Yama Sushi Marketplace, a sushi restaurant in LA, is dedicated to being a “window to Japan”. Originally founded by Kenzo Yamada, a popular fish broker, in the 1980’s, the current owners Wendy and Scott Kohno took over the business in 2020 after Yamada’s retirement and transformed it into a marketplace that offers cut-to-order sushi, curated Japanese products, and cooking classes taught by Japanese chefs.
But as a growing business with multiple layers, the Kohnos overcame three key challenges that ultimately set the business up for long-term success.
Catering was often a conundrum for Yama Sushi Marketplace. Customers would come to the store, sometimes all at once, to pick up sushi platters, leaving them little time to prepare and manage orders.
“We ended up calling it the Thanksgiving turkey conundrum because we realized we had to limit the number of sushi platters per hour. For Thanksgiving, you can’t have 100 people picking up turkeys at 12pm, right? You have to spread it to 10 turkey pickups per hour so you can prepare and get everything ready. Square allows us to do that,” Wendy Kohno said.
“We looked at every [POS out there]…we couldn’t find something that could do the job like Square did,” she added.
So, now, on New Year’s Eve —Yama Sushi Marketplace’s busiest day— they can set a platter limit per hour ahead of time, creating a seamless pick up process for staff and customers alike.
Yama Sushi Marketplace sells over 4,000 items, making inventory a long and complicated process. Initially, Wendy would try to tackle inventory on her own, making it a three-day process. The team invested in six Square Registers and spread them across six staff members, cutting inventory down to three hours through Retail mode.
The team is also able to pull sales reports and regularly mark their inventory “losers”, putting asterisks in front of the item name. This helps purge items that aren’t selling, so they can easily add in new items that might fare better with customers.
4000
retail products available
128
staff members, up from just 5
3
hour inventory counts, down from 3 days
The business is constantly bringing in an influx of customers, which led to the opening of locations two and three, but even then, there’s always a line. Yama Sushi Marketplace placed three registers on its counter in the West LA location to help minimize the wait.
“We barely have room [because our counter is so small], but we put up the third register, and the line moves fast. They’re in and out very quickly, so we rely on the speed and accuracy of Square,” Scott said.
Serving customers in a timely fashion is crucial, because they’re everything at Yama Sushi Marketplace. In the Kohnos’s book titled “Never Hire a Skinny Chef”, the duo makes a bold claim: “customers are worth 10,000 dollars”. In other words, customers are everything to the business, and they’re never willing to lose customers over anything ridiculous. “This mantra helps us make decisions,” Wendy said.
By making orders seamless from start to finish and investing in smart tools, the team is able to prioritize customers and build deep relationships that go beyond the business and into the community. Whether it’s fundraisers, church events, or different community initiatives, Yama Sushi always finds a way to keep its mantra top of mind.
When the LA fires happened, the business put together bento boxes for the entire San Gabriel Valley neighborhood. Customers volunteered to help package boxes, but there was only so much help they could leverage. “We only allowed 15 people to help…we had around 500 people that wanted to volunteer. The community is so pro-Yama that they were disappointed they couldn’t get in,” she added.
With a laser focus on customer, quality, and experience, Wendy and Scott have propelled Yama Sushi Marketplace from a small fish market to a three-pronged, multi-location powerhouse, powered by Square.
