Community Highlights: Meet Lisa Au

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa Au.

Lisa, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My story began when my father, may he rest in peace, sadly left my family and I when I was about 14 years old. My mother never worked, because she had to stay home to watch over my 5 siblings and me. My siblings and I had to take care of ourselves and our mother. At the age of 14, I got my first job watching over a computer game store and then I landed myself a job at Party City. The minimum wage was NOT cutting it for me, so I ended up working at a Vietnamese coffee shop. I was making so much more. If you had ever been to a Vietnamese coffee shop, you’d know why. I was able to save money and buy myself a car with the help of my sister Linda. By the time I turned 17, I met my boyfriend Anthony who’s now my husband, and moved out. We have been together for over 17 years now. I had to make a tough decision to leave high school because it wasn’t paying the bills for me. Once I left, I was working 6 to 7 days a week from morning to night. I even took on jobs working as a waitress at bars after my day jobs. I literally had several jobs at a time. Because of my good work ethics, almost every job that I worked at asked me to become a manger. By the time I was 19-20, I ended up working for Anthony’s family’s restaurant because he needed the help. I busted my butt off working day and night and made sure that the restaurant was up to par with his uncle. By the time I was 21, Anthony and I took over the restaurant. A couple years after, we opened up a food truck and another restaurant with my brother. I’ve been working in customer service for over 20 years! I’ve been in the restaurant business for over 15 years, and during that time I also became a licensed esthetician of almost 14 years and a Real Estate agent since 2016.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There were a lot of challenges and lessons, that’s for sure. A lot of struggles and sacrifices. It was never easy or smooth. I missed out in my teen years and my twenties from just working, working, working while having my kids and taking care of them. My kids would go to work with me all day long. I’ve missed birthdays, weddings, and even funerals. I would work 7 days straight with no breaks. People think owning a business is so easy because they can be their own boss, but it is not. It is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Owning any type of business, you’re going to have to go through the storm before you get to see the rainbow. Entrepreneurs make it look easy because we don’t have time to complain! We work hard in silence and move on to the next.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
The restaurant that we own is called Hank’s Crawfish – one of the first crawfish restaurants opened in Houston after Hurricane Katrina.
With my Esthetician License, I do eyelash extensions and hair extensions on the side.

I am a full time REALTOR® in residential and commercial. If you or anyone that you know is interested in purchasing or renting any property, I would be more than happy to help!

Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I used to be scared of risk-taking. I was always the one who had every single plan set out ahead of time and accordingly to avoid risking anything. Back then when I thought of risk-taking, the only thing that would automatically pop up in my head was FAILURE. As I grew older, I finally realized I needed to take a risk and gamble on myself if I wanted to succeed in life. I learned that the only way I will grow in life is to take chances on myself. Taking risks do have failures, but from those failures there’s lessons learnt, and what I learned from it makes me wiser. There’s going to be a lot of loses from taking risks, but also a lot of wins that come along with it. If you don’t take the risk and gamble on yourself, you’ll never grow.

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