The Job that Now Makes Him $3.6M/Year…

0:00How did this guy go from no restaurant experience to making 3.6 million dollars a year in revenue selling biscuit sandwiches. Do you see how flaky and buttery that biscuit is? The chicken, juicy, tender, fried to perfection. It all comes down to one job and a mindset that changed Brian's life forever. Join us as we discover the one question you needed to eliminate your marketing forever. When we started this business, I had never run a kitchen. I had never made a biscuit. If it comes to persevering or quitting, persevering. I wound up in the ER for like 10 days. For some reason, I was just kind of dying.

0:34And we were trying to get this business churning. the biggest decision you can make before your business even starts. And at last, the biggest life lessons learned after making over one million biscuits. Yes, biscuits. And it changed our whole business model. Orders coming in in massive amounts, and that changed all of our systems. So Ryan, you have sold over a million biscuits to date, which is so, so cool. What I want to ask is, like, what got you to the biscuit sandwich industry in the first place? Yeah, so the answer to that is I started off building a relationship with my business partner.

1:07He and I just wanted to start a business together. We traveled to multiple cities. I mean, we went to like eight or nine cities, saw all different concepts. And what we were looking for was why things were resonating with people in the places that they were at. Like what draws people to a place? Like what's the energy like? And one of the things that we saw is people really like breakfast. Sandwiches was one of the things that we took from it. And then we wanted to just kind of keep it simple and so when we came back to Austin we had a friend who helped us start with our base biscuit recipe we were going to make a lot of different things and then we just distilled it down to the biscuit and it was like there aren't people here doing that people are making tacos but nobody's making biscuits you know so you said you traveled to a bunch of cities you tried a bunch of different restaurants obviously that takes money and starting a restaurant takes money like we're going to dive into startup costs later but I'm sure people are interested like do you particularly More kids are shouting, are the biscuits on food?

1:54Not right now. We will be in the Navy tomorrow. Oh my gosh, this is mind blowing to see. Like a five year old just was streaming for the biscuits. But yeah, people are wondering, do you come from money? This is amazing. Do you come from money? No, I don't come from money, but I'm very blessed. I grew up out in the middle of nowhere in the country. I have three younger brothers and older sister. Went through my challenges as a child, like many people. You know, my mom passed away when I was probably 16 or 17 from MS. We kind of, me and my siblings all kind of grew up in different houses for various reasons.

2:26And so we had our adversities. Yeah. But through that, I met some of the best people in my life that have helped me kind of get to where I am and kind of build me into who I am now. Can you tell us more about Bird Bird Biscuit? Yeah, for sure. So we have two locations currently. You know, we do have about 50 awesome people. You're going to hear me talk about the people a lot because I love the people that we work with. And the people are the reason why Bird Bird continues to do what it does, because you can't do it by yourself. And so we were nominated the number five place to eat in the country.

2:55And I'm honored by that. And that speaks to what the people here do day in and day out. And they uphold our values and they care. So we are going to dive into Startup Costs. So before we do that, can you talk to us about your revenue and margins and how do they compare in the restaurant industry? Sure. So, I mean, in terms of like the overall restaurant industry, I'm not going to lie to you and say, I know exactly, but I can tell you where we're at. Yeah, yeah. So we're probably about now with these two locations, revenue-wise, close to$4 million as a business. And then, you know, our cost of goods typically runs anywhere between 25 to 27%.

3:29Wow. You know, and then our labor is typically closer to probably 30%. Awesome. Well, it is plenty of cold outside. Let's get into the warm production facility, see what you guys are cooking up. I'm so, so excited for this. We're talking about top five restaurant in America. That sounds good. And 2022. You know what I mean? We're still doing all right there. Let's see. Let's hop inside, though. After you. Thank you. This place is so, so cool. I love walking in here. Smells so good. So I'm excited to talk more about it and make some biscuits together. It feels so good too, yeah. Looking around here, there's expensive pieces of equipment.

3:59What do they do? Yeah, man. So I would say that our money maker will be these bad boys right here. Our ovens are probably the most expensive. They kind of make the biscuits and that's awesome. Smells so good. That's what we do is biscuits. Once they're done to perfection, this part over here is kind of like our assembly line. That's where we cook, that's where we fry. This is our dredge station. And everything just kind of flows over to the hospitality spot at the window where we send things out to the guests. Yeah, and you also mentioned in that answer, 2020, the pandemic changed your business model.

4:29It did change your business model. How so? So before the pandemic, we used to have inside seating. People would come in. We didn't really do online business that much at all or any of it. And it was the traditional model where people would come in, they'd line up at the register, you would take an order at a time. But the pandemic switched everything to where, I mean, now 90 % of our business is all online. Wow. And because of that, the flow had to massively change. Because when you have online orders coming in, it's not like a person that's coming up to you. They can pop in on the screen 15, 20, 25 at a time.

5:01Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. And you've got to be able to have a flow that can manage that. So as we go through this facility, tell us what were your startup costs and what were some of your business expenses starting out? Yeah, so to get Burr Bird going at that first location, cost us a lot more than we thought it was going to because we ran into some snags. So we probably spent about$600 ,000 to open that location. Yeah, our hope was that we were gonna be able to get it done for around 350 or four. Oh, wow. So it was a little bit more expensive. Yeah. A lot of those costs were time. Like we had some time delays, which would cost us a lot of money.

5:31Yeah. And then equipment was another humongous cost for us, obviously getting all your equipment in. And those two were probably our biggest, biggest cost. So you said$600 ,000 in startup costs, which is a shock, you know, out of money here. Like, did you have any of this saved up? In my partnership with my business partner, which I'll talk about, you know, I was kind of the sweat equity side of it. And he was very much the financial side that kind of allowed us to do this. I didn't have any money saved up, but he did. And I met him through the cafe. He owned the cafe that I worked at, Thunderbird, that I was telling you about.

6:00He wanted to get out of the cafe business. He was never a fan of that business model. So he came to me and was like, look, I want to start a business with you. I want to start something that we can have a vision for growing. When you treat people right, you get the best out of them. And I think because he was my friend and because I think he realized the value of that relationship, you know, he, you know, he gave me actual equity in the business and we really did it together. What makes Bird Bird so special? Yeah. So the way my brain works is like I will do something a thousand times and tweak it just a little bit each time to make it a little bit better.

6:28So really what has made this process where it is, is just attention to detail and trial and error. So now that we have this all mixed up, you're using your hands there in a way. What's the next step in our process? Yeah, so now we're going to add the liquids and mix that in into the dry. Awesome. Let's do it. Let's move this up there. Grab the liquids and let's start stirring this pump. Let's do it. Let's do it.

6:50All right, here we go. Let's see what we got. More flowers just going everywhere. This looks so good to me. I don't know. This is my first time seeing it. But you have probably overcome a ton of different challenges all entrepreneurs do. What's been some of the toughest challenges that you have endeavored on this? Yeah, I mean, obviously COVID was a huge challenge for us. And then also like many businesses, we almost closed our doors because we thought it was going to be two weeks. We have one employee who's just amazing. He's been with us almost since the beginning. And he just suggested instead of closing the business, like why don't we just pop open that window and keep selling biscuits?

7:26I was kind of like, Ryan, it's a good idea. We could close for two weeks or we could just do this. and we chose to do it. And then of course, two weeks was not two weeks. Yeah, yeah, that's not a two week. That's not two weeks. And it changed our whole business model because we had to then learn how to adjust to this new online thing and orders coming in in massive amounts. And that was a big adjustment. It had to change all of our systems. It made our inside spaces all kitchen space. We were able to grow our business because we had the space to grow our business. After selling over one million biscuits, Brian and Ryan would be the first to tell you The best biscuit starts with having the best ingredients.

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8:45For over 20 years, Busy has helped founders focus on growth, which means offering robust services like tax support that keep you compliant year after year. And here's the best part. Busy offers zero LLC formation plus state fees and a free registered agent service for your first year. No gimmicks, no surprises, just a better, faster, and more affordable way to get your business rising. Click the link in the description and get started with Busy today. All right, now we're going to move to our Fan Blitz questions with Brian. Brian, you ready for these seven questions? I'm ready. Cool. Number one, what's the one thing about running a restaurant that would surprise most people?

9:22I think that you definitely don't get to just live your life however you want for a long season. It dictates how you move. But what's your most popular biscuit flavor combination? The most popular one is the queen beak. It is just the biscuit. It's real simple with that bacon infused chipotle mayo, the fried chicken with that delicious dredge and then that spiced honey on top. What's your favorite way to unwind after a long day? I mean, dude, I'm a meditation guy, man. It kind of comes back to that. That's it. Oh, that's so good. What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received? Oh, man.

9:54The best piece of advice that I feel like I would want to share would be put the people first. So good. At what moment did you know Bird Bird would succeed? The moment when we were able to evolve our processes to actually make the product. Like once we figured out and cracked the code of how to make the product and make enough of it, I knew we could do it. So, so good. Last one for you here, favorite spot in Austin besides Bird Bird. There's this place over by my house, and it's just this little Mexican food place called Mitralita, but they do really great work, and they make these burritos that they'll toast for you all the way around.

10:31You can stuff them with whatever you want. You get it toasted, and the outside comes just nice and crispy and crunchy, and if you eat it right there, it's just off the chain. Oh, well, we know where we're going tonight, then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that place is off the chain, so I like it a lot. All righty, time is up. It has been in the freezer now. Let's pull it out and let's start making some dough. Yeah, let's do it, man. All right. Awesome. So this thing is big now. I would love to talk about it. We'll set that down. We're going to move this table back here. Let's do it. Let's do it. Awesome.

10:58That's a strong man right there. So I first want to feel this. Let's feel it. It's firm now. It's not concrete, but it's firm. And so what is this going to allow us to do? So it's going to allow us to shape the dough in a way where we can kind of keep it in its shape and compress it, but it's not going to run all over the place. Awesome. Before we start getting our hands really, really gritty, I mean, we're in a huge production space here. I mean, I'd love to hear like, what your monthly overhead costs are. What's your biggest expenses? Yeah, so I mean, obviously, one of our biggest expenses is labor.

11:29Like I'd say - Of course. You know, monthly, we probably are in between 75 to 100 grand with labor. Wow, that's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. You know what I mean? It's kind of somewhere in there. And then cost of goods, you know, it's probably somewhere around that like, and this is between both stores. Yeah, production facility. Probably somewhere in that range, 75 to 100, you know what I mean? Like probably about that. What is the most stressful point you've had along this journey? Yeah, so I can answer that pretty distinctly. So when we first started opening Bird Bird, we didn't have any systems or processes or anything built and it hit the ground running.

12:01It was really, really busy. My brother came down from DC to help me open Bird Bird and without him, it would have failed because we worked just insane hours. But it got to the point, this was maybe like six or seven months in, where just the repetition of doing everything and making all the biscuits and working the line, my body just started to completely fall apart. I lost basically all of my white blood, like my white blood cell count went to like zero. And I wound up in the ER for like 10 days, literally felt like for some reason I was just kind of dying. Yeah. And we were trying to get this business churning and that was super stressful because my business partner invested a ton of money and I physically couldn't do it.

12:39Yeah. And so that's the answer in terms of the most stressful. My brother really stepped up and kind of helped me through that season. All right, so this is all ready to go. Let's start making some dough here. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. So the first thing that we want to do is we'll get some flour on our surface here. So next, we're going to flip our dough out of our bowl. So then what we're going to do is we're going to cut this into quarters. And then we're going to shape it. We're going to take it first and shape it into basically a big old square. And these tools you kind of use to shape your edges.

13:10Yeah, I get it really, really, really squared off here. You guys haven't spent like really a dime on marketing. And you tell customers like one thing. What's the secret of marketing? Yeah, so for us, it's been one value that we try to live by. And that's blowing people's minds because you give them an experience. Look at the biscuit. Look at the chicken. Bird, bird. Yeah. Do you see how flaky and buttery that biscuit is? The chicken, juicy, tender, fried to perfection. And they want to talk about it with other people. They want to share with... That creates fans. And if you can create fans and have people who want to tell others about your business, it's like the best market you can possibly get.

13:47So we try to blow minds. We like, we give a lot of stuff away. We have a lot of stuff that we allow people to give away. That's not even on the menu. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Cause I like that strategy too. I like giving somebody, giving somebody something that they can't buy. Awesome. So we have these cut now. What's the next step here? Yeah. So we're going to take these biscuits. We're going to get them on the tray and we're going to get them in the freezer to finish freezing up. Awesome. And how long do they go in the freezer for? until they heart freeze. And that typically takes, you know, eight hours-ish.

14:14Eight hours-ish. Okay, sweet. One question I do want to ask you here is, you love the people here. You love serving the people here as well. And that obviously comes off with five-star reviews that are just raving about you. So what's your secret to customer service? And how do you have those systems across people to ensure they're delivering amazing customer service? Yes, trying to help people understand how to seek out the opportunities. Because when guests come to the store, these people are here. I'm here to serve them, but like, let's find the opportunity. It'll, if you think about it a little bit different.

14:41So I try to teach people to look for those opportunities of how to just serve people and blow their minds and elevate their experience. Interesting. Especially at Bird Bird now, we don't have an inside seating. It can be a faceless box if we don't reach out and go out there and try to help people feel that love. So we have to seek out those opportunities. For example, like this morning, you know, it's people come here and then those guys didn't come back to get their sandwiches, but it's just a little bit of extra effort instead of staying inside when people come up, when we're not open, going out there and talking to them, and giving them a smile, dude, it goes a long way just connecting with somebody on that level.

15:12Yeah, absolutely. They feel you care and that matters. That's why I think it's like so cool is like this morning, like we're in Austin, like the whole city's basically shut down because of the winter freeze, we can call it here. But you still have people come in the door like, hey, like we want food and you're like, oh man, like we're, I'm actually closed, but like, let me find a way to serve you in some sort of matter. It matters, little things matter. I love it. If you wanna start a business but don't have access to large funding, you're gonna wanna check out the UpFlip Quiz, where we have a business model based off your goals, situation, and personality.

15:39Click the link in the description below and get started with the Outflip Quiz. So you're managing two locations, 15 employees, but on top of 15 employees, you have a lot of food costs. Sure. How do you manage all those food costs? What advice would you give to entrepreneurs that need to manage that food cost as well? Yeah, so for us, I think just not doing it alone, I think the more that the people that work with you understand the variables that they're working with and what those variables cost, they approach things differently. Like if you're working the line and you know a piece of cheese costs 12 cents and people are aware of that.

16:08That's good. Your team is a part of helping you control your food costs. And I think at Bird Bird, that's what we're trying to do more of is just empower the team to understand what that stuff is. So it's not just a high level thing, everybody understands. And then we're really working together to keep that stuff under control. There's a lot of moving pieces going on here. I mean, you guys have a lot of processes in place, but like, how do you implement those systems to ensure the standard is high every time? Yeah, absolutely. So training is a big part of it. And that's something we're always trying to get better about.

16:34especially as we're growing into our third location right now we have a whole initiative around how we can really tighten up our training processes to get everything good yeah yeah making sure you have things written down is a big part of it because like if you don't have your systems and your processes written down you don't really have systems and processes so right now right now we're getting all that packaged and and good having certain people trained so it's consistent with what people are getting in terms of messaging making sure you're communicating all the way through with your team from top to bottom.

17:03That's something I'm working on being better at. Sometimes, because I move so quick, as you can see - Just jumping around. Sometimes I'll miss little things and I won't send the message all the way through the team. So all of those things are really important if you want to actually have a consistent outcome. And then we're going to take this nice over medium egg. Oh man. Drop it down here, close this thing up. And this, ladies and gentlemen - Look at that. Is a bird bird bacon. See, it's just kind of, you know, it's kind of talking to you. Oh, it looks so good. The cheese is cheesing. You know, so yeah, that's it.

17:31I love it. There's so much that comes to a business, but like, what's been the biggest difference for you in starting a company? Like what's the first thing that you guys started out with that you would give advice to other entrepreneurs? Yeah. So in all honesty, it is those values right there. Like we thought really long and hard about what those values mean. And sometimes values can, they can either be guideposts or they can kind of turn into a joke. And for us, our values are guideposts. I love that. Yeah. I feel like with values, like there are a lot of times where it's like, Oh, they're just on there.

17:58Like you don't really I need to follow them, but for you guys, it's right there for everyone to see and to live by. And we try to live by it. And what people find when they apply it, and there's so many different ways to apply it, it's fulfilling. So I wanna ask, as we're assembling this right here, you and Ryan, you guys are business partners, you guys are friends, but do you guys ever have disagreements? I'm sure they come up, and I would love to hear how you handle those. 100%. Proper communication leads to conversation and not confrontation. And so - That's good. If you communicate in a healthy way, a lot of times you can have disagreements, but they can be conversations.

18:34And that's how Ryan and I's relationship is. Yeah, we don't agree on everything, but we're both very respectful. We understand that we're on the same team working towards a unified goal. Yeah. And so, you know, no ego. We listen to each other and we recognize it. Is this a muscle that you've had to work or has it always been there for you? 100%. It's just a muscle that you have to work. There's no other way around it. So we've got our sandwich here, mate. It looks so, so good. let me take it out of the bag it comes yeah you know you talked about packaging it with care and stuff all right but the moment of truth of course when you have a restaurant people care about you but they care about the food a lot so for sure let me uh take a bite in this

19:12that is so good reveals itself as you kind of get in there too because you haven't gotten that sauce yet so you know you got to kind of that's so good that is an incredible sandwich um very hot very spicy a lot of flavors the texture on it is so so good you talk about that a lot yeah I wanna ask, is the restaurant business something you'd recommend others to get into? If so, what advice do you have for them? Yeah, I'd say for sure, I love it. I think that I would say any business, find the deepest level that it's gonna bring fulfillment. Because for me, if I was just in the restaurant business, that would be one thing, but I'm really in the people business.

19:45That's more so what I'm in. So whatever you do, I'd say combine that with being in the people business, and you'll be all right, because you'll be making connection, and I think that's what brings meaning to this whole experience. So books are obviously humongous when it comes to entrepreneurship. What are two books that you read that you think every other entrepreneur should read and what are your biggest takeaways? One of them I would say is a book I'm reading right now with my leadership team. It's called Dare to Lead. It's by Brene Brown. It's a great book. There's so many tools that teach how to be in right relationship with the people that you work with and how to communicate.

20:13And I think that if you're going to start a business, regardless of what you want to do, understanding those fundamentals is key. And then the other one, but I always gotta give props too, is Autobiography of a Yogi. Oh, yeah. So that's the book that changed my life. And I think that if you're gonna be an entrepreneur, everything you're gonna create is gonna come out of what you become and what you are. And so learning the art of becoming is crucial. Awesome, so you traveled everywhere to get this concept. For people that are tuning in, what advice would you give to them to think of a concept and bring it back to their city?

20:43Yeah, I mean, I think just asking the question of what's needed, you know, and then whether or not you're doing your concept for yourself or whether or not you're doing it because you really are trying to serve a need in your particular community. That's why we did this particular concept. And so that kind of determines how you go about your research. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was given a landscape to create my own way. And I really, really enjoyed that. When we started this business, I had never run a kitchen. I had never made a biscuit. I had never done any of these processes. And so that challenge excited me because where I'm at in my life is I know that those challenges are my opportunities.