Work-life balance has become a major priority for Gen Z, with young workers increasingly placing a premium on maximizing time away from their jobs—even ranking it above pay in some surveys. But work-life balance has never been much of a priority for Panda Express cofounder Andrew Cherng.
Even at 78, the self-made billionaire restaurateur has long embraced the demanding schedules and relentless work ethic that helped him build the largest Asian-American restaurant chain in the U.S.
“It was hard when I had no business, there was no income,” he said after recently being asked by NBC News on how to avoid burnout. “But even then, I wasn’t burned out because, you just work, go to work, and [if] you have a like a 12-hour day, you go home, you sleep well—I mean that’s life.”
And that mindset helped him and his wife, Peggy, turn a single family-run restaurant into a nearly $7 billion-a-year global chain over five decades. It has also helped propel their net worths to an estimated $6.6 billion collectively.
How two immigrants turned $60,000 into an empire serving 148 million pounds of orange chicken a year
