Big buildings amaze me.  A few weeks ago, I was in Dallas admiring the high-rises atop the hotel rooftop bar, and last week, the towering casinos in Vegas.

I know what my two-story, 9,000-square-foot building costs, so I can only imagine what it costs to build and maintain a 20-story skyscraper. I always think, “Your track record and paperwork must be insane for a bank to lend on one of these massive projects.  

As I walked the Las Vegas strip this week, my mind wandered again as I passed the Encore.  

HOW?!

After the finance aspect, my mind turns to construction.  The ideas behind the design, the building process, and “How deep is the foundation for a giant tower like this?”

This week, I spent four days in Miami working on my business and thinking a lot. Like many other weeks, doubt creeps in. “How are we going to do this? Will it work? Is it the right idea?” I had a lot of time to reflect on what we’ve built and where we need to go.  I think we, as entrepreneurs, tend to beat ourselves up.  To be harsh and not give US credit for what we’ve done.  

The event I attended was led by Josh Nelson of 7FA, a business coaching and mastermind for marketing companies like mine.  One exercise he does at every event is to reflect on the past three months.  Think about the victories and what they meant to your business.  Then, think about the future and what needs to happen in the next three months for you to be happy. 

This got me thinking, and I went farther back.  I went eight years to the start of our journey of building our restaurant marketing firm.  

I did this to see what I was missing.  Why hasn’t this process gone smoother?  Why is it taking us so long to find success?  This look back made me realize we’d found massive success amongst many tweaks, changes, and challenges. 

Then, I wondered if I had tweaked the process too many times.  Had I gotten too far away from what I set out to accomplish?  And then it hit me: we are exactly where we need to be, and it’s FINALLY time to sit back, stay in our lane, and do what we are doing now for 3-5 years before we add or make any more changes. 

THE BEGINNING

In 2016, I had the idea to take my local marketing firm and specialize in restaurants nationwide.  I created Restaurant Marketing That Works.  

From 2008 to 2016, we worked one-on-one with local business owners on their entire marketing plan.  At our peak, we had 34 clients from 31 different industries.  In that client mix were nine restaurants.  I figured out in 2015 & 2016 how I could easily replicate what we did across all of my restaurant clients.  We had created some great programs that helped our restaurant clients dominate social media and easily acquire new customers.  

So, with that, we started winding down the current client base and went national, focusing only on mom-and-pop restaurants.  

You’ll see the problem below: accidentally being in too many lanes.

So this got me thinking: what if we had 5 years of nothing new?  Just focus and determination to scale what we have now and do it at the highest possible level.  

What could we achieve?

Scratch that: here’s what we will!  THIS ->OUR 5/17/27 VIVID VISION

The timeline below is what I wrote down about our journey. 

2016-2018

When I started this new journey, I only had one employee, Ashley.  In these two years, we grew to a team of 6 and slowly built a customer list from all over the country.  In these two years we were very focused on building our customer acquisition system.  Probably the only area we were not clear on was our exact avatar. Because, like any startup, which is what this new offer was, we took on any restaurant that had a pulse:) 

2018-2019

In 2017, I started helping other marketing agencies as a favor. I was doing it to give back since, up to that point, I’d been alone on the journey, and I knew I would have loved some advice.  And then, something wild happened.  In March 2018, I made the most money I’d made in one day up to that point.  I did a webinar that was targeted at restaurant owners, but instead, a LOT of marketing agencies showed up.  Over the next 90 days, I would see 100 agencies join the ROI Engine training I had created for restaurants.  This was unexpected, but I didn’t see it as an issue. Money may have blinded my sight 🙂

For two years, I basically ran two companies, one for restaurants and one for agencies.  During 2019, a few close friends told me I had to pick a lane, but I was in denial.  I thought, “I can do both.”  By the end of 2019, I realized I couldn’t.  Even though we had doubled our sales with our restaurant clients each year, I was still not focused at the level I needed to be.  

2020

We started 2020 REALLY STRONG!  

I’d removed the distraction of the agency training, and our sales machine was starting to hum.  And then the pandemic hit.  This didn’t cause as much disruption in our business as you might think because I decided to turn up our marketing a few notches.  What caused a major distraction for me in 2020 was having too much money available to me.  It allowed me to think about what was possible.  It allowed me to create our next big thing, one that would turn out to be AMAZING but, at the same time, another “attention” setback.  While I could say this was a great thing, it really caused me to get careless, and it took me down a path that I didn’t need to go down yet: the ABR Path.  

2021-2023

America’s Best Restaurants and the ABR Roadshow had been on my mind for 3-4 years at this point.  I had this crazy idea to travel the country and document the stories of local Mom & Pop restaurants like never before.  I also wanted to create an online home for independent restaurants.  In the Spring of 2021, one year after the pandemic had ravaged our industry and flush with cash, I thought, “Let’s do it!”  With that, we bought a Mercedes Sprinter van, hired two employees, and hit the road to visit 348 restaurants from June 2021 until January 1st.  

The ABR Roadshow was needed.  This proved to be the best marketing program I’d ever created, but I wasn’t close to being prepared for what was about to happen.  I was right back in 2018 with two companies running simultaneously.  The only difference this time was that ABR grew to 20+ employees.  So here I was with a monster in my hands. Two companies were doubling and tripling in revenue each year and being led by a CEO who was not equipped to handle what was coming his way.  The growth of ABR set back our marketing agency a few years.

Once again my attention was split.

2024

And if things weren’t crazy enough the prior two years, in November 2023, we acquired a restaurant marketing software company, Repeat Returns. 

Over the prior 5 years, a weakness had been exposed in our marketing agency: the lack of LTV for our client’s marketing programs.  We could only show upfront sales results and HOPE they understood the value of building massive databases.  I’d see the latter as untrue; restaurant owners had difficulty understanding the value of attention and a customer list.  So I needed a solution: to either build or acquire software that could show our clients the PROOF of their customer’s journey.  

Enter Repeat Returns.  I was introduced to the owners in May 2023, and on November 3rd, we closed on the deal.  I thought we would acquire RR and have it as a third company, one that would tie in nicely with America’s Best Restaurants and Restaurant Marketing That Works, our marketing agency.  BUT that turned out to be bad idea. 

For four months, I traveled between our Kentucky HQ and the Las Vegas offices of Repeat Returns. During this time, I realized that our agency and this new software had to become one company, which became the latest project that would take the rest of 2024 to complete.  

MY THOUGHTS

Once I put everything above on paper last week, it was apparent what our problem was: a lack of “Warren Buffett Focus.”  My argument to myself through those years was that we’d been doing the same thing the entire time.  While there’s some truth to that, it’s simply a great lie to tell myself to ease my doubts.  

Yes, we’ve worked only with restaurants to help them grow their sales since 2016.  Yes, most of our tactics are the same things I’ve been preaching since 2008.  But, if I were being honest with myself, doing the same thing for the past 8 years would have been doing exactly what we did between 2016 and 2018. 

The agency training should not have happened.  I let money blind my vision, and I did not understand how to say NO! 

The ABR Roadshow turned out to be a great decision, but to be quite honest, it only happened because I lost focus in 2018 with the agency training, which slowed the agency’s growth.  We would have been a MONSTER if we had 4 years of focus heading into the pandemic!  We would have been unstoppable and been able to help even more restaurants in their biggest time of need.

The software acquisition was a must and a natural progression, but it benefits our agency clients mostly and had we been 10X larger, like we could have been, then our jet plane would have been a rocket ship 🙂

OUT OF ALL BAD COMES GOOD

I tell you all of the above to let you know that it yielded some great stuff.  The agency program, without a doubt, was an issue.  It caused a massive splitting of my attention, but we found many great employees from that group.  

The Pandemic getting me to pull the trigger on ABR will be the most significant decision ever to hit the restaurant marketing industry.  America’s Best Restaurants is a force and just getting started.   

And, a chance meeting with Kamron Karrington at a Las Vegas event hosted by David Scott Peters was the answer to our client’s biggest marketing woe, trackable LTV. 

WHAT’S NEXT

It’s easy to be a Monday morning Quarterback and to say, “What If?”  But the real exercise out of this for me was to really think about what to do next.  How do I finally take a few years, go deep into what we currently have, and learn to say NO?  

I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen restaurant owners go down this same path. They have one decent restaurant, and before making it HUGE, they run off and open three shitty restaurants.  Initially, I was writing this for our team only.  I did not have plans to publish it.  But then I thought, “What if I can help one restaurant owner avoid the temptation to open a second location too soon?”  So, with that, you have this blog. 

Good luck, my friends, you have my word; NO is the answer.  I’m taking the next eight years and digging into what we have on our plate.

 I’m calling this my Warren Buffet years.