← Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore
Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore
1248: Alec Bauer, Founder of Kitchen, Restaurant & Bar Specialists
01:54:47
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- [00:00]
A
A couple things before we get started today. First, thank you so much for showing up week after week making my vision for Restaurants Unstoppable come true. Your downloads are allowing me to do this show the way I've always wanted to do it. Boots on the ground, word of mouth, leaders, referring leaders giving the industry an uncensored, no BS platform to share their perspectives and truth. That's on you. Thank you so much. And we're just getting started. So if you're enjoying what we're doing here and you want to help us do it even better, please subscribe to this podcast on your platform of choice. And if you do that, I promise to do everything in my power to continue to improve the show. I'll deliver the restaurant tours you want to hear from and we'll continue to make everything you love about this show better. Thank you. Welcome to restaurant unstoppable. For 10 years and over 1,000 episodes, I've been traveling the country chasing word of mouth leads and having in person only long form discussions with the industry's finest owners and operators. Our mission is to inspire, empower and transform the restaurant industry by bridging the gap between this generation's leaders and the next. Listen to today's guest and so many others and get one step closer to becoming unstoppable. This episode is brought to you by Restaurant Technologies, the leader in automated cooking oil management. Their total oil management solution is an end to end closed loop automated automated system that delivers, monitors, filters, collects and recycles your cooking oil, eliminating one of the dirtiest jobs in the kitchen. Restaurant technologies services over 45,000 customers nationwide. Automate your oil and elevate your kitchen by visiting RTI Inc.com or call 888-779-5314 to get started. This episode is made possible by Sir Bony your all in one bookkeeping and financial solution. We're talking about reliable tax preparation Business Inc. Seamless payroll and compliance reports Strategic CFO services that drive business growth Detailed custom reporting for complete financial clarity Dedicated support for restaurants in multi location businesses Did I mention bookkeeping? Let Sir Bony handle the numbers so you can focus on the vision. Call Sir Bony today at 281-888-2413 to schedule your free 30 minute consultation and discover how Sir Bony can streamline your operations and boost your bottom line. Lim and exclusive to Restaurant Unstoppable listeners. Mention this Message and get 20% off your first month of services. This episode is made possible by US Foods. Running a successful restaurant takes more than just great food with US Foods, you can expect more high quality products, advanced tools and flexible deliveries to grow your business. Their industry leading moxy platform also does more than just place your US Foods order. It uses AI to help you take control, save time and increase profitability. Visit usfoods.com export expect more to learn how to become a US Foods customer one more time, that is usfoods.com expect more with excitement. Allow me to introduce you today's guest, founder of kitchen, restaurant and bar specialist Alec Bauer. My man, Alec, are you feeling unstoppable today?
- [03:27]
B
Completely. Thank you, Eric.
- [03:28]
A
Stoked to be here. I love talking to specialists. And you are a specialist in all things obviously kitchen, restaurant, bar, specials, but like really in design. That's your thing, right? Kitchen design, specifically your thing.
- [03:41]
B
Yeah. I mean food service design.
- [03:44]
A
Food service.
- [03:45]
B
Because it's, at first glance it's just kitchens, but it's not. It's kitchens and support areas. Of course we design bars and all that, but for us it's a lot about the whole, the whole project. Right. The kitchen is where all, you know, all this stuff happens and the most complicated room in the building. But despite being a kitchen specialist, we, we actually look a little more broadly than that. Yeah.
- [04:07]
A
And I do like talking to specialists. Actually got a little he recently because I, I said that I think all, not all, but a majority of restaurant consultants and coaches are going to kind of. I think that world is going to go in the direction of fractional executives. Fractional cos, fractional CFOs with tools like Restaurant365 out there. Now, these executives can manage multiple clients but not just tell them what to do, but to implement the tools and then to work the tools with them.
- [04:35]
B
Yeah.
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A
And I think that that takes care of a lot of the like P and L stuff, inventory stuff, labor stuff. If you're following the system and the system is the software and you know somebody how to. That, that knows how to use it and implement it. That replaces a lot of those generalist roles in the restaurant industry.
- [04:51]
B
Yeah, it does. It's interesting though. There's, you know, there's a range of consultant types in terms of what side of the industry folks are consulting on. What you're talking about is more of an operational consultant work. Financials, PNLs, labor, maybe even your broader model. Not just, you know, your operational mod on our side, it's more about design, development and construction, which is a whole other can of worms entirely. It's everything that happens before the door opens.
- [05:21]
A
Cue the specialists.
- [05:22]
B
Cue the specialists. Exactly.
- [05:24]
A
Yeah. So I can't wait to get into your story and to find out how you got to where you are today and to unpackage some of the specialist knowledge that you have. But before we do, let's get that motivational, inspirational ball rolling with the success quotes or mantra. What do you got for us today?
- [05:39]
B
The solution is never prescriptive. It's just what's right for the moment.
- [05:44]
A
Ooh, dive into that.
- [05:46]
B
A lot of folks come in, and I think this is something. And I just came up with that, so I got to workshop it a little bit. Appreciate that. A lot of folks come into a project with an idea of what it should be or what it can be or otherwise, which is a more prescriptive side. Right. I wanted to do this. I wanted to do that. I find it's much more invaluable and success oriented to sit with a little bit of ambiguity in the concept and in the overall development approach until you get more information. Right. I was talking to a chef in New York yesterday. Literally just yesterday afternoon, I was down there looking at a particular, very interesting piece of equipment in his kitchen. And I was asking him about what's going on and in the restaurant. They just opened in October. Little bit of a splashy opening. You know, how's. How's it going? He said, they're just hitting their stride and this and that. It's great. It's a beautiful place. And then he said something, and I kind of. I kind of finished his sentence, or we finished at the same time, which is. You start with a vision, and then once you open, your customers kind of tell you what you are.
- [06:48]
A
That's exactly what I was thinking.
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B
And it's. It's like. It's the same on the. You know, on. Not so much the same on the design and construction side, but from an interior design perspective, from an architectural.
- [06:57]
A
From everything.
- [06:58]
B
You come in with an idea, but you. You can't hold too loyally to that idea. Of course you need North Stars. Of course, you need a general direction. A general direction, exactly. That your. That your team is oriented around. But to hold too tightly to any. Any one idea can be. Can be a little problematic.
- [07:17]
A
Yeah. No two scenarios are exactly the same. You could have the same exact concept in a different market, and it might have to be slightly different.
- [07:24]
B
Yeah. Brief example, I was thinking about. I think about this one a lot when it comes to experience versus understanding versus wisdom, all that around food service, kitchen design, whatnot. Something a lot of folks don't really think about. But how much ice do you need. In a restaurant? Right. There are metrics out there that old school food service consultants would use. A certain number of pounds per day, per seat, whatever it might be in the bar. But I could give you three or four different bars with three or four different ice requirements, depending on how they do things. Right. So it's about getting in and understanding what the operator plans to do. Getting in and understanding how they plan to do it and then asking. Asking the right questions.
- [08:06]
A
Yeah. And then. Where are we going to put this ice machine?
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B
Where are we going to put it?
- [08:09]
A
Yeah, we're going to rent it or own it.
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B
Are we going to rent it or own it?
- [08:11]
A
Yeah, it just keeps going. And that's why there's room for specialists.
- [08:14]
B
Yeah. Spoiler alert. They always rent them.
- [08:15]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [08:16]
B
Not always.
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A
What is that? There's a company out there that I recently ice. It's like a ice cube with glasses, you know, I'm talking about, is there a logo? It's escaping me.
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B
But anyway, there's, there's actually there's a lot out there. A lot. In like every city, there's a bunch.
- [08:30]
A
It's a good business model.
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B
It's not a terrible business model. If you like, you know, selling ice machines and renting them and fixing them.
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A
And when your ice machine goes down, like if you have your renting, you can have somebody come in, just swap it out, you know, and it's, it's a monthly expense versus, you know, having to have somebody come in and repair it.
- [08:46]
B
Yeah. Not to get in the weeds too much, but hotels general, they want to be able to depreciate all their assets. And so they're going to buy them standalone restaurants, probably 7 times out of 10, 8 times out of 10 will lease them or rent them from one of these services.
- [09:00]
A
Yeah. And this is the kind of stuff we're going to get into. And you know, you're kind of reminding me of like when I was six years into this thing, when I started this podcast, like my naive self was like, I'm going to crack the code, I'm going to figure out the way.
- [09:10]
B
Let me know.
- [09:12]
A
Yeah, exactly. And like I remember being, I was in Thailand and I was just like, I got to figure, I got to commit to something. I got to say, like, this is the way, like how. But the reality is there is no one way. There is a million and one different possibilities to infinite amount of possibilities to get from point A to point B. And it all depends on, so like who you are, what your vision is, where you are what? Like, there's so many like, variables that come into play that there is no one way. So my intention with this podcast is to share the perspective is to. And then to give people that perspective and figure out like you need to figure out the way that makes sense for you based off of all these stories.
- [09:47]
B
Yeah. And all the various factors that go in your particular business model, your particular location, your team around you and what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are. You know, all the, all the modeling in the world falls apart when you have a last minute chef change or a gm, you know, something in their family, they're not with the company and whatever, any number of things can happen and turn your business on ahead. There's some pretty well known operations out there that started out doing one thing and then immediately transferred into something else. And that's what they actually became known for. That's sort of the David Chang Momofuku noodle bar story, at least to some extent. Don't quote me on that. Chef David starting out with one idea, but then quickly realizing that that's not what people wanted, it's not what people thought they were good at. And then all of a sudden it's, oh, we can do this thing. And that's not what we thought we were going to do. But this is what's killing it. This is what people are coming back for. So we're going to lean into this.
- [10:45]
A
Yep.
- [10:46]
B
Right. Ye.
- [10:47]
A
Awesome way to get this thing started. So you got into the world of design and project management around 2009, and you didn't launch your own business, kitchen, restaurant and bar specialists, until 2014, but you were a chef and a culinary instructor before that. So where does it make sense? Where would you like to start your story?
- [11:06]
B
Where do I want to start that? Let me back up a little bit. Started KRBS, my shorthand for kitchen, restaurant and bar specialist, in 2010. 10.
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A
Okay.
- [11:17]
B
10. 2010. Yeah.
- [11:20]
A
So ChatGPT failed me. Yeah.
- [11:22]
B
As it's, as it's want to do. Interesting that it had any info though. For me, it started a long, you know, my restaurant journey started a long time ago. You know, like legit. Was a busboy in a sort of typical, you know, Chinese restaurant in suburban New Jersey. And I didn't really think much about it other than that's where I get dropped off after soccer practice. And, you know, I'd spend the evening clearing tables and putting apples of mustard and whatnot and wontons and always, however, always had a sort of photographic memory for Food, you know, sort of famously amongst my friends and family, remember events and remember milestones in life and remember what people ate at them or what so and so had when we were at the such and such restaurant on that one trip. And for whatever reason, the food component, the flavor component, the nostalgia and the memory trigger that we all get from food has always been really, really strong with me. Really resonated, and was always sort of interested in unusual foods. You know, I grew up eating a lot of pickled herring and like, stuff that wasn't, I think, typical. And then, you know, found myself working in restaurants later in high school and then all through college working in restaurants, not ever thinking about restaurants as a career. Didn't. Didn't even occur to me that this was a possible career.
- [12:46]
A
I did see that you went to the New England Culinary Institute.
- [12:49]
B
I did. Right here in. Right here in Vermont.
- [12:51]
A
So was that later in your.
- [12:52]
B
Yeah, so I. Yep, that's exactly right. So I had been. I had been cooking for many, many years before I went to culinary school. Had been making a living actually working in kitchens. You know, traditional American pubs and grills, Italian restaurants, you know, what have you. Worked in Tucson, worked in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I was in college and a couple other places while moving around, and at some point realized that that's really. That was the direction that I was going. Like smoking weed and snowboarding wasn't making me, Wasn't making me any money. And sort of professionalizing myself in the culinary industry was when sort of realizing that I needed to do that was when I went to the New England Culinary Institute. I was already living here in Vermont at the time. And at the time, Niki, as it was, as it was known, was a really preeminent place. I mean, it was right up there with the CIA. That's the Culinary Institute of America in terms of quality of education, hands on seven to one student teacher ratios, running actual restaurants, serving actual food to actual people, and all of the attendant stress and pressure that goes along with service in that regard. So when I entered culinary school, I already had a college degree. Was living with my now wife in a home that we already owned here in. In Vermont.
- [14:11]
A
Like what was your original culinary or.
- [14:12]
B
Your original college degree in? I have a Bachelor of Science in natural resource management.
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A
Okay.
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B
With a focus on applied ecology and fishery science.
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A
Interesting.
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B
Yeah. In hindsight, it looks like I had some kind of arc here. Right. With a minor in organic agriculture. Also really interested in the ag side, which sort of, again, wasn't really planned. I was Just kind of going with things that I was interested in. But, but over the years that, you know, that deep dive into organic ag and CSAs, community supported agriculture and all that, which are super common, they're all over the, all over the place at this point. 30 years ago and 30 some odd years ago when I was in college, you know, running a student led CSA was pretty unusual. So started, you know, got involved in that, went to culinary school after having already had a bunch of years in the industry. So I was, you know, I was much more well positioned to take advantage of that education. That's the way to do it than some of my, you 18 year old. No offense to the folks who are 18 out there who are looking to go to culinary school, but they were living away from home for the first time they were in college.
- [15:16]
A
Some people know when they're 17, 16, some people get started early working in restaurants, maybe It's a family business, 13, 14, 15. And they know it's what they want to do. But that's rare, you know, that's really.
- [15:27]
B
Like, I think even rarer still that those people want to stick with it.
- [15:31]
A
Right. In the thousands or at least hundreds of people I've spoken to, it's always the ones that go into culinary school in their mid-20s where they take it seriously, obviously. And the value in a culinary degree, in my opinion, and feel free to disagree with me, is in the network you're paying for. When you go to that school, you can go learn on the job, you can go travel and get all the different culinary experience you want and, and literally in reverse engineer your education through the jobs you're getting to. One year, two years at a time, right? Yeah, but it's, it's that network that will open up to you that when, when you go, you'll learn the basics of cooking. But like man, if you're hustling in college and your professors like you and they see that you have talent, like they will open doors for you, they will get you those, those, those internships and those, those pathways.
- [16:21]
B
I think a proper culinary school education is potentially invaluable. It's also potentially really expensive. You know, it took me, you know, 12 or 13 years to finish paying off culinary school loans. You know, you, you go and you spend 30, 40, whatever. I don't even know how much it is. At the time it was like 40 grand a year. Yeah, something like that. And it's a lot of money. And then you get out and you're.
- [16:42]
A
Making minimum wage, 40,000 a year. If you're lucky, 50,000.
- [16:45]
B
And I wasn't making that the highest paying job I ever had working as a, as a chef was 19, 25 an hour. I was a union employee. The Four Seasons in San Francisco benefits and the whole thing going apart, going along with being a part of, local to the hotel, employee, restaurant, employee, union. Interesting situation. But I was much more in the, like I was making 650 an hour. I was making 925 an hour. You know, whatever it is, it's hard to pay off student loan with that. However, as you and I talked briefly before we got started on this, you know, the industry has really professionalized a lot. Wages are up for cooks. You've got a lot of, you know, out of necessity. Yeah, out of necessity. You've got healthcare service surcharges and whatnot. And interesting models that operators are looking at, you know, tipping. No tipping pool tips.
- [17:33]
A
Profit sharing.
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B
Yeah, profit sharing. How about that? You know, tipping out the, the cooks. I mean, I spent a lot of time working in fine dining restaurants making a fraction of what the servers were making out on the front, out on the floor. And not to take anything away from the really, really professional, really high quality, dedicated, you know, servers and sommeliers and you know, there's some really amazing people across the industry. It takes a team across the industry. Absolutely takes a team to run, especially at a fine dining level. But there's always been this imbalance between the folks who are working the longest, hardest hours in the back of house and who actually do are the ones like for all the beautiful architecture and for all the beautiful interior design and for all the wonderful guest experience that these operations can drive. What you're selling is food and food and booze. Right at the end of the day.
- [18:19]
A
Would you change the way you got to where you are? If knowing what you know today, would you have done the culinary school?
- [18:23]
B
So for me, again, it worked out really well. I was able to parlay my culinary school experience into two great, two different externships or internships that I might not have been able to get otherwise. One was working with Chef Jean George Van Gogh Richten in New York at the Mercer Kitchen. And the second one, when I was finishing culinary school, my, my second internship through the great relationship that I developed with the executive chefs at the school because they recognized, you know, here's, here's a guy who's really putting in the work, who really understands where he's going and is committed to it. And I was able to turn that into an opportunity to do a long term apprenticeship at a restaurant in Paris. And I spent five months, four and a half, five months at a restaurant in Paris, Maison Blanche, La Frere Porcelle. It wasn't a Michelin starred at the time, but they were three star Michelin chefs. It was incredible experience that I would not have gotten out of outside of culinary school. However, that was, you know, that was 25 years ago. And today the opportunities are different, right. Between, you know, not just the. Well, even if we just focus on Instagram, for example, right there, the, the velocity with which restaurant ideas travel around the globe is, is unlike it was before. Right. And you can be on somebody's radar in a way that you weren't before. And even as a, you know, the opportunities that have opened up for people to be YouTube content creators in the culinary space. Right. That's a completely personal chef. You don't need a culinary degree to do that. You just need to be good.
- [19:55]
A
Right?
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B
Right. And I will say this, this is one thing that does remain true in the restaurant industry. That is a bit of a departure from what you were saying before about culinary school, which I don't necessarily disagree with, but the restaurant industry really, really underscores work ethic, talent and the ability to make something of yourself that is completely independent of degrees, certifications, any kind of other specific acknowledgments, or even speaking English as a, as a, you know, as a native language or otherwise. I've seen so many people be so successful in this industry without the formal training that you would expect from, you know, a typical fine dining cook or what have you.
- [20:38]
A
And I'm spending time on this subject because it hasn't come out yet. But you're also a culinary instructor.
- [20:42]
B
I was. So I was. That was an interesting time. I was again still here, here in Vermont. I had finished an apprenticeship in France. I had worked at a crazy, crazy fine dining restaurant, you know, 1820 course prefix menus, real gastronomic. And again, this goes back to 2002 or 2003, somewhere around there. And at one point, one of the chef, one of the executive chefs at the culinary school heard that I was back in Vermont and that I was commuting this ridiculous commute to work at what at the time was one of only two or maybe three Relay Chateau properties in the state of Vermont. And are you familiar with Relay Chateau?
- [21:22]
A
No.
- [21:22]
B
Sort of a. It's not quite Michelin, but it's kind of in that range. It's a certification for restaurants and hotels and whatnot. That they can gain. That's a real measure of quality and a real measure of culinary thinking and forward thinking guest experience and whatnot. And I was really sort of on that fine dining track at that time in my life.
- [21:47]
A
Did you not derail your train of thought? But what was the track? Where were you headed?
- [21:53]
B
I was thinking I was going to continue on this fine dining track for a while and I would ultimately, you know, open my own place or open a place with other people or what have you. It didn't go that route, but at some point along the way, one of the executive chefs at the culinary school who had heard that I was, had this crazy commute here in Vermont, like an hour plus each way in the snow and this and that. And he called me up, says, why don't you just come and work for us? We need a chef instructor in our fine dining kitchen. You get to work with Chef Louise Duhamel, who's a wonderful, wonderful chef. She had been in some really top end properties around Quebec and Toronto area. It's a great opportunity for me to work right alongside a really talented chef. And initially you think, oh, culinary school instructor, I'm totally selling out. I really didn't think it was going to be that great. But the opportunity to take and the way, the way Nike worked at the time was you had these two week blocks, seven students per block, and you would have students for two weeks and then you would get a new set of students. And yet every day, seven days a week, you had to put out the same consistent fine dining product for the guests. And so it was a crash course in training. It was a crash course in me being able to do my stuff really well, really clean, really efficiently so that I could teach much younger people how to do it in their own way. And I, it was, it was really, it was great opportunity for me.
- [23:09]
A
This episode is brought to you by Restaurant Technologies, the leader in automated cooking oil management. Unstoppable restaurant owners know which services to keep in house and which services to outsource. And oil management is one of those things you should outsource. Their total oil management solution is an end to end, closed loop automated system that delivers, monitors, filters, collects and recycles your cooking oil, eliminating one of the dirtiest jobs in the kitchen. Create a more efficient food service operation and ensure consistent food quality with a safer, smarter and sustainable cooking oil solution. Restaurant technology services over 45,000 customers nationwide, including countless past guests on the show. Automate your oil and elevate your kitchen by visiting RTI Inc.com. or call 888-779-5314 to get started. If you could wave a wand and create a system for education in our current model, our current industry, what, what do you think makes sense? How should we be bringing up the next generation?
- [24:16]
B
You know, the apprenticeship model is great. It's been great in, you know, Europe, in Europe, most of the world. I think the apprenticeship model, I mean, the food service trade is a trade. It's not unlike being, you know, being in contracting, you know, plumbing contractor, electrical contractor. It's very different work, of course, but it requires a specific skill and it requires an understanding of the need to.
- [24:38]
A
Be a plumber and electrician too.
- [24:40]
B
It requires it certainly for what I do now, we have to at least speak plumber and electrician. But the opportunity to learn on a job is in many ways superior to culinary school because you can get in for much lower stakes.
- [24:55]
A
Get paid to learn.
- [24:55]
B
You can get paid to learn, right? And you can work your way up and really understand what's happening in a kitchen and understand what's happening in a hotel or whatever, whatever the property is.
- [25:04]
A
And it's a ticket to anywhere in the world.
- [25:06]
B
Again, the, the restaurant and the food and beverage and the hospitality industry rewards hard work. It rewards good, ethical, guest minded experience when you're on the hospitality side. Now, again, there's so many, so many ways to roam, as it were. You can get into food production, you can get into consumer product, right? You can develop a food product that you want to sell at the grocery store and what have you. And before you know it, you got to build a working commissary kitchen for your catering business or, or whatever. There's a lot of, you know, a lot of things you can do with a culinary education, whether it was born out of a more traditional school type situation or born out of an apprenticeship, there's a lot of things you can do.
- [25:47]
A
So you were a culinary instructor until 2009. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- [25:53]
B
Let's see, when was that?
- [25:55]
A
I see it's from 07 to 09. Is it when you were the instructor at the New England Culinary Institute?
- [26:00]
B
No, I think it was, it was a little before then because in 0709 I'd already been in the Bay Area for a little while.
- [26:07]
A
Okay.
- [26:07]
B
So I kind of went fairly quickly from, from culinary school, through my externships, through a series of other restaurants, and then back to the culinary school. It was from the culinary school. Again, to your point about networking, I was afforded an opportunity to Interview with the Four Seasons in San Francisco through the executive chef of the culinary school, who had been the executive chef at the Four Seasons in Boston previous to being at the culinary school, still knew some people. The Four Seasons. I took some opportunities to stage and to do some sort of temporary kitchen interviews, as it were, as a temporary stage at some hotels in LA and in San Francisco. Ultimately decided my wife and I to go to the Bay Area and was a round chef for the Four Seasons, which means I worked in all the different. Worked in pastries, worked in banquets, worked in the fine dining restaurant, did all that. And then. And a former culinary school student of mine who was out in the Bay Area at the time working for a restaurant in Napa I was talking to and he said, oh, you got to come up here, right? We're doing some really, really great food. I went up there and I staged for a day and I was like, oh, this is where I want to be. So I left the Four Seasons behind in the sort of union mentality, which was great. It's a great property. You know, I love the Four Seasons. You know, it's. They're all super nice, high end, you know, kind of affair, if that's your bag. But the work environment was a little more union, which is great, big union supporter. But there's a challenge in some of those environments where you have folks who, they can't do this part of the job, responsibility because it's not in there, right. It's not in their union lane. And in a restaurant that can be challenging. And that's really on the hotel side where that's where you see that, where it can be a bit of a challenge. So went up to Napa, got it, offered a job up there and was like, oh, this is where I want to be for a little while. And then, you know, sort of within a year or so of being up there was like, I think I, I think I want to get into design, I want to get into consulting.
- [28:03]
A
Yeah, I'm curious about that pathway in the hotel. The, the Four Seasons approach. That, that route. I feel like a lot of people when they get into this industry that isn't really on their radar. Everybody wants to go work in a restaurant. Like an independent restaurant is like kind of like the path that most people. But that other path, to your point, offers a lot of security. There's a lot of benefits to that path.
- [28:26]
B
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to go the fine dining route requires a couple things. It requires either a pre existing financial security or it requires the ability to manage with less for a period of time while you are cutting your teeth. Right. Putting in your dues in the, you know, in the 1, 2 and 3 star Michelins of, you know, across the country or wherever. It may also require you in this day and age to go to Europe or Scandinavia or Asia or the Mideast or basically anywhere where there is high end restaurants and get that kind of experience. However, there's a long time to be able to get that skill set, the skill set that you need to be able to walk into a two or three star Michelin restaurant and actually get a job and be able to survive. It takes a while to get that skill set, to build up those chops and that understanding and again, that endless, endless commitment to cleanliness and detail and consistency and, and you know, stick to itiveness. Yeah.
- [29:32]
A
But there's also the entrepreneurial path within this, the realm, the ecosystem of a hotel group too. So I'm thinking I just recently had Philip Bolhoffer. If I'm saying your name incorrectly, Phil, I apologize. Lots of names run through my life, life. But he is the FMB director for Parks Hospitality Group out of Asheville, North Carolina or I don't know if they're based in Nashville, but that's where he is.
- [29:58]
B
Okay.
- [29:59]
A
And his job as F and B director is to go develop and engineer concepts.
- [30:05]
B
Yeah.
- [30:05]
A
You know, and that is a very entrepreneur. So like, it's almost like you, you, you're wearing that, that restaurant tour hat, but within the ecosystem of a hotel group. And more and more hotels are trying to that, that symbiotic relationship between FMB and the hotel. It's a draw.
- [30:21]
B
Yeah.
- [30:21]
A
You know, so there is you, you.
- [30:24]
B
Can get the, the best of both worlds, especially now. And that part of the industry or that part of the marketplace I should say, has also changed. 25 years ago, boutique hotels were new, right There there were still predominantly, you know, corporate hotels and they were not known for their high quality food and beverage.
- [30:43]
A
You didn't know the restaurant was there. It was just an afterthought.
- [30:46]
B
It was there because they had to have it there as part of their brand standard and they knew they had to have it there just be able to serve guests. Whereas now you have all kinds of different hotel operators bringing in all kinds of different chefs with all kinds of different licenses.
- [30:58]
A
The restaurant's the draw.
- [30:59]
B
The restaurant is the draw. The restaurant is what put heads in beds.
- [31:02]
A
Let's get that rooftop, that roof, that rooftop restaurant going and that becomes why people choose to stay There.
- [31:08]
B
Yeah. And the, you know, the sort of traditional corporate hotel route, even as a standalone approach, as you noted, Eric, which I think is really accurate, offers a lot of security. You're far less likely to.
- [31:20]
A
Benefits.
- [31:20]
B
Yeah, benefits. You get all kinds of things that are much more challenging for a typical independent restaurant, even a high quality successful one. Even your successful multi outlet operators in the independent space will still struggle to maintain healthcare and security. And you get a lot of that in the hotel world. And, and you can travel.
- [31:42]
A
Yeah.
- [31:43]
B
If you're in one of these hotel, if you're in the Marriott system, for example, man, you can go anywhere in the world.
- [31:48]
A
Yeah.
- [31:49]
B
And there's some really great opportunities. I've met a lot of chefs who've, you know, they worked in, you know, they worked in Singapore, they worked in Hong Kong or they worked, you know, wherever. And I mean especially across Asia. The, the, the hotel scene is tremendous. Yeah, there's a lot of great opportunities there. Yeah. Again, none of which require you to have a culinary school degree or anything other than good work ethic, good, you know, good resume. You know, you put your time in some good places and you can really write your ticket.
- [32:17]
A
Yeah. So when did things start to shift for you from going to this, you having a dream to be the executive chef, a partner in a restaurant. That was the trajectory you're on. What changed?
- [32:28]
B
I think I changed. I had, you know, I had.
- [32:35]
A
I.
- [32:35]
B
Had a sort of realization that the trajectory that I was on, and this was even a little bit before my son was born, I had a realization that the trajectory I was on was not a sustainable one for me.
- [32:46]
A
What was, what was that trajectory and why didn't it work for you?
- [32:49]
B
Moving towards being in the, you know, again, towards being, you know, a chef owner, for example. And I think that's in large part because of where the industry was at 20 some odd years ago. And if I were now where I was 20 years ago coming up, still cut my teeth, I would probably, I would probably stay the course and I would probably continue moving towards opening a place or partnering with people to open a place or a group of places or getting involved in a multi outlet operation, you know, either as chef or culinary director, any one of those things could have been on my path were I doing it now. But again, 20 some odd years ago, the rest the industry was still a little bit, you know, it wasn't quite, you know, Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential anymore, but it wasn't so far. It was a lot closer to that than it is now.
- [33:37]
A
So what was it? That's. So what's different now that would pull you back in that direction?
- [33:42]
B
The, for lack of a better term, the culture within these operations. You know, the sort of team approach that, that restaurants take. Especially, you know, I've seen a lot of our clients open a lot of wonderful restaurants and I've had the, you know, the great fortune to be able to dine in a lot of these restaurants and to see the way they approach their operation as a team. First, in full, unified support of their hospitality and their unified endeavor to provide a fantastic guest experience. It's not that we didn't have that 20, 20 plus years ago, but it was a little more, you know, sort of everyone for themselves, just trying to get through the day, trying to get through their prep list, trying to make sure that their stuff was good enough or. And not that there's not healthy competition in all these operations for the primo, for the, for the great positions in some of these kitchens, but they're just done in so much more. It's all done in a so much more professional manner.
- [34:39]
A
It was a competition. It was a competition. It wasn't to climb to the top.
- [34:42]
B
Yeah, and it still is, don't get me wrong, it is. No, it is not for the fans of Heart even a time to climb to the top of any given restaurant, let alone, you know, the top of your city or your region or. And then you get up into the, you know, the, the, the 50 best in the world or whatever these other, you know, these other sort of awards programs are. It's a whole other stratosphere of operation. And we've worked with a lot of clients who are in, who live in that playground. Like that's what, that's the water they swim in. And I'm continually blown away, even now after being involved in, you know, 300 plus projects and having worked in a couple dozen, well, not a couple dozen, but 15 or 20 on my own, I'm still blown away at the level of commitment that it requires to operate at that level. And not to segue into what we do now, but having been on this side of the industry, meaning the design, development and construction side, pre opening, to see how much goes into building one of these operations is just stunning. It's, it's a lot of work by a lot of people. And you know, again, it was a much different industry 20, 25 years ago. And if it were as professional then as it is now, I think I would have stayed in, I would have stuck with it and maybe you know, who knows where I would have, where I would have landed. Maybe I'd still be sitting here talking to you. You know, maybe we'd be having a different conversation.
- [36:07]
A
I don't know specifically. The culture, the team approach, the. We're here to serve a greater mission, a greater purpose, and we're all pulling that same direction. It's less about the individual, more about the collective. Yeah, that's what I'm hearing.
- [36:20]
B
Yeah, it's a great, you know, it's. I always thought of, and I don't think I coined this term, I must have heard this from somebody else, but it's apt. I always thought of working in that fine dining, high volume, busy world is full contact ballet. Right. These are, these are team sports, these are team endeavors. At that level. There is so much to do, there's so much to, to manage. So many details flying through the kitchen and the bar and, and the, you know, in the wine room and everything else that goes along with it. Not, not to mention the dish room. Right. Where if, if one thing is going to break down that's going to shut everything down. It's the dish room, of course. And it's just, you know, it takes a lot of people doing, you know, doing a lot of things in the same, with the same kind of mindset, team approach. If somebody's in the weeds, you move over, you help them. And there was always a lot of that back in the day, but it's just different now.
- [37:10]
A
Can you give me an example in your experience working in that environment of the cutthroat? Like, what was like the worst thing you saw of just like I am like, this is it, this is this.
- [37:21]
B
Let me clarify. It wasn't always cutthroat amongst the cooks or the young chefs who were, who were going up, but it was so, you know, the chefs were, the chefs were, you know, not across the board, but at the, at the fine dining level, at the high end level, where I spent a lot of time, you know, it's very, very hard to run those establishments and to, and to corral is herding cats, as it were. Right. It's a lot of pressure to corral your people into doing things in your name as the chef, and it's your name and reputation, it's your name on the menu. That whole, you know, that whole thing drove a lot of pressure and I think drove a lot of people, drove a lot of people to drink, but it also drove a lot of people to treat their staff in a way that we no longer treat Our staff in the industry out in the world, I'm sure there are still some who do. They won't last, but I've seen fist fights break out in kitchens. I've seen grown men break down and cry on the line or crumple in the walk in because the pressure, what have you. I've seen people get fired on the spot, walk out on the spot. Plates, sheet pans thrown across the line at people. Yeah, it was kind, I mean, in a way it was always like, holy shit. Like I gotta, I'm just putting my head down and I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna butcher these 35 quail that I need to get done in the next, whatever 25 minutes or whatever it might have been that was like, whoa, this is really intense right now. And there's def. There's definitely been a shift there. Moving people into this team approach, I think allows for a much greater sense of urgency amongst the team. That doesn't feel like it's all on them.
- [38:58]
A
Give me a specific story. What's the worst?
- [39:01]
B
I don't even know. I don't know.
- [39:06]
A
I'll just put it on the spot.
- [39:07]
B
Yeah, I'll come back to that. I'll try. I'll come up with another example.
- [39:11]
A
But one thing I do love about your story, Alec, is that I think there is so much opportunity within this industry that is adjacent to what the traditional path is 100%. And if you. There is. So, like you're an entrepreneur, at the end of the day, you are a business owner. You didn't open a restaurant, but you started a business and you're very much an entrepreneur. When did you start to realize what your specialty was? When did you start to realize that there's something that you bring to the table that other people are missing?
- [39:37]
B
I think from a specialist perspective, from the perspective of what we do now. I realized as I began the transition from being in day to day operations and moving into consulting, which was a multi year process for me, I enrolled in an interior design and architecture program at UC Berkeley. I was going to class. I was working in a series of restaurants that were not that they were not good restaurants. They were below the status of where I had trained previously. And that was intentionally so that I could relieve myself from so much of the pressure, create some bandwidth and. Create some bandwidth so that I could, so I could go to school.
- [40:13]
A
Just get a paycheck.
- [40:14]
B
Yeah, get a paycheck and be able to do it well and not worry about it, it and then go to school at night, which was great. And you know, and I sort of realized that all these years that I had spent in the kitchen and this restaurant experience that I had had would maybe be good in service of people who needed some kind of design. And again, while I was going through this, I did not know that there were food service consultants who do what I do now. Like, I literally didn't even know that it was a career path or a profession that one could, could have or engage.
- [40:46]
A
Were you at this time where you start to explore architecture and design?
- [40:50]
B
I was in my, I was in my early 30s. Okay. Yeah. So it was definitely, you know, so I had sort of two career changes. Right. I'd come out of college and was, you know, was like, worked for the far service in Alaska for a little while and did all, you know, all these different things.
- [41:04]
A
So if you didn't even know that food service design was an option to this career path, what was your thought then? Like, why were you taking these classes? What was your, your strategy?
- [41:12]
B
I thought I was going to design people's home kitchens.
- [41:14]
A
Oh, that's cool. That would really cool though. I love that job.
- [41:18]
B
I mean, I mean, in hindsight I'm glad that wasn't where I, where I went. Now we get to design some people's home kitchens that'll knock your socks off. Right. That are like true chef's kitchens in people's homes. And at the time I was like, oh, I'll design just some like people's. I didn't know.
- [41:31]
A
I really got to know what kind of budget are you looking at with some of these home designs.
- [41:34]
B
We did a project for, you know, we did a project for a home kitchen a couple years ago that was probably, you know, 400.
- [41:43]
A
I have my dream thousand dollars in, in cooking equipment when restaurant stoppable makes it big. My dream.
- [41:49]
B
That's your dream.
- [41:49]
A
I have just a house that is home to a kitchen with like a bedroom off to the side. And I have this dream for a beautiful like home live fire kitchen. Like I want, I want to have it be like a horseshoe shaped kitchen where like it like it basically my guests will sit around me kind of like a chef's table in a sense, but like just being able. How often do you have companies and you're in the kitchen and everyone's like in the living room or in the dining room and you're away from everybody. Why not just bring the party to the kitchen?
- [42:16]
B
Everybody winds up in the kitchen anyway, right? We all know that, but you basically just described another residential project we're doing in, in lower Manhattan right now with you know, there's an omakase counter and 12 seats around a horseshoe and then a whole island cooking setup. And you know, that's cool. Those are not our bread and butter. Those are very unusual.
- [42:36]
A
That's my dream when restaurant stoppable. I'm not saying if, I'm saying when you're gonna be the guy.
- [42:40]
B
Absolutely. I love your confidence. So to say that I knew where I was going with that it would be, would be untrue. I knew that I was going in a direction that felt good and that felt like it was in furtherance of something.
- [42:58]
A
So you thought you were gonna, you're going to design home kitchens. You. When did you realize that there's a path within the FMB world for you?
- [43:09]
B
So there was a publication a while back, a trade publication called Food Arts. RIP Food Arts. It was great. There was some, was like a little bit of industry gossip, but it was mostly features of a couple of new restaurants, a couple of new things that were interesting in the industry, but it wasn't like all of the other like trade journals these days in, in the food service equipment world, which are really geared towards equipment and really geared towards, you know, like the nine newest ice machines on the market of 2026 kind of thing. Like it's, it's cool, it's interesting if, if that's, you know, if that's what you're interested in. But it's not a, it's, it's a little bit about like culture and, and whatnot. But Food Arts was just good. It was good, interesting journalism specifically geared towards hospitality and high quality restaurants and fine dining and whatnot. On. Anyway, I had a subscription to this as most chefs of my era did at the time. And I read about a guy in there who had designed a project in Ohio. I think it was for the chef's table or chef's garden. They did microgreens. One of the early folks who began selling, growing and selling microgreens and they described this guy as the kitchen designer to the stars. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And he was in Oakland. He's still in Oakland actually. And I cold called him. I think I looked him up in the yellow pages or the, or the white pages in the phone book. And I cold called him and was like, this is. Hi, I'm Alec and this is what I want to do. And we had a nice chat and he invited me to come down to his place, and he hired me on the spot. And I couldn't do much at the time. I had very basic skills, but I started with organizing blueprints and organizing, you know, catalogs from the manufacturers and sort of learning, like, I was like, eyes wide open. I could not believe how much stuff there was on the back end of this industry. And I started to just sort of realize in time, you know, because I started part time and I was working for another architect and an engineer because I developed some CAD skills and the ability to do some design. I kind of realized I had an affinity for this and that I could speak their language and that I could kind of understand what their design approach was. And it's not so different from developing menus or developing, you know, developing certain dishes and techniques that you want to employ or the sequence of techniques and whatnot. And I just kind of got, you know, got more experience over time working, you know, working there. And at some point, I was able to quit all the other jobs and focus on this full time. And it. There wasn't like an aha moment. But along the way, I came to realize that this was a much better place for me. And despite all our talk about specialists, in my mind, I have a generalist's experience. Right. I've got operations experience, construction experience, now design experience, agriculture experience. Right. And that sort of platform of background experience that I've just been humbled by and fortunate to have has afforded me the ability to look at people's projects from a development perspective and understand and see so many different angles.
- [46:26]
A
Both sides of the aisle.
- [46:27]
B
All sides of the aisle, right?
- [46:28]
A
Yeah.
- [46:29]
B
So to be on our side, and by that I mean food service consultants who do work like I do, you need to be able to speak to chefs, you need to be able to speak to dishwashers and commi.
- [46:40]
A
And not just empathize, but sympathize, be.
- [46:42]
B
There and completely understand their time and motion requirements. But then you also need to be able to speak with architects and structural designers and mechanical, electrical, plumbing engineers. You also need to be able to speak with private equity folks and talk about budgets and timelines. And you need to be able to, you know, to work with the developers and everybody that goes involved. Like, we. You see these restaurants in some places, and it's like, how'd that get there? How did this restaurant, with this chef in this time and place wind up in that location? And what started and how many years ago did this project begin? And we've had projects that have gone five, six, seven, Years?
- [47:20]
A
Yeah, it's crazy the amount of money and time that goes into building.
- [47:23]
B
And especially nowadays a very common project type that we see throughout, you know, small to large cities all over America are downtown urban infill. They are towers that are a combination hotel, an apartment and maybe some condos or like a fractional ownership type situation. And then there's some common ground floor areas where there are food and beverage amenities and there's a, you know, maybe a pool or what have you. And then there's like lounge space for the people who have the condos. So they're, you know, their grandparents or their grandkids or their parents. You can celebrate an anniversary or a Super bowl party or whatever. Like these amenity rich environments are very common now and those things take years to go through. Entitlements and then civil engineering and then site work.
- [48:08]
A
And I think that's a more appropriate approach to living than like, to like, I mean we, it's weird. Like we ne cities are unprecedented. Like we were never meant to live in cities the way we do today. If you're alive today, all you know is cities with millions of people in them.
- [48:27]
B
Yeah, but that is a new thing, relatively speaking. Yeah.
- [48:30]
A
Because it's a couple hundred year old thing where you have that many people living in skyscrapers on top of each other.
- [48:36]
B
Yeah.
- [48:37]
A
I just don't think we were ever meant to live like that.
- [48:40]
B
It's pretty efficient though. It is in terms of delivery of public services, you know, power, water.
- [48:46]
A
Was it efficient before the car came in and there was horseshit all over the place?
- [48:51]
B
We didn't have as many people.
- [48:52]
A
Well, that's the thing. I just don't think there's so much land, man. There's so much opportunity to spread out and to keep things smaller and to, you know, to keep it like I do hear the argument with efficiencies and public services and buses and stuff like that. But today people don't have to commute like they used to. But also in cities is the only place you see extreme wealth and extreme poverty in the same place. Yeah, so it's just like, I just don't know. And like I, I, I do see these, these types of living situations where it's, it's communal, it's like this, it's almost like socialistic kind of living but like social capitalism, you know, where you share resources but it's nice, like you have 300, 400 people living in a compound or a unit and there's a restaurant on site, you know, where you can Actually develop a relationship with the. It's kind of like a country club.
- [49:38]
B
Yeah.
- [49:38]
A
Where like, you can develop a relationship with those people. Like, I think it's an interesting approach to future living.
- [49:43]
B
A big part of the industry development right now in terms of construction and whatnot is building really nice, high quality, amenity, rich facilities for boomers to move into as part of an assisted living approach where there are beautiful apartments and nice restaurants and these lounge spaces where you can bring your grandkids in or what have you. And there's also memory care and there's also, you know, doctors on site and there's like outpatient facilities in the building. And these are. These are.
- [50:10]
A
What if there's mixed living where younger people live there too and their job is to take care of like, you know what I'm saying? Like, we could be way more creative. I'm fascinated with archeology and looking back at, you know, how we existed hundreds of or thousands of years ago, and looking at that community aspect, that tribal aspect of everybody having their role and intentionally keeping things. Things small, I think that's where we're optimal. I know we're kind of going down a rabbit hole right now.
- [50:38]
B
Interesting, though.
- [50:38]
A
It's all tied together. Yeah. Hospitality in the way we live is. Is all tied together.
- [50:43]
B
We all got to eat. Yeah.
- [50:44]
A
And not just that, but to serve each other. We ought to serve.
- [50:47]
B
I agree. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah.
- [50:49]
A
So anyway, I digress. You're explaining how some of these projects that we're talking about can be year long, multi year. Yeah. Projects.
- [50:57]
B
Yeah. Yeah. We worked on a. We worked on a hotel in San Francisco on Market street that started, well, pre pandemic, like a number, like in 2016, I think 26, 2017. They were done with site work. I think they had dug the pit and they had done some of the initial shoring and foundation work when the pandemic hit in 2020, and we were, if I remember correctly, we were the only consultants to survive the entirety of the project we were on in the beginning. We were one of the original team of consultants. Ownership changed hands twice. The architects changed, the interior designers changed, the operator changed. Everything changed along the way. The general contractor changed. And at the end of the project, I think we were the only ones who had been there for the whole time. And it took six years, seven years almost.
- [51:49]
A
When was this in your timeline of doing the work you do?
- [51:52]
B
So I started Care BS on my own in 2010, and that was after about, you know, four or five years working for another Consultant who I mentioned, and his name is Mark Steck Novak. Great guy, real mentor for me. Really, really helped, helped a lot.
- [52:09]
A
Is he the one that pushed you in the direction of food service, like consulting specifically because he was doing homes for like the rich and the famous, right?
- [52:18]
B
Not so much. Some. A little bit. A little bit for sure. You know, we did. While I was working in his office, we did some, we did a couple of crazy, crazy high end residential stuff for some Microsoft execs and a few other super, super high net worth individuals in the Bay Area, Peninsula, Saratoga sort of area. But it was predominantly, he was a former chef and it was predominantly restaurant work. What was interesting for me at the time working for him was that even though we were in Oakland or his office was in Oakland, we didn't do almost any San Francisco Bay area work. And so right out of the jump I left, I went from working at a fine dining level for some really good, well, well regarded restaurants and chefs. And as I switched into consulting, I was so fortunate to wind up with a consultant who was building kitchens for the same type of chefs that I had been cooking, cooking for or had been cooking with, and was able to make that sort of lateral transition and still be relevant and still be able to add value to the process. Like, because I knew exactly, I mean, I really knew exactly what those cooks were doing and what those chefs were doing because I was just doing it days before, it seemed like. And everything was remote, though. Almost everything was remote. So long before COVID long before Zoom, long before podcasting, I was sort of not even realizing it, but was developing and understanding of the communication requirements inherent in doing remote work. It's less so now because of Zoom and everything else that we have that supports remote work. But it was just fascinating to go through that process and be like, oh, okay, this is going on on the other side of the country, or this is an international job. But I had been working for him for four or five years and then spent a little while working for an equipment contractor. Global financial crisis hit at the, the office that I was working at the time, Mark's office, we lost a lot of work. We had a lot of spec. Spec projects in, in Vegas and some other locations. And those projects dried up real, real fast during the global financial crisis.
- [54:18]
A
2008. 0. 9.
- [54:19]
B
Yeah, 2008. 9. And then I went and worked for an equipment contractor because at that point I was like, all right, I got a lot of years in the kitchen and I got a bunch of years now on the consulting side but the thing I really don't have any experience in is actual construction, so took the opportunity to go work for an equipment contractor was. It was fortunate to be able to get a job at a contractor during that economic downturn and spent about a year doing that, realized that that still wasn't for me. It was great experience, really learned a ton, A tremendous amount. About a corner of the industry that is food service equipment, wholesaling.
- [54:56]
A
So tell me, bring me into that world what is like, this is all new to me.
- [54:59]
B
Yeah.
- [55:00]
A
About this stuff.
- [55:01]
B
It's, you know, it's a, it's a whole landscape. And that landscape has changed dramatically in the 15 years since I've been doing this on my own. You know, 15 years ago we didn't have Webstaurant or KTOM or the other online E commerce purveyors. And the only way that you could buy a six burner stove, a commercial one, was to either go down to the local restaurant depot or to buy one through a distributor. And you couldn't, you know, much like the, you know, car dealership model, you can't buy a Subaru directly from Subaru. You got to go buy it at a dealer. Right. And it wasn't until Tesla and Rivian and all the boutique car manufacturers started with this direct to consumer model. That direct to consumer model still doesn't really exist. Except for the E Commerce. And even those guys, they're not, they, it appears as if they're direct to consumer, but they're just, they're giant distributors in their own Right. And so you're talking about E Commerce, Webster. Exactly right. Where you go online and you buy a mixer or a food processor or you buy whatever else it is.
- [56:03]
A
And they just brought that distribution to the Internet.
- [56:06]
B
To the Internet. Or they brought the Internet to the distribution model because the distribution model is still the same. Yeah, it's cash and carry, except it's online and it's shipped. Right. It's.
- [56:16]
A
It's other purchasing processes different.
- [56:17]
B
Yep, yep, exactly. Exactly. But it's a whole landscape of manufacturers and engineers and sales reps and distributors and conglomerates that own many, if not dozens of the brands that we see out in restaurants. You know, there are. What would they be called? Not a conglomerate, I guess, really. Conglomerate. Conglomerate. And they own, you know, they may own 15 or 20 or 25 different brands.
- [56:50]
A
Like who owns Hobart?
- [56:52]
B
Not Hobart, no. If I'm, if I'm not mistaken, is a company called itw Illinois Tool Works.
- [56:58]
A
And they own a lot, don't they?
- [56:59]
B
And they Own a whole ton. Yeah. Hobart and Metro and is it Metro or Cambro, don't quote me on that. But Middleby for example, is another big one and they own Jade and South Bend and just so many. So there's the Ali Group and there's Middleby and there's ITW and there's Manitowoc and there's. Those are big conglomerates of manufacturers and then they're all the individual manufacturers and you work with them when you do a custom thing or otherwise where you need specific information. And then there are the sales reps who are the ones who actually will, will get that information across to people like myself on the professional side or we'll work with the end users, as they're called on our side of the industry. Who are the operators to do training or to help troubleshoot or to do service in the very beginning of a project. Warranty service that is for, for the equipment.
- [57:57]
A
And your role again was what was your relationship with the manufacturer or the distributor or not distributor but the, so.
- [58:02]
B
They were a dealer.
- [58:03]
A
Dealer.
- [58:04]
B
So you would call them when you wanted to buy like a whole kitchen worth of, a whole kitchen worth of equipment, like a contract. Got it. And so I was a project manager there. And so we would get a set of designs or a set of plans from somebody like me or like I am now and put a price on it. And then if we, if we got that job, then we would be responsible for the furnish and the install or the procurement and the install. We would buy it from the manufacturer, get it all, you know, queued up and then deliver it and install it at the right time. That's a challenging part of the industry.
- [58:40]
A
What are the challenges? What was the struggle with that?
- [58:42]
B
Well, you're dealing with construction and you're dealing with very, very highly specific utility requirements and dimensional requirements and all the vicissitudes that go along with building and construction and all the error prone things that happen. Architects.
- [58:55]
A
So here are the specs you get what happened from when you got those specs to one of the finished, finished job actually got to where it is, where you have to put things in a tight spot, all that stuff.
- [59:03]
B
Yeah, yeah. And that's challenging and you've always got problems on the job site and you know, they don't make a whole ton of margin and so they are, you know, frequently working a lot of lot, a lot of, a lot of projects at one time. And so the staff is stretched a little bit thin. And yeah, it's a, it's a challenging environment.
- [59:22]
A
So how has your world evolved since that point? Where are you today? This episode is made possible by Sir Boni Siboney is your all in one bookkeeping and financial solution referred to me organically in episode 1200 by Mama Betty's founder Jason Carrier. You gotta hear what Jason had to say about Sir Boni. Anything that comes remotely close to your financials, Sir Boni has your back. Reliable tax preparation and business incorporation, seamless payroll and compliance reports, strategic CF FO services that drive business growth, detailed customer reporting for complete financial clarity and dedicated support for restaurants and multi location businesses. Did I mention they do bookkeeping? They do it all. This is an end to end financial management solution all under one roof. Let Sir Boney handle the numbers so you can focus on the vision. Call Siboney today at 281-888-2413 to schedule your free free 30 minute consultation and discover how Cerboni can streamline your operations and boost your bottom line. Limited time offering this is exclusive to Restaurant Unstoppable listeners. Mention this Message and get 20 off your first month of services. This episode is made possible by US Foods. It takes more than great food to run a kitchen these days. With US Foods, More means consistently high quality products, industry leading tools, inflexible deliveries that let you grow your business on your schedule. Whatever your goals, US Foods helps you turn them into reality. As a US Foods customer, you'll gain access to their industry leading moxy platform which doesn't just make it easy to place your US Foods order, but it uses AI powered technology to help you take more control of your business and increase profitability. You can also explore the latest issues of Food Fanatics magazine from US Food Foods. In each issue you'll find real world success stories, bold culinary inspiration and practical profit boosting ideas you can put to work immediately. Visit usfoods.com expectmore to learn how to become a US Foods customer again. That's usfoods.com expect more so after getting.
- [61:37]
B
Out of the sort of equipment side, install side, contractor side, I knew that I wanted to get back into design and I wasn't really sure what I was getting into again even at that point. But I knew that I needed to do something different again. I had this notion I was really frustrated on the installation and the sort of procurement side and whatnot. Again, great experience, but I stepped out from that during the the global financial crisis. It was not a great time economically in hindsight, even at the time and in hindsight didn't seem like a great time to step out and like, try to start something on my own. Like security should have ruled the day, right? I had a little kid at home, you know, my son was like two or whatever he was at that time. And to go from there to where I am now was, you know, it was sort of slow, you know, 15 year overnight success kind of kind of thing. When I, when I first stepped out, I still wasn't really sure which part of this industry I wanted to be in. Although I knew this food service consulting, kitchen bar design, whatnot, operational consulting from a physical plant perspective, that is, was where. Was where I could really begin to add value. I had a couple of clients, some chefs that I knew in the Bay Area that I knew were about to step out and do some new project. And so I had a sense that I was going to be able to put that together and. And, you know, managed to do so. And in the beginning, it's funny, I still think about it sometimes after all these years in the kitchen and then after all these years working for this other consultant and then some time spent doing the contracting thing out in the field. Those first half a dozen jobs were just so panic inducing. Like, I was like, oh my God, I now need to do everything. I need to, I need to find the work, I need to write the contract and negotiate the contract. And then I got to do the work, and then I got to bill for the work. And then suddenly it was like, oh, wow. All those things that I've been learning along the way mean precisely nothing. If I can't make these, like, make these steps happen, right? Do all these individual things, like, I can't run, I can't start a business if I can't do the. It's one thing to do those things working for somebody else, but then when all of a sudden it's just you and your garage, right? You know, this acutely, right? There's nobody else, nobody else else to do the work. Yeah. And I was out there and I didn't have insurance, right? And I was like, oh man, this whole thing is like, really, really stressful. But I just, I had, I knew that. I mean, I was kind of betting on myself, which is never a bad idea. And I just kind of hustled it, right? And I would read the. The. You know, I was cold calling everybody. I was reading the. What were the new sort of food and restaurant blogs at the time? Everybody who has mentioned having some new project, I'd find them. I'd find somebody I knew in mutual connection, and I'd reach out and I just sort of pushed it, like sort of really hit the pavement in that regard. And in the beginning I was doing what I would say was a very straightforward bit of design, some layout. Right. Equipment layout, equipment specification, meaning choosing all the individual pieces of equipment with the chef and then providing some documentation. Right. And sometimes that documentation was depending on the job, a little more demanding, sometimes it's a little easier. But I feel like at the time I was mostly doing that. People would come to me with a project. And at the time it was almost exclusively independent, small, owner operated, chef driven restaurants. Right. Because those are the only clients who could have, you know, who would hire somebody like me. And I was too small to get anything other than that. Right. The hotel people weren't. Were knocking on my door and. And 15 years and hundreds of projects later, I find myself again, humbly and just through great fortune to have had a very broad experience in developing and building food and beverage operations.
- [65:41]
A
What was the tipping point for you? What was the change?
- [65:44]
B
How so?
- [65:44]
A
Of being the one stop shop, the one guy who is doing everything from finding the jobs to writing the contract to billing, to actually doing the work and building it out. Where is your business today? What is your team comprise like?
- [65:59]
B
Shout out to Kevin and Laura. On my team, my two, my two amazing senior project managers, I was going through a phase in the business where I was drowning. I had done.
- [66:09]
A
What was that?
- [66:09]
B
Oh, I mean, this goes back. It was only a couple of years in when, when Kevin started working for me.
- [66:16]
A
2012. 2013?
- [66:17]
B
Yeah, somewhere right around there.
- [66:20]
A
And how many clients did you have at that time?
- [66:22]
B
I mean probably, I mean probably 12 or something like that. 13. And I felt like I was drowning. Maybe it was a little more than that.
- [66:31]
A
Tell me more about that feeling.
- [66:33]
B
Just the feeling like I couldn't keep up and. All right, so to make things more complicated, a year or so after starting, a year and change after starting care bs, my wife and I decided to move back to the east coast here to Burlington, where we live now. And I figured, all right, before this business gets. That's much bigger, it's clear I've got something going here, I can do this work. I sort of proved that concept to myself and we felt, we, meaning my wife and I, we felt pretty good about it. And we kind of, we had kind of always known that we weren't lifers on, on the west coast in the Bay Area. Although who knows what might have happened had we stayed. But we came back to Vermont and all of a sudden Right around then. So this was like 2012. Right around then, the restaurant building boom in San Francisco took off. So it had plummeted during dot com, you know, bubble burst. And it was slowly coming back up. And then it seemingly. Right when I left, it just blew up. And I was traveling from Burlington back to San Francisco, and I still travel a fair amount to our job sites and projects, but I was back in San Francisco for a week or seven or nine days out of every month or more. Two trips, sometimes in a month. Just back and forth, back and forth out of Burlington. Yeah, yeah. And it was. I just found it was really hard to keep up. You know, a lot of time on planes, a lot of time in airports, a lot of time decompressing from a full day out on the job site, taking meetings and then not being able to respond to emails in the nighttime. Right. Having. And then having to do invoicing and like, all that. So cut to where we are now. We're. We're still. We're a team of four. I've got an office manager controller who helps with all my invoicing and compliance and all the other stuff we got to do. Do. Who's here in Vermont with me? And then. And I got two designer project managers. Kevin's been with me for, like 13 years somewhere around there, and Laura since before the pandemic. So six years or so six or seven years. And they both came with great experience. I'm incredibly, incredibly lucky to have them both. Incredibly grateful to them. Both. They do. They do all the. They do all the heavy lifting, they do all the detail work and all that. So where things have changed for me, and this was a really interesting process. And again, I sort of built and fixed this airplane all while flying it. Right. As any. As any small business owner knows. And along the way, I realized that I was sort of generating this experience because at any given time over these past seven or 10 years, I mean, we may have 35 projects, you know, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less across all the various phases of construction. Some are very early. We've come, got repeat clients who are looking at new properties, and then we've got projects that are in that long tail of construction. We finished all our work. We're just waiting for them to finish construction, finish installing the kitchen so we can go in and do a final punch list or what have you, and then everything in between. And like everything else in construction, it's start and stop, start and stop. Right. You're waiting for one crew to come in and finish something before you can do the next thing. Jobs go slow for a little while, especially in permitting and all that. That's a very, can be a very deliberate process where we don't have to do much on any given job. So for me to get to a point where I sort of understood what our bandwidth was, how many projects we could handle, how efficiently can we handle our projects and whatnot, that took a while. A lot of trial and error, a lot of overwork and some under, under work.
- [69:51]
A
Find the sweet spot.
- [69:52]
B
Yeah, some lean periods. And along the way it became, it became a little more clear to me that my value add to our clients was in an advisory capacity on the front end of these jobs. I'm no longer necessarily the guy who's going to make sure that your 40 quart mixer also comes with a 20 quart mixer bowl attachment, for example. Like that's not where my highest and best use on behalf of our clients is necessarily anymore. Now we're covering those details in our documentation and everything else we do and in our conversation about that stuff. Stuff. But I'm much more involved and I think a much more value add to our client base. Doing a lot of the front end conversations and front end questions or coming up the front end questions on a project. We're looking at a, you know, we just got awarded a pretty good sized project in, in Knoxville down at the University of Tennessee. And this is a large entertainment district that's going next to their, their stadium. And the numbers are eye popping. They have, have, you know, they have a hundred thousand people, 150,000 people who come to Knoxville on game days with no intention of going to the game. They're just coming for a big football game. Right? This is the South. This is football. This is college football in the South. This is a big deal. And we're, we're starting to, we're going through a program analysis, right? And there's a lot of really great, really experienced people on this job looking forward to digging into the, the, you know, digging into it a lot more. But on a job like that, we're involved or I say we in this case me, I'm involved in all the conversations that have to do with where are we locating these different food service amenity spaces and how are we going to come up with the sort of, you know, overarching plan for how, for how they interact with one another. Now this is no longer a standalone single restaurant.
- [71:45]
A
This is a system of food service.
- [71:47]
B
This is 10 or 12 or 13 or 14 different amenities, touch points. It's a bar, it's a grill, it's a pool bar in the hotel.
- [71:55]
A
I was just talking to Chris Goss and he was talking about how he was a director of FMB for Stowe Ski Resort and how that was 500 acres.
- [72:03]
B
I know Chris.
- [72:04]
A
Yeah, 500 acres of different facilities and units all over the mountain and managing all of that.
- [72:12]
B
Yeah, we do some work in the, in the ski resort industry. We've got some projects out there on some, some of the resort properties and they're, they're like that a lot. Sometimes it'll just be a restaurant that we'll work on. But in the case of some of these larger projects, I've found that in, in the last handful years, these advisory services, which are, is really sort of key to where we're going, where I'm going anyway. I mean, my team's coming with me, of course, but in terms of what, what I'm doing on behalf of my clients and what, what I'm thinking about on behalf of our client base and whatnot, is this advisory service approach. And this kind of dovetails with what you and I talked about in the very beginning about having fractional executives. Right. For us, we're bringing high level expertise on food service planning and design well in advance of needing to know stuff like is this going to be, you know, a two basket fryer?
- [73:07]
A
Yeah.
- [73:08]
B
So you, or is this right, you.
- [73:09]
A
Have the crystal ball, you know what to do look for well in advance of when you need it. And so people just don't know what they don't know.
- [73:15]
B
And so we are assisting our clients in making really good, smart decisions on the front end long before they get locked into something that is expensive to peel back. And an example in that regard is just the planning of what does our main kitchen look like? What is that kitchen going to produce relative to the other kitchens. So for example, if that main kitchen is of a certain size, are we going to be able to, it's like.
- [73:41]
A
A commissary, are we going to be.
- [73:42]
B
Able to facility, are we going to be able to run it like a commissary? And the individual restaurants requisition product from that commissary internally to the operation or are they going to license out that one signature restaurant on their property? Ergo, it's got to be a self sufficient, you know, standalone restaurant? Okay. Do we have the right amount of space? If you're going to do a standalone signature restaurant here in 2026, are you going to have solid fuel Are you going to have an open fire or a charcoal or something like that? That's, you know, that's key to where our industry trends are right now. And, you know, that comes and goes. We do, I'd say most of our projects have some kind of wood fire or solid.
- [74:20]
A
Do you know grows by Demont?
- [74:21]
B
I do, yeah.
- [74:22]
A
Chris. Awesome dude. I have him on the show. I love his work.
- [74:25]
B
Oh, nice.
- [74:26]
A
Lots of people like that in your network.
- [74:27]
B
Yeah, we've done it. We've done a lot of projects with Chris and his wife and they're super, so super lovely folks. We were talking about them on a call just earlier. Earlier this morning. Yeah. For a project. We may.
- [74:37]
A
When you design my house, we'll put.
- [74:39]
B
You want to. You want a grow by Jamont? Yeah.
- [74:41]
A
Work with Chris for me.
- [74:42]
B
Thank you. No problem. Yeah, so that's just one of the perks for us because we're totally independent. We, you know, we have no arrangement with any manufacturer or dealer or anything else like that. We're 100% client fee basis. Right. That means we can work with whoever we like. On the manufacturing side. We're not locked into working with anybody. We're not like our bottom line isn't improved by choosing one manufacturer over another. And so then we get to.
- [75:09]
A
So you're not making an affiliate commission on that?
- [75:11]
B
None. Zippo. We're 100% client fee income.
- [75:17]
A
Why is that important?
- [75:18]
B
It gives us the independence that we need to, to truly like, to truly advise on our. On our client's behalf with. With. Nope. Not even a perception, not even a whiff of, of. Of conflict of interest. Right. It does not matter to me whether you choose Montague or Jade or Heston or South Bend or Imperial or, you know, Vulcan or any of the other manufacturers of heavy duty ranges. I only care. This goes back to what I said in the very beginning. It's not prescriptive. I'm. My only interest is in what's right for your project, what's right for this situation. Okay, this is a pool grill. You just need a small grill and. Or this is a snack bar at the ninth hole. Like, okay, what do we need here? Yeah, right. I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to over build. I'm not trying to under build. I'm trying to get something that's right for your property. And on the, on the front end, our ability to sort of offer these advisory services is becoming much more invaluable to clients to see that, for example, we can be, you know, we can be a fractional, dare I say, director of construction for food service. Right. For lack of a better description of whatever that fractional executive would have been called were they an in house sort of full time sort of situation.
- [76:40]
A
Know what that executive would be? I guess. Executive, I guess.
- [76:44]
B
I mean, well, for a big hotel.
- [76:46]
A
Scaling, they have that person that's out there.
- [76:48]
B
Oh yeah, oh yeah. They have a director of construction, but that person is also managing the architect and the civil engineer and managing the contractors and whatnot. It's a little, it's in a smaller operation. That person's wearing many hats.
- [77:01]
A
Right.
- [77:01]
B
And as soon as you start scaling bigger than that, you get into. And again, this is not the case for your, you know, raising canes or your, you know, your Fast Casual, your QSRs. But this is very much the case, very much the case for hotel and traditional hospitality folks who are scaling because restaurant groups, those are one offs. Yeah. Right. I mean, maybe you have three of the same, but they're still pretty much one offs. You're not building. This isn't an in and out burger. Right. Where every single one is the same.
- [77:29]
A
You're not vertically integrating a construction company that is cranking out like the same footprint everywhere.
- [77:35]
B
Right. Yeah. So you need folks who understand how to plan appropriately. And that's something that I didn't even, like, I wasn't even, you know, no pun intended, planning on developing as a, as a service until it became more clear to me, you know, the example is I'm on the phone with a client, for example, and we're talking about something relative to, you know, an exhaust situation or whatever it might be. And in the course of a 20 minute discussion, not all the time, of course, but there have been multiple times, like maybe, maybe not countless, but a lot of times where I realize after a conversation like, I just saved you $75,000. Yeah.
- [78:19]
A
In a 15 opportunity cost in a.
- [78:21]
B
15 minute phone call. Like I'm gonna bill hourly for that. Like that's a weird, there's a weird value add mismatch.
- [78:28]
A
Well, that's kind of where I'm at right now when I'm curious about talking with our time that we have left, the people that are listening to us. Keep in mind. Oh, you're fine.
- [78:35]
B
Bang.
- [78:35]
A
That didn't even notice. The, the people we're talking to are independent restaurant operators, you know, anywhere from 1 to 10 unit operators. Operators generally or, you know, I think that's about my sweet spot for target audience.
- [78:46]
B
Sure.
- [78:47]
A
What, what, how can you save that person money Right now that's listening to this, like, what are the things that you can just like here are some low hanging fruit, some gold I can drop on.
- [78:56]
B
Yeah, it could be anything from, you know, again, a real world example. We have a client in, in Monterey who's looking at a project and they send us as a repeat client we've done a number of projects with. They'll send us a set of plans from a landlord for a space that they're looking at. Maybe they're really excited about it because of the location, for example, or they're really excited about the tall ceilings or something like that. Exactly the kind of thing that, you know, an operator might get excited about and they'll send us the plans and we, we may be able to say, you know what, this is a great opportunity. You've got the right duck shaft, you've got the right provisions in your landlord letter. Or we may be able to say, hey, here's what you need to go ask your landlord for, for. Here's what is going to be a problem. Knowing your concept, here's where you're going to run into an issue. So it may be, it may be a specific thing like, like a mechanical issue or a duck shaft type thing or a grease trap or a smog hog or something that they weren't necessarily aware of, that they didn't know, that they didn't know they needed.
- [79:57]
A
Give me some examples of the things you've caught that save people thousands of dollars.
- [80:00]
B
Oh, well, it could be. I mean, I mean, sometimes it's saving people, sometimes it's hard to put a dollar value on something like this example of the smog hog where somebody, or a pollution control unit where somebody may not have realized that in the course of their planning that they were going to need a pollution control unit. Because the code in that city, for example, requires that if you're exhausting your hoods horizontally out the building, you need to scrub that air and they need to plan for that. And if they were to miss that and move forward with their preliminary architecture and interior design and whatnot, and then find out later that they need this thing.
- [80:43]
A
It's, it's what work has to be undone.
- [80:45]
B
What has to be undone? Exactly what do you have to, what do you have to unwind? And how bad of an impact does that have on your operation now? Because you just lost whatever, you know.
- [80:56]
A
Just the cost of doing the work, work that you've done, that you've paid to be done now pay to undo it, then pay to redo it plus every day you're not open is operating capital going out the window.
- [81:08]
B
Now, smog hug may be, or again, a pollution control unit may be an extreme example of something like that that might have been missed. Or it may be that our experience has allowed us to do certain things or maybe the opposite, using the exact same piece of equipment. This is interesting. Somebody may have been looking at that, you know, a 15 story vertical black iron duct run up to the roof, not even realizing that they had the space and the capacity for a smog hog in their building. And that may save them an inordinate amount of coordination with the.
- [81:42]
A
You don't know what you don't know.
- [81:43]
B
You don't know what you don't know. Exactly. And I certainly don't know what I don't know, but I know a lot about.
- [81:48]
A
And the industry is only getting more complicated. The regulations are only increasing and.
- [81:53]
B
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [81:53]
A
When your job is running that running a restaurant is not the same as developing restaurant spaces.
- [82:00]
B
That's a very, very key point. And that's where the specialists like myself come in. Because you guys on the, not you, you're, you know, you run your own kind of business, but you folks on the restaurant operations side, you can be incredibly good. You may manage your margins, you may keep a really tight lid on your food costs and your labor and, and have great branding and a great product and a loyal following. But if you don't figure out how to be good at development and construction, you cannot scale, you cannot do it. You will lose money so much faster by building and opening improperly than you can make back by doing it again in a better way. Right. It's really like, you know, certainly as an, as an expert in this field and as a consultant, I'm very much of the opinion that you hire experts and you let them out expert. Right. That's not always the case. We're not cheap. Right. As consultants, my team, we're not, we do, we have very high touch engagement. We have very, very deep, deep bench of knowledge. And you know, that experience will save money. And so we have to, you know, manage our own costs and our own pricing and fee schedules and whatnot, accordingly for what we're saving a client, not what we think we're worth on any given hour by hour type basis. Right. It's a sort of project approach.
- [83:16]
A
What hasn't been discussed up to this point, that you can leave our listeners just better off knowledge that you have in this format that can just save people time and energy.
- [83:26]
B
Yeah. I think the DIY approach that is, you know, sort of intrinsic to restaurant operators can be a hurdle when it comes to development because there are so many more things at stake and so much more money at stake. Stake. Don't be afraid to go talk to the consultants. Don't be, you know, don't. There's nothing. There are a lot of professionals out there who are invested in your success. Like it's easy to think of consultants as just being, you know, folks who are, you know, rent seekers who are just going to collect some money and not give you a value add. We're not like that. And I know a lot of my colleagues are not like that. We are deeply invested in appropriate solutions for your project so you can be profitable. Right. I mean, again, I don't advertise. I have very, as you notice, I've relatively limited social engagement kind of thing. We are almost entirely word of mouth and referrals.
- [84:24]
A
People like you, yeah. Disrespect by this, but the people that don't have the social presence but that have the word of mouth, I don't know, reputation.
- [84:30]
B
If I had time to do all that, I'm doing something wrong in my business.
- [84:33]
A
Well, the truth, I think the reality is in the world we live in, if you're good at marketing yourself, marketing is becoming this unproportionately important thing where, you know, where it's more about how good you are at at convincing people how good you are. Aside from actually being a reputable business owner that has, you know, word of. If word of mouth can carry your business, if you don't have to promote and market your business like that, to me is. That's why that is word of mouth is what I chase with this podcast.
- [85:02]
B
Yeah, I agree. And it's very easy, I think, for, for businesses of all stripes to be better at marketing than they are at their core business.
- [85:12]
A
I'm not saying don't market market, but I'm saying it's become so proportionally important to the success of an operation.
- [85:18]
B
And we're definitely in a niche here. Right. We're definitely in a, you know, a sort of food service specific zone where this is our lane and this is what we do. However, within this side of the industry, again, design, development and construction, we have a really broad basis of understanding for how projects get developed. It is rare at this point, and I say this with no hyperbole or pride or otherwise just, you know, objective, objective truth. It's rare that I see a project, a project that's new to me, that is novel Right there, that sure you can, you can build a better mousetrap and you can find a better way to deliver food to customers in exchange for money. But it's just not, you know, it's just not like we're still kind of doing the same across the industry. We're still selling food and back. Right, right. Which I still love. And we're still finding sort of new ish ways to do that. But it's, you know, it's not, you know, we're not in terms of the design and development and construction, we're still talking about nuts and bolts and we're talking about plumbing and we're like still real world stuff. And it's easy to come, come in with a high concept on one side in terms of what you're going to do and how you package the actual transaction of exchanging food and beverage for money. But when you actually have to build that thing, like we're still building things largely the same way we have for a long time.
- [86:41]
A
You might not agree with the statement I am totally blown away at the money and resources that people put into design. I know it's important, I know that we're delivering experience with the physical space. Yeah, I know, I'm not ignorant to that. That when people go into, into a space that they're being influenced at a subconscious level.
- [87:05]
B
Right.
- [87:05]
A
I do think that is important should be considered. But I also think about the amount of that people aren't willing to spend on like surrounding yourself with the right internal day to day equipment, not necessarily the hardware but like the technology to be able to manage more efficiently. Like investing in a tech stack that will help you manage your business or investing in the, the actual human talent paying people well, you know, to execute, developing. But all that money goes into a pretty space and like brand new state of the art equipment and it's like how many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars are you spending on that? And you don't even know if your business is going to be successful.
- [87:52]
B
Yeah. You know, therein lies lies all the proof of concept endeavors. The prototyping on the fast casual and qsr, the kava and sweetgreen or the chipotle raising canes, the world and whatnot. Those didn't come from nothing. They didn't start out as a 200 unit operation. They started out with something very small proof of concept. They didn't spend any money. And then on the independent restaurant side, you're not going to be a first time restaurant, restaurant developer unless you've I mean, you're only by definition a first time. If you're doing it for the first time, you're not going to get the funding to blow the bank on interior design and on, on art and lighting and fixtures and whatnot. But once you've proven yourself and you've got the backing and people have the faith in you and you've got the investment track record that you're going to return on that, now you're at the point where you actually have to spend that money on the design and on the furnishing and on the, you know, and on the equipment because you know you're going to be successful. Right. You've built the brand, whether it's the chef or the, you know, whatever the, you know, the team is that's developing or the restaurant group, you know, you are guaranteed to get six months of Runway. Right. You know, people are going to come, people are clamoring for it, whatever it may be. And so you have to deliver on that so that you can be there six years later, later or 10 years later, and still drive a delightful, maybe even surprising guest experience. And there's no, you know, I'm a huge believer in design and design thinking and, and the process and the value that that lends to a space and the vibe that people have when they come in. And does that drive check average? Right, right. That's a real critical question.
- [89:35]
A
But I think really for me, it's like the amount of money you're to willing to spend on build out and not have for operating capital.
- [89:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, they're, you know, there's, that's just a, you know, a poor business model to come in without an understanding of what your Runway needs. From day one. Yeah, from first day of business.
- [89:49]
A
I think it's just as simple as starting small. You know, like people, they kind of like, you know, they, I think they come up working for these restaurateurs and these restaurateurs that have been in the industry for 20, 30 years that have built that momentum, that have built that, that depth of network and resources to build things out to the specs that they want. And then you have this young person that comes and they want, they want that today.
- [90:12]
B
Yeah.
- [90:12]
A
And they didn't realize that, you know, Thomas Keller had a restaurant fail before opening the French line.
- [90:17]
B
Most of them had many failures.
- [90:18]
A
Exactly. And that you, you start small in business, you blow out a wall, you take over the, like the adjacent business and like, you scale over time and that it takes time to get those.
- [90:30]
B
Things, brings Me back to another sort of overarching kind of design thinking or sort of North Star. Another North Star for us is in line with what I was saying before about not holding too tightly to what you want, you know, or what your vision of a space could be.
- [90:49]
A
It can still be your vision. It could be your vision, your vision tomorrow.
- [90:52]
B
Yeah. And you know, your clients, your customers, your guests are going to tell you what you are and they're going to tell you what you're good at and they're going to tell you what your next move should be if you're listening to them and you're sensitive to what you're hearing from them. And I do this as a business owner who works entirely on behalf of clients. I hear from them what we're good at.
- [91:11]
A
Right.
- [91:11]
B
I could tell you what I think we're good at. And I know, I know what we're good at, but I know that because of what we've heard from our clients over these years or dozens, you know, you know, dozens and dozens of projects. And trying to, to trying to force a concept into a space that doesn't want to accept it I think is the most common mistake. We see this all the time where folks will call us and they have a concept in mind. It's this or it's that or whatever it may be. And now they're looking for real estate and they find a space again that they like the location or whatever. But it's like, yeah, your concept, not so great for this space, but that's their concept. On the flip side, if you've got the, the, the, the experience and the people on your team who can do it this way, find a good location and figure out what's going to work there, what is, what are the people around there need? Are you in an office area? Are you in a suburban area? Are you driven by door dash and UberEats? Are you? And that's blown up the whole, whole side of the industry as well in terms of how we're organizing kitchens and you know, we're dedicating entire pickup zones for, you know, third party drivers. And, and that whole system being. Because it's a massive part of most, outside of fine dining, it's a big part of most, most operations.
- [92:27]
A
Sometimes up to 50% of the revenue comes through those platforms.
- [92:30]
B
You got it.
- [92:30]
A
Depending on the market and the business model.
- [92:33]
B
And to think that we can just design a space that doesn't pay attention to the specific needs of that portion of your revenue, even if it's 25% of your revenue.
- [92:41]
A
Right.
- [92:41]
B
That's huge. Yeah. One out of every four people.
- [92:45]
A
We've covered a lot today, man, and I'm not done yet.
- [92:48]
B
Only a little.
- [92:49]
A
We've, we've shared your story. We've talked about what you do today, what your business looks like today. You've given some value on how we can do what we're, you know, like, you've shed some light on your area of expertise. I do like to talk about the future, and not so much on where do you think the future is going, but also where do you think we could go. Like, what is the direction we. Instead of reacting to trends and reacting to consumers, like, is there a proactive, intentional play for the future of the food and beverage industry, or is that a pipe dream?
- [93:22]
B
It's a great question and it's a great sort of thought exercise. I think that I hadn't given any. I should have known you were going to ask something like that. Experienced podcaster like yourself, I do think that the industry continues to drive towards better work environments, towards better, more equitable pay for everybody on the industry. Now, that's not to say that you get a job at White Castle and you should be able to make a career out of that. Those aren't those kinds of jobs. Right. That's a stepping stone to another opportunity within the industry. But I do think that, you know, the industry continues especially we're more predominantly on, again, a traditional hospitality side, hotels and restaurants, a lot of restaurants. But I think across the board, it's still. The industry has become much more acknowledged as a professional endeavor. You know, you're not, you know, you're not just like the, the dumb kid who couldn't do anything else. And so you wind up in the restaurant industry. Right. It's a, it's a place where you can really go and sort of make, make a mark. Now, as far as trends and all that, I mean, there's design trends and sustainability and efficiency trends and all electric kitchens and all that stuff we're involved with and, you know, be happy to talk about at length in some other. Some other episode. But it is a really interesting. We're at. And not to be overtly political or otherwise, but we are at a rather unique inflection point. The industry is being assaulted by. By forces, by, by forces that are really, really hitting hard on the workforce.
- [95:06]
A
On what are these forces you're talking about? Be specific.
- [95:09]
B
I'm talking about DHS and ice, and they are making things extremely, extremely difficult unnecessarily. So for A massive portion of the food and beverage and hospitality workforce. I mean, the immigrant communities across the country are the ones who cook the food, make the beds, scrub the toilets, what, you know, mop the floors. And that's not to say that. Of course not. That's not all of immigrants or new Americans or otherwise. You know, it's. There is no one. They're part of our community, we're a part of their community. But very specifically, more so to food and beverage and construction, I think, than most. Well, food and beverage, construction and agriculture. That's a. The vast majority of the workforce.
- [95:55]
A
Yeah. And that's. We. The, the hospitality industry hits on all three of those.
- [95:58]
B
Yep, pretty much. Pretty much. And it's under, you know, it's under siege and that. I don't, I don't like it at all. I think we've got major, major problems. I think we, we. We absolutely have challenges around building and sustainability and climate change. Like, all these things are factors that the food and beverage industry absolutely needs to be contending with for. If for no other reason than, you know, personal politics and just a goal towards making good, good conscientious decisions for each other. And especially in these environments where you're working side by side with, you know, with folks who are new Americans or who are, you know, come here.
- [96:44]
A
Recently, I agree with everything you said. I also think that pointing at ICE and saying that's the problem is like putting a bandaid on an axe wound. You know, it's like. It's so much bigger than that.
- [96:57]
B
It is much bigger than that. I agree. That's the inflection point we're at right now, though, where, where I, you know, I have clients. Right. Who I have gone to, gone to visit job sites. You've traveled recently through the south and through Texas. I know. And the workforces there are almost entirely Latino.
- [97:17]
A
Right.
- [97:18]
B
And I have been in client restaurants while they are delivering their operational decisions on what to do if immigration comes to the restaurant.
- [97:28]
A
Do you think AI is going to influence this?
- [97:32]
B
I mean, AI is going to influence everything. Right, Right.
- [97:34]
A
It's hard to say how that's going to ripple.
- [97:36]
B
It's hard to say how that's going to ripple. You know, it's definitely going to ripple across all of these areas pretty much anytime. Right. Anytime you need to, like, whether it's that particular restaurant operator who needed to develop a plan for what to do if immigration or ICE or DHS comes to their restaurant. And this is even, you know, amongst restaurants who are entirely above board. Right. These we're not talking under the table employees or undocumented or any. These are still just restaurants with a big immigrant workforce. Yeah, but these are folks who are, you know, are here legally and have green cards and whatnot. But there's still environments wherein folks are scared and folks are, are challenged. This is one other layer of challenge for the business owner, for the restaurant operator to suddenly now have to deal with immigration enforcement when they've been doing everything by the book and, and according to standard HR practices and whatnot, and they're operating totally lawfully. And now all of a sudden, you know, this, it's a, the, it's hitting the, it's hitting the, the hospitality.
- [98:36]
A
Yeah.
- [98:36]
B
Trade real hard.
- [98:37]
A
I, I, yeah, I hear you, man. And I think it's just, it's so much of, it's such a bigger problem that is on the horizon or I think there's no other time to start thinking in terms of conscious capitalism or social c. Capitalism. I agree of, you know, look in, if we continue in this direction, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
- [98:56]
B
I agree with that.
- [98:57]
A
Is universal high income the solution? But what, what do we lose with that? That sense of autonomy? You know, like, we want that. We can't lose our autonomy or our freedom to do what calls to us. Like only in a capitalist or country could you chart the kind of path that you charted for yourself.
- [99:16]
B
100.
- [99:17]
A
You know, we can't.
- [99:18]
B
Or in an open economy.
- [99:20]
A
Right.
- [99:20]
B
Yeah.
- [99:21]
A
But what are we doing? Who are we giving our money to? As these tech companies continue to grow, are we comprehensive, consciously putting our money into sol? And right now there's a real flat hierarchy in that next wave.
- [99:34]
B
Yeah.
- [99:34]
A
And we really need to be intentional and conscious about who are we going to let win that race because that whoever wins that race wins it all.
- [99:44]
B
Yeah.
- [99:44]
A
And we have to invest our resources into the entity, whether that be open AI or something like that, with that, that vision of creating, you know, democratizing and decentralizing that power of who controls the AI because whoever controls that data controls the world.
- [100:03]
B
It's a, it's a crazy set of circumstances when the federal government tells the states that the states are not allowed to regulate AI within their own borders.
- [100:10]
A
It's crazy.
- [100:11]
B
It's crazy. Right? That's because it's bigger than those borders. Because. Well, it's bigger than those borders. And so there should be a federal, you know, there should be some federal regulation and there. Absolutely. It should absolutely be a regulated environment. Environment. Right. Even the folks who are developing AI think, think that it should be.
- [100:27]
A
But if this is where conscious capitalism comes in, where it's like conscious capitalism is where who am I in choosing to give my money to? Because that is the future I want.
- [100:35]
B
Yeah. If there are, if there are options.
- [100:37]
A
But I think the only way is to talk about it.
- [100:39]
B
Yeah.
- [100:40]
A
And is to explore what those different scenarios look like. And it's so complicated and so big. It's so hard to know what the right direction is. But I do think that, that white collar jobs are going to be going away. A lot of the executive and strategic level jobs are going to be going away because maybe AI isn't there yet, but in five or 10 years, you know, when I can walk into a restaurant with my, like my glasses that have a camera and it can access a data pool of every restaurant that's been designed ever and it has access to the zoning and the city coordinates and the like, it will give you like all the things like we're just getting that point where like I think people are going to revert back to more blue collar work of farming and hospitality and you know, and we're going.
- [101:31]
B
To have no choice.
- [101:32]
A
But I think that's a good thing because at the end of the day, like we, for our, the, our entire existence I mentioned, I love archaeology and anthropology.
- [101:38]
B
Yeah.
- [101:39]
A
We are hunter gatherers by evolution. Like we are tribal, small knit. Like we, we are so tied to food and food has become a literal commodity.
- [101:50]
B
Yeah.
- [101:51]
A
You know, and I think that when the rest of the world kind of can figure itself out and that opens up bandwidth to kind of reconnect with what matters, which is our food system and developing a food system for the future. There's a lot of opportunity in that world.
- [102:06]
B
I agree. There is a lot of, a lot of decisions that need to be considered and I think the extent to which, and it's certainly part of a marketing pitch is to have a good story about your business or otherwise. But I really do believe that, you know, folks who are approaching their businesses and their food and beverage establishments, especially from a really conscientious place, one that cares for themselves and their team as well as the customer and their guests and whatnot, whether you're, you know, packaged good or otherwise. But I mean, I think that's a good way to go because people feel, you feel good operating your own business when you know that you are providing a good value. I certainly feel better when I'm really conscious of the value that I'm providing to clients and knowing that it's A. It's a. It's an exchange of value. And that we're providing you with something. It's a relationship, of course, and we're providing you with something that you need. And you're providing us with something that we need, of course, which is money. And we need to. I got staff and we got, you know, we have an arrangement here. Right. We're still in a capitalist society and an economy that requires that. And it's okay to also approach all of that in a, you know, in a. In a sort of friendly, easygoing kind of manner, which is a bit of an approach that I've always taken. Could just be my, you know, sort of Jersey Jabroni background. But, you know, none of this needs to be. None of this needs to be high anxiety. None of the work that we do needs to be all that drop all that drama filled. And we just try to keep things like, focused on the people that we're working with and in support of their sort of business goals. And I know that there are really big, broad factors and influences at play across the industry, across all of. All of the industries that we just, we just mentioned. And I don't know. I don't. I don't know where they're going. I do.
- [104:09]
A
I don't think anybody truly knows. And there's so many variables, and there's like one big discovery away from that future vision totally being turned upside down. You know, it's. And it's happening so fast.
- [104:19]
B
Yeah.
- [104:20]
A
It's interesting. Interesting. But I think I'm excited because information, I think, for the first time is fragmented, you know, where we get our inspiration. Like, podcasts are like the number one way people get their information.
- [104:30]
B
Yeah.
- [104:31]
A
You know, it's. It's replaced like, you know, traditional, Traditional news organizations.
- [104:36]
B
Yeah. Independent journalism, independent media is. Is definitely. I mean, it's where I get the vast majority of my news and information.
- [104:42]
A
That's the first step is decentralizing the source of information.
- [104:45]
B
Yeah.
- [104:46]
A
And, you know, I think that that's really exciting, but that could change too, if we're not careful. So. This has been so much fun, Alec.
- [104:52]
B
It has, man.
- [104:52]
A
I. I really appreciate. I got a couple questions I ask all my guests that I'm going to try to tailor for your unique path as a designer specialist.
- [104:59]
B
Okay.
- [105:00]
A
What is one thing about your business? A value, a process, a system that makes you truly unstoppable?
- [105:06]
B
Oh, you. You got to take care of the client, you know, well, two things. I got to take care of my people. People. And if I Take care of my people, I know they're going to take care of the clients. Right. Our number one goal is in service of our clients goals. So we, if, if we're taking care of that, if we're looking ahead on their behalf, then we're good.
- [105:25]
A
Is there a company you've started working with that has really changed the game for you in terms of a strategist or a partner that you outsource your world to an element of what you do?
- [105:36]
B
No, no, no. I'd say that there are some support in terms of the tech stack. There are things that we use that obviously lots of people use, but.
- [105:45]
A
Like what?
- [105:47]
B
Like Slack is the most key piece for us in terms of internal communication. I know it's not the only message pro, you know, messaging type platform. But for us that's been tremendous in terms of being able to manage our inboxes and manage our, you know, our time spent in our inbox versus our time spent actually doing work. I mean, that's been key. Again, you know, the, the food service equipment and supplies industry is still this lumbering, you know, lumbering beast of, of an industry. Many, many billions of dollars a year in food service equipment sales. The top five food service equipment distributors alone probably, you know, they probably represent seven or eight billion dollars a year. And there's dozens more after that that, you know, a few hundred more across the country. It moves kind of slow.
- [106:35]
A
Yeah. Is that a problem?
- [106:37]
B
Yes and no. I mean, it's, it's hard for manufacturing to move fast and it's really hard for manufacturing, you know, and when I, when I say that I'm thinking in terms of energy efficiency, sustainability, climate sensitive equipment and cooking techniques and whatnot that are important and that are becoming much more common. But with the combination of manufacturing regulations, licensing requirements, it takes, you know, three, four, five years to develop a new piece of equipment.
- [107:03]
A
That's wild.
- [107:04]
B
It's wild. Yeah. And it's like, you know, for refrigeration manufacturers especially, you've got, you know, you've got a whole bunch of different legislative bodies that control your efficiency, that control what products you can use. They make mandates that are, if you ask some of the refrigeration companies, they'll tell you like these mandates are not possible by the laws of physics. We can't, we can't make this amount of cold with this amount of refrigerant. Just doesn't work right. And then we've got equipment that's out in the field that doesn't work because you're opening that refrigerator 125 times in a complex night. It's a complex system. A lot of variables.
- [107:35]
A
Wild. What is one thing, you know, if the mission statement is to inspire, empower, and transform the industry, how have you personally transformed. How are you a better man today than the men you wore when you got started in this?
- [107:47]
B
You know, it maybe sounds a little. A little redundant. I'm made better by working hard on behalf of my clients. You know, it's. I have not lost the service mentality approach, despite being outside of typical service and hospitality. I know that we are very much in service of our clients who are in turn in service in their, you know, in their marketplaces on. On behalf of their guests. We're always looking out for the food and beverage cooks and, you know, pot washers and. And whatnot and prep cooks, folks on the hotline. We're really looking out for terms of how we design things. We're really thinking about the ergonomics and the time of motion required so that they have good quality working environments, good indoor air quality, all that. It's good.
- [108:36]
A
Got it.
- [108:36]
B
Yeah.
- [108:37]
A
This is the last question. It's a doozy.
- [108:39]
B
Okay.
- [108:40]
A
If you got the news, you'd be leaving this world tomorrow. All the memories of you, your work, your businesses, the restaurants you've worked in were lost with your departure, with the exception of three pieces of wisdom that you could leave behind for the good of humanity and your legacy. Or those three pieces of wisdom be.
- [109:00]
B
Take care of each other. It's always better to have more than one way to get from point A to point B and right size your expectations.
- [109:10]
A
This has been so much fun, man. Thank you.
- [109:12]
B
Thank you.
- [109:12]
A
I like to wrap up every conversation. You know, I'd like to say that word of mouth is what steers the shit ship when you think about people doing good things in this industry, challenging the status quo, taking care of their staff, creating opportunity for others, really making an impact not just in their own lives, but in the lives of those they touch. Who comes to mind? Who do you think I should make an example of in the restaurant industry?
- [109:34]
B
Oh, man, that's. There's a lot. Somebody that does come to mind, though, whenever I'm thinking about, as I noted before, and I say this to a lot of people, when asked about this, how the industry has professionalized over these years. I think a lot about chef Ori Mina Nash and his wife Genevieve, at. They got a couple restaurants in La Bestia and Bavel and Safi's, and they're fantastic operators and they're really conscientious with their guests and they really did a lot for their staff and their employees during COVID in terms of providing, you know, providing a meal service. They turned their restaurants into meal provision services for their employees and continued purchasing product from their purveyors and providing, you know, to go food solely, you know, to go food for sale to the public solely so that they could continue supporting their staff. You know, watching their team meetings before service, their, you know, their pre service meeting is just, it's really, it's, it's really inspiring. And they run very busy restaurants and I know how stressful that is and. Yeah. And then here, you know, here, here locally, somebody I know who you've talked to is chef Eric Warrenst set, you know, from Hen of the Wood and Heirloom Hospitality. Those guys run great operations, you know, really conscientious, huge supporters of our local food network here in Vermont. Tons of local product use. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people like that. I mean, those guys come to mind.
- [110:54]
A
I'd love to get Eric back on the show.
- [110:55]
B
We're due.
- [110:56]
A
It's been, I think over six years since I last spoke to him, so a lot's changed since then. It'd be great. And is it Ori in Genevieve, look out. I'm coming out. They're out in San Francisco.
- [111:04]
B
La la.
- [111:05]
A
Hopefully you'll be making it back there in the next couple years. Yeah, there's been a lot of fun, man.
- [111:10]
B
There's a lot of great people in the industry. I mean, I, I, I really, I consider myself really lucky that I, I continue to get to work with the people that I get to work with and that my team gets to work with.
- [111:22]
A
Well, I consider myself luckily lucky to be able to sit across this table from you today, man. It's been a lot of fun. I do want to plant a little seed. I'd love to have you come talk to my community within restaurant unstoppable network. You are a specialist. And I'm trying to mirror what's happening on this podcast in the network. If you work to come talk to my community and to lead a conversation. How could you help the people that are listening to this? Whether it just be people coming to you with questions about design and build out, like, what would that subject be? What would you, how could you most help my listeners?
- [111:53]
B
Yeah, in line with every, you know, a lot of, of what we've talked about and what I've said a number of times, like, they'll tell me how I can be most, most helpful. I mean I think open, open Q and A that runs the gamut from what should I be asking my landlord for to is this a good looking design and layout that I got from so and so to what's your opinion on induction cooking? Like all that stuff is part of our normal conversation on a day to day basis. Right. It's.
- [112:22]
A
Well, if you have questions for Alec, be sure to stick around for the the closing thoughts of the outro of today's episode. I'll have a day in time that he'll be joining us live in the network about a month after this goes live.
- [112:32]
B
Yeah.
- [112:33]
A
And again, I cannot do what I do without people like you. Thank you so much. There is no questioning, Alec. You are unstoppable.
- [112:39]
B
Thank you. Cheers you as well.
- [112:40]
A
Thanks. There's another episode wrapped up here at Restaurant Unstoppable Network. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Alec Bauer and if you did and you would like to engage him and have conversation with him, be sure to join us on March 2nd at 11am Eastern for coffee with Eric. We're going to be live in Restaurant Unstoppable Network. We're having a blast over at Restaurant Unstoppable Network. Guys, we are going the next level. These conversations. I'm having great conversations with these people on the show but you're the operators, you're the people in it every day. You're the people that see angles I don't see. And if you want to engage my network of badass operators and the, the specialists, the experts that they're going to and learn from these individuals, well, they're a finger tip distance away. They're right there. All you got to do is reach out in touch and be a part of our community. Head over to restaurantunstoppable.com live to join this in all future conversations. But if you just want to join this one, if you just want to test it out, head over to restaurantstoppable.com c w e for coffee with Eric and we will have a link there, a zoom link that you can join this conversation because I want to make sure you're getting that help you need. So this first one's on me again, Restaurant Unstoppable.com CWE and if you're already sold on this and you just haven't pulled the trigger yet, head over to Restaurant Unstoppable.com live and be a part of this and all future conversations as you're listening to this. I am in Houston, Texas and I'M going to be going to Austin, Texas and then after that Dallas and I'm making my way back east through the Southern states. I would love to meet you. I would love to hear who you think I have to get on the show. I'm trying to get after after the most badass restaurant operators in the country. So who is out there that you think I need to make an example of who is making an impact in their communities while making money as they do it? Those are the people really challenging the status quo. Those are the people I'm after and I would love to hear what you have to say. Reach out to me, Eric, at restaurantunstoppable.com if you have a recommendation or if you just have a place for me to park my camper. That is such a huge support. I'll take it where I can get it.
- [114:43]
B
All right.
- [114:43]
A
That's it for today. Until next time. Peace out.