The High-end Restaurant Group Business - Morgan Weber from Agricole Hospitality - e16

Hey, Michael here. You will now hear some episodes of the Michael Girdley Show that we had branded differently, called Unusual Profits or some such like that. Same show, same person, just me interviewing people and producing content that could be helpful on your journey and mine as well. So with no further ado, here's the episode. Hey, Michael here. Sponsor for today's show is actually a product that I'm a part of called DM Bridge. And what DMBridge is, uh, is a service that we built, uh, to solve the problem that Twitter's direct messaging functionality is a total mess. So we built DMBridge to help you fix that. Um, a lot of the other solutions, uh, do things like requiring you to install a whole nother inbox. We didn't want another inbox, so we created DMBridge. And what it does is it takes all of your Twitter DMs and has them appear inside of your email inbox. So you can reply to them just like it's a regular email. You see them just like it's a regular email. You can search them later like it's one of your regular emails, all just by using DMBridge. So, uh, we're currently live with the product. Uh, would love for you to sign up and become a customer, uh, and check it out. So you can find that at dmbridge.app, uh, and go on there, put in your name, uh, and be either part of the beta or join us as part of the live use of the product. And again, check it out, dmbridge.app. All right, welcome to this week's episode of Unusual Profits. Uh, I am your host, Michael Girdley. I am super excited to be back this week. Uh, for those of you that are new listeners, this is a podcast about niche businesses, uh, the people that work in them and how they make money. And I am the world's number one nerd of people who like niche businesses and love talking about them. So I am super excited to welcome today's guest, who's Morgan Webber out of Houston, who I think is our first guest who has a more varied background than I have, doing everything from farming to California to, to right-of-ways. And it's super cool to dig into the business that they're part of and founded a few years ago. So Morgan, welcome, welcome to the show today. I'm super glad you're here.

Man, thanks, Michael, for having me on. This is— it's always fun to get in and nerd out about stuff like this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I'm so glad you're here. And also, thank you for dealing with all the technical difficulties that we had so far. I'm going to—

it doesn't help that I'm easily the most technologically challenged human that might own a lot of technological devices.

Yeah. Well, so we'll get there. We'll get there. It's going to be great. So y'all's business is called Agricole Hospitality, based out of Houston. Tell me what the business does. What do Yeah, I mean, we're a small independent restaurant group.

We have 6 restaurants in our group. We started the first one 10 years ago, grew very, very organically. We got started, we weren't looking down the barrel of a huge future and developing this kind of restaurant group as it might be. I come to it from a very peculiar stance as most either chefs or bartenders They, and even restaurant owners get into this game because they got into it early. They started cooking in high school or working in restaurants in college. I did none of that. I went to Baylor University in Waco and have a degree in music that I don't really use. In school, my parents thought I was super ADD and what I've realized over the last 15 or 20 years is that I'm not really ADD. I'm super OCD and hyperly focused on subjects that interest me and that I'm passionate about. When I left school, I had no clue what I wanted to do outside of knowing what I didn't want to do, and I didn't want to do anything in the music business. I was not a terribly strong performer. I had a lot of performance anxiety and all that. I just I knew that a life of that was not going to suit me. So I got a job that my dad helped me get acquiring property through eminent domain processes in Houston, and really didn't like that, but still had no clue what the long-term future was going to look like. So I parlayed whatever experience I had in that company to to land a job with the Metropolitan Transit Authority in Houston. They had a massive light rail expansion program going on, and I came on there to manage the real estate acquisition of two of their light rail expansion lines. It was very interesting to me. I was surrounded by experts in that particular field, whether it was the appraisal process, legal process, and it was just around— I was immersed in high quality experts that were experts in what they did. And that was really impressive to me, to find people that could just own a subject, whatever that was. And that, even though I didn't really care about the subject matter, it appealed to the way my brain works. So I did that for a few years. Got our project with Metro at that point was very, very fragile. The city of Houston did not want it, the landowners didn't want it, and it was Metro just trying to push push this down everybody's throat. So the project ended up getting paused and I found myself truly without a job. So at the same time, I was real— I've always— my family has always been a family of really great cooks. My grandmother tended a massive vegetable garden that my mom grew up with, and she did that until she basically too old to not. She died at like 90. 4 years old. So she did it a very, very long time. But she possessed a skill set, my grandmother did, that we have kind of lost. It's kind of— it's not something that the generation after her and then my generation has really picked the ball up on. And the general idea is that to be completely like a self-sustaining family— they grew— they lived out in the country, and she possessed this crazy amazing skill set that you could plant a massive garden. You would do succession plantings of seeds. So if you were going to plant corn for the summer, you wouldn't plant all of those corn seeds at the same time. You would space them out over the course of weeks so that all of the crop didn't just come together at the same time and you had an overabundance. So a family that preserved vegetables, pickled things, It was a really cool environment to, to grow up around. So I had that kind of intrinsically built into my system. And when I got into college, I started really getting into food. I grew up not a, not a very good eater. I was a pretty picky eater, um, but really got like— all that background just got wiped away. And I was just like, I want to try everything, I want to eat everything, I want to taste everything. And then that inherently led to an interest in in booze and how booze is made. And this was the mid-2000s and there wasn't like a, everybody was still making terrible drinks in bars with sweet and sour and bad ingredients. And I was like, "Man, there's gotta be something more to this." And to that whole, the history of why we have cocktails. I don't even know what pushed me down that road in the first place, but I was interested in it. Started doing research, started finding old cocktail books that were written in the late 1800s, kind of up until Prohibition, which is that golden age of the American cocktail. And it was just a historic world that blew my mind. And met a guy in Houston, just friend of a friend that was bartending at a restaurant. Let me back up a little bit. There were no restaurants in Houston at this point. That gave any sort of care about good cocktails in their, in their bars or their— even the good restaurants. They— it's like you'd order an Old Fashioned and it tasted good, and you'd order it a second time and it would be complete— a completely different drink. No one is putting any sort of attention to detail in, in drinks in Houston. So, uh, met this guy and we became buddies, and, uh, he was working as a bartender in a restaurant. He was doing drinks like this, but the restaurant was not supporting him at all.

Yeah.

And we— he ended up moving to a new place. It was this like neo-icehouse barbecue joint. And he was doing these amazingly detail-oriented cocktails there. And in Texas, you know, if you— in the mid-2000s, if you opened a barbecue joint that wasn't exactly like every other barbecue joint in Texas, you immediately put a target on your back because everybody's got an opinion. right? And it's like burgers, it's like, or pizzas. This is the best pizza, this is the best pizza. It's like, well, you know, you just open yourself up for criticism. And the barbecue, the Neo Ice House barbecue joint definitely received a fair amount of criticism, but the bar was killing it, was doing like 80% of the gross sales. So in a really weird environment, so we said, why don't we try and bar that's just a bar that just focuses on stuff like this. We're 26, 27 years old, had really no business doing something like this on our own, but we cobbled together $10,000 and $15,000 at a time until we had a quarter of a million bucks. We placed a down payment on a lease for a space in the Montrose area. We had no money to hire a general contractor, so we went in and we, like the day after we signed the lease, we started swinging hammers and did as much of that project with our own hands, me and my buddy and two other guys, as we possibly could. And we opened, there was a ton of anticipation, and when we opened, it was like nothing that we had ever seen or anticipated or ever expected. The bar was called Hanble. Barn Refuge is still around. It's been nominated for James Beard Award after James Beard Award. It's like the Susan Lucci of James Beard Awards. It's always there and it's always on the list, but it's never won. But it was an amazing learning experience. We paid our investors back in 9 months. I think the following quarter, I got a distribution check for more than I had made the previous year working at Metro. At that point, I was officially done. I'm like, I love this stuff. I love the restaurants. I love the grind of it. What I didn't love was we realized very quickly that we didn't have a lot of experience. We didn't even know each other, my business partners and I, and we realized that we were much better friends than we were business partners. So I peeled off, sold my quarter to the other 3 guys, And, uh, basically took that money and reinvested it in our family's ranch in South Texas. I grew up in a ranching family. Um, my grandfather, who was the primary caretaker of all that, passed away in the mid-1980s. And like a lot of multi-generational family ranchers, and so we turned it into a, like, basically just our deer hunting place in the fall and winter. And leased the land out to another rancher who just wanted the grass for his cattle. So we hadn't really done anything on our property since the mid-'80s to speak of. And through opening Anvil, the bar, I had met every great chef and restaurateur in Houston, and they were all asking for the same things. Omnivore's Dilemma and Food Inc. had just come out, and immediately gave most of the nation that was interested in this sort of thing a bunch of anxiety about like the provenance of their food and where it came from and what was in it, whether it was chock-full of antibiotics or, uh, you know, on the grain side, if it was a highly genetically modified corn or wheat variety. And, and people were just asking questions like, man, all the restaurateurs wanted high-quality, locally raised meat protein. So we— I reinvested the money that I made off of the Anvil deal into our family place, and we started raising pigs and sheep and chickens. And we were like, you know, I can't just raise sheep, lamb, and pork— and, or sorry, lamb, pork, and chicken without going all the way intense on the details of that. So we helped import a breed of pig from Austria to the Deep South for the first time ever. This is a pig variety that started in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the 1830s. It's called a Mangalitsa pig. They're wild. They look like they have poodle hair and they are incredibly fat. And so charcuterie, cured meat, doing that in restaurants was a massive thing in the mid to late 2000s, early 2010s. And, uh, I was like, man, we're gonna find the best pig with the best fat quality, and we're gonna figure out what to feed them to get the best quality of, uh, the best consistency of fat possible. And, and that led me down a crazy road to, you know, 2 years later I had, you know, about 8 different breeds of pigs that we were experimenting with, and rare breeds, like endangered breeds, and we're crossbreeding them. And we're— I mean, it's When I go down a rabbit hole, it's a deep one. Over the course of time, I'm driving around all over the state figuring out where to get these pigs processed, where to get them butchered, how to get them butchered well. Most of Texas is driven by rural processors that do a boatload of deer every deer season. Then outside of that, it's just a cow here or a cow there or a pig here or a pig there. I'm selling to the best restaurants in the state. I was like, the butchering has to be high quality. You can't mess it up because they'll just reject it, and then I just am sitting on product I can't sell. So about that time, one of my best customers was a chef in Houston that was really kind of ready to leave the restaurant. He was making beautiful food with our animals. And one day I was delivering a pig to him, in downtown Houston, and I was like, hey, you know, I've been complaining and such about not being able to find people to make products, uh, that I can sell to restaurants from our, from our animals in a really high-quality way. Would you ever consider, like, just maybe we open a butcher shop and we do it all ourselves? There's not a good butcher shop in Houston, and, uh, I think it's the right time to do something like that. It's like Yeah, I'll do that. It sounds fun. I'm kind of ready to get out of the restaurant, the actual grind of dinner service every night. So we opened Revival Market in 2011 in the Heights, and it was incredible. It was Anvil all over again. It was as busy as it could possibly be. We were making a boatload of mistakes just because we— and agricole has never been a company to learn from the mistakes of dialing in a previous concept. Like, we've never repeated a concept, so it's always like we just start from scratch every time. And, uh, so there's always a learning curve when we do something new, but this one was a pretty big learning curve. And we did— the, the gross sales were insane, but we were not making any money, and we just couldn't figure out why. Well, being super We were super green and we didn't have good accounting. We didn't have good bookkeeping. We didn't really know what a P&L was, or much less how to read one if they gave it to us. And it was just like a survival mode as we grew. And it paid our bills and we paid our investors back, but there was really no money left over at the end of the day. I'm like, how are we doing $2.5 million worth of business in this one space? We're literally plus or minus 1% every month on the profit. Because we also get bored, I was driving to the bank one day and right down the street from Revival Market, there was a space had come available to lease and I called them, got the number and it was crazy cheap for the Heights. It was like $12 a square foot. Which just even then wasn't a thing. And I talked to my partner Ryan, and he's Italian, and he had always wanted to open kind of a casual neighborhood pizza pasta joint. And so we pulled the trigger on that and opened Cultivare. And literally every restaurant that we've opened after that has grown that way. It was just like see an opportunity, see a hole in the market, and try to fill it, but while also staying really sensitive to what kinds of things are going on all over the world with restaurant trends and being on the front end of that. But it's been a wild ride and it's not for everybody, but it's been very satisfying for the last 10 years. And we've learned just so, so, so much.

Yeah. Super interesting.

That's the short story. Yeah.

That's great. So just trying to think about, so just to paint a picture around what the business is today. You guys have 6 locations, 6 different concepts that are all running, and they are— they all appear to be— the common theme, they're, they're all different concepts in terms of the food. So one's Italian, and then there's Americana and different stuff. But the common theme is just this, like, different caliber of food and preparation that's happening, right? You're— is that, is that the thread of what Agricole's about? It is.

And Agricole is a name— is a French name derived from agriculture. I feel like when we started Revival Market, we firmly rooted ourselves and our ethos deeply in believing in sustainable agriculture and realizing that there are problems with the commodity food industry in America. And we wanted to Whenever it was reasonably possible, support farmers that were not just local to Houston, but farmers who were doing a really good job in their animal husbandry and in what they're feeding their animals. And that rooted the whole company. So whether it's our whiskey beer taco joint or Revival Market or the Italian place or our and a Modern Texas, uh, place in East Downtown. It's all rooted in, um, supporting people that we know are doing a great job and, and, and giving us product that we can stand behind with our customers.

And then does that translate into a better ability for you to charge higher prices and compete? I mean, I'm going to say the F word for Tita.

Like, I mean, I think so. It's, you know, uh, when you, when you started the podcast with, with the intro, you were talking about niche things and like, I don't, uh, niche businesses. And, you know, I've never really thought of this as a niche business because it's pretty easy to open a restaurant. Yeah, that's the easy part. It's like opening and figuring it out and make— turning a profit and staying open is, is more difficult. And I think it's, um It's easy for somebody like Tillman to just bang out restaurant after restaurant after restaurant because the food— and I know Tillman, I've never told him this to his face, but, uh, you actually know him?

I'm sorry, yeah, I don't know.

He comes into— he comes into our restaurants all the time.

Oh yeah, okay, super cool. All right, continue.

Yeah, but it's the food, and I don't think he would disagree with this, the food is pretty lazy. Yeah, you know, it's— they have, they have figured out the formula that works for Landry's, and, and it works. It's—

yeah, it—

a lot of the scratch-made nature of food is taken out in their restaurants because it's, uh, it's easier to purchase from a bigger company that does a lot of the early work for you. And, uh, when you open restaurants in the types of neighborhoods that a lot of the bread and butter of his restaurants exist in, you just can't charge a lot for food. Yeah, um, the clientele is not our clientele. I mean, we both have our play— both— all 6 of our places, we're in East Downtown Houston and in the Houston Heights. They're both affluent neighborhoods, and our clientele is, is such, and they're not— they're able to pay for higher quality food. And I think this is one of the biggest problems with the overall food perspective in America. It's like the people that need the highest quality food typically can't afford it. So, uh, and there's a— we're not— we're definitely not going to solve that problem on this podcast today, but, uh, you know, we are fortunate to be able to work with the best product. And another part of our, uh, cooking ethos is just to buy the best ingredients and cook them well and not not get in front of them, you know, kind of like we're going to minimally process all this food, we're going to make it delicious, but we're going to get out of the way, right, of the ingredient. Uh, we're not going to make some crazy cooking method cover up the, uh, the fantastic product that's coming in.

So yeah, no, I hear you. Well, so does, like, compared, let's say, as a percentage of sales, like a typical, like Okay, well, I'll stop picking on Fertitta because he comes to your place, but let's say, okay, Olive Garden's cost of food, including spoilage and theft and all that stuff versus y'all's as a percentage. And I don't even know what the industry averages are for restaurants, but let's say it's 30%. Are yours higher or yours lower than theirs? Or does it end up just evening out?

You know, we toe the line at 30%, and that's gonna be a blended cost of good average. Sometimes our food costs are higher, but we sell— we offset it with our alcohol costs, our food, our liquor, beer, and wine. Yeah, across the board, because we can, we can get a better cost of goods, uh, percentage on those. And if we're selling 40%, uh, alcohol at a restaurant, you know, you can, you can afford to run with a little bit higher food cost as long as that blended average comes back down to about 30%. Um, we really like it at like 27 Because that gives us a little bit of margin for error. But yeah, we peg 27%, 28% across the board.

It's what— this is fascinating because I don't know if I shared this with you, but we started a drive-through coffee shop chain last year. Um, so kind of a Dutch Brothers style, the opposite of what— if Tillman was going to start a coffee shop chain, this is what it would be. So it's, it's the anti-niche. But, uh, it's very interesting that the targets that that business and the CEO CEO of it have set are very similar to the numbers you're putting out. It's like, okay, like COGS should be 25 to 30% if we're doing a great job. It's 25%. Uh, and then we'll prob— we're gonna talk about labor in a minute. I bet it's the same.

Yeah.

So it's your best thing. Um, cool. So I mean, as you think about designing, designing this restaurant group concept, right? So we talked about the idea of like a Fertitta or a Darden's just stamping it out over and over again and reaching the mass market. I mean, y'all have built a group out of 6 different concepts. Every single one of them is unique. So there's upsides to that, which is you can appeal to a lot of tastes, but the downsides and operational efficiencies seem significant. Like, how did you guys end up with that idea? Or was it just like, hey, let's do this other thing that seems cool 'cause you're shiny object people?

Yeah, I wish we could say, no, we planned it this way. But it was truly not planned and it was 100% organic. Now that we have 6 restaurants, we've been able to realize some efficiencies with just the fact that we buy so much chicken, we buy so much pork, we buy— I mean, when we opened Cultivari, we should have, if this could have been a thing, like if Parmesan cheese was IPO'd and you could buy stock in it, We should have done that then because we go through a shocking amount of parm at Cultivare, just wheel upon wheel every week of parm. But yeah, we've been able to realize some buying efficiencies with being able to just spread stuff out that one restaurant can't do. We just buy in such quantity. Revival Market now acts as a commissary for the other restaurants. So for our pepperoni pizza at both pizza places, Cultivar included, we make all that at Revival Market, and it helps us prop up that business, but also allows us super tight control on the type of product that we would buy. Our idea is that if we can make something better than we can buy it, or if a product doesn't exist that we want to use, we'll make that in-house. But if we— we're not going to make Parmesan cheese.

Got it. That makes sense. Okay. So, and then I see how you got there. And then also listening to you talk and what your personality is, it totally makes sense. You guys love developing these new concepts and bringing them to market.

Yeah. We like just the exploration. And I think it's— we've thought for years that if we were going to do multiple locations of any of our concepts, Cultivare, and 8 Row Flint make the most sense. But like, that immediately, like, just thinking about it, I get bored.

Yeah.

So we've always kind of wanted to just explore new things. Now we learn things from one to the next, that, yeah, that concepts that we do. Okay. But, uh, just to do 15 cultivars just sounds like a— it's just not what I'm good at.

I, I hear you. Well, and it's also something, you know, I've seen watching restaurant tours around here is like, there's some of them that are terrible chefs, like the food is mediocre at best, but man, from an operations marketing concept standpoint, like they kill it. And then I see other folks that are terrible operators, like terrible, and but food-wise killing it, concept-wise killing it. And like, it's cool that it seems like you guys— well, I, I know of two, two, two businesses like yours, yours and Union Square Hospitality, like those are two I know, but like, I mean, I'll totally, uh I'll take that compliment. Yeah.

I feel like Danny Meyer, uh, is certainly on a different level.

Well, he— I read his book earlier this year when we got into the coffee business because I was like, well, like, I need to know how to make people happy. This guy seems to know what he's doing. So I read the book, but his story of how he organically grew to have this multi-concept thing, uh, even down to Shake Shack, was very akin to what what you guys did.

For sure. Yeah. We didn't invest in ourselves early enough. I truly, for the first 6 years, we had, like I touched on earlier, terrible accounting and terrible bookkeeping, and just survived in spite of it. The best thing we've ever done as a company was hire a really amazing CFO. We would get, when we had, we started with really bad accounting and then we just got bad accounting and then we got okay accounting.

Wait, I will tell you, there's a worse accounting than all of those. It is dishonest accounting. That's worse than all of those. So just so you know, you didn't have the worst possible one. It's the accountant that steals from you. Okay, keep going.

Yeah, no, we did avoid that. And when we had okay accounting, we were seeing a P&L maybe once a quarter. That's just not fast enough. You can't make decisions based on that. So when we hired a true CFO, it took us about a full year to just organize what we're doing. Interesting. And just to get an accurate picture because we'd never had one. So after he got us organized, we now get an extremely accurate P&L 10 days after the month closes, and we have about a 2.5, 3-hour meeting as partners and him. And just go over the whole thing. It's so amazing how fast liquor costs can fly out from under you or wine cost of goods or food costs can fly out from under you, labor. That gives us the tools and the power to then go straight back to the general manager, straight back to the chef of each place to say, "Something's weird here and it might be just an invoice that got labeled incorrectly." that put all the limes that were ordered in the food cost instead of in the alcohol cost, because we use a lot of limes in the same margaritas. So it's not fair for those limes to get pushed into the food cost category. So they can then go back and look at their invoices and say, you know what, they did— that's what happened, and here's where it is. Like, okay, so now everything is normal, it just got allocated improperly. But, uh, It is single-handed. I would do it over and over again. And there's almost an infinite amount of money that our CFO should make to keep us. It's the best investment we've ever done.

Yeah. That's great. Well, it sounds like at least describing you and your partner, Ryan, you guys are very much like, I don't mean this in a bad way, but you're technicians, you're artists in your space and you love your space.

Well, and we're pragmatic and we're not super emotionally attached to any one idea. We can have an idea, and I think having 6 different, wholly different restaurant concepts allows us to explore ideas and just throw one out, see if it works, and if it doesn't work, back away like it never happened and go back.

I love it. Cool. So I'd love to switch gears a little bit. How is the business organized? So you've talked about the CFO, he's clearly on the headquarters staff. How do you guys go about organizing and putting together all the business?

So on the upper management side of things, we have a CFO, we have a director of operations, we have a culinary director who is also a partner, and then I do all the beverage programs and my partner handles just directions on food and making sure each chef at each restaurant is making the kind of decisions we want them to make with the food program and, uh, making sure that the food is ultra consistent coming out of the kitchen. We need it to be the same every time.

Every time.

So on a weekly basis, uh, CFO, culinary director Ryan, me, director of operations have Zoom meetings to just catch up on what happened the week before, make sure everybody's on the same page. And aware.

Yeah. And then so, you know, there's— you mentioned the three of you own the business together at this point, right? So what you said, there's you two, Ryan, Brian, and you.

Is that, is that accurate? No. Ryan, me, and Vincent, who is our culinary director.

Vincent Vincent. Oh, he's on the website. There you go. Yeah. Good looking guy. Okay, so the three of you guys are co-owners. So how is that organized? Are you guys just equal partners? Is one of you the CEO and majority owner? How have you guys structured that?

Ryan and I, we're 50/50 partners in Eight Row, Revival, and Cultivaré. And when we decided to do the projects in East Downtown, Vincent had been our culinary director for years, and he started as a cook at Revival Market 10 years ago.

Okay.

And just flew through the ranks because he's a hyper-intelligent human and a lot of fun to be around and has great ideas. When we opened East Downtown, we made him a full equal partner in those concepts.

Okay, so each— so I understand there is the headquarters concept, which is its own thing, and then each individual restaurant is its own thing. And some of those are 50/50, you two guys at this point. And I know early on it sounds like you took some investors for some early stuff, but we'll come back to that. And then some of the other restaurants have, you know, Vincent is a third in one, in one of those, for example.

Okay.

And then each restaurant has individual P&Ls and then headquarters charges? How does that work? Does headquarters charge back?

Yeah, so, so we— a couple years ago we reorganized and formed Agricole Hospitality Management Company.

Okay.

So all of our management teams, even at the restaurants— what, uh, and when I say management, chef, sous chefs, general manager, assistant managers— and then our kind of corporate team all are employed by the management company. Okay. And then each individual shop employs its own servers, line cooks, bus staff, barbacks, etc. So the management company houses all of our managers.

And so like the, the GM is on HQ's payroll then.

And then we just charge, we, we bill each individual restaurant for their— it's just as a pass-through cost. Got it.

So, and is each individual restaurant its own LLC or— okay. And so that limits liability flowing up to the parent company in theory. How do you, how do you keep one restaurant— you know, restaurants go underwater all the time, maybe none of yours, but how do you keep one restaurant from bringing down the whole ship? Or is that just not a worry? Based on how good you guys are?

We've historically not been super good at that.

Okay.

Uh, it'll also help to understand the investment structure. We started with two primary investors, and one of those investors bought the other out, uh, a few years ago, and he actually came on as a, uh, a non-operating partner when we started opening more. So, uh, that's where the cash to open the restaurants comes from. And when we do distributions, he just gets a quarterly distribution based on his percentage of ownership in the company, just like I get a quarterly distribution based on percentage ownership of the company.

And by company, you mean individual restaurants, or you mean the management company?

Everything except the management company.

So if this is a fund with operating companies, you have the management company as your management company, and the outside The money person, it's a he or she? He. He, okay, good. So he doesn't own anything in the management company. You guys do that. And then when you guys want to open up a new restaurant, you go to him and say, okay, here's our business plan.

Here's the idea.

Here's the idea. We need $2 million. And which maybe that's high for what it takes to open up a restaurant these days and get to dollar one. But you go to him and you ask for that. And then he, then what happens?

So he's either in or he's out. He's always been in so far.

Okay.

So, uh, we haven't had to navigate the out, but, um, then we will, we'll start the, the architectural design and permitting and really dialing in our, uh, dialing in the concept. Dialing in the concept is what happens first because that's going to drive design, that's going to drive everything.

Yeah. Well, and love to dig into that. How, before, before we go to that, how does the How does the structure work with the investor? How does he get paid? Is there a rev split or how's that work?

So when we have quarterly profit distributions, he owns a percentage of the whole company just like we do. And the distributions just get split based on his percentage of ownership. So if we have $100,000, $200,000, whatever it is to distribute over the course of a quarter, he just gets his slice of that.

Got it. And is there like a a preferred— like, I've heard of structures with restaurant investments where it's like, you know, 70/30 in favor of the investors till they get their money back, and then 50/50 after that. Do you guys have a similar scheme, or—

We started that way, we started that way, and we're paying them back, uh, in an extremely reasonable amount of time. So after 8 Row Flint, we, uh, we did a deal where it's just you get paid when distributions happen. He's been happy with that.

Yeah. And so have you guys done that?

There's no preferred return.

No preferred return at this point. And you think that's— is that because you're just proven operators at this point?

Yeah. Yeah. Got it.

Okay.

Most restaurant concepts will do some sort of preferred return and then a waterfall over the course of, you know, they get their money put back in a hopefully a really reasonable amount of time, plus, you know, whatever interest initial payback is agreed upon. And then a lot of restaurants will then pay it back again, but instead of being like 80% profits back to satisfy that initial capital contribution, it'll go to like 50/50 or until it's paid back again, and then it'll flip the other way. A lot of my colleagues have operated that way.

Have operated that way. So just to put some numbers to those concepts, so the preferred return might be 10%, 12%, and that can accrue or pretty normal. So it's pretty normal. And then in terms of the, say, like the folks— you're not them, but say the folks that are doing the splits, like, is it 70/30, 60/40 is typical, and then 50/50 after that? Or what do you see most in the market?

Like when we did Anvil, it was 90/10 going back to the investors.

Okay.

And then it went to 60/40, and then I think it went to 80/20 where we were getting 80 percent back and they would just have 20% for perpetuity.

Got it. And so that, like, it sounds like it kind of brackets their returns, right? Like, if things go really, really well, you can do well, but gives them a chance to have a really good chance to get their money back.

Exactly.

What— for the folks that, that did that early on, or this guy, what is typically the timeline that the payback happens?

You know, we really like it to happen in about 2 years.

2 years.

Okay.

And what is the order of magnitude cost to open a restaurant these days of similar kind of concepts? 2 million? 2 million, a wrong guess, or is that high?

Well, it's— that's higher than anything we've done outside of the concepts in East Downtown. You know, we spent $700,000 on Revival Market, we spent $600,000 on Cultivare, and we spent about $550,000 on 8 Row Flint.

Okay.

Uh, but we're scrappy, like We're hunting— certain used equipment is better than other used equipment. Like, I never want to buy a used walk-in cooler, but I will totally buy a used undercounter refrigerator depending on what kind of shape it looks like it's in.

Yeah, but, uh, why is that, by the way? What's so bad about used walk-in coolers, man?

There's just always so much moisture in a walk-in cooler. Yeah, especially in Houston, it's humid all the time. And no matter how well sealed you think that walk-in cooler is, moisture still happens. And, uh, electrical condensers and refrigeration equipment just do not like to be in a moist environment, so it, it eats the shelf life on, on those, on those, those types of pieces of equipment.

Got it.

Yeah, so, you know, ice bins, certain brands of ovens will feel very comfortable about purchasing used. And I think that because my wife and I do all the design, interior design for the restaurants as well, and you know, you can go buy— you can go find a guy who's going to build a custom banquette and it's going to look super sick, it's going to be awesome, but what's the function of that banquette? Like, a custom banquette that's got any size to it might be $20,000. Or I could go find really amazing chairs at some antique show that are well-built and they might be metal and they're $80 apiece. So at the end of the day, you want a butt in a seat, right? Because that butt in a seat is going to be eating and paying money. It doesn't really matter how much the seat costs if it fits the vibe. That you're trying to create. So we try to spend money where it's important and really be careful for the, what would you call them, the sexy projects. Yeah. No, I hear you.

Well, and you're welcome to duck this question or tell me it's a terrible question, but what sort of returns have the folks that have invested with you gotten? Have you guys done that math?

We haven't really done that math and I'm not trying to duck that question. It's so funny because I'm like, "Okay, tell me how you made money." And you're like, "Let me tell you how I get some awesome chairs really cheap." It's like, "Fuck." I mean, what I can say is for the last 3 years or so, pandemic not included because that was just such a weird year, we net 18 to 20% over the course of the year on any of our projects. So if it's a $1.2 million kind of gross sales place, it could be lower because a lot of times just that top line gross sales helps bring up the overall— it's like, it's not the right metaphor, but like rising tides, you know, lift all ships.

It's like, you're saying about because you have high fixed cost The more your sales grow, the more your incremental— more drops to the bottom line increasingly.

Correct.

Got it.

So, you know, if 8Row does $3 million a year, it almost monthly pegs 18 to 20% net. Yeah. Cultivar is the same way.

So, so what is the— and maybe I'm interrupting your point, but what is the other? So if I take— if $1 million comes in in a year, let's say from a restaurant concept, we already talked about it's expense-wise, 25 to 30% goes to food and spoilage. You're going to try 18 to 20% net free cash flow margin. So that's close to 50%. Where does the rest of everything go? Great question.

So because we have a blend of salaries and hourly labor sections of our businesses. Uh, we try to peg 20% or lower on our lease.

Okay.

And that gives us about 10% of our, of our top line sales to, uh, dedicate to salaries. And then, and then about 20, so blended 30% on the labor.

Okay.

28 to 30% on the labor is what we try to hit. And then, uh, 20% on kind of our fixed costs.

So rent and repairs and all that kind of stuff, negative 100%. Okay, that totally makes sense. So is that high, 18 to 20%, or is that low for, for especially concepts like for restaurants?

You know, I've got a buddy who's got a chain of Mexican food restaurants in Houston, and they consistently peg 25 to 27% net on a monthly basis. And I think—

and that's free cash flow Yeah, you start with a dollar, you end up with $1.27, that kind of— okay, perfect.

And so, you know, I've spent a lot of— because when he told me that, we were at a Sporting Clays charity event, and my jaw dropped because it was like, dude, we worked so hard to get 18 to 20% out of these things. And, uh, he's like, oh yeah, we wouldn't even mess with that. Um, he's like, I wouldn't get out of bed for that. So I think that goes back to our earlier talking point discussion of the quality of food we choose to bring in as product. We spend more on meat protein than anything because we buy really high quality meat protein and we're not a Mexican food restaurant. Yeah. So a lot of those are higher cost of goods like steaks or fish protein. It's also highly perishable. So, uh, the fish protein, not the steaks. And it's just the cost of goods is higher. It's just a different style of restaurant, you know. I think you can really do that when, uh, you can get that 25-27% if you're running tight. But if you're also, you know, you're selling tortillas and beans and rice and salsa, yeah, it's just easier to scratch more out of it.

I mean, yeah, I listened to our coffee CEO and the general manager today just like the machinations they had gone through to try to figure out how to save $250 a month on ice was just like, puh. I was like, this is great. I am so glad I'm not being asked to do this project because this would be terrible. Yeah.

I mean, we sweat paper goods. Paper goods kill us. We started charging for to-go ware about 2 years ago thinking we were going to get all this pushback. But we would sit there and look at the P&L every month. We're like, man, we spend so much money on to-go ware. And, you know, we— it's another ethos thing too. It's like, sure, we could buy cheaper styrofoam to-go ware. Yeah, but we as a company, it just doesn't line up with our ethos and our branding. I talk just can't get out here. Um, so, uh, yeah, there are ways we could, we could scratch more profit out of it. It's just like that line that we're unwilling to cross.

Yeah, no, totally dig it. Yeah, I mean, and go back to the capitalization stuff, like, it sounds like the end state is after people get back a certain amount of return, you and your partner own 80% of the business, 70% of the thing, and they get a coupon forever. And I mean, it just seems like a have your cake and eat it too situation for you where the capital—

we're in a very unique circumstance, and I realize that, like, where our financial partner is willing to not take a preferred return, it's like that's dream team situation for us.

Is this funny? And now you can duck this one too, but sometimes you see people that invest in passion projects like this and they're not in it for the return. I mean, is the person that you're partnering with, are they all about the return or are they about like, hey, like I'm getting other kind of return on investment here besides that?

He's very diverse in his personal portfolios. So he's not super on our back the whole time, but he gets the P&Ls every month too. And you better believe if something's off, he'll pick up the phone.

You get a phone call?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting. I watched a group here locally in San Antonio back, a niche restaurant chain as well that came along. I never really heard what happened to it, but I think people got tired of worrying about some of that stuff. Anywho, super interesting. But yeah, so it seems like a cake-eating-eater too thing where somebody else is taking all the downside risk, you're putting in sweat equity, and then the better you do for them, the more you own long-term. So you look up and without putting a lot of personal risk on the line, you're owning half or more of, of all these restaurants.

Like, that's pretty awesome. That makes it, that makes it extremely motivating for us to run a tight ship.

Yeah.

Um, you know, it took us, like I said, years to get to the point where we were content. And it's still a daily grind, like, just to make sure that we're on top of it, because the second you take your eyeballs off of it, it can go sideways quickly. So it's motivating to say, okay, we've got concepts that are busy. If for as many things as we've done the wrong way to begin with, one of the things that I think we've always been super in tune with is, uh, giving people what they want when they don't necessarily even know they want it, right? And then creating a hospitality feel. All of our You know, we have an amazing amount of regular customers that come in weekly, sometimes several times a week. And when you're in a city as big as Houston, you've got a ton of options. And so it's not just about producing good food, it's about, uh, making people feel like this is their third place. You know, you got work and you got home, and then you got your third place that you feel really good going to. Yeah, so I dig it. Yeah. So we spend a lot of time on culture.

Yeah. Well, so does that— you know, usually people spend a lot of time on culture because that's got a lot of benefits, right? From a customer standpoint, you like it, but also makes the employees much more likely to stick around. Are you guys— where are you in terms of kind of the benchmarks for turnover?

Our, our upper management really doesn't change much. Like, we've had people with us for Uh, some of them since Revival Market opened 10 years ago, and some that have just come on board when it's just time. Sometimes with employees, even amazing employees, you know, they, they just kind of run their course, you know. We've had— we had— I'm thinking about one specific manager at Cultivare about midway through Cultivare's lifespan so far. She was incredible. She's one of the best employees, uh, that has ever walked through that door. And we would've loved for her to be with us for the life of the whole restaurant group, but we knew that she was going to go open her own place eventually. And at that point, we weren't able to— we weren't in a position to help her open a place that we could also be involved in. We do some of that now, but it was just time for her to go spread her own wings and So we've had a little bit of that. And then inevitably, sometimes just people have to relocate to different cities for family reasons or whatever, but we don't see a lot of turnover in our upper management. We bonus them out also based on profits quarterly, and I think in and above their expected annual salary. That's a nice thing. We give a lot of PTO. And post-pandemic, we're in a totally new world of employment situations. We— there are certain shifts in our East Downtown project. We've been wanting to open brunch back after the pandemic for 6 months, and we can't find staff to do that, so we're not open for brunch yet.

Wow.

I read a Wall Street Journal article a few weeks ago that estimated that 30% of the restaurant industry left the restaurant industry permanently during the pandemic.

Yeah.

And I mean, I don't know of a restaurateur anywhere that is not having an absolute beating hiring staff.

Yeah, it's fascinating to watch how many places are operating, if at all, below capacity, just because they can't hire folks. So all the executive management of the restaurants, they have bonus plans tied to the P&L of the restaurant? Is that how you guys do it? So you carve out a percentage of the profits and say, okay, we're going to build a profit pool That'll be split amongst these folks.

Yeah, well, we create a budget at the beginning of the year. We share that budget. If your food cost is under this, if your booze cost is under this, if the overall, uh, COGS and labor are under these percentages, that is going to ensure us that we see— we realize a certain percentage of net profits every year, and they're bonus a percentage of those. And we do that pretty much clearly.

Yeah, totally dig it. Well, yeah, so I see how that aligns. So then what happens if, say, one of the restaurants starts operating in the red, which may have happened last year? My condolences for being in the— that you were in the restaurant business last year. So is there, given they're separate with separate capitalization structures, like what happens there? Do you guys have to come out of your own pocket personally? You go back to the investor?

No, uh, we went— last year is a perfect example, uh, because we did more robbing of Peter to pay Paul last year than has ever happened. We had a significant investment in a restaurant that had only been open— or so just to back up, our East Downtown Houston restaurants are 3 restaurants under one roof that share a centralized kitchen.

Okay.

For efficiency reasons. And that trio had only been open for about a year before the pandemic hit, and it was going very well entering into 2020. And then when we shut down in March, it just became, you know, crazy. And that, that is a very— those restaurants are not in an established neighborhood like our Heights restaurants are. So the neighborhood doesn't operate like a neighborhood. It's a place that people go as a destination to eat and drink. And without the ability to to have as much fun as you wanted to last year, those suffered dramatically. So we made— because we only have one financial partner, we made the decision collectively that whatever profits, uh, are coming out of the Heights restaurants, we can use those to float East Downtown until it gets back.

Got it. Well, so that's— that was an obvious upside of having a single financial partner. There's the obvious downside which is you're not building relationships with other potential financial partners in the future. So I assume that's something you guys have premeditated and maybe that ties in. Yeah, and— Go ahead.

Well, I was just gonna say that kind of goes into, 'cause a lot of people are like, "Well, what are y'all gonna do next?" It's like, man, the restaurant industry has changed so much over the last 10 years. I feel like what we've got is really good. And I don't, I have other, ambitions in life outside of the restaurants, just the pathways that have been opened because of the restaurants, but doing more restaurants in a metropolitan city with a massive amount of choices of other restaurants that people can go to, it's— even before the pandemic, it's getting harder and harder and harder to open unique things that people are interested in that push the envelope that can also be profitable. So we have, my partners and I have pretty much collectively decided that unless something that we are not expecting comes across the table, we're pretty much done in Houston.

Okay. Well, you know, all the cool kids are going to San Antonio. I don't know if you're aware of that. Pinkerton's just opened up here. Oh, I know.

Well, and my wife and I live in the Hill Country in Lakey. Tech full-time now. So we're back in Houston pretty much one week a month, and then we're opening a distillery in Marfa this month as well. So Lakey's halfway. So we're a week in Marfa, a week in Houston, and then the balance of the month we're out there. And we do everything via Zoom for our management calls now, which is everybody loves. And we would've never explored that. Pre-pandemic. It just— it worked.

Yeah, so super cool. Well, yeah, and then I'll definitely be interested to follow along and maybe interview in the future about being in the distillery business. Like, I've got friends that have done it and done well, and I've got friends that have not so good.

For sure.

So that's for real, for real.

Same thing as the restaurant business.

Oh yeah, I mean, the— I've, I've rarely been pitched restaurant concepts and stuff to put money into, but The one time I was pitched, they were trying to raise like $12,000 to start a restaurant. I'm pretty sure the concept that they have now produces that much a month. I was just like, "Ah, man, such a doofus." Sorry, it is what it is. I was curious about just the portfolio aspect. This is a note I took down, the portfolio aspect of having it. You know, you, you see these, you know, the 80/20 Pareto principle and stuff like that shows up in a— are you familiar with that?

I'm not.

Okay, I'm a simple—

I'm a simpleton, man. I'm a music major from Baylor.

Oh, okay. Well, I'm a computer science guy who reads a lot of business books, so that's what I do. Um, okay, so Pareto is P-A-R-E-T-O, and so it is— he was a monk back in the 17th, 18th century, who went and discovered that in nature, over and over again, distributions would happen on an 80/20 basis. So for example, if you have 100 locations or 100 customers, 20% of them are going to be 80% of your profits. Uh, if you have a portfolio of investments that are all high risk, 20% of them are going to give you 80% of the returns. He would see that over and over again, and it would translate to nature as well. 20% of the crops in the US types produce 80% of the calories, and so it ends up that way. So when people do portfolios and stuff like that or have a business like yours, oftentimes you see an uneven distribution that sometimes mimics that or something different. So that was my question. How does the distribution of impact differ across the portfolio, or is it pretty flat?

I think it's an excellent question. 8 Row Flint and Cultivare are our highest earners. The East Downtown projects pre-pandemic were on track to match that.

Wow.

And then the Butcher Shop is the lowest earner. So I don't know what that ratio looks like, but East Downtown has been a slow, slow build back. From the pandemic. So we lost a boatload of money over there during 2020, just because our fixed expenses are crazy. And we carried— what we didn't want to do, we furloughed most of the hourlies immediately in March of 2020. And we were like, man, well, at that point we were thinking, oh, well, we'll be closed for a month. Maybe, and we can't let our management teams go and then expect to open the restaurants anytime soon after that. So we carried most of the management staff through the pandemic. Now, it took a lot longer to get reopened than we ever expected it would, but no one had ever navigated a pandemic before, right? Right. Or not anybody that would be relevant to us. East Downtown, we just knew was going to take a minute to bounce back, and it is now. So I think by the end of the fourth quarter, that October, November, December, it will be back to being as much of an earner as the others, 8 Roofing and Cultivari are. That's a long answer to your question, so I don't know if that got you what you needed there.

Trey Lockerbie Yeah. Well, I mean, it sounds like there's an unevenness to it and some that are on the upswing and some that are pretty stabilized. So totally dig it. Cool. I had a couple more questions and then, uh, so I mean, I'm curious about like the level of like cyclicality in the business. Like, like did, how long did it take you to start to get a feel for how things like school holidays or Christmas breaks or any of that kind of stuff would affect business staffing, all that kind of stuff? Like, was that a quick learning process or? Are you still getting surprised by it?

We're still getting surprised by it. I mean, we, we have enough data now to know that like September is historically one of the worst months of the year. So is January. And what, what drives that? Well, people have been, uh, blowing cash on family vacations, getting kids back to school from summer, uh, and they tighten the purse strings in September. You know, Houston, uh just the weather pattern is an absolute beating in September. Yeah, so it's hot, it's gross outside. September is always a turd for us. And then same thing happens after the holidays, you know, people have been spending money and eating like crazy and, uh, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then they blow it out for New Year's and they all go get gym memberships in January. Yeah, so January is historically not very good, and then it starts to pick up again in, in February. And as soon as the weather gets pleasant outside, it picks up and it goes through the same cycle.

Yeah.

What's been interesting for us is to figure out how to prepare for holidays like Fourth of July, which is always on a different day of the year. And, and I think now that we've been open 10 years, we're still not great at it. In the pandemic, 2020, and then 2021 still being more of a— it's not like a let's go on a European vacation kind of deal. It's like let's drive around for 2 weeks or 3 weeks a year as a family. Leading up to 2020, we felt like we had a pretty good feeling on, well, the Fourth of July falls on a Wednesday versus Saturday, what that looks like. And post-pandemic, we have no clue anymore.

Totally cool. Um, another thing I'm curious about, what are— what, if anything, are you guys kind of doing around some of the experiments that people are running? Like the, the TALK guy, uh, Nick, Nick Kokkanis— totally butchering his name— but like dynamic pricing, bids for reservations, any of that kind of stuff. Is that, is that part of y'all's model, or are you just keeping it simple?

It's really not. We, we have worked so hard to cost our food appropriately and cost our drinks appropriately. Yeah, um, that our number one goal as a company is to be— to give you the highest quality and most consistent and interesting food that we possibly can for the cheapest price that we can. Yeah, we, we try to be a good value to people that come, and we don't want anybody to feel like we're taking advantage of the prices that we're charging. So it also doesn't give us a lot of meat on the bone to do a lot of special things. Just like, this is the price, and we're not overdoing it on that to begin with. So, uh, hopefully you understand that and you keep coming, and all that, right?

And the idea to build your vision, to build a durable relationship with these folks who are there 2 or 3 days a week, and that's what great restaurants are built on. Not, not—

and I would, going back to your 80/20 rule, I think 100%, 20% of our customers pay 80% of the bills.

Yeah, totally makes sense. I totally dig it. Well, super cool. Is there anything I missed? Otherwise, uh, this has been awesome. It's so good.

It's an industry— I just, I'll say this because I'm working with some— I've worked with as a consultant for people and, uh, in the past to varying degrees of success. And the restaurant business is such an easy business to romanticize, and it's relatively easy to get something open.

Yeah.

But if you are not 100% passionate about whatever it is within that industry that you are going down the rabbit hole on, whether it's coffee or cocktails or pizza or booze or whatever it is, If you're not willing to go all the way, your chances of succeeding are dramatically reduced. Anytime we've done something new, it's like when we decided we were going to go open cultivare and we knew we wanted to be really, really serious about pizza, we're like, "I don't know that I've ever thought of pizza in a serious way." Pizza is just all good.

Yeah, bread, cheese, butter, and, uh, tomato paste. Like, yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's like when we got serious about that, we're like, we need to go eat a boatload of pizza.

Yeah.

And we went to New York. Ryan and I went to New York, uh, probably around 2013, and we had a list of probably 40 pizza joints of varying and different styles. Yeah, we went for 3 days, and I think over the course of those 3 days, we ordered close to nearly 60 pizzas from about 20 different places.

Right.

And it was an all-day thing. It's like they open at 11, we'll start there and we'll just walk to the next one, walk to the next one, jump on the train, go to the next one. And until you are willing to do something like that, and pizza is just the metaphor here, but until you're willing to do something like that, you can't form opinions on what you think is good. Yeah. We ended up going in a completely different direction from your standard issue New York style slice pizza. We didn't go Napolitano. Over the course of eating that much pizza back to back and notating certain things about different dough styles and different cooking styles, we came up with our opinion of what we really loved. I would implore people that are dabbling or thinking about doing their own place, whether you're gonna like open a kolache place, I don't know what it is, just you gotta be a nerd about it or the odds are just stacked against you. And then you have to be sensitive to what the neighborhood you're considering doing this place in. Maybe there's 6 pizza joints already in that neighborhood. So maybe that's not something you should mess with. Like go in a totally different direction. But there's an unlimited number of things that you can consider before just jumping in, right? Because it is relatively easy to just jump in and get it open. Yeah, but it becomes unfun very fast when it's not working, right?

That's why those are wise words right there.

So it's like, man, like dreaming about it's the funnest part.

Yeah.

It's when things start not working out that you're like, "Hmm." I'll leave with this little thought. We had the opportunity 3 or 4 years ago to do a restaurant takeover, a second-generation restaurant space in the Montrose area, which is a very competitive neighborhood in Houston for restaurants. It was a fast turnaround, like 45 days start to finish from the time that we signed the lease at the same time we reopened. And we had this idea that we wanted it to be kind of tiki, not tiki, uh, as far as the drinks go. And the food was going to just celebrate kind of island cultures around the equator. Okay, so that could mean Thai food, that could mean, uh, Caribbean food, that could— anywhere around the globe around the equator. And we thought it was really cool. And we didn't think about it hard enough or long enough or nerdy enough. And even the elevator pitch on it, it's hard to explain to people. What is it? Well, it's kind of like tiki-not-tiki and it's island cultures from around. I mean, you would just see people's eyes glaze over and like, what is this? And it was not doing well before the pandemic. And when the pandemic hit, we pulled the plug on it. It was like, that was the perfect excuse. To get out of this not well-thought-out idea that we had in the first place.

Wow.

So just because you can dream it up doesn't necessarily mean it's appropriate.

Yeah, that's very true.

It's very true.

Super good, super good. Well, dude, thank you so much for making time on this. Like, thanks for answering all my probing questions about how much money you make and stuff. So really appreciate your, your candor.

There's nothing that gives me more anxiety than watching somebody walk into the fire and not know what they're getting into. Absolutely. So the more candid I can be about the positives and the negatives of that, what else am I here for? Yeah. Mentor and teach and learn from my bad decisions, learn from our bad decisions. You don't have to make those yourself. Right.

Super cool. Well, so I'm sure the listeners will be interested in following along on your journey. Do you tweet, LinkedIn?

Anything that's, uh, I'm more of an Instagrammer. Okay, it's @morganfweber. Okay, with one B. And I've even admittedly taken a little bit of time off from that in 2021. Okay, uh, yeah, all of our restaurants, uh, you can go to agricolehospitality.com. It's nice and dialed in. You can see the restaurants. Each restaurant has its own, uh, personal Instagram and Facebook accounts, so follow from there.

That's great. Well, thanks for doing this, man. Super fascinating, and congratulations on your success.

And I really, you know, Matt Weidert reached out to me, he's like, man, you got to do this podcast, he's great. So I really appreciate it. And man, truly some of the most interesting and, and, uh, deep dive questions that I have ever been asked.

Oh, fun.

Well, as a pretend star industry.

Yeah, super cool. Well, I'm total, totally fascinated in your You're great about it. So thanks for being here. Really appreciate it.

Thanks. All right. Well, have a great day. Bye everybody. Thanks again. Bye y'all.