← Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore
Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore
1273: Tony Stafford, Chef/Founder of Ford's Fish Shack
02:02:08
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- [00:00]
A
What up Unstoppables? Quick favor to ask before we hit play on today's episode and that is please follow and subscribe to this podcast. Nearly 70% of the people that listen to the show or view it do not subscribe or follow. And you owe it to yourself to do just that. Because if you do, when we get an amazing guest on the show that gets a lot of likes, a lot of shares, a lot of views, the algorithm is paying attention and it will push that episode to your feed so you'll get our best content. Not to mention it is absolutely free to you and it is the most impactful thing you can do to support this mission. Mission to inspire, empower and to transform the industry. And I can't do it alone. I need your support. 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. What up Unstoppables? Maybe you remember episode 1260 when Albert Sanchez told us how he has shaved nearly $500 off his tech stack costs. That's because today restaurant operations looks stacks of software services. Translation, it looks like stacks of monthly expenses. But tomorrow restaurant operations will look like the reverse engineering of your own custom software specifically for your unique operation. Mark your calendars because on May 19th at 11am Eastern, past guest Albert Sanchez will be kicking off a Vibe coding restaurant software one on one class. This is an eight part series. Head over to restaurant unstoppable.com vibe coding to claim your seat. And we're only letting 15 people into this course, so don't hesitate if you want to learn how to create your own solutions and lower your operational costs. This is the future. Again, head over to restaurantsoppable.com vibecoding that's V I B E C O D I N G and when you sign up, we'll send you the step by step syllabus of exactly how to do this. Restaurant owners, are you still using ADP paychecks or indeed, 35,000 plus restaurants have already switched to Workstream. The all in one payroll, hiring and HR platform actually built four restaurants. 46 of the top 50 restaurant brands rely on Workstream to hire faster. Stay compliant and run payroll in minutes across all their locations. Visit workstream us/unstoppable for three months free payroll. That's work stream us 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 expectmore to learn become a US Foods customer one more time. That is US foods.com expect more with excitement. Allow me to introduce to you today's guest chef, founder of Ford's Fish Shack, Tony Stafford. My man. Are you feeling unstoppable today?
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B
I am.
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A
I'm sure you are, my dude. And I heard some great things about you from my partner, US Foods, and they actually made this introduction there. This this interview is in partnership with US Foods. I asked them to tell me who is most impressing them in the D.C. market and they said you got to go talk to our boy Tony Stafford over at Ford's Fish Fry. So we're going to get deep into it today. I can't wait to find out who you are, how you got to where you are today. But let's get that motivational inspirational ball rolling with a success quote or mantra. What do you got for us?
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B
I always live by the by the phrase hot food, hot. Cold food cold.
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A
Hot food, hot cold food cold. Simple but sweet. Why does that resonate with you? Why did you share that today?
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B
No matter what technology puts in front of us, it's always important to make sure that the hot food is hot and the cold food is cold. You know, I think it's just easy
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A
to keep it simple.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Right.
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B
Keep it simple.
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A
We get so stressed out sometimes and sometimes it's just we're just doing food.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Hot food, hot. Cold food cold. Let's just keep it simple. Stupid.
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B
Yep.
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A
Yeah. So before we dive into your story and really unpackage how you got to where you are today. Like, paint the picture. Like, what is Ford's Fish Shack today? How many locations, other things on the table we should know about. Catering.
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B
Lay it out. Yeah. Well, thank you. First, let me thank you for letting us come and tell our story. To me, it's just, you know, our way of life. But a lot of people like to hear how it started and stuff. But Ford's Fish Shack was. We started about 16 years ago. I've been in the business 32 years, always loved food, went to school for engineering and actually switched over to culinary arts and then chased my dream. And 16 years ago, we opened up our first Ford's Fish Shack. My last name is Stafford. I shortened it to Ford's just because I tell people I couldn't afford all the letters on the side. At 150 bucks a letter. Yeah. And so it's Ford's Fish Shack. And we wanted a New England type of cuisine. A lot of oysters, lobster rolls, fish and chips served in a comfortable kind of neighborhood atmosphere. Yeah.
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A
Were you from that area originally?
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B
I'd worked up there with some other. Other concepts. And when we wanted to do a seafood restaurant, everyone thinks seafood has to be done in kind of a high, high standard, fancy environment. We wanted that kind of, you know, nautical New England type of casual.
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A
So Red Lobster, but much more elevated.
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B
Yeah, yeah. You know, and not that. No, absolutely. Red Lobster has done a lot for great seafood restaurants. So you have to give them, you know, the kudos for, you know, for what they've done. But, you know, we really try to. Used to say 16 years ago, put a bowl of mussels in front of someone with a beer and, you know, have them enjoy it for 20 bucks.
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A
Yeah. So you mentioned that you started as an engineer. Actually, let's hold off on that. So you said three locations. You have one food truck. You have two trailers. You have an ax throwing trailer.
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B
We do.
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A
Is that one of the trailers?
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B
Well, no, it's a fourth. That's a fourth trailer.
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A
A fourth trailer. And you also have a to go operation for.
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B
To go out of our commissary. So we actually have four locations. One of them is a central, kind of a central kitchen we call the commissary. And that does all of our prep for our three locations in our food truck and our catering. So we're still as. As labor tightens up, and as if, as you hear other restaurateurs and chefs talk about labor, we still believe in, you know, prepping a lot of our own Food scratch cooking. Everything except french fries is made in the commissary and then shipped out every day to the different locations.
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A
I'm going to unpackage that later for sure, so. But at the core of what Ford's Fish Shack is, it's your three brick and mortar. Correct to say. And you have three.
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B
You.
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A
You close one and opened.
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B
Yeah. This one we're setting in now was actually about a mile and a half down the road. We leased a space about 13 years ago, and when that lease was up, we were actually able to buy the land that we're sitting on now and build this building. So we were actually in the real estate business now, which is very odd for restaurants.
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A
That's not. I think that's a great play. You know, you got to own the assets. It's about building assets. It's about building wealth, and the only way to build wealth is with assets.
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B
Right.
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A
So going back, looking at your story, before we actually dive into that, can you give me an idea of per unit volume? Like how many seats per unit average?
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B
Yeah, they. Anywhere from about 140 to this one. That does about 220 seats.
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A
Okay, so this is on the bigger side.
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B
It is.
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A
And how long have you been open in this location?
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B
This location been open about 15 months.
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A
15 months. So you're just now trying to, like, get some stability and average in numbers. So what is your average per unit
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B
volume at this one? Last year, our first year open, we did 5.1 million.
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A
Okay.
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B
Our oldest restaurant, which is our Ashburn location, does about 4.6 million. It's actually our smallest also.
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A
Oh, wow.
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B
And then we have the third location, which is Lansdowne, which is about 10 minutes or about 10 miles from here. That one does about three and a half million a year.
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A
So you're averaging around 13, 14 million
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a year with the catering and everything.
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A
With the catering, too.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Got it. And you. Do you factor in the. The food trucks and with that, too, we do.
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B
You know, I. I call the food trucks an extension of our restaurants. Same menu, same rest, recipes on the menu. So we actually have the truck going out today to an event at a. At a. At a. A distributor. Liquor distributor for their. For their company party.
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A
So what percentage of revenue would you say comes from your brick and mortars against the. The catering?
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Catering is about 10%.
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A
10%?
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B
Yeah.
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A
So do you see that as almost like a marketing expense, too?
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B
It is.
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A
It is a market. And make money.
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B
Yeah. You get your name out there, especially in new markets. I may not know where you're at or who you are.
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A
Got it. Yeah. That's really important.
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B
So.
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A
And what are you, what are you hitting for on average, if you're willing to share a percent profit?
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B
You know, last couple of years has been tough with cost of goods and labor. You know, we're probably 6 to 10%.
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A
What about your peak year?
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B
Peak year, we were 18, 19. Yeah.
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A
We lost half profit.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And is that just because of cost of goods, labor and all?
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B
Yeah, cost of good labor. Everything's going up. You know, you, you can drill down in P and L, the, the credit card processing, the, the utilities, things that you never really looked at before. Linens. I mean, things like that that, you know, are going up, that, you know, it's just hard to control that.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And now.
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A
Go ahead.
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B
Yeah. And the guest is pushing back. We can't keep raising prices. You know, we've raised prices, raised prices. And now I think we're at a tipping point where we really have to make sure that we're not keeping our guests out. You know, we never wanted to be a fine dining or a special Cajun restaurant, but I think, you know, kind of this full service, middle tier restaurant group is now becoming special occasion, which is not what we wanted.
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A
Yeah, I think we should unpackage that for sure when we get to where you are today. But let's go back and start sharing your journey. So where does it make sense to start sharing Your journey? Started 14 years old, working in kitchens, right?
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B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I went to, you know, my grandfather was engineer, civil engineer, and that was just kind of understood that's what I was going to do. So I was growing up in West Virginia, Huntington, West Virginia, and went to school at Marshall University for civil engineering and just at the time was working in a restaurant and made friends with the chef and really liked that lifestyle. You know, it's much more exciting than being an engineer. So I went home, told my family that I wanted to go to cooking school. And I ended up in Louisville, Kentucky at a culinary school down there. And that was a great school, great experience for me because it was run by a lot of ex military, like ex army chefs. So one of the things that we learned during culinary school was the discipline and consistency. And consistency, especially in restaurants, is very important. Sometimes you go to a restaurant and you have a great meal, two days later you go back and it's not as great. And so consistency me is more important than, than, you know, using, you know, different unique ingredients and creating these over the top kind of Elevated food. I'd rather just have a great steak that's conserved consistently all the time.
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A
Yeah. And what about the brigade? Do you think that that is something that served you well?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, that that's, you know, in the. In the restaurant, everyone has their. Everyone has their place, everyone has their role when. When it. When the times get tough. And, you know, for me, I still get excited going into the kitchen at 5pm before the rush and seeing all that food in the shelves, and then coming back at 11:30 after the rush and seeing all the shelves empty, knowing that we served and we. We made a lot of people happy.
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Dad. That's going to be a satisfying. And that's one of the cool things about the restaurant industry is the instant gratification, whether it be a happy face or a full shelf being emptied and knowing that that all went out the door as, you know, like, that's all revenue.
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B
Right.
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A
So it's like the gratification there. It's tangible. So you mentioned discipline, the brigade. Any other experience you think that's significant of having mentors who were built out of that, like that military background?
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Yeah, I think it's just important as you get older, you start recognizing and looking back and saying, you know, that person. I may not have recognized him in the beginning as that mentor, but now that you know, you recognize them, you know, that was someone that really taught me a lot, and I learned a lot from them. You know, we were. We've been blessed throughout the years to have some great support. The first restaurant we opened up over in Ashburn, you know, day one, and we didn't have sodas, we didn't have a relationship with Coca Cola. And I called a mentor that I knew who had been in the restaurant industry for a long time, and he made some calls and got Coca Cola to bring a machine in. So, you know, those relationships, I tell young people all the time, long time, you know, no matter how small a relationship or how big of a relationship, but always con, you know, make sure that you're still cultivating those relationships. And I still try to do that.
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A
You can't do it alone. And that's one thing I hope people get from this podcast, is that successful people are willing to talk. If you go to them and you ask questions, they are. They're willing to help you. They were there once. They know what it's like and somebody helped them. So don't be shy. Go talk to people, talk to everyone. Get perspective. It will help you in so many ways. Absolutely incredible. Advice. So just real quick, I'm gonna get into the. The airplane. I like to say we're zooming up to 30, 000ft, and I'm just gonna do a flyby of your early career just to kind of get it out there and you can tell us where we want to hover and slow down and go deeper. So you started in around, like the mid-90s, you were at Harper's Restaurant. Then in 97, you were at John Harvard's. And then from 99 to 000, you were at rock bottom. From you're at Arty. So from 2000, 2003, Arty's great American restaurants. And then from 03 to 08, you're at Bonefish Grill. And that's where you were a managing partner. So this is the first time you have equity in a business. So where do you think it makes sense to. To slow down and talk about where you really evolve as a chef and future restaurateur?
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B
Well, I. I think that what was important, you know, I came to Northern Virginia area in 2 or 19, 1999 with rock bottom. And at that point, you know, I'd worked with some great chefs. I'd learned a lot of great things in the kitchen brigade and organizing kitchens and things like that. And I felt like, you know, I'd done a lot at that point. And then I got recruited to go work for a local restaurant group here in Northern Virginia that had a concept called Arty's Great American Restaurants. And so I was still cooking in the kitchen. I was still the chef. And I realized at that point that, you know, I had all this experience in the kitchens, but I never really had any front of the house experience. So got hooked up with Rock with Bonefish Grill. And Bonefish Grill is part of Outback Steakhouse osi, and they had an equity program where you bought in as a managing partner. So that was really my first introduction. The actual running a whole restaurant, you know, it's different. You can run a kitchen. There's a lot of great chefs out there, do a great job in a kitchen, but you got to run the whole restaurant. You know, you got to be profitable, right? And you got to learn how to make profit. And that's important if you want your restaurant to sustain not just years, but decades and multiple decades, you got to know how to make sure that restaurant can sustain. So one of the things, when I went to work for Bonefish Grill and being that managing partner, I had to learn all that. I had to have a kitchen manager had to have that, learn that relationship between front of the house and back the house with that kitchen manager and learn how to manage costs, learn how to work with the marketing team and learn how to manage all those different costs, learn how to price things out. At that point, you know, I didn't have a lot of that experience. So that really, I think if one thing helped me kind of elevate to the next, next level, which was opening our first restaurant, was, was learning that front of the house experience.
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A
When did you know you wanted to open a restaurant?
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B
You know, I came late in life, you know, all throughout the years I'd worked for guys and girls that had owned restaurants. And I always said, you know, I was, I was satisfied enough with just working for them, but then I realized that, hey, maybe I can do this, maybe I can open my own place. So probably didn't take off until probably the early 2000s and realized then, you know, and then, you know, when you first open your own first restaurant, you don't really realize how much you don't know, you know, what changed in you
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A
that made you be okay with working for others to really, you want to own it.
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B
You know, I think I started seeing the entire package after I came out of the back of the house into the front of the house. I saw, said, well, you know, not only am I good, was good in the front, the back of the house, but I started realizing I'm pretty good in the front house. So maybe I can have the confidence to do everything, have the confidence to run the entire operation, not just the culinary side of it.
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A
Yeah, the things I want to pull out of your story right now, I think the really important thing is if you, it sounds like you didn't know you wanted to open a restaurant before working for a corporation, but if you do want to own a restaurant and you do have the talent and getting that perspective, going to work for a corporation where their, where their systems are dialed in, where you can be a part of that level of operation and learn both front of house and back of house, getting that perspective, even if you gravitate towards one, knowing how the other side works so you can have that sympathy and empathy for your future partners is so important. But also just, just going to the best and learning those systems and I'm sure that your engineer minded, you know,
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B
it helps who you are, it helps
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A
getting into those corporations, seeing the systems and seeing how it truly is engineered must have been really appealing to you.
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B
Yeah, it is. And it still is to this day. I still, you Know, get excited about, you know, we, you know, when we opened up this restaurant and the central kitchen, I created this self draining seafood shelf to keep all of our seafood on ice down. Because I couldn't. I'd go to the National Restaurant show and no one, no one had created this thing. So I actually went to my stainless steel fabricator and we designed this thing. So it's self draining and it's easy to fill up with ice and your seafood. And so I. Engineering still plays a big part in my life.
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A
Engineers do really well in this industry because if you think about what we're doing, it's a. We're in the business of production.
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B
We're in so many.
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A
We're in the business of developing people. We're in the business of marketing. We're in the business of like a production line from taking raw goods from the back door, commodities and then, you know, goods, putting them together, creating a service out of that and putting it out the front door. Like it's a full assembly line.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
So that engineer mine, I'm sure has served you well. What were the biggest lessons you. So it sounded like in 2000, the early 2003, when you're leaving Arties, you're starting to think to yourself, I might be cut out to be an owner. Or did it not come until bonefish?
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B
It was probably right there, oh, three to five, somewhere around there.
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A
Okay. When you went with Bonefish, did you know that you were going to be entering into their managing partner program or was that after you had been.
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B
No, I was hired as a managing partner kind of in training. There was a store they were opening in Charlottesville and I was supposed to go and open that and run that one. And then a location opened up here and I took that store over.
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A
Where was Bonefish Grill at that time?
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B
It was just, it was kind of a emerging group. It was, you know, started in South Florida, obviously by a gentleman down there, a partnership down there. And then they got with Outback Steakhouse. I believe their first concept was outside of Tampa, or the first unit was outside of Tampa. Started by name chef Tim Kersey. And they grew this thing, they grew bonefish. I think there's over still over 150 units. But when I got on board, there was like 40. 40 or 45 units. Units. So it's still very new. It was seafood that they'd taken on the road kind of as a chain. And at that point, besides Red Lobster, there was no other chain based or national based seafood concept restaurant owners.
- [20:06]
A
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B
I think they had partnered up in the early 2000s.
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A
So not too long after you got.
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B
No, no, they were only. Had been around about three, three to five years that time.
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A
And do you know, was it an acquisition? Was it Private Echo?
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B
It was an acquisition. They went to these two founders of Bonefish and partnered up with them.
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A
Where were they with the amount of units they had at Bonefish before they did the partnership?
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B
I think they were three to five
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A
units, all in Tampa, that area. Yeah, got it. So, and then that was the early 2000s. You joined by 2003. So they really had scaled it. They like, they tripled, quadrupled this concept by the time you got on board.
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B
Yeah.
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A
What do you think was part of their success and why they were able to scale that?
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B
Well, Well, I think they had the discipline. That Outback Steakhouse, if we all remember, from the mid-90s, Outback Steakhouse, early, early-90s to the mid-90s, outback steakhouse was on fire. There was always a line around the door. They weren't blooming onion. Yeah, the blooming onion. There wasn't. You know, they weren't in great locations. They were just consistent and everyone loved them. And I think that they were riding that wave. And, you know, they had the discipline and the, and the, and the systems in place. And so they had this great chef who created this seafood, you know, concept and, you know, they used that discipline and his creativity and his idea for the seafood concept and they developed it out and, and, you know, took it nationwide.
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A
Does the Outback Steakhouse use the same partnership model?
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B
I think so, yeah, I'm pretty sure.
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A
Do you know how that partnership model works?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. It's it's they invest or you as. So they have a training program that you go through. And once you're ready to kind of take on, become a managing partner, you invest, you come up with, you stroke them a check at the time was $25,000, and then you get, you share in the profits at the end of the end of the month, which is usually it's 10% at least it was for me, it was 10%. So if a unit makes $100,000, then the managing partner shares in $10,000 in profit. So it really teaches you, hey, you, if you're running a business, if you want to make more money, if you want to increase your salary, then increase your profitability of the restaurant.
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A
Invest, get staked. Right. Like it's, it's no different than the stocks, except you're investing in the company that you work for in your effort directly out is influences your income.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
I think it's brilliant. So just to make sure I understood that there's a training program. You sign up for the training program, you have to be employed to be a part of the training program.
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B
Correct.
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A
And you can start from day one in that training program if you're qualified or you're cut out to be on that track.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And then you get one person or you get 10% of profit. And so, I mean, you can affect. So that, that encourages you to make more profit. Like, what can we do to be more efficient, to change the systems? We have more profit. What can we do to drive revenue so we have more profit? Like, if you want somebody to treat it like they own it, give them a pathway to own it.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
Right. Do you actually have stake in the business though? Like, are you, do you own a percentage of that brick and mortar.
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B
It's just on paper. It's just as a partnership agreement, you know, I mean, but you don't own
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A
the business, so it's really a, it's a profit sharing model.
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B
It's a profit sharing model. Okay. For 20, you know, obviously that, that restaurant, you know, if you, if you write a check for $25,000, it costs more than $250,000 to build a restaurant even in 2000.
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A
So you're putting in money to get access to profit.
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B
Correct.
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A
Why not give them a small cut of the actual, like, profit or like the, the stake in the business, like 1% of the business?
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B
You'd have to ask them. I'm not sure why they didn't build that. You know, it was not negotiable, wasn't
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A
like, probably because it's complicated.
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B
Yeah, probably.
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A
Probably because you gotta get lawyers involved
- [24:37]
B
and if things don't work, company. So they, they figured it out. But for me, it was a great opportunity because here I was phenomenal. Yeah. Here I was as a chef and didn't have a lot of front of the house experience. And they gave me that opportunity to learn the front of the house. But also, as I was doing that, but also to make. Be a, be a minority owner.
- [24:53]
A
I don't know if it's marketed or as presented as transparently calling it a partnership program if you're not actually a partner in the business, but I think that, that profit sharing is a phenomenal.
- [25:02]
B
Absolutely. And there are still restaurant groups that still do that to this day.
- [25:05]
A
Yeah. Can you just break it down one more time? If we're listening to this and we're interested in doing, doing profit sharing, just spell it out how they set it up and how we can replicate that.
- [25:14]
B
You set it up as, as the individual, the manager, whether it be the chef or the rest or the general manager, they, they invest or they, they give the ownership team a certain amount of money, whether it be 25, 000 or, or whatever that that group would decide, and then they, they get to share in the profits of that, you know, of that, of that restaurant.
- [25:33]
A
Got it. And how long did it take you to rec.
- [25:36]
B
Cooper 25, 000 investment within six months. Oh, wow. Yeah.
- [25:40]
A
So by putting 25, 000 up, what do you think that that does?
- [25:44]
B
Yeah, I, I think it buys you a stake in the, in there you have a little bit of more skin in the game, so to speak.
- [25:50]
A
It filters out the people who aren't serious.
- [25:52]
B
Absolutely. And, and so 25, 000 in 2000 and today it's still a lot of money, but even in 2000, it was a lot of money. And so you have a little stake in the game. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's something to keep driving me. And you know, and it was, it was motivational. Absolutely. And you know, when you get that check every month from the, from the previous month's profitability, you said, wow, this is cool. Because, you know, we had those couple big parties. We, you know, we had those great nights on the weekends. We were able to, you know, seat the, seat the restaurant a couple extra times. And you saw, you know, there were times I got $10,000 checks.
- [26:21]
A
Yeah.
- [26:22]
B
You know, which was pretty cool.
- [26:23]
A
I think this is something that we can, like, this is the goal that I'm looking for to make an example, to learn from the big corporations. How can we learn from these big corporations? To be inspired to scale this down and to do it at a local level. Right. And I think that two things that really I want to surface, one, putting people on a track to success. And that's what they did for you. They put you on a track, a partnership track. So they're going to give you the training. You're going through a curriculum, you're, you're literally elevating people. But beyond that, you're also giving them a chance to, to grow wealth. You're not necessarily buying an asset, but you're developing a separate form of cash flow that you can put into a high yield savings account. Right? Like that is profit. I don't use profit unless I'm paying off debt or investing in assets. But it gives you a separate cash flow that you can build wealth with to invest in assets. Maybe your own restaurant someday.
- [27:17]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [27:18]
A
What are your thoughts on that?
- [27:18]
B
No, I think it's, I think it's great. You know, I think the, the only downside I see to it, and, and we had a couple units, if I remember correctly, we had a couple units that weren't profitable. So, you know, as the managing partner, he doesn't want to, or she doesn't want to invest that 25,000 and not, not see profit. And so you've got to, you got to push yourself. You got to push yourself. And a lot of that is, comes from self, from kind of inside you and self motivating, hey, I'm not going to lose money. And it teaches you that, hey, you know, we're still in the business. We're not a not profit nonprofit. We're, we got to make money. So, you know, that's, that's the only downside I see to it is if you're in a location that may not be profitable and all of a sudden you've asked someone, a manager or a chef to invest in it, and all of a sudden there's no, there's no check at the end of the month. That's, that could be kind of demoralizing a little bit. But for me, it was, I was in a great location. I had sales and, and we were able to, you know, generate a lot of profit.
- [28:09]
A
So at what point you were there for. From 03 to 08 five years. This is the longest tenure you had at a rate restaurant. You're, you were front of house during this time?
- [28:17]
B
Correct.
- [28:17]
A
Did you ever get behind the Line?
- [28:19]
B
Oh, absolutely. I had one of the. I had my kitchen manager, you know, which. That, that position turns over, especially in corporate restaurants a lot, because it's just, It's a hard position. I was lucky enough have a gentleman who worked with me the whole time because I felt, you know, I, I took care of him. I knew what it was like to be in the line because I'd been there, I'd been there for several years before I took that job. So I made sure that Mike was, Was, you know, taken care of and, you know, had. Had what he needed to be successful, too.
- [28:44]
A
Where do general managers or front of house managers fall short with empathizing, understanding the back of house perspective?
- [28:51]
B
You know, I think that that relationship has always been a challenge in front of the house versus back of the house, so to speak. And I think that a lot of the front of the house staff managers don't understand that when they walk in at 10am or 11am, whatever time they come in, before we open the doors, they don't understand the. That kitchen manager, that kitchen team has been there since 6am, 7am schlepping boxes, cutting beef, you know, filleting fish, all those things. And then they walk in and they're. They're nice starched shirt and, you know, drinking a cup of coffee, you know, so I think, you know, I used to come in an hour earlier and just help them put the truck away and things like that. You know, I still do those things. I was this morning, I was over there going through my kitchens, making sure that they had everything going. I still love to touch the food, and I think that's the one thing that the front of the house team always needs to make sure that they have empathy for.
- [29:35]
A
Yeah, for sure. And then we got to be. There's the obvious, you know, just like the inequality in pay between front of house and back of house. Do you have thoughts on that?
- [29:44]
B
Yeah, it's tough. You know, especially in the last, say, five years when we're talking about tipping and no tipping policies and things like that. There is definitely an inequality of pay. You see servers making, you know, servers, bartenders making 20, 30, $40 an hour, and you got cooks making, you know, 15, 18, $22 an hour. It's tough. We got to figure that out. I think a lot of that, though, still hinges on our food prices, our menu prices. You know, we can't charge $28, $30 for a hamburger, even though probably we should.
- [30:13]
A
Well, I mean, that's the thing, right? It's like I.
- [30:16]
B
It's.
- [30:17]
A
Sorry to cut you short. We finish that train of thought.
- [30:20]
B
Yeah, no, I just think that, you know, our, the general population out there, it's just. Is not used to paying the prices that we should have to charge for our menus in order to give quality, to get rid of the inequality of pay.
- [30:32]
A
Right.
- [30:32]
B
Restaurants.
- [30:33]
A
Well, that's the thing. I think we should charge those prices. And I think that the. What I've learned with this podcast is that the industry is broken. But a lot of the reason why it's broken is it's upstream. You know, it's not what we're doing necessarily. It's the ecosystem the restaurant industry exists in. It's the culture that this restaurant industry exists in. And the consumer has been conditioned to think that a burger should be $10, but that burger that they're conditioned to isn't a burger. It's something completely different, made in a lab, you know, and literally today with Beyond Burger, it's like literally made in a lab, you know, and even that is greenwashing. Because the mono farming necessary to build that beyond burning burger is not good for the environment.
- [31:15]
B
Correct.
- [31:16]
A
So we just live in this ecosystem of mis. Direction, miscommunication, it's all for profit and we're getting sick and the, the, the independent operators can't exist in that ecosystem. So I think that there's a lot of awareness that needs to happen and I think that the restaurant industry is so well positioned to be at the leading charge of that awakening of Snap out of it consumer. Yeah. Like we have to start educating people. Is that a stretch on my part?
- [31:43]
B
No, I mean, I think one of the big things that a lot of people don't understand is just the sheer number of employees that a restaurant needs to run. You know, this restaurant alone, I have 70 employees in it, you know, to generate five million, five and a half million dollars worth of revenue. You know, there, there are businesses out there that can generate five and a half million dollars in revenue on five employees, six employees. So, you know, we need a lot of employees which is, which is money, which is revenue to generate the sales. They don't. People don't realize our fish and chips, which are most popular item on the menu, there's about 37 steps that go into making that fish and chips. It's not just dropping a piece of fish that we get cut, comes in a bag, cut it and drop it in the fryer, and it comes out beautiful. There's 37 steps that go into that. And any of those steps There can be a failure. So, and there's a, there's a, you know, there's a cost to that. So, you know, we charge $24 for our fish and chips. It should probably be $32.
- [32:35]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I think we could go deeper, deeper into this conversation. I mean, at the end of the day, I think it's a matter of communicating with your, your partners. When I say partners, I'm saying the people in your community and getting aligned and saying if we want to take care of our staff, if we want to do right, if we want to create opportunity in our community, we have to start not trying to beat each other, but elevate each other, you know, um, and that's a hard sell, but I think it's necessary. We could go deeper and deeper into that. I want to get back to your story. So when did you start living intentionally from like, okay, I want to do this for myself. I want to open my own concept. When did you start living intentionally to make that happen?
- [33:14]
B
Yeah, it was probably 06 07. You know, we, we, we left Bonefish after five years. I didn't, you know, they, they do a five year contract. So after five years I really could ask. I didn't want to resign another contract. So went started looking for locations and that was a whole eye opening experience is finding the right location, not only the right demographics, the right population densities, but the right, the right cost. You know, there's, there's spaces you can lease for $10 a foot. There's spaces you can lease for $70 a foot. What's the difference? What makes them $60 a foot difference? You know, so, you know, trying to figure that out and the model, you know, I always tell people, you know, we opened up, I was hoping to do $20,000 a week, you know, and you know, the first week we were open, we did 25,000.
- [33:58]
A
Oh, wow.
- [33:58]
B
Which was great.
- [33:59]
A
Yeah. Well, it's better to be undershoot yourself.
- [34:01]
B
Absolutely.
- [34:02]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [34:02]
B
And so, you know, trying to figure out where that first location is going to be. And I still truly believe location, location, location, but it's still important about execution, you know, location and execution.
- [34:15]
A
So you figured out the back of house, you figured out the front of house. You know, how a restaurant runs, you learn from the corporations, the, the, the, the things that make you profitable. Prime cost labor, inventory costing, purchasing, all these things that really move the needle. You got that locked in. The next point of evolution for you was location. The, the, the, that layer above the restaurant of how do I think about where to open, where my target market is running pro formas and really reverse engineering a concept.
- [34:43]
B
Yeah. And you're running pro formas on something you don't know. You. You're looking at a crystal ball and saying, hey, I think I can do $20,000 in this location. Well, what makes you think you can do $20,000? You know, you're going to be charging $10, $15 that time for fish and chips. So I need to sell, you know, 3,000 orders of fish and chips a week. You know, I can fit this many
- [35:02]
A
seats in here, you know.
- [35:03]
B
Yeah. So you have to do all that stuff, but you're really. You're looking at a crystal ball, and you're just hoping that, you know, some of the guesses you get are going to be right.
- [35:10]
A
Were you talking to other restaurants in that market that get an idea of what they were?
- [35:13]
B
Yeah, absolutely. You go sit at them. You sit out in their parking lot. You count the number of cars in the parking lot. You go. And you count the number of chairs. You count the number of empty chairs. Absolutely.
- [35:21]
A
Did you have a mentor during this time, somebody that helped coach you, mentor you?
- [35:24]
B
I did. You know that. That gentleman I talked to you about helped us with the Coke when we first opened?
- [35:29]
A
Getting the Coke machine.
- [35:30]
B
Yeah, getting the Coke machine and stuff. He. He helped us a lot.
- [35:33]
A
He worked with Coca Cola?
- [35:34]
B
No, he worked with another restaurant group. Okay. You know, he was a. It was a owner or founder of another restaurant group, and he, you know, I would ask him about certain locations. What do you think about this location? What do you think about that location? He would. He would, you know, he would answer my question with questions that I would need to go out and kind of find the answer to. He never really gave me straight answers. He would just help me kind of see the vision, ask the right question.
- [35:55]
A
So we need more men like that. Maybe a woman. Was it a woman or a man?
- [35:59]
B
No, it was a man.
- [35:59]
A
Okay.
- [36:00]
B
We need more people, like.
- [36:01]
A
And that's what this whole podcast is. Absolutely. So thank you for being one of those people.
- [36:05]
B
Thank you.
- [36:06]
A
So you. What were the. How much money did you think you were going to need to get the first one open?
- [36:12]
B
Yeah, you know, I tell people we opened up on. On an investment about $240,000.
- [36:16]
A
And this is 2010.
- [36:17]
B
Yeah, 2010. 240,000. We took a.
- [36:19]
A
So about 500,000 today.
- [36:21]
B
Yeah, probably. Yeah.
- [36:22]
A
Close to double.
- [36:23]
B
Which, you know, even with the call. Yeah. With the cost of construction today, you couldn't open a restaurant for that, you know. And so, you know, we did a lot of the construction ourselves. You know, I was in there with the saws all cutting down walls myself. A lot of friends and family helped out. We just did it on a shoestring and got it open. I spent a lot of time on auction sites buying equipment. I still have my first mixer that I used in the first restaurant I bought for $150. And you know, I refuse to get rid of it even I probably should. Yeah.
- [36:52]
A
Don't buy new.
- [36:52]
B
Yeah.
- [36:53]
A
Unless it's a refrigerator year.
- [36:54]
B
Yeah.
- [36:55]
A
Any other Unless things you can think of like don't buy new unless.
- [36:59]
B
Yeah. I mean, there's just so much, you know, just, you know, just, just pretend like you've got, you're spending your last $10 and, and look for, look for deals out there. And there are a lot of auctions or a lot of used equipment out there every day, unfortunately. You see restaurants grow out of business, right?
- [37:14]
A
All the hardware, any hardware you can get, get used.
- [37:17]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [37:18]
A
So you, you did it on a street shoestring. Did you go to a bank for this money?
- [37:21]
B
No, it was all self funded.
- [37:23]
A
Wow. So what were you doing with that 10 that you were making? Or you're getting 10 of profit?
- [37:28]
B
10 of profit.
- [37:29]
A
But what were the margins like at Bonefish were.
- [37:32]
B
They were 15 to 20.
- [37:33]
A
So you're getting 15. So 10 of 15 of profit?
- [37:38]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [37:39]
A
What. I mean, what kind of volume was.
- [37:41]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think my best year there might have been.07 Before I left, you know, and I was of kind clearing 140, $150,000.
- [37:47]
A
Oh, is that with your pay plus profit? What percentage that was profit?
- [37:54]
B
It was probably 2/3. 1/3.
- [37:56]
A
2/3. 1/3 of the 110,000 that you got was profit? Yeah, from profit. So you know that. What is that? Like I'm horrible at math. Like a little more than 10% a year.
- [38:08]
B
Yeah, well, it was like 60 grand. 60, 70 grand that I was getting through the profit share.
- [38:12]
A
60, 70 grand.
- [38:13]
B
So we were making 67 or 600, $700,000, which is great profit for a restaurant, you know, and those are, those
- [38:21]
A
numbers are harder to hit today, right?
- [38:23]
B
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [38:24]
A
But I guess the point I'm trying to make is if you understand how profits meant to be used, if you're kind of following the rich dad, poor dad approach or profit first profits only touched if you're investing in an asset or you're paying off debt. So did you have, I'm assuming You probably didn't have a lot of debt.
- [38:40]
B
No, no, no, no. We tried to close all the debt out that we had and just knew that, you know, I. I still have a restaurant. Potential owners call me now and say, how did you start? And I said, well, you know, I didn't have any debt. They said, how do you do that? You know, they said. They said they would say. They say, I need to make $20,000 a month in order to, you know, survive and pay the debt I have. I said, well, you know, I think I needed. At the time, I needed about $2,000 a. A month to pay, you know, my, My health insurance, my. My cell phone bill and whatever little bills I had at the time.
- [39:14]
A
So just to be clear, we're talking about. I. When you say I didn't have any debt, you're saying me personally, Tony Stafford, the individual, didn't have anything.
- [39:22]
B
Myself and my wife, Anna. Yeah. So it was. It was a partnership.
- [39:25]
A
I think this is one of the biggest lessons. If you want to. The journey always starts with you. If you want to be a restaurateur, it doesn't start with a brick and mortar. It doesn't start with a concept. It doesn't start with a website. It starts with, who the f. Am I? Where am I positioned to do this? You. Your commitment to owning a restaurant doesn't start when you get the keys.
- [39:43]
B
No, it's.
- [39:44]
A
It's a personal development journey.
- [39:47]
B
Absolutely.
- [39:47]
A
Making your. Elevating yourself, getting out of debt, putting assets aside for leverage. You can start that on day one. So if. What. How lean can you get before that opening day to make sure everything you have goes towards that baby.
- [40:02]
B
Absolutely.
- [40:03]
A
That restaurant, and that's what you did.
- [40:04]
B
Absolutely. And. And to do that now would be much harder. And, you know, it's. It's tough. You know, I. I said, you know, we're going to do this. We opened up, we had $10,000 in the bank to cover bills, cover vendor bills that first week until sales. Sales came in the door. And we were blessed, like I said, to do 25,000 that first week. And, you know, we. We just put our heads down and we. We made it work. You know, we just didn't.
- [40:32]
A
You just didn't what?
- [40:33]
B
We just didn't do any frivolous expansion. We didn't have a. A gold rim plate or. We didn't buy, you know, special fancy glassware, flatware that, you know, overspend. We didn't overspend. We let our food.
- [40:44]
A
I don't see any linens. Out there either.
- [40:46]
B
No, we do, we do have linens, but we don't use a lot. But, but, you know, we, we didn't, we didn't buy the stuff. I didn't put things on the menu that, you know, would cost us to. I knew where every penny was going. I knew where every dollar was being spent and made sure that was, you know, we didn't put that extra lemon or that, that half a strawberry garnish on the plate if it didn't need it.
- [41:06]
A
Yeah.
- [41:06]
B
So 240,000 is $250,000.
- [41:09]
A
$250,000. How long did it take you to pay that off?
- [41:12]
B
Well, it was all, it was all equity for me. I mean, we, the first year we were open, we did $600,000 in profit, you know, so.
- [41:18]
A
Wow.
- [41:18]
B
You know, we were profitable from, you know, I want to say month, two, but that was because we had no, you know, it was literally myself, my wife, and one manager, and that was it. And we, I was in the kitchen and my wife was at the stand, and we had one manager and that was it. And we all worked seven days a week.
- [41:33]
A
Yeah. So what were the things in these early years that made you unstoppable? That if you could identify the things that you did. Absolutely. Right. Yeah.
- [41:40]
B
I think it's just not spend any extra money than we didn't have to spend. I think it was controlling the cost and, and purchasing. Not over purchasing. You know, with seafood especially, you got to purchase for what you're going to use today or tomorrow. No, no more future. No more future buying. I didn't buy the forecasting. No, no. Yeah. Know exactly what you're going to spend. Have a descending dollar report and stick to that and just, you know, give people value. And if they give them value, people will come back.
- [42:08]
A
Why is the dis. We get into what the descending dollar report is? I think that's really important. We don't talk about it enough on the show.
- [42:14]
B
I think it's important. If you, if you, if you did $25,000 last week in sales and you don't have a holiday this week, then predict that you're going to spend $25,000 in sales this week. So take 30, 30% of that $8,000, roughly. That's what you're going to be able to spend to get to keep your prime cost at 30% or keep your food cost at 30%. So don't spend more than 8. Don't spend $9,000 and expect to do $30,000 in sales. It's Just not going to happen.
- [42:39]
A
Yeah. Did I hear you right in saying getting a descending. A descending dollar report?
- [42:43]
B
Yeah. And that's simple. You don't need to buy one, you don't need to invest in some fancy app, just, you know, create an Excel spreadsheet, put $25,000 at the top, and then track every invoice.
- [42:52]
A
Right.
- [42:52]
B
And hopefully you don't come in the negative end of the week.
- [42:55]
A
So it's like, what. So what. What do you sell the most here?
- [42:59]
B
The fish and chips? 30. 30,000.
- [43:00]
A
Is that halibut?
- [43:02]
B
It's. It's cod.
- [43:02]
A
Cod. So cod is probably your most expensive line item because of the amount of volume?
- [43:07]
B
No, I mean not expensive, but through
- [43:10]
A
volume, most of your money go to.
- [43:13]
B
Right now it's lobster just because of how much lobster means $40,41 a pound. And we buy 20,000 pounds a year of lobster meat.
- [43:21]
A
How many pounds of cod do you buy?
- [43:22]
B
About 30,000 pounds.
- [43:24]
A
So you're still, you're spending, you're getting more volume of cod but cost per pound.
- [43:29]
B
Yeah, Cod, lobster. Is your lobsters your number one expense? Yeah, I buy 600, $700,000 a year in lobster meat.
- [43:35]
A
How much more expensive is your. That line item, lobster over cod. Is it close to double?
- [43:41]
B
Yeah, it's probably. It's double.
- [43:42]
A
So this, there's a name for this. The law of diminishing returns. Yeah, something like that. Or not. No, the law of diminishing returns is what happens over time. Like you might, you know, hockey stick, you know, grow, but over time that's going to plateau. Absolutely. I think Zip's law is the law. Have you heard of this law?
- [44:02]
B
No. Tell me about it.
- [44:03]
A
So Zip's law says in any marketplace, the difference between number one and number two is exponentially, usually greater. So in, in your restaurant, which is a market, right. Technically, this is a micro market. The number one product that you sell is lobster. In terms of that, that is like your. Like. Or maybe it's cod, But I guess in terms of what you're spending and it does twice as much. So usually between number one and number two, there's twice as much resources that go towards that thing or get expended towards that thing. And that applies in a, like a city, for example. So if they're. If now you can. So you have to compare like to like. So if you were a burger concept, the. In that market, the number one burger concept would do twice the number as much volume as the number two burger concept in that market. And then number three would be you know, number one is three times as much as number three. And it's usually proportionate like that. There's always a dis. There's always a inequitable amount of resources distributed across number one through number two or number three, number four, number five. And it's usually exponential. And I think that's a really. It's like the Pareto's principle. Like, that's a. That's a cool law that we can pay attention to to see how this manifests and references.
- [45:11]
B
Absolutely. And for me, I mean, everyone talks about percentages, you know, your food cost percentages, but for me, you don't take percentages. The bank. So if you're a burger concept, you make $5 per burger. And so, you know, you sell the burger for $15, it costs you $5, you're making $10 burger. It's a 30% food, roughly 33% food cost item. For me, my. My lobster roll is 40%, but because I charge $30 for that, I'm making dollars, you know, per lobster roll versus, you know, so I'm making more on a lobster roll. There's more investment in that lobster roll. But I'm. And it's a higher food cost item, but because I'm taking dollars to the bank, I'm taking more dollars to the bank on the lobster roll than a burger.
- [45:51]
A
Right. And probably just as much labor, if not less, to put out a lobster roll than it was to put out fish and chips.
- [45:56]
B
Absolutely. Absolutely. Like I said 37 times to touch a fish and chips. I think a lobster roll is 24 times I have to touch it.
- [46:02]
A
Yeah. So with a lobster, are you getting that whole lobster and you're breaking that down?
- [46:07]
B
Well, funny story. We did that up until 2020 when Covid hit. And then we. We were actually shucking, what we call shucking 40-50lbs of lobster a day. And then we. We started partnering with a group out in Portland, and they started cleaning and shucking the meat for us.
- [46:22]
A
Yeah.
- [46:23]
B
Which saved us labor.
- [46:24]
A
What was your inspiration for that? I'm just curious.
- [46:26]
B
Just because labor. Yeah.
- [46:28]
A
Was there another operator doing something similar where you're like, they kind of figured it out.
- [46:31]
B
Well, it's funny that a lot of the New England clam shacks up there in. Up in Maine and New and New England states were already having someone shuck the meat for them. If you go to a fancy place up in Maine called Reds or not fancy, but this little lobster shack's been. It's called Red's Eats, and it's been there for years. It's, it's. No, it's up in Maine. Wickets of Maine. And it's been there for years.
- [46:52]
A
Is that in Kittery?
- [46:53]
B
It's outside of Kittery. Yeah, it's outside.
- [46:55]
A
I'm from that area.
- [46:56]
B
Are you okay? Yeah. It's Red Z. They've got a cookbook they've been around for. The daughter runs it now for the father who founded it. But they, they get meat already picked. So I went to their supplier and said, hey, can you. His name was Scout. Hey, Scout, can you pick lobster meat for me instead of me having to cook? And he said, sure. And so it's, it's, it's more expensive. But what people don't understand about lobster is lobster is only about a 20 to 21% yield. So you take 5 pounds of live lobsters, once you cook them, you're only going to get a pound of meat out of those £5.
- [47:27]
A
Yeah. I think at some point I get the idea of scratch. I think scratch. There's something to that. It gives opportunity for specialists within your four walls to do things. But there's also something to be said about, like, do you really think that you're doing a better job shucking that lobster than somebody who has built a whole business around doing that one thing really well?
- [47:47]
B
Yeah, and I think it's. It's a combination. I think some, some things. We still cut our own steaks, we cut our own fish. There are certain things we can use, some of the byproduct, leftovers for ceviche and different specials and things like that. But for lobster, these guys, that's what they're doing. They're designed to hold industrialized. They've industrialized it. So. Yes.
- [48:04]
A
And you're not going to make the product better by doing it yourself. So at what point do you get out of your own way and let your ego kind of say, hey, maybe I do. What is cost effective here?
- [48:13]
B
Absolutely.
- [48:14]
A
And you're creating an opportunity for an entrepreneur somewhere who found a niche in their. In their service. Like, do you make your own mayonnaise in the house?
- [48:19]
B
No.
- [48:20]
A
Why not?
- [48:20]
B
Yeah. Well, it's funny, we, we considered that when mayonnaise went through the roof a few years ago. We're going to make it ourselves now with the labor.
- [48:29]
A
Will it bounce out?
- [48:30]
B
Yeah.
- [48:30]
A
Consistent.
- [48:31]
B
Yeah, that's, that's the problem. Consistency, you know, it always goes back to that, you know, So I think there's still, you know, we make our own salad dressings, but we don't make Our own mayonnaise. So. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are some culinary chefs out there that want to, you know, die hard on mayonnaise.
- [48:46]
A
You don't want their variety in mayonnaise though.
- [48:49]
B
No, you don't.
- [48:50]
A
Like, the consumer gets mayonnaise. They want it to taste like mayonnaise.
- [48:53]
B
Yeah.
- [48:53]
A
You know, whereas if you're doing a, like a, a salad dressing, like, I think there's less expectation of what a vinaigrette might taste like. You get a little more, I guess, grace in making it your own. Yeah, right. And I think what are the other benefits that.
- [49:09]
B
Yeah, I think that, you know, for us, we buy the same mayonnaise. We've been buying Ken's mayonnaise for years and years. And we like, we like the flavor profile. The consistency is great. You know, if you're trying to make your own mayonnaise and you got to worry about, you know, the amount of eggs, you know, if you're using pasteurized eggs, if you have to switch companies of who's selling you your pasteurized eggs or using oil. Oil, the consistency of oil may change throughout the year. The flavor profile of olive oil changes throughout the year. If you could buy a kind of a no name packer olive oil. So, you know, for us it's about getting with great partners, suppliers, manufacturers and sticking with them, creating great relationships with them and using their product as long as their product is consistent.
- [49:49]
A
Yeah. So we got into this conversation talking about sending dollar reports. One thing I was hoping would come out of that conversation is the significance of what is the number. We started talking about it. The number one expense for you is lobster. The number two expense is cod. If you can figure out your systems around those two things. First, purchasing. Where can I get the best quality balance of, you know, quality and price. And then how can I streamline my processes around this to get consistency around how much ounces is going into every, or how many grams is going into every serving and how we get controls around that so that we know there is no waste. Like that's where you're going to really move the needle on your prime.
- [50:30]
B
Absolutely. You know, it's, it's.
- [50:31]
A
And they just keep going down that line. Item. What is this? What's the third thing we spend money. What's the fourth thing? And like that is where you will start to really move the needle and cost and getting those margins as big as possible. We didn't really spell that out. I wanted to make sure that, yeah, it's.
- [50:45]
B
And for us, it's 20 items. You know, I concentrate on the top 20 items I purchase. Not that the 21st or the 31st first is not important, but for us, we spend so much in those top 20 items.
- [50:55]
A
8020 rule.
- [50:56]
B
The 8020 rule. Exactly.
- [50:57]
A
80% of your revenue is going to come from 20% of the things you buy.
- [51:00]
B
Absolutely. So we contraind that. So those 20 items, I'm constantly making sure I have great relationships with the vendors who I buy those items from. They're giving me as much advance notice if the price goes up. You know, I've now, after so many years, I've gotten to know when the price of lobster goes up, when the price of lobster goes down, when the price of cod goes up, when the price of cod goes down. And then, you know, controlling that, that, that product. Product as it comes through my central kitchen, all the way to the plate on the guest and making sure that's consistent. You know, sometimes, you know, I've been in kitchens where they didn't portion anything. They just kind of eyeballed it and that worked for them. But for me, I've got to know because I put a plate cost on there and I know that it's 6 ounces of cod, 3 ounces of batter, you know, and a lot of, you know, when you're talking about fish and chips, the other thing people don't think about is the fry all. And I put 25 cents in every fried. Fried item that's on my menu to cover the cost of fry all.
- [51:51]
A
Yeah. You know, do you, you, Are you working with like a RTI on the fryer oil or anything?
- [51:56]
B
No, I buy my own fry oil just because I, I think I can negotiate a better contract with some of my vendors.
- [52:02]
A
Okay, gotcha. So speaking of vendors, I found you by way of U S Foods. You started in 2010. Did you?
- [52:09]
B
Yeah, they were my first broadliner that I've ever used. I've Never switched off U.S. foods.
- [52:14]
A
26 years or not, 2016 years. 16 years you've been with U.S. foods. What has it been like? What is that relationship like?
- [52:21]
B
You know, it's been great. You know, I have no, you know, are there, are there better, worse vendors out there? Absolutely. US Foods is a partner for us. I consider them a partner. They've been great. They've. They've been able to hold on to the products, the manufactured products that we, we prefer. They bring us stuff when we need it. They're just a great partner. You know, we, we've been using their kind of monogram or their Their fry, all the canola fry oil since the beginning. It's a branded product that they get, get produced, manufactured for them. And we've been on that product for 16 years.
- [52:55]
A
You know, when you say, you keep resurfacing this word partner, when you refer to US Foods, can you get into more of what a of part that partnership looks like?
- [53:03]
B
Yeah, I mean, we don't, we don't, they're not a traditional partner, but in the, in the big scheme of things, I have a broadliner partner with US Foods. I have a seafood partner with Congressional Seafood. You know, I have several partners. I have a small wares partner with Adams Birch. We've currently started using more and more with Web Restaurant. You know, there, those partnerships.
- [53:25]
A
Yeah, yeah, I was making sure.
- [53:27]
B
Yeah, yeah. I call, call it Web Restaurant webstaurant. And, and they've been great for us too. You know, they're a big company. They've been able to save us a lot of money in our to go packaging. So. But those partners, you know, all the way down to my landscaping partner around my building, I, I try my best to, to get into relationships, get into partnerships with certain vendors and don't switch. You know, even if someone comes to my back door and says, I can save you 50 cents a pound on something, I, I, I don't think they can because I've been with these other vendors for a long time. And the other thing we do, and one of the things we've always done is we pay very quickly. You know, restaurants are notoriously not pay, not fast payers. And one of the things we wanted to do from the beginning, and we did from the beginning, is we pay quickly. We pay net 14 on pretty much everything. And net 14 for us is 14 days. So we have seven. What I do myself, I'm disciplined. We have seven days to buy or, excuse me, to serve or to use whatever we buy. And then we have seven days to pay that bill. You know, I never want to stretch it out to 30, 60, 90 days just because, I mean, you get behind and you can't do that. And our, our partners, they need money. They need cash flow. The restaurant industry, you know, when Covid hit and I saw some very fancy chefs and famous chefs being interviewed by national television saying March was the worst month to be shut down because we were paying bills and invoices from Christmas parties. Well, you're telling me in March, you're paying invoices from December? You know, I paid those invoices in January. And so, you know, it's important that we recognize as restaurants. We, we are one of the few industries out there. When someone comes in and consumes our food and has a great meal, they pay us right away. We're not chasing money. You know, you never see chefs, chefs and restaurant owners out there having to chase a chase an invoice or chase money. We get paid right away and that's great. We need to reciprocate that back. We need to pay our fish guys. We, we need to pay our broadliners, we need to pay our dairy companies, we need to pay our landscapers because they, they have bills too. They don't want to be stretched out.
- [55:18]
A
Yeah. Did I see that you follow or I know Casey Anton follows you. Do you know the name Casey Anton? Spark Business Consulting.
- [55:26]
B
Okay, yeah, I've heard of Spark, Yeah.
- [55:28]
A
Are you a Profit first company?
- [55:29]
B
I, I've studied him a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. I've studied him a little bit. I, I, I have, you know, I have some questions. I'd love to sit down with them and, and talk to him. I've, I've, you know them.
- [55:39]
A
You're talking about the Profit First. Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First.
- [55:43]
B
Absolutely.
- [55:44]
A
Casey Anton's the author of Profit first for restaurants. She is a prophet, first professional. And I saw that connection. And I think what knowing you and how just in this short amount of time are very pants like you're a numbers person.
- [55:56]
B
Absolutely.
- [55:57]
A
And what profits, what profit first preaches is you take your profit off the top, you take, you take your taxes, you put that away because that's not, that doesn't belong to you. And basically you, you, you at the very end, the last thing you allocate is, is opex. And opex is what's basically that's your budget. So after you've paid your taxes, after you've paid, you taking your profit out because you want to make sure you're making a profit, you're reverse engineering that you're paying yourself owner's pay and then you're paying your labor. Right. That, that is unique to the restaurant industry, which is a separate line item from opex. Then whatever's left over determines what you have for budget to invest in cost of goods. Do you, do you align with that?
- [56:40]
B
Yeah, a little bit. You know, one of the challenging things I see in restaurants is we don't really know exactly how much money we're going to make today. I mean I could forecast and based on the last three weeks, six weeks last years that we're going to do $16,000 in revenue. It could start snowing right now. And all of a sudden it goes from 16 to $8,000 in revenue. So you have to prepare for those things. A little cushion all the time. There are always things and, and reverse. You could have a 20, top party of 20 walk in that you weren't planning for, and all of a sudden do $18,000 in revenue. So the, the profit first model works for, for restaurants, I think about 90% of the time. I think now the struggle is for us is you have to be watching a lot of those, those columns on your P and L that you never thought would change, that are now changing. You know, for years and years, I remember 2016, 2017, we never raised prices for two years. Sometimes you can't do that now. You have to raise the prices in a restaurant two to three times a year now. And we've got to get the, and I'm passionate about this. We got to get the consumer to understand that prices are going to raise two to three times, maybe more in a restaurant. You know, this year, because of the cost of beef, I'm considering putting my tenderloin, my filet mignon on the menu as a market, as a market price item. I've never, I've never seen restaurants do that. Maybe there are some that do that because beef is.
- [57:59]
A
I think we should do that with literally everything.
- [58:00]
B
We should.
- [58:01]
A
I think if it as dynamic pricing, that wasn't an option 15, 20 years ago because the cost to print out new menus every day outweigh the cost of, of the tweaking. But with digital menus, and most people are looking at your menu online and the cost of even printing is coming down, you can have digital menus like, why shouldn't we change it weekly?
- [58:23]
B
Yeah, yeah, I think, I think. And you know, going back to raising prices and being at a tipping point like we talked about earlier, I think that dynamic pricing will eventually, sooner than later, come into restaurants. I think people are more willing to pay more money for that burger or that, that lobster roll on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, when everybody wants to go out to eat, then maybe on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I think it's all about marketing. I also think that hardware wise, I think that we've learned that technology's there, technology's there. I think we have to create a menu. You know, you're seeing these, you've seen these foldable screens now. I think we have to create a thin enough menu, digital menu that can be presented to a guest that looks like a traditional menu, but it's actually digital. It's, it's foldable. It's, it's, it's, you know.
- [59:07]
A
Well, they have the pads that they put on the.
- [59:09]
B
Yeah. But sometimes are a little clunky.
- [59:11]
A
Yeah. I mean, it's, I think the user experience with a foldable menu would be the same. It would just make it feel closer to a menu.
- [59:17]
B
Yeah.
- [59:18]
A
And technology would work the same in terms of interacting with it.
- [59:21]
B
Yeah. I think what, what we've learned is people don't like the qrs. We did those during COVID because nobody had menus. But for us with three restaurants, it cost us $5,000 to print menus.
- [59:31]
A
I'm gonna look out. I've been looking out your window and I think that there's a certain demographic of person that comes here that might not be as willing to pick up their phone and use it.
- [59:39]
B
Absolutely.
- [59:39]
A
Yeah.
- [59:40]
B
Yeah.
- [59:40]
A
So you guys take that into consideration.
- [59:43]
B
Absolutely. And, and, but dynamic pricing will. Eventually you'll see it more and more in restaurants because I think that that's an opportunity for us to reward the guest for coming in on Monday through Tuesday, Wednesday.
- [59:54]
A
Right.
- [59:54]
B
And then, you know, if you want to come in on Friday, because we're still, we're ultimately in the real estate business.
- [59:58]
A
Right.
- [59:58]
B
I have 36 tables in this restaurant and I want to fill up every one of them every night. That doesn't happen on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, but on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, they fill up and there's a line to get on the table.
- [60:08]
A
The technology is there to your point with whether it's hardware, but even the software. Now you look at back to US Foods, your partner, what they're doing with Moxie.
- [60:16]
B
Yep.
- [60:17]
A
That ordering app, like the information is at your fingertips.
- [60:21]
B
I use Moxie twice a day and I use Moxie in a lot of ways because they do some specials daily deals, fresh to frozen things. Like they may have 10 extra cases of steaks that no one bought and they'll put them on there as a daily deal. And I just bought five cases of hanging tenders for $4 off a pound. And I grabbed all five cases so we can run those in Ford's Fish Shack as a, as a surf and turf special. So that saves me five bucks a pound. And so, you know, I would highly recommend that anyone use Moxie and use those daily specials.
- [60:52]
A
This episode is made possible by US Foods. It takes more than great food to run a kitchen these days with US Foods. More means consistently high quality products, industry leading tools, inflexible deliveries that let you grow your business on your schedule. Whatever your goals, US Foods helps you turn them into reality. As a US Foods customer, you'll gain access to their industry leading moxy platform which doesn't just just make it easy to place your US Foods order, but it uses AI powered technology to help you take more control of your business and increase profitability. You can also explore the latest issues of Food Fanatics magazine from US 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 expect more this episode is brought to you by Restaurant Technologies, the leader in automated cooking oil management. Unstoppable restaurant owners know which services to keep in house and which services to outsource and oil management is one of those things you should outsource. Their Total Oil Management solution is an end to end closed loop automated system that delivers, monitors, filters, collects and recycles your cooking oil, eliminating one of the dirtiest jobs in the kitchen. Create a more efficient food service operation and ensure consistent food quality with a safer, smarter and sustainable cooking oil solution. Restaurant technology services over 45,000 customers nationwide, including countless past guests on the show. Automate your oil and elevate your kitchen by visiting RTI Inc.com or call 888-779-5314 to get started. Yeah, so I mean with the access to the dynamic pricing as it's happening in real time as technology progresses, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a way to push the cost, the price directly to your pos, directly to your costing technology. I think Moxie has its own costing technology built in. So like with all those tools vertically integrated, why not do it? It's a difference of like changing one button or just tapping one thing to get the information. Why not do it?
- [63:17]
B
Well, I think restaurateurs are a little scared of technology. I think we're a little old school in a lot of ways. We, you know, we grew up with the convection oven and it took so long for us to start using combi ovens and now we are in love with them. It took so long for us to use online ordering. You know, we had a host scheduled for the first 12 years of our, of our, of our restaurant to answer the phone and take an order over a phone and now 8, 85% of our orders come in online. But I still think online ordering is not intuitive enough. I keep saying that someone needs to develop an intuitive online ordering that you come into my restaurant or you place an order online twice a week or twice a month, however long, and you always get the fish and chips and you get it with a Narragansett Ale. Well then do an upsell and you recognize that and offer them a growler of Narragansett when you order your fish and chips. But we've got to get more intuitive in that kind of stuff.
- [64:05]
A
I think the apps are making progress on that front. If you get customized apps to your restaurant because it's kind of like a closed system where they create a user, there's a profile, you get their, their, their behaviors like their, their spending behaviors you can upsell like based off of things that you're.
- [64:20]
B
Yeah. And, and hopefully it only gets better.
- [64:22]
A
Yeah.
- [64:22]
B
You know, we got to get the cost down. You know, some of the, some of the developers have reached out to us. They, they still are trying to use a, a kind of a standardized outline or standard lines platform app, but it's got to be all customized for that.
- [64:36]
A
Yeah, Dash Track is doing a really good job. I think met them out of Phoenix. There are some really great platforms out there that are getting a lot of attention right now in terms of throughput. Owner.com was a past sponsor and I think what they're doing to, they're, they're looking at, they studied like dominoes. Right. And they said how can we recreate what dominoes? We're not going to reinvent the, the wheel. We're going to take who's the best at online ordering right now and give that to your everyday average, you know, domino, like QSR concept. But the thing is not every restaurant's a QSR concept. Not every restaurant want, not every restaurant does the majority of their volume through online sales. So if you're not optimized, like you're not optimized for online, you're optimized for four walls, 250C restaurant experience. So your website might not, you might not want to optimize the website for that. Like maybe you want to optimize for pushing catering or on site events because that's where your money is. So that's the one downside about a platform like owner.com is it's rigid, like you're getting a QSR throughput machine. But if you're a full service, you might want to look for a more customizable Dash Track experience. I think from one of my conversation with them, they're also really doing good stuff. Stuff I Don't. It's been over a year since I spoke to them, so I don't know where they're at with the, the online web ordering experience. But that was a little bit of a rant.
- [65:58]
B
Okay. Yeah. Anything technology based. Even though I still believe hot food, hot cold food, cold 100 and, and it's just technology. We've got to be more abrasive of technology because labor, you know, you see now, you know, McDonald's, who's the largest restaurant chain out there, they don't have a cashier anymore. They have a kiosk. And I saw a statistic the other day that the reason they put the kiosk in was not to save labor, but they found that you spend 13% more when you go to a key upsells because the upsells and like that.
- [66:25]
A
That's the one thing about systems is the software is going to miss a step.
- [66:29]
B
Yeah.
- [66:29]
A
It's going to make sure that upsell hits every time. A cashier will forget to ask because they're busy or maybe they'll, they'll be thinking like you're angry person. I don't want to ask you to spend more money. You might get mad at me. It's awkward. Like, like we're too socially aware sometimes. We're just.
- [66:45]
B
We are.
- [66:46]
A
Yeah. So. Okay. One more thing I'm curious about because you keep on saying this word partner. And, and I like to say in full transparency. Like I, I chased U S Foods to become a sponsor. I was working on them for years because of what I was hearing. And I, and I, from the people I'm interviewing is that it's a partnership. It's the reps, the, the relationship with the reps. I guess what we want. Can you just add any more thoughts or experiences you've had relative to that partnership and why that's so important?
- [67:15]
B
Well, I think that the, the, the tms, I think they call them the, the reps Sales, the sales team. You know, they, they, they hire people that, that have either been in the business or know the business. I remember the first TM we had back in 2010. You know, he would come and show up up in our restaurant. Not at, not at 10 o' clock in the morning, not at 2 o' clock in the afternoon, but you'd show up at 9 o' clock at night with a couple brewskis and we'd sit out back and talk about my order for the next week and what I needed and have a beer together after the shift, you know, and when it slowed down and I to this day still think about that. And I tell the TMs, Hey, Mike, you know, my first TM, that's what he used to do. And I think that that's important. I think that he, as a salesperson for US Foods, recognizing, hey, I don't need to show up when these guys are these guys. These teams are trying to get open for business. I need to show up after the business and bring them a beer, bring them a, you know, soda, whatever. But, you know, that, that built a lot of relationship. That was really, it was a great experience for me.
- [68:13]
A
Yeah, for sure. So we haven't really talked about the scale. One thing I did notice. So again, we're going to get in the airplane. We kind of hovered over this time getting open the things that contribute to your success early on. But getting back into that airplane, zooming up to 30,000ft. You open your first location in 2010. Second location, 2013. By January, that was April of 2013, you opened your second location by January 2013, you launched Foods Wicked Catering. 2015, I saw that you got your own Oyster line, which I think is really interesting. You opened your third location four years after your second in Lansdowne, Virginia. Virginia. 2019, you had your Fords on the road. Food truck. 2021, your first location closed, but you have since opened another. Where we currently standing or sitting today? Same market, Third, like you. So you basically replaced that location.
- [69:17]
B
We did. We replaced it from one we least to one we own.
- [69:19]
A
So for a period, you're. You're operating at two restaurants and now you're at. Did you see this coming up on the horizon or.
- [69:25]
B
Yes and no. We knew that we wanted to open a. Or we wanted to buy some real estate. We didn't know it was gonna be so close to a restaurant we already had open.
- [69:32]
A
Got it. And then you got your commissary facility in 2020 to expand on the catering. In 2022, you opened Chantilly, which is where we sitting today. Three years ago.
- [69:46]
B
No, it's been 2025.
- [69:47]
A
2025, sorry, 2020. Sorry, I have a typo here. Excuse me. You have two trailers. I think that was 2022. You got the food. The two food trailers, not the truck, but you added two trailers to your catering arsenal. And then you also have an axe throwing.
- [70:02]
B
We do trailer.
- [70:04]
A
So that was kind of a fast forward to basically where we are today. So while I was sharing that timeline for you in terms of your personal evolution, where. Where were those points of evolution for you like, if you could think about how you became a betting, a better operating, like, what were the challenges to scale?
- [70:22]
B
Well, I think every time we open a new restaurant, you know, probably a year before, then we realized, hey, we've got a lot of staff. We got some great, you know, hourly employees, developing them up into managers. You know, I tell people, even today when we interview managers, you know, they ask what our growth is. Our growth is, has always been when we're ready to open more stores, we will. I'm not going to open a restaurant just because a landlord gave me a great deal or I have a bunch of money in the bank that, you know, I need to open a restaurant. I want to open a restaurant. If I feel like I've got 50, 70 staff members that are ready to open another restaurant, I'm not going to open a restaurant and then let the other three restaurants that we currently have open fall because of my ego. To open a restaurant or open 10 restaurants, that's not, that's not why we do do this. You know, we don't need to keep opening restaurants. And that's one of the reasons we bought this land and developed this building was we wanted to develop deeper, you know, deeper roots into this market. We, that's the reason we started, you know, we branded our own oyster. We, we opened up, you know, we opened the food trucks, you know, so we don't have to open up a new restaurant, you know, 30 miles away where I can't go to it and monitor it every day. We can take the food truck there for a couple days, you know, a month.
- [71:28]
A
Yeah, so a couple of things that came out of that. I definitely want to go into why you started your own oyster line and what that looks like. I think it's important to talk about looking at food trucks as catering in marketing tools more than anything else, or market research. When we're bringing these trucks, places like, what locations are doing best, maybe that's where we put our, our fourth, fifth, sixth location. And then doing things even like putting your money into what you're already, already doing better, not doing more. And I think when you do things better and you put your money into your people, when you focus on developing people to the point where you're busting at the seams with people, that is when the next location comes, because you don't want to lose the people. You want to create opportunity for others, I think that is how it should be done. If I'm biased, that's. That's the way I'm doing It, if I open a restaurant. So, so get into why you in 2015, I think it was Wicked, Wicked oysters. Why you decided to bring that in house? So you're kind of vertically integrated.
- [72:30]
B
Yeah, you know, we sell a lot of oysters. We sell half a million oysters a year. And so we had a farmer down, you know, we're, we're on the eastern, you know, we're on the eastern shore here. We're, you know, the Chesapeake Bay, we're all around water. If you're, if you're in the mid Atlantic market, you're selling oysters, you're selling, you know, crab cakes. And so, so we had a farmer down In Northern Necker, Virginia reach out to us, say, Hey, I harvest 200,000 oysters a year. I'd love to work with you. Let's create a concept, let's create a brand of an oyster. You have a strong brand.
- [72:57]
A
Is it a species that you're developing?
- [72:59]
B
So it's not a species, it's the same species. Oysters get a lot of all their flavor from where they're kind of harvested based on the salinity of the water. So this certain farmer has leased this farm. This, this water lay in water. And so he raises them a certain area for. So salinity is very consistent. And so we branded the Wicked, you know, the Ford's Wicked Pissa as our oyster name. You know, so it's not a certain species species, it's just we're working with a farmer who. Great. Who raises our oysters, farms our oysters in a certain area of the Chesapeake Bay to keep them consistent in salinity.
- [73:35]
A
Okay, but you're not vertically integrating where you don't have mistake in that farming business. No, no, you just have a, an agreement with that.
- [73:42]
B
We buy his inventory.
- [73:43]
A
Yes, got it. And that's exclusive to your brand?
- [73:46]
B
Correct?
- [73:47]
A
Got it. And what, what are the benefits of going straight to the source?
- [73:51]
B
Well, we know, we know, we know that the Forge Wicked Pistol oyster is going to have the same salinity as it does year in, year out because we're buying from the same farmer. You know, it's like anything, if you buy something from the same person, they're going to raise it the same way every year, year in, year out. So for us it was consistency, you know, because before then we would, we would have a house oyster and it would be bought from a certain part of the Chesapeake Bay and then we'd go to this part of the Chesapeake Bay and the salinity may change a Little bit. And people were like, oh, you know, you had this other oyster six months ago, you were selling as your signature oyster and it tastes different now. So we wanted that consistency. It all goes back to consistency. So we partnered with John, you know, oyster farmer. John.
- [74:28]
A
Oyster farming isn't year round, is it?
- [74:31]
B
Yeah, it pretty much is. Yeah.
- [74:32]
A
I know you can get oysters year round, but I wasn't sure if that you could source them.
- [74:36]
B
Yeah. Now there are seasons for wild oysters in the Chesapeake Bay and then obviously if you go up New England area where the water's a lot colder, the water can start to freeze over, you know, and they actually have to wear wetsuits to go down and dive, get oysters. But here they're pretty much in Chesapeake bay. They get 12 months out of the year.
- [74:52]
A
Got it, Got it. So many things we can talk about. You're making, you're talking about lobster earlier today and this, this topic of vertical integration. Are you familiar with Angie's brand by any chance? Angie's Prime. So they're based out of Arizona. I had Anthony Christophilis, I think was his name on the show. He was behind Salad and Go, that concept. They ended up selling it. He, he learned a lot from private equity and corporations where you lose a lot of your identity and your, your entrepreneurial freedom when you go that route. So he wanted to start from scratch and he wanted to, to create prime meats affordable to everybody. And his approach to that was vertically integrating. He, I should mention, I think he got close to $120 million when he sold solid and go. So he, he was cash liquid and he wanted to use those, that asset, that, that cash to develop supply chains. So he, he, he bought a boat, he, he bought a, a dock. He has the processing facility and then he ships the lobster from Maine to Arizona in bags. And then it's just kind of like that last mile is just like getting it out of the bag and putting it onto the roll or whatever. But they're able to offer. This was a few years ago, a lobster roll for like 10.99 or like 12.99, like in that ballpark in Arizona.
- [76:12]
B
Wow.
- [76:12]
A
Because he owned the entire supply chain. So I was curious if there was some similarity with what you're doing here. Is there any overlap in the approach you're taking? No.
- [76:22]
B
I mean, it's. For us, again, it goes back to just having a partner. You know, John takes care of us with Oyster. I never have to worry about. We're gonna have supply issues with, with that. You Know, I want him to, I want him to be successful and to make a lot of money. We, we pay him well, we pay him quickly.
- [76:35]
A
Another partner.
- [76:36]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, for us, you know, I, I, I, I have hesitated, I've had opportunity to kind of go into that vertical integration and partner with certain people. But for us, you know, it's still about being in the restaurants and taking care of the restaurants, taking care of the guests that comes in here. And if I'm out trying to run my oyster farm, if I buy an oyster farm, you know, what's going on my four walls. Right.
- [76:56]
A
Yeah. Okay. So going through your timeline, looking, what about, what was it like going from one to two locations for you in 2000?
- [77:03]
B
The hardest thing we ever did.
- [77:04]
A
Yeah, it was hard about it.
- [77:05]
B
Just because you now all of a sudden you got, you can't. You know, In Ashburn, from 2010 to 2013, I literally saw 95% of the plates of food as they were coming across the line, the pass before they went out. You know, now you got two restaurants. You're not going to be in two places at one time. So you really have to start depending on other people, depending on your people that you've developed up, your staff that you've developed up.
- [77:27]
A
Yeah. Took you about three years to go from one to two, and about four years ago, from two to two, three. What, what did you do differently that, that third time to go to, to
- [77:37]
B
go a little bit long, take a little bit longer. You know, it's just about location. You know, we didn't need to grow. We had, you know, people reaching out to us. You know, I have people, I had two people reach out to me yesterday about locations. But for us, it's just about being at the right time. You know, is it the right time to, to open?
- [77:51]
A
You know, do we have the people
- [77:52]
B
and do you have the people?
- [77:53]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the cool thing. When you put your energy in, not out. The, the opportunities come to you. You don't have to go searching for them. And then the governor is, do we have the culture carriers, the people that we've built up to move to that location to create the opportunity, but do they even want to go there is another thing. Like, you know, have you struggled with that maybe?
- [78:15]
B
No. Most of our locations are within 20 minutes of each other.
- [78:17]
A
Got it.
- [78:18]
B
So we, we actually move a lot of our managers around to the different locations, just so everyone knows everything, knows everyone.
- [78:24]
A
So from this time to being from one unit to two units, going to three now is in 2017. From 2017 to today, in terms of, like, organizational structure, how you organize your business, how you've grown professionally. Does anything come to mind?
- [78:43]
B
You know, it's, it's, you know, after Covid, everything's changed. You know, we spent a lot of time, you know, used to be, you know, prices of certain items, certain menu items or certain ingredients, you know, the, the chairs, the. The physical plant. A lot of those prices didn't change. But now we're constantly watching, you know, prime cost, cost of goods and. And chasing a lot of that, which is not a fun part of my job. You know, I still enjoy getting on the line, rubbing shoulders, working on the expo line, walk in the dining room, those kind of things. But, you know, what's changed now is your. Is your. Your. You're having to manage your P. Ls a lot harder than you used to have to manage, which is. Which is, you know, not what I got into this business for.
- [79:21]
A
There is technology to help to make it easier.
- [79:23]
B
There is, there is. But, you know, does it have the heart, you know, does it really, truly understand your business? I tell people all the time, you know, I was the first employee. So when someone, one of my kitchen managers or managers or brings me an idea, you know, I have the experience and the knowledge to know whether that's going to sell, because I probably tried it before in the past. You know, no one knows our clientele like, you know, the first employees, you know, I had recently, we just brought back a manager that we had workforce when we first opened, and he came back to work for us. And, you know, getting him, you know, back into the fold is great because he was there in the beginning. He was there when we first opened up. But, you know, technology helps us, but it's still. The restaurants have a heart and they have a brain of their own, and you have to kind of be that person to kind of, you know, still kind of have that control over it.
- [80:08]
A
Yeah. So I don't like to talk a lot about COVID because we were all there. We all know what happened.
- [80:13]
B
We were.
- [80:13]
A
I do think it made a lot of us stronger on the. The back end. It forced us to evolve, it force us to pay closer attention to the numbers like you're talking about. Let's just kind of fast forward to where you are today. It looks like 2022 was a big year for you. You between 2021 and 2022, you closed a lot of location. So you went from three to two
- [80:34]
B
locations for a period I think we closed in 23.
- [80:36]
A
23.
- [80:37]
B
23.
- [80:37]
A
Okay. But around this time, seems like a lot's happening. I think we're recovering, we're stabilizing. Post pandemic, the world's kind of back to normal. Ish. You invest in two trailers, you invest in your commissary. Not far from the this time, but close to this time. So you're starting to reap the benefits of the commissary. So they kind of paint the picture of what your business. Business looks like today.
- [81:00]
B
Yeah, A lot of the last three years has been real estate. We bought. We bought four warehouse units over where our central kitchen's at. We have about 10,000 square feet over there that we use for our central kitchen. And so we. We bought that real estate, which was a big, big step for us at that point. We never owned commercial real estate before, so we bought that. We built out that kitchen over there. It has our offices there. We could have meetings there. We can training there and train our staff there upstairs in the, in the, in the training room. But that's, that's. That was a big investment for us. We didn't have to do that. We didn't have to develop that central kitchen. But what. It's made us stronger in our consistency. Consistency, consistency and purchasing. Now, I Bring Us Foods brings 80% of my product I order to that one location. They're not bringing it to four different locations.
- [81:47]
A
How does that. Does that lower your cost working?
- [81:49]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So when I negotiate contracts with them on pricing, obviously it saves some fuel, you know, so they don't have to pay as much fuel to deliver.
- [81:57]
A
Yeah. And then you're processing everything at that one spot and distributing it.
- [82:00]
B
Correct. We invest. Labor goes down, labor goes down, you know, and then it's centralized. So all the catering. The catering used to go out of each individual store. Now it's going out of one location. I have one team that just does catering instead of having three teams doing the catering based on the demographics of that delivery, that catering delivery.
- [82:16]
A
Which is why you invested in the two trailers?
- [82:18]
B
Yes. Well, one. One of the trailers we actually bought. Interesting story about that. One of the trailers we actually bought because when we closed down the location that was 1.5 miles from here in 2023, we needed a year to build this thing, this 13,000 square foot building. We needed a year, and I didn't want to lose those clientele that we'd had over the 10 years. So we put a trailer. We built a trailer and put it here right out Front where my red truck is sitting right now. And we, we serve food here. We served our menu from Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, when a young man there forking on truck because we didn't want people to forget and also let people see the construction as it was going on.
- [82:52]
A
Yeah.
- [82:53]
B
And so that was why we invested in that third trailer. But yeah, we, we did that and then we built this up. And now we're currently looking for tenants. And not only are we owning our land, but we're actually going to be landlords. We're looking for tenants for our, the other half of this building. So, yes, it's. The last three years have been all about real estate for us.
- [83:09]
A
So it's interesting. And from the outside looking in, it was like, oh, like they're opening restaurants, they start to slow down around 2000s. But in reality, you weren't slowing down. You were just, again, you're putting that energy into infrastructure. Slowing down, putting the energy into what you're already doing better, more efficiencies. You're evolving as an entrepreneur, not just a restaurant tour. And recognizing that, I want to invest in assets, land. I want to own the dirt. That's where. That's the long game. I'm looking for a retirement plan. And I think that that's really important because we can look sometimes at brands we think, oh, they're slowing down, they must be losing steam, or they're just being really intentional for what's next. So what is next for you?
- [83:49]
B
Great question. You know, for us, you know, we're looking at retail. You know, we have a strong. You know, I tell people all the time, the most valuable thing we have is our brand. That's the one thing we protect. That's one thing I squeeze at at nighttime is our brand. You know, when you, when you're in the Northern Virginia market and someone says Fords, they think you're talking about Ford's Fish Shack, not Ford Motor Company, which is a lot bigger. Bigger brand, bigger company than I'll ever be.
- [84:10]
A
Is your food truck a Ford? I gotta know.
- [84:13]
B
No, it's not. It's not. And, but if you go to, you know, if you go to Chicago and someone says Fords, they think of Ford Motor Company. So I, I truly believe, especially regionally, the brand is the most valuable thing, thing you have. So that's, that's the thing we protect the most. But we're, we're looking at opportunities. You know, we, you know, like I said, we put our, we put our name on our oyster. We put, we, we have branded water bottles for our takeout, for our catering so that when people go home and they set that, that half drink water bottle on their counter, they see that word Fords and maybe their neighbor comes over and they see that and they say, oh, let's go to Ford's tonight. For us, it's, it's about keeping that brand strong. And after 16 years, we're not a, a, we're not a new concept. And as, as we all know, the, the general population loves to go to new restaurants, but it's the old restaurants that we keep coming, hopefully keep coming back to.
- [85:00]
A
Yeah. And that's my mission with this podcast, is to, I keep saying I want to see fewer 100 unit plus operators and more 10 to 20 unit operators. And how do we keep that money local? How do we help those people? I think there's something about restaurant owners and the public and those, the relationships there, that friction between the consumer and the restaurant that if there's, it seems like the smaller things are, the more, the more friction there is. I think friction's a good thing. We're supposed to bump up against absolutely people. We're supposed to create opportunity locally. It's nice to go to a market and see brands that are unique to that place, that are, that have that place as well, culture tied to it. And I think, I don't know, I
- [85:45]
B
just think that's worth protecting 100% agree. It's, it's, it's important to never lose that vision too. Never lose that, that it's under threat. Right now. It is more so than ever. Right.
- [85:56]
A
So how do we protect that? Like, what are you doing? Like, how can we, like, you are a clear leader in this market. You have loyalty. You, you're established. How do we get more restaurants like Ford's Fish Fry. Sorry, Ford's Fish Shack.
- [86:10]
B
Yeah, Ford's Fish.
- [86:11]
A
Am I getting it right?
- [86:12]
B
Yeah.
- [86:12]
A
Talk to a lot of restaurants.
- [86:14]
B
Yeah. It's important not to lose your identity, not to, not to grow bigger than your, than you, you know, you're comfortable growing and, and to protect your people, take care of your vendors, take care of your partners and you know, hot food, hot. Cold food, cold. I keep seeing, keep saying that, keep saying that. That it's, it's important and you know, everybody wants to, you know, become the next Outback or the next, you know, Darden Restaurant Group and tell me, I honestly think that that's not, that's never going to be my goal. My goal is just to keep it as a small regional, keep Building. You know, there's one of the things we're looking at now for us is can we do a third meal period? Can we do a breakfast, can we do a breakfast concept in the buildings we already have? You know, so instead of building a new restaurant, can I generate another million dollars in revenue by just opening four hours earlier than I do currently?
- [87:05]
A
Yeah. What is the vision for you? Like, like at the end of this, when you're ready to transition out, maybe sell it or whatever, the end goal, whatever your exit strategy is, like, what is your target? Where do you want to bring this thing? What is your vision?
- [87:18]
B
Yeah, I think, you know, if I can, if I can sell it, if I can somehow work some kind of partnership with, with current or, you know, former or future or some kind of employee, you know, ownership thing, that would be great. Keep the, keep the real, keep the assets, use the assets as my retirement. But, you know, the business, maybe the business is, is handed down to the next generation.
- [87:38]
A
Got it.
- [87:39]
B
I think that's, that's important.
- [87:40]
A
Is there like a scale that you want to hit in your, in your time here?
- [87:43]
B
Like, you know, if, if we, if we can get this to 6, 7, 8 units, I think that's for us. That's, that's more than I ever thought when I had that first restaurant in 2010 with 250, $50,000 investment.
- [87:53]
A
Why is that the sweet spot there?
- [87:55]
B
I think any bigger than that, you have to have a big support center. And I think if you have to have a support center, and I don't like that word, support center, but if you've got to start getting into hq, regional, regional chefs and regional directors and, you know, HR people and all this stuff, that just adds more cost.
- [88:10]
A
Yeah, yeah. It's another layer to the hierarchy. And although each one of those roles comes with a six figure plus paycheck, so like, do you really want to scale? Like, is it worth it? Like, why did you get into this industry? Because once you start getting to that point, the game's totally different.
- [88:25]
B
Absolutely.
- [88:26]
A
Yeah.
- [88:26]
B
And, and, and for me, I don't need $100 million buyout package. You know, I, I, I live comfortably and I don't, I don't need to, you know, have all those things. To me, it's not about who has the most money for me, it's about the most relationships and.
- [88:39]
A
Bingo.
- [88:40]
B
Yeah.
- [88:40]
A
Yeah. What are you, what are you willing to lose for scale? I think that's an important question we
- [88:45]
B
need to ask ourselves. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's not, I didn't get in this business to make money. You know, I've been very fortunate to make a good living off of it. But, you know, there's other industries, other businesses I could have gotten into and probably made more money. But for me, I do it because I love it. I do it because of getting a chance to meet people like yourself and meet, you know, have. Have partnerships with vendors and meet people that I never would have had the opportunity to meet.
- [89:09]
A
Yeah. So is it safe to say today, as an operator, you're the most effective operator you've ever been in terms of what you are able to do? And, like, you're. As far as your evolution, are you continuing to grow to this day?
- [89:22]
B
Oh, absolutely. I learned stuff every day. I learned stuff from my employees every day. You know, my employees will teach me things that they learn about the food that we've been handling for 15 years. I learned things from other restaurant operators. I learned things from other. Other business operators. I'm always trying to learn stuff. I'll pull over on the side of the road and take a picture of something that I see as I pass it that looks cool, that maybe I can use it one day.
- [89:44]
A
So can we take a look under your hood today? Like, before, we kind of talk about the future and, like, how we move into, potentially into the future. Like, what is under the hood of Ford's Fish Shack in terms of, like, what is your organizational structure?
- [89:56]
B
What.
- [89:56]
A
What is your tech stack? Like, what does that look like? How are you doing things today that is, like, the optimal version? Like, it's a culmination of your. Your life as a restaurateur. Right.
- [90:06]
B
So I think it's important that we're not. As you know, in the past, we've been reactive to things. You know, when. When our vendor raises the prices of. Of. Of cod or lobster meat, it takes us two or three weeks to. To raise the price of our lobster. By the time we change lobster roll the times we change the menu and print out the new menus and. And change the POS and things like that. We are. What I'm trying to do is become more proactively and work with my vendors to give me notice so that when I raise. When I change my menus, I'm changing the day, the price of that item goes up, not two weeks later.
- [90:40]
A
Yeah. So what is. What is your organizational structure today? You're the founder, CEO.
- [90:44]
B
Yeah. So I. I control what I tell people is I. I pretty much control everything that you put in your mouth and swallow. So all the food I Do all the food purchasing, all the, all the drinks. I have Anna, my partner, who's been with me, you know, since the beginning, she does a lot. And. Business partner. Yeah. And what's, what's her role? And she. She does a lot of the back of the house stuff. She does all the catering proposals. So if we get a catering proposal come in, she'll meet with the client, she'll talk to the client, she'll write a menu based on what we've done done in the past, and then she'll. She'll give it to me and she'll say, what do you think about this for $30 a person or whatever the number is, is. And then, you know, then she'll kind of keep rolling that with the client. Then we have a catering manager that kind of sets it all up and gets it organized. And then I'll come in and actually help with the production of the food and get that going. And then at the commissary, we have a central. We have a kitchen manager, the maribelli. She takes care of all the production there. I help her with some of the purchasing. I do a lot of the bulk purchasing. And then each unit I have a general manager. We have a general manager, and then we have a kitchen. Kitchen manager. So we don't have a director of operations. We don't have a. A coo, anything like that. It's. It's pretty much Anna and I, and. And that's the way we. We like it. We like. Because we're employee number one, employee number two.
- [91:56]
A
Yeah. And at that store level, your front of house, you got your. Your general manager one, you got your kitchen manager two. Do you have any direct reports to them? Is there like agm?
- [92:06]
B
Yeah. So we have roughly three front of the house managers, and each store one's a general manager and then two assistant managers that report to them, and then the GM reports to. To myself.
- [92:15]
A
Okay, and what about under the kitchen manager? Is there.
- [92:18]
B
They have two assistant kitchen managers usually have an atom, an AM and a pm.
- [92:21]
A
Got it. And in terms of, like, roles and responsibilities, like, what is. Like if you're handling all the ordering, purchasing, that's not on the shoulders of the kitchen manager. What. What is on their shoulders?
- [92:34]
B
So they handle the purchasing from the commissary. I pretty much handle the purchasing at the commissary. I work with Mary Belly, our kitchen manager there. But they order all the purchasing items they need for to run the individual stores.
- [92:45]
A
They're not putting together, like, an actual order. Like, are they like, they're not purchasing it. They're saying, like, this is what we need.
- [92:51]
B
No, they purchase it from the commissary. The commissary is a central, separate business.
- [92:55]
A
Okay.
- [92:55]
B
And we build a store. So if they order five pounds of lobster meat or five or five quarts of. Of clam chowder, we make it there. We have a cost integrated into the system, and it charges them for that. And we have a piece of labor. We charge each store roughly about 300 a day for prep labor.
- [93:13]
A
Okay, so you're basically treating that like vertical integration.
- [93:15]
B
Absolutely. So your.
- [93:16]
A
Your commissary is a standalone business. You are getting. You're getting. What's the word? Not goods, but commodities from the. Your purveyors. And then you're breaking those commodities into goods.
- [93:30]
B
And you're, you know, you're.
- [93:32]
A
You have costs associated, the cost of good with getting this prepackaged item. This is how much we know it costs at this volume. And we're selling that to our stores. And at a marked up, are you. What's your baked in profit?
- [93:43]
B
We don't bake in a profit for it. We. We. We want to break even. Whether for our commissary, where our profit comes from is catering in the food trucks. All the catering sales and food truck sales go through the common. Go through the commissary. So we just want to break even for the stores. We want to charge them for labor, want to charge them for the cost of the food, but, you know, there's no. There's no profit. Now, you know, we could charge them a profit, but for us, we'd rather the profit stay in each individual store.
- [94:10]
A
Got it. Got it. Anything else we should know relative to how you set that up? Like, why did you set it up that way?
- [94:15]
B
Yeah, we. Well, I mean, we've got to be. The commissary's got to be reimbursed. Reimbursed for those items. So the biggest part for us was to get those standardized recipes into some kind of formula program to keep track of that stuff. So we know that the clam chowder cost us $8 and 15 cents a gallon. And so every time Daniel, the kitchen manager here orders 2 gallons, he gets billed $16.30 for that and then a portion of the labor that costs to make that.
- [94:39]
A
Yeah. So what's next? I mean, I'm just curious because, like, it sounds like you're setting up, but right now your commissary only has three customers. Three customers. But are you planning to have more customers?
- [94:49]
B
Yeah, we could actually, we could, we could work with different restaurant groups.
- [94:52]
A
You talked about retail?
- [94:53]
B
We talked about retail.
- [94:54]
A
I mean, you could. Yeah, like, you, you're such a well known brand, why not like, if you have, I don't know, like, what's your. What's, like, what's one thing that you produce at that commissary that could be under a different brand?
- [95:05]
B
Well, I mean, people love, people love our, our sauces, our Remy blood sauce. They love our clam chowder. So, you know, regionally, we could work with some of the grocery stores around here to start selling that stuff. You see, when you go to the grocery store now, a lot of national chains selling their items, you see Chick Fil A sauce being marketed right next to the rotisserie chickens.
- [95:23]
A
Right?
- [95:23]
B
And so, you know, we could do some of that stuff for some of the local grocery stores here. Produce it in the commissary, ship it out to these guys. We're working with some spice manufacturers to create a spice blend for us. Our seasoning spice blend that we would, we would label and brand for Ford's Fish Shack.
- [95:40]
A
So we haven't talked about tech stack yet. What is your tech stack today?
- [95:49]
B
I. We use the same POS company we've had since day one, which is Positouch. They just recently, in the last couple years, got, got purchased by shift 4. You know, for us, POS's are all about the credit card processing and, you know, that's their big role, which credit card processing is our fourth biggest expense. And the data they're collecting through credit card processing in restaurants is huge. So I'm trying to figure out where POS's are going in the future. Obviously, a lot of people are using Toast. Toast is a big one, you know, out there. Now we use a partner of theirs for our online order. I don't think it's the, the best one out there. I keep looking for an all encompassing kind of tech stack that, that, you know, will take a lot of the responsibility off of our shoulders of making sure everything blends together. It's still a very fractured part of the, of the restaurant industry.
- [96:51]
A
Yeah, I've heard some really shady things about Ship 4 in terms of what they're doing with credit card processing. Borderline. Like, I don't even know if, like I'm, I worry about saying things I don't want to get.
- [97:02]
B
Yeah, no, it's, it's. You have to monitor them. Whatever credit card processor you use. I, I sat down, I created a spreadsheet, and we went on visa.comamericanexpress.com and got the actual process rates and we put them into a spreadsheet and we go through and we true them up every, every month to make sure that they're not overcharging us on certain categories.
- [97:22]
A
I don't want to say they're doing, doing anything criminal because they're within their legal rights, but they are pushing the envelope and it should be illegal.
- [97:29]
B
They are, and a lot of them are. And if you've ever tried to read those contracts that they have you sign and they're. And they're all that way. I've been with several of them over the years. You know, the problem with, with switching POS for us is because we have been with the same one for 16 years, all that data, if I wanted to wake up tomorrow and switch to a different POS company, all they don't care about all that data for the last 16 years that I've, that I've.
- [97:56]
A
Specifically what data are you looking for?
- [97:58]
B
Sales. You know, if I want to. Yeah. Customer behavior. If I want to go back and see how many Budweisers I, I sold on Cinco de Mayo in 2000, you
- [98:06]
A
can't export that information.
- [98:08]
B
You can export it, but it's exported into a big spreadsheet. And then how do you input. Exporting is great, but how do you import it into something that's readable?
- [98:15]
A
This is why I get really excited with AI, because AI should be able to do that. If not today, tomorrow, if not today, somebody hasn't done it yet because it can do it, but it's just a matter of figuring it out.
- [98:26]
B
Wouldn't that be great? I'll be the, I'll be the third customer and, and in with AI, you
- [98:31]
A
should be able to look at those contracts and find out if there's anything I should be worried about in this agreement right here. What is the language you look for in those contracts?
- [98:40]
B
Specifically I look for 30 day outs or some kind of out. So look, I take the penalty out. I don't agree with penalties. You know, we all want to get out of relationships and we shouldn't be penalized for them if we want to get out of them where you know they're going to make us pay a year's worth of whatever the expenses would be for a year. I take all that stuff.
- [98:55]
A
So copy paste that contract into any LLM, Claude, ChatGPT, Gronk, whatever your preferred is and say, are there any, is there any language in this contract that locks me in I don't want to be locked in and then ask for it to give you language to, for an ideal situation, send that back. This is the cool thing about AI today is you don't necessarily need a lawyer at, you know, $10,000 and like whatever their rate is, you know, you can have AI do that. And it can also, to your point, like, if you can get that data eventually and if, if POS companies aren't allowing this, they should be allowing it where we can have information flow, but between platforms.
- [99:34]
B
Yeah. And the thing that I've always struggled with and I've talked to a lot of people about, is that data we're creating. When people come in and use, when guests come in and use their credit cards, that data that's being collected and used and sold by our credit card companies that collect that data, that's really our data and they're selling that to benefit them. And then they're turning around and charging us three or four basis points to process the credit cards. You know, I'd love to get to a point where there we're actually being reimbursed for that data we're collecting, you know, because all that data they're collecting, they know when you come into our restaurant, you're what, you're ordering current, future currency. Absolutely. And so that, you know, for us, I think we should be.
- [100:11]
A
We're data mining machines.
- [100:12]
B
We are as a restaurant, you know,
- [100:14]
A
and this is the conversation. These are the conversations.
- [100:16]
B
Yeah. And we need to be reimbursed for that stuff, you know, because that's. There's real value in that stuff. And they're collecting that. Not only collecting it and using it, you know, they're selling it to anaheist Bush, are selling it to Excel Beef, they're selling it to large manufacturings.
- [100:28]
A
The real cool thing is there are platforms out there today that want to take these new business approaches. But the struggle is that these large companies. Back to Ziff's Law. And this is one of the reasons why I think Ziff's Law is so important, because we live in a global marketplace today. And that law of uneven distribution of resources applies, whether it's a small market, the four walls market of your restaurant, or your community or the world. There can only be one number one in the world, and that is the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. And the only way to overcome that is being aware of it, being mindful of it, conscious of it, and choosing to do something different. Because, you know, that doesn't work for us all so, and I think that's why we have to be really. You mentioned Toast is the number one positive, by far the most recommended POs on the show. But is it a good thing if every restaurant in America is using Toast? No, no, I'm not talking about Toast right now. I'm just saying we cannot get into another micros aloha situation and we can consciously choose to go with Spot on, which is a great platform that is number three in terms of what's been recommended on the show. It's. It's Toast Square. And I think the POS I like to promote is Spot on because they have great customer support, the technology is good, but most importantly, because they're not number one or number two. You know, we need to intentionally spread out the resources, and if there's a POS company that's from your market, go with that one because it's probably not that much worse than number one, number two, or number three. It's just like we, as in our nature, human instinct is to go with word of mouth. We are social creatures and that word of mouth is king. So if we are hardwired to go with what, what the number one is, that's why number one so powerful, because we all want to get from number one. That's word of mouth. But we, I think we just have to realize that like it's, it's. Those instincts are no longer serving us in a global marketplace. It's interesting.
- [102:34]
B
Yeah, it is, it is. And you know, I mean, I think that, you know, Toast and all these other positive are great and they have great platforms and depending on what you're comfortable using. But one of the, one of the things that we look at, we use a company called Margin Edge for our packaging. Yeah, they are local source. They're like Bo and Roy. Yeah, yeah. I know Beau very well. We were like his customer number 100 or something. We released early on with them and they've done a great thing and we use their back of the house software. We use their back of the house transfer system for our commissary. It's great. It's a little clunky, but it's getting better. It's. It's not as intuitive as I want it to. They haven't figured out how to use AI to process the invoices. But, you know, I'm old enough to. Back in the day, we used to actually manually input every invoice into the different categories, cost categories. We wanted it. Now they have, you know, in people that are other parts of the country, other parts of the world that do that for us. But, you know, I think Margin Edge next step is to. Is actually to use AI to get them to categorize that stuff. And being intuitive, you know, for us. One of the things I look at, I still sit down, you know, people roll their eyes, but I still sit down with four stacks of invoices every day and go through them with my price guides. And it doesn't catch when salmon went up because I hold my vendors accountable to, you know, you give me a price for salmon that starts on Tuesday and goes to the next Monday, and you give me a price guide on Monday that I know that starts the next day. And so I'll sit down and I'll see that the price on Tuesday didn't change like it was supposed to. And I'll catch mistakes that are in their favor too, where they'll be charging me less than they're supposed to. And as a partner, I'll say, hey, you didn't change your price, didn't change. But also catch. I catch probably 10 to 15% of every of all my invoices. There's some kind of pricing mistake in there. And. And we haven't figured out how to catch that stuff for whatever reason.
- [104:20]
A
Yeah. Well, the cool thing about AI too, is that it's also works in machine learning.
- [104:26]
B
Absolutely.
- [104:27]
A
So it can it. We can teach it as it goes. If you this up, don't do that again. Oh, I'll be mindful of that the next time I run this algorithm. You know, like. And then like, if one thing learns it, they all learn it. Which is kind of cool too. It's really exciting.
- [104:41]
B
I.
- [104:41]
A
You know, this is a weird conversation, but at the rate at which AI is progressing in technology exponentially, you know, Moore's law states that like, technology progresses exponentially. We're getting at that point where exponential of its current state is like whoa, and then whoa again and even faster. I wonder that if the like Margin Edge amazing company, past sponsor of the show. Beau, past guest of the show. Love what they're doing. Current sponsor, Restaurant Systems Pro. You see it on my.
- [105:14]
B
My.
- [105:14]
A
That's out of my camper. Very similar offering to Margin Edge. Now US Foods offers a lot of the same services that these companies offer. I do think that the things are moving so fast that we are going to move into a place where your average restaurateur is going to be able to develop their own software solutions using vibe coding. Are you familiar with expression? If you can speak the language of Software development. If you're kind of a nerd and you understand that world, you can have a conversation with an AI agent and tell it what you want, like what's the outcome? And it will develop the software for you. And it doesn't take much understanding of that. I don't really understand that world that well. But there are some people who are like tech nerds who also own restaurants, and I've had them on the show and they're developing their own software in house. And what's going to stop those restaurateurs from sharing solutions? So I think there's a real outcome, there's a real possibility that we're going to leap far, leapfrog this. Like, it's going to go from, you know, extreme, two or three solutions for one problem, to quickly the pendulum is going to swing and it's going to become fragmented and we're all going to do in house, DIY software solutions. We're going to share it with our buddies.
- [106:32]
B
Yeah, I think that's great.
- [106:34]
A
And it's going to drive the cost of technology way down, down overnight because we're going to be able to build just as good. And here's the exciting thing. When you have a diverse competitive marketplace, things get better, faster. And I think that's going to also make things better and less expensive. So it's a really exciting time. I might not be making any friends with my sponsors right now saying this, but I don't want to be, I don't want to be censored either because I think it's important to know how much influence we have. You know, that's very important.
- [107:02]
B
Yeah. I think technology is something we as restaurateurs need to embrace, you know, because it's, it's gonna, it's gonna, and it's gonna help the consumer, it's gonna help the business, and which is ultimately going to help the customer coming in and dining our restaurant. So we won't have to keep raising prices. Yeah, it wouldn't be great to not have to raise prices as much as we've been raising prices.
- [107:21]
A
Well, I mean, I think it's interesting. So there's a book out there called the Town Food Saved. It's, it profiles a, like Waterbury, Vermont or some, some Vermont town. And in that book, they, they say that like around the 19th or 20th century, 1920s, around that time of the industrialization of the food system, we went from spending upwards of 20,000, 20% of our total income went to food. And then in that like, like that period Thereafter the, the full swing of the industrialization of the food system. Today we're at about 9% of our income goes to food. And it's just if you're alive today, all you know is a broken food system. It's all we know. So we don't know that at one point a dead person and a half ago they were paying most of their income to food and that we're actually not spending more on food relative to our not so long ago ancestors and that we just got so conditioned and so acclimated to a shitty, cheap food system. So are we paying more? No, we're paying closer to what we should be paying for the thing that keeps us alive and healthy. Not just am I, my, my, you know, heart rate beating, but like am I putting good things into my body that isn't causing cancer? You know, what, what's going through your mind as I share that?
- [108:40]
B
Yeah, I think, I think, I think you're 100. Right. And I, I've heard those statistics over the years and, and I truly believe it. I think one of the things that's caused the cost of food to go up exponentially or the cost of eating out has dropped, but our salaries have raised is the environment, we want to consume the food. In the real estate. There's a lot of things that go into opening a restaurant that doesn't necessarily go into the cost, that goes into the cost of the burger, but not a direct cost to that burger.
- [109:11]
A
Like real. Like rent?
- [109:12]
B
Yeah, like rent. You know, it cost me $7 million to build this building, you know, and another $2 million for the land. So we're all in at like nine and a half million dollars. And so that's, that's a lot of mortgage, that's a lot of rent that I'd have to pay or any other restaurant that comes in here has to pay. And so that goes into the cost of that, that food supply. And so what do we do? What do we do? We try to go out and find the cheapest plant, cheapest ingredients to use the mass produced ingredients. Because we've spent all this extra money on the actual building, the, the fluff of the building. You know, 100 years ago they didn't, you know, they, if there were restaurants and there were restaurants, but you know, you consumed your meals at your dinner table at home, in your home or you know, at a saloon or a small restaurant that was probably in the front section of someone's house. And so we've started spending, you know, is it, is it really Important that we have 2 inch maple top, you know, tabletops to eat the food off of, you know, and so I think that restaurateurs, we spend so much money making sure that we have a, a beautiful building to serve our hamburgers in, you know, that, that, you know, it's in this conundrum now. Now we have to buy the cheapest food because we've overspent on something that didn't really matter on what we're trying to do.
- [110:24]
A
Yeah. And it's all connected.
- [110:26]
B
It is.
- [110:26]
A
And it's all connected. This has been so much fun. I do want to get like, if there's one thing we can do, the mission statement is to inspire, empower and transform the industry. We inspire with stories. You shared your story. It was inspirational. We empower with knowledge and we transform with, I think, community, but also going into the future intentionally having a shared vision for a better future. So along that lines, like when I say that what is a better future? What is one thing we could all be doing better as the independent operator to move in a better future for ourselves and the communities we're in.
- [110:58]
B
You know, I think it's important that, you know, we just concentrate on what, what got us here. You know, if it's, if it's a great hamburger, if you're a restaurant, a great hamburger restaurant, concentrate on the great hamburger. If you're a great seafood restaurant, concentrate on great seafood. Don't worry about all the stuff around it, you know, that'll take care of itself.
- [111:15]
A
Do one thing really well.
- [111:16]
B
Do one thing really well. Yes.
- [111:17]
A
Yeah. So is there one thing in terms of where you are to today that you've recently adopted that's really moved the needle, whether it be top of line or bottom of line that you can share with us, whether it's a technology, a practice, a system, a mindset. What's, what's moving the needle?
- [111:32]
B
You know, for, for us, it's that central kitchen, centralizing production, you know, still keeping that scratch prep recipes, but you know, centralizing them.
- [111:42]
A
Economies of scale.
- [111:43]
B
Economies, absolutely.
- [111:44]
A
Yeah. You mentioned combi oven today. When did you start using Combi oven?
- [111:48]
B
We started using combi ovens about three years ago.
- [111:49]
A
Which, how's that?
- [111:50]
B
Which is great. You know, I, I'd use combi ovens in my past and other restaurants and things like that. And they're not cheap. You know, they're $35,000 for a nice combi oven. But the great thing about the combo is you put the recipe in there, you don't keep coming back and open the door and check the bacon. You put it in their bacon and the bacon comes out perfect every time.
- [112:08]
A
So how would you say you're getting that money back?
- [112:11]
B
Yeah, I think it's consistent. I think it's not yield loss. We're not overcooking items. You know, I, especially in the seafood business, we look at yields a lot. You know, if something drops 2 or 3% yield, you know, when you're paying $20 a pound for scallops and you lose 2, 3%, that adds up real fast.
- [112:27]
A
Yeah. What about outsourcing? You use the word partner a lot today. Is there a recent company you've partnered with outsourced to do something better?
- [112:40]
B
Oh, that's a tough one.
- [112:41]
A
It could be a lawyer, it could be a designer, it could be a marketer, it could be anything that you're not doing in house.
- [112:49]
B
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that, when you talk about branding, you know, we, we still use the same printing company we used when we first started for us and, and he understands our brand. So the other day for, for St. Patrick's Day, I had him take our logo and, you know, turn it green. And so he really understands what our brand is. And when we do menus, he really kind of gets what we do on our menus and stuff like that. So for us, when we outsource, that's something that we tried very briefly in the beginning was to print our own menus in house and design them. We realized that wasn't something that we were good at. So we found this local company that does all of our printing and does our design work now.
- [113:32]
A
And give him a shout out.
- [113:33]
B
Yeah, Gam. You know, Nathaniel Grant at Gam Gam. Great Gam Grant. I'm not sure what Gam starts for, but, but he's, he's a great, he's a great gam over in Sterling. And he's, he's a very pet focused business. They all bring their dogs in. So we started a couple, couple six months ago, we started saving the salmon skins from the salmon we make. And I'll show you one after the show. And we start drying out the salmon skins and his dog is on the picture, but he as a partner, he presented all this marketing, all these stickers for the packaging and stuff. Didn't charge us anything. We put his dog on the, on there. But, you know, those are the kind of partnerships we look for.
- [114:13]
A
Yeah. Do you agree restaurant owners need to talk to each other more?
- [114:15]
B
Oh, absolutely. We're so closed vested.
- [114:18]
A
Yeah. What's one conversation you think restaurant owners need to start having with each other,
- [114:22]
B
just about how they're doing, you know, and recognizing. I think now we're all not doing very well. We're all watching our p. L's a lot closer, and to recognize that we're not the only one that's not doing well right now.
- [114:30]
A
Precisely why I start every episode asking my guests to share their percent mark profit and their. Their cash flow so we can get some transparency to understand we're not in this alone. And that if some people are doing really well, like, why, why.
- [114:44]
B
Absolutely.
- [114:44]
A
And how do we share that information so we can all do better? And I think that people get worried. They get worried that, you know, competition, but I think it's going to make us all stronger. It's going to make us all better.
- [114:53]
B
And we.
- [114:54]
A
Yeah, we need to be transparent.
- [114:55]
B
Absolutely.
- [114:56]
A
What's one thing about your business? A value, a process, a system that's truly uncommon, that makes you unstoppable?
- [115:03]
B
I think it's. I still love what I do. I don't do it for the money. I get up every morning excited to come to work, excited to see what's going to be the challenge today. You know, the shifts are never without incident. And no matter what happens, we're going to get knocked down, but we're going to get up and we're going to have a better day.
- [115:21]
A
The mission statement, again, is to change the world through inspiring, empowering, and transforming the industry. And we're going to do that by transforming one owner at a time. They hear this, they want to get a little bit better. We elevate them. But how have you personally transformed. How are you a better Man Today, 16 years into being a restaurateur than you were when you got started?
- [115:37]
B
You know, I think I. I think I've learned how to not carry the weight of the entire restaurant on my own shoulders, because when you do that, you're more likely to carry the emotion also. But to understand we're all, you know, all 240 employees that I have that work for this concept that we've been blessed to be able to create. We're all in it together, and we're all trying to make it better one day, one shift, one plate at a time.
- [116:03]
A
If you got the news you'd be leaving this world tomorrow, all the memories of you, your work, and 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.
- [116:18]
B
I think it's for the newest generation, the young people that if they've worked for us, that I've been able to take, Take, teach them something that they'll take with them throughout the rest of their career. That's right. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, that that last plate of food that you had in my restaurants, it's created some kind of memorable experience for you.
- [116:36]
A
That's two.
- [116:36]
B
Yep. And I think from an investor standpoint, that whatever we create is able to transform a future owner, future restaurant. Some of the wisdom that we have been able to share to make them a better restaurant owner.
- [116:49]
A
That's three. This has been a lot of fun. I mentioned at the beginning of today's show that I find my future guests through word of mouth, through referral. This is a maritime hypocrisy. I think that the industry knows best, who should be made an example of. So on that note, of people who are doing it right, who are making a difference, who deserve to be made an example of. Somebody, if they were a guest on the show, you'd be like, I absolutely want to hear what this person has to say. Who is that person for you? Who do you think I should talk to?
- [117:16]
B
Oh, that's a tough one. You know, I think a lot about my mentors and over the people I've had over the years and things like that. You know, I think that, you know, I could go either someone that's taught me something or hopefully someone I've taught. But, you know, I've been blessed to have seven employees throughout the last 16 years to actually go on and open their own restaurant. And we have a local gentleman who was a kitchen manager for me for 11 years. He left three years ago, and it was not a good. It was not a good time for us for him to leave, but he left to open up his own restaurant, and he's still open. He's going into year three now. And so Felix Hernandez, he's over in Lovattsville from Virginia. He's a great guy. He's a great chef, and he's got a great restaurant over there, Cowboy Cafe. And he's doing great things, and it's a small restaurant, but he's. He's. He's doing awesome. And, you know, hopefully I was part of that success of him being able to open that restaurant. And he's a. You know, he came over here from Mexico 25, 27 years ago, and he worked his butt off.
- [118:07]
A
That's what I love about this industry is that it's truly like the, the lowest hanging fruit to like to live the American dream.
- [118:15]
B
Absolutely.
- [118:15]
A
You know, so Felix Hernandez, Cowboy Cafe. Look out. I'm coming after you, connect with you while I'm in town. Maybe not this time. I, I'm forced to drive through this part of the country whenever I'm going back home. So I make passes through Washington often. Would love to connect. And how can we connect with you if we enjoyed today's conversation? Maybe we want to come check out your restaurants. Maybe we want to come work for you or just ask a question.
- [118:38]
B
Well, you know, we're very reachable. Obviously we're on all the social media platforms. Ford's Fish. Ford's Fish. On Instagram fordfish shack.com My email, Tony TNY fordsfish shack.com or just, you know, stop in sometime and set at the bar and hopefully I'll, I'll step up next to you and we'll, we'll catch
- [118:56]
A
up and we'll have those links in the show notes. If you want to just check out those show notes. We'll have the links to connect there as well. And I literally cannot do what I do without people like you letting me sit across from you, ask you all these personal questions, air out your laundry and learn from your experiences. And, and thank you for being transparent. Thank you for being generous with your knowledge. There is no questioning. You are unstoppable.
- [119:21]
B
Thank you.
- [119:22]
A
Cheers.
- [119:23]
B
Cheers.
- [119:23]
A
There's another episode wrapped up here at Restaurant Unstoppable. Special thanks to our guest today, Tony Stanford. And I've mentioned that I'll be going from two episodes to one episode a week going forward for the foreseeable future. And the reason for that is after 13 years, almost 1300 episodes, being a student learning, it's time to slow down, it's time to digest. It's time to start distilling the biggest lessons. And it's time to double down and go deeper on the relationships that have had the biggest impact on me. So that's what the future of Restaurant Unstoppable looks like. And the podcast will be still going strong, one episode a week. And here is my process. The podcast is my research. It is the way I find these amazing people, through word of mouth, talking to people. And the what's behind that is what I want to work on. Restaurant Stoppable Network. And that's where I'm going to be going. Back to past guests, back to the specialist. Because here's the thing. I believe success lies and who not, how And I have a whole massive network of who's that I want to go deeper with and promote and lift up. And I think that if I can find these people and put them on a platform and elevate them, then I can elevate you. That's the vision of Restaurant Stoppable Network going forward is slowing down, creating space for leading restaurateurs to share what they've learned in a lifetime of leading successful restaurant groups across the country. And I want to give you access to these people, and you will become the average of those you surround yourself with. And it's not just what they know. It's. It's who they are, what are their values. And that stuff will rub off on you. Head over to restaurantstoppable.com live to be a part of these live conversations. A lot of people listen to the show. Very few people actually join the conversation. And that's where growth is, that's where transformation is, is surrounding yourself with these people and letting them lift you up. What are you waiting for? Again, head over to restaurantunstoppable.com live to join the conversation. And a reminder. Tomorrow we pop off the Vibe Coding 101 course with Albert Sanchez. This is a beautiful example of finding people that have unique skills and then putting them on a platform to share those skills with the industry. I think that we need to come together as an independent industry to move this thing. If you're interested in vibe coding your own software, head over to restaurantstoppable. Com vibecoding. We'll see you there.