← Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore
Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore
1268: Robby Kukler, Founding Partner of Fifth Group Restaurants and Founder of Kukler Restaurant Advisory
02:30:08
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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 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 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 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 to you today's guest, Founding Partner of Fifth Group Restaurants and founder of Kukler Restaurant Advisory, Robby Kuar. My man Robbie. Are you feeling unstoppable today?
- [02:44]
B
I am. I'm always feeling unstoppable.
- [02:47]
A
I'm psyched to have you here. Honored to have you here. The things I heard said about you from Ryan Turner and Chris Goss. I have no doubt that this is going to be a. An awesome conversation. Before we dive into who you are and how you got to where you are today, let's get that motivational, inspirational ball rolling with a success quote or mantra. What do you got for us?
- [03:07]
B
I think a mantra that I probably learned and started living by and teaching and promoting about 10 years ago is this idea of sustained effort wins.
- [03:21]
A
Sustained effort wins. Why does that resonate with you? Why did you choose that quote?
- [03:26]
B
Because I think neither life or business goes in a straight line, right. And there are ups and downs and highs and lows, and getting knocked down does not have to be a big deal. It is, how do you get up and what do you do about it? And how do you constantly keep moving forward? Because in my mind, just like your question about being unstoppable is, what is the alternative to that? If. If you are not unstoppable or if you're not looking towards the. The alternative is not good.
- [03:59]
A
Yeah. How do you sustain it? What's the trick to sustaining it? What's the trick to keep on going?
- [04:05]
B
I think part of it is saying, well, if I don't keep going, what am I going to do? Am I going to wallow in this? Am I going to go backwards? Am I going to become stagnant? Am I going to feel sorry for myself? What does that achieve? And this can apply to your physical well being, your mental well being. A business, a team, a sporting team, a business team. Because, yeah, you can have a moment. You can say, oh, my gosh, this. I mean, think of COVID right? You can say, oh, my God, what is going on? Or why is this failing? Or what just happened in this relationship? Or why are we not doing the numbers we thought we would? And you can ask yourself those things and you can feel bad about it briefly, but. But again, if you're the leader and you're trying to have folks follow you to accomplish things for themselves and the team and the business or your family or whatever that might be, you have to figure out how to move forward.
- [05:07]
A
Yeah. I think you're making me think if you have the right, why you can deal with anyhow. Right? Sure. And I think the reason why we write these things down is so when things get hard, it's not for our team, it's for us, because we're the leader.
- [05:20]
B
We're.
- [05:20]
A
We're writing these things down so we stay focused. So we can sustain, so we have the endurance because we got to pull the team.
- [05:25]
B
That's right. If you're. Everything trickles downhill. And if you are negative or pessimistic or woe is me or oh, we this can't believe this happened to us. How are we ever going to get out of this? Everyone will just follow you there. But if you, if you move forward and you're positive about it, or you have a plan, or you bring your team together and say, let's discuss what happened. Let's discuss how we got here. Okay, done. Let's learn from it. And I've had people that have told me all my life, even, you know, even younger, when I was very young, out of college and working for a chain, I had a mentor, Bob Keady, who said, you know, couple things. One, I had two different people tell me something. One was an investor at South City Kitchen who said, you know, it doesn't matter if you fumble the ball. It's pick it up and keep moving. Flip the field.
- [06:16]
A
Yeah.
- [06:16]
B
And Bob used to say, excuse my French. Doesn't matter if you something up, just don't up the same thing twice.
- [06:23]
A
Yeah. We're allowed to make mistakes as long as we learn from them.
- [06:27]
B
And you know what? That. And even in the last few years, I think that has become a mantra of a lot of coaches. Right. Is. And, and raising kids or raising teaching managers, you're like, there's nothing wrong when something goes wrong. Nothing wrong with failing. But stop and learn from it. If there's going to be other mistakes in the future, try not to do these over again.
- [06:47]
A
Right. Awesome. Great way to get this thing started. So I can't wait to dive into your story to go back to where it begins. Before we do, I would just want to get a snapshot of where fifth group was before you departed about three years ago.
- [07:03]
B
Yeah, in late 2022 is when I retired and left the company. The company started with a single restaurant in 1993 and over those 30 plus years grew to 14 restaurants, 10 of which we owned and operated. These are all in the Atlanta metro area and four that were licensed. So three locations in the Atlanta airport that were licensed to a third party concessionaire and then a South City Kitchen at Avalon in a signature. The hotel at Avalon, which is a Marriott signature hotel and beautiful restaurant. Again, we helped design it, create it, set standards and operating procedures, train the team and then they run it and we keep an eye on it with very, very detailed parameters and such. And then also part of that Fifth group restaurants was a very large catering and events company called Bold Catering and Design. They did about a thousand high end events a year. Everything from, from seven figure weddings, if you can imagine that, to a lot of corporate work with many of the medium to large companies in Atlanta as well.
- [08:12]
A
So of all the concepts, like if you were to take an average of like the type of restaurant you were doing, how would you define like your niche?
- [08:20]
B
I would say all but one was casual fine dining and that one was more, more casual, family friendly. Tex Mex is A$20 ppa. The rest of the other restaurants were casual fine dining, some dinner only, some lunch and dinner. But you're talking about, you know, very, very specific points of service per person. Check averages in the back then in the 50, 45, 55, $60 per person. They're probably higher today with all that's going on. But 45, yeah, $45 to $60 ppa, check per person, check averages. And you know, it was, it was about execution and hospitality. Not just great food and beverage, but creating experiences for people.
- [09:10]
A
Oh, so can you give us an idea of like the average like, like volume each of these locations were doing? Did you have a sweet spot in terms of like footprint?
- [09:17]
B
You know what we, we kind of learned that over time, but because they grew over 30 years, they really varied quite a bit. Restaurants ranged from 2500 square feet to 9000 square feet. They ranged in volume from around 2 million to 6 million plus each again just depending on that size, that location. Again, some were dinner only, some were lunch and dinner with, you know, weekend brunches and you know, 14 meal periods a week and some were seven nights a week only. So it just really depended on. And some were very neighborhood like and others were in areas that huge portions of the business were. Business was business travelers, convention people, you know, people from hotels that surrounded some locations. So they did, they did vary, but they were all for the most part, most of them, other than one or two were in town locations.
- [10:09]
A
So out of the concepts that I could find in my, my research, you had South City, you had the Tava Trattoria, am I saying that correctly? So sorry, the Tavala, you had, I think a total of, I think I wrote these down somewhere. Three of the South City. One of the three, is it eco or echo?
- [10:30]
B
Sorry, Echo.
- [10:31]
A
Echo.
- [10:31]
B
Thank you.
- [10:32]
A
And then two of the taco concepts. Right.
- [10:35]
B
Well that was Alma Cocina was a different. There was an El Taco that is no longer has been replaced by a Mediterranean called Ella. But the original El Taco was that real casual that I mentioned. Alma Cocina was more of a higher end, modern Mexican concept. And there were four South City kitchens and like you said, three echoes. One of which was in the airport, still is in terminal F. Full service, it's international concourse, full service dining experience in the rest in the airport.
- [11:07]
A
I think Lower is the only one we haven't mentioned yet.
- [11:09]
B
And lure. That's right, A seafood restaurant got it
- [11:12]
A
out of these concepts, Would you say there's one just like Cash Cow, like the one concept that was like the king of all the.
- [11:19]
B
Well, South City Kitchen started this company and put. Put fifth group on the map in 93. Written about on a national level. The New York Times writer at one point wrote, if this is the future of southern food, we have a lot to look forward to. Awesome. And so subsidy kitchens. And then Echo also Echo, the first location was chosen at the time by Esquire magazine as one of the best new restaurants in America. And we, we were doing things. Charcuterie boards, which you now find everywhere, didn't exist in Atlanta. They were in New York, but that's really about it, you know, with house made and imported and even some local charcuterie cheeses. Again, some local because there's some great dairy farms in Atlanta, but also imported charcuterie boards. And then the cocktail revolution, to be honest, kind of started. South City Kitchen and a bar, Holman and Finch here in Atlanta kind of started the cocktail craze in Atlanta with different, different ice preparations. And mythologist, which, you know, that term now has kind of come and gone.
- [12:25]
A
Right.
- [12:26]
B
And the multi, the multi ingredient cocktail has changed. They still exist and there's amazing cocktails out there. But there are also what I call the connoisseurship of the American diner, both with food and beverage. Right. You think About Echo is 15 years old. No one talked about tequila 15 years ago. Now people know it inside now. And of course bourbon, Bourbon was already on that trail, but it's continued to advance in rye and whiskeys and tequilas and now mezcals. So that whole industry or segment of our industry has evolved. But Echo really kicked off a few really big trends in Atlanta that you now find everywhere.
- [13:06]
A
Got it. So with the three concepts that you scaled beyond one location with Cell City Kitchen, Echo, the original El Taco. Can you give me an idea of what you're hitting in terms of average percent profit with those three columns? Just to kind of give the listeners an idea of who we're talking to. I mean, you've given us a great idea.
- [13:24]
B
Yeah, they range a little bit too based on location. But I would say give or take, if you add back a management fee because the way our company was structured, we had a management fee that came off the top that supported the fifth group support team, which we can get into that at some point of what, what it took to run all those restaurants. But basically high teens to low 20% EBITDA.
- [13:46]
A
Got it. Yeah, that's, that's when you're doing upwards of 6 million on the high side and 2 million on the low side. I mean that's, that's money.
- [13:53]
B
Yeah. Two million. A two million dollar restaurant wouldn't put that to the bottom line. But those, those concepts you just asked about were, were the hot, bigger, higher volume restaurants. Got it. But a little, you know, dinner only, two million dollar restaurant wouldn't necessarily put, put high teens. It might put, you know, 10, 12, 13.
- [14:13]
A
Got it.
- [14:13]
B
To the bottom line.
- [14:14]
A
I think we have a pretty good idea of who we're talking to now. Thank you for getting into that detail. Sure. And okay, so now that we know who we're talking to, where does it make sense to start sharing your story? Let's go back.
- [14:23]
B
Oh, gosh, I don't know how far you want to go back. I grew up in Flint, Michigan, an auto town, a blue collar town in a family of people in the medical industry. My father was a family physician. My mother, I say was, she corrects me. She's 90, is a RN and was a surgical nurse and then helped run my father's practice. But this is all I wanted to do as an 8 or 9 or 10 year old. I used to literally talk about one day owning McDonald's. I was writing menus. I don't know where the love or passion came, but I've always loved food. I've loved growing it, I've loved cooking it, I've loved serving it. And I think part of that comes to serving it comes from being someone who likes making people happy and found and still do, whether in a restaurant or in my own home, putting great food in front of people and making them happy and experiencing that joy that they're experiencing because they're tasting something or eating something or, or experiencing it again that they just love.
- [15:27]
A
Yeah. And, and I'm happy you answered the question before I asked it, but I was gonna ask why food? And I think we don't fully appreciate how important seeing and being seen is. I think that is at the core of hospitality. There is no better way to see Somebody than to feed them and then to feel seen in that same moment than by that. That, you know, that reciprocity of, like here and then. Do you like it? Let me see your face. Are you smiling like that? That feels so good, right? It's. I think we're addicted to it.
- [16:04]
B
And I. I think there are also, especially from the food side, not necessarily which we could get in, not necessarily the dining room side. I think there are. I, by nature, am an introvert. I have learned, when we can get into this too, how I learned things that were very against my nature that made me uncomfortable and why. And it kind of goes back to the sustained effort wins. But right by creating food or cooking something on your own and putting it in front of somebody, there's not a lot of communication and interaction or connection or relationship effort. It's done through that plate of food. And I think you'll even find, you know, people talk about chefs often being creative types. Many of them are often very quiet. They are. They're sometimes caught up in their craft and. But then they see what. Sometimes from the hot side of the line, watching, you know, watching people in the dining room experience their food. And that is. That's. That is very satisfying. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Yeah.
- [17:03]
A
So I think we identified the why for you is. Is seeing people and feeling seen and being appreciated for feeding people. It's. It's a. It's an addicting drug like that that hit writing. It's.
- [17:13]
B
It's more than. It's more than just feeding people. And I think that is each other. That's changed so much over my. My 40 years in this business from, you know, working in restaurants when I was 15, I'm now 61. The appreciation for it and the love. And you are. You are, you know, part of our purpose. The. Our written purpose at fifth group was to create the opportunity for our guests to experience joy. And even when we wrote that, we debated and discussed and had dictionary that and thesaurus is out about the word joy. And I remember I am. I. I for one, thought it was very schmaltzy, a little too much. But. But. But what really sold me into this day, why it was perfect, is joy is defined differently by each person.
- [18:00]
A
How do you define joy?
- [18:01]
B
It is whatever I think brings you a particular feeling of, again, excitement, happiness, satisfaction, mental being taken care of, relaxation, Zen. Right. It is defined by people different ways. And another thing we preached in our restaurants was it also can be defined by the same person differently every single day because let's say if you are eating at one of my restaurants all by yourself at the bar, what you're looking for is one thing. The next day you might be in for a Tuesday night dinner with your partner. And. And that what you're looking for is another thing. The next night you might be hosting a potential investor to invest in your podcast business or an advertiser. And what you're looking for in that experience is completely different. And it is. And you don't walk in carrying a sign telling us what it is you're looking for to experience joy that night. We have to read it and examine it. Yeah, we might ask a few questions here and there, but you can only ask so many. You have to read it and figure out that's a sign of a great server.
- [19:06]
A
Right. What is the experience?
- [19:08]
B
What is going on at this table and what shall I do? Timing, how much I talk, how much I interrupt, what I bring, what I try to get on the table. The kind of experience I try to create for this 1, top 2, top 4, top of people, whatever it is. And it goes a long way in that those people walking out the door, no saying they. They nailed that.
- [19:32]
A
Yeah.
- [19:32]
B
Yeah.
- [19:33]
A
When I think of joy, I can't help but think of. What comes to my mind is joy is satisfying your needs. And.
- [19:40]
B
Yeah, that's a very succinct way to say it.
- [19:42]
A
Right?
- [19:42]
B
Yeah.
- [19:42]
A
And then you think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs at the base. You got, you know, just feeling like you're safe and secure. Right. You're in a safe space. Then beyond that is, you know, are you growing or do. Or do you feel seen? Right. Back to feeding people and creating joy. Do you feel seen? Do you feel valued? Then beyond that, you think about. You're like, is it just delivering joy to your staff? But is it also delivering joy to your. Sorry. Not to your guests. But is also delivering joy to your team?
- [20:07]
B
I don't think. I don't think a team who's not joyful is going to deliver joy.
- [20:11]
A
Exactly. So then if you start thinking about joy relative to your higher needs, like, am I growing as a professional? Am I finding my purpose in life? Like, that's all joy.
- [20:23]
B
Right.
- [20:23]
A
You know, I think it is a perfect word to use to. For a mission.
- [20:27]
B
It's been there for decades now.
- [20:29]
A
Yeah, I love that. So back to your story. You knew very young that you wanted this.
- [20:33]
B
Yes.
- [20:33]
A
And you started working like. Like, when did you, like, really break in? Like, when did you start working, like, as a career.
- [20:40]
B
Every sum as a career. Well, as a career was out of college, I actually turned down a handful of jobs to move to the east coast with a friend, with Chris Goss, to open Guest. Yeah, past Guest. To open a car detailing shop with a cafe in it next to a very busy train station in a bedroom community outside New York City. And it didn't work out. We, we got business plans. We were close to signing a lease and things fell through. And so I said, I called the company I wanted to work for the most and they said, well, because they told me if it doesn't work, call us. And I called them three months after, you know, turning them down. And that didn't work. And I said, can you still come to Atlanta? And Atlanta was my city of choice because I tell you, it was only large, warm city I knew of growing up that I had been to. Growing up in Michigan. I had never been to the west coast at that point. Got it. And they said, come on down. And that was June of 1987.
- [21:42]
A
So did I hear you correctly that you went to the east coast to start a car detailing company and that
- [21:47]
B
fell through with a cafe in it? Oh, with a cafe next to a train. Big train station in Stanford.
- [21:53]
A
Is this your vision or were you someone's exit strategy or like what was.
- [21:56]
B
Oh, no, it was a vision that Chris and I created and had this idea, you know, this was a. One of the wealthiest zip codes in America. This is when people, you know, their winter.
- [22:05]
A
What was the area?
- [22:06]
B
Stanford, Connecticut. Okay, right. It was this beautiful red brick building next to the train station. And, and that, that was a vision to do that.
- [22:16]
A
Three months is how long it lasted.
- [22:20]
B
Well, we worked on it a little bit before, before I graduated. But yeah, I got there. It was a few months we were working on it. It's amazing. We had a consultant and we did all this research by going to the library, literally, and pulling to put performance together of looking at past history of rainfall and cloud cover and snow, week by week by week, year by year, from decades out of books. If you can imagine this right now, you literally could tell AI to give you that and it would print it in five seconds. We spent hours in, in a Manhattan library, along with other things, trying to figure out what, what will our revenue be.
- [22:59]
A
I love to play the game of just looking back. Hindsight, right?
- [23:02]
B
Thank God it didn't work.
- [23:04]
A
What was it about this? Like, can you. Is there a lesson that we can draw from this 3 month experience or 5 month or whatever it was, was,
- [23:10]
B
you know, it was so long ago. And it was. Well, it was. It was the fact that we hired this consultant and he made us do some things. It kind of was our little. Our little mini masters. Yeah, right. Even though the business didn't get off the ground, it said, wow, look at all the things you need to think about.
- [23:27]
A
Okay, so you guys never even opened?
- [23:28]
B
Oh, no, no, we never. We were a day away from signing a lease when some things fell apart. Financing and. And that kind of thing. And to be honest, I was not loving the East Coast. It was like I said, it was.
- [23:40]
A
It's not Atlanta.
- [23:41]
B
It's not Atlanta. It's. It was, you know, it's. Stanford is. It's, you know, like I said, this. It's a bedroom community for Wall Street. It just wasn't my crowd, my vibe. I didn't see living there a long time. I would have. If this business would have worked.
- [23:55]
A
Yeah. I think two kids out of college. Right. You're 22, 23 years old.
- [23:59]
B
Exactly.
- [24:00]
A
To have the. The foresight to hire a consultant.
- [24:03]
B
Yeah, I.
- [24:04]
A
Where did you get that?
- [24:05]
B
I think from Chris's father.
- [24:07]
A
Okay.
- [24:07]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [24:08]
A
Because I think most people, that's the. They. They do that as a last case, like, where if we don't do something, we're going to lose it. We need to get help. And they do it as a last resort. Yeah, but they don't usually do it to be proactive.
- [24:18]
B
Right.
- [24:19]
A
So, like, what would have happened if you didn't have that? Consultant. 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 outsour. 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 hyphen inc.com or call 888-779-5314 to get started.
- [25:18]
B
Well, the money fell through in there, and thank goodness we hadn't signed a lease because then we would have really been in trouble.
- [25:23]
A
Were you getting steered away from that lease from the consultant?
- [25:27]
B
No, no, no. We. We just weren't able to. In the end of the day, weren't Able to come up with all the money we needed to do it, and it just kind of fell apart. We're like, well, without that, we can't it. And do.
- [25:35]
A
And here's a question. If you didn't spend the money on the consultant, would you have had the money to sign the lease?
- [25:41]
B
No, it was all personal stuff, but I think. But we could have. We could have ended up signing that lease earlier. Right. Without working on these other things and so maybe. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
- [25:51]
A
I mean, really, when you. When you have somebody that, like, knows what to do and forces you to go through the motions, right. The money you spend on a specialist, on the resources to get access to that information, it pays for itself.
- [26:07]
B
And people, you know, you just said a minute ago, a lot of times people look for a consultant after the fact. They write, they're new to this and they've never done it. Or even if they've done it, but they've worked for somebody else but have never been in certain positions, they should find that consultant before they do their things. It will save them time, headache, energy, and probably wasted money. Right.
- [26:31]
A
Right. So back to the story. You.
- [26:34]
B
You.
- [26:34]
A
This deal doesn't work, you find yourself coming to Atlanta, The. The company, the dream company. Are you willing to say what that company was?
- [26:42]
B
Oh, yeah. I worked for a company called Elenin Seafood.
- [26:45]
A
Okay.
- [26:45]
B
It was part of the specialty restaurant division of Morrisons. Okay. So the same division that ran and owned Ruby Tuesdays at the time. Remember, this is 1987. Okay, right. So Ruby Tuesdays with killing it. L and N Seafood. The first one was opened in Knoxville at the World's Fair in an old train station. That's what L and N was, a train line.
- [27:04]
A
Okay.
- [27:05]
B
Louisville, Nashville, I think it stood for. It was fresh seafood from scratch, chowder and gumbo seafood. We only bought fresh fish from three locations in the country. We could not buy anything local. It was mesquite grilled.
- [27:20]
A
Well, it's hard to buy something local in. Where were you.
- [27:23]
B
But we're here, and I was in Atlanta.
- [27:25]
A
Well, I was thinking, like, it's not too far from the ocean, I guess.
- [27:27]
B
No, but I'm saying there. But there are local seafood companies that we were not allowed to use. It was three companies in the country. Two based in New England, one based in Florida. It was the only place because the chef of the brand examined them, had specs, he visited, visited them regularly. Alan Lamoure was one of the founders, was the chef, and Greg Bushmill was his cousin. And they started this when I I joined them. There were 12 locations and they were. And they were growing. It was from scratch. It was really great food. Hot biscuits, kind of like Red Lobster currently does. Out of the oven all day long. Fresh from scratch. Out of the oven, carried into the dining room on a hot cast iron skillet. Literally every server wearing a hot glove.
- [28:13]
A
Why L and M. Why did I
- [28:15]
B
go work for them? Through the interview processes, the people that I met were buttoned up. They were growing. They had systems. I felt that I would be trained and taught this business because of the systems that they had in place and the people that they had in place and the fact they had a growth plan, that there was opportunity for me.
- [28:37]
A
Got it. So you're there for six years.
- [28:40]
B
Five.
- [28:40]
A
Five years. Just before going into business for yourself. In 93. Not 87 to 93.
- [28:46]
B
80. I was there from 87 to early 92. Got it. I left there and I took 10 weeks to drive back roads from Atlanta to San Francisco. Right. Go west. My son. I had never.
- [29:01]
A
That's a beautiful drive.
- [29:02]
B
Yeah. I've never been there. Camped all over, you know, all over. Page Pariah Canyon. 66. A part of it on Route 66. Backroads. Page. I was in. In Big Bend National Park. All over the Pariah Canyon, Rainbow Bridge, Lake Powell. Lots of hiking.
- [29:20]
A
That's cool.
- [29:21]
B
Took 10 weeks to get there. My dream at the time, I wanted to open a Chinese restaurant since I was like 12 years old. I don't know if you ever heard of a woman by the name of Barbara Trop? No. So Barbara was a. Working on her PhD in Chinese history at Yale. A young overweight woman went to China, fell in love with the food and the culture while working there. Lost a lot of weight from eating this food. Came back first wrote the Encyclopedia of Chinese Cooking, which won a James Beard award in like 90ish.
- [29:55]
A
Okay.
- [29:56]
B
And then opened right on Post Street. A block or two from. Is it Union Square? What's the main. Where the fountain.
- [30:04]
A
Oh, I don't know.
- [30:05]
B
Yeah. In San Francisco. Opened a place called China Moon Cafe. That was an old cafe that was Chinese. Basically Chinese meets California food. Very fresh, unbelievable food. And I wanted to work for her. I wanted to learn how to cook Chinese food. Her book was amazing. That that book also won a James Beard Award. The China Moon Cafe Cookbook. And it took me a while to get an interview with her because again, these are tell. Right. You're picking up a landline or going and knocking on a door and shoot.
- [30:39]
A
The best way is to show up at the front door.
- [30:41]
B
Right. And I did that and I left that. And I never got heard back. I finally thought, I better get another job. I started working. So again, at this point, I'd been a GM for two years of a $3.3 million restaurant. And so in today's dollars, it'd probably be about double that.
- [30:56]
A
Is this L and M?
- [30:57]
B
That was at L and N? Yeah.
- [30:59]
A
So you had already started at L
- [31:00]
B
and N. I had worked for them for five years. And when I left, that's when this road got it.
- [31:05]
A
And the goal was to surround yourself with somebody doing what you wanted to do.
- [31:09]
B
Right. And well, and to learn Chinese food. Right. Because it's completely different than French based food.
- [31:13]
A
So she never. She never responded.
- [31:14]
B
She did. I took another job at a place called MacArthur park, kind of an institution in San Francisco. Burgers, ribs. I was teaching people what to do because, remember, I'd been a GM and now I was a prep cook making nine bucks an hour. And finally she called, she said, I'm so sorry. I was on deadline for my China Moon Cafe cookbook. I'm done. Would love to talk to you. Went in, interviewed, had to do nice skills test in front of the team. They hired me as a pantry cook. That's what I was hired.
- [31:43]
A
We skipped over this. What did you do in. What did you go to school for?
- [31:46]
B
Food systems economics.
- [31:48]
A
Okay, but you weren't cooking in school.
- [31:50]
B
No.
- [31:51]
A
You were learning about the systems.
- [31:53]
B
Correct. And even in the summer, the summers that I worked at restaurants in Flint growing up, and it was always bartending, serving bar back, you know, those kinds of things, I. I had never cooked in a professional kitchen, ever. Now at LNNC Food, I learned to cook and I learned to run a kitchen. Got it. As a gm, where they had a general manager, typically the structure there was a gm, two or three assistants, depending on the size of the restaurant, and a kitchen manager.
- [32:22]
A
And you were hired as a gm?
- [32:24]
B
No, no, no, I was not. I was hired as a manager in training. I became a GM at 25. The youngest GM the company ever had. I started there when I. Just before my 22nd birthday.
- [32:36]
A
Okay.
- [32:37]
B
And so it took me about three years to become a GM, and I became a GM of it and opened a restaurant at the same time.
- [32:44]
A
And you held that title for two years?
- [32:45]
B
That's right, yeah.
- [32:47]
A
That's amazing. So you stage. Essentially, yeah.
- [32:50]
B
So I ended up working for her pantry for about two and a half months. I worked three days a week. And then I walked down the alley and I Worked at a French restaurant two days a week. And I learned a lot. But I had a date set that I would come back to Atlanta. So the goal was to go there for a period of time. I went out to dinner every single night. I worked. I worked lunches in both these restaurants, and I went out to dinner all over San Francisco and wine country until all my credit cards were maxed out. And then I knew it was time to come home.
- [33:20]
A
What a life. I mean, I think it's really important that you took the time to do that while you were young to go get that experience into. I mean, I. I think you should do that before you go to college today.
- [33:29]
B
Yeah.
- [33:29]
A
You know, like, do you.
- [33:30]
B
I wish there was a program nationally where it was just okay for everyone that graduated high school that was college bound to take one or maybe even two years. Yeah. Right. The fact that they say you're 18, you're going to college, and you're supposed
- [33:43]
A
17 for some people.
- [33:44]
B
That's right. And you're supposed to know what you want to study to do for the rest of your life makes zero sense.
- [33:49]
A
Do you know why?
- [33:50]
B
Why?
- [33:50]
A
It's a four business organ. Call it like it's for business. And also, I'm profit and I don't know. And if anybody's listening to this and they know more about this, please reach out to me, because I'd love to educate myself on this subject a little more. But I'm pretty sure that when schools are getting funding or they're being ranked, a big part of high schools. I'm talking about a big part of what determines whether that school district is doing well is how many kids convert to college.
- [34:16]
B
Oh, sure. So that's the ratio.
- [34:18]
A
So they want to push kids to college because that is how they get measured on their success. And they just. They just want that throughput. So they don't care where you're going to school as long as you're going to the college.
- [34:29]
B
Right.
- [34:29]
A
And that makes us rank higher in our school system. So we probably get better funding or. I don't know. But it all comes down to money is what it comes down to. So they're forcing young people. And maybe that wasn't a big deal in, like, the 90s and 80s and 70s when college didn't cost as much as a house.
- [34:45]
B
Right.
- [34:45]
A
You know, but now, like, you go to college and if you invest $100,000 or $200,000, that was my case. You're like, you're. You can never get over that hurdle. Every dollar you make.
- [34:58]
B
Well, you know, it's interesting. I had a friend say to me the other day, whose daughter is about to go to college, she's going to go to a private school. And he says, I don't know what she's to going to do. She's not going to be a doctor or going engineering or. He said, I'm about to spend $75,000 a year. That's 300 grand.
- [35:14]
A
An expensive party.
- [35:15]
B
What if I put that into investment fund?
- [35:19]
A
Right.
- [35:19]
B
And she just went out and started working at what she wants to do and learn. Because the goal of working, granted it is self satisfying. You feel, I mean I, it's important to be productive when you work, but ultimately it is to make money and ultimately it is to save enough money so that you can live without working at one point in your life. Right. That is the goal. He said if I, if I put that money away and invested it from the time she's 18 to 60, she'd have more than enough to retire on and she could go out and work and live and be happy with that maybe without ever going to college.
- [35:55]
A
Yeah.
- [35:55]
B
And is that a better investment?
- [35:57]
A
100%.
- [35:58]
B
Right.
- [35:58]
A
I think the other thing that you get that's invaluable is self awareness.
- [36:01]
B
Yeah.
- [36:02]
A
Because how many 17 year olds are self aware, fully self aware?
- [36:05]
B
Zero.
- [36:06]
A
You don't.
- [36:06]
B
Right.
- [36:07]
A
Your frontal lobe doesn't finish like developing until you're 27 years old for males, like 25 or like 23 for women.
- [36:14]
B
Right.
- [36:14]
A
Like and that the peak of emotional intelligence or of the peak of, of. Yeah. Emotional intelligence is self awareness. We, we aren't positioned to make those types of life choices. Right. Invest that kind of money. 100% with you on that. So back to your story and I'm loving the conversation. So you're out here, you style, you're exploring your passions, your interests.
- [36:36]
B
Right.
- [36:37]
A
Ultimately you never open a Chinese restaurant as far as I know. So did this, did this experience change something in you?
- [36:44]
B
No. We talked. It's funny because. So no, I still always wanted to, but that doesn't mean it would succeed. And we talked about it off and on over the years at fifth group of is Atlanta number one, how we would want to do a Chinese restaurant. Is Atlanta ready for that? The answer was often no. Right. Chinese restaurant, kind of like Mexican was and still is to some people. Right. It wasn't 10 years ago. There were no higher end Mexican restaurants. It didn't exist. Everyone thought it's a burrito, it's a taco, it should Be cheap. People still think that way primarily about Chinese restaurants. It's a, it's a to go thing. It, you know. Yeah. Or whatever it is. Even if it's right. And it should be 10 bucks or, you know. And so it was never. Are they ready now? I will say we created an entire concept, name, menu, so on and so forth. Had a space that we were supposed to start construction on April 1st of 2020.
- [37:45]
A
Yeah.
- [37:45]
B
Well, we closed all of our restaurants March 17th and ironically enough, we're sitting here. Just dawned on me, Today is the sixth anniversary, right. March 17th, that we closed every single restaurant in our company because of COVID Oh, right, right. We went, we went from $60 million in sales and 1,000 employees to $0 in sales and about 100 employees. Yeah.
- [38:11]
A
And your concepts weren't really engineered for. To go take out.
- [38:14]
B
Oh no. It was a dirty word actually, other than the casual Mexican, you know. Yet we tried to avoid doing to go. We were Uber and all that was going on back then. Uber. Uber eats right and such. And we had, we had no interest in it.
- [38:27]
A
We'll get to that as your story evolves. One thing that I that hasn't come out of your story. You talked about your evolution as being hired as a manager in training and being the youngest ever 25 years old to become the General Manager at LNN. I like to focus on transformation.
- [38:43]
B
Sure.
- [38:44]
A
Points of growth.
- [38:45]
B
Yeah.
- [38:45]
A
How do you think this experience, five years with this organization sets you up for success?
- [38:50]
B
I think it was the very beginning. Right. They did it. They had a lot of systems. They were profit focused because it was a publicly traded company. I also was fortunate enough. My first GM guy by the name of Steve Watermeyer, who unfortunately has passed away already. And then my area director, Bob Keady, who actually lives in Petoskey, Michigan and built a group of restaurants there in Petoskey where they taught me about people and team building and management and leadership. And that is exactly what I preach to people today. My 22 year old son just graduated in December from Auburn with a hospitality degree and is going to start on March one. Interviewing for jobs. And I said, what you need to find is someone who's going to train you well and teach you about management and leadership and people along with process and business and P and L. And if you learn those things 5, 10, 15 years from now, if you want to own your own restaurant, great. But you can run, I believe, any small to medium sized business. If you learn how to do those things in a restaurant, you can apply them You, I'm not saying you could go run a multi billion dollar company, but you can go run your own successful business if you have learned leadership, management, people, process and how to make a profit.
- [40:09]
A
Yeah. Biggest lesson. So I mean essentially what I'm hearing is they, they, they taught you how to be a coach.
- [40:15]
B
That that's the be the beginnings of it. Right, right. The vernacular back then was very different, the terminology. But yes, they, they and there were some things they tried to teach me to be honest that I fought. That eventually became the absolute core of my and fifth group success and what I preached and teach today. But I was too young. The whole, the whole, my funnel lobe hadn't closed and part of my mantra back then was no one will ever outwork me. I will always get this done.
- [40:51]
A
Is that healthy?
- [40:52]
B
No, it wasn't. And that was, that was part of the reason I even ended up leaving. Right. Because I was fried. Because I was working 70, 75 hours a week and working hard versus smart. And I would, when my do would tell me we had management by objectives, we called them. And that was, that was an evolution that has changed since then into other things from other business coaches. And I would say, you don't understand, I'm too busy. I can't do these things. I'm running a restaurant. And he was right. And eventually I did learn those things from another coach at fifth group. And what we ended up implementing very, very successfully and exactly what I teach today we can get into later. Kukler Restaurant Advisory. Part of that name came from the fact that the acronym KRA also stands for key result areas.
- [41:44]
A
Yeah. So we're talking about is like what us talks about with like having rocks, starting with like what's the vision, what's the goal? And then reverse engineering breaking that down into chunks and then starting where you can. And like where do I have to be this year to be on track for my 5 year?
- [41:58]
B
What do I need to do?
- [41:59]
A
That's right. And then you just delegate and you know, chip away at the list the things that have to get done.
- [42:04]
B
Yeah, that's a very boiled down. And then we, I've, we've created a version that works on the restaurant unit level that after many years we determined restaurants themselves should not have a plan for a year. They have a budget. We write a budget with cost objectives and those kinds of things. But there's too many things going on in a restaurant in the world to say this is where we want to take this restaurant, you know, from January to December. So we Wrote based on the key result areas and the metrics that went along with them. We wrote corporate quarterly objectives. One we also learned over time for a restaurant, not a company, but a restaurant. Right. They're already running dayto day and they're already dealing with sales and profits and training and hiring and culture. They do that all day long. And the vast majority of their time call it, you know, if an average work week is 55 hours, 10% if you can have 5 or 10% that you're not working on. If you're lucky. Right. 90 of your time is work is working on just running that business. What's one thing that you and your team can use part of that 10% to move the needle.
- [43:15]
A
What's the most important thing?
- [43:16]
B
Right.
- [43:17]
A
What is the thing? Yeah.
- [43:18]
B
Right. Right now what? Right. And we were. We created a system where GM and executive chef or a team of the entrepreneurs running that restaurant at the end of a quarter they would sit down and review the. The key result areas and say and. And rate them in their restaurant current day and then say this is the one that is suffering the most. And then they would come up with this is what we'd like to do. And they would pitch that to their do. And this is in like the second to last week of a quarter. Now it might be the same one you had the previous quarter if you had made no headway.
- [43:51]
A
Right.
- [43:51]
B
If sales are still suffering, still focus on that training the wheel wheels keep falling off. We're not following up on our follow
- [43:58]
A
one course until success. Have you heard that acronym focus?
- [44:01]
B
Yeah. Or the client might be the cleanliness of our building. Right. Whatever that. Because those are some. A few of the key result areas that we had. And then they would say they'd come to an agreement of this. This is the key result area. This is the objective which has to be measurable. Here's where we are. This is what we want to move and how we move it. Then they come up with strategies and actions and those are broken down into individuals priorities and delegated to the team. And then that that ties into an entire communication system where everyone's using the same system. I think language within a business, common language is there is essential that that's part of why I think Danny Meyer nailed so early on that he was able not only his idea ideas were ahead of their time, but he was able to label them and put a name to things so that they could all talk about it the same way and know what they were talking about. Yeah. To the point where it Worked so well that he could then write a book about it and other people knew what he was talking about.
- [45:04]
A
Yeah, yeah. Super powerful stuff. And you look at every culture across the globe. They all have their own language. It's one of the things that defines a culture is the language they speak.
- [45:14]
B
Speak. That's right.
- [45:14]
A
And if you want to build a culture, are we all speaking the same language? When I say these things, do you know exactly what the translation is?
- [45:21]
B
Right.
- [45:21]
A
You know, I think it's. I couldn't agree more with you. So when did you, in your journey, start operating at this level? When did that happen for you?
- [45:31]
B
So South City Kitchen was started in 93, and I was not a part of that.
- [45:36]
A
Okay.
- [45:37]
B
I created an idea for a coffee shop that I pitched short. Very, very short story to. To Chris. Go. And then the owners, Chris's partner, and two investors, they love. This was before Starbucks. They literally back then said, we will never cross the Mason Dixon Line. You know, now they're in China.
- [45:53]
A
Yeah.
- [45:54]
B
There were no coffee shops we opened. We. They liked the idea. They all gave me a percentage of South City Kitchen and we all became the five of us. So Chris and his partner Steve and me and the two investors became equal partners at Felicity Kitchen and the coffee shop that was called the Urban Coffee Bungalow that opened in 95. And we were doing things like smoothies, paninis, craft beer, open from 5am to 11pm and, you know, no one was doing those things. Something was happening in Seattle, but it really wasn't happening here. And. But it was very difficult Right. Back then. We would celebrate a $4.00 PPA at the end of the week. Oh, wow. Right now. What's your coffee? You know, your coffee at Starbucks. The PPA at Starbucks, I would guess, is probably about eight bucks now.
- [46:47]
A
Yeah.
- [46:48]
B
And we ended up having three of those. And I will never forget the next. Getting to your question of the next evolution. Right. So I had been a successful gm. We were applying some of those things. We had South City Kitchen that was absolutely killing it. We opened the first urban Coffee Bungalow. We were baking a lot of things ourselves. Some were from mixes, some were from scratch. We started doing all the production of cornbread and biscuits for South City Kitchen out of that bakery. Because South City Kitchen, eventually, in a year, two and a half or so, closed for a month to expand its kitchen because of the business it was doing. So things like that. And I said to a insurance broker one day, oh, my God, I just can't believe how I'm working. I'm working Harder than I've ever worked. Something is wrong because I'm working harder than the CEOs that are running billion dollar restaurant companies. Right. How can that be? How can I be working harder running a coffee shop than a guy that might be running 500 restaurants? And he said I should introduce you to a friend of mine. And he did. And her name was Kathleen Askier. Kathleen was a business growth consultant. She had never had a restaurant client. We didn't need guidance and operations. We needed guidance on organizational structure. We needed guidance on how to implement these ideas of management tools that I kind of had only been the only one that had even seen a little bit of it in the management by objectives. And we ended up working with Kathleen on a week weekly basis for 15 years.
- [48:24]
A
Okay. And that was for org structure and the implementing the management tools that you had but you weren't practicing.
- [48:30]
B
Oh no, no, no. Something like some of them I maybe had seen. We weren't there. We went well beyond. I mean we didn't write business plans. Right. We, we didn't have a system for, you know, agendas and weekly meetings that were. Structure. It was a lot of structure. And this happened over years.
- [48:46]
A
So this what got us down this, this current direction, what we're talking about. I asked you when did you start implementing and working the systems that you were sharing earlier? When did that happen for you? And what I'm picking up is like this is the, the precipice. Like this is where this started. You got working with Kathleen helped you maybe slow down a little bit and put these, these systems into place.
- [49:06]
B
Yeah. Along with long term thinking. When we went off to write a mission and vision statement, part of that was where do you wise. Where do you guys want to be in five years? Yeah. No one had ever asked us that. That thought had never crossed our mind. And we, we probably stumbled around that for a two hour conversation. Like are you crazy? You know, we're 20 years I'm trying
- [49:30]
A
to get through today.
- [49:31]
B
Yeah.
- [49:31]
A
Who knows where I'll be in 10 years?
- [49:33]
B
Right. Five years break. Right. It was mind bending to all of us.
- [49:38]
A
Yeah. And so this was around 95.
- [49:41]
B
Yeah.
- [49:41]
A
So you started the coffee bungalow.
- [49:43]
B
Yeah. 95 maybe. Actually maybe 96 by the time.
- [49:46]
A
How, how fast do you open those three locations?
- [49:50]
B
Well, the first in 95, we had one in the High Museum for the win the Olympics in the summer of 96.
- [49:58]
A
Okay. So that was the second location.
- [50:00]
B
Yep. And then we had one in Peachtree Tree Battle that might have already been opened. I can't even remember, we, we opened them pretty quickly. Yeah.
- [50:07]
A
So around by 97 basically. Is that safe to say in two years you had three locations.
- [50:12]
B
Right. And we had opened the Food Studio, which was a four star fine dining restaurant at the same time as the catering company.
- [50:21]
A
And when did the catering company come online?
- [50:23]
B
Both of those opened in the summer of 96, prior to the Summer Olympics. Olympics.
- [50:27]
A
Okay. So and that was Bold.
- [50:30]
B
That's right. And the Bold and the food studio shared. The food studio was in the front. There was some shared prep kitchen and catered. Bold did off site catering as well as had a 10,000 square foot gallery. And this was in a hundred plus year old repurposed plow factory called the King Plow Art Center. It's still there today. And Bold still operates there today and still does events in that gallery today.
- [50:58]
A
You dropped a lot on me. I'm gonna get some situational awareness here. So you joined Fifth Group in 1995?
- [51:06]
B
Yes, maybe, maybe, maybe. Yeah. It might have been late 94, but yeah, late 94 to early 95.
- [51:12]
A
And at this point your partners Steve Simon and Chris Goss, he was episode 1247 for the listeners.
- [51:18]
B
Right.
- [51:18]
A
If you did not catch that episode, I highly recommend you go back and listen to 1247 with Chris Goss. It was an awesome conversation. So Steve and Chris opened south city kitchen in 1993. Two years later you come on board. When you come on board, you pitch the urban coffee bungalow concept. And in two years you open three locations. And as these three locations are opening, you also launch your studio. A food studio. Right, you said four star fine dining.
- [51:49]
B
Yeah, it wasn't a AAA for sure. It was only one of three, four or five restaurants in the state that won that AAA four Diamond, four star, four diamond label for years.
- [51:59]
A
And Bold.
- [52:00]
B
And Bold.
- [52:00]
A
So you go from one location to I guess technically five locations plus a catering.
- [52:08]
B
Right.
- [52:08]
A
So this is. So it's kind of like, you know, I've identified that there tends to be these hiccups or these points of like bottlenecking or like you can only take it so far with just human effort. Right. And that's usually between three and four locations. Like you by being there, by hustling, by working 70 hours a week, by having partners divide and conquer, you can scale to about three or four locations. But at that point, if you don't have systems, if you're not delegating, if you're not working on the business, you have to remove yourself from the business at that point.
- [52:41]
B
Right.
- [52:41]
A
It sounds like that's kind of where you guys were approximately. You did pretty good. I mean, you did a lot. You went from one location with. For two years. Right. From 93 to 95. And then in two more years, you 5x right.
- [52:56]
B
Your.
- [52:56]
A
Your scale, that's. You're gonna feel some pain.
- [52:59]
B
Oh, absolutely.
- [53:01]
A
Yeah.
- [53:01]
B
Right. Especially being as young as we were, you know, we were. I was just having this conversation. The day. Often when you meet people who are opening their restaurant, I find they're often in their late 30s or early 40s, where they've gotten to the point in their life, in their career to say, I got this. I can. I've run enough that I can go open my own restaurant. We were 28.
- [53:25]
A
Yeah.
- [53:26]
B
So a lot went wrong and a lot went right. Especially hospitality went right.
- [53:33]
A
Right. But that only gets you so far that.
- [53:36]
B
Yeah, well, especially it can get you
- [53:38]
A
really far, but with your systems and processes and.
- [53:41]
B
Right, well, and it can get your business as far. It doesn't mean the underbelly, the people working at it to make it happen.
- [53:46]
A
The reviews are fantastic.
- [53:48]
B
That's right.
- [53:49]
A
The ratings are fantastic. But what's the P L look like?
- [53:51]
B
Yeah. Or, or just your life.
- [53:53]
A
Yeah.
- [53:53]
B
Right. So it's like kid, like. Like kids. 1 is 1, 2 is 2, 3 is 5. The. The zone defense goes away. Right. Or the man, I should say the man to man goes away. Right.
- [54:04]
A
So you guys, you. You realize you need help.
- [54:07]
B
Yes.
- [54:08]
A
And you reach out to Kathleen. What was her last name?
- [54:10]
B
Askier. A S K I E R. And
- [54:14]
A
what does Cat like? What's the first thing? So she's there, she's witnessing. She's taking it all in. What's the first thing that you. Well, you also talked about how she taught you about visioning. You know, let's. Let's look five years out, mission, purpose, all these statements. Let's. Let's get our culture on paper.
- [54:29]
B
Well, and as you mentioned, the. Why. Why are you guys doing this and getting aligned? I think part of it is alignment, you know, which is also something I do currently in my consulting is, you know, you come in and you meet with two or three owners and you say, if I asked the three of you separately in a separate conversation, what are the three most important things you're working on in your company this year? I always, for the most part, get nine different answers and how. Right. Especially if you're at three or four or five plus locations. How are you drive moving your company forward successfully? If the ownership or the leadership, maybe it's. Maybe it's one owner and there's three directors or partners. I mean, who knows? Every structure is different, but there is a group that is making the decisions to drive this company forward and lead it from the top. If they're not on the same page with what is most important instead of what is most urgent, what is important and where do we all agree we want to be a minimally a year from now? Right.
- [55:30]
A
I think of alignment. The visual I love is you have, you know, so you have five trucks all tied to the stump and you're trying to pull the stump out of the ground.
- [55:40]
B
Right.
- [55:40]
A
And every truck is at a different radial a way in a point. Like one's pointing north, one's pointing east, southwest. And you know, maybe you got two pointing east in one direction. And then you all hit the gas. You get chains tied to the stump. You're trying to pull it out of the ground. You're all pulling against each other.
- [55:56]
B
That's right.
- [55:56]
A
But what happens if we, what happens if we all pull our chains east? We're all going east. How fast is that stump going to come out of the ground?
- [56:05]
B
Pretty quick.
- [56:05]
A
Yeah, that's alignment.
- [56:07]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [56:08]
A
So you guys get alignment, you get these. You cement your culture, you put it on paper, you all sign off to say, we agree, this is what we're doing. Super powerful.
- [56:19]
B
And then the how.
- [56:20]
A
And the how.
- [56:20]
B
Right. And then when we did that, that's when back then we started doing, creating an annual process for every restaurant to write an annual plan. And I think that was needed at that point. We eventually grew out of it and learned other ways to do it. But at that point it was very important and had twice a year meetings with the entire management team. You know, that was in the beginning that was a dozen people. And then it grew to where that meeting was 80 or 90 over the years. But where you one we when we first started having those meetings, it was to actually work on the plan. Like we are going to create this time for you where we're going to come here at 9 in the morning and stay here till 1 and work on this. Eventually those meetings came, you know, in February of a year and then typically July or early August. And they would give July, early August would be, here's what our priorities for our restaurant were coming into the year that we told you about six months ago, and here's our progress. And they would get up in front of their peers and say, but their numbers, again, some of those objectives aren't just numbers, but they are. They could be. Check Average, they could be turnover rates. They could be. You know, we, we got to the point where, you know, there are ways to measure culture, right. As far as satisfaction and net promoter scores and things. And they would report to their, to their whole company how they did and they would take turns doing that. And then we, as a company, the owners would do the same. And then, and then in February, we would do a quick recap of how we ended the year. And here are our goals for this coming year. Yeah. And so not only is there alignment, but it's in writing. I'm also a big believer in. You have a plan, share it. Yes. You know, whether that is I'm going to take my business from one to four restaurants or I'm, I'm running a marathon in nine months. Let me tell you about it, right? You start telling and then you, and you pay for it, you sign up, you pay for it, and then you tell people. And it creates a level of accountability. And that, that goes a long way in getting up in front of your peers and talking about how it is and when it's not great being able to explain why and what we're going to do about it. Again, why are we unstoppable? We didn't get all of this done. And often, especially from a sales perspective, you know, more often than not, it's driven by the economy. So oftentimes they might all be in the same boat, maybe not to the same degree, or it could be a new restaurant and we're struggling. You know, restaurants don't just open the door and kill it.
- [58:58]
A
What I'm hearing right now, earlier you highlighted the significance, the importance of language. Right now what you're highlighting is the importance of ritual. Again, every culture has language and rituals. These are the things that happen regularly on cadence and part of. So you have language to communicate. Everybody. You know, when you say these words, they mean a certain thing, but also you have to. We write these things down so that we can share them. But you have to create ritual, a time and place for these things to be shared.
- [59:28]
B
That's right.
- [59:28]
A
Right.
- [59:29]
B
We had all of that created on a more micro level. What I just described was kind of the macro of the year, the six month, the whole company for your business. And then we created the micro version of the same thing within the restaurant of how a management team is to communicate. How often? What are they covering? What, who's responsible? Because I think areas of responsibility. Right. Strong believer. You've heard the saying, right. If, if everyone's responsible, no one's Responsible, Right? Very. From our part, from my partners to directors, to every single person on a management team, GM, assistants, chef, sous chefs, what is your area of responsibility? And you are the one that has to, has to do X, Y and Z. Z. You're the one that reports on this. At a manager meeting, when something's not going right, you need to be able to explain why and what you're going to do about it. When it's going well, you get the win. And then that, you know, again, getting all way down into things that ties into how we wrote our bonus plans, that everybody in a restaurant was on the same exact bonus.
- [60:29]
A
Delivering joy, wins, bonuses, security.
- [60:33]
B
Yeah, you know.
- [60:34]
A
Yeah, it's all there. Um, man, you're dropping so much gold on us right now. I, I, I have to bring to the conversation because this idea of, like you said, macro and micro.
- [60:44]
B
Yeah.
- [60:44]
A
I'm thinking about HT Schultze Carlton and his 26 standards of service that every day they, they go through that list of 26 standards.
- [60:54]
B
Right.
- [60:54]
A
And they share the standard, and they make an example of somebody who exhibited that standard.
- [60:58]
B
Right.
- [60:58]
A
And that's an example of a micro. That's a, that's a ritual. It's a daily ritual that we are reinforcing our language, our standards. And like, I think that. Is that a good example of Mike Micro?
- [61:10]
B
Well, yeah, And I think that's also another great example of how you have to define something. Right. At L and N, at one point we said, we have to raise the bar on service and said, well, what does that mean? And this idea of legendary service was created with bullet points that evolved over time at fifth group restaurants to the 14 elements of the guest experience.
- [61:36]
A
Targets. You got to give people targets.
- [61:37]
B
Right? Right. You can't just say, well, go give good service. One, Everyone defines that differently. So, one, you don't even know what the goal is. But if you also don't have them defined, how do you teach it and train it and how do you follow up on it? And it was, I don't know if you remember the book back in the day about moments. Moments of Truth. There are thousands of moments of truth when you visit a restaurant from the moment you pull your car into a lot to getting out and stepping into that parking lot and everything from that point until you're back in your car.
- [62:07]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [62:08]
B
Right. So our 14 elements of the guest experience, and these have evolved into Indigo Road, I believe, uses something similar, because there are people in that company that came out of Fifth Group by this. There's this huge tree. Right. With roots.
- [62:20]
A
It's all connected. That's one of the things I love the most about what I get to do. I'm not just sharing individual stories, your legacy, cementing your legacy and learning from your experiences, but I'm also learning how it's all this web, this connection, and, you know, like, using Chris Goss as an example. Right. So how I got back to Atlanta, I talked to somebody in Burlington. You know, Jordan Ware referred me to Chris. Chris Goss. Chris Goss found out that he's connected with Steve Palmer. Right. When he was in with Indigo.
- [62:53]
B
Right.
- [62:54]
A
Or Magnolia, Was he.
- [62:55]
B
Steve worked at Magnolia, I think, as a server 30 some years ago. Right, Right. Yeah.
- [63:01]
A
So, you know, and then birds of the same feather tend to flock together. Together. Our job is to develop professionals. So these institutions end up pumping out the future of restaurant tours.
- [63:11]
B
Absolutely.
- [63:12]
A
And you start to see how it's all connected. But, yeah.
- [63:15]
B
And when you speak to Ryan Pernice later this week, he worked for Danny Meyer, Right? Yeah. Yeah.
- [63:19]
A
And so. And, and so Ryan. So Chris. So. So again, Jordan, to Chris Goss. Chris Goss said, you got to talk to Ryan Turner there. There's some stuff going on with giving Kitchen, which I was already familiar with. Chris was. Sorry, Ryan Turner was a guest 10, over 10 years ago. He was episode 120, for context, you're going to be episode like 1000, I think. 270, you know.
- [63:43]
B
Yeah.
- [63:43]
A
Anyway, so reconnected with Ryan Turner. Ryan and Chris connected me with you
- [63:48]
B
and Ryan and his partner, Todd Musman worked for us at Fifth Group.
- [63:52]
A
Yeah. It's just. It's just so much fun to, like, share like the. The big picture, go deep into all this. But I digress. So one thing that hasn't come out of your story yet and something that I like to talk about. It can be awkward talking about this, but I think it's an area that needs to be discussed more frequently, which is this idea of partnerships.
- [64:10]
B
Right.
- [64:11]
A
So you come in to this partnership two years late. You had already known Chris well, went to college with Chris, high school.
- [64:19]
B
Yeah.
- [64:19]
A
So there's this level of trust and culture that you two share.
- [64:22]
B
Yeah.
- [64:24]
A
So you're coming into this partnership two years after the restaurant opens. How do we approach partnership at this. This point? Like, how did they bring you in? And did you get lawyers involved at the very beginning or, like, just take us through how.
- [64:38]
B
No, then there were no lawyers. Steve and I spent a lot of time getting to know each other.
- [64:44]
A
Yeah. I mean, was he threatened by You?
- [64:46]
B
No, I don't think so. I think no, because we can get into this later, but Steve and I, who eventually became the main partners of the company after Chris left, had very, very different and complementary skill sets and areas of passion. Well, yeah, it was. It was really a yin and yang. But no, we spent a lot of time working together and making sure that we would mesh and see eye to eye, at least to a certain degree, on things and talk about what would we do and what would we not do and. And who worked on what and what, you know, And I was an operator at Hart. All of us were. Started there. And there were no. There were no attorneys. There were no attorneys with the original four. With Chris and Steve, the. The two investors. There was nothing in writing, which, you know, years later led to a very interesting buyout. It took five years because everyone was busy and you'd get together and talk about it and nobody'd be happy.
- [65:39]
A
Was that when Chris left?
- [65:40]
B
That was after Chris left? Many years after Chris left.
- [65:44]
A
So you had no lawyers involved when Chris left?
- [65:46]
B
When Chris left, we did 99. When Chris left, we came to a conclusion of what we would do and how it would work. And then I do believe it was drawn up and signed, but there was nothing to go reflect on to say, how will we do this and that? And then five or six, seven years later, the guys that had invested, who are also restaurant owners, but in other cities and states, other cities, did they
- [66:10]
A
bring a lot of expertise, experience doing this? Like, well, they did.
- [66:13]
B
They weren't. Yes and no, but they weren't around much because they had no businesses in Atlanta. Other places they ran were far more casual. So it's kind of a different world. And eventually we're like, okay, let's, you know, let you guys. Their company grew to be much bigger than ours. And it's like, let's buy you out. That's great. You know, it's been a great run. But then it took five years to figure out because there was nothing.
- [66:34]
A
So their company, being the original investors, bought you out?
- [66:37]
B
No, no, no.
- [66:38]
A
We.
- [66:38]
B
Chris had left, and they were only the investor in South City Kitchen. Excuse me. In the original South City. Nothing that had opened since then got it. And. And they're like, yeah, you know, this is just a small thing. And we're like, yeah, we'd love to own it all and not. And not have. And have fifths.
- [66:54]
A
So you bought them out?
- [66:55]
B
We bought them out, but it took years because people were busy. And they'd say, oh, we're Coming to town, we get together, we'd have a conversation, really wouldn't get anywhere. You know, one of them eventually said, you know this, we're finally going to get to a conclusion when none of us think it's a good deal. Which, you know, you hate to think that way, but it's a little bit true. When you have nothing in writing to go by, if you're, if you're both sides of the party are a little happy and a little unhappy, it's probably fair.
- [67:20]
A
Right?
- [67:20]
B
Right.
- [67:21]
A
I mean, yeah. It's so important that we, when we get into partnerships that we take the time to have a lawyer to. And it can be weird because you don't, because like I think when you, when you think about lawyers, you think about like, oh, like you don't trust me and you get a lawyer involved. But it's because I, I, maybe it's more than trust you. I love you and I want to make sure that like our, our relationship is spelled out. It's similar to like hiring a lawyer to do a prenup, you know, like, this is mine, this is yours.
- [67:51]
B
Yeah.
- [67:51]
A
You know, like, let's divide our stuff up. Like who's responsible for what?
- [67:55]
B
Right.
- [67:55]
A
These are my responsibilities. These are your responsibilities. If we decide we don't want to be married in business together.
- [68:00]
B
Right.
- [68:01]
A
Like what's the exit?
- [68:02]
B
Right.
- [68:02]
A
And like when you go, we, and
- [68:03]
B
we eventually did that with me and Steve and we have had another partner join later or another Chris, Chris Reinhard. And I'll never forget asking the attorney, you know, all these questions he was bringing up and he, one of the best attorneys I've, I've ever known and still know him as a friend, just so level headed. And I'm like, really? We really have to come up with some of this stuff? He says, robby, the idea here is, and the goal is that you never ever need any of this, but if you do, it's here and decided.
- [68:29]
A
Right?
- [68:30]
B
Right. And I have preached that to a family member who, that, that I actually recently met a very distant cousin who, young guy, very passionate, was going to, getting ready to try to open a restaurant with a friend. They were both coming out of the back of house and I gave him a bullet point of questions like, you know guys like who's responsible for what, what's going to happen if and when someone wants to leave? What if a year from now one of you just decides not to come to work very often?
- [68:56]
A
Right.
- [68:56]
B
What are you going to do? And they were looking at me and they're they're 26. They were looking at me like, oh my God, this is this heavy stuff. I'm like, I'm telling you, it's marriage. You nail this down now and figured out one, it's going to lead to some really good conversations right now that you've not thought about at all. And make some decisions like what are your areas of responsibility? You can't just both do everything. It won't work, you'll be miserable and it won't be as, as clean and as successful.
- [69:24]
A
Right.
- [69:24]
B
But all these things and they're like, they got it.
- [69:27]
A
But what's cool too, going through that process, forcing yourself to write down responsibilities, putting your name next to of those responsibilities literally is the first step of developing an org chart, right? And that gets you going. And then if you're doing stuff and you're like, oh, like, I know I'm the best at marketing, but I hate marketing. I don't want to do this. Well, that becomes the first thing that you erase your name from and you delegate to somebody who loves it, right. And the goal is to get it so your name's next to one thing, right. And you're doing the one thing that only you should do because you're the best at it. But you have to write it all down first so you can start taking these responsibilities off your plate.
- [70:04]
B
I've done this with a client who had multiple restaurants, a handful of owners and directors. And there was a lot of confusion in interviewing the directors. They're like, you know, we don't sometimes know which partner to go to for something. Or we're pretty sure we do know the partner to go to and they'll tell us to do something. Then the other one will come in and say, do this. So I created these documents that we went through and designated which of the partners is responsible for which. What. What are the, these two main directors responsible for? And then in those, that list of partnership areas of responsibility, it was I can do these things. And they, we had a symbol, you know, icon system, mark these things of as a partner, I can do this on my own without talking to anyone about it. Another set was, I can do this, but I need to inform my partner I'm about to do it or I've done it. And then another set of things of this can't be done or something. A decision in this area cannot be made without the partnership agreeing. Yeah, right. And it created some parameters of how. And then that same thing for those directors. So they gave, these are long term people Gave them freedom to know I could just go do this. I don't need to call so and so about it. I don't have to worry. They've given me in writing the permission to go do this.
- [71:23]
A
It's similar to giving your server permission to, you know, engage the guests a certain way to solve a problem.
- [71:30]
B
Right? Yeah.
- [71:31]
A
Like, and if you just give them that permission, you know that I'm allowed, I have a budget of $50 or $100 to make things right. Right. Then that that rule applies throughout the organizational chart.
- [71:41]
B
And I think that all of this that you're talking about, though, starting with the lawyers or areas of responsibility or flushing things out, comes to a whole nother topic that people in general do not like, and that is conflict resolution. Right. Or even I've written an article about how the power of a good conversation and how to plan for it, how to address it. Follow up is key. But so many people don't have conversations, whether it be with equals or, or someone that they manage and are ultimately responsible for because they're worried of how is it going to go. Am I going to upset them? Are they going to get defensive? Are they going to blow up on me? And if it is planned and done well and done respectfully and always keeping the topic in mind, not the person, the person isn't the problem. We have an issue here.
- [72:33]
A
Correct. The process, not the person.
- [72:35]
B
That's right. And you do all those things. You know, I, I, there are people that have thanked me so many times or I, I appreciate you having this conversation. I had no idea I was doing that or coming across or that people thought that about me, you know, and, and then the key to the success of that, beyond planning for it, delivering in a particular way, is then following up on it.
- [72:58]
A
Right.
- [72:58]
B
Often people will have a conversation and you'll never hear from them again.
- [73:01]
A
Yeah, yeah. But building these rituals.
- [73:03]
B
Yeah, Right.
- [73:04]
A
Where you're forced to twice a year, once a year, come back to the drawing table and say, are we on track?
- [73:09]
B
Right.
- [73:09]
A
Do we hit our goals?
- [73:10]
B
Right.
- [73:10]
A
Yes. What's the next most, most important thing we do next year?
- [73:13]
B
Right.
- [73:14]
A
And like, it's a system for growth. And it's interesting because it sounds like, you know, so in the story where we are, we're between 2000, sorry, 1997 and 1999, all these things happen. The next restaurant you open, correct me if I'm wrong, is in 1999. Latavia trattoria.
- [73:33]
B
That's right. Yeah.
- [73:34]
A
I'm dyslexic, so Like I. I see things and I don't say it right sometimes. Latafa. Yes. So and that was your. That would have been. At this point you're at.
- [73:43]
B
Not counting the coffee. It would have been three coffee shops and it would have been the third full service restaurant.
- [73:49]
A
So five total. Three. Three.
- [73:51]
B
Three coffee shops, three restaurants and the catering.
- [73:54]
A
The catering company.
- [73:55]
B
That's right. And that was the first restaurant we opened after Chris had Goss had left the company.
- [73:59]
A
So 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 in flexible 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 over of your business and increase profitability. You can also explore the latest issues of Food Fanatics magazine from US 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 expect more to learn how to become a US Foods customer again. That's usfoods.com expectmore and then I'm just gonna go through the timeline real quick just for the sake of getting it all out there. So two, so 1999 you open the trattoria. 2006 you open your second self city. Correct?
- [75:12]
B
Yes.
- [75:12]
A
And then you have 2006 you also open your second echo.
- [75:20]
B
First echo.
- [75:21]
A
First echo.
- [75:22]
B
Yeah, like three months apart. And I mean that's a story in of itself why they opened, you know, two big restaurants two or three months apart from each other.
- [75:30]
A
But so then you have your, you did another. The original El Taco.
- [75:36]
B
Right.
- [75:37]
A
And then 2011 you have Alma Cocina. Cocina. Thank you very much. 2012 lore. 2012 you also had another original Taco. El Taco.
- [75:48]
B
That's at the airport. Right.
- [75:49]
A
So licensed.
- [75:50]
B
Yeah. And those are. And those in the airport were created into qsi like walk up counter.
- [75:54]
A
Got it.
- [75:55]
B
Order. And again we helped design it, but. But again being run by a third party concessionaire.
- [75:59]
A
2013, another echo. In 2016 you have your third South City. 2018 your third echo.
- [76:10]
B
Right.
- [76:11]
A
And then from what I gathered, I think that was maybe the, the last restaurant you opened and then you exited in 2022.
- [76:19]
B
And then we opened the second AMO casino in January. Got it. No, yeah. January 20th, I think, of 2020. So it was open six weeks before having to be closed down because of COVID Got it.
- [76:34]
A
So with that laid out in front of us.
- [76:38]
B
Yeah.
- [76:38]
A
What happened in the coming years post 1999? More than doubling in size. In that amount of time, you total, you had 14 restaurants, either licensed and or yours, that you were operating.
- [76:50]
B
Right. And the catering company.
- [76:51]
A
And the catering company.
- [76:52]
B
Right.
- [76:53]
A
Again, the mission statement is to inspire, empower and transform the industry. When I think of transformation, we're going to transform owners, the industry, by one, one owner at a time. Right. So what I'm interested in, as you're taking me along, really reflect back at how you evolved.
- [77:10]
B
Oh yeah.
- [77:10]
A
And how you were like, how you were becoming a better restaurateur. So when was that next evolution for you in terms of how your perspective, your value, the way you run restaurants evolved?
- [77:24]
B
So right through that process, Right. I was day in, day out operations running the bungalows. And then when Chris left again, we had a one year plan. When he decided to leave and move to Vermont, we kept it quiet. We had a one old year year plan. And part of that plan was me taking over all operations. And so in some way I kind of became the D.O. the director of operations for the company. And that was the coffee shops, the bungalow, the coffee shops, La Tava. I'm sorry, the coffee shops, the food Studio and South City Kitchen. And for a period of time, I oversaw the operations of the catering company until realizing that I went to my partners and said the catering company sells food and beverage. And that that's kind of where the similarities to a restaurant end. And Bold has gotten to the point where one it, it completely changed what catering is in Atlanta at that point it was very institutional. It had been, you know, literally, you know, potatoes out of a bag of saline and it was hotel food. And we started doing everything from scratch. We would build kitchens on site and we would cook real food and serve hundreds of people. And BOLD changed what catering is in Atlanta. But it got where I said, I can't manage both these. I would say, although BOLD today it's about experiences because the decor and the food, it's unbelievable. But it is as much, because that's nailed down, it's as much of a logistics company because they will do up to 18 events in one day. Oh, wow. Right. All over the city with 30 trucks going out.
- [79:12]
A
That's wild.
- [79:13]
B
Right? In planning, that is, you know that some of the chefs and operation managers are in there are just logistic geniuses.
- [79:20]
A
Yeah.
- [79:20]
B
So eventually that went by the wayside and became. That's when Chris Reinhardt came in and he stepped into that role as a partner to be the GM and to kind of drive that company.
- [79:30]
A
So again, I think a perfect example of having a hierarchy putting people's names next to responsibilities and when something isn't right for you, delegate it as fast as possible.
- [79:40]
B
So back to your question. So at this point I'm kind of a director of operations, which I had never done when I worked for L and N. Right. I was a GM only responsible for one company then. I was very hands on in the restaurants and especially the coffee shops early on because they were kind of my baby. I helped create them and what is the food and who's running them and how are they executed. They didn't really have GMs because they weren't big enough. Right. They had a team of hourly employees. So that again became the next evolution of me as a manager was overseeing multiple locations. The Food Studio did have a general manager and the management team. So did Subsidy Kitchen and South City Kitchen was, you know, cranking and busy. And the Food Studio were taking was food and service and the guest experience at a whole nother level even to South City, which had great reputation for hospitality. And then as we started creating Latava hired a GM for La Tava. So now we have that restaurant under. So I'm overseeing. And. And during this time we went and rode our mission to statement and wherever we wanted to be in the next five years. And it did not include coffee shops. Okay. We talked at the time back then the PPA for a year, if the coffee shop was $3.30 and the restaurants were in the $30, $30, $35 range, we said we want to be in the $33 PPA business, not the $3.30 PPA business. So we sold two locations and the High Museum because it was in their museum was a 90 day notice and we helped them find another operator and it changed. You know, they reflagged it and. And Alons Bakery I think went in and has changed many times since. Got it. So we eventually we got rid of the coffee shops. They were just, they were too hard, they were too much work. And of course Starbucks and Caribou were invading Atlanta. Yeah, right. And we did not have drive throughs. They were great neighborhood places selling really awesome stuff.
- [81:34]
A
Yeah.
- [81:34]
B
But man, it just wasn't worth it.
- [81:36]
A
Back to this idea. Whenever I don't think this actually came out today's conversation but it's a lesson that's been learned on the show is just do one thing really well.
- [81:42]
B
Yeah.
- [81:43]
A
And that one thing doesn't have to be a concept, but it can be a type. A business model.
- [81:47]
B
Absolutely. Yes.
- [81:49]
A
So you, you, you realize your business model is the 30 to the $50ppp.
- [81:54]
B
Yeah. That's where we got our joy. It's what we, you know, that experience the food and the wine is what we're.
- [82:01]
A
Full service.
- [82:01]
B
Full service was our passion.
- [82:03]
A
Find casual. That's your niche. That's what we're going to do.
- [82:06]
B
That's right.
- [82:06]
A
We're going to, we're going to be the best at this.
- [82:08]
B
That's right.
- [82:09]
A
So I guess continue that train of thought.
- [82:14]
B
Yeah. So. So I worked my way through all of those things. As we start working at another restaurant, it's like, okay, we need another D. We need a. Do I have other responsibilities? I'm now doing marketing. I'm now doing HR and people and culture and I'm heading up a lot of our strategy.
- [82:31]
A
So you're like CEO and CEO at this.
- [82:33]
B
Yeah, I would say. I used to tell people that Steve and I were CO CEOs. I was the CEO and he was the CFO.
- [82:41]
A
Okay. So he was financial.
- [82:42]
B
He was financial. Investment relations. Banking relations. It. Steve built South City Kitchen as the contractor. He was very knowledgeable. Still is. But we got to a point where he, we hired gcs. But he understood that we had our entire maintenance team in house of seven people. We did everything ourselves. He oversaw, you know, we had a director of facilities but that they reported to Steve. So that's where the yin and yang. Right. What's that?
- [83:10]
A
The creative vision collective. The two of you?
- [83:13]
B
Yeah. As co CEO, I would often come up with ideas and concepts for a restaurant. We would then work with architecture, architects and designers together to bring that to life. And then he would get it built. Got it.
- [83:27]
A
So he was working on the systems to build restaurants. You were working on the. The day to day systems and how to make sure those restaurants were running well.
- [83:34]
B
Right.
- [83:34]
A
Profitable.
- [83:35]
B
As well as the systems for our fifth group support team that had director of operations, director of marketing, controller, director of facilities, ZP of people and culture. Eventually a vp. VP of culinary. Right. And how do these systems. So we would work with Kathleen together on vision and plans and mile markers. But then I would be kind of own. Well how are we going to do this in creating ideas around how to articulate it? What are the systems within? We would all. Then I'd pitch them to not only Steve, but even some of the directors or getting the directors involved. And that looked. The first general manager of Latavola, Stuart Fearman became the DO and is still at the company today, 27 years later as the VP of Operations and a partner.
- [84:26]
A
Got it. So what was the next point? I mean back to this idea of. I've noticed that there's these key points of transformation for restaurants. I've noticed these patterns 1 to 3 or 4.
- [84:39]
B
Right.
- [84:40]
A
And then trying to go from 4 to 10. When you get to that tenth things usually have to start to change again. Did you find that to be true?
- [84:46]
B
Yeah. I mean that's when again we added. Right. At one point we had a director of recruiting. When it came to. We always also agreed backing up a minute. We didn't really have an HR department. I always thought HR is where people go to complain. I had one experience in a hotel as an intern during college and that's what I went this and I didn't like it. So yeah we. We had in our accounting office is where we took care of health insurance 401k payroll. That was almost. It was like a black and white. You know, we're going to exit. We're going to offer this aflac to people that wanted it. We're going to offer this, we're going to execute it. But it is from a black and white numbers percent.
- [85:28]
A
It's a line item.
- [85:29]
B
It's a line item. It is not about. It's part of culture because it's part of benefits that we offer.
- [85:34]
A
You're offering security.
- [85:36]
B
Right. And we as owners would determine what those things were. We went out and interviewed and found the 408, 401K company and we did analysis with help of other people of insurance and so on. But it wasn't being executed by an HR professional. It was being executed by bookkeepers.
- [85:53]
A
In most corporations HR is cover your ass.
- [85:57]
B
Right. That was not us. It was. It was that over. We didn't. We literally didn't have hr. So we had for a long time we had a recruiting manager right that recruited from for management positions and did interviewing helped train wrestling managers how to interview and what all the rules and guidelines about around hiring people were eventually to get to your question of where do you go when you start getting, you know, 8, 9, 10. Eventually we also hired a VP of people and culture who the director of recruiting reported to and that VP of people and culture was more about what are our succession plans? How. How are we nailing down and pro and telling the World about it. Right. Because even before COVID that was five years before COVID finding great people. It got harder and harder all over the country. But Atlanta was booming with restaurants. You know, every.
- [86:48]
A
The hiring pool stayed the same size. More people pulling from it.
- [86:51]
B
Oh, yeah. And the level of professional servers and the levels of people with certain cooking skills. The number of restaurants opening was far outpacing the number of people. We went from having a handful of our first restaurants with 100% professional servers to 20 years later hiring people as servers who had never even eaten in a restaurant of this caliber.
- [87:15]
A
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of variables playing on that.
- [87:18]
B
Oh, yeah, a lot. Very complex.
- [87:20]
A
We can maybe get into that later. I don't want to get too far down that rabbit hole.
- [87:23]
B
But that's why the VP of people and culture started, you know, working, selling
- [87:28]
A
to come work for us.
- [87:29]
B
Right. And, and, and helping create along with, you know, me and the VP of Ops of. Okay, when someone's an assistant. We had obviously job descriptions, all this. What is a track for some assistant? That's crushing it. Like, who says I want to be a gm? It's not. We don't want to just say, well, keep working at it. Keep working hard. We had it in writing, right. To be able to do that. And we had, we almost created a little in house apprenticeship too, because we had so many different brands and concepts. If you want to learn to cook, right, so many people go, I'm going to go cook for so and so for two years. Like, you don't need to do that. You can work. You can cook high in Mexican for two years. You can go cook European for two years and learn how to bake and make charcuterie and make pasta in house. You can go over here and cook Southern food, you know, and you can work for us and learn whatever you want. And we also created brand culinary directors. Right. So four South City kitchens. We had one chef that oversaw those four. Cause it's four, you know, and we started getting into purchasing your agreements and things and being able to negotiate purchasing prices on, on certain items, whether it be paper goods or the amount we. We sold more of the chicken that we bought from a, from a Georgia farm. We sold more of their chicken than anybody in the country because of our South City kitchens.
- [88:49]
A
Yeah. So as you grow, what I'm hearing is you're, you're. You went from developing restaurants to developing people.
- [88:57]
B
Yeah, I went. If you, if you went from beginning to end with obviously lots in the middle, I went from being no one's going to ever outwork me. As you know, as a young manager and a GM at 24. No one's going to ever outwork, work harder than me. I'm going to get it done. Everyone's going to be happy, even if I have to do it all myself. To 30 plus years later, a coach and a leader and a mentor and a planner.
- [89:23]
A
Right. And that's where we need to get every owner, whether you have one restaurant or 100.
- [89:28]
B
Yeah. Part of, part of what drove that. Right. There's so many people in our restaurant talk about, you know, a busy night and putting out fires. And I'm like, the goal is there are no fires. Right. And you don't have to be, you know, I mean, all of us get charged on a busy night. That busy night doesn't need to be stimulating because they were too many problems. How do you avoid the smoke?
- [89:54]
A
Right.
- [89:55]
B
How do you set that? Comes down to systems. That's what I explained to people in our business. You can that the, the love and the hate. And the challenge is we just had a 30, 300 cover Saturday night and we crushed it and everything went perfect. There wasn't even a discount. Nothing. Went back to the kitchen, people ready. You wake up the next day and you have to do it again. Right. And it doesn't happen by luck and hope. All right? Hope is not a strategy. I don't care. Right. I'm not sure who said that, but hope is not a strategy. You have to have those systems in place, and they're not just systems for the day. You build the foundation. I've often said to people, I'm not necessarily an Alabama football fan, but I am a Zabin fan and he talks about teams. And I believe that the restaurant industry is the ultimate team sport. Yeah, right. I don't. You can't run a Michelin star restaurant without a dishwasher. You can't seat 300 people in a restaurant without greeters that know what they're doing and care and are sincere and answering the phone with a smile on their face. And I often, just like Zabin says about his football players, you're the left guard. Don't worry about what the center is doing. You learn every play and you execute it exactly what you're supposed to do, as close to perfect as you can every play. And if every player does that, we're going to move the ball down the field.
- [91:17]
A
Bill Belichick, do your job.
- [91:18]
B
We'll get in the end zone. And the restaurant business is exactly like
- [91:23]
A
that 100% and I looked it up. Hope is not a strategy. Does it? Was it Rudy Giuliani or Vince Lombardi? Did those names ring a bell in terms of who you heard?
- [91:34]
B
Maybe. I thought maybe it was Obama, but I don't know.
- [91:36]
A
Maybe Rick Page is another name that pops up. So we've covered a lot and I said something, you know, that I hope my listeners heard in reflection of what you were sharing. Whether you're one restaurant owner or 100 restaurants, you know, you own one restaurant or 100. We need to get people thinking to be more like coaches, more like mentors, more like leaders. Creating, putting. You said something that I think was so important. Like we're in the business of putting people on a track. Where do you want to be? What's your five year plan?
- [92:08]
B
Right.
- [92:08]
A
How do I get you there? And we also talked earlier today about how the, the school system is just so transactional and just trying to get people to sign up because it's a for profit, you know, like these fancy dorms, somebody's got to pay for them, you know. Oh, how do we move away from that and towards a future where the industry takes care of the industry? Because right now I don't think that that's happening. I think there's a shift happening, happening.
- [92:31]
B
Yeah.
- [92:32]
A
But we're at the point of the conversation where, you know, we've kind of gone to where you brought fifth Street. Sorry, fifth group. I had a fifth Street.
- [92:40]
B
Yeah.
- [92:40]
A
On the show back in the day. I always confused the two.
- [92:43]
B
We, we.
- [92:44]
A
You shared it with us where you got fifth group and what that was looking like and what the, the peak of your evolution of a restaurant tour looked like? Is there anything that hasn't come out in terms of what that looked like before we start talking about where do we go, how we move the industry in a better direction.
- [93:01]
B
Yeah, I think what gets really hard at executing on all of those things and keeping a culture as you get bigger and bigger is really, really hard. But I believe that if you have those in place and you apply them, the vast majority of the time, the culture stays, the business grows and it is giving people opportunity. I mean, when so you want. We used to say, if you want to own a restaurant one day, come work for us. Because we don't, you know, we would have people, especially in the back. I'd say I've worked for so and so and so and so and so and so. And I can cook. I've never seen a P and L, you know, and I'm 32 and I want to own a restaurant one day. You know, we taught all of those things and we taught management and leadership. And the best part is that people would say, well, I'm a, I'm a better, I'm a better manager, but I'm actually a better person also because all these things, you know, they go back and forth, they can work in your life as well as how to run, how to run a business with balance and not always constantly putting out fires, not being react, reactionary. You know, there's this idea of responding to something versus reacting to something. Well, you can apply that to your business, but not if you're in a panic mode. Right, right. And that's that mean by not being in a panic mode, it's about staying out ahead, seeing down the road and then, and keeping your cool and living by sustained effort wins.
- [94:32]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I truly believe my mission, I mean I always say is to inspire, empower and transform the industry. But when I say transform the industry, I think that there is no better industry position than the restaurant industry to change the world. So transforming the industry looks like if we, I think we can transform the industry, we can change the world. Because of what you're saying is that we. If you get into this, this industry, if you are an owner and you're, you're doing all the things that you're sharing with us today, like being a coach, being a leader, developing people, putting people on tracks, it gives you better people skills, it's, it gives you team skills. Because this is a team. The ecosystem in which a restaurant runs is so aligned with how humans are supposed to engage.
- [95:18]
B
Right.
- [95:18]
A
On a day to day, face to face, giving warmth, giving generosity, loving on people, creating opportunity for people. That is the closest thing to the tribal existence that we had for the majority of our existence.
- [95:30]
B
Right?
- [95:31]
A
And if you can bring people into this world, then you can give them opportunity, you can give them skills, both emotional skills and hard skills and let them find their purpose in life under your roof. And you can do that in communities across the country. You're telling me that this industry can't change the world in giving the next generation of people the skills they need to be happy, healthy and, you know, wealthy. Like, I think that the, I think we're moving in the direction where if it's, if it's meant to be, it's up to me. If it's meant to be, it's up to this industry. If there's, if there's change that's going to happen, it has to come from the inside out.
- [96:06]
B
Absolutely. And, and it's doing that hard work if you're not doing it. And being able to say, how do I do this? And putting the work in to create some systems or create some culture or understand what as an owner or a GM even, or that what it. What is it I can do to change these people's lives? It's, it does not happen by itself. It takes effort. I don't even, to be honest, don't even think it takes a lot of money. It takes effort and energy and a tenacity to keep it going.
- [96:40]
A
Level of.
- [96:41]
B
Give an F. Absolutely. And, and, and what? The thing is, I don't know if enough people understand that if they do this, how many rewards will be reaped by them and everyone that works for them.
- [96:54]
A
Did you ever have opportunity to scale beyond the 11 in house and licensed operations? Was that ever on the table?
- [97:04]
B
You mean like to go to other cities and stuff? Yeah.
- [97:06]
A
Why, why did you stay in Atlanta?
- [97:08]
B
I think a combination of all of us as owners, like going home at night, we are engaged enough in our hands on things and talking to people and going into the restaurants and having an office that people come to for meetings or conversations or know where you are and being. It's just a lot harder. And I also think a lot of what of our success also was because we knew and know what a lot Atlantans want and they knew and know who we are. And I think clearly there's lots of people that like us that go to the restaurant other cities and succeed. It just always seemed that there was so much opportunity in our own backyard. I mean, this city has grown. I mean, it's, you know, it's 100 miles wide, for God's sake, and there's good restaurants everywhere. You, you know, 15 years ago, even 10 people got in their car and drove into town on a Friday, Saturday night to eat out. They don't have to do that anymore. Right. It's a nightmare to do it.
- [98:05]
A
Yeah.
- [98:06]
B
And. But there's great restaurants all over this city.
- [98:09]
A
What's interesting, you point something out, you know, I bring this up often, is we got away what from what it means to be a restaurant. If you look back to when we were colonized, when the English were colonizing America, this idea of a pub was a part of the culture that the, the British brought to America.
- [98:27]
B
Right.
- [98:28]
A
And if you wanted to open, that's
- [98:29]
B
what it stands for. Right. Public house.
- [98:31]
A
Yeah.
- [98:31]
B
Right.
- [98:31]
A
And if you wanted to start a town, if you wanted to Colonize a town. Very similar to like, you know, like starting a business. Right. You. One of the first things you needed to do to be considered a town when the like, number one thing on the checklist was start a pub.
- [98:46]
B
That's great.
- [98:47]
A
And who in the people who started pubs were? Community builders, literally community builders. And the purpose of that pub public house was to be the place where the public came together to get their news, to get their entertainment, to get their, their love, you know, to be with the congregate, to be together. It's a part of what we are as humans. And we got so far away from that in like this big, like develop, like developmental boom where like we just started building like these homes that are like cookie cutter homes, oceans of one house on top of another house. Like tens of thousands of people living next to each other.
- [99:24]
B
Right.
- [99:24]
A
And they would have to get in their car and drive 20 minutes to get to the public house.
- [99:28]
B
Right.
- [99:29]
A
Because we never engineered into those communities, the center of that, that community.
- [99:33]
B
Right.
- [99:34]
A
I'm talking like for every two to 300 homes, there should have been a public house where people would come together in that community and be with each other.
- [99:41]
B
Yeah.
- [99:42]
A
You know, what are you thinking? As I'm saying, business.
- [99:45]
B
I think that that would be great. I thought about serenity when you were talking about that, which is, you know, community outside Atlanta that is kind of built around gardens and farming. But they live there together, they garden and they have, you know, two or three restaurants. Right. That you walk to. But yeah, I'm thinking it's. It's amazing. I didn't know that about the colonization. Yeah, that's what, that's what you had to have to start a town at the heart of everything.
- [100:11]
A
I maybe should check my facts. I'm pretty sure I heard that somewhere. It's just kind of cool. I think developers really screwed up this, this country because it was just about building as much as possible as fast as possible, getting the available land and building homes. Building homes. We.
- [100:27]
B
I think that is changing with them. They realize the, the now they're. Now they're creating kind of these small. They're not towns, but communities and they mixed use developments, use developments. Right. With green space. Avalon is a huge success and one has led the way kind of up north Alpharetta with apartments and homes and restaurants and green space that there's activity on regularly. Yeah, but they all have learned the. Because of the importance of, of restaurants and food to people that they now are, you know, it's a halo effect, actually. I Have another friend that's a developer that. Small towns. If you did research around Atlanta, there's a lot of small, small towns, Evandale Estates, Duluth, that are saying we want a town square and we want a restaurant. And they're hiring this one particular developer. Well, and he actually. Is it automatic that he has Eric? Yeah, Eric, yeah. Yeah.
- [101:25]
A
So he's on my radar.
- [101:27]
B
Yeah, yeah. Eric Weatherhole. Yes.
- [101:29]
A
So I actually spoke to him. Yeah, I would love to get him on the show. I was hoping to get him on the show. On this road trip. I think they try to avoid media really, because they, because they, they're trying to. So it's an invite only community where they're traveling across the country.
- [101:46]
B
The automatics. Automatics, yes. Right. But he, but he has Weatherholtz Development that he's built these and he started down in Summerhill by the old Brave stadium.
- [101:55]
A
Right.
- [101:55]
B
And we, he and I discussed this idea. It's called the halo effect of bring great restaurants. And then all the other things that wanted to come because they were there and he gave rent away.
- [102:06]
A
So what he learned is that you can increase per square foot $2.
- [102:10]
B
Exactly.
- [102:10]
A
If you have somebody, a leader like a, like people care about the. Like, it's the most human, obvious thing. Right. Like, but the thing is, we got so far away from what it is to be human. Where, you know, the, the developments across America were more about the developer relationship with a corporate entity that wanted to put lubrication on that deal by, you know, like basically the social lubrication between the developers and the corporate entities that, you know, these developers are going across America opening developments all across like these, like huge commercial outlets. And they wanted the same restaurants in each one of those developments. The global chains. And when you have a developer deal with a restaurant, you know, you, you do that deal once, right? And then you can open 50 restaurants. So that is so much easier than trying to go into a community and find the leading restaurateur in each one of those communities and start a new relationship. And maybe you're rolling the dice on that local restaurant tour because they're not proven. But it just became this like, game to open as many things as fast as possible. And there's no opportunity for the local restaurant tours. But it went so far in that direction. I feel like the pendulum swung so far in that direction of transactional scale fast that now there's this clear opportunity that if you take time to be intentional about who you go into business with and you take people from that community.
- [103:36]
B
Right.
- [103:37]
A
And you Put them, you give them the opportunity to build their restaurants and the developments. Who would have thought that would be a better outcome?
- [103:44]
B
Right? Exactly.
- [103:45]
A
Isn't it crazy that that's a surprise?
- [103:48]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [103:49]
A
Like, sorry, I'm talking too much.
- [103:51]
B
It's like you said, things became especially in real estate for some real transactional. And it's always a boom or bust. Right. When things are going well, it's like build, build, build, build, build while we can, because. And then eventually whoever's on the tail end of that loses a lot of money. Right.
- [104:06]
A
There's a big risk in development.
- [104:07]
B
Yes.
- [104:08]
A
And then they are taking the risk. They're, you know, they're putting up all the capital to build it.
- [104:12]
B
Right.
- [104:12]
A
And they want it to go smoothly. So I understand that, but good things are meant to be hard.
- [104:16]
B
Right.
- [104:17]
A
You know, and relationships are hard and. But they have to be intentional. So I mean no disrespect to Eric, by the way, and what they're doing. I understand why he doesn't want media to come in. So I was hoping to go to the Tampa event when they had their most recent. And it's invite only and they're trying to pull restaurant owners from across the country to be aware of these mixed use developments. I believe that those mixed use development programs are the closest thing to communities.
- [104:46]
B
Right.
- [104:46]
A
That we have today.
- [104:47]
B
And the ones that he's doing are not mammoth either. They feel real. Yeah, yeah. They're really a good size. Or they see. And they often are around a town square or a gathering place versus a gigantic, you know, multi million square foot kind of. Kind of thing. Yeah.
- [105:04]
A
There's this book out there called the Social Brain and it's the Social Brain, the Psychology of Successful Groups. And it's written by two women. Their names are Tracy Camarilli and Samantha Rocky and. And Robin Dunbar. Does that name, Robin Dunbar ring a bell?
- [105:22]
B
No. That sounds interesting. Yeah.
- [105:25]
A
So Robin Dunbar is the, the man behind Dunbar's number. And he studied apes, chimpanzees in the, the jungle. And he started to like, figure out their social dynamics. He came up with this number that apes can optimally exist in groups of 50 and each different primate has their own number. And for humans it's 150. Where it, like the thing that's unique about 150 is it's where divide starts to happen and it becomes them versus us.
- [105:56]
B
So interesting.
- [105:57]
A
The reason why I bring this up is because there are more numbers associated with Dunbar's number. I think the next. So it's, it's 1.5. So that is a couple, a man and a woman, or two men and two women. Whatever you're. It's a, it's a, a family unit. I guess a 5 would be what would happen if they had kids. Then you, I think the next number is. You double it and round up, I think, is how you find the number. The next number is 15. The next number after that is 50 and then it's 150, then it's 500, then it's 1500. And the thing is. So those numbers are groups of people. And they found that if you're in between, say 150 and 500, the goal is to get to 500 people as fast as possible. Because scaling from 50 to 500, there's always divide and there's these patterns. And that brings us to the conversation because I was asking you about scale, why you chose to never scale, and you say it's because you wanted to stay here. Locally we started talking about optimum groups of like, like how people are supposed to be able to congregate. I think if you look at those numbers and you look at mixed use developments, if you can develop these, these situations, or maybe there's only 500 people living in them.
- [107:12]
B
Right.
- [107:12]
A
Or only 1500 people living in them. And you, you go for these sweet spots and then you build community around them. The restaurants, the barber shops, the, you know, all the things that people need every day. I think that that Dunbar's number can be a real good guiding post for us.
- [107:30]
B
Yeah, it's interesting. I, yeah, I need to learn more about that. It's, it's pretty interesting.
- [107:35]
A
Yeah, I do think it's fascinating. But Eric, if you're listening to this man, open invitation, I would love to chop it up with you. And I get why they don't want media there because when they have these events, they want restaurant tours to feel like they can open up and get vulnerable and share.
- [107:52]
B
Right.
- [107:52]
A
And I understand why that's important, which is why I appreciate people like you, man, coming on the show and being on this public platform and sharing this information, getting vulnerable.
- [108:01]
B
I've been to some of those events and I don't know that that really happens because they're big enough and there's realtors there and there's people you don't know and there's, there's only so much. I mean, it depends on what the topic is. Obviously, you know, if they're talking about parking, they're going to be very, very glad to talk about all the is issues. With parking. But, but, you know, getting into some of the more, the softer, more personal people issues in our industry. Maybe not.
- [108:26]
A
But did anybody ever approach you to scale? Was that on the table all the time?
- [108:30]
B
All over Nashville, Florida. I mean, all, all over the Southeast.
- [108:34]
A
Did you ever come close to doing it?
- [108:37]
B
No, not really. Yeah, no, we, we went and talked, looked at a couple places, but no, it was just, you know, part of that's timing when it's happening and Right. You think about, you know, the 0809 debacle. I mean, you had 9, 11, you had 0809, you had Covid. So during some of these things where we're talking about growth, pretty big awful things occurred that you had to really live through and work through and figure
- [109:02]
A
out what to do between those trough those, you know, valleys or peaks.
- [109:06]
B
Right.
- [109:07]
A
And you could have capitalized because you're, if you came out the other end.
- [109:10]
B
Yeah, part of it is, you know, I talk to people about trying to grow in general. It's, there's a lot of reasons to grow and there's a lot of reasons to not grow. I mean, and you start a lot of those questions are, what are your per, what, what do you like doing personally? Is it, do you have a partner? Do you have a family? How old are you? How's your health? Where do you want to be at night? How busy do you need to be? Why are you go, why do you want to go from 3 to 10 or I mean scale? Why do you want to go from, from 10 to 40? What are you gaining?
- [109:41]
A
I think I know. Well, what, what are the, the right answers to those questions?
- [109:45]
B
I guess, like, I don't think there are. Right. That, that's my point is it's very personal.
- [109:49]
A
Right?
- [109:49]
B
It's a very personal thing. And running a, running a couple of restaurants is one thing. Running a dozen is another. Running three or four dozen is another.
- [110:00]
A
Right.
- [110:01]
B
You know, I, I, I had a friend and a mentor talked to me. Well, he said something. Are you, look, if you ever looked at so and so it was a suburb. And we're like, oh God, that's so far away. And he's funny, he's like, see the company that I ran, I got to point where I said Argentina. Are you sure? I think that's too far away. And he's talking about Argentina. And he was a CEO of a multibillion dollar restaurant industry. But it all becomes relative. And we didn't, we didn't want to go to Acworth or wherever it was we were Talking about, like, you know, that's an hour drive, for God's sakes. Right. So I don't think there's right or wrong answers. I think it's what do the people who are putting the money on the line, the time and energy and the effect on their life and the people in their lives does. And then there's all sorts of other questions, like, why do you even think you can scale? Like, what is your. You know, we always used to say, why open another restaurant when, you know, if I could do this and this. I have a client now with. I was talking to him, he had 34 restaurants, all QSR and people want him to open more. He's been doing this for decades. And he's like, if I could take my, my bottom five or seven and increase their sales, like 300 grand each, each, I would make so much more money than opening another location. You think of everything. Every one of my operations is not nailing it. If I could make these five better by 15 or 20%, that's far better than opening another use of energy and time. Right. So there's all sorts of reasons.
- [111:45]
A
Impact, not reach, you know.
- [111:47]
B
Yeah.
- [111:47]
A
And I, I tend, I know my bias. I tend to lean towards impact, not reach. What are the good reasons to scale, in your opinion? If there's like, if there are, like, what are the good arguments, if there are any arguments to scale?
- [111:59]
B
Well, I think if you. Again, part of the structure. How do you even get into this? Right. And you say prioritize structure. It depends on what your structure is. And if you have a big investment group, who's that you got in bed with, and they're looking for X return. Again, I have this, another, another mentor who invested in a very successful company that had two brands and they, they brought an investment group in tens of millions of dollars. They bought 51% and the owners came like, this is. We can't, I can't design these places this fast. This isn't right. They said, you better because we own 51%. And this.
- [112:34]
A
Right.
- [112:34]
B
This was.
- [112:35]
A
Careful what you wish.
- [112:36]
B
This was the deal.
- [112:37]
A
Yeah. And I've spoken to people, talked about this.
- [112:41]
B
Right? Go figure it out. And it's, it was kind of a ruthless play, but that's what they all signed up for.
- [112:46]
A
Right.
- [112:47]
B
So you need to know what you're, you know, getting into. And we never did that. We, we had, we were in control of our own destiny. We decided what we wanted and, and going to another city is, was, it was just, it was too much. We didn't need it. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's even part of why I ended up retiring when I did. It's what, what do you really need? What's, what's enough? Right. Of, of everything we live.
- [113:11]
A
I think it's part of American culture. We kind of tend to be obsessed with scale. I feel like it's a part of American culture. It's like the American dream, you know, to bigger, better, faster, you know, like. But I think that there's almost. I don't know if I agree.
- [113:24]
B
Bigger, better, you know, I do not,
- [113:26]
A
but I think that's a.
- [113:27]
B
And bigger and better don't necessarily go in the hand in hand. Right, right.
- [113:31]
A
Yeah. Especially with a business that's so human facing, so hands on. Why do you think, what do you think drives people to open more? What. What's going on there?
- [113:43]
B
I think they're caught up in what you just said. I think they're caught up in that is what success is. I think they mean some, some people want a lot. Yeah. They have a dream of what. What this is going to get them. Or some people are driven by a hole in their heart that they're trying to fill and they don't know. I mean, that is a. That is such a complex question. Right. Because again, the answers are so personal.
- [114:11]
A
Ego gets involved.
- [114:12]
B
Absolutely.
- [114:12]
A
I think some people chase awards and other people chase being the biggest.
- [114:17]
B
Right.
- [114:17]
A
You know, you mentioned private equity or investors. Have you noticed over time there's been a shift towards more and more people getting into the game to build something and sell it from, from your. From being where you are in the circles you're in. Have you, has that changed? Is that.
- [114:41]
B
No, I don't know that I know anybody that gets. I mean, I know a fund that has started up to go look for small operators and help them grow, but I don't know that there's too many people that start something. I mean, maybe now and then, you know, there's a couple of people that are like, oh, I think I got the best next fried chicken kind of thing, or this or that, and Blue Ocean Effect.
- [115:04]
A
Everybody's, you know, trying to corner the market for the next thing.
- [115:09]
B
Right?
- [115:09]
A
Yeah.
- [115:10]
B
And. But no, I don't know. I can't think of an example of anyone I know or met who has started something with the idea of selling it. I do think there's obviously more venture capital and more of that happening in, in lots of industries. We had people calling us about that also all the time, but we also knew they would not like how we ran our business. And they would have tried to squeeze more margin and they would have wanted money not being spent on certain things like people and that they would want us to run our business a different way. And we were, we were just, you know, we went down the road a couple of times really to learn.
- [115:47]
A
Yeah.
- [115:48]
B
But, but it was never, it's like they, they, they. I mean you hear classic story after classic story. You know, they send in the Bain executive or the Harvard MBA who's never run a business in his or her life, but they're going to tell you what to do to make your business more profitable because all their goal is, is to sell it.
- [116:07]
A
Right.
- [116:08]
B
Right with. And get, get blood out of a rock. And, and unfortunately it's happening in a lot of industries around the country, whether it be car, you know, it's a huge thing right now going on with plumbing, electrical, H vac.
- [116:22]
A
Because there's all these, these companies that
- [116:25]
B
all mom and pop. Mom and pop.
- [116:26]
A
And they have no retirement plan or succession plan. And you can go be their exit strategy. But you got big corporate. I think we are at a very pivotal time in our existence as a country where we can, we're about to go one of two ways. Whether it's going to be either all corporations or conscious capitalism is going to rise and we're going to be very intentional with who we give our money to. But we're at this pivotal point where we're about to go too far in one direction.
- [116:55]
B
I agree.
- [116:56]
A
But I think most people are just totally unaware, unconscious of the opportunity on the horizon. But also the people selling these businesses also have to think about what do we want the future to look like. Do I want to get as much out of this transact transaction as possible or do I want to be someone's opportunity.
- [117:15]
B
Right.
- [117:16]
A
To lift up the middle class.
- [117:18]
B
Yeah. And I think that, you know, that is another potential client of mine. Tell me. His father was approached landscaping business. He'd been running it 25 years. He had no, no ever even a thought of selling it or even retiring and was approached by VC and they made him an offer he couldn't refuse and now they own it. Right. And they're going to just buy those up and they're doing with veterinary. Veterinary clinics. And they buy, they bought three in my neighborhood and closed two of them.
- [117:43]
A
Yeah.
- [117:43]
B
And then, and then all their rates went up and they. Right. They consolidate their back office. They find out ways to, to squeeze and, and car washes. Yeah. I mean it's just Crazy. And it's, it's not going to be good for the consumer. Long run. No.
- [117:57]
A
Or just for people.
- [117:58]
B
So it might be. Yeah, well, that's what I mean. I guess.
- [118:02]
A
You mean like not just the consumer,
- [118:03]
B
but people working there.
- [118:04]
A
Right.
- [118:05]
B
And the owner and you know, and maybe it's going to have to go too far before it flips back and people say, well, I'm going to open one of these myself. Why would I go open, why would I go open one and be a part of that chain?
- [118:15]
A
The best entry for somebody to open something isn't to start from scratch. It's to be someone's exit strategy. That is the lowest bar. And we are most people to get over.
- [118:23]
B
I don't know how much you read about the number. Right. The, the baby boomers aging not only about the trillions and trillions of dollars that are about to be left to other generations because of the wealth. Right. That they've lived so long and had such productive lives and have so much money is now going to be left to these generations below them. The same thing is going on with individual private businesses. There are, there are, you know, tens of thousands of businesses, if not hundreds of thousands across America that are becoming ripe for buying from people because they're. No back.
- [118:58]
A
Exit strategy.
- [118:59]
B
Yeah. No exit strategy. They've run this great business. It's whatever it is, 2, 3, 4, 10 million dollar business.
- [119:05]
A
Kids don't want to take over.
- [119:06]
B
Right, right. And, and, and especially in certain. That's happening in farming. Right. Where, where people are like, I don't want, I don't want to be. I grew up on this farm. I need to get out of here. I don't want to run a farm. Right, right. Sometimes it's third and fourth and fifth generation and all the kids are like, no thanks.
- [119:21]
A
Yeah. Have you heard the book Main Street Millionaire?
- [119:24]
B
It does sound familiar.
- [119:25]
A
Cody Sanchez.
- [119:26]
B
Okay.
- [119:27]
A
She, she gets into deep on this whole thing that you just talked about. But she also like lays out a play by play strategy to take over these businesses with zero money down.
- [119:37]
B
Gotcha.
- [119:38]
A
And you basically share profit with the person who you're buying the business from. Like they get 100% of profit. You take. Owners pay like you. And then once the profit pays off the value of the business, then you start taking profit.
- [119:54]
B
Well, it's funny you say that because one of the things that, that I think about if I were to get back into the restaurant business is that I would have a system of some form where every single employee in that restaurant got part of the profit and knew what was going on in the business. Not into too much detail that again depending on whether they could understand, but again also educate. I mean I have a big believer. That's one of the things I, I've been thinking late. I've done a lot of volunteer work. My life primarily with the food bank. Part of an organization now called Food well Alliance. It's all about urban agriculture. But financial acumen is right. They don't teach it in high school anymore. People don't know about even what a credit card works or the stock market or how to, you know, even, you know, I was just talking to someone the other day, 28 years old, making 82 grand a year and like they don't understand the difference. Like even what their 401k offers them or that they could be doing a Roth as well and saving money or even how to go price out insurance. Right. But my point is in a restaurant, if you could teach everybody about the business to a certain level and set goals that everybody, again depending on levels, got something, the buy in and understand, understanding and camaraderie and talk team would. Would be huge. And also reward them to learn more, to do better and, and to stay there.
- [121:22]
A
Right. 100. You mentioned earlier a management fee and I'm happy that you're talking about this. Yeah. You bake in a management fee into the bottom line.
- [121:30]
B
Top line.
- [121:31]
A
Top line. Sorry. Yeah, into the top.
- [121:32]
B
Like a G and a. Right. Because we had an entire office to support that had a, A controller, a payroll person, insurance person. Three IT people. Right, Three people in a marketing department.
- [121:45]
A
Is that management fee like visible on the check?
- [121:50]
B
On the check? Yeah. Oh, no, it's not the P baked in. It's not, not like it's not a fee.
- [121:56]
A
Service fee, like.
- [121:57]
B
No, no. This is, this is what, a line item on a P and L. Right. It's a percentage of sales that comes off the P and L before ebitda that goes to support the support of the back office.
- [122:09]
A
So it's an additional fee after cost of goods, right?
- [122:13]
B
Yeah, it's an expense line. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
- [122:16]
A
I think that's something that's not done enough. These are little things that we need to do.
- [122:20]
B
Yeah.
- [122:21]
A
Like you need to know, it's weird. We're so afraid to charge the consumer what we need to charge the consumer in order to pay the bills because we're afraid that things will be too expensive. But when you are able to pay the bills and pay your people and create opportunity, you output, perform everybody Right. And if you are the top 1%, then you will, people will come to you.
- [122:41]
B
Right.
- [122:42]
A
You know, the people with the money will choose you. Anything else that hasn't come out of today's conversation that you were hoping would come out of today's conversation?
- [122:51]
B
I don't think so. We've covered, we've talked about a lot of stuff.
- [122:55]
A
Yeah.
- [122:56]
B
And I think. Like we talked about, about people. Hopefully someone gets an idea or says, oh, I can do that or I need to plan at a different level or I'm going to go figure out how to communicate with my team better. I think this is a very hard business and. But everything is hard.
- [123:18]
A
Right.
- [123:19]
B
Just the other night when we were at Team Heidi, I was talking to a chef owner who I hadn't seen in a while and he has three restaurants. Restaurants. And you know, and I mentioned to you, my son, I have a 22 year old son that's going in the restaurant business. And everyone says, no, you can't talk him out of it. I said, you know what, I have another son that's gonna be a doctor. And my doctor friends say, oh, you can't talk him out of it. And lawyers don't like being lawyers because it's hard work. Or, you know, a guy running a plumbing company says, oh my God, you can't believe the things I deal with. It's, you know, I've got four locations now and it's hard to succeed at anything is hard. Right. And if you love that this. And I will say there's a lot of things in the restaurant business that make it harder than a lot of other things. I have a neighbor who bought a building and had a restaurant past restaurant. He decided to open a restaurant. I saw him two years later. I said, how's the restaurant going? He said, it's done, it's over, I'm out. It's the hardest, worst thing I've ever done in my life. He said, well, yeah, you thought you're. Because you were smart and smart enough to have enough money to buy that building. Run a restaurant. Right. Doesn't make it easy. And there's obviously people, both employees and guests and clients, and both of those have changed dramatically since COVID how they think and operate. But if you have a passion and a love, then you go do it. But there are ways to form, there are, there are habits to build and skills to build that you can run any business, including a restaurant, easier than if you don't have those skills. And they take commitment and consistency. I mean, everyone Talks about, right. The magic word in a restaurant is consistency. And that's true. They're always talking about it from a guest experience. Right. I know the food I'm getting, the service is going to be friendly and kind and fast and the restaurant's going to be clean. Those are consistent. Well how about how you make those things happen? Usually come from consistent, formulaic, boring, tenate, boring systems and habits. And a lot of people in our business don't want to do that. There's a lot of left brained people or they just want to do the stuff they like doing. And I just tell people if you do this, it first of all you're going to go backwards. It is going to be very difficult and painful to form these habits. But then it will pay off. It's like golfing, right. Or any other, any sport. Like you're going to get worse before you get better. But I'm telling you you're going to get better, but you got to do it and it's not going to happen in three weeks. You got to do this day in and day out. And it will work and you will thank me and the people that work for you will thank you because all of a sudden they're going to understand what you want from them and they're going to understand if the business is performing or not. Or they're going to understand that their people are happy or all of a sudden your managers are to going to stay longer because you're showing them how to become a better manager. And often if you're a better manager, your life gets better because you can apply these same things to your life.
- [126:17]
A
Yeah, I love everything you just said. Man, this was a lot of fun. You said something I really want to emphasize and I, I think there's an inconvenient truth about psychology. What we've learned about this brain is if to, to be alive is to suffer. Whether you're suffering for someone else's why or for your own.
- [126:40]
B
Yeah.
- [126:40]
A
But when you, when you choose to suffer for your own why your own purpose, it makes the ability to endure that suffering so much better. And I think that one of the reasons why I want to see more 10 unit operators and fewer 100 plus unit operators is because I think that we need partners purpose.
- [126:59]
B
Right.
- [126:59]
A
I think we're losing purpose. And we want, we need autonomy. We, it is human nature to have a sense of community and a sense of, of autonomy at the same time. And if we can fragment business and give people one of the coolest things about America Is liberty. Right. This choice, this thing to go. Freedom to live and to be autonomous and to choose your path. And I think that if we, if we're going to make that a thing of the future, we have to do it intentionally. We have to do it consciously. I just want to emphasize that. So anyway, man, another thing I want to. You said something that I think we need to put emphasis on is this idea of offering profit sharing. I think another way of thinking about that is I think we need fewer employees in this industry. We're always. You hear about the National Restaurant association always talking about creating more jobs. I think we need fewer jobs and more careers, more owners.
- [127:55]
B
Yeah.
- [127:56]
A
And I don't know the difference. I mean, yeah, there's more complexities of offering ownership to people than there is in sharing profit. But I think people show up differently when their name is on the door.
- [128:08]
B
Right.
- [128:09]
A
When they have skin in the game. And I think that there are ways to teach people how to be better owners.
- [128:14]
B
Right.
- [128:15]
A
Everything we talked about today, org charts, putting your names next to things like why not give the marketing person stake in the business, you know?
- [128:22]
B
Right.
- [128:23]
A
Like we need more owners.
- [128:24]
B
Yeah.
- [128:25]
A
And the only way we do that is by lifting each other up.
- [128:27]
B
Right.
- [128:27]
A
And creating opportunity for each other and putting people on these growth paths. Like you talked about before, it has to come from the inside out. We can't wait for the government to do something about it.
- [128:36]
B
Oh.
- [128:36]
A
Because like, let's be honest, like that the corporations influence the direction of the government.
- [128:41]
B
Right. You know, I think other thing you were just talking about, about how hard this is and, and it is. But I think putting that in context and living with something I didn't learn until much of it, I say an older age. I'm not ancient, but was not when I was young. As far as gratitude. Right. Number one, you're running a restaurant, but you're probably going home with a roof over your head and you, you're eating and you're getting a paycheck. I mean, there's so many things that can be worse. Right. And having gratitude for even having, you know, what did you say a minute ago? Right. Like pressure. Pressure is to be alive is to suffer. Be alive is to suffer. Right. So when you're suffering through something that, and I don't mean anything, I don't mean mental health or people die.
- [129:37]
A
To suffer, to do the little details I don't want to do because I just want to be creative.
- [129:41]
B
That's right. Is right. Having the gratitude of. I, I actually get to suffer through this so I can get. Get through this and be better and I create opportunity for other people. That's right. And putting yourself. I mean, I. I've often said put myself. I tell people all the time, there's something you don't want to do because you're uncomfortable with it. Whether it's speaking in front of people or explaining something or trying to do numbers or figure out something in your mind to motivate you to say, if I don't do this, this is what's going to happen. And if I do do this, this is what is going to happen. You have to have motivation of some. Some kind to put yourself in discomfort and struggle to get through. That's what. How you grow. Yeah, right.
- [130:31]
A
No gain.
- [130:32]
B
That's right. And. And then. And think about other people that. You know, I have a couple people in my life that have lived through certain things that I say. I. If they can get through that, I surely can do this. You know, maybe that's not healthy. I don't know. But it's like, just do this. You know, sometimes I say to myself, if not me, who? If not now, when? Just do this and push through it and see where it gets you.
- [131:00]
A
Ain't nothing to it, but to do it right. I like to say, yeah, just keep showing up. This has been a lot of fun. I want. I have a couple closing questions. I ask all my guests. We're close to the end. You said you had nothing on the back end of this, and I took note because we are officially 16 minutes over our agreed upon time. But it goes by fast.
- [131:17]
B
Idea. Yeah.
- [131:18]
A
Yeah. And I'm gonna try to make the rest of this really quick.
- [131:21]
B
So.
- [131:21]
A
Restaurant stoppable. How I found my future guests is through my current guest. Word of mouth referring each other. I want to be better about trying to find out. You already mentioned Kathleen as somebody who really helped you. Is she still doing what she does today?
- [131:33]
B
She has just. She does not live in this area anymore and has just recently retired in the. In the last year or so.
- [131:41]
A
But if she's open to having a conversation, I'd love to connect with her. Are there any other vendors or organizations, people that you've outsourced to who have helped you become who you are?
- [131:51]
B
Others help me come. Who? No. Oh, I shouldn't say no, but that's what I was thinking of when you were talking about this. You're talking about ownership and someone who he actually was at the Team Heidi event. Brian Boland is the CEO of Choate, which is a construction company who builds a lot of restaurants, but they are entirely important. Employee owned.
- [132:19]
A
Okay. Esop. And what does it stand for?
- [132:26]
B
Oh, I don't know.
- [132:26]
A
Ownership stock.
- [132:28]
B
I don't know. I don't know what their structure is. It's been a family business. It's been around forever. He's not part of that family. And they are now completely owner. Employee owned. So it might be an interesting conversation.
- [132:41]
A
Employee stock ownership program is what, an estop.
- [132:43]
B
Yeah. I'm not sure what their structure is, how they do it.
- [132:46]
A
I've looked into that.
- [132:46]
B
Yeah.
- [132:47]
A
What was. What's the name of the company?
- [132:48]
B
Choate Ch O A T E. And his name is Brian Boland. He's the. He's the CEO of the sports. This industry. He was at Team Heidi. Yeah. So I don't know if he would fall into your podcasts, but he might be someone really interesting. Like, how did they go through that transition? What did they do?
- [133:05]
A
I wouldn't be surprised if they're in esop.
- [133:07]
B
Yeah.
- [133:08]
A
And the thing that keeps people from going down that path is that the lawyer fees associated with it are like hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- [133:14]
B
Yeah.
- [133:15]
A
But I'm really excited about AI because I think that AI is going to drive down the cost of figuring out the details. You can look up best restaurant partnership agreement in AI right now, and it will give you all the things to do. Just follow the to do list, put it in a document, sign it.
- [133:30]
B
Right.
- [133:31]
A
You don't need a lawyer to get you that.
- [133:33]
B
Right.
- [133:33]
A
You know, so I'm looking forward to
- [133:35]
B
AI creating efficiencies in our business that give people. Remove people from having to do some of the desk work, whether that's creating prep lists or reading P Ls looking
- [133:49]
A
for efficiencies in the piano.
- [133:51]
B
I just talked to a guy from a company called Kitchen Sink X, Y N K that's doing this and creating a P and L and gives you troubleshooting. I asked about some of these other things and he said, oh, I think we could do that down the road. Road. And they're getting ready to come up with a huge new version in about a month.
- [134:07]
A
I think we need a leapfrog.
- [134:09]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [134:10]
A
When I. So what I mean by leapfrog that I think there are a lot of circumstances where the tail wags the dog in the restaurant industry. When I think a lot of the SaaS companies that are around the restaurant industry have more influence and control than the restaurants themselves. And we're at this point right now. I've spoken to Restaurant tours that are vibe coding their own restaurant software. Do you know what I mean by vibe coding?
- [134:33]
B
No.
- [134:33]
A
No. AI is getting to the point now where you can tell it what you want and it will develop a program for you.
- [134:40]
B
Gotcha.
- [134:41]
A
And I think that you can, we are really close from eliminating all third party services of software.
- [134:48]
B
Yeah.
- [134:48]
A
And I think that we can create our own solutions and just bypass the software.
- [134:54]
B
Yeah. I mean I tell people like, why, why can't you implement sales information the last two years and staff having a rating system for your staff and, and, and have AI write your schedules.
- [135:06]
A
You can.
- [135:06]
B
Right, right. This should be so easy. Or writing a prep list for every apart a part list for every station that's waiting.
- [135:13]
A
It's happening.
- [135:14]
B
Yeah, it's happening.
- [135:15]
A
That's the cool thing.
- [135:16]
B
People are doing these kinds of things. Hopefully that can take, you know, instead of working a 55 or 60 hour a week, maybe you're working 45 or 50 or maybe you're just spending more time with your staff.
- [135:25]
A
Yeah, this is, yeah, this is, I mean, I'm loving this, man. I, I, I'm tempted to keep going, but I want to respect your time.
- [135:32]
B
I think one other person that comes to mind and, and I'm, he might be willing to talk to you because he, a guy by the name of Phil Hickey who is a legend in our industry and is a friend of mine and been a mentor of mine for the last decades. Phil. Phil has been building restaurants. He's a Michigan State grad. He worked for Hoolahanz out of college 45 or 50 years ago. Went on to build multiple chains. CEOs. He was the CEO of Longhorn when Garden bought it. He's been the chairman of the board of National Restaurant Association.
- [136:09]
A
This name sounds familiar. I think he might be on my radar.
- [136:12]
B
He, he knows everybody and he is just an awesome human being. Also on top of being an amazing restaurant executive and wise person, he's an awesome human being.
- [136:27]
A
Awesome.
- [136:28]
B
Yeah.
- [136:30]
A
Well, I'm gonna keep that back pocketed. I've been writing down. So I'm trying to work in some new questions right now. And you're kind of experiencing them for the first time. Like, I want to get more viewers, vendors. I want there to be a world where the restaurant industry is based off of a meritocracy of people, word of mouth. I think marketing is really controlling the world right now in terms of like, who gets the, the attention. Whoever has the most money wins the game of marketing.
- [136:52]
B
Yeah.
- [136:53]
A
So I think creating space for us to refer tools and services and individuals is necessary. Another question I ask all my guests is what's one thing about your business, a value, a process, a system that's truly uncommon and has made you uncover unstoppable.
- [137:08]
B
I think the, the planning that we talked about and, and, and I say that that's just one part of it, but it's, it is what it, how it tied in and it's not. Was not just an executive functioning thing that. But it tied what going into the restaurants and creating this quarterly planning system with quarterly priorities that broke down into strategies, actions and priorities to every individual who then met around a table as part of their. Their weekly manager meeting. And all working off this one sheet of paper that also had their own personal goals on it. Right. This was not just about moving the restaurant forward. This was what this one piece of paper was, what they used when they had a one on one with their gm. And that meeting was that person's meeting. Not, not the supervisors meeting, not the general manager's meeting. It was their meeting. Here's what I'm working on. Here's where I need your help. How am I doing? Here are the goals that we wrote together. The beginning of the year or at my last evaluation that I'm working on. Right. And so it had, it was a, it did drive success in the restaurant, but it drove the team, it drove accountability, it drove results that again, they're all paid, being paid bonuses for. You know, we had a section of our bonus plan called gab Guest awareness bonus that had to do with health inspections, white glove inspections that we did ourselves, our loyalty program scoring, our net promoter score, our online social media ratings all combined into a formula that hit dollars. And no matter what the restaurant was doing in sales and profit, even if it's losing money, they got paid based on those scores.
- [138:57]
A
I love that.
- [138:57]
B
And the idea was we are a top line driven company, which means you do what is best for the guests and the staff. Not just today, but next week, next month, next year. And if we all do that and then these other things are happening, like your restaurant's clean. Our most loyal guests think you're amazing and they have amazing experiences. That means you're executing. Yeah, and we are very confident. If we're executing, we're going to do sales. And when we do sales, we know how to make money.
- [139:24]
A
I don't want this conversation to end, man. You're giving us so much gold. I'm loving it. So the mission statement is to inspire, empower and transform the industry and the way we do that is by sharing the transformations of people like yourself and the organizations you've run. But if you could distill it down, how have you personally transformed. Transformed. What is the biggest transformation that's happened for you in your life?
- [139:43]
B
I think it's kind of what as a manager and an owner in this business, Is that what you mean? Yeah, I think from that perspective, it's kind of what I said a few minutes ago of I used to be the 22 or 20, 24, 25 year old, said I will never get out worked. And even when they tried to teach me better ways to do it, I told them they were wrong. And then I have eventually, you know, I guess the hole closed in my frontal lobe and I realized they were right. And we started implementing and putting it to work and teaching it to people and it created a level of freedom, right? As I say, to people it's counterintuitive.
- [140:17]
A
It's in doing the thing you don't want to do that locks you down, that pulls away your freedom, that will give you freedom.
- [140:23]
B
And it gave it to everybody else also, right. And it gives a time and a place. And this goes this all then this ties to these, these rituals of meeting, meeting and talking on a regular basis. And that might be every week. For some people it might be quarterly, in other situations it might be twice a year. But I would say to people, I never walked into a restaurant and walked up to a GM and started asking him things he's working on that we've discussed like in a shift, right? That is, that is not the place for that. That is not the time for that. Now if I saw a fire or there was a good, a bucket of grease spilled in his back parking lot, of course you tell him, but it was more, how are you? What can I do? I'm here for dinner. There was a date and a time to have a conversation about the business and we both knew when it was or. And I had a place, everyone in our company had a binder and that eventually went digital, right? From a three ring binder to digital of where to put a question, a comment, a concern, an idea for this person. Because I know I'm meeting with them. So I could, I could literally wake up at five in the morning going, oh, I got to talk to so and so about this. And I could open my phone and go to their, their tab and put that on there and it's put away. I don't have to worry about it. And I know I'm meeting with him the next Wednesday at 3pm because that's when I. I meet with him.
- [141:44]
A
Yeah.
- [141:45]
B
And that's the GM or the do or whomever. And that's when you discuss it. You don't. Oh, God, why is my owner walking in the door? What's he going to say to me? I didn't.
- [141:54]
A
Yeah.
- [141:54]
B
I didn't give feedback on time when I ate it either. Unless something was just wrong. Like, okay, this is our pulled barbecue pork sandwich we've been selling for 12 years. It's. Something's off. I would say something. If it's a new dish that I have an opinion about or a thought or a question, I wait till the next day. Yeah, right. You.
- [142:11]
A
You must read the book Getting Things Done.
- [142:13]
B
No.
- [142:14]
A
No, you haven't.
- [142:14]
B
Oh, okay.
- [142:15]
A
I know. That was a book that Ryan Turner referred to me.
- [142:17]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [142:17]
A
Ten years ago.
- [142:17]
B
Years ago.
- [142:18]
A
I'm actually coincidentally listening to it right now on audio. And I didn't realize. I didn't make the connection. My universe is kind of folding in on itself right now.
- [142:25]
B
Yeah.
- [142:26]
A
All these different angles. But that's a great book about just like getting it out of your head and putting it onto paper and putting it on the list it belongs to.
- [142:33]
B
Yeah.
- [142:34]
A
So like, you get it on your head and that goes under the. The meeting with Johnny list.
- [142:38]
B
Right.
- [142:38]
A
And then it's there and then you
- [142:39]
B
come back to it and it releases it from you or worrying about it. It's got a place and you have a time for it. Yeah.
- [142:46]
A
So this is the last question before we officially wrap things up. If you got the news you'd be leaving this world tomorrow, all the memories of you, your work in your restaurants, would be 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. What would those three pieces of wisdom be?
- [143:05]
B
I think. I think some of them. We've talked about this idea of never, never giving up, never stop trying, never stop moving forward, which is all then wrapped in sustained effort wins. Because again, to me, the alternative is not good. So I'm going to figure it out. Never create. And if you have the tenacity to do that, you are separating yourself from the vast majority of the human population.
- [143:33]
A
Sustained energy wins.
- [143:34]
B
Sustained effort effort. Sustained effort wins.
- [143:37]
A
That's one.
- [143:37]
B
I think the second thing is what we talked about a minute ago about gratitude is learning early on in your life to be grateful and say that to yourself and be grateful for the opportunities you have and the things you are going through. Even when it's not perfect, but what are the things you have to be grateful for and reminding yourself. But then that's step one. And when you become, when you get in the habit of that, then start expressing gratitude for other people to those people out loud. And what it gives, the. The giving and receiving of that is unbelievably powerful hospitality.
- [144:18]
A
That's warmth, that's generosity, that's caring.
- [144:20]
B
But saying that, and I wasn't doing that to people as a leader, even probably until my 50s. Yeah, right. Because so many people, and especially in this visit, are so hard driving. It's all about. Because there's no perfection in this business. Right. There's no such thing as a perfect restaurant. And it is all you're ever thinking about is what is next to do, what went wrong. It is very easy to think that way. And a lot of great operators can get caught up in that versus, oh my God, look at all the amazing things we just did. And then the third.
- [144:56]
A
So consistency is one, gratitude is two, three.
- [145:01]
B
And I think Maya Angelou said, right, what you do to people, what you do for people, it's not what they remember. It's. It's not it how you make people feel.
- [145:13]
A
People will forget what you did for them, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. Something like.
- [145:16]
B
Something like. Yes, and again, probably didn't come to me until my. Until my 50s. Um, but again, you get so caught up in things and so little things. It ties to the gratitude as well. But it is remembering all that you can do. And again, a Danny Meyer statement, right? The higher you go up the, the ladder in an organization or in life, the. The louder, not only, first of all, the bigger the microphone microscope gets on you as far as what they're going to. People are going to hold you to and expect from you, but also the louder the megaphone on your mouth becomes, the more you say or what you say means that much more to people and understanding the responsibility that comes with that. And what a difference, positive or negative, that you can make by your. By your small words.
- [146:10]
A
Yeah. This has been so much fun. I usually have my guests call somebody out to be feature guests or. You already mentioned Phil Hickey. I don't know if that's who you had in mind, but is there anybody else that you, you know while you're
- [146:20]
B
meeting with Ryan PR was Phil Hickey. I don't know these guys, the guy. The brothers that own a company called King of Pops here in Atlanta have done some really interesting, fun things. And I I, I think I could probably. I think the Carson brothers, I, I don't know them, but they've, they've built an amazing company around popsicles.
- [146:42]
A
That's King of Pops.
- [146:44]
B
Yes, King of Pops.
- [146:44]
A
Ryan piece. I've already got him on my docket. I'm going to be talking to him tomorrow morning. And Phil Hickey, I think that name is also on my list. I would love to make that happen. I literally cannot do what I do without people like you blocking two plus hours out of their day to sit with me, to get vulnerable, to share your knowledge and to move the industry forward. I just cannot say thank you enough for making the time.
- [147:10]
B
Oh, it's been great. It's my pleasure. I love talking about the business and people and how we can move all this forward to help all the people in it and get better and better as an industry, to lift people up.
- [147:23]
A
Yeah. If we want to connect with you, what's the best way to do that? Your own advisory group.
- [147:29]
B
Right. So kuklarestaurantadvisory.com is about a website. I have a LinkedIn page there and my email is as simple as r kukleroutlook.com r k u k l e
- [147:40]
A
r outlook.com we'll have that in the show notes if you guys want to reference the website and the email. And now I want to say there is no questioning Robbie. You are unstoppable. Cheers.
- [147:51]
B
Cheers.
- [147:52]
A
There's another episode wrapped up here at Restaurant Unstoppable. Robby Kukler, this was awesome. If you enjoyed today's episode and you want to connect with Robbie, he is going to be live for coffee with Eric on May 18th at 11:00am Eastern. We would love to have you join us. Head over to Restaurant Unstoppable.com CWE and we'll get you the link again May 18th. Follow that link at 11am Eastern and Robbie will hook you up with some great advice. I really enjoyed today's conversation. Just a heads up, this is the first of a ton of amazing interviews to come your way between Atlanta, D.C. charlotte in Asheville. As I'm recording this today, I recorded my last interview of three months on the road with a two week break. But we got some great stuff coming your way. I'm honestly more proud of the work I'm doing today, the quality of interviews we're getting. Just stick around. Subscribe if you have not already subscribed because what we got coming your way, you will not be disappointed. And one more thing, I want to give you a heads up that we are going to one episode a week for the foreseeable future. Basically, you got to slow down to speed up. This is something I've learned, something I've practiced. And we're really doubling down on growing our community, growing our network, doing more amazing live events like Coffee with Eric, but more specific, topic focused. And we want to build community. I mean, it's been 13 years, 1300 episodes. Nearly 1300 episodes. I've been a student learning so much. And it's time for me to distill my lessons, double down on relationships and people I believe in, and really provide an amazing service and community to restaurateurs across the nation. So if you're interested in being a part of what we're building, please head over to restaurantstoppable.com live. We got a lot of projects in the mix. It's only going to get better and we would love to have you be a part of it and we would love your support. Again, head over to Restaurant Unstoppable.com live and be a part of what we're creating to inspire, empower and transform the industry. We'll see you there.