Here’s the unlikely story of how a piece of restaurant equipment that forms perfectly shaped, delicious hush puppies shaped my professional career…

It all started with my graduation from a small liberal arts college in Western Ohio. I was in the business program and majored more in the highly enjoyable college lifestyle than a concentrated effort in business studies. Regardless I did enough to graduate.

I was able to land a job with a growing restaurant company who were looking for new recruits to join their management training program.…. and hey you had to start somewhere.

So, the day came to start my 20 week training program with Red Lobster Restaurants. My training manager was big Bob Gallentine a past offensive lineman for the Ohio State Buckeyes football team. Bob cut his teeth with Woody Hayes and he carried his football discipline to his training responsibilities for new recruits.

You know the feeling you get when you realize you are walking into a hostile situation? Where you realize you are going to be treated like the person on the bottom rung of the ladder …That is how new management trainees were treated in Bob’s restaurant.

The twenty-week program was meant to indoctrinate new trainees in all of the functions necessary to run a Red Lobster. So, you were a server, bartender, cashier, busboy, kitchen production worker, dish washer, and line cook. It was very structured, long hours, and very humbling.

But I was a good trainee and really flourished in my position trainings. So, by the time I got to week thirteen, I was full of confidence. Week thirteen was the week where you started to learn the line positions – by far the most challenging and important of the positions in the restaurant and very foreign to me.

There were six positions on the line all focused on the cooking and assembling of food orders. Week thirteen started on the fryer station, a bank of five deep fryers. And that is where my young career came face to face with the “Hush Puppy Machine” – a cast iron piece of equipment that hung over the middle of a bank of five fryers, where dough was loaded into the top of the machine and the fry cook while leaning over the fryer manually cranked perfectly shaped dough cylinders into the boiling grease. If you are thinking that plopping dough into 350 degree grease could cause some issues you are right. By the time my fry week was over I had the burns to prove it.

Over the remainder of my training and my seven years with Red Lobster I often found myself on that machine during busy times. In a strange way that machine helped me gain the credibility of the hourly employees and managers, who reported to me.

For the next thirteen years I built on the excellent operations training that I received with Red Lobster in the full-service restaurant industry. I opened forty new locations in various capacities with several restaurant concepts and the last six years I had a small ownership stake.

My operations expertise connected me with a group of partners who became the founding franchise group for Blockbuster Video in 1988. At the time Blockbuster was really just an undeveloped idea but our managing partner saw the potential. He negotiated the exclusive rights to develop locations in Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Atlanta and Milwaukee. I was located in Detroit so that was the market that I would develop.

While it was not all smooth sailing our group in the first 3 years developed 240 Blockbuster locations, 80 were in my market of Detroit. Those 240 locations formed the nucleus of locations that allowed Blockbuster to build its national presence. Our locations were reacquired by Blockbuster and our team became a big part of the national management team for Corporate. I spent the next four years on the west coast replicating the success we had in our original core markets in a senior operations role.

As Blockbuster became a more complicated organization the ability to impact the business in an entrepreneurial way became less obvious. The company had been acquired by Viacom and it was clear that it was headed in a different direction, one that unfortunately ended up killing them. In any case at the time it just did not have the same feel and I was not confident that my experience could add value to their new direction.

My Blockbuster partners had all left several years before me and had created the Boston Market concept and later its sister company of Einstein’s Bros.Bagels. At the time I left BB they were looking for partners in several areas to head up the bagel shop development which I found to be a new challenge. I signed on to be the West Coast Market partner and CEO and over the next five years developed 126 locations. Our store development success led to an IPO for Einstein’s.

Over the next several years my entrepreneurial interests grew and I looked for other projects that would build on my core strength of operations, training, and team building. All with the common goal of building successful models that were repeatable and scalable. Industries like self-help legal services, financial services, online auctions, and most recently a Latin based pizza concept.

At this point in my life I have found a way to bring all these worlds together and share them in my coaching practice. I’m doing the thing I love – teaching – while sharing the operational and business ownership knowledge I’ve accumulated. And in the process, I’m helping people to realize their dream of owning their own business.

Looking back, I learned some valuable lessons from my time on the “hush puppy machine” that I have carried throughout my career.

• If you want to be admired and followed then walk a mile in your staff’s shoes (or crank out a batch of hush puppies during a rush).
• The key to organizational success is following a process…there are no short cuts to success( wet hush puppy mix blows up in a fryer).
• I learned that I was a pretty good trainer and I enjoyed mentoring the people that I worked with and who worked for me. I stay in that lane. (many employees who started on the hush puppy machine went on into the management program under my supervision
• The scars that you carry with you from experiences in life are constant reminders of your successes and failures. They are valuable sign posts to help keep you on track. If we meet I will share my scars from my time on the “hush puppy machine”, they are still there.

I have seen first have seen first-hand the power that business ownership can have on your life. My mission is to help you to tap into that power as well. I have helped hundreds of candidates to meet life on their own terms and create the American Dream. So, I invite you to schedule a call with me – now is the time for you to take that first step into your exciting future!