Ashley Morris: Product-Market Fit Forgives Every Mistake

0:00This is crazy. Right now, most restaurant owners are using AI to write Instagram captions. That's like hiring a Michelin chef to microwave a Hot Pocket. You've got the most powerful marketing tool ever built, and you're using it to punch up a post that nobody even asked for. Stop underutilizing AI. It could become a full marketing machine for your restaurant. And in this month's five-day restaurant marketing masterclass, I'm going to show you exactly how, step by step. I'm going to show you how to use AI to bring in guests on schedule. I'm going to show you how to turn a first visit into a fourth and how to fill seats on repeat without living inside of your phone.

0:41We're going to use the same tools you already have and create a completely different result. It's going to be five days. There is zero cost associated with it, but seating is limited. So I want you to go to restaurantbusinessschool.com to register your free spot today. Now here we go. To me, it is singularly focused around one major belief. If you don't have this belief, figure out how to get it. It goes back to clarity of vision. When you know the what, when you are so crystal clear about what you want, the how works itself out. Welcome to Full Comp, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry.

1:26featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators. Served up on the house.

1:35What if the reason you're surviving your own mistakes has nothing to do with how smart you are and everything to do with the product you sell? Ashley Morris spent years in finance before he bought the sandwich shop he was obsessed with in college. Today, he's the CEO of Capriati's and WingZone. He'll tell you the real asset he bought was product market fit so undeniable, it gave him the room to make every mistake in the book. In this conversation, we get into why product market fit forgives the mistakes that sink everyone else. Why owning your data means nothing until you know what to do with it and what actually transfers when you scale into a second brand.

2:12If you're grinding against the current and you can't figure out why, this one's gonna show you where to look first.

2:25I definitely didn't have plans on doing it when I was young. Probably would have lost the bet from you if you would have said, you know, are you going to be in the restaurant business when you grow up? I mean, like any kid, my first couple of jobs were in restaurants and, you know, unskilled labor. But my background is finance. From the time I was a young adult, I wanted to pursue finance and really be on Wall Street, so to speak, or do things in investment banking or financial services. I hadn't decided yet. And so as I started to pursue my passion of finance and go to college, I got introduced to Capriati's from my best friend who I lived with.

3:02And he stopped me at the door one day when I was coming home and he said, hey, man, have you ever tried this place called Capriati's? I tried it today. It's absolutely fantastic. And he knew I'm a lover of sandwiches and said, you got to go try it. And so a couple of days later, he stopped me again. It was like, hey, did you go eat this place? I go, no, man, I went to school and I went to work. Like, I'll get there. And so he's like, you know, I've eaten a sandwich four days in a row. I'm taking you there. And so he literally grabbed me. Yeah, he grabbed me. It is like we're going. And so we went and he had been introduced to a sandwich that was on the menu called the Bobby, which was homemade turkey, homemade stuffing, cranberry sauce and mayonnaise.

3:41And so it was like Thanksgiving in a sandwich. And he's like, you got to try this thing. And I looked at it and said, mayonnaise and cranberry sauce and stuffing on a sandwich. I'm out. I'm getting the cheesesteak. And so like under protest, he and I had this like healthy debate about what to get. And so I got this cheesesteak and I'm a huge lover of cheesesteaks, would eat them anytime I'd see them on a menu. And when I took a bite of this cheesesteak, it was literally the best I'd ever had in my life. And it wasn't even close. And I immediately fell in love with the product. But again, I was really just pursuing my finance degree.

4:14And so as I started to do that, I became a portfolio manager for Wells Fargo. About 25 years old, I was running about a hundred million dollar portfolio for them. So I was making a lot of money. And my best friend and I had still always kind of talked about wanting to be in business together. And he was in his respective career. I was doing great in mine. And I thought, hey, we've got no kids. We've got no wives. Let's do it. Let's do something on the side. Let's have a side hustle. We had this strategy session and we said, we're both going me at the public library on like a Wednesday or whatever and bring all of our ideas.

4:46And I remember walking into the library that day feeling like a total failure as a friend because I had only brought one idea with me. And that idea was Capriati's. And as we sat down to talk, my buddy looks at me and goes, I feel like a failure as a friend. I only brought one idea. And I said, oh yeah, what's that idea? And he said, I think we should open a Capriati's. And so literally it was one of those things where we were highly aligned right from jump. And I was like, okay, let's figure this out. And so we went and bought a franchise. Can we pause there for just a second? Yeah. So the reason I want to pause is this.

5:17I mean, especially with your background, right? Being in finance, one of the things that you were taught that you were trained to do is figure out whether a company is investable or not. Right. And when you're buying a franchise, you're investing in a brand. A sandwich is not a moat. Right. And Capriati's at the time wasn't large enough that you would say, oh my goodness, it's not like buying a national subway franchise, right? It's not like there was this name recognition globally. So in your mind, as a young person, I'm sure that there's excitement and enthusiasm for the sandwich. I'm sure when you and your buddy looked at each other, you weren't like, I'm sure everyone will eat these sandwiches five times a week like we do.

5:58What did you think was investable about the brand? So let's start with We were 23 and 25 respectively. And so 98 % naivety, 2 % confidence in the fact that we knew who we were as human beings, right? And so honestly, if you sat me down and you put a 10K in front of me and you said, do comprehensive analysis on this public company and tell me if it's worth the price earnings ratio, I could do that very easily. when it came to Capriati's, there was none of that. It was just straight up. We love the brand. We love the product. And we just let's get involved and let's see what happens. Right. I don't think we had any more than that really going for us at the time.

6:41But what I did know was, is I had the money, I had the resources that if it was a failure, it wasn't going to like ruin our lives. So it was a calculated risk in that regard, but definitely vastly different than what I would do for my clients day in and day out. And so now we're older, right? We're no longer in our 20s. So when you look back at that, and like, obviously, that was a solid investment for you, Ashley. Why was it? Before you, you ended up buying the brand outright, but as a franchisee, what did make it investable? And what made the brand work for you that you were able to scale up as an individual franchisee?

7:18What did they have in place? And then what value were you able to add? But so, again, you have to start with the man. And anyone who knows me really well knows that if I set my mind to something, I'm going to accomplish it. Right. Like I just have that mindset and probably to a fault, truth be told. But it's there and it's always been there. And so when we decided to do this, it was it doesn't matter what the guy next door is doing. It doesn't matter what the AUV, the chain is. We're going to go set out for ourselves and we're going to go build this thing to the level at which we believe it deserves to be at.

7:50Right. And so it started first and foremost with this clarity of vision, clarity of mindset, which I just intuitively do very well. And so buying into this brand, what did it have? It had a recipe book and it had a name. I mean, the rest of the infrastructure really didn't exist. It was really, we signed a franchise agreement on our, on the owner's living room table. And here's a hat and an apron. Godspeed, figure it out. So it's like, you know, there really wasn't anything you would see in a sophisticated franchise system that could increase the likelihood of success. And in fact, you know, you want to talk about hard truth.

8:28So the store we were building, we hired a contractor and the first thing he did was steal$50 ,000 from us and go out of business and leave town. So I went back to the franchisor and I found her. I said, what do I do? And she's like, it's not my problem. I mean, if you're too stupid to pick a contractor, sucks to be you, right? Go pick another contractor. don't open the store. So, I mean, we were making mistake after mistake after mistake. And really, again, I think it was just tremendous desire to be successful and confidence in our abilities to figure it out that we were willing to go through the 10 ,000 hours it took to become an expert in the business.

9:03So that's, you know, where we were way back then. Obviously, as we became a franchisee, there was a three-year period between like 05 and 08 where we were franchisees that became multi-unit franchisees. So again, you know, sort of to my character, as I started to build the first one, I went back to the founder and I said, hey, how many can I build? And she's like, you're one and done. You can have your store and that's it. And I said, well, can I make acquisition? And she said, well, we can't prevent you from doing that, but we're not gonna allow you to build any more new ones. So I immediately sent a fax on the fax machine to every store that just said, I'll buy your store for cash.

9:37And we got one to accept that. And it happened to be the store that was the very closest to the one we were building. So we actually went from zero to two overnight. And you want to talk about a learning curve. I mean, again, with no support from Franchisor, the first six months, we were just getting crushed. We're just losing money, losing money, losing money, losing money. And then finally, I was like, all right, time out. We need to figure this out and really spend time because it was passive for me also. Like it was passive for Jason, was passive for me. But my girlfriend at the time was the manager of the business and she quit her job to be the manager.

10:10And so I kind of stepped back. I took two weeks off of Wells Fargo, got in the store and I'm like, let me just figure this out. And then we started to be able to manage our business and we started making money. And then within a year, we were making the right money. Like how? Like what did you do? Like everybody listening is like, what are you doing this weekend? Can you come look at my business? You're like, I took a three day weekend and I put it together and then it was profitable, right? That statistic that just came out, 41 % of all restaurants break even or lose money in the United States.

10:41What did you do? Well, we had zero tools, right? And so first and foremost, that's really what I did. So I got in there. I worked in the store for a week. I came back and I said, OK, I'm going to create a food cost modeling spreadsheet and I'm going to create a labor matrix for you to follow. And then my managers are going to run these metrics like we are going to. I just built the P &L basically after learning the business. And I said, look, from here on out, food cost is going to be X, labor is going to be Y, and the rest of it we'll worry about later. And after we did that, that's where we turned a losing business into a successful business because those are the two things you can control.

11:17In the restaurant business, you have controllables, you have non-controllables, semi-controllables. I just went right after the controllables. And I said, we're going to manage cogs and we're going to manage labor. And if we can do that on the most optimal level, and the only way to know that is to know your theoretical food costs, right? And so I had to build all of that in. And I just basically built this thing that said, based on how many sandwiches we're selling, this should be our food cost. This is what you're going to achieve. And again, we're just throwing money out the window. I see that a lot in restaurants, that people who don't have visibility on their P &L is very difficult to make money.

11:52It's impossible, honestly, to make money if you don't know your expenses. So that's what I did in the two weeks. And it worked very well. Now, did you have the top line in place then? I'm assuming you did, right? If you were able to turn it around, you guys were making good money. You were just spending it. Yeah, exactly. So the store we opened opened up at System Average. The store we acquired was slightly better than System Average. We had the top line in a spot that you could definitely make money. We just had to figure out how to do it. And then we eventually opened them. Once we figured that out, we opened a third store.

12:24We got the owner to allow us to open a third store because concentrically it was like in our trade area and probably wouldn't have cannibalized anybody else. And that store opened with the highest top line of the three. And we already had our controls in place. So at that moment in time, we had figured the business out. And you could have probably stopped there or grown incrementally and then it would have just been passive income because you had a full time job. But you decided to buy the franchise. Ironically, a few months before the crash of 2008. So smart, right? There you go. I'm talking about all that intelligence.

13:01Who knew? I can remember sitting with my business partners January 1st of 2020, saying like, this is going to be our year. You never know what's around the corner. There were gifts that came out of the pandemic as it relates to operations and repositioning the industry. And I think the same is true of the 2008 financial crisis. You bought the franchise and now you own it outright. What did you learn through that crisis that probably benefited you in the long term? Well, we put the company into sort of proverbial escrow, if you will, early in 2007 with the closing date, Jan 108. That's what the founder wanted.

13:42So over that time, we had about nine months. So over that nine month period, you know, Jason and I, there was just no way to get an education on franchising. The company was already franchising, right? It was 35 to 38 operating units in two regions. And so we went to Barnes and Nobles, which existed at the time, and basically bought every franchise book we could find and read them. So as we were going through that time, I started to build this business plan that was comprehensive and it rolled out five years of how we're going to do it with ads. I mean, it was for what we needed. It was perfect.

14:14And so we closed on the company, Jan 108. We had the limited knowledge of reading books, no real knowledge. And three months later, the world ended financially, right? And so within 90 days of buying the company, my business plan had gone into the trash because for 32 years, the company had never seen negative same-store sales. And now the company was seeing minus 10 in terms of same-store sales. And we were undercapitalized. We were underknowledged. We were underexperienced. franchisees were yelling and screaming at us looking for an answer. And we had owned this thing for 90 days and didn't even have a corporate office yet.

14:50Right. We were trying to build this thing again from scratch. And so it was like, OK, hold on, take a deep breath. Let's just put the blinders on and figure out how to save what we had, which I think in a roundabout way, to your point, it was an unintentional hard knocks lesson that really, I think, set a great tone for Jason and I's ability to run this company because instead of trying to go out and have all these grandiose plans of growing, doing all these things that we, you know, sort of manufactured in our own mind as to what was possible, we got to learn the business for real over that year and a half.

15:24And so we put our heads down. We said, first thing we're going to do is never sacrifice on quality. We're not going to do discounting like all of our competitive set. We're just going to execute the brand as well as we could. And so we sat with franchise partners and said, look, we cannot save our way out of this problem. Let's create an advertising cooperative and let's all pull our money and actually advertise for the first time effectively in the 32 year history of Capriati's. And so we did one or two really good decision making processes that really pay dividends. And by the end of 2008, we actually turned our minus 10 comps into plus one or two.

15:57And in 2009, we actually grew comp sales. So we got really narrow in our focus and became experts in our business for the first time ever. Because again, like you said, this was passive. I didn't quit my job at Wells Fargo until January 3rd, 2008. And so like this was literally the first time I was running this thing. And it was great and also very stressful. But it was great that we got this forced lesson. So this story could have gone a very different direction, right? And that's typically the way it goes, right? Two best friends who don't know shit about shit decide to get into an industry they know nothing about because they like to eat food too.

16:35We've seen this thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, and it doesn't work out well, but it worked out well for you. And you were able to do it without diving into the business, right? Oh, I'll cover the dishwasher today. Why? Have you and Jason thought about why when this is such a common narrative that works out so poorly, why it worked out well for you? To me, it is singularly focused around one major belief. And if you have this belief, it will make sense to you. If you don't have this belief, figure out how to get it. Again, it goes back to clarity of vision. When you know the what, when you are so fucking crystal clear about what you want, the how works itself out.

17:25It really does. So for us, we were very good and continue to be very good about clarity of that what, you know, OK, we're going in this direction. It doesn't matter what happens to us. We'll figure it out because our goal is what our goal is. And if you never stop working towards that goal, you can't fail. You just have to keep going and going and going. And yeah, look, dude, I could tell you 10 ,000 ways not to build a successful restaurant company. The first 10 years of us doing it, we failed 99 % of the time. Everything we did was wrong. We had to go out and raise capital five additional times.

18:00We had to go out and do other things more times than we wanted. We had to close restaurants we shouldn't have had to close. We had to close our own restaurants because I made stupid mistakes. All of those things happened. And at no point were we scaling this business correctly in the beginning. But we're here now, right? We did it. And that's the point. The point is just staying clear and getting your conscious and your subconscious aligned on a goal and not worrying about the how. There's infinite ways to make something happen. Just stay clear. As I was preparing for this interview, I was thinking about a conversation I had with a new client recently.

18:34The one thing I want to highlight, which is actually the thing I think that you bought when you bought the initial franchise, is product market fit. There's this great marketing quote that says, product market fit is like stepping on a landmine. I talk to people all the time and I say, well, have you achieved product market fit? And they're like, I think so. And I'm like, then you haven't. Because you know, you look at like Howlin Rays in Los Angeles. It's like 12 years in and they still have a line out the door every day of the week, seven days a week. That is product market fit. It is undeniable.

19:07You never have to wonder whether you have it or not. I think that one of the reasons that you had the grace to make so many mistakes is because you had this seamless product market fit. The client that I was speaking with recently, she's in this place that I think a lot of people find themselves where she's middling and she's middling because she almost has product market fit. She's close, right? But she's not all the way there. And until you have that seamless product market fit, it's like pushing against the current. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. And even when you have it, it's really difficult to repeat it outside of a trade area that you found it.

19:52Like, to your point in LA, what works in LA doesn't always work in Iowa. What works in Iowa rarely works in LA, right? And so it's like, you have these different geographies. And so then you take the brand and you say, OK, well, we're predominantly cheesesteak and this cheesesteak is knock your socks off and it originated in the Philadelphia DMA in Wilmington, Delaware. How is that going to do in Spokane, Washington, where you're about as far away from the mid Atlantic as you can get? And how do you create that same product fit? It's tough. It is tough. And I think, you know, one of the things that the restaurant industry does when you spend enough time in it, it kind of ruins restaurants for you because, you know, when you walk into a restaurant, you just, you see it differently.

20:35And like, once you've seen something, it's really hard to unsee it. So I would assume that you, like so many of us, you patronize a ton of independent restaurants and we're going to get into wing zone and how, you know, you acquired and scaled that up as well, but you had this amazing worldview, right? And it's super broad because, you know, you've had access to so many franchisees and so many markets. What are the things that you think are the greatest hurdles for independence that you see them struggling with that they might not see themselves? Well, look, I think today, if I was putting on my independent hat, which again, I have that experience as a franchisee who was independent because there really wasn't a support center.

21:16I think that you really need to make sure if your head doesn't think in numbers and you don't have that financial acumen to be able to really understand your P &L, understand how to get data and insights from your restaurant and from your guests, then you need to get somebody with you doing that or hire some outside company to provide you that data because today the world is moving so fast. 1976, the world moved relatively slow. Even 2000, the world moved slow compared to today. But today the world is moving so fast and AI is pushing the limits on what's possible that if you're not constantly getting that data and you're not constantly looking at those insights, you're going to get cooked at some point because scaled brands are.

22:04And so if you're an independent, you're always up against a scaled brand, whether you want to believe it or not. Right. There's a type of people who are completely disinterested in eating fast food chains. And they're like, I want to go to the local guy. Right. I want to go to the local this. I want to go to the local that. Yeah, that's great. but it's not reality for you to build a successful business for longer than about seven years. That mentality, you have about a seven-year life cycle and then you're done. And that's why restaurants fail. You are competing against chains because those are the only things that last longer than seven years.

22:38So if they're out there getting data insights, collecting information on your customer as well as their customer, I mean, today we know with credit card data. If you come to our restaurant once, I know where you've eaten in the last year all over the place. I know how many times you've come. I know what you've ordered. I know what you reorder. I know what your propensity to eat sandwiches is on a weekly basis. Like if you don't have that data, you got to get it. Okay. But that's half the story. I think that, you know, you get, you get a toast when to say, oh, you get a ton of data. Don't you think that the bigger hurdle is knowing what to do with the data?

23:14What are you doing with the data? Once you know where people get their nails done and all of this through the credit card data. What are you doing with it to build a deeper relationship with these people? How do you think you're leveraging and monetizing the data better than the next guy? Yeah. I mean, that is the second hurdle, right? So you're right. I give you the entrance fee, but you still got to run the race. So we think about it two ways. Number one, how do we create brand loyalty, right? How do we create brand loyalists and how do we use the data to get these people into our own loyalty channels.

23:48So to your point, Toast has a loyalty program. Anyone who's ever gone to a Toast register, they flip it and they go, you want to put your phone number in and save 10%. Okay. So now they're in the loyalty program. What are you specifically doing to engage them on a regular basis to keep you top of mind and keep them coming in other than just offering them the standard 10 % discount? Because all you've really done, if you're not engaging them, is just give them 10 % off, which isn't a great economic decision. So for us, we're taking this data and what we're saying is we're using it for menu development.

24:20We're saying, hey, when somebody comes in and orders a Bobby, their likelihood to return in the next two weeks is high. But if they're ordering a tuna sub, then they may not show up for 90 days. And so you take that information and you look at it to do menu development. And then again, you also look at how do I now create loyalists in this brand? How do I get these people from here into our loyalty channel because that's where I can talk to them often. That's where I can really engage them. That's where I can start to storytell and say, hey, you want to know why you keep coming back here? I'm going to tell you why, because we're the only brand in the country that takes whole turkeys and slow cooks them for 12 hours every night in the restaurant you're eating at, pulls them apart, puts them in your sandwich.

25:00You're eating turkey with one ingredient. You're not eating some slimy processed turkey, right? So now you can engage your customer. Now you can use that data to really go in and say, I'm going to turn you into a lifer. And when I do that, I have a higher likelihood of getting more money out of that customer and keeping the customer long term. So yeah, that's critically important. Let's talk about wing zone. So as an outsider, you can look at that and you could say that that was an opportunity or that was a distraction. And I would think that for you guys, once you had reached a certain level of success, there were a bunch of opportunities.

25:34I'm sure that maybe you sought out wing zone, but I'm sure that there were a million wing zones out there that were reaching out to you saying, hey, what do you think? When did you know you were ready to grow outside the brand and what benefits did you see in growing outside the brand relative to just continuing to grow the thing that you knew worked? As I started to build the Capriati's infrastructure, right, the backbone of a franchise concept is its support center. In order for us, what we did in like 2016, 2017, I had hired a franchise development legend. His name is David Bloom. He built so many chains and like in the industry, he's a rock star.

26:13Quickly, he built this incredible franchise development platform that was starting to generate tremendous lead flow. And then he was starting to sign a lot of deals. And so very quickly, our pipeline became very vast to the tune of like, you know, over a hundred stores in the development pipeline. And so what that did was that gave us confidence to go forward, invest into an infrastructure that could support opening 30 to 50 restaurants a year. And so now you have more real estate people and more construction people and more trainers and more director of franchise people. And so all of a sudden your infrastructure becomes more vast.

26:46Right. And so we did that in 2018 and 2019. We leveled that up and we had this significant infrastructure. And then 2020 came and COVID hit. And so we kind of looked at it and said, we have a choice to make. We are no longer going to be opening 30 to 50 restaurants a year through this period. We didn't know how long COVID was going to last, but we certainly saw the writing on the wall. And so it was like, do we let go of all these people that we are just brought on and created this organization for? Or do we figure out how to utilize, cross utilize them? And so the idea was, what if we were able to take another brand on?

27:21What if we were able to take a brand that was, you know, much smaller than us, that was sort of not growing, had no development pipeline, bring them in. And now we can use our infrastructure to grow that side by side. And that was the thesis, right? And so we wanted to diversify. Obviously, it was pizza or chicken or burger and burgers too close to sandwich for us. And so we looked at chicken and then we looked at wings specifically because Wingstop had just been doing incredible thing for the last 15 years. I mean, Wingstop's been a darling in the restaurant industry, right? And so everyone in the world's eating Wingstop.

27:51And when you go to Wingstop, you realize one thing. Yeah, the wings are great, but they take an hour or they take 20 minutes or they take 15 minutes or they take 30 minutes, depending on how busy it is and that you couldn't get delivered. And so we started to look at how can we create a strength out of their competitive weakness, which was let's develop a wing concept or buy a wing concept and make it really fast. Like you should be able to get wings in 30 to 45 seconds or, you know, that was the concept, but it didn't happen. It was more like four minutes. But the idea was let's get this out there really fast.

28:22And so we actually started to look for either creating our own or buying something that gave us a head start. And WingZone happened to be on the block for sale. And we looked at it and said, oh, it's 30 years old. And I'd really seen its heyday 15 years prior to us buying it. It was a little bit like a falling knife, right? They had at one point had 150 stores. When we were looking at it, it was sub 50. And there was no growth pipeline. The brand was in decay. And we said, OK, well, we have this 30 year hit head start. Let's buy it and see if we can completely turn it around and turn it into what we wanted.

28:54And that was the thesis. So utilizing the infrastructure and then taking something and growing it in an industry that really operated in under a monopoly. Right. I mean, it's a wing stop or no one. And so could we you know, the thesis was could we be a strong number two player in the space? Could we be the undisputed number two? And that was the idea. And what did you learn through the process? You know, when I went from nightlife into fine dining and to fast casual. Every time I made the transition, like I knew absolutely without a doubt that there will be all of these transferable skills that I had acquired along the way only to discover sadly that there were few that it was always starting at zero.

29:34Was wing zone starting at zero? What was transferable? And then what did you learn through that process, they make Capriottis better. Yeah. So I totally agree with you. We looked at it and said, in order for the skills to be transferable, what we must do is make sure we're not operating too far outside of our expertise, right? So the wing zone that we designed was going to be 12 to 1400 square feet, which is the same as a Capriottis. The equipment package and the line was going to be similar. The labor model was going to be similar. The food cost model was going to be similar. So effectively, we were operating a brand that was very similar with just a different product offering.

30:15And so it was like, yeah, that's badass. Let's go. This is going to transfer. And to your point, we did all that. We spent a year and a half, two years developing this thing. And we went out and we launched it. And the world was like, it's not Capriati's and it's a totally different brand. And so you go out and you go, holy crap, everything we thought was going to happen didn't really happen to our liking. Now what? And what you quickly realize is it doesn't matter that those skills moved over. You now need a real operations team for this brand. You now need real capital for this brand. You now need to go build a brand.

30:47And you're going to build a brand from scratch because this other brand geographically and maybe one or two markets had name recognition, but nowhere else on the planet it did. So are you ready to go build Capriottis and WingZone side by side and double the amount of work thus making your kids and your wife very happy. Right, for sure. In the beginning of it, it was you and Jason probably sitting there smoking cigars going, how hard could this possibly be? It was so worse than that too. It was like the shareholders and board members going do you really have what it takes to do this? We're like, hell yeah.

31:25You look back now and you're like, well shit. This is really hard. Let's talk about Jason for a minute. So like, you know, you guys started as best friends and you've been partners for a really long time now. Most partnerships don't last this long statistically. And the fact that you've been able to maintain a partnership and a friendship, I would assume. The other thing is this, man, who I was in my early 20s is certainly not who I am in my mid 40s. And so either you grow together or you grow apart. And then you think about like trying to grow a business and how that impacts you as well, because no different than having a child, this is a living, breathing thing with a set of needs on its own.

32:06So you're changing. Jason's changing. The businesses are evolving. They're all problematic because they're all fucking problem factories. How have you guys managed to maintain, if not healthy, a productive relationship over the course of the past, let's call it two decades? Yeah, get asked that question a lot. And first of all, it starts with the fact that, yeah, we've been best friends since we were 10 years old. I still consider my best friend in the whole world today. He's my brother from another mother. That's how I describe it. But our skill sets are vastly different. We are not one plus one equals two.

32:43We are one plus one equals three all the way. And so when we were going into this, even when we first got our franchise, I said to him, bro, we have to promise each other we can never not be friends. So let's just play out the exit strategy right this very second, because what I can promise you, Jason, is that we'll never let money come between our relationship. So let's just figure out an exit right now. Let's pretend it didn't work and let's write that down and agree to it. And so before we got in, we knew the exit. Right. If the franchise didn't work, no harm, no foul. We close the shop. We sell the shop, whatever.

33:16We recover what we can recover. We give ourselves a hug. We go on and we stay best friends. As we got into this role, as we expanded our role into, OK, this is no longer passive. This is now a career. We added a line to our proverbial agreement. Yes, we have an exit plan. Let's work that exit plan out. But also, we need a hierarchy and we have to both agree to the hierarchy. And so what we agreed together is that at the time I was putting more money into the deal than he was. And so he said, look, you actually can have the final say. If we both disagree, we can't get each other to agree. And you say go, we go.

33:52And we shook on that. And to his credit, that's been his word for 16 years. And he's never wavered from it, not even once. But he also knew his best friend, which is in my just general personality type. I'm very collaborative as a leader. And so if I'm in there and you're going, hey, you're a dumbass. Don't do this. I don't hear. Well, you don't know what you're talking about. I hear. Well, then let's keep figuring out why, because at some point you're going to say, yeah, I agree. Or you're going to say still disagree, but at least you're not a dumbass. And so I can live with those two scenarios.

34:25Right. And so there's been times like maybe two times in 16 years where he's done something and I've done something. We got to a point where it's like, dude, we are so far away from each other in terms of where we think this thing can go. Ash, you're going to have to make the call because there's there's no way for us to figure this out. But other than that, we've always got to alignment. So it's worked out. Right. And so it worked because we had clear checks and balances. And I tell anyone who gets in with a family member, anyone who gets in with a friend, work your exit strategy out right from Jump Street and don't be don't work it out like you think it's going to work out, really work it out and live with that in your mind for a few days and like look in the mirror and really make sure you're going to be like I have a lot of money to lose.

35:09You better know you're the type of human being that can lose that money and turn around and still be friends or family with that person. If you're not, don't do it. But for me, I knew I could do that because I tend to see money more as a tool than some sacred thing that lives in your bank account. And, you know, you need every dollar. So I just knew friendship was more important than that. Fortunately, we never had to come to that. Right. Which, you know, maybe who knows if it did come to it and blew up, Maybe I'd feel differently. But we worked the exit out and then we went after it. And that seemed to work very well for us.

35:40And in terms of growing apart, the thing about working with a human being for 16 years is you at least have a commonality. We did grow apart. There's things that we do that are totally different. But we have this absolute connector in the fact that we're both connected to a business that's provided for our families for 16 years and hopefully will provide for our families for the foreseeable future. And so we've grown together. We've got war stories together. We've got all this stuff that brings us, I think brings a commonality to our relationship. And so do we hang out as much as I'd like to on the weekends?

36:12Probably not, but I see him five days a week during the week and I get my fill in my best friend, right? So it's one of those things that it does change, but we were able to work it out. That's Ashley Morris. To learn more about Capriati Sandwich Shop, visit capriatis.com. Hey, it's Josh. I wanted to take a hot minute to thank you for listening to today's episode and to ask that if you are getting value from FullConf, please like and subscribe and be sure to leave a review. Those reviews matter and they help other independent owners and operators find the show. Also, if you want to take the stuff that we're talking about in these episodes from idea to execution, head to joshcopal.com.

36:54There you will find a ton of free templates and tools and all the details on upcoming learning events so you can keep building momentum. I know you're busy, so I don't take your time for granted. Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode.