Transcript: Successful, beloved, and out of business, a Boston restaurateur tells herself, “nothing that you’ve done is a waste of time.”

Irene Li: Leading up to the layoffs, I was really struggling with how to talk to people and what I should share with them. They had been seeing the numbers all spring, so they knew that we were way in the red and that we were we were losing money by keeping people employed. So I’m 30, so having never been laid off from a job or had never having had to lay anyone off, I felt really kind of like a fish out of water trying to figure out how to navigate that. And in retrospect, I think that I adhered really closely to kind of like corporate policy and best practices around separation layoffs. And one of the things that meant was that I didn’t tell anyone that there would be layoffs except for my sort of core management team. And that was really hard, obviously, because transparency is something that is really important to me and I think is core to what Mei Mei is.