Mike Mudrey: Your Restaurant Doesn't Need You

0:00I'm going to ask you a question that might sting a bit. How many holiday parties do you have booked for the month of December? Not like how many do you expect? It's how many are on the books right now with the deposits collected and the contracts signed. And for many of you, I worry that the answer is not enough. And here's why that matters. I think that the companies that are going to throw those parties are picking their venues right now. This is a sweet spot between August and September. And by the time you start thinking about December, the decision's already been made. You're not losing those parties in November.

0:34You're going to lose them this month. And that's why I built the Private Events Engine. It's a simple three-part system that leverages AI to do most of the work for you. And this month in the Marketing Masterclass, I'm going to walk you through it. It's going to show you how to package events, how to get in front of the people that are booking them, and how to close them without discounting. And you get the whole thing for free. So show up to this month's Marketing Masterclass. Go to restaurantbusinessschool.com today to sign up. Now here we go. I've gotten good at realizing that I don't want people coming to me with every single problem.

1:13And this is one of the realizations I had as we went to four and we're about to go to five locations, is that if I have to answer the same question twice, we need to put a system in place to answer that question. Welcome to Full Comp, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators, served up on the house.

1:38What if the reason your restaurant runs on you is because you keep showing up? Today's guest bought a crepery in East Lansing with no restaurant experience and a corporate job that he had no intention of leaving. Nine years and four locations later, he still has both. And one of his restaurants sits over an hour from where he lives. And never being able to work on the floor is what forced him to build systems instead of habits. In today's conversation, we get into why every question you answer twice should become a system, how prepaid and pre-selected bookings drove his no-shows and his food waste to almost zero, and why, even when owning a creperie, the money was never in the food.

2:16If your operation stops working the week that you take off work, this one's for you.

2:28The long story short is I got a degree in supply chain management and marketing. I got an MBA in operations management and kind of general business. I knew no other path than to go into sort of the default. A Fortune 500, worked for a company for 40 years, career. And I was doing that, doing it fairly well. I'd worked my way up and worked from big companies down to a smaller company that I helped grow over time. And again, long story short is my wife and I had four kids. We lived in Atlanta. All of our family was in Michigan. In 2017, we made the decision to move back home and we were kind of deciding where to move.

3:08We decided it was best to move to her hometown, East Lansing, Michigan. got here and despite having gone to school here twice and her being here we didn't really feel like we had roots so i spent every saturday morning and i did what i called daddy boys breakfast i took my three young boys out for breakfast and we'd go to different local spots and we just would kind of hang out and one day we got talking and i was like maybe we should we should have something like this of our own so i started looking around and i looked i went down to like should we get a Subway franchise path. Should we open a pizza place?

3:39Should we open a burger place? And kind of realized that I didn't want to give into that. If I was going to do anything, I wanted it to be unique. So I got on Biz Buy Sell. I did not even realize it existed. And then I realized that at any moment you can pull that up and you're surrounded by owners that want to get out of their business, whether it be a restaurant, a bar, gas station, or whatever it is, they want to get out of it for a reason. And there's a sucker willing to buy. And I was that sucker. So we We bought in. My wife and I bought a creperie. We figured that was very unique. You know, that a creperie is something that one, only one town or one in each town could probably handle and found ourselves in the restaurant world.

4:14Not a restaurateur, not a chef. You know, my wife's a really good cook. I'm a decent cook. She's got a big Italian family she comes from. So hospitality is sort of in our nature. We love hosting. We love gathering. And we figured we would try our hand at it. And what's the worst that could happen, Mike? Typically, like this is the story, right? Like somebody that has absolutely no exposure experience in the industry feels like because they eat and they have been to restaurants that they're qualified to enter this vertical and do something for a living that like people spend their whole lives doing.

4:44And again, like what could possibly go wrong? So then typically hilarity ensues, right? And then somebody else picks up your problem down the road, but that's not your story. And so before we get into the minutiae, high level. What do you think enabled you to not only survive, but ultimately thrive and grow about your approach? A couple of things. One is, I think, perseverance. Although I'm not a born in the industry, I'm a connoisseur of the industry, but I'm also a connoisseur of business. And I read a lot. I consume a lot. I find myself fascinated by the study of how businesses grow. And in almost all cases, I think that it required determination and perseverance for whatever industry, whatever business it might be, where at some point everyone was on the brink of failure and they somehow pushed through.

5:36We've had plenty of the ups, way more of the downs probably, but each case, like one is just determination. And then two is I do consider myself a business person operating in hospitality. And I say hospitality more than I say kind of the restaurant world because I, you know, I think I view it at a different level. You know, we're not the best food. We're not the best restaurants, but we try to provide the best hospitality. And so I take a business approach to it. So I, you know, I know what it means to provide good service. I know what it means to pay attention to details. I know what it means to look at the books closely.

6:09I know what it means to look at the cash flow and make sure you can survive through the next payroll. I'm learning what it means to market, which is something I didn't really appreciate. So I think that's, you know, I think that's what survived. You know, it's funny when I did this. I went down to Atlanta. I go back and forth to Atlanta all the time. And I'll never forget. This is probably a famous quote everyone says, but yeah, I mentioned that we were doing this and somebody said to me, well, the best way to make a million or to have a million dollars in the restaurant industry is to start with 2 million or something like that.

6:35For sure. And it's like without, you know, one, nine out of 10 fail or whatever the stat is. And, and I was sort of, you know, I kept that in my mind and I was like, well, we're going to make it work come hell or high water. let me ask you though as we go through the process and again this is a happy story it's not a sad story but was there a threshold for you so like you know as you come out the other side it's really easy to say oh they come hell or high water we were going to make this thing work no matter what but like you're also a business guy right so at some point if that dog's not gonna hunt you're gonna take it out back and shoot it yeah i think i don't know if they're i don't know what the threshold will be.

7:13But I'll tell you that when it started, I'll admit, and this is probably how it starts for a lot of us. It's a hobby, right? I didn't, you know, I sort of paid attention to it. We played around with it. It was really fun. It's fun to own a restaurant because it's a great place to take your friends and be like, yeah, I own this place. And it was a hobby. It was a great place for us to hang out and play with. And went one to two, two turned to three, three turned to four in this growing empire. And all of a sudden I started looking at things like our weekly payroll amount. because I was like, oh, it's not a hobby anymore.

7:42Somewhere between that, somewhere in that second location, I realized that if you treat it like a hobby and don't treat it like a real business, not only is it like it might not work, we'll have to shut it down, but oh, it could really, you know, it could impact my family. It could wipe out the whole thing. So that was sort of a turning point for me that, you know, I don't know if it was a threshold, but it was like, it needs systems, it needs, you know, processes, it needs management, it needs to be run like a business. Well, and I want to talk about business for a second because for me, the paradigm shift in my career took place when I joined a group called EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization.

8:15And I spent my entire life as a restaurateur, as a barman, surrounded by people of the industry, right? So it's just the blind leading the blind. I didn't know restaurant managers at Applebee's, so we were all independents. Nobody knew anything about anything. And it wasn't until I joined EO that I began to associate with people from other businesses, other industries that had other worldviews, because I think that in this industry in particular, there's a lot of group think, right? Nobody makes any money. Everybody's struggling. Anyone that says otherwise is lying the whole nine yards. And when you're steeped in it, when you grow up in it, there's really no difference.

8:52What helped my businesses turn around and truly thrive was adopting the best in class business practices from every other industry and just installing them into my business because as it turns out, there's certainly nuance to this industry, but like it does align with normal business tenants. And I have an interesting worldview because I've coached hundreds and taught thousands of restaurants, which has made me a much better restaurateur, right? And it's the worldview. It's you get that many at bats, you have that wide of an aperture And like, it just makes you better. You had through your consulting practice, you had seen hundreds of businesses before this.

9:37So how did that influence your approach to the industry? Yeah, that's a really good observation. And your analogy is spot on. So, you know, I still to this day, I think it's been sort of my secret sauce to making it work for us is that I have a full time job. So we have four kids. I've got a full time job. My wife and I are managing partners. We're running this business. But it's forced us to run it like a business because I can't rely. It can't rely on me being in there and washing the dishes or greeting the guests or answering the phone every single day. But two, my full-time job is basically what you described.

10:07So I'm an executive director at a company called World 50. I've been there for 14 years. I don't know when I'm going to lead because I love it. I had this intention of the 601 group, our hospitality business, that eventually is going to be my career 2.0. But right now they're both going so well that I have no desire to leave either one, obviously. But what we do in that organization is what you just described. So it's a private membership group for the people at the very top of the biggest companies in the world. And I tell them every day when I talk to them that putting you in the room with people from different industries that have a similar job to you, you may look at it and say there's nothing in common.

10:43I've got nothing in common between an oil and gas industry company and an apparel company. But then when you peel back the layers of the onion, you're all dealing with the same stuff. Business is business to an extent. So my day, you know, nine to five, eight to five, whatever, is facilitating those types of conversations and making people realize that actually if you if you put smart people together that are sort of operating in a similar way, regardless of whether or not they're in the same industry, they're going to learn from each other. And they're not only going to like, you know, take one thing from one direction that goes both directions.

11:12They both get better. And then, too, I do that all day long and I take that back and implement it into our business. So, you know, it's sort of, again, another piece of the secret sauce for us is that, you know, I sit here and I listen to and learn from CEOs and executives at some of the biggest companies and they're leading 200 ,000 person teams and we've got 60 or 70. but there's still little bits and pieces that I think, okay, there's, there's something about that that applies to what we do. They talk about, you know, spend visibility and analyzing, you're having their building systems for their company to operate more efficiently and make better real time decisions.

11:49And I'm like, oh, the same thing applies in our handful of location concepts. So I think there's a big piece of that. I think you're, you're absolutely right. And I think, again, you know, I think as an outsider coming into the industry, you know, I come in thinking about it doesn't matter what it is. It could be an automotive repair shop or it could be an apparel store or a restaurant. And to some extent, we're trying to do the same thing. We've got money coming in and money going out. We're serving clients. We're serving guests. We're serving customers in one way or another. So the better we serve them, the happier they are, the more likely they are to tell their friends and to come back.

12:21How do you solve for proximity and visibility, though? I was at a mastermind last week in Nashville with Alan Dibb, who wrote lean marketing, a prolific marketer. And we're at this big group thing and we're all sitting at this table together at this restaurant and it's a game. So he goes, Josh, what do you see? Right. And so I run him through everything I see and everything I'm changing, all of these things. And everyone at the table is amazed, Mike. Like, oh my God, you're so brilliant. You're so good at this. And I was like, yeah, if only I could figure out my own business. It is so much easier to clean other people's underwear than it is to clean your own.

12:57It's the proximity. It's because you're in it. So you don't have those first principles, that objective thinking that you're able to overlay into other people's businesses. So even though you're not actively operating your businesses, you are married to your business partner and you guys are definitely in the shit, right? Like, you know, Sally, who's the general manager of this, you know, she's going through a real bad breakup right now. And you know that most days she's doing a really good job and There are all of these things that are coming at you. That's the nature of the industry. And so how do you get the visibility you need in order to lead well?

13:33Yeah, it's a tough one. I think the proximity goes both directions. So to some extent, because personally, I'm not in it every day, though I'm accessible pretty much all day long and I get pulled into stuff frequently. sometimes I get to play your role. You know, if there's an issue at Brown Butter Creperie, which is, you know, an hour and 10 minutes away from me, I'm not in there every day. But so I, you know, when, when they're dealing with a problem, I can be like this, this third party, even though I'm, you know, ultimately it all comes down to me. And ultimately I'm the one writing the checks or the one who's going to lose all the money or get my ass kicked.

14:05I still have sort of a third party first principles look at things because, you know, it's insanity to me. Well, you guys are both wrong. You're that kind of thing. So I think the proximity plays both directions. It's good in that sense. It's bad in the sense that I, you know, sometimes I don't know everything that's going on. Maybe that's, maybe that's good or bad. You know, and then the running a business with your spouse thing is, is an entirely different conversation. There's good and bad there. The dinner conversations will cover everything from like, what the hell happened at the, you know, the local Epicurean sales today?

14:34Why didn't we get any class bookings to, you know, the kids got to get to school, start school next week. We got to get everything to, it's a little interesting when, you know, my wife and I have different opinions on things because it makes it a little bit different and a little bit more difficult and a little bit more nuanced of a feedback conversation or a direction setting conversation on things. But ultimately, we also balance each other out. So I feel like I'm the business person and she's the day-to-day operations and experience director, if I was going to describe it as anything. So we kind of, you know, it's a yin and the yang to an extent.

15:07And then I'll just say that we have our very first employee when we bought that creperie nine years ago, whatever it was, Susie, director of operations now. She was just basically the equivalent of a line cook. And she's moved up with us and now is director of operations across the entire thing is the absolute blue of the company. So bringing up people kind of from within to like elevated management roles and giving them your incentives that are profit sharing incentives that make them feel like an operator, like owners of the company helps that helps decisions be made kind of on our behalf appropriately.

15:39So not everything has to come through us. The decision to open it, right, was it was a lark. It was, you know, oh, let's do this thing. Let's see how it goes. I think there's a more interesting conversation to have around why you chose to grow it. So like the really cool thing about restaurants is like I think it is the number one source of generational wealth as it relates to first and second generation Americans. There's this amazing probably second only to the market, right? That if you can get into the market, you can invest enough in the market over time. It's going to be great. There is no financial incentive for you to do this.

16:15Like you have money. You're sitting in a very nice office right now. And so I share that because you could put that money in the market. And again, like the single location, I get it. Everybody likes to have a hobby. But there had to be this conversation that you had with your wife or you had with yourself where you're like, we could grow this thing. And it could be huge or it could be a fucking nightmare. Right. And then on the other side of it, I could put this money in the market. Right. I put it in a Vanguard fund and just let it work for me for the next 15 years. And I'm guaranteed to triple, quadruple my money.

16:52Josh, I have that conversation inside my head every single night. It's not even with my wife. But the one thing I try not to do is to ever do what you just said. Because I think, unfortunately, I find myself in that same, like, I could probably just, you know, put it. Sure. I could away and retire and I'd probably get a better return. I think the bet for us. Put it in SpaceX. It's less of a gamble. I'm sure if I looked back in 2017 from the very beginning and you did that exercise, people said, instead of buying the first iPhone, if you just put that money in Apple, you'd have like a million dollars now.

17:30I'm sure that same thing exists with every dollar we've sunk in over the course of eight or nine years. But I do think for us it was kind of an upside down side. It's going to be a fun ride no matter what. I often think about like the Jeff Bezos regret minimization framework. I'm like, if I'm 85 years old and I've got my grandkids sitting on my lap and the great grandkids, maybe at that point, regardless of whether or not it worked, I bet they'll love the story of how mom, you know, grandma and grandpa built this mini empire and all it all either, you know, we graded, we sold it or, you know, it's still going today.

18:06And I sit on the board or it all folded. And that's why I live in your dad's basement now. But like either way, there's a portion of it that's like, I want to do something. I don't think there's a lot of fun in just like sitting and watching the stock market every day and hoping it goes up, watching it go down. I think the same anxiety I have today would probably exist in just looking and seeing, OK, SpaceX went public at a 180 and it dropped to 130 or whatever. And I'd be feeling like I have no control over it whatsoever. And it went down. So I think there's that portion. And then second is that, you know, when we, the financials, the economics, the underlying financials of our businesses, I think are actually pretty good when we're not pouring everything back into growth.

18:46So personally, we haven't made really anything off of it because we've been pouring it all back into growing, which hopefully will pay off. And then second is, I think the concepts are really cool. So I think there was a point where we said, OK, cripperies, the American version of a crippery, they're tough. The food costs, the labor are a little bit more drastic than some of the best higher performing. We're not just throwing everything in a bowl and calling it whatever the latest fad is. We've got eggs, we've got flour, we've got milk, we've got the labor of twirling and assembling it. But it's unique and nobody's really cracked it.

19:18There's a big national franchise right now. I've visited a few of their locations and it's a beautiful atmosphere. But I'll tell you, like the food quality, I think ours is better. So I think like I still think, hey, there's an opportunity here. So we long story short, we're to fast forward. We're in the middle now of relocating our original one for the third time to a much bigger location with a better kitchen, better atmosphere and a liquor license. And we're introducing mimosas and frozen mimosas and frozen espresso martinis. And and I we have a design and kind of an expanded food concept that I really think is something that we could take and we could replicate around the Midwest initially and then around the country.

19:56So I have no idea if that's going to happen, but that's why we did it. That's why we had one went to two because we learned a lot from going, as you know, like everything breaks when you go from one to two and everything breaks is the time you get to learn a lot. So every time we make mistakes, I feel like I've got to get a level up in my grade. And then the local procuring or other concept is totally different. I, you know, that one I fell in love with. The financials are great. It's similar to a restaurant, but it's different than a restaurant and that I can get in details on that. But I think it's, again, something that we're definitely expanding quickly.

20:27We went from one location to two locations. We got a third location under LOI. And then we're working on some franchise agreements to actually go pretty big. So I don't know if it's going to work out, but I'd rather say I tried than sit at home and say I lucked out and put it in SpaceX. Well, I guess here's my question. So I want to go back to moving locations for a third time. I don't want to gloss over that. So I was doing a bunch of research and I came across this piece you had published like a year ago. Right. And basically you were talking about how like restaurant math is broken. And then you look at like these moves with moving locations and trying to acquire a liquor license.

21:06Right. Making it ostensibly different than it is today. It's a different business model. Right. It's a different value proposition. It's a different, you know, in marketing, we would call it positioning. Right. It is different positioning. It's a different utility entirely. And so I want you to talk to me about the thesis around restaurant math is broken and then what you have done over the last year to try and fix it. Yeah, I think that I am trying to remember there. You'll find a lot of stuff that I it's again, I was describing it to somebody earlier as my therapy when you see me just dump like poor thoughts out into something.

21:41And, you know, sometimes if you go back and read some of that, it's really just me like sort of venting on something we're dealing with. The long opening was what I wrote about last year too, and it might've been tied into the same piece. So our creperies, we were not, we were sort of a hybrid quick service model. We're not counter service. We bring it out to you, but you order at the counter and you get a number, typical thing. No liquor license, very simple concept, very tough and very hard to work under. Labor and food are the biggest costs by far as with anybody else. In such a small business, they can drastically swing it.

22:13The average ticket is not very big and maybe somebody upsells and they buy a latte instead of a drip coffee and we get a couple extra bucks. When we opened the local Epicurean, which is this hybrid European market slash private cooking school slash pasta production and everything else. But with a full bar, I realized what everybody else learned that that's where the money is. So, you know, people come in and, you know, we do private classes, minimum party of two up to groups of 80. You know, that's obviously where the real money is. That group of 80 or group of two, whichever one they are, they have a cooking class.

22:50It's a three-course meal. They do a pasta dish. They do their salad. They sit down. They come back and do the entree. Then they come back. They do dessert. And each time they're getting a glass of wine or a cocktail. and that ticket is going from their$99 per person class up to$300 or$350 by the time they stop in the market and they buy things on the way out. And that's when I realized that, okay, if we want, for crepe's sake and brown butter, which now both have liquor licenses, to actually excel and survive and thrive, we need opportunities to raise that average ticket from$21 to$30,$40,$50, depending on the size of the group.

23:28So that was, I think, the big thing for us. And the story behind the first move was it was never supposed to be a first move. So I did what every smart business person, restaurateur does. In March of 2020, I signed a lease to open a second location for Crepe's sake, thinking, OK, there's some rumors about this disease thing, but it's fine. We're going to go all in. We're going to expand this. So we were going to have two in the same city, which now that it looked back, doesn't even make sense. In a way, the pandemic was a little bit of a blessing. I got out of our current lease. We had already signed the new lease.

24:00So instead of opening a second location, we moved there. It took about a year for us to get open, mostly because of the construction delays and process delays and opening and closing regulations in the state of Michigan, all kinds of stuff. But once we had opened, we realized our sales doubled. They were twice what they were pre-pandemic in the previous location. And I quickly realized that having a 90 minute wait on the weekend for a creperie is good, but we're turning a lot of people. And like, it was just that we went into a location that was not big enough. So we always had the desire to relocate.

24:33And then long story short, I found this other location had been vacant for a while, found out the business, the building owner had a liquor license that he needed to sell to. And so two things came together and I was like, okay, this is the concept we've been spending six years trying to get to. Let me know if I'm interpreting this correctly. Like you figured out what I figured out, which is the only way to make money in this business is through higher ticket averages and high ticket sales. And by high ticket sales, I'm talking catering, private events, large parties, the whole nine yards. And so that is the driver.

25:06You're not going to make millions one croissant at a time. It's just it's a more efficient business model. And so that would explain the need for the move. And having moved, have the margins gotten better for you? So we have not finished that move. So that move is we're probably six to eight weeks away from actually being in the new location. So I can't answer that question yet. My assumption is they will. So we're still operating out of location number two. but earlier this year are so we have that we have in grand rapids which is about an hour 10 minutes away from us we have brown butter crepery which we've had for a long time and we now own through acquisition the local epicurean which is next door and when i bought that i was able to stretch the liquor license across the two locations and call them one business yeah and so that is where we've seen the benefit.

26:00We quickly added that license and we started adding mimosas and espresso martinis, champagne and glasses of wine pours. And I've seen that already. So the average ticket price is going up. The margins are better. The challenge there, it's a beautiful, small, it's like the Instagrammable place. So people get their drink and they want to hang out forever, but we need to keep them moving. But I think it's paid off. And ultimately what we're chasing is not chasing away low ticket customers, but trying to drive out the average ticket. I want to talk about like the compression of time. So the reason that we hire coaches, we hire consultants, that we do this whole thing that you do for a living that I do for a living.

26:40It's to mitigate the ignorance tax is what Hormozzi calls it, right? It's that, you know, you said it five minutes ago, you said, you know, and, you know, looking back, I don't even know what I was thinking. Like, why would I do something like that? Right? It's ridiculous. us. But that's knowing what you know now. And so you got into an industry, right? With no prior experience. What have you done to try and mitigate that ignorance tax to like compress the time that it takes for you to learn things? Well, I'm going to get, this is not what you were fishing for, but I've listened to like every one of your episodes.

27:12Oh God. I mentioned I'm a student of business. I spend a lot of time, I'm not joking. I listen to every podcast. If I'm listening to your podcast and you interview somebody that mentions another podcast, I go listen to that podcast. I've also studied people that have done well. I read a lot. Ari Weinschweier, Zingermans. Ari Weinschweier. Yes. I've read every one of his books. As you should. As I should. But, you know, I've actually got, I told Gina and my wife that we should start sending our managers to his training, to the Zingerman's training. It's an hour away from us. So I feel like I learned, you know, the managing partner model that I've introduced now with the lady in charge of our creper operations, our director of operations, where they, for all practical purposes, own a percentage of the business, feel the benefits of the P &L.

28:04Like I got that right from him. And this couch back here is where I sit every morning and I'm usually reading a book. Sometimes it's related to hospitality. Lately, it's a lot. A lot of it's been about marketing because it's a world that I never appreciated and I'm learning a lot about. And sometimes it's just founders and entrepreneurs and people that built interesting things. I was just thinking this morning, Nick Hakonis from Alinea. I think he may be the one that got me into this to begin with. You know, hearing him on either Tim Ferriss or whenever he first started popping up on podcasts.

28:36And I and he's this he tells the story of finding grand tickets and, you know, starting Alinea and how he had no idea. He had no experience in the business in the restaurant world, but he had a business background. I don't know why I was thinking about that this morning, but I was like, I bet you that was like subtly operating in the back of my mind. It's like, OK, a guy like that who comes in and looks at totally different and thinks about the reservation strategy different, the ordering strategy different, the pricing strategy different. Like a lot of those things are just interesting to me.

29:04It's somebody that came in and looked at an industry that he had nothing, no experience with, with fresh eyes. And so I just, you know, all that to say, I try and learn as much as I possibly can from people that have done it before. So what's your approach to growth? You know, when I was a young man, it was just growth for a growth stake. All I wanted was one. And then once I had one, all I wanted was two, but I wanted it to be different. And then once I had two, I was like three would feel so much better. but then three was sparse and so on and so forth. And if you had asked me at any point in that process, if I open this, how does it change my life?

29:40I would have told you that I didn't think about it. If you had asked me how much, oh, if you open this, how much more money are you going to make personally? I would have told you that the thought didn't cross my mind. And knowing today as a much older man, exactly how much money I want to make a year and knowing what that growth looks like, you know, at breakneck pace, at a comfortable pace and everything in between. I'm able to make informed decisions about my career. You are married with four children, a full career plus a virgining business. What is your perspective on growth and how does it translate to your personal goals?

30:19It's a, yeah, that's a really good question. And I'll tell you what, that I find myself, you know, I deliberately, I've got thoughts on, you know, growth for the sake of growth. And I always thought it was interesting that, you know, there's the concept of, I think it's small giants, the book, small giants, and it studies businesses that choose to be great over businesses that choose to be good. That's always been my motto. And I always thought it was weird or not weird, but I think about the rat weight race or the treadmill as I spend all day long working with large public corporations and they've got investors and shareholders and quarterly growth targets.

30:55And I was like, why can't you just run a good business? What happened to just being able to run a good business? They can't do that. They already jumped the shark to the extent that they have to fulfill the future demands and the future cash flow that the stock price supports. And then, to be completely honest with you, I'll sit in bed at night and, you know, by the time everything is slowed down for the day, and I'm like, I just put myself on that same thing. Like, we're relocating for crepe's sake. I'm not vacating my current location. We're putting another concept in there. I'm like, and what am I doing?

31:28Like, why do I have to do this? I've got an LOI in my inbox for local Epicurean and one of the best suburbs in the Detroit area, West Bloomfield. I don't have to do it, but I do, I have to throttle myself sometimes because it can be fun. You know, what you just described a minute ago, like, you know, one to three, one to two and two to three. And I'm not necessarily searching for any specific, okay, this is what I wanted. This is the portfolio I want us to build. So it returns X amount of dollars and I can go sit on the beach. But I also do have to make sure I don't just do exactly what everyone else does and just chase growth for growth sake.

32:05So, you know, at the same time, I'm a big student of that principle of be great versus be big. But I want to be big enough to be great and be sustainable. So I don't know. It's this again, if you could sit inside my head at, you know, 1030, 11 o 'clock at night when everything settles down and all these thoughts start coming through. This is one that I think about frequently. Do you have industry ties? Like, do you hang out with other restaurateurs, other hospitality professionals? I do. You know, it's funny. I, one of my good friends is a really good chef, moved from Brooklyn where he was a personal chef to a billionaire, helped open per se, worked with Thomas Keller.

32:43He lives, he moved back to Michigan and Traverse City area and he's got his own network up there. So he's kind of the person I lean on the most because he has done this for 25, 30 years. I've got, you know, in our network here now that I'm in it, as soon as we opened one location, all of a sudden that you kind of find yourself in the network of people that do the same thing. So I know a lot of local people, but not a lot. But the other part of it is I had the benefit, you know, in my World 50 Days of we do a lot of events around the world and we're treating. We've got clients or members that have really, really expensive tastes.

33:19So I find myself in a lot of in the kitchen with Daniel Balloud and like a lot of in a lot of nice restaurants and opportunity. I don't know them personally, but I get to learn from them. Everyone wants to hear the chef's story. Everyone wants to hear the restaurateur's story. and I get to hear it and learn from them. So I'm not a, you know, I don't have a personal relationship, but I get an opportunity to not only learn from the people running Home Depot and Nike, but the people running some of the best restaurant groups in the world too. So I don't have a lot of people I call other than Tim and Traverse City to teach me things.

33:48And maybe that's a good thing. I don't know. I wouldn't argue the point. Here's why I ask. I always knew I was different and kind of a weirdo. So I graduated in marketing, albeit before the internet. So not the best use of my time. But I was always interested in marketing. I'm sure if you've listened to enough of the episode, get them a little salesy, Mike. Right. And I was just born this way. I'm just interested in it. I'm interested. I love to be sold. I love to sell. I love the mechanics around how you get that done. And so as a restaurateur to succeed across multiple tiers of dining in what was a very competitive market, I don't think we had the best food or the best beverage.

34:32Probably didn't have the cleanest restaurants. That wasn't what we sold. That wasn't the brand promise. The reason that I think I was able to excel and so many other people weren't was because I was trying to be not the best restaurateur. I was trying to be the best marketer in the restaurant industry. And it was a greenfield opportunity for me. And so that's what I got after like hanging out with my contemporaries in LA. I was like, Oh my God, all I spend my time on is something that no one else is even thinking about in the limited exposure you've had to other restaurant tours and the success that you've had, because there are a bunch of people listening today that haven't been in it for seven years.

35:15They've been in it for 17 and they still can't grow from one to two. So what is it that you think, what is the game that you're playing that no one else is? Let me start with, I went to Michigan State, maybe a year or two ahead of you, graduated. So the same era. And I was a marketing major, switched to supply chain. But when I met with my advisor, she was like, hey, if you take one more marketing class, when you graduate, you can declare yourself a marketing major or supply chain. So I took that class. So theoretically, I was a marketing major. For the next 25 years, next 20 years, I don't think I knew a thing about marketing.

35:49For the first five years of being in this industry, I'd realize now that I still didn't know a thing about marketing. I was like the people that you met, the 17-year veteran, the 27-year veteran that just assumed that the product will speak for itself. And when I say the product, it's not the experience. I think, you know, Gene and I are really good at designing the experience. We went in right away and the atmosphere is better. The music's better. The sound, the welcome, the greeting, everything from the minute you walk in the door to the minute you leave is better. And I thought that was marketing.

36:20And so I thought if you build it, they will come. And until we opened the local Epicurean and I poured, this is the stock market equation I don't want to do. You know, opening from scratch with a pretty big investment, personally funding that entire thing at the time ourselves. And then not spending a dollar on marketing was insane. And that's when I started realizing that, oh, shit, I've got to learn marketing. And we've barely scratched the surface. I think I'm probably six months into relearning marketing. A lot of it is, you know, I'm not listening to your podcast, listening to others and hearing people talk about it, reading your newsletter, reading other newsletters, reading Alan Dibb's book, reading StoryBrand was another good one I read recently.

37:02It's been like an MBA in marketing for me or an undergrad and MBA all over again. And I just, I never appreciated it. I never took it serious. I never realized what it actually meant to both market and to advertise. So I don't know. I think we've sort of lucked out. I think we were decent at focusing on the experience versus maybe some other people around here. But I think the lever for us now that we've just uncovered in the past six months to a year is what you said. I look around at our competition and I don't necessarily consider them competition, but I think most people in this industry still don't have a clue.

37:35The things that you learned and were doing 15, 20 years ago or 10, 15 years ago, they're still not doing. And I'm just starting to scratch the surface. What should we steal from you? Assuming that success is nothing more than successful behaviors repeated again and again, what are the tactics, the tools, the strategies that have served you well? I think it's, you know, going back to the perseverance and learning from others and just not giving up. I think there's something to just trying. I talked to, I'm back, you know, back in East Lansing, Michigan State is two miles from here. I volunteer and coach at their incubator and the entrepreneurship school.

38:14And I'm always like, you just go try something. Just try something. I dabbled in entrepreneurship in the first few years, but it took me probably 15 years after my undergrad to actually go all in to an extent and really pour money into building a business. And it would have been very easy for us to just say, okay, that was fun. First one, let's just write it off or resell it for roughly what we bought it for and get out of here. But I think just trying. I didn't know what I was doing. I learned. I learned by listening to podcasts, by reading books, by observing others. And then I think you've made a really good point by just looking at everything from first principles and saying, I can look at a different industry and there's things that can apply in our industry that maybe others aren't thinking about or haven't done because they've been embedded it for so long.

39:04That's Mike. To learn more about the 601 Group and their portfolio, visit 601-group.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 Full Comp, 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. There you will find a ton of free templates and tools and all of the details on upcoming learning events so you can keep building momentum.

39:44I know you're busy, and so I don't take your time for granted. Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode.