea and the experience, the hospitality experience, but really didn't know what I was doing quite at all. And so I walked in and I met Jerry and Raj the first day. They were my team from the beginning. Oh and with score, I went to them every week. They would give me homework every week. And that was the beginning of my business career, really, is learning how to write a business plan, learning about financials. That was all new to me because I didn't have a career, a financial career. I just had the hospitality and I had the grit and the drive. And they saw that in me. I didn't even have that much money, to be honest. Part of my startup issue. But uh yeah, so that's how I ended up at score. Maybe that was a little more than more information about how I got here, how I ended up in Houston.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Oh, that's wonderful. That's nice. Tell me, uh, how did you select the name Dandelion? What's the background to that?

SPEAKER_02 5:37

So, Dandelion, it was I had always when I was in college, I remember talking to a friend who was in the hospitality industry. And I said, I really want to have a breakfast place where people feel like they're eating in a garden. And I just had that idea when I was in college when I was working at the cotton shop. And and so when I had come up with this idea in 2015, I was always into gardening. My mom had me gardening from the time I was little, right? I grew up in my hands in the dirt gardening, and I was really into flowers, and so I wanted a cafe that kind of symbolized that, right? Like eating in a garden. And so we started some friends of mine and I we started going through different Texas wildflowers. Oh, it could be blue bonnet cafe, or it could be this, and we stopped on dandelion. I also wanted it to be something that could be called the one-word name, like dandelion, okay, right? That could we could knock the cafe off of and just call it a one-word name, and people knew what you were talking about. So we started going through different Texas wildflowers, and somebody had mentioned to me, because I had wanted it to be a coffee shop originally, they were like, Oh, you blow on a dandelion and the seeds kind of float, right? Just like you blow on a hot cup of coffee, right? And so that kind of was like, oh, that kind of stuck. I was like, Oh, that's great branding. And so it ran with that, ran with the name originally from the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Yeah, would have thought. So this is the one that you started at that time, yeah? This cafe. So tell me what was the initial investment required and what kind of equity you could put in, what you had to borrow, how did that work out? Or did you have any idea that this is going to be the capital cost involved? What is working capital? And how did you experience all those things?

SPEAKER_02 7:39

Oh my gosh, I was so green. I had no idea what I was doing, right? I've always been a financially savvy person. I'm never, I'll be honest, I'm not a huge budgeter, but I just am good with finances, I'm good with money, I understand it. And so really, I think I didn't start in a very traditional way that restaurants start at all. I had no collateral, which is tough for loans. I had $40,000 to my name.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 8:13

Now, I don't know if people know that much about restaurants, but if you're and I'm going into a space that was a restaurant previously, right now I've built two restaurants from the ground up. My first one cost $135,000. The second one I built from the ground up cost over a million. Traditionally, restaurants, even when I built this 10 years ago, cost way more than $135,000. I made it work. So truly, it was crazy. I had the $40,000. I borrowed $10 from my brother and $10 from my aunt. So I came with $60,000. Now I had been going to score, they've been helping me write my business plan, helping me with financial forecasting, all of that and assumptions. Everything is fictitious, right? I've never had a business before. I have no financials to give the bank to back up what I'm doing whatsoever. I have my job, which they say, Oh, are you gonna keep your job and start a restaurant at the same time? And you're like, no, I can't. How am I gonna keep my job? And then also work at the restaurant. It was impossible. So it really made getting funding really difficult because outside of my experience, there wasn't a lot there for people to invest in, right? And so score my score mentors saw my drive and my grit. Uh, and ultimately that's what got me the money that I did get. So it was a very challenging thing when you go to banks for traditional loans for businesses, it's like closing on a mortgage every time you fill out the application, it's it's quite a process. And I ended up going to seven different banks and getting turned down seven different times, okay, trying to get even small amounts of money. I wanted to try an SBA loan, but I needed 100,000. Most banks didn't want to lend less than 100,000 for that for an SBA loan. And so ultimately, what I ended up doing, and I don't necessarily recommend this for everyone, I ended up taking out five different credit cards because I had great credit, zero interest credit cards for 12 to 18 months and maxing out $35,000 on credit cards. And then I got this small micro lender called the Bayou Micro Fund, who I'm actually on their board now, they put up collateral for me to get a small bank loan of $35,000 as well. So that was it. I had the $35,000 on the credit cards, I had the $35,000 that I got from the bank, and then I had my 60. And that was pretty much all she wrote. And I was able to figure that out and make that work. And it was really difficult. It really the first year I was open, I think I made $11,000 for myself that I paid myself, and that was just to cover my bare minimum, my bills. I was eating at the restaurant, working all day every day at the restaurant. Definitely a challenging way to start a restaurant. I wouldn't do it now. I'll tell you that. But it worked out in the long run, and I learned a lot along the way.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

So tell me when you estimated the cost of capital cost or whatever it was, and how much you ended up with, were you within that budget, or you'd exceeded that?

SPEAKER_02 11:47

I would say we were pretty close to that budget. I had very inexpensive contractors, and I knew we were gonna come out about 120, and then I was thinking I'd have 15 or so working capital. So we came out pretty close, but what I didn't understand at the time was cash flow and how all of that worked. And three months in, I ran out of money, and I ran out of money. And one thing that I hadn't touched was my 401k. So I left, and so I sat down and I talked with other restaurant owners who had been in similar situations and old different mentors. And I said, Do I shut the doors or do I take my 401k out? And I took the risk and I pulled out my retirement, my little amount that I had, and I injected it, and that got me to break even.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

So which month you reached the break-even, really?

SPEAKER_02 12:47

It took about nine months.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

And what did you plan in the business plan? Did you did you expect it to take so long, or were you uh I expected at least a year?

SPEAKER_02 12:59

I think it was about what we had estimated. So it's it was a little sooner. Yeah, it was great. I mean, I will tell you nine months is actually really great for a restaurant. It usually takes longer than that. I was doing everything. I literally built the tables in the restaurant. I spent $500 on wood, built all the tables myself, styled the bar, I did a lot of stuff on my own. The reason we could reach break even was because I was watching my cost so much, and because I was pretty financially savvy, I was on I was really on top of that stuff. And then as we grew, I was able to add a manager on and other things that we really needed to be successful. But initially, I ran a very tight financial ship to get us to that break-even point.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

In terms of the offerings, the menu, what you started with, and what all you added subsequently, and where was the profit mainly coming from for you?

SPEAKER_02 14:01

So I'll tell you, coffee doesn't have a lot of profit unless you're doing very high volume. So you have to do very high volume, and you just want to be a thumbshop and actually make money. Starbucks high volume. And so I was learning that initially I just had some pastries and some grab and go items and a refrigerating case, a few sandwiches, that kind of thing. And one thing I think as an owner and a boss, you you need to listen to your community. And so my vision was a coffee shop, but the community that was coming in here, everybody said, We need breakfast, we need breakfast, you need breakfast, and everyone will tell you how to run your business all the time. Oh, you should do this thing, and oh, you should do that thing, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you so much for the input. But when you hear your local community who's supporting you saying the same thing over and over again, we need to be flexible to change your vision of what you want it to be. And my community was telling me to serve breakfast, and so I thought, okay, I gotta serve breakfast. And this was before break even and adding just a few items. I couldn't afford check, but I had a small kitchen and we were just doing grab and go, prepping grab and go stuff. We turned it into a small kitchen that where we could do some egg dishes, basic egg dishes, and breakfast tacos, breakfast sandwich, that type of thing, oatmeal, some small stuff, and that is what got us to break even within a month or two of adding those food items. And we started to grow more. So that was a very small breakfast menu at first, and that's how we started turning into a restaurant, and you really make more money on food than you do property.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

So, this uh, what you recommend for any newcomer into the cafe business would be that it's very difficult to make break even purely on cafe and cakes and pastries or what. So you need to have a food menu run partially at least like a restaurant. That's where possibly the profitability will come in, and possibly that's what is going to attract more customers to walk in. Is that right?

SPEAKER_02 16:21

That depends on the community that you're putting the cafe in, too, right? I you need to really know who your demographic is and who you're building this for, right? We know that our demographic is young, affluent families, and so when we open our cafes, that's where restaurants go. I would love to own the property, but most of the time where we need to be is not where we can buy property, right? So we know what our demographic is. I think that's key, right? So then yes, having food items and that type of stuff on the menu is very helpful to bring more people in.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

So this when did you look at moving starting a second restaurant and then the third? By the time you had created enough surplus for you to invest reserves.

SPEAKER_02 17:15

Yeah, so we had talked about it for a long time. We didn't open our second one until two years ago. That's not entirely true, about three years ago now. But what happened was our second one was we had started to search for a second one about six years old, seven years old. I will say I I brought on a partner at year two, who I had met in the restaurant, and he and I had started dating, and we'd been together for a little while. He was a chef, I had met him through a friends, and we had a baby, and then this the restaurant had gotten to the point where it could support both of us, and it just made the most sense for him to come on. I was not a chef or a feed person, I 100% have been a front of house, people person, hospitality person, right? And so I'm like, oh my gosh, when I have to do a menu, I've like loathe it because I'm like, I don't, I'm not a creative food person. So it worked out really well once the restaurant had was able to support the both of us, that he would come on and he redid the menu. And that's when we started really seeing growth. It had grown a little bit with the menu that I put in, but when he came on, I'd say by the third year, we changed he added more menu items that made us more into looking for the restaurant, and that was really we started seeing a lot of growth then. So then he was there for about four-ish years, and we had done really well, and we had decided we want to start looking for another location, and we actually that may have even been year five. We were looking for a location plus a year or two because we knew our demographic, we knew the neighborhoods that we needed to be in, and we weren't going to settle until we found the right location. Location is so key for restaurant, and so the day that our second location's property was listed, they had six LOIs the day it was listed, and we went to see it, and they wanted a breakfast brunch concept in that location that had prudence success, and we'd already been around five or six years, seven years maybe by that point. And so we got chosen to be in that location. Like the day the property was listed, it got snapped up by us almost immediately. So then actually, that turned into our third location, funny enough, because while we had signed that lease for our second, like it was our second location, right? We signed the lease, we were in the process of getting loans and getting contractor bids and all of that kind of stuff. We had somebody come into our first cafe from Rice University, and they said, Man, we love this concept. This is awesome. You guys want to come be on campus at Rice University? And we were like, they were like, We've built this cafe already, half the equipment's already in there. You guys basically just have to get an espresso machine or whatever other little equipment you need, and then you can run it. And we're like, this is only gonna cost us. I think it cost us $60,000 to set up. And it's like, how are we gonna turn that down? Here we are. We find this lease for the one in the heights, and we got money, like we know is gonna get tied up there. And we secretly, because we didn't want the landlords of the heights that hopefully they don't hear the podcast, but we didn't want the landlords at our heights location because we should be all invested in that location, right? To get that up and running. We didn't want them to know we were actually in the middle of opening another location at Rice University, right? Because the funds were diverted from the heights location. But we knew that our heights, we had to build that from the ground up. We knew that was gonna take a long time from the time you sign a letter of intent for the actual property until you open, it can be a year and a half, sometimes even two years. It really depends on permitting and contractors and all of that stuff. So we knew that Rice University that ended up being our second location, even though we had to find a leaf for a second location. Rice ended up being our second location, and Heights ended up being our third location. Yeah, so we opened Rice unexpectedly, and really it was only within a few months, right? They came to us, they said, Hey, we'd love to have you on our campus. And we went and looked at it, and we signed a an operating agreement, and we were open within a matter of a few months there because it was already turned two, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

So now you have experience of three restaurants over. about 12 years of running restaurants yeah cafe yeah and uh tell me if you had to advise the new clients entrepreneurs what would be the challenges of running a cafe like yours what should be they should be aware of uh from based on your experience yeah yeah so funds having enough money is very important i don't recommend people do it the way that i do it but if if you don't have the experience you have to have the money to pay people with the experience right so i would say that for sure if you have the experience and you want to wash your butt off you can make it successful with a little less money because you're the one running the show your team is really critical right so I talk about if I couldn't afford a team in the beginning I was it I was a management team but then once you can afford and you start with money and you have a little experience setting up a management team that really buys into your vision variant uh and also learning how to manage people is really critical I didn't know how to do that when I first so I made a lot of mistakes I was a terrible boss in the beginning I lost plenty of people before I really started getting training of leadership and so leadership is really key and management experience is really key as well so if you can have the management experience and the business experience for what you're starting and then have the funds I think those are kind of three key things to being successful in business to start and you're still gonna learn a lot along the way I didn't have any business background whatsoever but I was really fortunate to get into the SBA's Emerging Leaders program.

SPEAKER_02 24:00

I did the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program along the way they're each about semester long courses. They are free courses but you had to be nominated to get in and you have to hit the bell for the program. But it was really great to take those because I hadn't had any formal business training and it was really it was great to take them to learn but it was also great because I learned that there was a lot of stuff that I was actually doing right and it was just me learning it along the way and so yeah so I think it's a tough call the restaurant industry is a tough business. 90% of restaurants fail by the time they're five years old and so it's a tough industry to go into it's a lot of hard work it doesn't have high profit margins that's another thing but if you're really passionate about it and you're passionate about people and hospitality you can be successful if you have the drive and you have the grit and you have the management experience and you have the funds and and your flexibility to change your vision I think all of those things are pretty key to being successful. Did you have to really market your restaurant or word of mouth worked in your favor but I didn't have funds for marketing I did our social media initially in the beginning I wasn't able to bring on a marketing company I did that about a little over a year I was able to do that once we had broken even marketing is so key marketing in social media is so key but initially I couldn't do that but I did what I could do but really I would say word of mouth is what kicked in and that takes in restaurants it takes three to four years for word of mouth to kick in. They talk about restaurants being like you really reach your full potential and start breaking even around year five and it's true that's exactly what happened to us. We had most of our bills paid back by year five we'd really picked up and we're busy by year five and starting to make money that was even before we we did our breakfast competition on Good Morning America which really made us increase in good month in 2023.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

That's wonderful yeah in 2023 but the recognition there by Good Morning America we did that I mean that that recognition was invaluable.

SPEAKER_02 26:37

We couldn't put a price on that kind of marketing but I would say what got us even attention by Good Morning America to be on that show was because we had a marketing person who was putting out press releases that was getting us in top 10 Breakfast for Houston or top 10 chicken and wackles or she was getting us in those small articles and that's how Good Morning America found out about us because of those small little articles they got us in. But I would say PR and marketing is super key we wouldn't be as busy as we are now without it.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

Well that's good so you are successful now and looking back over the years any specific decisions that you took that you you're thankful for that made the difference for you yeah I would say I'm really grateful that I made the decision to cash out my 401 rather than close the doors so that's that's one I'm really grateful that I really listened to the community around us and was flexible with my vision.

SPEAKER_02 27:43

And as hard as it was I'm really grateful for all of the hard times that I went through in the beginning because it really grew me as a person and as a leader and a boss uh it was very challenging for me and it was very hard and it's very hard to become a good leader and a good boss. I talk to people all the time that just complain about their bosses in every industry not just restaurant ones even though those were very difficult times I'm incredibly grateful for the things that I learned along the way and that has made me a better leader and it really reflects in our team. And so I'm super grateful for that stuff as well.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Did you continue your association with score, Jerry and Raj?

SPEAKER_02 28:36

Sure we hang out we go to dinner sometimes it's been a minute now but they still will come in and support me sometimes and come have breakfast and coffee and I just touch base with them. They send messages every once in a while to see how I'm doing but yeah absolutely we've kept in touch over the years and on their poster child it's if they don't have somebody on staff on the volunteer staff that does restaurants like I'll have somebody show up at my store and be like oh Roger sent me over here because I want to start a cafe. But it's interesting because when I talk to them they say 90% of the people that come in here they just send it out tell them don't do it or send it something along those lines because people just don't really have the drive and determination entrepreneurship really is a special breed. You have to be willing to go through some hard things but keep bouncing back okay thank you Sarah that was wonderful discussion and good luck to you and see you sometime soon. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 29:45

Happy to be here okay thank you for listening to small business success stories at Score Houston. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner we'd love to support your journey you can reach us at 713565 or visit us at 8701 South Gestner 31200 Houston Texas 77074. Our office is open Monday through Friday 10 a.m to 2 p.m except for federal holidays and walk-ins are always welcome to learn more request free mentoring or register for our workshop visit us online at www.score.orgslash houston until next time keep learning keep growing and remember at score we're here to help you thrive