Michael Symon: Good morning everybody. I have agreed not to tell your mother I’m saying that in the beginning because I will walk and flail and all those things. I’m not having a seizure; it’s just part of my make up. I appreciate the little plug for Roast. I don’t know if it is worth the drive because I woke up at four in this morning naked. I’ll let you know when I drive in the more regular time if it’s worth there to go for dinner but in the four in the morning, it’s just not that great of drive.
Yeah, no traffic, a lot of trucks, no traffic, and people in Michigan drive very fast too. I don’t know. It was like Indy 500 at four in the morning. I’m going to talk a little bit about not only our story of how we won about building our business, about the things that I feel important in building a business whether it would bee restaurateur or otherwise. And then after about a half hour of me talking about that, we could do a little bit of q and a if you guys have questions about business or Iron Chef or Dinner: Impossible or driving to Detroit and it goes it will be fine.
You know one thing I think about owning your own business. I don’t think there is anything that is frightening, more rewarding, more challenging than being the owner of your own business. I was lucky, when I was 16-years-old I was working in restaurants. I immediately knew at some point in my life, I had to own a restaurant. So at a very young age, I decided that this is what I want to do, this is what I want to aspire to. You know, went out to culinary school, came back, worked with some restaurants throughout Cleveland, started the Player’s. Why I really, when Mark Sherry really learned about the passion of food and what the passion of being a chef and then work for a Para Quadriplegic Giovanni's and really learned how to run a restaurant like Karl was a terrific teacher in teaching me how to run a restaurant. And then my wife and I did some things on our own Caxton Café, which we just kind of ran and then decided to open our own business, which was Lola in Tremont 12 years-ago.
The biggest advice I think I could give is being your own boss is one. When we told people we’re going to open a restaurant in Tremont 12-yeas ago, they looked at us like we were doing the crack that was currently in the neighborhood.
You know they just had this look on it like, why? What? You know. We lived in the neighborhood at the time because we worked in the restaurants so we can make any money so it was a very affordable place for us to live but we both have worked in New York, we came back to Cleveland, we fell in love with this little urban community that was outside of downtown Cleveland. And I think as the neighborhood grow around us, the restaurant grew also but the biggest thing is when we decided to open this business there, we did not have a shadow of a doubt or we have a shadow of doubt but we had a tremendous faith and passion about doing this project in this neighborhood. We just though it was going to work, we knew it was going to work and we’re going to do everything within our power to make it work and we believed in the neighborhood so much that when our customers came in to dine, they felt that it was safe there too. Which at the time, it really wasn’t, to be quite honest with you.
It’s a very safe neighborhood now. It’s a fantastic place. I can’t even afford to live their anymore. Liz and I, we’re going to, once Kyle our son graduate from high school like let’s move back down the Tremont, I’m like $600,000.00 for a three bedroom, and you know, condominium. What the hell happened over here? So but the neighborhood is very grown but the thing that really, I think is the most important is having the tremendous passion about what you do.
When you go into business for yourself, you have a lot of decisions to make like why am I doing this? Am I doing this for ego? Am I doing this because I hate my current boss? You know, am I doing this for money, which we almost absolutely the wrong answer.
Or am I doing this for passion? And when we go into a project, its 100% pass and driven. Myself, Liz and Doug we look at each other, we say why do we want to do this project. What makes this project and everything that we spill out whether in meetings, on paper, on the computer, whatever, is a 100% passion driven.
Our theory is we’re going to do this the right way and then we’re going to figure out how to make money because if you do it the other way, it never really seems to work in my business. I know so many restaurateurs or chefs that want to open restaurants and I’m going to open a restaurant because I’m going to make money. All right, you’re going to be out of business in six months, you know because you go into it with the wrong ways. We all in our own businesses, we know how to look at a bottom line, what is our bottom line need to be.
In my business my bottom line, we strive for 7%. That’s in the current economy. Ten years ago, it was 15% but you know margins are shrinking. Now we look, we hope we can make 7% in the business.
How are we going to work backwards to that, from passion to numbers? So when you go on to something, I feel it, it always have tot be something that you feel strongly about. You have to have an incredible amount of conviction to be a business owner and see it through and if you’re doing it just for money, if you’re doing it just for ego or if you’re doing it because you hated your last boss, you’re going to fail. It’s just, that’s just the reality of it.
The other thing that I think is really important is what’s your mission, you know. When we said, when we opened up and we decided we’re going to open up in Tremont. We said we’re going to be a funky eatery that’s open late, serves food that is good or better than any of the restaurants in the city that’s going to be casual.
I come there, I mean you guys, my dog really didn’t eat my clothes, and this is how I really dress. So, I needed a place, we wanted a place that we could get a great meal and not worth tree pea soup. But if you wanted to wear a three-piece suit, you could. So that was our goal when we opened Lola. We stacked very hard to it and certain people criticize for us openly but we knew we couldn’t be everything to every person. Like I’d be prior to Lola, I was chef at Giovanni's which have you’ve never been there but the servers are in tuxedos, the guests are in tuxedos, the parking attendants in a tuxedo, you know. They tried to make us wear tuxedos in the kitchen for crying out loud.
So, the customers that I catered to their and they knew me there was used to a certain place, you know, there wasn’t music. You could hear a, you know, a pin dropping in the restaurant. You’re almost afraid to talk in their as a guest. Just back in the 80’s, it’s a little more casual now.
And so my customers will come to Lola and I’d like the rolling stones cranked up. We’re wearing t-shirts, you know, it was like a big party but that’s what way we wanted the restaurant to be. And you know, did I lose some of those customers because of that? Probably but then I gain a lot more because we believed in how we’re going to do it and we really followed through with that concept absolutely.
So believe in your concept and follow your concept.
In my opinion, the most important thing; the absolute most important thing about owning your own business is your staff or your employees. They and so many people forget this in every business. I mean, I’m a restaurateur. I know restaurants but I also have a lot of people that I hire out and they send their employees to come do things for me.
Your employees are the biggest reflection of you there is. They will typically act how you act. If you act, is my place a lot cozy? Okay, if you act like a jackass and treat them horrifically, then they will leave your presence and treat your customers exactly how you just treated them, period.
We have staff that I, we have employees that have worked with Liz and Doug and I for over 15 years. One of them is at now going to be the general manager of Roast in Detroit. Frank which has been with me for 14 years, he’s still with me. We have a tremendously amount of loyal employees. We treat our employees like family. We pay them as good as anybody in the city. We give them benefits. We do all those things because to us, they are our greatest reflection. Between Lola and Lolita alone, there’s a 140 employees; counting Roast and consulting that we do it on a Country Club, we have about 340 total employees in our business. I know all their names. I treat them all with an incredible amount of respect as is my partner Doug, as is my partner Liz, as those the manager’s below us and so forth.
The greatest assets that you have are your employees. They are the ones that are going to get your message across. So and it’s hard sometimes like I, you know, I go into a kitchen, there are 30 guys in the kitchen. I turn around, I just show the guy how to chop garlic yesterday, he’s doing it like, and I don’t even know what he’s doing.
Being Greek and Italian, part of me wants to go absolutely ballistic but you know I had to take a deep breath, take a step back and treat them like I want to be treated. So I see it so much in the restaurant business because that’s the business that I’m in so much that people don’t treat their employees the right way. They don’t treat them how they are supposed to be and then they don’t understand why they don’t react to the customers how we want them too.
And I think that is the same in any business all the time, no matter what, you know. I have an electrician that I use at the restaurant. When he is there, I’m happy as a clown. He sends his guys, not so happy, you know and it’s, they are not a reflection of them and they need to be.
So really take, you want to always teach your employees about, there’s a very famous restaurateur in New York named Danny Meyer who owns Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern, several sponsor and the way that people in the business referred to Danny or even his employees is he makes a strength the Kool-Aid. And it’s like, you could talk to anyone of his employees and it’s like talking to Danny Meyer, it’s magical, you know. So the biggest advice I could give to all of you is make your employees drink the Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid is not that bad.
Once we open our first restaurant Lola, we waited ten years before we did our second project. Our second was Lola which is kind of funny. We actually changed Lola to Lolita; open our second restaurant, which was Lola. When, at that point, it was just Liz and I. We always said, we’re just going to own one restaurant, we never thought we would own more than one restaurant.
So eight years passed. We started with 25 employees at the original Lola. Eight years passed and about 17 of them are still there. So Liz and I are looking at each other and we’re like, you know. All these employees are growing with us. They are growing, they are growing, they are a 100 times better now than they were eight years go and we have nowhere for them to go. So when people looked at us, they said, “Why did you open a second restaurant?” We literally did it 100% for our staff. I had, you know, show chefs that deserves to be chefs. I have bar managers that should have been managers. I had managers that should have been GM’s. And they showed a tremendous loyalty to us so we showed that loyalty to them and show us to grow.
And that was, it was almost like a last minute effort like I said. Here I got this great Frank; yeah I got this great chef job for you. It’s going to double your pay, blah, blah, blah. I don’t want to leave boss. Okay, you know. And literally once we’re there with all of our employees, we realize it and it was most flattering thing that ever happened to me that our employees didn’t want to leave. So we opened a second project so they could grow with us and they taught us a lot, thought us that maybe that’s not always the best idea. The reason to open a second project but especially in the early going but at the end of the day, it ended up being the best thing to do. I don’t know if some of you have write or whatever the stories when we opened our second restaurant. We’re about a year and a half behind in opening. I had hire the entire staff, brought people in from different parts of the country, cooks and so forth to different parts of the country that decided to move here to be part of our team and our family.
I hired them nine months before we actually got the restaurant open. I made a commitment to them that they are coming here, we’re going to pay them. Liz and I chose to keep the pay essentially the entire restaurant pay roll for nine months leading up to the opening of the restaurant. When we opened the second Lola and Lolita, the day we opened the second Lola, I had $80.00 left in my bank account and that was after the $800,000.00 loan I took from National City. So we were literally weeks away from being bankrupted and this was only two years ago.
So we went through the process Lolita’s open, Lola’s open, fortunately, the restaurant generated a lot of volume and a lot of business we pulled ourselves out of that in a very quick fashion. I could give it two hour of seminar of how you should never open a restaurant with $80.00 but that’s it. Maybe that will be COSE’s next year.
But again, we did because we were passionate about the project. These people that are now my extremely loyal employees made a commitment to me, I made a commitment to them. We chose to be to honor our commitment and it worked out for the best. Was it the best way to go about business? No. But almost 75% of the staff I open with the Lola downtown is still with me today two years later and are now moving on to bigger and better things.
So again, it shows you what loyalty breeds. The last thing I feel about growth that is important is when we decided to do a second project, Liz and I, you know, I know that some people in here as I look around, you’re very hands-on owners, we’re very passion driven owners, we’re very monkey see, monkey do owners, you know like all right he’s going to pick up this because I picked it up. He’s going to clean that because I clean that. Not, we will ever superstructure. We’re liberal artist or how were you want to refer to us, you know. We’re one of those kinds of people.
So we knew that to take our business to the next level, we needed to bring in a partner. We ended up bringing a partner, who’s been best friends with ours for over 20-years, Doug Petkovic who is a tremendous operator. Knew the numbers, knew how to work number, knew how to dissect things and so forth and so on. So I think another thing to really look up when you’re looking to grow or when you’re looking to start your own business is know your strength and weaknesses. Before you decide to grow, you need to look at it, you go, what can I do.
Lola original was 50 seeds, you know. Liz and I could run it. Just, it just, was easy to run. Now we have another restaurant now. We’re doing consulting, so forth and so on. We got to know what we’re strong at. I do obvious. Liz does decors and beverage program. Doug does operations. We talk about everything but we all do our certain jobs.
So know your strength and weaknesses. I could tell you in the restaurant business so many times, member of my family, so many times that a chef wants to open a restaurant. He’s a great chef, a great chef. I want to be my own boss. I want to open a restaurant. He goes and opens a restaurant. He has no idea he or she has no idea how to run the front of the house, how to run the books, how to make money. It doesn’t matter how great of a chef you are. In a year, you’re going to be out of business. So it’s like that I think with any business. Know your strength; know your weaknesses and you continue to grow as a company now our goals changed. We are our goal was always let’s own one great restaurant. Okay second. Employees have been around, we’re going to open a second great restaurant then I go on the silly food network thing, I went Iron Chef. All this stuff, I’m sorry Sam can you tell me stuff that we have no idea how to handle.
You know being, no ones prouder of Cleveland than me. I guarantee. We look at this room, there are proud people equally as proud but no one is more proud than me of the city. Part of being a chef in the city is it doesn’t matter. I want food and wine, best time chefs in American in ’98, been on Food Network before, the show called, Melting Pot that was very big in prisons and nursing home, I don’t know if you’re upset. And one—Lola had won a glutton of national awards. As a chef in Cleveland, other places around the country really didn’t care. It’s sad but it’s true so we got offers to consult here and do this here, do that there. I went Iron Chef and suddenly like to the rest of the country I just learned how to cook. And all these calls will come in, “well we want you to develop a concept for us, we want you to do this over here.” So now we’re in this weird spot. All right, what do we do? Are we going to grow? Or we’re not growing to grow. We need to make some decisions here, we even need to make them fast, and these things are h like crazy.
This is my last business advice for you is, I was fortunate enough to have friends in the business that had been there. And Bobby Flay has been a dear friend of mine for the past 15 years. He’s been like my, what do you call a person that like tells you what to do all the time, mentor, thank you. I’m a chef. I barely graduated from saying nuts. So I have Bobby, so I call him up and I’m like freaking out, I don’t understand all these people call me, I don’t know what to do, he’s like, “you don’t need to rush anything, they will keep calling.” Well first, he said, how long is your contract on Iron Chef. So he said all right, everybody let’s take a deep breath, let’s figure this out. We decided to bring out a director on operation, Sam Lindsley, who is a terrific operator.
We meet with Starwood hotel. Starwood hotels who is W. Weston St. Regis and he comes to Cleveland. They looked at our operations, they say, “we’d love what you do, we want you to start developing concepts for Starwood.” Is that me, you know, so what it means, it’s a really great thing. It’s really worked out great for us to this point. We haven’t even opened one yet, we open today. I drove and that I was I drove it from Detroit this morning right after this, I drive back to Detroit and our first day open at Roast is this evening, so I don’t have any hair. So we get to develop concepts and operate the concepts with other people’s money.
This is great. What a great idea this is. Obviously, there are numbers that we have to hit. We have to do it the right way so Lola and Lolita, we own, they are ours. No partners, just Liz, Doug and I and a couple of banks and Roast, we are a management contract, two months. So now we’re learning how to grow again. We’re going to learn how to grow again and we’re going to learn how to grow again, it’s not going to take us out of our hometown. But it’s going to give us the ability to do some other projects and what those other projects, the way that we’re choosing to grow is the people that have shown tremendous loyalty to us with each new project that we open, we’re going to make partners of our management team. So when we opened Lola at the first, we opened Lola in Tremont for a $120,000.00, insane.
To put that into perspective, Lola downtown cost $3,000,000.00, Roast with other people’s money cost $4,000,000.00. If ever we do one in Vegas is its going to cost $14,000,000.00. So we opened it with a $120,000.00, couldn’t get alone from a bank. No one gave us money. Finally one of our regular customers said, “I believe in you and Liz, here’s the $120,000.00, pay me back in seven years.”
Okay, great. Beautiful we paid them back in four, so instead of my employees who, instead of them going through all that trauma, we’re just going to make them partners as we go and we’re going to grow with partners. Our first partnership deal is going to be on the east side. We’re opening up patisserie which is just a fancy name for a place that sells coffee and sweets. The French though surely confuse us.
With our pastry chef, Cory Barrett, we are blessed; we have one private top five-pastry chefs in the country that works for us so we’re going to open up a little pasty shop for him. He’ll own 60%, Doug, Liz and I will own the other 40 but we’ll raise all the money for him, he doesn’t have to worry about it but he’ll own and operate it. So now I’m going to, our goal now is to invest in the people, we’re going to invest in essentially people that we’ve, we’ve invested all this time and effort into them, now we’re going to invest money to them, hoping that they make money for us and them. So that’s kind of our new, our new and our last goal with them.
The last thing I’ll talk about and then we will do a little q and a is, I think, I hope you can tell what means to standing up here. I’m me. I just am myself. I go to work everyday, this is how I am. I come home from work everyday. This is how I am, other than when Liz is yelling at me and I’m a little more sheepish. And when customers come in to my restaurant, this is how I act. What you see is what you get. And I think that’s a great way to run your business. Build a business around your personality. Build a business around yourself, then you never have to pretend your something your something that you’re not.
And I think as independent operators, all these small independent business owners here and there are chains everywhere, you know. There’s national chains here, national chains there. The thing that will separate you from all those things, the things that I feel protects our restaurants in Cleveland from cheese cake factory, I just go down in all the food empires, you know is we’re ourselves. So we feel that we don’t have to change how we are. Our customers like how we are. We’re going to give them this, embrace them of ourselves and that’s what makes our businesses successful. A chain can never do that. They can’t teach that and it’s fearful for us as we’re going to try to maybe grow here because how do you that. So as a small business owner, be yourself, build your business around unless you’re an asshole.
Then build it around someone else but and your customers will embrace you and they’ll keep coming back. That’s how we need to fight against all these, you know, big things. Also, your old Clevelanders here support Cleveland. Everyone here is a small business owner; I should never see one of you people in Wal-Mart, never. Great local grocery stores hire us but why, why, what do when you are there, you know. I almost had a heart attack. But support your local businesses. I’ll always drive an extra two miles down the street, passed the Home Depot to get to an individual small little joint hardware store. You know, I’ll drive pass the, all these giant, mega box stores and restaurants to get to my local diner, to get to my local deli, to get to my local restaurant.
You want to be supported as an individual operator, make sure you support your own. That’s the key to huge key. That’s all I got.
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