Taro Arai, Shawna Chrisman and Michelle Watts opened up about the risks, mistakes, relationships and personal turning points behind three successful businesses
The success stories are easy to see today. Mikuni Restaurant Group has grown into one of the Sacramento region’s most recognizable restaurant brands. Destination Aesthetics Medical Spa has expanded from a single room to multiple locations. YogaSix owner Michelle Watts recently opened her second studio, bringing the growing fitness brand to Folsom.
But when the three entrepreneurs took the Folsom Focus stage Wednesday, the conversation was less about celebrating where their businesses are today and much more about what it took to get there. There were stories of financial struggles, difficult hiring decisions, sleepless nights, unexpected setbacks, personal turning points and moments when each had to decide whether to keep going, change direction or take another leap.
Kotaro “Taro” Arai of Mikuni Restaurant Group, Destination Aesthetics founder Shawna Chrisman and YogaSix owner Michelle Watts headlined Choose Folsom’s latest Business Over Breakfast program at 890 Glenn Drive. The discussion was built around growing a business beyond its first location, but over the course of the forum it became a much broader and more personal conversation about leadership, company culture, mistakes, resilience, community and the personal toll that can accompany entrepreneurship.
Taryn Grows, the face of Economic Development for Choose Folsom and an entrepreneur herself, moderated the discussion. She opened by polling the room for business owners, employees and those who came hoping to leave with something useful for their own businesses. Grows acknowledged that she has learned firsthand how difficult entrepreneurship can be through opening Uncle Charlie’s Firehouse and Brew with her father.
“I had no idea how hard this was gonna be,” Grows said. “And I can’t believe I get to sit on stage with three incredible humans that have done what I feel like is almost impossible and have such a brand image around them.”
For all three, the paths to Wednesday’s stage could hardly have been more different. Arai brought the longest business journey of the three — one that began with a struggling family restaurant in 1987 and, after years of financial hardship and uncertainty, grew into one of the Sacramento region’s most recognizable restaurant brands.
Known as Mikuni Restaurant Group’s “Chief Dreaming Officer,” Arai described himself Wednesday as someone who gets “to dream all I want for free” as well as a servant of the company. His family’s restaurant story began after coming to the United States from Japan, when his parents announced plans to open a restaurant despite having neither a traditional business plan nor the money to make it happen.
Arai recalled questioning the idea from the beginning. His father had never cooked professionally, and when Arai asked about the business plan and financing, the answers offered little reassurance. But the family ultimately received $300,000 from a man they met after arriving in the Sacramento area, Arai said, and in 1987 his parents opened the modest Fair Oaks restaurant that would become Mikuni.
The business that eventually became a major regional brand was anything but an overnight success. Arai told the audience that during the first five years, the more the family worked, the more money it seemed to lose. There were times when they went months without paying rent, suppliers stopped providing fish and the family was nearing the point of losing everything.
“One time we didn’t pay six months in rent, we were about to be homeless,” Arai said. “We didn’t have any fish to sell because they cut us off. I broke my ankle and I couldn’t go to the doctor because we had no money. My dad said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry, but you have to keep digging. That’s how deep we have to dig ourselves in.”
Arai said his father eventually gave him two pieces of advice that would help shape the direction of the business. The first was that success was “not about what you know, but who you know,” which prompted Arai, despite his limited English at the time, to begin talking to customers and developing relationships. One of those customers hired him to cater a wedding nearly three decades ago, an opportunity he still remembered Wednesday.
“The second thing he said was, ‘Just do your best and let God do the rest,’” Arai said. “So I changed the whole attitude toward work, life. I never had a bad day.”
Then came one of his father’s dreams. After the birth of Arai’s daughter, his father told him he had dreamed that the restaurant could one day serve 1,000 customers a day. Arai thought the idea was impossible for a restaurant that could seat roughly 30 people and was aiming at the time for about three hundred in daily customers.
But neighboring spaces began becoming available. Mikuni expanded into one, then another, gradually increasing its capacity and customer base. After approximately 12 years of struggle, Arai said, the family finally opened a second location.
That willingness to listen to customers also became part of Mikuni’s identity. Arai recalled that because his English was limited, someone told him that when he did not understand something, he should simply say, “No problem.” He carried that attitude into the restaurant and began treating unusual customer requests the same way.
“I used to make hot dog roll because a customer would get a hot dog roll at the liquor store and like them, so I made a hot dog roll for them,” Arai said. “Some people say, ‘I like hamburgers.’ No problem…hamburger with a little miso in it and we did it. I used to call it the miso happy burger. And one of the customers said, ‘My name is Marilyn, I want you to make roll for me.’ So I started making Marilyn Monroe roll.” To date, that roll is still one of the many popular ones on the Mikuni menu, with many others.
Those customer-inspired creations multiplied, eventually helping produce a menu with hundreds of different rolls. More importantly, Arai said, the relationships brought customers back with their families and helped build the business at a time when the family desperately needed the community.
“We only had a family of five to start with,” Arai said. “My sister was the general manager, my brother was the kitchen manager, I did everything I could, and my dad was, well, I don’t know what he was doing but it was a lot. It wasn’t easy for us. It was just a survival for us. And I talk about community alot, because it’s because of their support that we’re here right now. I don’t deserve to be even here talking to you, because it was community that made it work.
Chrisman’s path to entrepreneurship began in an entirely different world. A board-certified nurse practitioner, she founded Destination Aesthetics Medical Spa in 2011 while still working in medicine. What began in a 10-by-12-foot room has now grown to six locations, she told Wednesday’s audience.
In 2023, Chrisman partnered with Advanced MedAesthetic Partners and today serves as its chief aesthetics officer and a managing partner while continuing her work with Destination Aesthetics. Her decision to fully commit to aesthetics, however, came long before the company reached that scale.
Chrisman recalled working in critical care and feeling unfulfilled before training to administer Botox and beginning with Botox parties on the side. Eventually, she needed a physical location where patients could return for treatments, leading to the small room that became Destination Aesthetics. At that point, however, she said she still had not fully understood what the work would ultimately mean to her.
That changed after an encounter with a woman battling breast cancer. Chrisman said the patient told her she never imagined herself seeking Botox but wanted the treatment after her diagnosis because she wanted to feel brave and did not want her children to see her looking angry or sad.
“It was then that I realized that what I’m doing is I’m practicing medicine with my hands in a completely alternative way,” Chrisman said. “I’m giving this woman a sense of courageousness and a warrior, like a warrior look. I’m not giving her a look to have less wrinkles, I’m giving her a look of bravery and strength and resilience. And that’s when I went all in on Destination Aesthetics and realized that this is my calling, this is my passion.”
For Chrisman, the realization reframed medical aesthetics as something beyond changing a person’s appearance. She said her mission became challenging the perception that aesthetics is simply about vanity and focusing instead on how patients feel and the confidence they carry when they leave.
Her first major move into a larger location came under circumstances few entrepreneurs would include in a business plan. Chrisman recalled that her original room was near a medical director who was conducting medicinal marijuana consultations at a time when large amounts of cash were changing hands. The office was eventually held up at gunpoint.
“It forced me to move into a different office at that time, which was great,” Chrisman said. “It did force us to get into a brick and mortar a lot faster than what I realized. And at that time I realized I needed a great general manager. I needed some form of processes, and I needed to market myself, and I became the brand in the beginning.”
As Destination Aesthetics continued expanding, Chrisman said the challenge shifted from building a business around herself to developing a brand capable of standing independently. She pointed to Mikuni as an example of what happens when customers know what to expect from a brand before walking through the doors of a new location.
“Now it’s great because I’m trying to take myself away and have the brand kind of speak for its own self,” she said. “Scaling locally like Mikuni and they’re doing, it kind of helps improve your brand footprint where you open up a Mikuni and everyone knows, ‘People say wow, I’m gonna go to Mikuni, I’m so excited.’ They already know what it’s going to be and what their experience is going to be like.”
Watts brought yet another perspective — and the freshest look at expansion of the three. She arrived at entrepreneurship after 24 years at Intel, where her career spanned finance, sales and marketing and included leadership of global teams. Originally from England, she moved to the United States 18 years ago, but her decision to leave the corporate world grew out of an intensely personal moment involving her grandmother.
Watts was in yoga teacher training when she received a call telling her that her grandmother was dying in England. Her family warned her that she might not make it home in time, but Watts boarded the flight anyway, praying that she would have one final opportunity to see her.
“So I flew, praying the whole way on the airplane, like, just let me see my nan one last time,” Watts said. “So I got to her bedside, and in that moment, it was just like, ‘What am I doing?’ I was a badass executive at Intel, working well in the work, great image in the community globally to my kids, but that’s not what I wanted to be remembered for.”
Watts said the experience forced her to think about the example and legacy she wanted to leave for her children. She had enjoyed her Intel career, but realized that simply continuing along the same path was no longer what she wanted.
“I was just like, I’m just drifting, cruising through life, working really, really hard, and I didn’t want that to be my legacy,” Watts said. “I was like, what do I want my kids to remember me for? And it wasn’t working at Intel. I loved Intel, but that’s not what I wanted to be remembered for.”
The timing of what happened next made the decision easier. When Watts returned home, Intel was offering another round of voluntary departures, and she immediately volunteered.
“I didn’t even hesitate,” she said. “I raised my hand. I was like, ‘I’m doing it.’ I didn’t even ask my partner. I was like, ‘No, it’s my time, I’m doing it.’ And the big bosses at Intel are like, ‘Are you OK? Are you having like a midlife crisis?’ Probably so, but I need to leap and try this and have no regrets for not trying.”
That leap ultimately led her to YogaSix. Watts opened her first studio in El Dorado Hills about 2½ years ago and opened YogaSix Folsom at Palladio just 30 days before Wednesday’s forum. With the second studio still in its infancy, Watts offered a particularly current perspective on the realities of expansion.
“It feels like I just gave birth, honestly,” she said. “It’s like I just had my second child. You know the sleepless nights when you just had your child and you’re breastfeeding one baby, but the second child is vying for your attention. It’s a lot. We were joking about it earlier, like it’s a bit like postpartum. If you ask me if I’m going to open a third right now, I’ll probably say no. But in all seriousness, you forget after you go through it.”
Watts said she knew there was an opportunity to expand after other YogaSix operators began approaching her about taking over studios, but she was not ready to travel to another state and inherit someone else’s distressed business. Instead, she looked closer to home, where she had already established relationships, credibility and a customer base.
“I recognized that I’ve built the credibility and the reputation within the local community, within Best Yoga Studio in El Dorado Hills and Folsom, and just the support network around me was really the sign of, ‘We’ve got such a beautiful thing, we’re making a difference in people’s lives,’” Watts said. “I decided that if I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it locally, and I already have the license in Folsom, and I’m like, ‘Why not do it now? Let’s do it in my own backyard where I’ve built the credibility, I have the reputation.’”
The people surrounding an entrepreneur can be as important as the location or business plan, Watts said, encouraging those in the audience to identify the small group they trust enough to provide candid advice when major decisions arise.
“I think that’s probably one of my biggest words of advice is, who is your tribe?” Watts said. “Who is your five people that you can call on that’s gonna be your mirror and ask you if you’re doing the right thing? Is it your partner, people in the industry, in the network? Like, who are your five people that you would call to help you, give you that push, to give you the mirror that says, ‘Oh yeah, you should be doing this or not,’ and who would you call in your moment of need?”
Despite their different beginnings, the three entrepreneurs repeatedly arrived at the same subject as the conversation continued: relationships. For Arai, those relationships were the customers who helped a struggling family restaurant survive. For Watts, they were the people who make a yoga studio feel like something more than a place to exercise. For Chrisman, they were patients who often shared some of the most personal parts of their lives while sitting in a treatment chair.
Watts said culture is central to YogaSix because clients are choosing to take an hour from their day to do something for themselves, sometimes for fitness and sometimes while working through stress, healing or difficult periods in their lives.
“We know everybody’s names. It’s become like a family. It’s not just a workout place, and people feel it from the front desk to the teachers,” Watts said. “People have joined our studio just because of the front desk staff and how they make them feel, and I feel like if you’re humble, you’re transparent, you’re authentic, and you show your true self, and you expect that from your employees, the energy just is infectious.”
For Watts, hiring people capable of making those connections is essential because customer service cannot simply be added later as a policy. It has to be reflected in the people representing the studio.
Chrisman described a similar relationship at Destination Aesthetics, where patients frequently share highly personal details with their providers during appointments. She said the company intentionally built that relationship into its culture and branding.
“We form connections with patients like they’re our friends and family, and what we did as a collective is we branded our culture with our patients,” Chrisman said. “Some of the hashtags that you’ll see we use from the very beginning is hashtag DA family. When we say that, we are incorporating our patients. You are our family. And our DA life, what we live is a lifestyle, and part of that lifestyle is being with you and integrating you in our life.”
Grows summed up the common philosophy emerging from the discussion as being “relational, not transactional,” but relationships were also at the center of some of the biggest challenges the entrepreneurs encountered as their businesses grew.
When asked to identify her biggest mistake, Chrisman pointed to not preparing members of her management team early enough to understand the financial side of the operation.
“Not training my management team on financial acumen and business KPIs earlier,” Chrisman said. “I kind of carried that weight and just led them with me, but I needed to give that delegation and that acumen to them a lot earlier.”
Watts’ answer also centered on people, but from the standpoint of finding the right person to entrust with a business that still feels deeply personal to its founder.
“I think it’s the people, the talent,” Watts said. “I’ll be honest, I’ve had four different GMs already. Trying to find somebody that cares about your business just as much as you do is really, really hard. So I’m still trying to figure that out. I feel like I can expand and grow even further when I have somebody that can run the show and be my support, so I’m still trying to not be everything.”
For Arai, one of his biggest mistakes came after Mikuni was already doing well. Around 2007, he said, his accountant wanted to become his business partner and offered to run the company, freeing Arai to step back. His father told him not to do it, but Arai moved forward anyway.
Then the economy went south. Arai said Mikuni ultimately found itself $11 million in debt, and an attorney advised that it was time to consider bankruptcy. Once again, he turned to his father for advice and once again was told to keep digging.
“I said, ‘I don’t think we can dig ourselves out this time dad,’” Arai recalled. “He said, ‘Well, God started it, God finishes it. It’s a learning process.’ So I bought him out too. I borrowed another $300,000 from all my friends.”
The financial crisis ultimately forced the company to rethink how it operated, Arai said. Mikuni developed a new mission and core values and embraced “kaizen,” the Japanese concept of continuous improvement. The transition was painful, with Arai saying the company lost about half of its corporate team after pay was cut sharply, but over roughly five years the company worked its way out of the crisis.
“We changed whole attitude toward work,” Arai said. “We have new mission statement. We don’t have to make the best sushi or be popular. We just want to love people, just want to love God, just want to love each other. And since then, you know the word kaizen, meaning continuous improvement. So we changed, we’ve got core values and everything all together. We started brand new.”
Looking back, Arai said the episode that came close to breaking the company instead became a turning point. “That was an expensive mistake, but that was the best thing happened for us,” he said.
As questions shifted to the audience, the conversation became increasingly personal. One attendee asked how the entrepreneurs maintain their energy and motivation when business turns difficult. Arai said his father once told him that in business he had to learn how to be happy, something that gradually changed the way he reacted to everyday frustrations.
“I used to be very short-tempered and my dad said, ‘You know what, in business you have to learn how to be happy all the time,’” Arai said. “So I try my best. Now if somebody cut me off on the freeway, I just say ‘Oh, thank you for not hitting me.’ I’m so happy.”
Over time, Arai said, that his deliberate choice to be happy evolved into something deeper, rooted in his faith and gratitude. His morning routine now includes a devotional and a thought of the day that he sends to roughly 50 people, something he told the audience he has done for years.
“I asked God to give me joy from within, and it’s so amazing,” Arai said. “People see your cup is half full — oh, you have no idea. Every morning, I’m so grateful, I just can’t stop smiling.”
Chrisman said she has developed her own approach to difficult periods, including learning not to surrender control of her happiness to outside circumstances. Some days, she acknowledged, that is easier than others.
“You have to go through the bad to appreciate the good,” Chrisman said. “So what am I learning from this? Things happen for a reason. My mom told me a long time ago, don’t let anyone else be in charge of your own happiness, and sometimes that’s harder than most. Some days are really hard.”
The COVID-19 pandemic was one of those periods. Chrisman said Destination Aesthetics had to close all of its locations without knowing when they would reopen or how long the company could continue paying employees. She candidly described being overwhelmed during those early days but said the experience forced her to strengthen her resilience and change how she views setbacks.
“What I’ve had to do is really work on myself and my self-resilience and my mental state with regards to how I’m perceiving this and taking it as a learning lesson always,” Chrisman said. “A lot of times in business, we have experiences and what we learn is what not to do. And we have to understand that that’s OK too, and a lot of that is self-inflicted, meaning I made the mistake, I made the bad decision, but what am I gonna learn from this and move forward?”
The final audience question, from Renee Snook, turned to another challenge familiar to entrepreneurs: work-life balance. Chrisman immediately took issue with the phrase itself, arguing that expecting life and business to remain evenly balanced can become another unrealistic expectation.
“First of all, I don’t say the word balance because I don’t believe in it,” Chrisman said. “I just think that I don’t challenge myself on maintaining balance. So balance to me is like you have a five-pound weight on one side and on the other side. To me, that’s balance. Life and business is never that way, it never fully balances.”
Instead, she said, she thinks in terms of priorities that change depending on the season of life and the demands of the business. Her analogy was a stove with several burners: one may need more heat at a particular time without requiring every other part of life to be completely shut off.
“Don’t think of it as balance, think of it as an adjustment in priorities and that you’ll always come back to the table with what feeds you,” Chrisman said. “Sometimes you have to feed others before you feed yourself, and that’s in entrepreneurship, that’s the majority of the time. Some burners are hotter than others, but you can leave all burners on and manage them. You just have to communicate where you’re at.”
Watts said she never found true work-life balance in the corporate world either, but she does have one non-negotiable in her life now: moving her body and practicing yoga every day.
“I truly believe that you can’t pour from an empty cup, so for me, it’s a non-negotiable to do yoga every day,” Watts said. “Every day I have to move my body. It’s for my mental health. I show up as a better partner, I show up as a better mom, and I’m just so much more productive in my own job when I move my body.”
That time on the mat, Watts said, gives her an opportunity to turn her attention inward and separate what matters from the constant noise surrounding a business owner.
“It’s that time on my mat to really turn my focus inwards and really look at what do I want to be working on, so I can drown out the noise and listen to what’s really important to me,” she said. “So that daily check-in is just a non-negotiable for me.”
Arai learned his lesson about priorities during Mikuni’s earliest years, when he said he routinely worked seven days a week for about 15 hours a day. Eventually, an encounter at home drove home how little his family was seeing him, and he made the difficult decision to begin taking time away from the restaurant.
“I prayed about it, I said, ‘You know what? I’m gonna take a rest,’” Arai said. “So I started taking a day off, which was a big step for me, and my partners and dad were pretty upset about it. But I love my family. I work for my family. I needed to do this.’”
Today, Arai has five grandchildren and said he makes time to be with them, including taking a walk with them before work just a day before the forum. He also sets personal goals each year, putting deliberate thought and effort into the kind of husband and family member he wants to be alongside his ambitions for Mikuni.
By the end of Wednesday’s discussion, there was no single formula offered for turning one location into several. Instead, three entrepreneurs from vastly different industries described businesses that grew through a combination of relationships, risk, mistakes, persistence and an eventual realization that growth often requires founders to stop trying to do everything themselves.
It also made clear that the recognizable brands represented on stage were built through stories customers rarely see — a family restaurant that once could not afford enough fish to sell, a medical aesthetics business that began in a 10-by-12-foot room and was pushed into its next chapter after an armed robbery, and a longtime corporate executive who boarded a flight to her grandmother’s bedside and came home ready to change the direction of her life.
Grows closed the forum by challenging one of the most familiar sayings about turning a passion into a profession.
“I know they always say if you’re doing what you love, you never work a day in your life. I call BS,” Grows said. “You work your butt off. You work your butt off for the things that you love, but you are all exemplary in what you’ve done.”
She thanked Arai, Chrisman and Watts for bringing three very different perspectives to the discussion — restaurants, aesthetics and wellness — while sharing many of the same lessons about what happens when an entrepreneur takes an idea beyond its beginnings.
The next Folsom Focus program is scheduled for Oct. 16 and will focus on the State of Education. Choose Folsom also announced the Foothill Wine Fest will take place Oct. 24 at Palladio at the close of Wednesday’s forum. More information and tickets to attend the events can be found at www.choosefolsom.com.
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