Episode 65: Health and Profitability with Bryn Davis

Hello, you've reached Chris Kern, and I'm not available to take your call. Oh, wait a minute. This is the. This is the Profit first podcast, episode 60. Oh, sorry. You say that.

No, it's okay. It's a recording. How could I say it's episode 65. Oh, man.

Boom.

Oh, God.

Trying to be creative. Look what happened.

This is gonna be the biggest episode we've ever done. Dude, I've been waiting for this one for 65 episodes. 65 weeks of waiting for this. For this.

Welcome, everyone, to the Profit first podcast. I'm Chris Curran. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording.

And I'm Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First. And you are listening to the Profit first podcast, where we explore every single angle of profitability, from marriage to mayhem to building a business. From a popcorn stand to a multi million, multi location, dollar practice.

That's right. You can find our podcast in a lot of place on itunes, Stitcher, Tunein Radio, and our website, profitfirstpodcast.com. if you go to that website, profitfirstpodcast.com, you'll see all the previous episodes. And then if you're kind of like a crazy cool person, you can binge listen to, like, four episodes in a row on the weekend sometime. It's great fun. Yeah.

And if you do it, make sure you have tissues. Cause listen, you'll be crying, you'll be laughing. Every emotion you can experience. I mean, you'll be bringing.

I waste my time listening to four in a row.

Oh, my God. No. It will destroy you emotionally, but it will build you financially. So you got to do it.

That's right. So we got a great guest today. I know that. And what have you been up to, Mike?

Yeah, so what I've been up to is really anticipation. When we started this podcast, my dream was to bring on a guest who has gone full cycle. Not with Profit first alone, but all I've done. And this guy, I gotta be careful what I say, I always want to say, was somewhat of a student of my. My books. But that's only a modicum of what made this guy so successful. He has courage. He had commitment. He had drive and persistence. Started a business, bootstrapped, it grew. Something that was wildly successful. So what have I been doing? I've been. I've been anticipating this. This episode, literally for 65 weeks now. So happy we're able to pull it off.

I can't wait to get into it. Why don't we introduce him right now?

Yeah. I won't even bore you bore everyone else with like, you know, I got my haircut yesterday.

Oh really? What style?

Yeah, exactly. So his name is Bryn Davis. And if you want to see who I'm talking about as we're talking here, go to Bryn. That's spelled B R Y N by the way. Brynanddanes.com. it is a fast, healthy food business. And listen, here's a guy who wasn't a chef, he wasn't a restaurateur, he was just looking for a healthier way to eat. He was 70 pounds overweight. Now type in Bryn Davis. Check him out. The guy is ripped now. Why? Because he found the diet to doing it. But then he realized he stepped into his life's purpose. That instead of serving fat burger or whatever it's called, that it's time to start serving healthy, fast accessible food. He starts burning Danes. But how's he start it? He bootstraps his way to it. He starts off with a popcorn machine that turns into a multi million dollar business. We're going to hear the story right here, right now. Welcome to the show Mr. Bryn Davis.

Hey, what's going on guys?

How you doing, David? It's a pleasure to have you, man.

All those people are on the phone loving you.

Do you remember how we first met, Bryn? Do you remember how we first met?

Absolutely, I do. Yeah, you go ahead.

Well, I remember you were one of the few folks this was the ultimate flattery to me. You read the Toilet paper Entrepreneur. You road tripped up from Philadelphia to the northern part of New Jersey where I was and just said, hey, let's talk. That's what I remember.

Absolutely. Yeah. That was the first time I met you for sure. And I remember being super, super, super nervous. And at that point we hadn't even opened our first location yet. I had just got done, you know, a pseudo business plan or an idea board or whatever it was. And then I was able to able to meet you.

When I first met you. You know what blew me away about you? Here comes a guy, Chris. Bryn comes all the way to northern Jersey just to meet with me. He reads my book, Toilet paper Entrepreneur. First reader to reach out. The book had just been released and says, I want to come up and meet you. Here's Bryn. What impressed me about you, you came in this white SUV that was beat up, had a dent in the side if I remember. It was this roadster and you're like, yeah, this is what I drive. I'm proud of it. I'm saving money because I'm going to start my own business. And I remember as you drove away saying, there's a guy who's going to make it. He's not about flash, he's about success. He's about drive. Do you remember that car?

Oh yeah, it was an old, it was an old crv. I had it for like the first three years that we were open. I actually, it actually broke down when I was driving in between location. I was forced to get a new car, but I remember distinctly and at that point I was still living at home, staying at that point with like my 8 year old brother. I was still sharing a room with him. So we were super lean back then. I didn't spend much money at all.

So you had an idea of starting your first business. You wanted to start this, this restaurant chain. We're talking and as the discussion goes, you're saying, yeah, my vision, at least that's what I remember. My vision is to build this great restaurant, but I'm going to bootstrap it. I'm not going to borrow a single penny at this stage. I'm going to do it on my own. Why did you, why did you believe that was the way to go about it? Everyone says you got to borrow money.

You know, it was kind of out of necessity. I think at that point it was probably 2008, 2009. And I had these big grandiose plans of a full scale healthy fast food restaurant. And that's really what I built our business plan around. Our marketing plan around, et cetera was taking a conventional fast food model and infusing it with all healthy options. And it's funny because that was about six years ago that I really started developing that plan and every single nuance was figured out. I had the menu done, the scheme done, the design done, et cetera, but I couldn't afford anything. I had no money whatsoever. I didn't have family money to tap into, etc. So through talking with you and reading your book and all that kind of stuff, and just personal experience, I thought, you know what, you know, if I, if I wait forever to try to raise this money, and especially if I have to give up equity in my brand, which I was very, very opposed to doing, I might never get this off the ground. So I might as well just start a little tiny piece of the plan and build it out. So what we ended up doing was starting with just smoothies and popcorn. And that sounds like a bizarre combination, which it is. But the truth is I could afford blenders and I Could afford a home popcorn machine. So by starting off with just snacks and hustling, I had two really high profit margin items, and I was able to sell as many of them as possible and stow away all the capital to slowly build out the rest of the business, which is what we did for the next year.

Who was buying the popcorn and the smoothies?

I love that question because. So the big thing was we opened up in my hometown. And what was crazy about that period of time was the economy was so bad that landlords and all those kind of people were very concerned, like they thought the recession was never going to end. So the huge opportunity there was that I was able to negotiate amazing, amazing deals on everything. So, for example, we opened up in my hometown. The reason I opened up in my hometown was because I could spread a message much quicker. Because I knew most people. I had seven months free rent. I built out this little location with just my buddies. I'd usually trade a case of beer for them to paint at night. I had buddies who were doing models, all kinds of crazy stuff. And what I did was, although we only sold smoothies and popcorn, and to answer your question, was on the wall day one, I think it's something you and I discussed too, right? When you walked in, you saw our business or our mission statement, right? And the mission statement, without going into it specifically, just said that we're the first, you know, healthy fast food option the world's ever seen. There's going to be a Bernie Danes on every corner, corner in corner in America, et cetera. And people walked in, they bought in more to that statement than they did the option that we were selling. And it was almost like they were just showing. So they might come in and order smoothies and popcorn knowing that they were buying into a larger plan. And we, you know, back then, I was the only person that worked for us. I was able to really indoctrinate every single person that walked through our door and create just hundreds and hundreds of regulars. So over time, we became very, very, very busy.

So people are buying into the mission statement of bringing health to America. So do you think they saw this as basically a contribution to that vision with the benefit of getting some food, or did they see they're getting some food with the benefit of contributing to a mission, which. What came first for them?

That's a great question. I think. I do think that they came in supporting the mission more than anything else to this day. It's crazy because back then, you know, it was funny in the beginning, we Would do, like a couple hundred dollars a day sales. And I thought we were like, rich. Like, I thought, like, oh, my God, we're going to change the world. And right now, each location is going to do well over half a million dollars in some smoothie sale of the year. So the smoothies were obviously worth coming back for, and it's still probably the cornerstone of our business. However, I really think that people were into the idea. And the reason I think that is after we had started with just the smoothies and popcorn, and I had saved enough money up to really convert the back area into a little pseudo kitchen where we could start to do wraps and salads, etc. I bought a new sign. And that sign was bright green. I'll never forget it. We put a bright green sign out front. It was lit from behind, and for the first time ever, it said, britain Dane healthy fast food. And no joke, the day that we put out those three words, because it's almost oxymoronic in the sense that when you read it, it doesn't make sense. Fast food isn't healthy. And when people see those three words together, it's remarkable, right? So the day that we put that out there, we went from doing maybe $500 a day in sales to immediately doing $2,000 a day in sales that day in this little old converted shop in Horsham. And I think people saw that we were putting ourselves out there with conventional, iconic American brands like McDonald's, Wendy's, etc. That they didn't like anymore. And we were there to answer their question. And I think that day is when everything changed for us.

Whoa, my gosh. Were you able. I mean, that's four times the size overnight. Were you able to sustain that? Did the wheels fall off the bus? What happened to that phase?

They completely fell off every day. I remember the first day we opened, I called my little brother. I'm one of four boys and a little sister. I called my little brother out of school to help us. I was never, like, properly staffed, anything. We kind of just figured it out as we went. And we used to call it throw up busy. Because we'd be standing in the kitchen and lunch would hit and immediately there'd be 30 people in line. And we had no fucking clue how. Excuse my language. I'm sorry.

No, you can swear. You can swear.

No clue how to even handle this. But, you know, in the beginning, it was crazy, but we were. I think that we were transparent enough. And when people came in, if it took a little while Longer, et cetera. Again, we explained our story. I go out there and say, listen, we went from doing, we have four times more people here than yesterday. This is crazy. And people really bought into the culture and the vibe that we gave off. And we never really had any issues, although in the beginning, the wheels were definitely falling off the wagon.

What lessons did you gain in that very early stages that you continue on and leverage today in your business?

You know, a lot of it was again, tying ourselves to a larger mission, which you and I, we've been talking about right now for quite a bit. And communicating, you know, where we want to go as a brand, I think is something that we still do every day. That when people walk in and you see our mission statement on the wall that's now on every wall, in every wall, in every single solitary location, as well as all of our bags, etc. So when people come in, they know that they're buying into a larger picture than just their lunch. They're not just getting a wrap and a salad. They're contributing to something that's changing the fast food industry. That as well as the momentum of a brand growing, I think, is that even the common consumer gets excited about. So as long as we show momentum and we're opening new locations and when we make a mistake, we're transparent about it, we fix it. All those kind of things, those principles we still practice every day and I think contribute to our growth.

Okay, so you're really, and I agree, I've been to your stores. You are very transparent. You're putting the word out there. You also leverage Facebook in a big way. How's that served you?

That's everything in all honesty, specifically Facebook, not just social media. If Facebook didn't exist or social media didn't exist, we would not at all be in the position that we are right now. And I think what we did well in the beginning was, you know, first we always say, you know, Horsham, Penn. Which is where our first location was before we opened our second location. Horsham was the only location that we had. We had right under 30,000 fans on Facebook. Horsham only has 14,000 people. So we were very good at spreading the message about Brendan Danes online and getting a lot of people who bought into us. One of the big contributing factors of that is right after we opened, Men's Health did an article about us and then six months later re ran the same exact article. So we have a large base from across the country on Facebook, which is really exciting. But we never treated Facebook and now a lot of people are doing this. But we never treated Facebook as a straight up marketing tool where we would write $5.99 smoother, $5.99 wraps $2.99. But we never did any of that. We really use it as a mechanism to show give some insight into the brand and what we stood for. And by doing that, we've been able to get a lot of momentum and some virality and letting people know who we are rather than just what we offer.

And Chris, you understand that Bryn is the king of effective communication. If you just visit his website, Brennan Danes, and you go to the homepage, they tell you their mission right there. You land. It says, we're growing, you're slimming. Another slide comes up. Join the fast food revolution. Join our mission. Next. Next one. I love this one. The secret ingredient is, is no secret ingredients. Keep your friends close and your farmers closer. I mean, every element of this business is said so eloquently. Bryn, one thing you did is you. I hope you remember this trick. You leveraged a mistake that Starbucks made and use it to your advantage. You know what I'm talking about?

Oh, my God, yeah, absolutely.

Tell us your secret. This blew my mind when you did this.

Okay, so this kind of stuff happen all the time, especially in the beginning, but so going backwards, a little tiny, but we started off that first location, you know, right after I talked to Mike. We started the first location with $12,000 and two credit cards. And that's no BS. And if you look back at our original location, you would see that I'm not lying. It really didn't cost much. We got a lot of stuff for free, etc. As we, you know, we offered food and we added in, we added in wraps and salads and we went from doing $500 a day to $2,000 a day. We completely outgrew that space. We were in an old converted beer distributor and it was just way too busy and to the point where people weren't even coming in because it was too crowded. So my dream location was about two miles down the road and it was a standalone drive through brand new Starbucks. In fact, that original business plan that I wrote before we even opened our first location was written about that spot. And I always told myself, if I get that place, it'll be the launching pad for thousands of people places. So anyway, so, you know, the economy isn't going well and Starbucks actually never opens up after they built this space with the drive thru. It's breathtaking they never opened it. And they ended up putting a Seattle's best in there that failed very, very, very quickly when that closed down. I remember one morning I left my room with Dane and my mom said, you got to go down there. I think that you should at least tour that Starbucks. It's been your dream location forever. You got to look at it. And I said, listen, I can't afford it. My rent's pretty much free now. You know, that place is going to be, I think it's over $10,000 a month. I'm just not in the spot to make that, take that risk. And she said, listen, just go. So I went down there and I looked at the space and I met with the guy, the guy that was repping it, and he said, you know, listen. And he didn't really give me the time of day. He said, listen. He said, you know, pizza shops are looking at this and, you know, the rent's gonna be like $7,000 a month, $8,000 a month. If you want to put an offer in, you can, but I wouldn't go anywhere lower than 10. And I said, listen, well, you know, when these places send those offers in, what's Starbucks saying? They're not even getting back to them. Well, I thought, you know, that doesn't make any sense. I bet you Starbucks doesn't even have a department that's dealing with this stuff. I bet you they're closing locations, etc. And this is the first time they've done it. I bet you they're not even getting these emails or these offers. So what I ended up doing was I bypassed that rep and I wanted to call Starbucks to broker my own deal. So what I ended up doing, I went to call them and getting the name and number of the guy that I need to get name number through Starbucks corporate was next to impossible. It was like getting to the CIA. So every time I call this, they, we can't give the number up. So finally I called back one day and I said, hey, listen, I said, I'm looking for, you know, my name's, you know, John Smith. I'm out on the east coast. I'm trying to get a hold of the guy that handles your commercial real estate. But I met him at a conference last week. I have his phone number, but I don't have his first name. Could you just give me his first name so I can call him and don't look like a jackass? They said, sure, and they gave me his first name. I called back two days later. And I said, hey, listen, I got this guy's first name. I met him at conference last week. I don't have his phone number, and I really need to get in contact with him. How can I do it? And they gave me his phone number. So I was able to have his name and his phone number. I ended up calling him. I called literally every hour for about, I don't know, a week, 10 days. I forget what it was. Finally, I got somebody on the phone. And when he answered, I remember I was totally caught off guard. I called him so many times with no answer. And it turned out, long story short, this guy was out of the office for almost a month for some reason I didn't know about. When I called him, he never even heard. He didn't even know about the space in Portrait. He never looked over any of those pizza shop offers. And I said to him, listen, man, you know, if you can give me this space and give me a good offer, you'll change my life. It'll be a dream come true. So just do a good deed and help me out. And he said, listen, what can you afford a month? And I said, I can give you four grand, 4,500 bucks a month. And he said, fine. I had the paperwork that afternoon, and we had our dream location, and I moved down the road probably the next month.

Unbelievable. Un. Freaking believable.

It was wild. It was the most ridiculous thing that probably ever happened to us.

Now, Bryn, that location today is generating how much in annual revenue?

$1.8 million. And we just now. We just. Right now. Up until about two weeks ago, I owned 100% of Brendan Dan. We just sold some shares, but we're up about 10%. We're on track to probably, hopefully hit that $2 million mark. In all reality, probably not this year, but next year.

Okay, so $1.8 million in 2009, when you were selling popcorn and smoothies, what was the revenue your first year? There's.

I don't even know. Which sounds bizarre, I can tell you. I mean, only because the way we started was so bootstrapped, it was insanity. Like, I didn't even have a real register. So our numbers were probably maybe 100 grand a year, something along those lines. Not even. We were doing a few hundred bucks a day and constantly changing things and constantly developing. So we've grown quite a bit to the point where Philadelphia, the Wharton School does the fastest 100 growing companies every year, and we were the fastest growing restaurant last year. They take sales within the last five years. So how much did you grow over the last five years? And I remember it was like 100, maybe $30,000 in our first year to $2 million in our third or fourth year, or 1.8 in our third or fourth year. So we've grown pretty darn quickly.

I mean, Chris, this is what's unbelievable here. Bryn is doing a hundred dollars a day or 200 bucks a day in selling popcorn. Now, one location, and he's got three, plus three more coming online. One location does $5,000 a day. Bryn, how do you make this transition from. I mean, this is only six years later now. How do you make this transition from the guy who's serving the popcorn to a guy that's running three locations with three coming online?

I think, you know, one of the. One of the. When I opened, I had, like you said in the beginning, I had no experience, you know, running a restaurant. I wasn't a chef. I had never even been. I worked. I was never even a manager at, like, a Starbucks. I was nothing. And I actually worked at Starbucks, but wasn't a manager. And so I never really knew what I was doing to begin with. And I think that's actually been a good thing since. As we've grown and added new locations and etcetera, I've taken my biggest inefficiencies and outsourced them and hired other people. So, you know, in terms of operating, you know, operating, I barely operate one unit. I definitely can't operate five units. So I went out there and we got. Our COO was with Trader Joe's for, I think, 15 years. And it's just unbelievable. So I brought him in to do the stuff that I didn't know how to do in terms of the design work of the locations. I brought in somebody else that's exceptional named Matt Scheller, and he's from the Philadelphia area. And I've really hired to take care of all the things that I do very poorly. So we have an amazing team at this point. And really, all I do now is the business development end and the marketing, which really is arguably all I ever did beginning. So the Brendan Danes machine is just getting a little tighter every day.

Yeah. And so it must take a lot of discipline to not do what you're good at, because in the beginning, yes, you're doing the marketing, and you say that's all you were doing, but I know you were the guy serving popcorn. I know you were the guy serving meals. When I came down to that first store, when were you able to make These decisions of saying, I, I can't do this anymore, I need to sign it out. When did you have that realization and actually pull it off? How far along were you in your business?

Okay, got it, got it. In terms of transitioning out of like store level activities, I'd say I was there probably the first two years. First two and a half years. I was there quite a bit in the last two or they're doing every single solitary task. And the last two and a half, three years it's been outsourced.

And now. So let's fast forward so the listeners have a good sense of where your business stands today. You've three locations, right? Two of them are full restaurant locations. Both doing, we'll say 1.8 million, right? Roughly. So that's 3.6 million. You have another partial location, which means actually explain this so the listeners know what's the partial location mean?

I call it partial location. We call it like a non traditional location or whatever you want to call it. We got a lot of people reached out to us, whether it be universities, hospitals or fitness centers, all of those types of locations reached out to us and said, hey listen, we would love to have a Bern and Dean's who can't fit you. So what we did was we did a prototype in the YMCA in the Philadelphia area that has 21,000 members. It's insane. It's like a fitness mall. And we did what we call it a Brennan Danes cube. And it's a glass cube that's a little shrunk down version of Brennan Danes where we do all of our smoothies, we do Pre made wraps, etc. And the reason we did that was as we grow and we open and you know, we saturate the Philadelphia area as we want to go on to college campuses and in hospitals, et cetera, we have a model that we could pop right in.

And then you also now have three more locations that are opening up, right? Three full locations.

Yeah, yeah. We have Brynn and Danes in Bryn Mawr, Malvern and Center City.

Okay, I want to know. Well, I'm going to ask you in a second. I have a question before us, but I want to know how you now sustain this growth because you're under this rapid growth curve. But before that, as you've grown from, from popcorn guy to multi location restaurateur if you will, what are the lessons you learned and what not to do?

I think the biggest lesson which is the most relevant right now for us is I waited until we needed money to begin raising it in the past that was okay when I needed smaller sums of money. When I say smaller sums, a couple thousand dollars or $10,000 for growth, it wasn't that big of a deal. I was always able to scramble and make it happen. Recently we decided again, I own 100% of Brennan Danes until very recently, and we decided to sell off 15% of Brennan Daines for $2 million. And we had a group of investors and all that kind of stuff that were interested in doing so. Closing that round took much, much longer than I anticipated. In hindsight, I think I was very naive. I thought it was going to be a couple weeks, process in end up being a few months. And we came down to the very last minute where we needed the money. And that stress is something I never want to go through again. So I think just being prepared with raising capital and having strategy for those kind of things as we got bigger is much more important. That whole bootstrap mentality where it's down to below wire and all that kind of stuff is great in the beginning and probably very, very necessary, but once you do that five, six times, you're going to want to blow your brains up. So I think being more strategic at this point is something that I need to do if I want to keep my sanity.

And did you find when you're raising capital, one thing I'm hearing from folks that come on the show and listeners is that when you're raising money of that magnitude that it becomes a full time endeavor. And it's very hard to keep your eye on running the business when you're trying to raise money for the business.

I'm not lying. It's been the topic of conversation with our most strategic investor at this point. He's a great guy and I was talking to him last week and right now, to this, to this moment, really the last week was probably the last week where it was a full time thing with, you know, with, with the amount of money we raised. So we raised $2 million, right. And our initial investor that came on board said, hey, listen, I can do the whole, the whole 2 million. However, I'd be more comfortable if we get a group of added value investors to create like a dream team that can come in and really, you know, really strengthen the Brennan Danes brand. And I said cool. I said great. I completely agree. And I really obsessed on that and went out and got, we targeted a group of people and we got them all, which, which was an amazing feat and we're really blessed and I'm really happy about that. However, trying to get all six of those people to agree to the same terms, close in the same week, you know, agree to the same vision, who gets on the board of directors, et cetera, was painstaking and became more than a full time job. And it was, I would honestly argue, borderline impossible to raise that capital effectively and do it the right way as well as run Brennan Danes. And to be completely transparent, you know, we did see a fall off in our regular operations while I was doing that. And that again is something that, you know, if I didn't wait until the last moment and I was more strategic about it, I probably could have balanced both much better. But I didn't. So next time around I will. But I learned this time that, you know, it is truthfully a full time job and extraordinarily stressful only because it's your baby. So when you talk, you know, for me, when I'm talking about equity and money, I mean that, that's me giving up a little piece of my baby. So I was very stressed out about it and it did consume me for probably about a three month period.

Yeah. So raising money, it sounds like it can. If you don't do it right and you don't time it well, it can kill a business. Okay, tell me about your target customers. Because I think one thing, when we met, I remember the palm trees that you installed and stuff like that. And then a year later I see you again and you're like, you know what, there were some mistakes there. I didn't really know my customer. Now I do. Who is the customer? You're catering to that niche.

It's interesting because most people assume that with we sell smoothies, we have, you know, we use organic produce, we source locally, etc. And most people picture, you know, yoga moms and kids as our target market. And don't get me wrong, that's probably the group that we're the most popular with. However, the group that, you know, at the end of the day we offer lunch is what we offer. Right. And the people that are on the road and need to eat lunch out are generally just white collar and blue collar workers that work in office contact on office complexes around, you know, an individual location. So what we found is, you know, and a lot of this too is taking our competitors into consideration is we need to be approachable by the mainstream if we want to be an iconic fast food brand. We can't niche ourselves out when we're a hipster brand or we really just cater to vegans and Vegetarians and all those things. I think a lot of those things make sense for us, you know, in the short term. But the long term, if, you know, if we want to stay true to our mission, which we obviously do, and we don't have a Bernie Beans on every corner in America, we need to appeal not just to 20 to 35 year old men and women. We need kids to love us, older people to love us, blue collar workers to love us, white collar workers love us. And I know that, you know, trying to appeal to everybody is tricky and not always the best route. But for us, making sure that we're approachable to everybody has been something that we've really focused on a lot over the last year.

Okay, so to get started, you first targeted people that got your mission, those crazy early adopters. Then you hit the yoga moms to expand, and now you're going for the McDonald's consumer, but get them over to you for the healthy fast food.

Yeah. And just in terms of just competing with that group, we always say when it comes to marketing and convenience, our competition is fast food. When it comes to actually battling for dollars in the lunchtime and maybe when you take price into consideration, our competitors are fast casual. So your Chipotle's and your Zoe's and your Paneras, that's really what we keep focused on.

Okay, now just to wrap things up here, you have this grand vision of where you want to get the business go. Every single corner. Sounds very similar to what I heard from Starbucks themselves. How are you going to pull that off?

So what we're doing right now is we're focusing on the Philadelphia region and you know, opposite from a lot of our competitors, we're going to go from the suburbs in. So right now we have the two big locations in the suburbs, we're doing two more in the Philadelphia suburbs. And then we'll go into the city, maybe sprinkling in some non traditional locations into high volume areas. We'll take that same exact model and then pull that into a different city. And right now we've started very, very brief conversations about that with our real estate team as well as some of our investors. But that model works for us in terms of the capital structure for that. So we just raised the $2 million. The goal is to get to between seven and 10 units and then going after a series A where we raise a much larger chunk of change and use that capital to get to the 25 unit market. @ that point, really assessing the environment and seeing how we're going to really get the capital and the infrastructure to get to a couple hundred units.

Do you think as you look back at your career to this point, you realize that your super strength is in marketing and communication? Let me tell you, Chris, it's. It is, Bryn. Do you see there's a certain point where maybe you. It outgrows you and it's no longer you, or do you think you're there for the entire ride?

We talk about that a lot. I think I would love to see a point where it outgrew me. I can't imagine ever not being involved with some capacity. But I do think that, you know, eventually the hope would be that it definitely outgrews me. I think we'll start off, you know, we brought in the coo. I think our next. And this probably won't happen until we get to seven unit mark. We bring in a cfo, which I think will be the biggest game changer for us in terms of our corporate structure. And from there, you know, if Brendan Daines benefits from bringing a CEO other than me, then that's great. And if I stay on the board and can be strategic and still do things involved with Brendan Danes, but maybe not in the same capacity now, I think that's a huge plus. And that's something that I wasn't comfortable with for the first five and a half years that we were. That we were in existence until probably about a month ago.

Bryn, this has been amazing. This has been the dream interview I've been waiting for. Just watching you grow as an entrepreneur and explode. You are literally my favorite entrepreneur in the world and I can't wait till you do, Grace. Oh, you're welcome. And I can't wait till you Grace. Every single corner in the country. We are starving for your success, brother. Keep it going. Hey, if people want to learn more about you, Bryn, where should they go to learn more about you and also your wonderful restaurant?

Our website's great, but I love our website. But Facebook for us is our best tool by far and it's the most relevant and we change in real time and we communicate in real time obviously. So that would be the place to really connect with us. And on there you'll also find my personal contact information if anybody wants to reach out.

All right, man, we'll talk to you later. Go grow your business.

Thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it. See you guys.

Bye Bye, Chris. He grew this out of his shared bedroom at his parents house. That was six years ago.

Yeah, this is, this is the most amazing entrepreneurial story I've ever heard. I mean, I'm sure there's whatever. Maybe people like Walt Disney have a more amazing story. But this is like the real deal, you know, starting from nothing. And that whole trick where he got the. Well, anyway, we're gonna cover our takeaways.

Yeah.

Soon.

Yeah. Well, there's folks that, that make this show a reality. There's a reason we're able to keep doing this and bring on just rock stars like Bryn. Amazing entrepreneurs that have faced the greatest challenges. The spouses of entrepreneurs like we did last episode. And so I want to thank our sponsors. They are Fundera. That's a one stop funding source. You know, Bryn's company maybe has finally outgrown what Fundera can support. But they make loans up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and they can turn around many loans in 24 hours or less. Maybe in the early bootstrapping stages that Bryn was going through. Fundera was a great source for him. I don't know. But there may be a great source for you too. Fundbox. If you is fund box. Not Fundbox, fund box. If you have invoices and they're sitting out and your clients aren't paying you quickly, you may be experiencing what's called a cash flow issue. Fundbox is the solution for that. They will release the funding in its full amount to you. You invoice 10,000, you get 10,000 today, immediately. Then you get to continue the collections to. So you don't have some collection agency stepping in. You just talk with your customer like you always do. And when they release those funds to you, you return it to Fundbox plus their service fee. That's the simple process. It's the only factoring company I know. It's not even a factoring company. It's the only company I know that operates like that. It's a great way to manage cash flow challenges if you're facing those. Nextiva, that's our VoiceOver IP phone system that we use in house. And I strongly encourage you to consider it for yourself. There's a lot of voice over IP solutions out there. We've been with nextiva for over five years, but prior to that I was with five or six other solutions. I've gone through them all. I used to be a tech guy. I understand how stuff works and I found that nextiva is the best in part, in a big part because of their support. Any issue I have, they fix it. I'm not left to walk through my own and try to figure it out. They hop on remotely and Just fix it. Send me a note when it's done. And then the last one is tsheets, that's time tracking software. We use it here to manage our payroll. You can manage projects with it. Track where your people when they're at places using their GPS component. It can auto trigger when they start, when they arrive at a location. So you can see how long your one of your employees is on site and then leaves the site. It'll tell you the exact start and stop time. Thank you to all those sponsors for making the show a reality.

Yeah, we love our corporate partners and there's links to all them and they're very helpful and you know them all, so they're good people.

No, use them. It's like my relationships. I know him and I use them. So. Bryn Davis, man, Bryn Davis. What, what, what triggered in your mind listening to that amazing story.

He mentioned the word hustle or hustling and, and that's. I think that's like the, the vibe I get from him is that he's a hustler. He's like hustling, meaning working really hard and being diligent, not, you know, trying to scam people or anything. He really brings it and you can tell and I don't know, this is like one of those things. It's one of those aspects of an entrepreneur that really makes the biggest difference, I think, you know, you can have a great idea. Like me personally, I'm an idea guy. I'm not a guy who's going to wake up at 5am every day and work for 14 hours. You know, my brother's like that. You're like that broke Brin is obviously like that and that's great. And part of the reason he can do that, I think is because of the mission. He's so tied to that mission. But it's not just the mission. I think it's a personality trait and he's being true to himself and it's just amazing. What an amazing story.

I love that the word hustle has a positive connotation associated with it. You rewind five, ten years ago, hustle was a negative thing. You're a hustler, right?

Right.

But hustle has turned into this positive thing. Bryn is the epitome of it. I've been fortunate and flattered to now have hundreds of thousands of readers of my books. Cumulatively, I've been contacted over the years by thousands and thousands. Probably 10,000. I don't know what the number is, emails, calls and stuff. You know, many people showed up to my door, I think five, maybe six, they've gone out of their way saying, I'm going to travel wherever it takes to meet with you and spend time with you. And listen, I know I'm not a Mecca of knowledge. I'm no one special. I'm another human being, just like you and I. I mean, we're just people. But what it shows is there's some people that are willing to go to an extraordinary effort to extract one little piece of information, one little inspiration, one little nugget. And that's what Bryn did. He I said, yeah, I'll meet with you, but I don't have time. And he pursued and he was persistent. And finally he just said, I'm going to make this meeting happen. And he did. He didn't come up for a day's meeting. He didn't come up for an hour's meeting. He drove, I don't know how long it took him, two hours to meet with me, to meet for five minutes. And when he left, he said, I'll never forget this. I took home a piece of information I needed. But what was more amazing was then the follow through and following up and reporting his progress. It started intriguing me as he kept me involved. I wanted to participate in his success. And that's what he's done throughout the the public knows of his mission statement, the transparency he has of sharing the successes, but the challenges he faced. You got to go on the Facebook page and just see his own personal transformation and what people are saying. It's such a strong, consistent communicator that you can't help but just get enraptured in his story. And the guy thinks, out of the box, man. Everyone drives by a Starbucks store, I'm sure, and says, oh, it's a beautiful place. I wonder if it's a $10,000 lease. I'll call the agent. He, you hear that? He calls the guy. I don't know his first name. He finds out, first name, I don't know, John's last name, what other guy's name. He finds it out, gets the number, calls the guy every single day, every single day. And the guy picks up and the guy says, what can you afford? He goes, 4,500 to make my dreams come true. And the guy says, okay, we'll have it done by today. Those opportunities exist, man. They exist, but so few people get in the car and drive. Over 10,000 people email three to five people, take the action. God do the same.

I was going to say for the average or the I want to say average entrepreneur listening like. Or, you know, if you have your own business and you're not, you know, doing $1.8 million in one location right now, even if you're smaller, if you're under six figures even, you can still find these ideas of. Of to be bold and to push the limit and to. To take it to that next level for sure.

Well, I think it was Woody Allen said, like, you know, 95% of success is showing up. Yeah. That. That's the definition of showing up.

What.

What Bryn has done.

Right.

I wonder how many people, listen, even listening to the show right now, have dreamed about opening that bar or that restaurant or whatever it is I've always wanted to do. And it's just a dream. Show up. Show up.

Are you not going to get all Bobby Knight on this art now?

No, no, no, not today. I think Brynn did enough of that, Right?

Yeah, you were. That's it. You'd have to. We're gonna all have to listen to this about four times. We're gonna have to rewind and listen over and over to this story and then really focus on our own businesses and think, you know, what. What can I do? You know, like, there's something right there that you can do. You just have to think of it and find it.

Yeah. Yeah. And live to that higher purpose. He's got a mission. He's. He's changing the health of the world through fast food. Like, we've never associated fast food with health, but that's his mission, is to make this new association just like the word hustle changed from a negative to a positive. Fast food. He's doing the exact same thing. But what's your mission? What is your mission? Make your business. Make that mission a reality. I did.

Yeah. We gotta hit the road. So thanks, everybody, for listening. You can find our show on itunes and Stitcher and Tunein Radio and also our website, profitfirstpodcast.com and by the way, if you have any questions about podcasting itself, give me a shout. My website is fractalrecording.com and if you.

Want to learn about a business that can make your business more profitable, check out my business. It's called Profit first professionals dot com. And if you go there and you click on the find button, we will hook you up with an accountant or bookkeeper, someone you need already anyway. But an accountant or bookkeeper that's been trained specifically in the profit first method. These are financial business, financial experts who will bring profitability to your business. I don't care if you're $100,000 business or you're doing brins types of numbers. Every business has an opportunity for serious profitability. Profit first Professionals will show you how to do it and hold your hand throughout.

I love that they're not just totaling up numbers. The first question out of their mouth is, hey, you want to become more profitable? Let's do it.

Yeah. And here's how. We have the exact step by step to do it.

There's your mission, bro. What's your mission again? You told us. You told us many times.

Oh, we. We exist to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. Boom. Boom.

It is rampant.

83% of small businesses survive. Check by check. The vast majority of folks listening to the show right now, Chris, are barely getting by. You're experiencing entrepreneurial poverty. That means money comes in and it goes out faster. But there's a solution. There's a solution. It's waiting for you. Just go to first professionals.com, click on find. We will walk you through it. It will be a game changer.

That's it. Change your life. Thanks, everybody for listening. Thanks, Mike. Thanks again to Bryn. We'll see you all next time.

See you.