Latest / ADU Adventures: Building in Your Backyard / In Rosemead, Homeowners Turn Backyards into Family Businesses | ADU Adventures EP015

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In Rosemead, Homeowners Turn Backyards into Family Businesses | ADU Adventures EP015 · ADU Adventures: Building in Your Backyard

• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to ADU Adventures Building in Your Backyard.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm James, and today we're in Rosemead, California.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to open with a moment that every family business owner on earth will recognize.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's late, the books are spread across the kitchen table, because the kitchen table is the back office.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: The first location is working.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not easy, never easy, but it's working.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And somebody at the table says the words that are equal parts terrifying and thrilling.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's time to open up a second location.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Rosemead, California, I'm prepared to argue is one of the world's capitals of that moment.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is a modest city, about five square miles, around fifty one thousand people, most of whom rent their homes.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And somehow, this small working class town is the headquarters of companies like Panda Express, the largest family-owned restaurant company in America.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's where Sriracha, yes, the rooster bottle in your pantry, grew into an American icon.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Two of the most famous food empires in the country, both built by immigrant families from almost nothing, both with their roots in the same square miles.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Even the city's name comes from an immigrant's business.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you right now, there's one more company that belongs in today's story, one more that started with almost nothing, in this case, one man and one truck.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's our company, and we'll get to that a little bit later.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the map.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: First, the history of the city that keeps turning kitchen tables into headquarters, and it's one of the great untold stories in the San Gabriel Valley.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Second, the second location idea, why the family business instinct that built Rosemead applies directly to the ground behind your house, with a real worked example and real numbers.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And third, the story of a broken mallet, a truck, and how a thirty five year building legacy went all in on the backyard home.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So let's dive in.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: City of Kitchen Table Empires.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Start with the land, as always.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Before any of this, the Rosemead area was home to the Keek Nation, as well as the Tongva, and in 1771 the very first site of Mission San Gabriel was built nearby before the mission moved to its current home.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you heard our San Gabriel episode, this is the same deep soil one town over.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: The name comes next, and here's where the pattern begins.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: In the eighteen hundreds, a German immigrant named Leonard John Rose built one of the most famous ranches in Southern California, right here in Rosemead, the Sunny Slope Estate, where he bred and trained champion horses.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: He called this land Rose's Meadow.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Over the years that got squeezed into Rosemead, R O S E M E A D E, and then the last letter fell off.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the city that incorporated in 1959 carries his enterprise in its name to this day.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Rosemead is literally one immigrant's family business.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now fast forward a century and watch the pattern repeat at a scale nobody could have imagined.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: In nineteen seventy three, a young immigrant named Andrew Cheng and his father, Master Chef Ming Psi Cheng, opened a single restaurant in Pasadena called Panda Inn, one location, a father cooking, a son building.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Ten years later, in 1983, they opened a fast casual version in a Glendale mall and called it Panda Express.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Today, Panda Restaurant Group runs nearly 2,300 locations, brings in nearly$6 billion a year, employs 48,000 people, and here's the part I love the most.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: It is still entirely owned by the Chung family.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: No shareholders, no private equity, a family.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole empire is run from a headquarters on Walnut Grove Avenue, right here in Rosemead.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the rooster.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: In December 1978, a man named David Tran, who had made chili sauces for a living in Vietnam, fled the country with his family aboard a Taiwanese freighter.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: As Forbes has documented, David carried his life savings as gold hidden in cans of condensed milk.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: The freighter's name was the Hui Feng, which translates roughly as gathering prosperity.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Tran landed in Los Angeles in January of nineteen eighty, and one month later he incorporated a little sauce company and named it after the ship that carried his family to safety.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hui Feng Foods.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: He put a rooster on the bottle because he was born in the year of the rooster.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: He sold his sriracha out of a blue Chevy van, and by nineteen eighty seven the company had grown into a big facility in Rosemead, where it was based for over two decades before moving to a larger plant one town over.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: David Tran became, by Forbes' accounting, America's first hot sauce billionaire.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in all those years, the company famously never spent a dollar on advertising.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: His stated motto, as reported over the years, was to make a rich man's sauce at a poor man's price.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: A ranch that named a father and son single restaurant that became twenty three hundred restaurants, a refugee's sauce recipe that conquered every fridge and pantry in America from a blue van, three different centuries, one pattern.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Rosemead is where kitchen tables become headquarters.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the pattern isn't just the famous cases.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Walk Garvey Avenue, today, Bon Mi shops, family restaurants, family markets, family everything.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: More than 60% of Rosemead's residents are of Asian descent, one of the largest concentrations in Los Angeles County, with a deep Vietnamese and Chinese communities alongside longtime Latino families.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: There's a Buddhist university, the University of the West, and the towers of Edison International's headquarters rising over family noodle shops.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's a denser than almost any city we've covered on the podcast, nearly 10,000 people per square mile, averaging 3.4 people per housing unit.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: And most residents are renters.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Hold on to those two facts.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: The density and the renters.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're about to matter a great deal.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the second location, a worked example.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let's come back to the kitchen table.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because here's the idea at the center of this episode.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you own a home in Rosemead, you already run a family enterprise, whether you think of it that way or not.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Your household has revenue, expenses, assets, and a next generation counting on the decisions made at the table.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the biggest asset on your books is the ground under your house.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: According to Zillow, the average home value in Rosemead is now about$913,761.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: For most Rosemead families, that's the family business's first location, and it's been quietly appreciating for years.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: The second location question is this what if the same ground could produce revenue?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Let me make it concrete with an example.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And let me flag this clearly the way we always do.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: The family I'm about to describe is an illustrative composite, not a real client of Actin ADU or a real house that you can go check out.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: I do that for reasons of keeping people's privacy.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've also simplified the number ratios as well, so it's easy to track.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Your property, your costs, your results will differ.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: So treat this as a way of thinking, not a promise.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Let's call them the Herrera family.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: They've owned their Rosemead home for 18 years.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Both parents work, they also run a small print shop a few blocks off of Garvey.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Classic Rosemead.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: The business and the family are the same project.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Their backyard has room for a well-designed two-bedroom ADU.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now the revenue side with some sourced numbers.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: According to Rentometer's April 2026 data, the average rent in Rosemead is about$1,640 for a one-bedroom and$2,531 for a two-bedroom.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Say the Herreras build a genuinely high quality two-bedroom ADU unit and rent it for$2,500 a month, right around the market average, even though well-designed units typically sit at the top of the comps.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a conservative figure on purpose.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: We'll also budget for the real world and assume the unit sits empty 5% of the year between tenants.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's roughly$28,500 a year in rental income.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, put that number in Rosemead terms because this is the part that separates this city from the San Marinos of the world.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: $28,500 a year is not a rounding error.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: For a working family, that's practically a second salary that the property itself earns every year without anyone working a second job.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's a mortgage that starts paying for itself.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a college fund with a front door.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Run it forward ten years before any rent growth at all.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the ground behind that house has produced almost$300,000.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: And here's why Rosemead specifically is built for this.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Remember the two facts I asked you to hold on to?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Most residents in this city rent, which means the tenant demand is not theoretical.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's the majority of your own neighbors.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And at 3.4 people per housing unit in one of the densest cities in the valley, the pressure for good housing is constant.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: A quality two-bedroom ADU in Rose Mead is not a unit hunting for a tenant.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's a unit choosing among them.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: One more business lesson from the city's famous companies, and then the disclaimers.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Notice what the Cherngs and David Tran actually sold.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: The quality product at a fair price, a rich man's sauce at a poor man's price.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly how to think about the unit you build.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: The same comfort, privacy, and livability you'd want for your own family is what good long-term tenants look for and stay for, and it's what holds the unit at the top of those rent comps year after year.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Build a cheap version, and you compete at the bottom forever.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Build the quality version and it performs for tenants today and for your own family in whatever chapter comes next.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because a second location isn't only a rental.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's where your parents can age close by, where a kid can launch from, where you might live yourself someday.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: The revenue is one use, but the flexibility is the real asset.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now the honest fine print spoken out loud.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't told you what it costs to build because I never quote construction costs on this show.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Every lot and every design is totally different, and anyone who gives you a number before assessing your property is totally guessing or they're not being honest.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Rental income is not guaranteed.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Markets change.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Being a landlord is real work with real responsibilities.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And nothing in this episode is financial advice.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sit down with an ADU specialist who knows their numbers.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm giving you today is a way of thinking.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: The diligence, though, that's yours.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that said, I want to share a story, and here's the heart of it, and it all started out of a truck.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: At the top of the show, I said one more company belongs in Rosemead story, and here it is.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because everything I've described today, the kitchen table, the first location, the leap, isn't something I researched for this episode.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's something I work inside of every day.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: It starts, believe it or not, with a broken mallet.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: When the Acton ADU founder, Stan Acton, was a boy, he broke his father's wooden mallet.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not just any mallet, a family heirloom his father had crafted himself on his own father's antique shopsmith lathe.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: There was three generations in that one tool, and Stan had broken it.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: He was devastated.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: So he grabbed a hunk of old firewood, climbed up to the same antique shopsmith, and turned a new one.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere in the spinning of that lathe, instantly a builder was born.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Stan Acton actually studied computer science and worked his way through college as an apprentice to a local remodeling contractor named John Warren, who taught him two things that would become the foundation of everything the satisfaction and pride of quality craftsmanship, and the profound importance of integrity.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: When Stan graduated, he was headed straight for a career in Silicon Valley Tech, and the craft won.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: He made a decision.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: He left tech and he became a builder.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: He found an act in construction out of his truck.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: One man, one truck.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And those two values riding along in the cab.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: And over more than three decades that truck grew into a veteran design build company.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Home remodels, new custom homes, entire property renovations, many of them including ADUs on a lot, long before ADU was a word most people knew.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And a striking number of those clients were entrepreneurs themselves, or small business owners, families using the extra space as a base of operations for a business, for a dream, and flexible housing for family.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: People invested not just in their business, they were investing in each other.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then Stan did the most second location thing imaginable.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: After 30 years, he looked at what was happening in the entire state of California, families priced out, parents aging far from their kids, backyards sitting idle, and he committed the entire legacy of Actin Construction to one focus, navigating the regulations, design, and the building of ADUs so that homeowners could keep family close, earn lasting income, and grow their communities responsibly.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Actin ADU was born, and the whole 35-year enterprise reinvested in one simple thing that they believed in most.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: So when I tell you about the Cherns building 2,300 restaurants from one Pasadena kitchen, or David Tran building an empire from a blue Chevy van, understand that I'm not admiring those stories from a distance.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Stan Acton is the same species, Rose, the trans, and actin.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: People who started with almost nothing but skill and built something their families could stand on.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's really what family integrity planning is.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: When you strip away the branding, it's the family business plan for the entire household itself.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Every family enterprise, from a print shop to a sauce empire, exists for the same underlying reason.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the people at the kitchen table and the generations after them start further ahead than the founders did.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: And a well-built home in your backyard is the same act, in its purest form, one location, built with care for a family.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: The second location was never really about revenue.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was about what the revenue is for.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining me today.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: If today's episode found you at your own kitchen table, doing the math on your own second location, we would be loved to talk to you.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is the exact conversation our company was built around.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Acton ADU carries more than 35 years of experience in design build methodology, remodels, new homes, whole property renovations, and of course, ADUs.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we're committed to bringing that experience to homeowners across all of California, including Rosemead.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: We don't just build ADUs, we build homes that last and legacies.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Family first, transparent, and no surprises.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you're ready to explore what's possible, visit actinadu.com or give us a call for a free consultation.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: One last reminder the Herrera family is an illustrative composite, all rental figures or market averages that change over time.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And nothing in this episode is financial, tax, or legal advice.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Bring qualified professionals into any real planning and verify current ADU regulations with the City of Rosemead.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again for listening.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And to everyone building something at their kitchen table tonight in any language, this episode is dedicated to you.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm James, and this has been ADU Adventures Building in Your Backyard.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be seeing you out there.