Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Friday Lessons in Business and Entrepreneurship

Episode Date: February 10, 2023

I am knee-deep (more likely neck-deep) in my first true business venture. Mistakes have been made. There are a lot of people who want to start a business, and many don't know where to look. This episode is about picking the brains of two successful entrepreneurs (one in tech and one in restaurants) about what has worked, what hasn't, successes, failures, where to start, and what to avoid. I am still in the process of working through some of these issues, hopefully, this discussion can help others in the same position.

Okay, got the red smoke. Gun runs, north and south. West of the smoke. West of the smoke. Okay, copy, west of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Come on winter, baby. You're cleared hot.

Copy, cleared hot. I have a 30-minute timer starting now. So we can make dinner, but most importantly, not be killed by our significant others. Best title for the episode. So you think you want to start a business? Just don't. Or lessons in business life

with Dan Hart and Denver Maddox. You can do two titles, right? You have a main title, subtitle? We definitely could. First off, thank you for the ass feedings. We're at an undisclosed location, a little training den for the, well, I was going to say for the three of us,

but it's for quite a few people. But you're in town. We just soft opened the coffee shop. It's the first time anybody's ever seen. your face, Denver, the mythical half owner of Black Rifle Coffee Callis Bell. So here we are. So we have just soft launched our business. This is my first business venture like this of any kind. I know you have done business before in the past. And Dan, every time I've had you on, Hickson, Hickson, Jesus, your coach is a Hickson Gracie black belt. But Henry Aiken, you are,

Henry Aiken's black belt. But we've always talked about Jiu-Jitsu. Not about your journeys through the entrepreneur space. And speaking for myself, like I'm incredibly grateful that we have you as a resource and reference over the past two years since we have started this process, but even more importantly,

the last week or so, just bouncing things off. If you're like, what should this cost? What should we do? This is unreasonable to pay this? So I think we should focus the whole thing on business. And if we only have 30 minutes,

which we do, because we'll get killed otherwise, I think we should focus on mistakes that we've all made along the way that maybe we could tell people not to make. Because you said you were going to write a book, right? Yeah, I started writing a book called Please Don't Open a Restaurant. But if you do read this book. And I got almost finished with it. And then just like everything else, sometimes it kept being like fourth or fifth and stayed there for long enough that it fell off the radar. Well, talk about your journey into the restaurant space.

How did it start and where are you at now? Because you're getting ready to launch two more inside of 2023. So I started when I was 16 years old working. at a subway as a sandwich artist. And then I moved on to Pizza Hut, which I tell people all the time. Pizza Hut was the hardest serving job I ever had and I served all through college and everything because back then nobody has buffets anymore since COVID, I don't think. But the Pizza Hut buffet was a thing.

I had forgotten about that buffet until you just mentioned that. There's no harder serving job than the Pizza Hut buffet. Everyone's a jerk, or an asshole rather. They're all cheap. most of them don't tip and they're still putting in custom orders which like you could sit down and be like well I want sausage and jalapenos and then we're required to like take the order and then to go make it and the turnaround is just lightning so like maybe to normal restaurant if you had a four tables section you turn it three times you have 16 tables pizza hut you're doing like a hundred tables like it's just nonstop people coming in so then from there I was going into college and I served and bartended all through college when I graduated college I was managing and bartending at a place and we moved out to Woodstock. They opened another location. I eventually

became a 10% minority shareholder and tried to get out of the business, went into selling prefabricated rubber sports flooring and I ended up buying the DC Cobbs which you've been to in 2008, which was just a bar at the time. It opened at 3 p.m. and then until bar time, no food at all. And then we went from there to Hart's Saloon. There's now three DC Cobbs locations about to open a fourth, So I have six restaurants total that we operate. We're opening two more, so we'll be at eight. How many total employees will you have? Total employees between all locations, probably in the 200 area, I would guess it.

We fluctuate a ton in the summer. I mean, in the summer you've been to my places. We have huge patio areas. And, you know, just like here in Calespell, people would rather be outside in the summer. Well, you guys have beautiful mountains and stuff in Illinois, not so much. Do you guys don't have topography like this? No, not quite. but you have the groundhog we do have the groundhog we do determine the literal groundhog when

i say that i'm talking about the square where groundhog day was filmed yeah and it's ponsitani phil right yeah it's 30 year anniversary this year so as you saw katy and i were there we get up i'm not an early riser we get up at 6 am on groundhog day go out there and they have a whole like to do there's thousands of people and they ask like who's from out of illinois who's from out of the country there's like 30 people there that traveled from out of the country to come see groundhog day. Where do they keep that groundhog when it's not groundhog day? I have no idea.

I do not believe, to my knowledge, that the city of Woodstock owns that groundhog. I think that groundhog's like on tour. It's kind of a celebrity, you know, goes around to something. You'd think there would be enough people would want to reenact Bill Murray kidnapping that thing that they would keep it under lock and key,

like in a secret location. Well, who knows? I mean, is that the... I don't think groundhogs live 30 years. I was just going to say, I feel like there's been a robust amount of swapping out of the groundhog. It's like your dad with a goldfish when you're a kid. Like, that's the same gold.

It's Punks of Tony Field of eighth. Yeah, if they're even keeping track of that. And then, Denver, your experience in the business world. Yeah, I spent, from the mid-90s, I was in, like, the early days of the internet. After Al Gore invented it. Yeah, after Al Gore invented it. And pants. I adopted pants and started working on the internet.

It was like a happenstance thing. I was a total college dropout. I hated school. I paid for it for a little while, pretended to go, mostly just farted around. And then I found my way into a ground level job at an ISP doing dial-up tech support. If everybody remembers, modems. I was the guy that you'd call when you couldn't get on the internet. You couldn't download photos.

Well, here's the best part is I didn't actually know how to do that job. When they hired me, they were like, do you want a job? And I was like, I need a job. What does it do? Like, you get people on the internet. I'm like, I don't know how to get on the internet. They're like, don't worry. We're going to train you how to do that.

So I got trained on a job. And then I spent the subsequent 22 years working my way through three startups. I did my first startup in New York City before 2000. And then I did two more startups in 2005 and the last one I did in 2014 in Australia. How many people at your apex did you have working underneath you? The biggest team that I ever managed was probably around 200 people. Okay. So similar numbers that Dan at PTAs.

Yeah. And that would have been. the last two companies I was at, I had my largest teams. And I'm not my favorite. I, by the way, I much prefer smaller teams. I was going to ask both of you, is there a number at which it becomes much more difficult? So I can't manage 200 people. I manage our, we call our Tier 1 management team, which is five or six people.

Even past that, I mean, we have some of our, our Tier 2 team, which is our lower level management, but still running stores. Even when we expand into that and there's 10 or 12 people in the room, I find it personally. I don't, I'm not able to communicate as well. Yeah. I used to try to cap teams at about eight. You maybe get to 12 depending on what the team did, but you get past eight people you can't give any focus time to those people. And, you know, whether you're a team lead or, you know, a vice president of a company,

you need to have a team that you can spend time with. You need to be able to communicate directly with people. You need to spend, you know, an hour a week with most of your direct reports. If you get to the point where you've got eight plus, you're spending most of your week, your work week actually just talking to people. And then you're not getting any work done. And that can have its ups and downs. But, yeah, eight was my cap.

I prefer five, six people like Dan. You know, that's where you can really develop a relationship with someone. You can really communicate effectively. You can start to learn how the other communicates and how they need to communicate to you and so on. Yeah. So since I've known you, and I'm sure the same is true with Denver, you have constantly been working on like the next project, architectural drawings, design, layout. And Denver and I, for better or for worse, cannonballed into that pool as well.

I don't think, did you realize it was going to be as involved as a process as it ended up being? Of course not. Okay. Absolutely not. Because it certainly caught me by surprise, potentially because I had never done it before, so I had no idea. But you literally, every time I'm talking to you or with each other, it's like you're working on either like logos. Even like with Katie's, you know, High Fusion, you're working on the build out of all that stuff.

Have there been any, and I ask this, because I'm gonna bounce it off of what Denver I've gone through. And the builds that you have done across all of those, have there been consistent issues that you have come across that you would warn people against before they launch and do a project like that? Yeah, everything costs three times as much, it takes three times as long.

So no matter how many times I do it. So the quote that comes in, get a calculator out, and then the time that comes in, multiply that by about three as well, all of them by three. It's never, yeah, and you know, there's, you try your best to prepare for things, you know, and you always build into budgets, areas and stuff, but there's always something that comes up, you know, whether it's, we got to sprinkle this or, you know, hey, we're dealing with this older building and we uncovered X thing in the

ground or, you know, whatever happens or, you know, this is an ADA or suddenly somebody within the inspector's office changed and now they're doing it this way or this code's been adopted. I mean, unfortunately, like a lot of things, government tends to get in the way of progress. What's been the most costly, and I don't necessarily mean economically, maybe the most time or the headache, decision that you have made and regretted in the builds that you have done? Not owning all my buildings. I mean, I wasn't always in a financial position to do that, but there's times where I have been and I've chosen to rent instead. And ultimately, I don't think, I'm not one of these guys that you always have to own the dirt.

but you think you're better off in the long run a lot of times if you are and you know I've been able to sell businesses where I didn't own the dirt and a lot of people will tell you you can't do that you definitely can and been profitable doing that but you know I think not owning the dirt is a mistake a lot of the time which you know you guys own your building it's beautiful I've seen it and you know regardless of whatever happens that's got a you know significant value to it I mean and when you're talking about you know when I'm running my performer or something I'm looking at rent going out I mean, that rent is just into the ether. It's gone when you guys are making a mortgage payment, you know, on that.

It's not gone. It's just going to somebody else's asset. Hopefully they come spend money in my restaurants. Yeah. Ooh, that's a risky tradeoff. That'd be a lot of like burgers. I mean, I have had a tradesman where I'm like, I'll hire this guy more because he gives me all of it back. Fair.

What do mistakes look like in the tech world? I mean, they don't look. Is it like an ideological mistake where you realized you went down a path and then another company leapfrogged ahead of you? There's a few traps that I've seen that were hard to back out of. And I don't know if you guys have heard the phrase tech debt, but there is a phrase in the industry, tech debt, which means you've likely built something that will either be out of spec or out of currency, and you'll need to bring that into a more scalable, more modern platform. You mean before it even launches? Or after it launches.

Like you can many times be ahead on an idea, but by the time you've developed it, you can be. be at market, somebody else might come along with a similar idea. Polygenesis is a thing, right? So you'll have the same idea appear in multiple places all of a sudden. I mean, QR codes are a great example of that. When the QR code came out, like four instances of that technology popped up at one time. And then somebody wins, like beta and VHS, right? That sort of stuff. So tech debt is a thing where you've got to dig yourself out of a hole because maybe you underestimated how you needed to scale a project. Or you underestimated the cost of getting project to scale. So that was the other one that was always a kick in the balls. Like you'd say,

all right, well, our budget is this. Like, we're going to, we're going to, we've made this complex budget. We've got these dates. Maybe those dates are arbitrary. Maybe they're based on some reality. Usually there's somewhere in the middle, like a wish and a prayer. And then some reality that somebody said, we think we can do that by F-date. And so you start driving hard to that. And whether they're mistakes or not, like, that's interpretable, right? Like, some people say, oh, it's a mistake to not assume it's going to take longer, assume it's going to cost more. But that might not always be the way you want to manage that too. It might be better to say, no, we're going to hit that target. And maybe you don't in the end, but you manage it to the

point where you're like, it's going to be super tight. And maybe, you know, if you think you're going to hit it, like we're going to hit a date in 90 days from now. We're going to do this really cool thing. Maybe it's 91 or 93 or 190 days. I've seen all of those things happen. And so I think underestimating complexity and overestimating the ability to, you know, maintain a schedule on a budget are the most common mistakes I've seen. What's the biggest tech idea you've seen or heard of that never was? Like it was going to be the next big thing that just vaporized. Streaming video games.

I lost a lot of money on a stack for one of those. I worked on a very large project with a lot of bees at the end of that budget. And I actually helped write a patent for how to actually start a stream basically for a video game. And we had worked up a whole infrastructure on how games were going to be basically delivered where they needed to be. We worked out this geo fencing capability. We worked up distances to people to keep within side of certain latency boundaries and things like that. And it was a very aggressive project. And I was like super stoked to be part of it.

And then when we started looking at the cost of it, I said, this is never, ever going to work. And sure is hell, it was canned, not long after that. How much money would you estimate was put into that? to just get to that point, it would have been a few million. Okay. Yeah. It wasn't a huge waste of capital, but there were salaries involved and a lot of time involved with people that could have been probably doing other things.

But it was a cool idea, but it was never. Bumped your microphone down a little bit. I'm worried your beard is going to run into that thing. Your ginger beard. Put it down here, like by a button. It's interesting, too, the restaurant world and tech. world colliding and talking about ideas of things like POSs that we've talked about, where you end up with a technology of cloud-based versus server-based and people doubling down on old tech rather

than kind of getting into the game of what's more modern. You said today that you've been, or actually was yesterday, you were talking about being an early adopter sometimes to your detriment. Is that something that you are intentionally trying to do, push the front leading edge, or are you just kind of interested in new stuff that comes out? I think that's just me as a person. It's not just in the restaurant industry. I like to try new stuff.

I mean, anytime new technology or something comes out, it's going to cost way more and not work as well as if you wait for the umpteenth edition. And I think, you know, in the restaurant, you know, hospitality field, I like to, I try to go to the Vegas show here, new stuff. And sometimes we get stuff and it's like a home run. And then other times I invest a bunch of money in something. And it's like, that doesn't even work at all. How far do you let it go before you pull the plug on it?

I mean, so there's a difference between me. spending money and not getting it back and something costing me money. So for example, like a point of sales system, if there's delays that are happening or the system's crashing or it's doing things where I can't physically bring in money, that's something I'm cutting off very quick. If it's an idea of, you know, I paid X amount for this thing and it's just not getting used or whatever, then I don't mind as much because I've already spent that money. That's fair. Where would you guys, so both of you have built businesses, I guess I don't know shit about the tech world, as you know. I refer to you as to Steve Jobs any times. I'm not even allowed in the room. I'm not even allowed in

the room the houses the you know you're not allowed to go into that room we'll push buttons. I will. I cannot help them. First off, there's so many flashing lights in there. It reminds me. I don't, it came in the name of the movie. It's like, shall we play a game? That's the terminal that's like, yes, I want to play war games. And then the building is going to explode. So I'm not allowed in that room, which is actually, that's fair. I don't have an issue with that. Um, Because you're building, Dan, you are building, you know, that's brick and mortar. The tech world is different in my... There are elements that are brick and mortar.

There's gigantic construction projects that are data centers, which are humongous buildings with very complicated power systems. Does that scale... Is there any limit, like, as people's usage of the devices that we have, do we just have... Do they continue to build more and more and more of those and bigger and bigger and bigger? Yeah, I mean, you have a couple curves that you follow. adoption curves, which are the more people use things, the more you need of it, you have

like Moore's Law and things like that that indicate that, you know, as people adopt, technology also advances so things get faster, smaller, better, along with that adoption. So, you know, back when not everybody had a computer, they were big and clunky and kind of lame, and now we have devices in our pockets that are more powerful than the entire neighborhood's computers were back. But even TVs are the same way. I mean, I think the first flat screen I bought was like 4,000. $1,000 and like 40 inches and weighed like 200 pounds now.

I think I just saw the first wireless TV announced recently, which is, you know, hot swappable batteries and all wireless reception. Like it doesn't plug into the wall at all. That's cool. Yeah. I mean, so what people can't see on that wall over there's, I'll call that a 50-incher. It's 85. 85.

Okay. My estimation skills are way off. I'll just say it's because I'm at an angle. But I remember when those TVs came out, that'd be 20 G's. That's probably less than a grand at Best Buy or Costco. It was maybe $500. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, so, yeah, the curve that goes up and the cost that comes off of it.

But I asked about the tech space. So it's brick and mortar, the tech space, you guys have both been involved in building businesses. For somebody who wants to go down either of those paths, and they could borrow 15 minutes of your time. And they said, hey, this is what I want to do. Where would you start them? Go work for somebody already doing it. That would be my advice and anything you want to do. I mean, the amount of people that, the problem with the restaurant industry is there's no

barriers to entry. And maybe that's not a problem, but that's why the failure rate is so high. People blow their whole life savings doing things. And one of the things I hear a lot when people pitch me ideas or tell me about what they're going to do is no one's ever done this. There's probably a reason no one's ever done that. And how many things truly haven't been done or tried at this point? Well, that's like, you know, I'm going to do eight minute abs. Well, have you heard a seven minute? Okay. But, you know, generally speaking, we talk about this the way down here. in most areas, a restaurant that serves great burgers or pizza or things like that is what people want. You start getting into super niche stuff. You start narrowing down that demographics. So you better

be in New York or Chicago or somewhere with a ton of people. And most people don't want to do the hard work. I mean, go learn how to be a busboy. Learn if you walk the restaurant space. Learn how to serve tables. Learn all of those things. Or you better hire somebody that you can trust that knows and can do all those things and advise them and hopefully get them to have some skin and in the gamer commitment because I don't want anybody running stuff on that level. If I can't do it, they can just quit at any time. Yeah, a single point of failure. What would you say for somebody in the tech space?

Yeah, I have a pretty similar answer, actually. I mean, it's very difficult to get into the infrastructure side of the tech world now, but they're controlled by just giant corporations. And the amount of capital it takes to build, you know, a reasonably scaled infrastructure to do something unique, you could now do inside of cloud services. So the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and Google, you can use their, They're cloud services to build a virtual infrastructure. But if you wanted to build your own brick and mortar

and you wanted to build your own server farms and things like that, then you better have a lot of money. I mean, in a lot of money, because it's not just going to be the servers in the building. It's going to be all the bandwidth that you need, the dark fiber you're going to have to acquire and so on. So really, in that, if you want to learn in that space, you're going to have to go work for a large infrastructure company.

If you want to be on the software side of things, you want to create apps and things like that. There's more opportunities for that. That's definitely a cheaper, a cheaper way for people to do something in the tech world. But you need to know how to code. Not everybody needs to go to college for that. I'm a bad example of college dropout.

A lot of the best software engineers I ever met didn't finish college. They were just incredibly bright and very into it. And people that have passion in that aspect, you can create a lot with very little on the software side of things. Because you can do that on your laptop. You can start building an app with some software development kits right on your laptop. And then you have to figure out the hard part, which is scaling that app to multiple users and how that works.

Those are the scalability of the of the tech world is actually in my opinion the hardest problem to solve What would happen if Amazon turned off their cloud services? A lot of things would break a whole lot like instantaneously, right? Yeah, perhaps most people don't realize how much of the US government buys cloud service from Amazon, but that is also a very distributed highly redundant system like me shutting it off locations. Oh yeah, I mean multiple locations that locations upon locations you have that have multiple locations inside a region that have failover zones inside of those regions and inside of those local zones. So it's very, very nested. To shut it all off would be a gargantuan feat, a very complicated. It's not like that green switch over there, which is what I'm imagining. It's just like red button, don't push, and the dude just standing there with a shotgun. I'm like, nope, you don't get to push this one. I mean, I'm not saying there's not something like that out there. There's probably not many people who know what it is. What's interesting you say college too, and I get asked a lot by now people that are our age that have kids. Well, my kid would like to open a restaurant.

I'm going to send them to culinary school. I would say almost universally, that's a complete waste of money. There are some very high-level chefs that have restaurants that have done that. But most people who do that drop out or their parents spend a bunch of money. They graduate and they do nothing. Find the nicest restaurant in your town. Go wash dishes. Is culinary school more of like a pedigree thing?

It would be like an Ivy League school. There are certainly. like certificate there's schools like CIA and stuff that are highly respected but every community college has a culinary program but I would say save your money and again go wash dishes and then start prep cooking and then start you know working the fry line do whatever and you don't need to go to a super fancy place just go to a place that's doing some scratch sauces and some other stuff and like anything else in any career start at the bottom work your way up and if you are working hard people are going to notice and you're going to come up now Denver and I've had this conversation

The only way I know how to do it is to work really hard for a lot of years and miss tons of things that I don't regret. It's not like I look back on my life and I'm like, man, I'm really wish I was that more of this or that. I'm happy with the way I came up. I'm sure there are people that have shorter ways to do things. The only way I know to do it is to grind it out, work 100 hour weeks. You know, now we talked about today working in the business versus on. I used to work in my restaurants seven days a week open to close. And that was just my life.

That's not my life anymore. but that's the only path I know. So I can't advise somebody on a different one. I swear you've told me this story, but did you at one point in time fire everybody and do the entire kitchen yourself? So I did fire an entire kitchen in one of my restaurants, yeah. And I worked, it was me and the manager at the time, Julius,

who's still with me, worked open to close like seven or eight weeks in a row every day, seven days a week. Is that when you said you would just go into the walk-in freezer and eat like cheese that hadn't been cooked or something like that? No, you're talking about cheesecake. And that was, that's a different story. No, we had cooked cheesecake we'd make from scratch. And the guy who was running the kitchen at the time

used to get super upset because I would be there until close and occasionally I would have some cocktails and there would be no food. But cheesecake, you can eat cold. And he'd be like, someone's eating all the cheesecake. I'd like, yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know what's happening. And so the joke was once eventually I told him

that I was the cheesecake bandit. Fair. A good example of what you're talking about as starting at like washing dishes and working your way up is actually Tyler. Yeah. So he works just down the road. Tyler's my middle son, 17, just graduated high school early, doesn't know what he wants to do or even if he wants to go to college and I'm of the idea that I want him to be

able to explore and figure things out. And I mean, shit at this point, you could probably find more on YouTube than you could in most colleges, depending on what it is that you want to study. And I have nothing against college, but he's working in the service industry. I forget, I think he called it the marinera trenches when he was working at McKenzie River, which like such a small world, our general manager at the coffee shop

used to manage the McKenzie that he worked at. There was no crossover, but he would come home covered in marinero sauce. Just like, God damn it! Good for him. Well, and then so he goes, and he works now to a place called Sacred Eats, great food in the valley, super small,

and it's, and they started off. I think he did, he was doing just dishes, And then they taught him POS. And now he's like fully working the line. What do they call it? Serve safe? The certification you get on. Oh yeah,

yeah. He did all of that stuff. And now he's like, Pester Neal. Like when's Dan Hart University? He wants to come out and work for you and just get his ass beat every, I'm like, you better be careful what you asked for, buddy.

Say, oh, fuck you up at that, Jim. But he wants to do all that. And because what we're actually, we haven't talked about, but screw it, let's just all committed to it now. We're going to open up a smash burger place very small at the coffee shop as well.

because we're still going to develop the outside area. And he's already talking about, well, what do you think about me and my buddy who also works at Sacred Eats coming and we can run that? It's like, you know what? You might actually have enough experience to do that because you've been working in the service industry now for two and a half. It'll probably be three years at that point. Like, game on. And it doesn't take forever.

A couple years, work hard. It's like anything. I mean, I don't have any secrets. You just shut up, listen, and work hard. And generally speaking, you're going to get noticed and you're going to move up. I don't, you know, I don't have another way. I mean, that's been my experience in the tech world too, by the way. It's still just work.

Yeah. It's still skill building. Doesn't matter if you went to, if you went to university and you got a degree, the chances of that knowledge of your degree in the tech world, translating directly to something you do at a job is low. It's like saying I got my med degree and now I'm going to go to start immediately doing brain surgery. You're probably not going to start out there. I would not want you to operate on me. Yeah. I mean, but it's given a choice.

You know, there's a baseline of knowledge for that, that a lot of other jobs, you can only get, I mean, there are, there are professions in the tech world. I know that you still cannot get trained for at a university. You literally have to learn them on the job. Got to be OJT. Yeah. You've got to be literally in the trenches working on and figuring stuff out. And they'll be different from business and business that you go to. I mean, if I look at, you know, guys that build and design networks, there's not a, there's not a degree for that.

They have to learn how to do that over years and years of experience. I'd imagine each network has unique things to it too. I mean, even for me, within restaurants, I mean, the way that we would handle something at Hart's Saloon compared to a GC Cobbs is vastly different. The way that the managers are trained is different. You've got geographical problems. You've got application constraints. You've got, you know, whatever your audience wants, they can demand that certain things happen. And you have to accommodate for that in your designs, whether it's a restaurant or a piece of software or a network.

Well, and to, you know, bring it back like a smash burger thing, for example, you know, it's, you don't have temperature. on smashed burgers, so there's no need to train people. Like we talked about on the way down, you know, a steakhouse. If you're doing that, I don't know anything about it. I've never done it. But cooking a medium rare filet is a lot different than smashing a burger with, you know, get iron. The odds of getting the burger coming back due to a cooking variation versus the medium

rare filet that might be 60, 80 bucks. Yeah. And of course, you could dry something out and there's some parameters within there. But generally speaking, you're putting ground beef on a flat top, cooking it, flipping it, salt pepper, and we're good. All right, we have two minutes. So I asked you guys both the most costly mistake. If you can think back over your business career, can you highlight maybe not the best decision,

but something that sticks out where I did that right. And it's something that made a mark and you replicated it going forward. I mean, for me, it's more of a broad thing. But it's two things. When I made the conscientious decision, I need to stop working in the business and work on the business if I want this thing to really grow bigger. And that's, you know, something I worked really hard on for a long time. It wasn't overnight. It's not like I made that decision. And then, oh, tomorrow I don't work in the store anymore.

It took a long time. That's actually a rough transition. But, you know, doing that and then, you know, systems just checks and balances of, you know, hey, this person is in charge of this. And this person also checks that and having redundancies in there so that things don't slip through the cracks. Theoretically, things always slip through the cracks. Nothing is perfect. But for me, making that really moved me into being more successful. And that was not always an option either with one.

store and limited ability for payroll and things like that I had to be there all time that's just how it is yeah about you dimmer I I purposely tried to not not let myself get too comfortable at any time in my career as soon as I start feeling like I kind of got this I always start thinking about all right what can I go do now that I suck at what can I go do now that needs more work what can I go do that's different than this the the idea of just you know constantly micro-refining things and being comfortable and was just never a comfortable place for me. So I was probably an asshole about it many times in my

career. I'm sure there'd be plenty of people out there who say, yeah, he was a real pain he has to work with. But I was constantly trying to push myself into doing things that were harder and harder and harder and harder. And just getting myself way out over the tip of my skis, maybe more than I should have, but in the end, there was a reason for it. It was just I wanted to, I wanted to try to do more things than I thought I could. Kind of like we're doing now with our stuff. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Over the tips of our skis, do you like coffee? Because I like coffee. We should build a coffee. Yeah, totally. Let's invest be the biggest coffee shop I've ever seen. It's the biggest coffee shop I've

seen. Most beautiful, by the way. Correct. Okay, it's time for Bison Ragyu. That's 30 minutes. Hopefully somebody can glean something out of that and not make the mistakes. Well, you guys are more in the business world. I guess I can't say that I'm not in the business world anymore, but I'm early on. So I think you're in the business world at this point, Andy. I look forward to galactic mistakes. I just have less to speak of at this point. No, it's been awesome. Let's get out of here before we get killed.