Lay It On The Line

A transformative journey

As I swam a half mile this morning, I contemplated my weekly Substack post. Today's post is the big reveal. After a year and a half of working with a life coach, resume polishing, multiple conversations with job recruiters and way too many zoom call interviews, I am announcing that I left Nova Restaurant Group, my employer of 15 years, to join the rapidly expanding America's Best Restaurants. As I swam laps, I searched for a snappy headline for today’s post. Through the magic of underwater sonic headphones, the next song in my workout play list was Triumph's, Lay It On The Line. That's it, that is precisely what the culmination of the last five years of my professional life has led me to do. At 58-years-old, I jettisoned the familiar for the unknown. I am leaving a job I easily could have ridden into the sunset of retirement for a much smaller, riskier, yet growth desiring company. I took my personal goals and finance skills, derived by work with my coach, and "laid it on the line!" Tomorrow, I fly to Northern Kentucky to begin writing the next professional chapter in my life. And you, my reader, whether you have known it or not, have followed me on this journey over the past two and a half years I have been posting on Substack.

To get to this "jumping off" or "jumping ahead" (entirely the perspective of the company I am leaving vs. the company I am joining,) point in my life, I must start my story five years ago in 2019. That year was significant for two reasons. First, I had just reached my ten-year anniversary with Nova Restaurant Group, and we were in the best economic performance year of that organization's history. Many financial moves initiated in 2016 and 17 were maturing and the company was well poised for rapid growth. I wrote bold budgets for the upcoming year and by February of 2020, we were exceeding those projections. The future was looking so bright, I was planning my vacation in the Maldives to celebrate our anticipated success. 2019 was also the year my youngest graduated from high school and went off to university, thus freeing me from daily parental (not financial) obligations. For the majority of my Nova stint, I was a single parent with sole custody of three children. I posted that story line in great detail in the twelve-part series titled Almost Paradise. In addition to professional success and parental freedom, 2019 was also the year I penned my first book, Restaurant Management, the Myth, the Magic, the Math.

Even though I did not know exactly where any of those 2019 moves was going to take me, I was confident the path would lead to somewhere exciting and fulfilling. I had a growing restlessness inside me and was eager to pursue the possibilities. My stone was rolling, and I intended it to gather no moss.

Then 2020 happened. In early March of 2020, I was in Las Vegas as a speaking guest for MURTEC. The normally large convention crowd was thinner than usual. There was talk in the air of a global pandemic and many typical participants and vendors stayed home. From the time the conference started on March 9th there were rumors of a government shut down and by the time I flew home on the 11th, I was deemed lucky to have received a seat on an airplane. Full crazy had taken over the State Houses and White House of this nation and by the time I returned to Minneapolis, I was not thinking about my company's budget exceeding year or my winter vacation, but how to simply survive.

A mere four days after my return from Las Vegas, my State's governor, Tim Walz "the Restaurant Slayer," ordered the entire hospitality industry closed. On March 15th, he decreed all restaurants in the state closed at 5pm sharp on March 17th. That was St. Patrick’s Day, and thanks to an Irish immigrant population and a country that can overtly commercialize any trend originating from overseas (Starbucks coffee houses, need I say anything more?), that day is a huge profits windfall for my industry. The governor, who hailed from the education sector and never signed the front of a payroll check, also went on to order our industry shuttered one more time in 2020, again with less than 48 hours' notice. Just to put those two forced closures into perspective, as CFO of Nova, with each shutdown, I was staring at seven figures due in just payroll and sales taxes alone. I had over a million dollars of mandated obligations to remit in less than two weeks of each closure and my governor completely turned off my revenue spicket.

Many have memory-holed 2020, but I have not. I will never forget those early days of the pandemic watch. I showed up to my shell of an office with one owner, an HR director, payroll manager and an operations manager trying to figure out how to overcome the next edict emanating from my governor’s office. I watched Gov. Walz's daily briefings on what he would or would not allow his citizens to do. I remember looking at his face on the television each day searching for whether he felt any pain for what havoc he wrought on businesses in our state. I saw nothing. No contrition, no angst and most of all, no remorse for the utter agony his decisions caused. Gov. Walz's lack of empathy for the damage he caused to thousands of businesses and millions of residents is why I dubbed him the "Restaurant Slayer." Although Walz’s Covid orders hurt thousands of families and businesses, his dutiful compliance to the Faucean State dictates paid handsomely for the Restaurant Slayer himself as he is now on the short list for Presidential candidate Harris' VP pick. (For more on that topic, see this Star Tribune article)

Prior to the Covid reaction, 2020 was to be my transforming year. My book was to be published, I was expanding my personal branding through podcast interviews, I had several speaking engagements secured and my CFO decisions were having positive effects on Nova Restaurant Group. I did not know where my career was going, but I was confident that all the efforts plus timing (I was 54 years old and at my prime earning capacity) I invested would pay off. I was either going to surf the wave of growth created from my last ten years with Nova or I was going to bust a new career move. Governor Walz locally, and many others government bureaucrats and mega corporate C-Suites nationally, killed that progress in 2020. Not just for me but for countless other individuals and businesses. 2020 will go down in the annals of history as the year the entire world paused to pay homage to political egos and to feed the ravenous bellies of the pharmaceutical industry. I pray we never find ourselves in such "sciency" days ever again.

As we slogged ahead at Nova Restaurant Group into 2021, the restaurant industry was still under restrictions. The Restaurant Slayer still had capacity and social distancing restrictions in place and federally mandated sick policies forced hard working employees to the side lines for a 10-day recovery period each time they got the sniffles. The book I published, and dreams of career advancement took second fiddle to survival, for both me and the business.

2021 was a busy year for restaurant CFOs. We learned to navigate Draconian lockdown policies apologies called Payroll Protection Plan (PPP,) Earned Retention Credit (ERC,) and a wild and extremely underfunded program called Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF.) Slowly, Covid restrictions eased in 2021. I really don't remember if the Restaurant Slayer lifted the crazy and unprotecting policies first or if businesses just started ignoring them and the policies were reversed because there was no real mechanism in place to enforce them. Ultimately, my state lifted the Covid restrictions because 50% capacity restaurants only remit 50% of possible sales taxes. To be sure, the only thing big governments want more than the power to tell their subjects what to do and how to think, is to separate them from their money. Just like when the mob shakes down local businesses for projection money, the grift falls completely apart if the hand of projection becomes too heavy and the business closes.

If 2021 was the year restaurant CFOs learned a new set of financial operating metrics with the applications for PPP, ERC, and RRF, 2022 was the year of waiting for the funds from all those "emergency" programs to trickle in. I kid you not, the application for these programs triggered immediate income tax obligations for the owners even though funds had not been received and in some cases took years to arrive. It was the ultimate "Three Card Monty" game and the government became an expert at palming the Queen of Hearts. Despite the economic manipulation of those two years, Nova Restaurant Group managed to remodel one existing store and open two more. Somehow, though we were deemed the shill, we beat the dealer and emerged with all our existing, plus two new stored intact.

As 2023 arrived, I finally had the breathing room to resume my career prospects started in 2019. Except I and the owners of Nova Restaurant Group were all four years older. Plans that appeared plausible in 2019 no longer seem possible in 2023. For starters, supply and labor shortages drove up construction costs by over 40% and the doubling of interest rates made expansion a far less attractive endeavor. Supply distributions did not only affect buildout costs but commodities costs as well. The restaurant industry, not only burdened with rebuilding after the Covid disruption, was also faced with labor increases and wild commodity fluctuations. In 2023, while all this volatility was going on, I was also staring at the calendar. I was an executive approaching 60 years of age in an industry struggling to find a viable pathway for growth. The last thing I wanted to be was to be in my early sixties and unemployed. Do you know what unemployed businesses executives in their sixties say? "Hello and welcome to Walmart."

Not wanting to be that guy, I set out in 2023 to find an alternative. That quest started with hiring a personal coach to help me work through my job options. At that point, it had been over 20 years since I needed a resume and the rules for finding a job had dramatically changed. I also attended an annual conference called Small Giants. The theme of that conference stemmed from the work of Bo Burlingham and his book by the same name. At that event, I met business leaders from around the globe that were not only running successful businesses, but more importantly, they were deriving purposeful business results. It was in those rainy few days in Detroit last May that I also discovered the Entrepreneurial Operating System called EOS. My fate was sealed, with the help of my coach defining my ideal career path and the knowledge that some companies truly script their purpose and pathway to success, I was on a mission to find and join that type of company. At 58-years-old, I was not ready to "sunset" my career. I was always a growth-oriented entrepreneur, and I wanted another shot to grow a company.

That shot came with America's Best Restaurants. I could not possibly tell their story better than ABR's founder and visionary, Matt Plapp. Tomorrow, I embark on my next business adventure and the writing of the next chapter in my life. With any luck, this new position will give me the inspiration to finish the book I started last year on how to grow businesses.

I am walking away from a comfortable position to a new opportunity. I am taking 45 years of restaurant and financial management experience and “laying it on the line.” I make those career move out of pure excitement and not fear. Fear, I learned when I got sober 16 years ago, is a wasted emotion and unchecked, caused me to make bad decisions. I move forward to this new chapter in my career with confidence that this is the right place and right time to help others. My primary goal, when I wrote , Restaurant Management, the Myth, the Magic, the Math, was to help restaurant professional become successful. At Nova Restaurant Group, I got to practice on ten restaurants and over 800 tremendous team members. At America's Best Restaurants, I will be able to expand those lists to thousands of restaurants and millions of people.

Thank you, readers, for following and supporting me on my journey of discovery. Having an audience for my weekly writing means more to me than you will ever know. Your sharing my work and comments are greatly appreciated.