Nobody hands you a manual when you start your first business at 20. There’s no roadmap for leading people twice your age, no blueprint for navigating a deal gone sideways at 2 AM, and certainly no class that teaches you how to hold a vision together when everything around it seems to be falling apart. You learn all of that the hard way, and if you’re paying attention, you come out the other side a fundamentally different kind of leader.
I opened my first restaurant at 20. I thought leadership meant being the smartest person in the room. I thought that if I worked harder than everyone else, stayed later, made the calls, and controlled every moving part, success would follow. And for a while, in that early scrappy season, it did. That version of me got things done. But that version of me also burned out teams, missed things I should have caught, and, I’ll be honest, missed the forest for the trees more times than I’d like to admit.
Twenty-plus years later, running a multi-sector development company spanning commercial real estate, hospitality, and construction across Northern California and Nevada, I’ve had to fundamentally unlearn almost everything I thought I knew about what it means to lead.
The Shift from Doing to Building
In my restaurant days, I was deep in operations. I knew every station, every supplier relationship, and every cost line. That granular knowledge felt like power. And in a single-unit business, it was. But the moment you start scaling, with more locations, more asset classes, and more complexity, that same instinct becomes a ceiling.
The first real mindset shift I had to make was understanding the difference between being a doer and a builder. A doer executes. A builder creates systems, cultures, and teams that execute without them. I had to stop being the answer to every question and start being the person who built an environment where great people could find their own answers.
That’s harder than it sounds, especially when you’ve spent years earning trust by showing up and delivering. Letting go of that identity is genuinely uncomfortable. But it’s non-negotiable if you want to grow.
The Mistakes That Shaped Me More Than the Wins
I could write a long list of the deals and decisions I got right. I’d rather talk about where I stumbled, because those are the moments that changed me.
Early on, I hired for talent and ignored culture fit. I brought in sharp people who didn’t share our values, and I watched those hires create friction that slowed everything down. Talent without alignment is a liability, not an asset. I learned to hire for character first, capability second, and to be honest with myself when a hire wasn’t working, rather than waiting for the situation to resolve itself.
I also made the mistake, more than once, of moving too fast on an opportunity without doing the deep work on the why. In real estate development, urgency can be a trap. I’ve walked away from deals, sometimes painfully, because I learned to ask not just “can we do this?” but “should we do this, and does it serve where we’re trying to go?” That discipline has saved us more than it’s cost us.
And perhaps the biggest mistake: thinking I had to figure everything out alone. That’s the ego talking. It took mentors to break me of it.
The Mentorship Moments That Changed Everything
There are a handful of conversations in my career that I can point to as turning points. Not seminars, not books, but conversations. With people who had walked the path longer and were willing to be honest with me.
One mentor, early in my transition into real estate development, told me something I’ve never forgotten: “Stop trying to be the best at everything. Be the best at seeing the whole board.” That single reframe shifted how I approached every deal, every hire, every partnership. My job wasn’t to be the expert in every discipline; it was to see how the pieces fit together and build a team of people who were better than me in their lanes.
Another mentor challenged me about my relationship with failure. I was treating mistakes like threats to my reputation rather than as data points. He helped me understand that in development, where projects span years, markets shift, and variables multiply, the leaders who last are the ones who fail fast, learn faster, and don’t let pride get in the way of pivoting.
What Leadership Actually Looks Like Now
The Akki Patel leading LRE & Co. today is a different person from the 20-year-old behind the counter at his first restaurant. Not better in every way, that young version had an energy and a hunger I still try to tap into. But more measured. More patient. More interested in building something that outlasts any one deal or any one cycle.
Today, leadership to me means clarity of vision and generosity with it, making sure every person on our team understands not just what we’re building, but why. It means being willing to have hard conversations early rather than late. It means staying curious about what I don’t know, especially in a market as dynamic and unforgiving as commercial real estate.
It means understanding that the best thing I can do for LRE & Co, our investors, our partners, and our communities is to keep evolving. Not just the company, but me.
Twenty years later, that’s still the work. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. https://lrecompanies.com/news-blog/