An exciting artisan Italian restaurant is about to open in Salem, NH. They've got a big staff (100+), a cool location, and a passion for bringing artisan Italian to main street.
Check out this cool Irish Pub in Hamilton, NJ. They're passionate about their food and beer and about showing their guests a good, fun time. Here's a cool page on their site, with Polaroid images of smiling, happy customers hanging out and having fun. They've also got a great Facebook page and a cool simple mobile web site.
We're excited that this fun 25-person crew joined the Schedulefly movement, and we hope we're making their lives a little easier.
Schedulefly users, watch this fun 3-minute video clip when you have a chance, because you've started a movement just like this...
You are all the equivalents of the "first follower." As the moderator points out, there is no movement without the first follower. We were the "lone nuts" dancing around in the field, waving our arms and trying to convince people that we have a simple restaurant staff scheduling solution that can make their lives easier. All of you were ahead of the curve and you believed we might be right, so you had the courage to follow us. It's because of you that we are not lone nuts any longer, but rather we are part of a movement that was started and is being lead by all of you!
The cool thing is that the movement is still in its early stages. Right now it's just two of us (we're "shirtless guy" and you are the "first follower"). Because while over 50,000 individuals have joined the movement, we believe that millions will in the coming years. That's why our web site is full of pictures and videos of YOU. You are the most important part of the movement - the spark to our flint. And you are the one that others will follow.
So thank you for being brave enough to walk down the hill and join us. We know it's going to be a fun movement to be a part of for many years!
We've added a feature that allows managers to get their daily crib sheet as an email each morning. The crib sheet is a handy list of everyone scheduled for the day - including their in/out times, contact information and any descriptive shift notes like "Open", "Patio" etc. We also include any events or notes that have been posted on that day as well...like reservations. The name of each scheduled staff member is a link to their email address - clicking it on a computer or touching it on a mobile device will open a new email message to them. Their cell number on most mobile devices will be linked for an easy one touch phone call.
The daily crib sheet is often printed by our customers and left at the hostess stand or somewhere where managers can quickly double check coverage for the day. Our mobile site allows managers to view the crib sheet on the go - and now they can opt-in to have it sitting in their inbox when they wake up.
Admins: this new check box is on the My Account page - in the system alert section
Here is a crib sheet I got this morning...
Keepin' It Simple and Useful, The Schedulefly Crew
We are really excited to have this fun loving team from Santa Barbara CA in the Schedulefly family. Arch Rock Fish just opened this month and came running out of the gate with a fantastic looking concept and company culture. They are also making great use of social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to help kick off their journey. Clearly that is helping get a buzz going in Santa Barbara...
Check out this great promotional video they put together...
They've also created some funny web commericals. The simple, creative delivery of these messages is great.
We are working on a book called Awesome Indie Owners (or something catchy like that), which tells the stories of twenty highly successful independent restaurant owners. It's going to be an absolute must-have for anybody who wants to own a restaurant. I can confidently tell you it's going to be an incredible book. And I'm not being arrogant.
You see, the book is simply a compilation of interviews with these owners. They have all kinds of wisdom and knowledge and experience, and they have offered to share it. My role is simply to ask them questions, collect their answers, and share it all with you.
And by the way, each person I have interviewed has taught me something valuable about running a business. So I've already learned that while this book will be mostly about owning restaurants, it will also contain tons of general business wisdom.
Twenty successful restaurant owners. Tons of wisdom. One fun and educational book. Stay tuned...
The Office Drinks & Nosh, a really cool place just opened in Oklahoma City, and we are looking forward to keeping up with what's happening out there. Welcome to the 30 staff members - we hope ya'll have fun using Schedulefly to check your work schedules online.
This week I've tipped one server 25% and one server 10%. At the same restaurant. The guy who got the 25% tip was just so much more attentive, genuine, and helpful. The guy who got the 10% seemed like he couldn't have cared less that I was there. I don't even know why I gave have him 10%. Habit I guess.
So I'm curious, what do all of you do to try to maximize your tips and earn yourself the most income you can on each shift? Fire away in the Comments box, and I'll write a follow up post on some of the best ideas.
"Guys I guess this is stating the obvious, but it's so clear to me that when you don't have any money to spend you are forced to be creative, and that's how you innovate and come up with cool new ideas and elegant solutions. Let's always always always take that approach, no matter how much revenue we are driving, so that we always force ourselves to innovate."
Needless to say, they agreed. But you know what, it's easy to lose site of this philosophy once you start growing quickly and turn profitable. It's easy in business to think that since you have money, you should find creative ways to spend it. But if you pretend you don't have money, you force yourself to figure out creative ways to do things as well (or often better) than you could with money. And you reap the additional benefits of enjoying the challenge of dreaming up creative solutions, and simply having more fun.
There's a cool quote in a book called Founders At Work from Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple: "All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life." I couldn't agree more!
This cool American Stir-Fry place in Atlanta just jumped on board with our simple restaurant employee scheduling and communication app. The lives of 50 more folks just got a little easier! Check out Big Chow the next time you are in Atlanta.
Bananas Diner opened recently in Orlando, and they've got a cool, fun concept and a GREAT philosophy. Check out this quote from co-owner Eddie Nickell: "We envision the wait staff getting to know people on a personal level, how they like their coffee and what their favorite dish is. This is the place that you can always count on for excellent comfort food and a relaxing atmosphere early in the morning, for lunch, or even late at night. It’s all the best food and sense of community that a good diner can provide. This is the kind of place where you can see yourself becoming a ‘regular’.”
We're excited the fun, personable team at Bananas is using our restaurant staff scheduling app to help make their lives easier. And we wish them a very successful first year!
I love this place. Visit Cafe Kubal's web site and tell me you don't feel the passion pouring through your screen. I love coffee and I am stoked to see this cool crew using Schedulefly's restaurant staff scheduling app to make their lives easier, and have a little fun while they communicate and stay connected at work. And by the way, you can order some of their coffee to make at home. I know I will be!
Oh, also, Cafe Kubal is doing an outstanding job with their Twitter page. In addition to sharing what's going on behind the scenes at their shop - they are showing a little personality and letting people easily engage with them. Great job guys...Twitter for business is much more fun and useful that way.
Bub's Burgers & Ice Cream in Carmel, IN has been a great customer since 2008. These folks serve up famous burgers with the best, freshest ingredients they can find. And you won't find better ice cream.
They do tons of business and need a huge staff to keep things hoppin'. So when they opened their new location in Bloomington, they were glad to already know and love Schedulefly for their restaurant staff scheduling and communication. Their 75 employees and managers never had to deal with all of the inevitable scheduling snafus and errors when restaurants open. Nope. Their lives were made easy from the very start.
Chad's Grill in Lakewood, CO has been successful for 28 years without Schedulefly. But like any business that has endured as long as Chad's, they are always making changes and tweaks to improve their business. They recently decided to make the lives of their 45 staff members and managers easier, by taking their restaurant employee scheduling and communication online.
Locally owned and operated neighborhood restaurant/bar since 1982. Known in Lakewood for eating, drinking and gathering, Chad's offers a varied menu featuring rotisserie meats, certified Angus beef, pasta, pizza and seafood. Full bar service with 16 micro brews, specialty martinis and wine selection. Join the crew at Chad's for any occasion: lunch, dinner, brunch, happy hour and late night.
Making Life Easier for Restaurant Folks Every Day,
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Good afternoon. It’s Wil with Schedulefly and today I’m talking to Richard Taubin. Richard is the owner of Friends Coastal Restaurant down in Madisonville, Louisiana. This place is awesome. It’s sort of a Key West meets New Orleans fusion. It’s a fun place. They’ve got a really fun crew. A great team. And I’m really excited to talk to Richard today. So Richard, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved in the restaurant business, and tell us about Friends.
[RICHARD TAUBIN:] Yeah sure thing. I appreciate it. Well you know it’s kind of funny. If you were to ask me a month before I actually got into the restaurant business, which was around 2006, I would have called you crazy. I actually had zero restaurant experience. One of my best friends growing up Chris Binnings, he worked in restaurants growing up. So I went off into the IT world and he was helping people build restaurants and so forth and learning concepts. He’s been in New Orleans there for his entire life except for about maybe a two or three or four year stint over in Colorado and Key West. Any rate, when he was in Key West he saw a lot of New Orleans in Key West. He thought it would be a great fusion. He initially wanted to call his concept Hurricane, which you know obviously after a year later into the story, you’ll see why we didn’t do that. He worked for this restaurant called Friends on the Tchefuncta in Madisonville in high school. And after Hurricane Katrina came through and essentially brought it to its knees and the owners were older in life and they more or less wanted to do a lease out on the property and have someone else run the business. And it just so happened Chris had this concept in his head. And when he came back to visit his family from Key West he ran into them and pitched his idea and they said “Let’s do it” because he spent four years of high school at the restaurant. He knows the owners very well and they like him a lot and everything. So here he is. He’s going to be a new restaurant owner after helping other people open restaurants and manage them and cook at them. He’s done everything, managing and so forth. So now he’s going to implement his concepts into what was Friends on the Tchefuncta. We renamed it to Friends Coastal Restaurant. So we kept the Friends name. Obviously calling it “Hurricanes” after opening a place after Katrina was not necessarily the best idea. The name Friends I think is a really great name for the kind of restaurant we are. And it really kind of ties in to the fact that we grew up together as best friends. All of our friends and family helped us kind of put it together and brought it to fruition after a long six month stint after the hurricane of rebuilding the place. So the hurricane was August. We opened up the following May. So we didn’t really get started until January because it was just sitting there for awhile. We didn’t even know about it, it was available.
Anyway, Chris calls me up and says hey man, I’m going to own a restaurant. I said okay. And he said I want you to help me out. Him knowing that I was on the IT side. I’ve had a website company and I’ve been the director of IT for several companies and so forth, so I had a really good foundation that I can help them with. I helped design the logo. The marketing and advertising. The website. Actually built the website myself. Got him kicked off really fast in that regard. Helped design the menu. Not the actual items on the menu but the layout and so forth. And you know the restaurant business is not completely foreign to me. My mother was in two fine dining restaurants when I was growing up for a long time. So I’ve been around restaurants before. It wasn’t completely foreign. Certainly when you own a restaurant there’s a lot more to it than people think. It’s not just about cooking good food. It’s about running a tight ship and about controlling costs because that’s only way you’re going to make money in the restaurant business. So that’s more or less how I got started in the restaurant business. Chris gets to focus on the front of the house and the back of the house staff and it’s been a great partnership. We bought that restaurant. Before we took it over, the sales at that restaurant were probably between 800,000 to maybe 1.5 million at the peak, and they’d had it for ten years. The first year we’re open we’re at 2.1 million. And we’re probably about 2.5 right now. So every year we’ve gotten bigger and bigger and it’s due to a lot of hard work. It’s due to a lot of dedication. We’re just trying new things here and there. We’re trying to shave costs and look into how we can better the restaurant and give people a better experience, good food. Of course the atmosphere is there. This place is definitely a Key West feel to it with a New Orleans flair. It’s worked really really well for our community because it’s kind of like a “vacation destination in your own backyard” – that’s the phrase Chris uses all the time. So that’s kind of how we got started. We’re going on our fourth year this year.
As a matter of fact, we decided to do Friends Fest at the end of this month. Kind of celebrate our four years and do a yearly tradition with two non profit organizations. One is Art in Madisonville and Teachers for Guitars in the Classroom. So we have music and art. We’re going to have bands, we’re going to have art booths and everything. We have four live bands and we have fireworks show at 9:30 at night on a river on a barge which is going to be really cool. So we’ve promoted our restaurant through really cool functions to give back to the community and that’s really helped us out. Certainly we get a lot of support from that and it’s just a cycle of helping other people in the community. So that’s really been our philosophy is to be engaged in the community. Chris and I both have children and we think it’s good to give back and be a real big part of the community as opposed to just sitting idle and trudging along.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Richard, it’s a really cool story how you guys got going. You started this place - or got it reinvigorated - after a terrible storm, as the community was rebuilding. You’ve been through a very severe economic downturn. But I just wrote down the numbers that you mentioned. You guys have, depending on what years maybe they have done in the past, I mean you somewhere around doubled sales just about. You talked about top line stuff. You’re growing your sales a lot. But you also mentioned a couple of times cost cutting and saving costs so you’re focused very much on your bottom line. So you guys are savvy businessmen. Tell me about that. Tell me about what you do to grow the top lineage to drive more sales. I mean a lot of it I know you mentioned things like Friends Fest and promoting the restaurant through doing cool things like that and cool functions. What else do you do to drive top line growth and what kinds of things do you do to shore up your bottom line?
[RICHARD TAUBIN:] Well you know, we’re all in it for profit. I mean certainly there’s a love of the game. The food, the industry, the hospitality industry…it’s almost like it’s hard to pull away from it. It is a very high and a very low kind of industry where you go through a lot of highs and lows. Usually it’s something new everyday and dealing with people and personalities. We have 80 people during our peak which is during the summer months. We spend eight months out of the year and then we kind of shave it down to about 40 people average in the wintertime. The main thing for us is just it was fun for me getting into this restaurant because it was… from the beginning, it was figuring out exactly what the look and feel is going to be like, and that was me being also a graphic designer and having an eye for art. My stepfather was an artist and his father was an artist, you know really kind of played into us having a really high energy going into this. I was more the support person. But I certainly shared his inspiration for it. One of the things that you quickly learn is that you’ve got to make money. You want to be able to feed the family and you want to send the kids to college. We’re not a chain restaurant. We’re a local restaurant. We have considered possibly taking it to other places. We know we have to fine tune our processes and fine tune our operations to get it to a point where it’s definitely a feasible thing. You can make millions of dollars in sales a year but still make no money if you don’t do it right. The industry standard is typically around 30 percent for both labor and food costs. If you’re at 40 percent labor and food costs, that’s 80 percent of all the money you bring in. You’ve got 20 percent to pay all the rest of the bills and put some money in your pocket. And typically that doesn’t happen if you’re doing those percentages. So one of the things that we’ve really struggled with is a little bit of both, a little bit of food and labor costs. We’re hovering around about between 30 and 45 percent. When the sales are coming in you can get away with it but that’s when you really should be making money. And when it’s really tough during the wintertime when sales are down, you don’t have a choice.
So the biggest thing for us was to really stay consistent with the model that we have and realizing exactly what our costs are through the different times of the season. I mean we look at the weather everyday because we are a fair weather kind of place. And we tell people we’re not just your fair weather friend because we feel like we have great food and great cuisine and certainly the atmosphere. It’s hard when people associate being on the river on this big huge deck when with boats going by and it’s raining outside. So when it’s not nice outside we can just bet it’s going to be quiet. So we’ve gone through a few chefs and so forth who are managing the kitchen with inventory and so forth. We have somebody now named Travis Cabler. He’s been with us for almost running on two years. He’s done such a phenomenal job of tracking sales and tracking food cost. He puts them in all the time. He keeps the vendors on their toes with prices going up and down and so forth. It takes a little bit extra time to do those things but it pays off in the long run. And we’re able to compensate him accordingly with what he’s doing to help us save. We’ve been down to in the really good months around 26 percent food costs which is really good. Really really good. But it’s averaging probably between 20 to 30 percent. So we’re definitely in the ballgame on those.
As far as labor that fluctuates. It’s part of the daily grind of saying you know you keep people around and have bad service because you think it’s going to be slow and if you get a rush you’re going to have to deal with it. Or you keep people around and people pop in. So we have to play that game all the time and it is a daily decision. If you bring in a hostess making eight dollars an hour and they come in an hour early everyday. We don’t open until eleven, they come in at ten and they really don’t need to be there until about ten, 15 minutes before because they have a few small duties to do. I mean you’re talking about eight dollars. We’re open six days a week. So eight times six times 52 weeks. You’re talking about several thousand dollars that is right there in labor that you can save. Otherwise if you just bring in people at certain times and make sure they clock out at other times. There’s a whole management side to this. It’s just not about cooking great food or great recipes out there and great chefs and so forth. But you’ve got to have that management team behind you to make sure that you actually make money doing it. That’s one of the things that’s really tough is just to manage that.
Schedulefly has been an incredible tool for us to use because we can obviously see a list of what our salaries are. We can see a list of the schedule and create a template. During the summer months this is our template. We need one hostess, one mid hostess to kind of blend between the beginning shift and the evening shift and then bartenders and so forth. We’re able to kind of really get a good visual of what our labor is going to be and we start working accordingly. When a storm comes in and it starts raining we start letting people go. Certainly that parlays into our conversation with Schedulefly, I certainly enjoy the simplicity of it and the staff absolutely loves it. And they’re telling other people. A lot of people work at several other restaurants. They’re telling other restaurants, “Hey you’ve got to get this because they can check their schedule any time the want.” So using tools like that really helps us try to streamline our costs. On the food side we’re working closely with our vendors to streamline a certain cost structure so that we don’t have these fluctuations. With the oil spill in the Gulf, we’re working really really close with them right now to figure out plan B from getting seafood at different sources because we are a seafood restaurant. So that’s going to, we have to be concerned about pricing and so forth. We have a fixed menu. It’s not something that we just change arbitrarily. It’s going to be a big decision on us to try to figure out exactly we’re going to modify that and how it’s going to impact us and how it’s going to impact other people. We’re able to bring in more business because I think we have a neater concept. We have a great staff and we have great food and of course the location is the location. I mean everybody comes there for definitely the location. It really parlays into doing poker runs with the speedboats and doing festivals the whole time and things like that. That kind of helps drive our exposure and keeps Friends in the forethought of people when they think about going out to eat.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] You’ve got to be creative, you’ve got to be engaged in the community. You obviously have to have good food. That’s a non starter if you don’t. But the staff is something I always wonder about, Richard. How do you find and retain good staff? How do you get them as excited about Friends Coastal as you and your partner are?
[RICHARD TAUBIN:] Well one of the things…it’s kind of an easy sell because the place does high volume. They’re going to make a lot of money during the summer. So we can more or less hire who we like to because we have a really neat restaurant that does high volume. I mean it’s a really cool place to work because you have such a beautiful view. Obviously you have to deal with managing a lot of people at your table and so forth and a lot of issues. One of the things that Chris and I both…as kids we were really good friends. We kind of separated for a while. I was in Texas, he was in Louisiana. Then he went to Key West for a while. We kept in touch but, you know, people grow up, they have different personalities and so forth. They have different philosophies about treating people at work and so forth. When Chris and I really touched base again on this whole project. I asked a lot of questions about how he managed people and how he felt about that and how he was treated growing up in the restaurant business.
One of the philosophies that we both have kind of taken hold of is that the employees come first, even before the customers, because if your employees are taken care of, if they’re compensated correctly, if they’re given the right tools and they’re treated professionally, that shines on the customers. So those customers are going to be taken care of. We have an open door policy. I’m not going to sit here and say there aren’t temper flares and here and there and stuff like that. For the most part we really keep it professional. We try and treat everybody with respect. You don’t necessarily get the best of people if you don’t give them the opportunities to excel. And so we try and implement a lot of training and we try to implement a lot of fair play with shifts and schedules and so forth and have an open door policy. If there’s issues you can talk directly to the owners and the managers and we’ll have to process to help you all out. And we’re very family oriented. I mean I’ll give you an example. During Gustav and Ike, which are another two storms that really put us under the weather, we paid our employees. Here we are a restaurant going to be closed for several months and all our employees have to work so they’re going to look for other jobs. So what we did is we actually paid them to stay around and help clean up and get the restaurant back on its feet. We retained our employees that way and they really loved us for that because they really didn’t have any other place to go. We certainly know a lot of them didn’t. So they were part of rebuilding a place which instills a lot of pride and so forth of, “Hey we all brought this back together.” So we are family oriented kind of people. We have helped out people that needed their paycheck right away. When their other check came in we voided it or whatever. We take care of them if we had to. And doing those kinds of things builds trust. It builds camaraderie. It builds retention. And we have some employees that started with us four years ago. I mean it’s a very transient industry. You have a lot of people in school, high school, college, so forth. Then you have some career people and that’s what they do. We’ve had some people who go thorough their entire college career at Friends. Here we are going on four years and we still have a few of those employees. I think that speaks well for us and it speaks well for how we run our operations. We’re not perfect by any means but we definitely strive to do the right thing and to make it a place to want to work. And then of course you get extra effort out of people when you treat them right. Theft is a big thing in the hospitality industry and we have to keep an eye on those kinds of things. I think you start to see less of it when you try to get a feeling that the owners are there to be with you and go through this thing together. If you go through tough times we give you more shifts or try to help you out other ways. That’s kind of our philosophy. It’s not a perfect science but it definitely works for us.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Well you guys are doing a lot of things right, Richard. I congratulate you on your success. You have just given some really awesome perspective and great philosophies and just really wonderful insight to anybody that is interested in what restaurant owners are thinking and, more importantly, tp people that are wanting to start restaurants. I thought this was awesome. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your time. I know you’re a busy guy. So thank you. Thank you very much. This is really cool and I look forward to putting this into our series. It’s a really good one.
[RICHARD TAUBIN:] You’re quite welcome. I have to say when you asked me to do this for what you do for us and for me what kind of business you’re running there, it was a no brainer for me to help you out with doing this and certainly share our knowledge with what we have. It’s no problem at all to take some time to do that. So we definitely appreciate you and what you provide for us.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Awesome man. Well thank you. I’ll let you get back to it. I appreciate it and I’m sure we’ll talk again soon.
It's a nice sunny morning here in Wilmington NC today and a typical Monday morning for me. Wake up and have coffee with my wife and watch the news, while our 3yr old son performs surgery on his stuffed animals. You know - the kiddie doctor kit with the shot, stethoscope and blood pressure monitor.
Anyway, I just hopped on the laptop to knock out a few small changes to our little website and as usual I got sucked into watching the really cool map of live restaurant customer activity on our homepage. It's a google map that pans to the location of a customer when they do something like check their schedule, trade a shift or approve a schedule change. It was bouncing around venues on the east coast since it's way too early for most people to be up on the west coast...and then the map zipped across the Atlantic Ocean and across Africa and Saudi Arabia to Dubai - because our new customer there was logged in doing some work. For a second I thought there was a bug making the map flip out...but no...the owner of a restaurant there was approving a schedule change online.
As I sat there, still in my pajamas, and watched that map zip across the globe to show a customer on the other side of the earth logging in...a feeling of amazement came over me. Seriously, Schedulefly is a simple system, with a simple team and a simple business model. We've not taken any investment, we are not working on a global marketing campaign - yet a really great restaurant in Dubai heard about us, tried us for 30 days and is now a happy customer. Amazing.
I felt an urge to blog this and let people how we are reaching the other side of the planet with our service. Wait - I really have no idea! We are 3 guys with a laser focus on keeping our software simple and serving restaurants. 10 years ago, a software company run by 3 guys in North Carolina would have had a hard time serving customers in places they did not actually visit. Heck - finding new customers in South Carolina would probably have cost us some money - someone on the other side of Africa? Forget it.
Today is a different story...the internet has changed everything for small businesses. What an incredibly fun ride it is...
Wild Peeta, in Dubai, is the world's first fusion Shawarma restaurant. The founders are two ex-corporate Emirati brothers who've decided to follow their dream. That's really cool and we are thrilled to be a small part of helping them get there by helping ease the pain of restaurant staff scheduling and communication.
Follow them on Twitter - twitter.com/wildpeeta. They are a good example of a restaurant using Twitter to not only promote their restaurant but also to engage and listen to their audience.
Tad Peelen at Joe's Real BBQ in Gilbert, AZ posted this awesome pic of his employee of the week, with a very nice comment about her. It took him a few seconds to post the pic and write the post. But it undoubtedly made his employee, Alex, very happy for the recognition.
Here is a screen grab from their Schedulefly Message Wall...
Check out our cool new customer, Sushi Omakase in Gilroy, CA, where you'll dine on a culinary artistic performance. They scrapped their paper and pencil and took their restaurant staff scheduling and communication online with Schedulefly.
Wish I were in Gilroy for lunch today!
Proudly Serving Indie Restaurants All Over the World,
We're stoked that the fine crew at Eagle's Bluff Country Club dining room are now using Schedulefly for their restaurant staff scheduling and communication. If you ever happen to play 18 at Eagle's Bluff, make sure to stop in and ask the crew how much easier their lives are with Schedulefly at their fingertips.
As we mentioned in a recent post, we focus on serving indie restaurants, but we get our share of franchisees. And another just joined the family. Welcome to the folks from Cold Stone Creamery in Clarksville, TN. They're now using our easy restaurant staff scheduling app, and the lives of the owner, managers, and staff just got easier!
We mostly serve indie restaurants, but we get our share of franchisees as well. Today we welcome another Pita Pit to the Schedulefly family. All the managers and staff in this Grand Forks, ND location now have easier lives with our restaurant staff scheduling and communication app at their fingertips.
Making the lives of restaurant owners, managers, and staff members easier every day,
Here is a transcript of Wil's conversation with Scott Maitland, owner at Top of the Hill Restaurant and Brewery in Chapel Hill NC. Aspiring restaurateurs can really learn a lot from Scott and his journey as a successful restaurant owner.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Good morning. It’s Wil with Schedulefly and this is another in our series of conversations with restaurant owners. And I’m really excited today to be talking to Scott Maitland. Scott owns Top of the Hill, which is a very famous spot in Chapel Hill. If you’ve ever been to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home to the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, you have most likely heard of Top of the Hill, been there, and had fun there. Top of the Hill was Scott’s idea. He started it out of law school. Scott, I’ll let you take it from there. Tell us how you got started with Top of the Hill, and whatever you’d like to say about your place.
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] Yeah. Well I was in my second year in law school back in 1994 and my now landlord was building the building on the main corner of Chapel Hill, and he announced he was going to put a TGI Friday’s up where Top of the Hill is located now. And Chapel Hill is kind of progressive, anti-chain place, and the whole town was upset about that. To be frank, I was upset about a chain restaurant dominating downtown Chapel Hill. So I was perfectly suited to do this. I had absolutely no experience and no money, but I decided that I would stop a chain restaurant from dominating downtown Chapel Hill.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Wow! That’s cool. So you were in law school, so that was in ’96. So you guys have been humming along for close to 15 years now.
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] Yeah. It’ll be 14 years this September. Like I said, it took me two years to raise the money, and half a year to build the restaurant. So we opened in September of 1996, and that was literally the day that Hurricane Fran hit Chapel Hill. My opening night, I’m on the third floor of my opening night, I honestly thought that the restaurant was going to be flooded because we had so much rain coming in that the outdoor patio drains couldn’t handle it and we literally getting inches of water inside the restaurant on the third floor.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Nice way to start with a bang. I remember that storm and that was a big one. Tell me more about this. This is fascinating. So you’re in law school. You’ve got no experience running a business, no experience owning a restaurant. You got this idea. It took you two years to raise the money. Tell me about that. How did you go about raising money to get this place started?
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] Well I’ll tell you, that’s a book in and of itself. You just put together a business plan and you start making pitches and you get feedback from your pitches and you revise your business plan. I look back at my original concept which was I was going to get ten investors to each give me $100,000, and realize how naive that was. I ended up migrating to a model that we were going to be using an SBA loan and using obviously equity investment from investors yet to be found. The big breakthrough was ultimately getting a SBA loan contingent upon me raising equity money. And not to make this a long story, but there were 18 banks in the triangle, which is our geographic area. Obviously Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham. There are 18 different banks here at the time. All of them said “No” to me. I was at bank number 18, and he finally said that he would give me $50,000 dollars if I would raise $1.15 million in equity. I asked him to put that in writing, and I went back to bank 17, who I had just seen four days earlier. I said “These guys gave me $50,000, but I like you better, and I really want to do business with you, what do you have for me?” And they gave me $75,000, and by the time I worked back up to bank number five, they gave me a full half million dollar loan.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] That’s great.
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] Contingent upon me raising the rest of the money. But once I got that SBA loan that established some credibility and that allowed me to start getting some investors.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] That’s fascinating. That reminds me of that Lending Tree’s tag line, “When banks compete you win.” You really got them competing. You went from $50,000 to $500,000. Is that right?
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] Yeah. And I’ve got to tell you, it was one of those classic things. I mean I honestly it was one of those deals where I had nothing else to lose and so I said, “Geez!” I realized at some level everybody’s in competition with each other. So a bank vice president that had denied me a loan, but whose competitor gave me one, might be interested in just outdoing his competitor. I was able to ride that gravy train all the way back up to a full at that time full maximum SBA loan. And it gave me credulity. All I needed was one person to buy in and I was able to leverage that out. Another thing that I tell people all the time is that when you try to raise money, people will say, “I’ll be the last $50,000,” or “I’ll be the last whatever.” So I just ask them to put that in writing. I finally learned. Please put that in writing and they did. On the last day I called up five different people, so I said, “Okay, you are the last $50,000, and “You’re the last $25,000,” and “You’re the last $10,000.” But while we were raising money I was able to show folks those letters and say “Look, I’ve already raised $125,000 from folks who will put it in on the last day.”
[WIL BRAWLEY:] That’s cool. This is good. This is good practical advice for somebody that’s in your shoes. That’s what we’re hoping to do with this series – have people that are…maybe they’re in culinary school or maybe they’re in business school or law school or whatever. They want to start a restaurant, and they’re trying to figure out ways to just get going, which is the hardest part. So two years in, you raise the money. You guys get started the night of Hurricane Fran. What’s happened since then? You guys have been very very successful. As I said, you’re just an extremely well known name in Chapel Hill and the Carolinas and the Southeast. Probably all over. You guys have got some great beers I know that have won a lot of awards. Going into this, what were the things that you focused on that you thought, or knew, or hoped would make you successful?
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] Well I’ll tell you that I’ll always feel like a poser when I’m surrounded by my brethren in the restaurant industry, because the reality is that although I love food and beer and care greatly about our product, what really motivated me was our sense of community and the location of the establishment being where it was and what it can mean from downtown Chapel Hill. Basically two weeks before I had the idea for Top of the Hill I decided I was going to live in Chapel Hill for the rest of my life. Two weeks later this opportunity came up, this idea came up and it was all about trying to live in the apartment at the corner of Franklin Street and Columbia. It’s been about the community ever sense. And I did open up another place in Raleigh called Top of the Hill Grill, and had that for about two years. But what I’ve learned from that experience is that I don’t really like being in the quote-unquote “restaurant business” so much as I really like being in the Chapel Hill business. I love being in Chapel Hill. My place in Raleigh was taking my focus away from that. So I think in some ways, I know this is kind of a weird answer, but in some ways I think what make us special is we are absolutely dedicated to our community and see ourselves as a big part of that community.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Well I think that’s a really neat point. You’re focused. So I’m assuming that means that you guys, you do a lot in the community. I bet you’re involved in a lot of ways. Tell me about that. What do you guys do in Chapel Hill?
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] We’re about ten yards from campus and basically we’re the front porch of the university. And I think we take great pride in the fact that on any given day we have people making life impacting decisions in Top of the Hill. Should I move to Chapel Hill and become a student. Should I take a faculty position? We get a lot of folks that get engaged and get married because of, again, our location right in downtown. So we just try to create an environment that is going to facilitate all of those things and I think at the end of the day when you say “Hey, we’re about community,” that doesn’t just mean being at charity events and all that. Of course we do all those things. But I think what it really is listening to your customers and creating a product that fits the needs of the community that’s around you. That’s pricing, that’s the type of foods, etc.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] It affects every big decision you make, or even little decisions. I like your focus. You and I talked a little bit offline before we started this about how we’re trying to really have a laser focus here at Schedulefly on independent restaurants. And the main part of that is, and we’ve written about this in our blog, is that it’s what we enjoy, it’s what we like to do, and it helps us not get distracted. It helps us make the right decisions. It’s a neat way to do business. I don’t want this to be about us so I’ll shut up. But I guess my point is I can relate to that. I think a lot of folks like yourself that own independent restaurants tend to have that same mentality. Once you start growing and expanding and new locations – not that that’s wrong – but for some people it can cause them to lose focus. Maybe even lose a little bit of the passion. I suppose did you have as much passion for your restaurant in Raleigh?
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] That’s what I’m saying. I think I did, but I also think that I realized that what suddenly happened was is that I was a visitor to both restaurants suddenly. No matter how much time you spend in either one, you’re split. My hats are off to people that can run multiple locations. It’s unbelievable to me. I think a lot of that also depends on the format of your business. The whole idea for our brand to begin with was keeping Chapel Hill free of a chain restaurant. I just think the whole idea was rooted in the sense of community. I didn’t feel that in Raleigh. I came back and I think that you’re exactly right. There is a universal truth. Figure out your passion and what’s important to you and make all those decisions that you make in day to day running of your business through that lens. And that can be “Hey, I want to be the finest Asian restaurant.” You have got to figure out a niche. Our niche is being, at least in my mind, the first place at Chapel Hill where all of these weird elements of our community – students, professors, townies, everybody – can come together and be in one place because that’s what’s what was missing when I was in school.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Awesome. I love it. So how about this? You mentioned earlier that you went to West Point, and then of course you said you were in law school at Chapel Hill when you had the idea. And I thought it was neat because you had a lot of people telling you that you had to unlearn some of the military discipline and leadership style that you learned at West Point, but maybe that wasn’t the case. Maybe you’ve be able to leverage that. Tell me about that.
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] You know, people said “You can’t run this place like you did in the military, yada yada yada.” And for some reason I took this at face value. I figured these folks know these things. Well you know what I’ve come to realize, is people just don’t understand how the military works. I mean they just have this idea that you give an order and people just jump up and do it. I will tell you, especially when you’re in combat, I’m sorry but you need to be able to motivate and lead people in a way that’s different than relying on just authority, because at some point getting shot by somebody else is going to outweigh whatever authority you have unless that authority comes from true love and belief. And so what’s interesting is that I think that people misunderstood. They thought that a military leadership style was simply: you give orders and people follow it. And what I realized a couple months into it is that any organization benefits from the setting of fair standards and the making sure that everybody lives up to those standards. And that you have to put the organization first, even if you’re the owner. You have to put the organization first. There isn’t some kind of exception that oh, well everyone gets to do that except these three guys. And so people have said, “Well what’s better: a tight ship or a happy ship.” To be honest, I’ve never seen a tight ship that wasn’t a happy ship. That doesn’t mean you need to be Captain Bly to have a tight ship. But you do need to have standards that are fairly applied across the board.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Yeah. That’s really cool. It’s interesting because I’ve been talking a lot to owners during this series, and everybody has their own way of looking at things. Everybody has their own way of doing things, and they’re very different. Although all of you have been successful. Seems like a lot of it is figuring out what you’re good at. What you know, what you’ve learned, what your passion is and then applying that. So people say you can’t use military leadership style in restaurants. Well that’s because they probably weren’t in the military and before they owned a restaurant. And you went and figured out how to do it, and figured out how it works, because that’s you, that’s who you are. And it seems like that’s a lot of what we’re getting out of this series, is people taking what they’ve learned and what they know and applying it, and there’s many ways to skin a cat. You are all doing it very differently. But I know one thing, Scott, that all of you are doing, and I want to ask you about this. It seems to me that every successful owner I’ve talked to has figured out a way to really get their employees engaged and bought into what they’re doing. They share the passion. How have you been able to do that? That might be expanding what you were just talking about. How do you keep your employees motivated, excited, engaged about what’s going on at Top of the Hill?
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] Well first of all, and this goes for everything that we do at Top of the Hill: It’s sure not the Scott Maitland Show. I’ve got an amazing cast of folks at Top of the Hill, and general manager, Guy Murphy, who has been there for over ten years now. Started off as a bartender and worked his way up. Our chef’s been there for over ten years. It is a group effort. What’s cool is we can proud of our culinary and proud of our beverage program. For example, our grilling staff has been with us…John Libby actually has been with me 15 years, and our head assistant brewer has been there 13 years. We are proud of those things. But we also get to be proud of them within this idea that we are important to both the town and the university in terms of creating this sense of community. And I think that people believe me when I tell them new staff members that it’s not just, “Hey, we’re working at a restaurant in a strip mall.” And I don’t mean any offense to restaurants in strip malls, but if you’re coming to work one day and you’re feeling a little disengaged, you need to recognize that there are folks coming to Top of the Hill that are going to make your decisions about Chapel Hill in general based on the one lunch or dinner they have at our restaurant, because oftentimes that will happen. People visit the university and they go have a bite to eat. Since we’re the closest one to the university they choose us. It’s one of these things that we feel a responsibility to the entire town. And I know that sounds stupid and if you’ve never been to Top of the Hill you wouldn’t really understand. If you have been, you would understand that we are…in many ways we straddle the line of literally geographically and socially between the town and the university.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Yeah. You have something that is clear to me that many successful business owners have, which is a very strong and clear passion for what you’re doing and for your vision, and your vision is BIG. I love it! It’s bigger than just owning a restaurant. It is providing a very important icon for your town and your university. You mentioned that people make important decisions about Chapel Hill there. They propose there. They think about important decisions in their life. I think if you didn’t look at it that way…there’s lots of restaurants and lots of good locations, if you will, that come and go. Maybe you wouldn’t be as successful as are if you didn’t look at it that way. Is that fair?
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] Yeah. Right. Exactly. I think that’s the lesson I learned in Raleigh. I think Top of the Hill Raleigh was a fine restaurant. But because of a number of reasons, location, the fact that I didn’t live in the community, etc. It was just going to be that. It was just going to be a place that people could have a bite to eat. Which, again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but for me, I want my organization to be involved in something larger. It’s interesting going back to this idea of figure out what it is that you’re passionate about and then that forms every decision. My decision we tied into the local community was the big reason why I decided to be a brew pub. I loved the idea of having a product, making a product that you could only buy at our place. And it wasn’t some where you could go to every bar in the world and order it. It’s interesting because a lot of folks in the brewery world aspire to be in every bar and all that stuff. I really like the fact that basically other than us being the first micro cannery in the south, a couple years ago more as a promotion than anything else, you could only get our beers inside our restaurant, and I think that’s kind of cool. It’s a unique experience. It really is.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Yeah. Keeps people coming back. I bet you guys have got unbelievable word of mouth because you’re unique and you’re different and you have that mentality and you can’t get the beer anywhere else. And people come there and they say, “Where should we go grab a bite to eat, or where should we go have a sit down and take a break and have a beer?” And I bet 95 percent of the time anybody there in town will say, “Oh you got to go to Top of the Hill. If you’re going to go to one place, go there.”
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] Well I’m going to put you on my marketing staff. How does that sound? I hope you’re right. I don’t know if you even know this Wil, but we just doubled the size of our restaurant. We ended up actually changing the laws about historical buildings in downtown Chapel Hill and we ended up building a second floor in the old Carolina Theater building that was next to us and we created a special events space that can handle parties with 20 to 300. Then we created another bar which we called the Back Bar. What’s cool about that is, as far as we know, it’s the first establishment in the south that has its own cast conditioned ale program. It’s kind of cool. It’s on the cutting edge of microbreweries right now. We continue to try to expand and do things that are cool. Again, we keep asking, “What does this community need?”
[WIL BRAWLEY:] The first what kind of program?
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] It’s a cast conditioned ale program. So it’s kind of on the cutting edge of microbreweries. What it really is is a throwback to how beer was made from 500 years ago until basically World War II, when commercial refrigeration started getting around. And so this is what we did – when we built the back bar, we had specially designed for us a cooler that basically replicates the English cellar and stays at about 52 to 54 degrees, and when we manually pump the beers through it pumps up into the glass. So it would be the same product. And our brewer is English, and he’s been brewing now for 40 years. He actually has had his own pub where they did this. So this is an authentic cast conditioned ale product that you’re not going to find anywhere in the United States. I guarantee it. It’s a lot fun to do it, and it’s a lot of fun to compare. We’ll often have the same beers on tap as we do on regular tap. And so it’s interesting to compare the flavors of the beers when it’s a cast conditioned product versus traditional using some CO2, all that kind of stuff. I thought it was fascinating, I thought I was going to have to explain this to people what this all about. And I’m going to tell you what. Cast conditioned fans found us like within the first week. It’s crazy. It was amazing how much cast conditioned beer we go through.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] That’s awesome. That’s very cool. I didn’t know you guys expanded. Congratulations on that. That’s an important thing for your business.
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] We couldn’t have done it without Schedulefly. I’m not joking. It’s very complicated. So you guys have really helped us do that.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Cool. Well good. So you guys have done a lot of cool things up there. I think this is just awesome. I know you’re real busy. I don’t want to keep you much longer. You’ve been really successful and it’s clear listening to you, the vision you have, and I think it’s very clear why you’ve been successful. It’s cool that you’ve really built a true icon up there in Chapel Hill. To be honest with you, I thought you guys had been around a lot longer than you have. When I think of Chapel Hill, I think Top of the Hill. One more thing I want to ask you about is… again, we were talking off line and you said, I’ll butcher this quote, but you said something to the effect of, “We don’t do marketing, we make news.” Tell me a little bit about that.
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] Well I’d like to say is “I don’t like to buy advertising, I like to make news.” So for example, that in some ways was the heart of my decision to become the south’s first micro cannery back in 2005. So we were the first people in the south to put micro brewed beer in can about fifth in the country to do that. And you know now micro canned beer is the hottest thing. Of course in my infinite wisdom we no longer do it. But it’s just literally we ran out of beer. We had excess beer and we thought, “We can put this in cans, it’ll be a lot of fun.” It was all driven by the fact that I like to golf, and I couldn’t get a micro brewed beer on a golf course, because they’re all in bottles. What all this ended up doing was it ended up this whole program got us into the Wall Street Journal and MSNBC and CNBC. Got us a lot of press in the News and Observer and all of that. And so it really spurred in-house beer sales. The $50,000 it cost me to get into the canning business I think got me hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars of media exposure. That’s the kind of thing I like to do as opposed to deciding, “Hey I’m just going to go ahead and buy $20,000 of advertisements.” And so I think whatever you can do to try to make news is good. Along that line and following that same idea of making news and then also following our passion. We’re getting ready to launch North Carolina’s first vodka distillery. We purchased a building off Franklin Street, off the Chapel Hill News building, and we’re putting a distillery in the back. Hopefully this fall or winter you’ll end up seeing top vodka come out on the shelves and in North Carolina liquor stores.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Nice. That’s great man. You guys are always thinking forward and on the cutting edge and it’s just so cool to hear all the things you’ve done and are doing. Let me ask you this. When you make news like that Scott, are you guys natural or do you guys use PR firms? How does the Wall Street Journal and all these large media organizations find out about this?
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] We have not used a PR firm. I tell you what. We talk about the need to get PR person on there. Honestly one day we looked at ourselves and said, “Well, Jesus, we get a lot of PR. What would happen if we actually had somebody trying to get PR?” We’re maybe looking into the possibilities of that. But my sense is if you do something that’s interesting and then let some people in the press know, they’re going to pick up on it. One of the advantages of Chapel Hill is, for example, I was on the board of visitors at the university with someone that worked for the Wall Street Journal. We just got into the conversation, and decided to do a story on this, and that led to the MSNBC thing. It’s one of those things where it’s kind of an embarrassment of riches here in Chapel Hill. We don’t have to work as hard as maybe some places in other towns to get PR.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] Sure. Cool man. Well hey do you let folks who go to Duke come to your establishment, or any rules against that?
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] It’s funny because you’d be amazed as much of our customer base actually comes over from Duke, although Durham has a lot of neat stuff now with restaurants. I think a lot of kids from Duke still come by. I’ll let anybody in as long as their money’s green.
[WIL BRAWLEY:] I hear you man. That’s cool. All right well good Scott. This is just awesome. I just can’t thank you enough for your time. I’ve just learned so much in the few minutes talking to you. I know anybody that listens to this will just eat up so many of the cool ideas and advice that you have. I really appreciate it.
[SCOTT MAITLAND:] Absolutely man. It’s my pleasure. And like I said, I’m delighted your company is going strong and you provide such great service for us. Thank you very much.
Just a quick update on our Restaurant Job Sharing Site. Each week more and more restaurants are posting open jobs and sharing them on their social networks - which is bringing in applications from local talent that are familiar with the restaurant or someone on staff. In most cases the staff are also sharing the job openings with their personal networks - driving in qualified candidates that they already know. The candidates see the post from someone they know at the restaurant and hop on over to the job page and apply online. The hiring managers get an email alert when this happens and can review the resumes and comments from candidates online at any time. They can of course go back and look at past job openings (that are closed now) and review the old applications. Maybe the person that was not the right fit last month is a good fit now. It's nice and neat and simple.
Here are a few restaurants that have posted job openings in the last few weeks...
By the way - if you're a restaurant with open jobs and your not currently using Schedulefly, you can use this tool for free. Sign up and give it a try.
I am working this morning in my kitchen with my 3yr old son Joel - and the creativity is flat out soaring. We've got Yo La Tengo playing on the Sonos and we are not saying a word to each other...just building. Nothing is distracting us - we are in our element. He is building stars and a moon with his Play-Doh and I am continuing to build a business with my 2 partners - both in different cities. I think back to the path I've taken to get to this point - the dress pants, the cubicles, the offices, the meetings, the corporate environments where I never got comfortable and rarely got much done. While I met some great people and learned stuff along the way - the full on passion was never there. It's just a process (I guess) to end up where you really want to be.
Today I am watching Joel build all kinds of shapes and animals with his Play-Doh and I can see in his eyes and his focus and his determination that he loves it. He loves what he is building. I only hope when he is my age that he has that same passion and is in the same position with his son or daughter as we are today. I hope he ends up being in a place he really wants to be - building something fun.
Wil and I are enjoying using this blog to share snippets of our journey with Tyler (the smart partner who wastes no time blogging) and Schedulefly. We hope it is interesting and maybe it helps inspire someone along the way...
This series profiles restaurants that are creating a buzz in their cities and towns. With each Awesome Indie we profile, we’ll check in with owner (“The Head Honcho”), the GM (“The Fearless Leader”), and an employee who personifies their brand (“The Evangelist”), to pick their brains and find out what they’re doing that makes their restaurant hum.
Today we’re serving up Fudpucker’s, a famous restaurant with two locations in Destin, Florida and Fort Walton Beach, Florida. They’ve been in business for over 28 years. They are located in the Panhandle on the beautiful Emerald Coast and employ approximately 150 employees year round. During the summer season, their numbers swell to 400-500 employees.
The Head Honcho Chester Kroeger - Chester has become a gourmet cook through trial and error. Having no formal training in the culinary arts, "I learned that you had to give people what they want as opposed to what you want to give them. There is no mystery to cooking well. Like in life, you make mistakes and you learn from them. Eventually, you get it right. The big thing is desire." This has served Chester well as he has been in business since 1982 – over 28 years. In that time Fudpucker's menu has grown from one that featured nothing but sandwiches to one that has over fifty items including the "World Famous" Fudburger.
Why is Fudpucker’s successful? Fudpucker’s provides an atmosphere of great food and fun/friendly service. Our aim is to make sure everyone leaves with a full belly and a smile on their face. We also have a lot of stuff for folks to do while they wait for their table. We have a 3,000 square foot gift shop, full of wonderful treasures and of course our world famous t-shirts. We have a small playground for the little tykes and video games for the “tweens”. Gator Beach is fun for all ages. With over 60 live alligators, guests are treated to a free gator show and can get their picture taken holding a live alligator. We are committed to making the visit a memorable one so guests will want to tell their friends and family about it and will want to return themselves again and again. Having a good time is what it’s all about!
How do people find out about Fudpucker's? Almost all of our guests find us either by word of mouth (referrals from friends/family) or by driving by. At night, the deck on the front of the restaurant is lit up and during the summer, you can see the folks lined up the walkway enjoying the free Gator shows while they wait for their table. There’s no better advertisement!
What’s your favorite meal on your menu? Fried Fish Pucker with American cheese – side of tartar sauce. With that, comes the best fries on the Emerald Coast. I always get a side of Crazy Mother Pucker BBQ sauce to dip my fries in. Top that off with a Chocolate Sin cake that is big enough to share. It's warmed chocolate cake served in a huge goblet with ice cream, chocolate syrup, whipped cream and a cherry on top! Yummmmm!
Let's say you meet somebody on a plane who is coming to visit the Emerald Coast. He doesn’t yet know you own a restaurant, and asks for a restaurant recommendation. What’s your “airplane pitch” for Fudpucker's? Fudpucker’s is a very unique restaurant that looks like a big tree house. There are so many different levels, it’s easy to get lost. There are even yellow pelican feet on the floor so you can find your way to the bathroom! They have plenty of space for meetings, private parties and receptions. Make sure to take a sharpie so you can sign the walls. The menu is a keeper! It has funny stories and lets you in on what’s going on at Fudpucker’s. It also serves as their catalog for Fudpucker merchandise. There’s a little something on the menu for everyone; from steak to sandwiches. Definitely, try the Fudburger with the best fries on the Emerald Coast. You can also try the Gator Tail appetizer. You can also shop in the 3,000 square foot gift shop. It features world famous Fudpucker shirts, hats, drinkwares and all sorts of gifts/souvenirs. Don’t forget to get your picture taken with a live alligator before you leave. There are free gator shows at the top of the hour. If you have teens, they have Teen Night during the summer. Teens 13-17 have the deck to themselves and can dance the night away while parents relax in the bar overlooking the deck.
What do you hope the future holds for Fudpucker's? Businesses along the Emerald Coast have been seriously affected by the BP Oil Spill and we are no exception. We’ve survived a lot over the years (hurricanes, floods, etc.), we’ll survive this and come out stronger for it. We hope to keep adding attractions to make Fudpucker’s not only a restaurant, but a destination where people can bring their families and spend a few hours with us.
The Fearless Leader Rich Neal – Rich has been with Fudpucker’s since Jun 1991. He came to us from the Pizza Hut Organization from Jacksonville, FL. He was recruited by our then general manager. Rich is an extremely steady, reliable manager. Never a “Yes” man, we value his input into the daily operations of the restaurant. We can always rely on him to give us an accurate read of any given situation. He is fantastic with crisis management, staying calm and cool under pressure. He is fair to employees and well-liked by everyone in the organization.
Why do you like working at Fudpucker’s? Fudpucker’s is a family run business and they treat their employees like family. We are extremely busy, especially in the summer and every day is a new day. It’s never boring.
What’s the most important aspect of your job? Making sure our staff has the training and tools to ensure our guests have the best time possible. This includes servers, bussers, bartenders, managers, hostesses, etc.
What is your management style? Restaurant management is not only about physical resources and schedules. You have to be in tuned with your staff as individuals. Be aware of challenges they may be facing in their own lives. Guidance and discipline with an occasional dash of tough love is what I hope I provide to the staff. I would like to think I treat the staff like they were family.
What’s your favorite meal on your menu? Our Ultimate Chicken Wrap is fantastic!
The Evangelist Tom Kelly – Tom has worked at Fudpucker’s for over 18 years, since Feb 14th, 1992. He is the longest term employee (non manager) at Fudpucker’s. Tom, known as TK, is a daily fixture here at Fuds. He’s a dependable hard worker, never missing a day and always has a friendly word/smile for those in passing. He is an asset and is key in the smooth operation of the kitchen. In general, he’s a fun guy to be around.
Why do you like working at Fudpucker's? I like working with the people and the company. It’s fun working here and very enjoyable.
What’s the most important aspect of your job? Making sure the customer gets what they order in very timely and enjoyable manner.
What’s your favorite meal on your menu? I enjoy eating the Shrimp Scampi.
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Restaurant with Open Jobs to Fill? Check out Restaurant Jobs by Schedulefly The easiest way for restaurants to find and hire great people
An exciting artisan Italian restaurant is about to open in Salem, NH. They've got a big staff (100+), a cool location, and a passion for bringing artisan Italian to main street. 
Check out this 
We are really excited to have this fun loving team from Santa Barbara CA in the Schedulefly family. 
So far we have spoken to Joe Johnston and Tad Peelen of 
Wil Brawley
Needless to say, they agreed. But you know what, it's easy to lose site of this philosophy once you start growing quickly and turn profitable. It's easy in business to think that since you have money, you should find creative ways to spend it. But if you pretend you don't have money, you force yourself to figure out creative ways to do things as well (or often better) than you could with money. And you reap the additional benefits of enjoying the challenge of dreaming up creative solutions, and simply having more fun.
This cool American Stir-Fry place in Atlanta just jumped on board with our simple restaurant employee scheduling and communication app. The lives of 50 more folks just got a little easier! Check out 
We take our BBQ and seafood pretty seriously here in N.C. So we couldn't be more excited to have 
Here is a transcript of 
This time it's the fun folks in the Little Rock, AK 
Check out our cool new customer, 
We're stoked that the fine crew at 
As we mentioned in a recent post, we focus on serving indie restaurants, but we get our share of franchisees. And another just joined the family. Welcome to the folks from 
We mostly serve indie restaurants, but we get our share of franchisees as well. Today we welcome another 
Here is a transcript of 
Today we’re serving up 
