Kelly Black

00:00Running a restaurant is tough. Staff turnover, rising costs, and the endless tasks that bog you down and take you away from what you love. Let Adams-Keegan lighten that load. Their privately held Tennessee-based restaurant and hospitality-focused outsourced HR, payroll, and benefits firm. The team at Adams-Keegan removes the administrative burdens of HR administration, payroll benefits management, garnishments, unemployment claims, compliance, 401k, and so much more. From their proprietary HRIS platform to seamless payroll and competitive benefits that keep your team smiling, they've got you covered. Adams-Keegan lets you focus on what you do best, creating unforgettable dining experiences, while they handle the rest. Essentially, think of Adams-Keegan as your back office HR department, right here in Music City. One of the many things I love about Adams-Keegan is that unlike big publicly traded companies out there, they have an incredibly high standard of customer service. And that's what we all need, is really good customer service in these areas. They don't give you a 1-800 number and make you fill out an IT ticket submission. They surround every client with a team of experts, all based right here in Tennessee. You can call them today at 615-627-0821 or visit Adams-Keegan.com. That's A-D-A-M-S-K-E-E-G-A-N.com for your free HR consultation and see how they can create a customized solution to help your restaurant thrive. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, the tastiest hour of talk in Music City. Now here's your host, Brandon Styll.

01:40Hello, Music City, and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll, and I am your host. I'm joined here with Vince Lanni. Hi, Vince. Hey, what's up? Hey, we are powered by Pepsi-Cola. Super excited to have you guys here today. Fun episode today, Kelly Black. Yeah, yeah, that was a good episode. Kelly is the owner of Pop Hospitality, which is the row over, I said it was Hay Street, but it's actually Lyle Street, Tree House in East Nashville, the Nash House Southern Spoon and Saloon, and the all-new Bravado. There you go, is that Bravado? Bravado. In the musical sense of the word. I don't know. I don't know. It's Bravado. He's the founder of Pie in the Sky Pizza, if you remember Pie in the Sky Pizza.

02:45I do remember Pie in the Sky Pizza. Yeah, and so he tells the story of why Pie in the Sky today. Also, he's a veteran of the industry, but he's a songwriter. He was a songwriter in the music business, so lots of fun songwriter stories today. I mean, it's Nashville, so we got to hit music and food, and they're all big parts of the city. I completely agree. I talk about that in the episode, why I feel like the two intersect so well. It's why we've had different musicians on the show, and I think my favorite musician was probably Montel Jordan back in the day. You weren't in that episode, but it was a lot of fun. Or Layla. Or Layla Vartanian. We've had Jeremy Lister on the show. I want more musicians. I think more musicians. I think there's a fun intersection there for Nashville restaurant radio for that sort of a thing. So he was our first interview in the new studio, and where we are now, a lot of fun.

03:46You'll see video snippets of this one coming out. Wait till you see it. Yeah, wait till you see it. Couple things. We have a little bit of house cleaning. Do want to talk about something from a cool non-profit, CORE, Children of Restaurant Employees, is what that stands for, C-O-R-E. They have a new program. So CORE and Cisco are bringing back their Groceries with Gratitude program for its second year. Very cool. What is Groceries with Gratitude? That's a great question. Groceries with Gratitude supports the families of food and beverage employees in financial need. So it's not like they're just giving you money. Your sponsorship or personal donation will help fund gift cards to provide holiday groceries to feed a family of at least five meals. So feeding a family five meals. I think they give you gift cards to grocery stores who can go and shop and buy food for their families. If you're interested in sponsoring Groceries with Gratitude or know of a food and beverage family who might be in need, please visit the CORE website at coregives.org.

05:06That's a cool program. Food costs go up everywhere in restaurants and in grocery stores and it can impact people. This is the time of year where you're spending more. People invite you to a party and you got to bring something and there's a lot of pressure. If you're not doing that well financially, that can really be hard on you to feel like you have to bring something and you don't have the budget for those groceries or you're struggling just to feed your family. You're trying to make ends meet and you're behind on bills and you're like, how am I going to feed my children this week? That's something that CORE wants to help you navigate this holiday season. I would bet too that groceries maybe seasonally go up in price this year. I don't know the market, but that would make sense to me because more people are going to be buying for holidays so the prices inflate a little bit maybe. Yeah, that's a thing. Well, I know all primal cuts of meat, all your fillets, all of your strips and ribeyes, all prices go through the roof because that's what everybody eats during the holidays. If you're a restaurant owner out there and you're looking at how you're going to navigate the holidays, the auxiliary cuts of meat, sirloins, skirt steak, flank steaks, all these other steaks, their prices go down on. If you can find an alternate meat with your holiday menus, that definitely can help. If you're at home, those prices go down.

06:28If you want to eat fillet, that's going to be up this holiday season. It always is. Yeah, shop the deals and ask for help if you need it. One thing I do when I go to bed at night is I have to turn my brain off because my brain just doesn't do that naturally. I'll play solitaire or something, but the last three episodes I've done, I've laid in bed and I've thought, I need to talk about this because this is a NARA thing and this is something that I really want to get out there for people to understand. And it has to do with contracts. If you are out there, there's a lot of people that have you sign contracts. If it's a linen company, a dish machine, chemical company, a technology company, whatever it is, I implore you, don't sign a contract until you call us. We have so many people that we visit on a, and you can tell me if I'm crazy, how many people that we sit down with and we go, let's talk about your linen company, and they go, oh, we hate them. And I go, okay, they just came in and they just said, hey, we'll do this for you if you re-sign your contract, even if it's CO2, whatever it is.

07:45What's happening now is we are organizing. We have NARA, we have 120 members now. We are seeing what everybody's paying and we are going in and we're helping them negotiate better deals. We're redlining contracts, we're making sure the contracts are beneficial for the people. But also we see everybody's contract, we hold the contracts for them, we make sure that they're not auto-renewing. We do not want a contract to ever auto-renew. We want to renegotiate that contract. So the people who sign these contracts have got word of this and they're going in as fast as they can to get you to re-sign contracts so that you can't get out of your current contract. Do not sign a contract before you call us. That is such a major thing right now that people are trying to figure out how do we get these people locked into something they can't get out of. And I'm sure if you're listening to this right now, you're going, oh, I know I'm in a contract right now with this XYZ company and it's driving me crazy. Just auto-renewed or we missed it. What sometimes they'll do is they'll offer you a discount, but it adds another year on your term or something like that, which is then an inflated price. And you think you're getting a good deal. Oh, I've negotiated a good deal. Chances are it's not a good deal. Chances are we're seeing these all the time. We're like, I'm thinking, why would you sign this?

09:08I mean, they're specifically offering it to the independents because they know they can take advantage because you're busy. You're doing other things. You're not going to read a 10, 20 page document. That's what we're here to help with. What are you comparing it against? You think it's a good deal because these people are predatory and they know that you're not calling five other restaurants to see what those restaurants are getting. Hey, what does your contract look like? You're looking at it. You're saying, okay, that's better than what I'm currently paying. But if you're currently paying 50% more than everybody else and they're offering you 40% worse than everybody else, you think that's a good deal because it's better than what you did. We need to look at that to go- It's like the Black Friday savings, right? When the prices are the regular price, but they just say on sale. When you inflate prices to discount them during a time- That's what everyone does to the independent restaurants. It happens. When you're buying from different vendors, that's the same thing. You're just getting a discount on an already inflated price. 100%. Yeah. This is where we're seeing the most traction when it comes to helping small restaurants and some large restaurants is that we have a visibility. Now, we have NDAs and we can't share with anybody any specific pricing.

10:27That's not what we're doing, but we know. We now know where you need to be in the market. Versus having to call five other restaurants, we're looking at 100 other restaurants and we're leveling the playing field. If you are out there and you have a contract put in front of you, do not sign it before you call us to look at it, especially if you're a NARA member. If you're not a NARA member, give us a call. We'd love to sit down and talk to you about what you're currently doing and how you're doing it because we're just seeing a lot of people coming to us going, dude, thank you. Thank you for this. This is amazing. We almost signed that and we would have been in a bad place. A lot of our vendors that we use don't even have contracts. We can do the same deal, if not better deal, without a contract. Yeah. Even if they do, the ones that do have contracts, they're really easy to work with. We can lock you in somewhere that's- It's also beneficial to get some of those contracts when it's a really good deal. If it's a really good deal, there are contracts, especially for our broadline vendors that we're assigning that are great deals.

11:29Yeah. You want to be locked in. You want to be locked into these kinds, but we know it's a great deal because, again, we have a perspective and a vision that we can see. The fact that we're organizing now and local restaurants have a benchmark of where they should be and we know what some people have and some people don't, what we don't want to have is, oh, we're getting good margin in that account. No. We want you to get a fair margin. Yeah. The vendor to get a fair margin. Yeah. We're acting right now as a large chain. We're acting as 120 restaurant chain that we're able to negotiate deals on that kind of volume. If you're not on that kind of volume, that's where we're really seeing success. Yeah. That's the biggest competition is the chains coming in that are paying pennies on the dollar and stuff. They're getting this because they're operating like a chain. They buy a certain way. You can do now. It's a thing. That's the thing that we get that most people are like, this is amazing. This was the dream. We want to help restaurants be more sustainable.

12:36I mean, we've seen some people that are doing this with us that didn't think they had enough volume to do something like this too, but they do. The thing is that you have prime costs, right? Your prime costs, your labor, your food, and your liquor, beer, wine. That makes up roughly, it should be about 60%. We're seeing people at 70, 72%. That's not good. It needs to be about 60%. These other brands that are on that controllable line in your P&L, that are the 1%, the smaller ones, you don't typically focus on those because it's only 1.5%, but if you could make that 1.5%, 0.8%. Yeah. I mean, if there's 10 vendors eating up 1%, but they're actually eating up 1.1%, that's a whole extra percent. Yeah. I mean, we're finding these things all over the place. It's these little things that you don't necessarily think about that we're hyper-focused on. I lay in bed at night and I'm like, I need to talk about contracts because every time we walk into a new restaurant and we're like, great, let's look at what are you locked into? What do your contracts look like right now?

13:42It's like, oh, we just signed this extension. I'm like, why did you sign that extension? It just cost you 20 grand. And I would love to have not had you pay that extra 20. What you could do with $20,000 is amazing. I mean, for a restaurateur that's struggling right now, that's a big deal. I mean, one of the areas was we're seeing it with 312 Pizza. Just these little things that we're able to help them. You get some business in there and it really helps them a lot on top of the fact that they're saving a bunch of money on a lot of the items they're buying is huge for them. And hopefully it's going to keep them in business for a while. And we're really excited. And that's another thing. We have an amazing partner in CMB Linen and their parent company has a suite at the arena. They let us go there and we bring... Yeah, so if you see my Instagram with all these pictures in a suite, I'm not rich and have a suite that I invite all my friends to. No, but this is our Linen company. It was like, hey, our parent company has this suite and we'd love to bring local restaurant owners in there. So we've been able to bring... We had, I think, seven or eight restaurants in there last week.

14:53Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It was so cool because we know all these people. We've been in their restaurants, working with them, but bringing them all into this one little room and saying, oh, this is Cody from Bobbo and this is Don and Tony from Gordo's. And oh, this is Tunji, he owns Steamboys. And introducing all these people together, like, oh man, I love your... And just, it was almost like it was a really cool NARA Connect event, but there's also a hockey game happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like you turn around and Bill from Shotgun Willys is talking to Tunji and they're in the corner talking about all these different things. And then it was just really neat to see that we love doing those sort of things. And that's kind of the fun thing that we get to do here at NARA. So I think we're still on a wait list, but it's like one or two restaurants. I mean, we're almost cleared the wait list. So don't think... Yeah, if you go and we will probably get to you towards the end of the month, so...

15:54I mean, well, yeah, it's real... We're getting to them a lot faster. We now have somebody who's doing scheduling for us and putting it on the calendar. So we can get to you pretty quickly. Like in the next week or two, we will be in your restaurant to sit down and talk to you, find out what we can do. If you're out there, go to naranashville.com. You can see a full list of all of our members. And if you're a diner, if you're somebody who likes to go out to eat and you want to support local, we want to encourage you to go to naranashville.com and choose one of those restaurants. Choose one of those restaurants where you're going to go eat, because we saw it with 312 Pizza. When the neighborhoods show up, when people show up, when they start choosing local... I mean, the Sweet Family, Aras and Kim and Mimi. I mean, like... And Mimi was at the game the other day. And Mimi was at the game. And, you know, but like she's at the restaurant all the time. Like this is a family-run business that needs your support. And when the community showed up to support them, it was everything. They're still going. And they were going to close on Labor Day. Yet, here we are today. I want them to still be open when like Mimi's old enough to wait tables there. Yeah. Full circle. You know, that'd be so cool. That's like our mission here at NARA is how do we help these things continue? And it's through little things like contracts, reviewing them, making sure that they're in your best interest is how we're doing this. So reach out. Go to naranashville.com. There's a button you can click on there that says, hey, join NARA. We'd love to have you if you're a vendor. We're not really bringing on more vendors right now. Yeah, we're kind of at capacity. But I mean, hey, reach out. I'm not afraid if it's something that we really need.

17:37Yeah, we can get you on a waitlist for that too. Yeah, we can certainly do that. We're focused more on restaurants right now. And really, we have almost 30 vendors. So we're crushing it there. And these vendors are awesome people. You'll hear about them in our advertising in this episode. Anybody who's an advertiser on the podcast is also a NARA-approved vendor. These are people that we've vetted that we love that are good friends of ours. I want to talk about a new vendor that we have that you out there, we just heard him, Jonathan Butler, on the podcast. He was just on as JB. Gold Drop Vodka is a brand new Nashville-based vodka. It's made in France. Amazing cost structure. We need you to put it on the menu. We want to show this brand an amazing return. So if you are a NARA member or if you're anybody, go to liquor store, purchase Gold Drop Vodka. If you'll listen to the episode, I mean, apparently you can't get hung over drinking this stuff. I think that sounds like a challenge, but I won't know. In my day, I would have accepted that challenge. In my day, we probably do a whole podcast. Every four minutes, we're going to do a shot and see what happens. If you're a guest on the show, we have cold bottles here. We'd love for you to taste it in our new green room. We have a bunch of mixers from Pepsi. You can mix it with whatever you like, like vodka Mountain Dew. I was just going to say it's a vodka Mountain Dew. It's like a vodka Red Bull, but just a little bit better. Instead of Red Bull, you can have a vodka Celsius with a lot more delicious flavors. You're a big Celsius guy. I am a big Celsius guy. Well, we love having Pepsi as our presenting sponsor. They have been absolutely amazing. A lot of people are going over to Pepsi. We're going to convert this whole city into a Pepsi city. I was already a Pepsi guy. It didn't take much for me because I came from Pepsi.

19:40Everywhere else is Pepsi. It's just like the South, it's not. It's wild how it does like that. Hey, we've been talking for almost 18 minutes. We talked for over an hour on this episode, fun episode with Kelly Black. Let's just jump right in. Thank you for listening to our whole conversation. Hopefully, this is beneficial to you. You heard this and you're like, I'm going to call them before I sign this contract because you need to. It could save you thousands and thousands of dollars just from having us look at it. Put that at the top of your to-do list. Income generating, savings generating activities, top of your to-do list every day. I hear all the time. We just need to save. We need to make more money. We need to make more money. It's like, so stop doing the things that are prohibiting you from making money. A lot of it is signing these contracts that you don't need to sign the way that they're written because they're not written to your advantage. I can sleep better tonight knowing that I've said this out loud on the show. I've had a good night. I've had a good week this week. Fall break, the kids, it's been fun. Kelly Black, we're going to jump in right now. You are listening to Nashville Restaurant Radio. Super excited today to welcome you to a brand new episode of Nashville Restaurant Radio. Welcome into the Minuteman Press Studio. Brand new studio for us, Vince.

21:07New studio. It's awesome. I had to drive all the way to Franklin today. Kelly Black is the owner of Pop Hospitality. If you don't know Pop Hospitality, that is the row over a Hay Street. It is the Treehouse, the Nash House, Southern Spoon and Saloon, and the all new Bravado. That's right. Bravado. Bravado is a small plates and pizza bar right in Cool Springs. If you don't know where that is, if you don't know where Cool Springs is, but you were the mind behind Pie in the Sky Pizza. That's correct. That old Cool Springs location is where Pie in the Sky Pizza was. I built that location out in 2003. Not to say I need to date myself like that, but yeah. How long have you been doing the restaurant gig in Nashville? We opened our first Pie in the Sky on Mayfield Drive, which is now the Minios, that's off of Carothers. It's a little pizza place. That was our first Pie in the Sky. We built that space out in 2000. We opened February of 2001.

22:22Wow. You're 25 years into this business. Just been one big happy blur. Are you just a glutton for punishment? I don't know what it is about hospitality personalities where we like the action and the rush and the people and the enigmas of fixing things and dealing with unsolvable problems. We hate money and like to throw it down. You know the drill. You've had to fix things. Hey, this whole studio audience jumped in there. That's nice. They're enjoying the sitcom vibe. Yeah, it's a thing. The personality of doing all that, I don't know. It's one of those natural things we gravitate towards. Do you have ADHD? Very much so. I think it's finding that calmness in all the chaos. Yeah, because we juggle a million spinning plates. The ADHD thing is funny because I was in that first generation of diagnoses of ADHD.

23:29Really? Early on in the 70s. Do you medicate for it? No. My theory is that this business just breeds people like us. I'm an ADHD survivor currently. Bless Ben's heart over here having to deal with all of my... I've got a bumper sticker on my car. My partner is an ADHD survivor. He's like, and people just pull over and they're just like, bless you. I'm so sorry you have to deal with this guy because all the chaos is our happy place. We need that chaos. When I get home at night, it's like... Yeah, you're all wired. But you can't. It's hard to stop it. I need to have seven plates spinning and I need to drop a couple of plates because that's what makes me happy. First thing I recommend is taking magnesium when you go to bed. I do that. That actually made a huge difference for me. I couldn't believe it. I even called my sister. I was like, I just took magnesium and I feel chill. This is crazy. This is it. Yeah.

24:31So I take magnesium, go to bed, and that means I don't stay up thinking about 6 million things. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. I used to always do... My experience is downtown Nashville bars and stuff. So I'd leave work and I'd listen to classical music on the way home or just silence. That was my unwind on the drive. Everybody hates riding with me. I do not turn the radio on in the car unless... Really? Occasionally I do. And for a guy that lived in 4-4 time for 20 years, because before the restaurant business, I was in the music business and worked in the studios all the time. What'd you do in the music business? I was a songwriter, performer. I came to Nashville when I was 23 with a record deal with Columbia. And did not get to make my record. So welcome to that club. You're not alone. Yeah. Yeah. But I ended up getting songs on the radio immediately when I came to town. So I was part of the weird anomaly that the couple of people, when they step off the bus, they get lucky and some things happen. What's your biggest hit?

25:42I had a song with Diamond Rio called Holden that went to number three on the charts. Nice. What do you get paid for something like that? I'm just curious. Diamond Rio, number three on the charts. You're the writer for that. Do you still get paid for that? Little bits and pieces, but our generation kind of lost the leverage the way I understand it. And I may have this a little bit wrong. I haven't spent enough time with the lawyers in the music business. Probably should go hang out with the NSAI guys. They can probably explain it all better like Bart Herbison and those guys. When we came along, we got supposedly a little higher rate on the initial royalties from BMI and ASCAP. And then as it goes further, our rate decays and goes away where the old songwriters got full rate forever to perpetuity. And apparently the boys over at Walt Disney are really good at keeping their old, old, old, old catalog protected that hasn't gone public domain because they keep changing the laws.

26:52And one of the things that they sacrificed was the future royalties for young people to get what they wanted from the broadcast side. Did that make any sense to you? Yeah. So basically, so basically broadcast gets to pay less and less for residual songs. Because the rate goes down. So that will give you a little more up front, but we're going to pay a lot less over time. So how much, how many songs did you have that like, how many songs did you write? Like a hundred? I left 200 and something songs at Sony and still there and buried in a tectonic layer of sedimentary songs under a million other songs at Sony. But I was lucky. I had about, I mean, it was close to 30 major label cuts and eight top 40 singles and got to play in the game. And I did it under a pseudonym. So nobody in the restaurant business knows that. And my PR people want to know why I don't play into that.

27:59And I'm just like, because I think what was wrong with me in the music business to begin with was I don't really like to be the center of attention. Yeah. That's like the songwriter, right? Yeah, exactly. You kind of hide in the basement and write the songs and then you go back and do it again. But when I came to town, I came as an artist and I was competitive. I was in there. It could have happened. And the second I started getting royalties, I was like, well, I like going home at the end of the day. And opening that mailbox is kind of nice. Well, when that happened, yeah, the mailbox dance is what they call it. Yeah. When you get your first big check. What's the biggest check you ever received in the mailbox for a song? It was right at about a hundred thousand. Wow. What'd you do? What did you do? You open a hundred thousand ninety eight, ninety nine, one hundred and five. I don't know whatever that number is. What do you do? What did you buy? I went straight to Jim Humphreys, who he was also he's a he's a CPA.

29:03He's retired now. His son, Jamie, is CPA in Franklin. But I was fortunate enough to get exposure to him. He was Billy Ray Cyrus, his business manager, and later he was Miley's manager. And he's doing OK. Helped her become mega rich because that's a cool story all in its own for for, you know, because Hannah Montana was owned by Disney. Yeah. So he had her change her name to Miley from like Hope Destiny or something like that. And because that was the the street name of Hannah Montana in the series. But she changed her name to Miley and then got he brokered the deal with Walmart for the teen clothing deal and got her half a billion dollars or something like that. What would she do with that check? She wrote a wrecking ball through a wall. You know, my CPA doesn't do any of this stuff for me.

30:04Yeah, well, he didn't do that for me either. I didn't get my own clothing line. I don't know how popular that would have been anyway. So with your hundred thousand, I went to the he told this story to tons of people. He said, you know, Kelly came in and just pushed a check and said, what do I do with this? Because I did. I went over I went over to him and said, what the heck do I do with this? Because, you know, there were other songwriters. I forgot Springer, the guy that wrote a lot of the Mark Chestnut songs. Apparently he got drug out of the writer's room in handcuffs under, you know, with weapons pointed at him by the IRS because he wasn't going to pay any taxes or what. You know, we have fun songwriter stories because we're not your average personalities. But like I said, I just went in and said, I just don't want to screw this thing up. I don't know. I, you know, how this how I should structure this. But but, you know, I did all sorts of weird things that put me ahead of the game because I invested money.

31:11And that's such a smart thing to do, though, like people would go and spend that or don't know what to do with it and take chances with like I had a co-writer friend that he hit it a little bigger than I did a good bit bigger. And the first thing he did was blow his big check in Mexico with all of his buddies. And I was like, Mexico is cheap. What the heck did you do in Mexico? Can only imagine. Yeah, yeah. Well, and once again, the stories are good. And I think that also ties into the restaurant side. The stories are good, you know, unbelievable. We go all night long telling stories from restaurants. So we're just on our timeline here, though. You were a songwriter. You did OK. You did. You did well writing songs and you were smart with your money. Why did somebody give you the advice or did you want to go into the restaurant? Why did you all of a sudden make this hard left turn? Everybody everybody begged me not to do it, actually.

32:14Why did you want to do it? I worked in rest and pizza places and restaurants coming up, you know, when I went through, you know, late teens into college and stuff. I worked in pizzerias and I recognized when I lived in Franklin that it was a pizza desert. Pretty, pretty much straight up. I mean, we had Pizza Nizza and they didn't know how to cook a pizza all the way. Wow. I haven't heard that name in a long time. And we had Pizza Nizza. And then there was like that was over there by Franklin High School, right? It was there was one right by Franklin High School. That was that was maybe Mateo's or something like that. I can just when there was a Pizza Nizza right over there because I went to Franklin High School. Pizza Nizza was in the little shopping center that's at the corner of Moore's in Franklin. That little low slung place where there's a moon liquor store and that sort of stuff. OK. It was in the corner there when when I was aware of it and maybe they moved. But we saw an opportunity to bring really good pizza and that the people would.

33:18Because I had worked for a guy. I had worked for a guy who was from up north and we shredded the cheese and did all the hard work. And, you know, granted, you choose what style you want it to be. But then there's the quality behind it and the execution. And I saw that everybody was kind of in a race to the bottom for what I would call profit pizza that sucks, you know, because of the old joke, you know, pizzas like sex. When it's bad, it ain't that bad, you know. And and then I would argue that, no, pizza is not like that because nobody goes to therapy for pizza. Anyway, but so that was sort of it. I was like, well, also, to be fair, I went to lunch at Longhorn. So this is actually prophetic. The old Longhorn is now the row on Lyle Avenue by Vanderbilt. I said Hayes Street. It's Lyle. I said, oh, I'm sorry. You said Hayes.

34:19It is a forgotten little alley street right there. Yeah. You know, that that you have to connect. It connects kind of West End and Division Street. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so we we went to lunch. I was at lunch with Jim McBride, who unfortunately passed like in the past year. But he's a big Hall of Fame songwriter. And I was there with Paul Nelson as well. He wrote like big hits like 18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses. So I was with these like gods, you know, and like, hey, Kelly, let's go to lunch. And they were all writing with me at the time because I had a record deal. So that was how how I kind of broke the Nashville system when I came to town was I had a record deal. So all of the big writers want to write with the kids who are signed because that's their ticket to their next cut. Yeah. Is to get all over that record. And so that's how I was writing with guys like Craig Wiseman. And that's who ended up writing, you know, some the Holden song with was Craig.

35:21And but anyway, so I'm there with Jim McBride, Paul Nelson, and they had this awful bay window that was by the jukebox by the bar. I don't know if you remember that restaurant or not. I had been I have been to that Longhorn, but it is everybody obviously been 30 years. So when you came through the door back then, the bar was immediately on your right. There was a jukebox immediately to your right and then an oddball bay window in the table and the bay window was just this hot box that had a bench in it. And I unfortunately sat in that bay window. And so I'm dripping sweat, but I'm sitting with my heroes, right? These guys are. I mean, my gosh, the songs, they were, you know, Hall of Famers. Sure. And so I'm sitting there and all they do is complain about the music business the entire time. They talk about control composition clause and how they lost the Travis Tritt record and how they did that. It just goes on and on and on and on about just how miserable it is. And and and Jim looks at me and goes, man, just give me one more good lick, Kelly, and you can have it stuff like that.

36:28And I'm listening to this going like, well, I better get a side gig. Yeah, I better get a little something to stand on one foot on the dock, one on the boat bumping up and down in the waves, but diversify a little bit. Yeah. And so I looked at it. You know, I came through. I had a good run. Things were going well. And a lot of my co-writers now are some of the biggest that have ever been. And some of the guys I worked with, even the artist I was coming up with now are guys that you wouldn't believe. I mean, when I when I left Sony in the production side, you know, it was Eric Church. It was I've heard of him. Yeah, it was. Sounds familiar. It was Blake Shelton was over there all the time. Like Blake who? Yeah, exactly. Just Miranda's ex-husband. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, crazy. Like the guy, the guy that did all of my demo work ended up producing Miranda Lambert and getting Grammys for that. So that was Mike Ruckey from Wisconsin.

37:29And and he was a kid living in his truck when I met him. And I had a budget at Sony to do demos. And I was one of his first clients in town because I heard how good he was. And so I had I had a sort of a nice divining rod, if you will, pointing at young talent. When I was talented, I didn't care to work with the old jaded guys because most of them all they all just complain about how terrible it is. And and the truth is the music business kind of uses you up and kicks you off to the side. And they've had you know, it's on to the next generation. There's a lot of similarities to the music business and restaurant business. I mean, you talk about the old jaded guys that complain. Yeah, I run into a lot of old jaded guys that are just kind of like it's not like the good old days or things are changing and they're upset about it and they just want to complain. Well, I was very lucky, had really great mentors in that business. And I remember one of the really smart, talented mentors I had. He told me it's using you while you're using it.

38:37And so you kind of look and go, yeah, fair, you know, it's a good to trade off. Yeah. What do you so you got into this business, you open that first pie in the sky. And the dog caught the car. Yeah, it was I was absolutely right. There was a need at the time. And we did a really good job. We put a lot of lot into it. Like I said, I had I was shredding cheese. I was fermenting dough. I was doing all the hard work. In fact, we started with cutting boards. And and so it was a whole green pepper and it was a whole piece of chicken that we pulled out and we cut into that topping when you ordered the pizza. And after about two weeks and I still have a callus from the from the chef knife where I couldn't cut that fast. And then we discovered food processors do a better job anyway. Sure. So it's that, you know, the magic of science. We did it the punishing, you know, culinary school way.

39:38What's something that you in a bit of advice like so when you go back to that day when you started that your eyes are wide, you've got this pizza. We're going to do great things. All the hope and wonder that you have and fast forward to today. What's something that you wish you would have told yourself back then? And maybe nothing, because all of this is an experience you had to learn. But like if you could go back and give yourself advice, if there's somebody out there who is in that awe and wonder, I'm going to open my own place. What's the number one thing you would tell them? The world is different now, so it's hard to give advice from 25 years ago, because I'm not sure that the recipe is the same. You have a tremendous amount of competition now. Everybody has social media, YouTube. They're playing a different game now that when they come out, they're trying to sort of out chef each other.

40:39You know, there's just a completely different game. The problem for most people is they don't understand how to make money at what they do. And you are committing to extreme expenses when you sign a lease, when you take on a note that probably is guaranteed by your home equity or your mom or something. Somebody is hanging out the window in trouble if this restaurant doesn't do well, because banks are not going to lend a restaurant easily. They know that the failure rate is spectacular, and that's not a good. Even now, when I go to bankers, if I just tell them I need money, that's not a problem. If I go and tell them I'm going to do a restaurant, then all of a sudden, underwriting becomes a huge mountain. Why do you think restaurants fail? What is the number one thing? When you go to a banker, what do you think the underwriter is thinking right now? What do you think the questions are in their mind? Why?

41:39What are they looking for for somebody? Well, I think they know it's fickle at best. It's fickle at best whether customers will continue to come, whether trends will change. Operations are only as good as that operator that day when things flip and change. Coming out of COVID, when we saw the great resignation and everybody just drops and walks and quiet quit or rage quit or whatever the type of quitting we're doing, it's quitting. That turnover damaged a lot of the culture in a lot of restaurants. We get back to what a banker is looking at. They're just looking at the math saying, this is a high risk. There's no way to argue around that. If you want to do it, you're putting your money at risk. That's a fact. You have to divorce yourself from it being a math equation to go and put the passion and get it to do what it's supposed to do.

42:41Then the math always comes surging back like a tsunami. We've seen great years. We've seen troubled years. I've opened restaurants. I've closed restaurants. I've been through all of those processes. I still do it. You just opened Ravato a few weeks ago. Correct, yeah. You told me while we're waiting to start this interview, you said, I am seven days a week, two shifts a day. How old are you? 58 years old. 58 years old working seven days a week, two shifts a day all the time. Is that what it takes when you open a restaurant? What's going to make Ravato be a success? Well, it's like anything newborn. It takes a lot more attention at first. Systems, we live and die by our systems. Training, education is more necessary now than it's ever been because people don't have good social skills. They have not been held accountable typically by society.

43:45They're being held less and less accountable for their actions, and they make more and more excuses for their failures that it's other people's faults. You can run to the internet and prove that you're right by just finding the right group to advocate whatever behavior it is you want to do. So when kids have to get in and engage with a real customer, with a real situation, and they have to get the right outcome, they have to skill build. I've been watching, I told you I was watching the show, the show called The Bigger Bigger I told you I was watching that 30 rule guy a little bit. He's great. Yeah. Yeah, he is. And he's really good. Because I'm a huge fan of visualization as part of success, that you have to paint the picture of what success looks like, and then you have to drive everybody to that. And when you do that, that's positive reinforcement, and you're pushing people towards a positive outcome.

44:47And so that's what you work with with your team. We know that positive reinforcement gets much greater results than negative reinforcement. So the old school that we came up in, where somebody might throw a pan at you and scream at you and tell you what's wrong with you, that's not the way we motivate people anymore. And I think there's been like, we've gotten away from that, which is good. But then we haven't fully gotten into the positive reinforcement. And we're in this middle place with a lot of places that they don't want to come down on people, but they're also not doing the right things in the positive reinforcement. So we're just kind of in this like no man's land. But you have to reward your strong performers and protect them from the weak performers, because your C students will drive off your A students. And then you, you know, Brandon, I'm sure because you were in operations, you've seen when a team, when the fulcrum tips to the negative, as opposed to the fulcrum tipping to the positive.

45:48And so when you get good people, they will kind of help, I don't say police, but they'll help call out the poor performers. Because, you know, if somebody is a poor performer because of lack of, you know, experience or something like that, then we want to work with them and we want to invest in that person and help them get there. But when you have somebody that just wants to come in and be, you know, a disruptor or accurate or doesn't want to perform or seeing what they can get away with, you've got to get those people out. Because when you get when those start to become, you know, the majority of your people, then your restaurant crashes. And I've been through many of those cycles where you kind of can't believe what was so great, you know, six months ago. Now you're dealing with this, you know, huge problem that you have to clean up because you've now got, you know, a negative resonance in the walls as opposed to a positive resonance.

46:51We did that at Maribor when we went to tip pool. We when we came back from COVID, we closed. We came back from COVID. We came back on a tip pool because we wanted everybody because there's a lot of events and different things. Bravado is our first tip pool. It was amazing how fast you recognize the people who got it and excelled. But then immediately there are people who didn't bust their tables and hid in the bathroom because they didn't want more tables because the high performers would make all the money. Like if I hang back, I still make a bunch of money. And it was the disparity between those two. And you have to find out those people who are hiding and don't want other people to make. And you have to get them gone because the second that the people who are the higher earners start realizing that they're doing the work for the people, then they leave. And then you end up with this middle ground. So it's like this constant training, constant training. But when you don't have a tip pool, you have the opposite problem. You have the table hawk, the person who's gaming, you know.

47:55Well, it's about them. Right. And they don't care about the guest either. No, it's about that's my table, my tip. You know, we talk about I don't care about flipping a guest upside down and shaking all the money out of their pockets. I don't like that at all. I wouldn't want to go to a place like that. What we want to do is have a place that people want to come back to over and over again. And so we have to create an environment that they have a great guest experience. I love when they say things like experiential design and things like that. That's what it's becoming. What is the experience when somebody goes out and how do we manage and maintain that? So. What's the experience at Bravado? Let's give a little bit of talk about your new place. So Bravado spun off of a little bit off of Treehouse. And Treehouse has been my, you know, in the past two years, my larger restaurants have diminished in sales some and with the trends of what are out there in the industry.

49:00But Treehouse, the neighborhood place with the little, you know, small, more small plates and stuff that we've seen that it grew in two years, like 40 percent. Wow. So we look at that being a completely different style of dining. You know, here come the small plates that come out. It's a little kitchen. We can't we can't stage a table there because we don't have, you know, a big expo area. It's literally the plate hits the window. It has to go out. They got to get it out of there because they got to get the next round. So that hot food, hot, smaller plates, more variety, nice chef touches to the food. So it's got some creativity and, you know, and some, you know, I don't know if that would be excitement when somebody tastes something that may be a little different than they've had. Which is difficult for Cool Springs because you're in the East Nashville Treehouse. Treehouse is in East Nashville, right? Yes. Yeah. You have a much more adventurous eater who wants to try new things.

50:01And I found like in that Williamson County, Cool Springs, Brentwood area. Oh, no, no. They want to tell you how to make the food, right? Well, I mean, people would always say, you know, we would bring a chef in and he would do kind of his own menu. And I'm going to have to run to the restroom. I'm sorry. Yeah, no problem. Take a break. 50 or eight year old things kicking in. No problem. We'll take a break. We'll we'll come back right afterward from our sponsors. There are two types of business owners. Those who are busy and those who want to be busy. Toast is designed for both. With tools to keep you humming and help turn grind into growth. That's how you turn busy into business. Toast, built for busy. Hey, guys, want to talk to you today about C&B Linen. And we don't have a lot of time. So what I'm going to tell you is typically you cannot trust your linen company. 90% of people we meet with do not like their linen company. C&B Linen, you can trust. They're absolutely amazing for all of your linen needs. Tablecloths, mats, any of these things. Definitely contact C&B Linen.

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53:05All right, we're back. All right, we are back. And before we left, we were talking about the difference between Cool Springs and East Nashville. And it sort of started as, you know, it sort of started as what is bravado, right? What is bravado? Oh, well, that's a whole other diatribe. Bravado is a fun word that I think really fits restaurant people. Everybody thinks their ketchup's the best with the anise and the whatever. Yeah. Oh, I put pears in mine. No. Whatever. You get it. It sounds horrible. Please tell me don't do that. No. But the example is, like, if you go into bravado, one of the things we did was make our murals hospitality workers as daredevils and as, like, circus performers or whatever.

54:12And we did that because we jump through hoops and we do crazy things and we try to please the public. And, you know, it's always, you know, there's always inherent danger that it's not going to go well. Risk. And yet we still show up and say, hey, we're great at what we do. And we, you know, and we have to have a little bit of, you know, overconfidence in what we do to do it. So I thought bravado was a fun name that has enough of a negative in there to go with a positive. It's not just saying, hey, we're the greatest place. It's like, yeah, and maybe, you know, we're actually restaurant people. Right. This is kind of I just kind of thought it felt it fit the tribe, you know, kind of thing. What makes a restaurant person? Other than ADHD. Yeah, well, we started on that. I mean, that's a thing. Well, well, I think that I think that you have to have a reasonable amount of intellect to be able to juggle a lot of things and solve problems.

55:20You get you get almost no thanks. And this this is actually another parallel story with a friend of mine who's a successful restaurant guy who was in the music business, too. And he was my neighbor, literally my neighbor. And he came in to pine this guy one day and he said, hey, I just signed a lease on this restaurant. Steve Dale, who did soap appears. Oh, yeah. And so he came in and he said, I make tamales when I'm on the road with what's her name? NARA, Nashville Area Restaurant Alliance NARA, Nashville Area Restaurant Alliance NARA, Nashville Area Restaurant Alliance NARA, Nashville Area Restaurant Alliance NARA, Nashville Area Restaurant Alliance

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