A fragile economy and overabundance of debt make it an especially difficult time to start a company. But this week, restaurant industry leaders and legends gathered in Chicago to recognize foodservice’s ability to develop hard-working operators — and their ideas.
The inaugural Winning Ideas from Successful Entrepreneurs Summit, or W.I.S.E. Summit, brought together founders and chief executives of some of the largest restaurant brands in the U.S. to share what drove their success and what keeps them dynamic in the face of new challenges. Restaurant Hospitality and Nation’s Restaurant News presented the conference along with John Y. Brown Jr., former governor of Kentucky and a serial entrepreneur who purchased KFC from founder Col. Harland Sanders and grew the chain by more than 4,000 units.
Other featured speakers included Drew Nieporent, founder of Myriad Restaurant Group; Rich Melman, founder and chairman of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises; Antonio Swad, founder of Pizza Patrón and Wingstop; Todd Graves, founder and chief executive of Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers; Kent Taylor, founder and chairman of Texas Roadhouse; John Schnatter, founder and chief executive of Papa John’s Pizza; and Tim Gannon, co-founder of Outback Steakhouse.
In his opening keynote speech, Brown said opportunities abound for entrepreneurs because “corporate America is pretty much brain-dead,” meaning that professional management executives can’t run restaurants or grow the industry as well as the operators starting their own brands.
“There are no geniuses,” Brown said. “The people here are all about the idea and dreams, and will, courage and independence.”
Here are some highlights from the speakers’ presentations:
Developing people as much as brands
In a joint question-and-answer presentation, Nieporent and Melman said they built their companies of eight and more than 80 restaurants, respectively, by developing their team members to have the same entrepreneurial mind-set that helped them open their first restaurants decades ago. To instill that confidence in others, they said, leaders must always work on improving themselves.
“Confidence without professional knowledge and the ability to back it up is just false confidence,” Nieporent said. “The best coaches, it’s not so much about their technique; it’s their character. The people who work for us have to have the confidence in us that we’ll make the right decisions.”
Leadership isn’t always necessarily about operating perfectly, Melman said.
“If you worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week and never missed a budget, I might not want you as a partner,” he said. “One of the basic things at our company is the ability to develop other people. What I look for goes under the heading of confidence: I look for people who could replace themselves.”
By trying to say yes to his servers and managers as much as possible, and creating a working environment in which they can be as happy and productive as possible, Melman said he could expect to hear “yes” in return when he asks them for their maximum effort.
