Panelists on the CREATE the Event for Emerging Restauranteurs’ Founders Forum tackled issues that made three companies successful.
The panel on Oct. 10 in Nashville, Tenn., was moderated by Sam Oches, editorial director for sponsor Nation’s Restaurant News, and featured Tim McEnery, founder and CEO of Cooper’s Hawk Winery and Restaurant; Cameron Mitchell, founder and CEO of Cameron Mitchell Restaurants; and Nick Stone, founder and CEO of Bluestone Lane.
“We have 64 restaurants across the country from Beverly Hills [Calif.] to New York City,” Mitchell said. “Ocean Prime is our national brand. We have 21 brands in total and we’re in 16 states.”
Mitchell said he “had an epiphany” while working at a local restaurant as a fry cook, and he pursued education at the Culinary Institute of America. He opened Cameron’s Bistro in October 1993.
“You have to set your goals,” Mitchell said, “and you have to write them down and you have to then communicate them to everybody else — everybody you can.”
Ocean Prime locations can total revenue as much as $22 million in a year, he said, citing the Tampa, Fla., location, and average unit volume is $13 million.
“It’s just it’s such a great seafood restaurant and a great steakhouse combined,” Mitchell said, adding that he considers it a successful “triangular relationship” between associates in the company, customers, and the corporate management.
Stone, founder and CEO of Bluestone Lane coffee, moved to New York in 2010 from Australia for investment banking.
“When I moved to New York,” he said, “the coffee scene was dominated really by two very successful lives chains that’s quite the opposite of the coffee culture you find in Australia, where Starbucks actually failed. There’s no Dunkin.”
He said that the Australian approach is “about feeling like a local not a customer — and that was the thing that was so apparent when I moved to the U.S.”
Stone said he had worked in London as well “so I just thought there’s a there’s an opportunity here to build something that really doubles down on the quality, especially coffee, but is very much hospitality and service.”
Stone opened his first location in 2013, and the company has about 65 locations.
“I’d never worked a day in hospitality,” he said. “I didn’t have any precedence where you have to follow this rule or what you can’t do that, so I’ve definitely pushed the envelope.”
Bluestone has opened in small and out-of-the-way locations, but close to where Australians worked.
Bluestone did some very small rounds of funding with friends and family. The first big round was $1 million with investment banking friends, he said, and that was followed by one of $25 million.
“I think that plan was just to double the business as fast as we could,” Stone said. “Whether that was the right strategy or not, that was the play that were running and so we closed in the middle of 2018 and we used all the money to really go from, say, 30 to 51 stores in 18 months or so.”
The COVID-19 pandemic then posed a challenge, he said, but the concept was able to adapt.
“I think one thing that’s not valued enough in society is the role of hospitality establishments in driving community, driving friendship and recognition,” Stone added.
McHenry, the founder and CEO of Coopers Hawk, said the wine club has been a big differentiator for his concept.
Oches noted that about 99.7% of Cooper’s Hawk’s 750,000 wine club members visited a restaurant every month or two.
“This is a multifaceted business with a wine club and the wine bar that had been missing in the marketplace.”
McEnery said, “the way that I think of Cooper’s Hawk is that the restaurants and tasting rooms are where we invite people to join my club, and if you do a good job operating, providing great food, wine, hospitality, they’ll stay there.”
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