Ask Jim D’Alesandro why he decided to go from owning restaurants to funding them and he’ll tell you, “I didn’t like the arithmetic.”

D’Alesandro, who owned six restaurants during the course of about 20 years, adds, “The upside never seemed as great as I expected it to be.” Gradually, he realized that the restaurant business was oversaturated, and he left the business in 2001.

Although D’Alesandro was willing to say arrivederci to owning restaurants, he wasn’t willing to walk away from the industry completely. “I wanted to provide services to restaurant owners because I knew they could use the help,” he says.

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