Now that I was committed to a new footprint for my restaurant, an extremely simple menu, and a focus on food being consumed outside my four walls, It was time to make it work. NO MORE DISHWASHING TIL 3 AM!! NO MORE TURNING TABLES AND NO MORE 25 MEMBER FOH STAFF! Wait staff, mind you I am one, are like the wide receivers on the football team. They are always open and want the ball every play, have diva like tendencies and are flashy but the good ones are worth all of the heartburn and headache they cause.
THE TECHNICAL “PORQUE”.
At my full service restaurant I had a menu that was over 60 items in length. I had to make several sauces, prep many different items, and be prepared for whatever came our way. We eventually got our par levels down and became better and better at being less wasteful in both labor and food. In this exercise I became more cognizant of how to bring more to the bottom line, sometimes we don’t have to worry about percentages, after all, we deposit dollars not percentages. At this point full service, full menu was all I knew and the biggest thing you can know is that you don’t know what you don’t know.
The new business model was the unknown, based on all the efficiencies we had created and some that we had seen but could not implement. The new business model lessened my fixed costs so much that my catering alone would provide me a comfortable living. I ran a product mix of the best selling items at my big restaurant and figured which would be the most flexible and travel well. From the beginning of my catering revenue stream I had focused on cooking two items that had sides I could handmake, make to order, traveled well, were well known, and gave the best representation of the hard work and flavors we offered. After all, at my first store we made all the tables in our garage and bought handmade chairs. Handmade goes a long way.
With this simple menu came a simple equipment package. This simple package allowed efficiencies and low opening costs. This all allowed us to become specialized and, with time, implement efficiencies. I graduated with a marketing and an entrepreneurship degree so I liked, and thought, in terms of scalability. I knew this model provided that and it was a matter of fine tuning now.
OPTIMAL PRIME COSTS (I like transformers)
Restaurants live, or don’t, based on Prime costs. This is the addition of your labor percentage, and your cost of goods sold percentage, at least it is to me. I count everything that goes into putting the final product in the bag. I could get specific, and I do, down to every item percentage, but for back of the envelope math, my way works best for me. Like I mentioned earlier, the fixed costs had been minimized by the smaller footprint (1200 sq ft). My success now was truly in my hands, and as a business owner, that’s all you can ask for. Its never easy and it probably won’t be but I like having the chance to fail my way.
THE NEW BEGINNING
I opened my first store (the big one) on September 4th 2002. My mother and I labored, fought, scratched and clawed, for six years. Slow forward to August 15th 2008 and here I am ready to start this new path. I’m a little older, realized I still had a lot I didn’t know, but now at least I was aware of it, and I am laser focused on what needs to be done. I have scraped every rock that is below the surface of this river I jumped in back in 2002. The rocks can either serve to stop you, trip you, or be used as another foothold, a new place to plant and push forward. So I had. Some customers were upset, very upset. After 6 months of telling them I was leaving the old joint and opening a new tiny one I realized that no one realized that I meant tiny. Families showed up on my new first Friday and kids were in tears, no chicken dance to be had. The guests were mad that no seating area was available in this jam packed 4 table restaurant. The line was out the door for a short time and then they left with a coupon in hand that explained in writing what I had been telling them for 6 months. This ain’t that.
I was just going to do my catering from 8 am to 1 pm and be gone, selling, spreading the word, and for a bit I allowed myself to imagine a life outside of a restaurant. then a storm hit our city. We were flooded, without power, worst of all, I had just received $3,500 worth of product that would go to waste if I didn’t act quickly. A cousin and I found a way to reach the store. We came in felt the AC, lights came on, cooler was at the perfect temp, the day was saved. This happened a month into my new venture. We were lucky, some of our new neighbors were not. I gathered up what crew could make it to the store. I had my crew that had been with me for the entire six year journey up to that point. They were good, loyal, and we both needed the help to get through this storm. We had a team meeting to see how everyone fared through the rains, then we came up with a game plan. My cousin and I would go around the neighborhood knocking on doors of houses that had no power and would offer them a free meal, hot and fresh for them at 5 pm at our new store. I opened my original store at 5 pm 6 years earlier, hoping for a line out the door and great sales. This time we wanted a line out the door to give away free food. Power could go out at any time and all would be lost, we made lemonade out of it and gave away everything we had to cook. We did have a line out the door because, as luck would have it, one of the neighbors doors we knocked on was trying to organize a block cook out for the neighborhood. We told him to do that tomorrow because tonight we would do all the cooking for them. We told them how to find us, as no one knew our name yet, and find us they did. 80 plus families came in and got what we cooked. There were no menus, no options, no choices, just pounds and half pounds of free fajitas with all the trimmings ready to go once they got to the counter.
NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED
The power never went out. The rain stopped and recovery efforts began all around us. Neighbors still had no power so we gave out bags of ice daily, fed people in the store, took orders to their houses and had orders ready for pick up when they called. The dream of catering and going home was gone. No banker hours for me. ( Branch bankers, I mean, not investment bankers, those guys are animals. They have the work ethic of restaurant people with the brains of, something that has great brains.) Either way, the customers kept coming. Not enough to merit the extended hours and added labor, but who could say no? We are in this because we have serving hearts, so serve we did. People kept coming, and other guests would see the traffic, so they came in. At first people thought I was crazy. Delivering Mexican food to homes, absurd, and uber unlikely. It was 2008. Dinosaur fossils were still easily accessible just by kicking the dirt in your garden. We were looked at as too expensive to be fast food, because we weren’t, and too small to be a restaurant, because we weren’t. Skeptics would come in and stare. I had an open kitchen and my tortilla lady right by the counter. I wanted to show the fresh. When an order was placed you would hear the kitchen printer, then meat hit the grill to fulfill that order. Still they were apprehensive. My grandma was a gem, self taught to read, full of knowledge. Regarding hiring she would say “you can tell a lazy man by the way he walks” and not to be fooled by new hires because “every new broom sweeps good”, of cash handling she said that “people aren’t crooks, but you can make them crooks with poor systems”. Of the new challenge with the new business model she told me “don’t mind earning it”. So I didn’t mind it. I handed out the order with a business card and a “money later” guarantee. The guest would take the food and if they liked it they could call the store and pay then. If they didn’t like it, no harm no foul, a free meal and I got the chance any business owner wants. People called and paid, a lot. Then they called for delivery to their doors, that led to the office, and it grew from there.