The Overnight Success Myth Truth BBQ's Founders Want You To Know

Truth BBQ was built on two thousand dollars, zero sleep, and a decade of obsession, and this episode of Success Formula pulls back the curtain on exactly how it happened. Host Shawn Lynch sits down with Leonard Botello IV and Abbie Botello, founders of Truth BBQ, to unpack how they turned a two-table shack in Brenham into one of Houston's most awarded barbecue restaurants, and why this conversation matters right now for anyone building something of their own.

Leonard and Abbie walk through the early days of running Truth BBQ on almost no sleep, the two thousand dollar smoker pit that started it all, and the discipline required to earn a spot on the Texas Monthly Top 50 Barbecue list. They talk candidly about surviving the pandemic, the tax and insurance mistakes that nearly sank the business, the hardest hiring lessons they learned while scaling a small barbecue joint into a Houston institution, and why they have deliberately chosen not to expand into multiple locations. Shawn digs into how authenticity, word of mouth, and relentless consistency built a brand that Michelin, Texas Monthly, and thousands of loyal customers now recognize.

If you are building a business, a brand, or a career and want the real story behind the discipline it takes to succeed, subscribe to Official Success Formula for more conversations like this one. Listen to the full episode and explore the entire back catalog of the Success Formula podcast, and learn more about Truth BBQ directly on their website.
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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Most people know truth barbecue because of the lines, the brisket, and the awards, but what they don't know is what it actually took to build it. Every time I click on my 10 years to like 35 years, everyone sees the finished product, but no one sees the morning that started before sunrise.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

And you would say every two hours to take the breakfast and then go to the farmhouse, and you would go there and it's fitting on yourself.

SPEAKER_03 0:30

You can see the finished line, so you know that they're finished because I already know it.

SPEAKER_04 0:37

What does it really take to build one of the Americas?

SPEAKER_02 0:44

It's eight up until four o'clock in the morning, and I'm like crying on the couch, and we're just kind of like staring at each other like, what the F are we gonna do? If you ever had the dream to build something from nothing, we're 11 years old, and I feel like we're still in that middle every day because it's like the job is never done.

SPEAKER_04 1:01

You will not want to miss this episode. Take me back to the beginning. Tell me how you got started. Did you always want to be a chef?

SPEAKER_03 1:10

No, no, no, no. That was like the the very last thing on my list.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

I think people are always so disappointed that this was not Leonard's dream.

SPEAKER_03 1:18

Uh I mean you that's why it's a good story.

SPEAKER_04 1:21

I want to hear it. I mean, because a lot of people, you know, they're super passionate or they wanted to do it their whole life. And so like their dream to do this.

SPEAKER_03 1:30

No, I grew up grew up in restaurants and grew up in in hospitality, so I knew that side of the beasts. And I mean, you know everybody that has everybody that you know that has restaurants or is involved in restaurants or any any type of hospitality business, whether it's hotels, restaurants, whatever, they will all be like, don't do it. Um and it's not because they don't love it, it's the complete opposite. They I think they love it too much, and it's what drives them, and you don't know when to put it down. So I noticed that from a very early age. Um my parents did have good decent work work life balance. Um, but they were the same way. Like we grew up in small towns, both of us, and it was like you gotta get out of here. So it was like uh and we were during the same era of like you it's college or or ex. Like there's only two options. Um so went to AM to not get into restaurants, and how did you go to AM for? Uh biology.

SPEAKER_04 2:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 2:40

When you graduated, you moved home to help run the restaurants.

SPEAKER_04 2:43

Yeah. Yeah. So your parents owned restaurants and they still wanted you to go to college. Yeah. So that was always odd to me when like you have two entrepreneurial parents or just one, and like you have to go to college.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

Like But I think it's it's it was the boomer thing. Yeah, right. It is, I think so too. And anybody who was born in the 80s, you know, but late 70s, 80s, and early 90s, your parents were just conditioned. The culture was you go to school. You're a loser. That's the mark of like the American dream at that point.

SPEAKER_04 3:10

So now if you don't go, you're you're you're wasted.

SPEAKER_03 3:13

Yeah, you almost felt like you weren't you weren't um smart enough or or capable enough to get into college, but that wasn't a fact. Like it was either you sometimes you just didn't want to go. Like uh, but that guilt, I think, of like feeling like you were dumber than the rest of your friends, like you just pushed through it.

SPEAKER_04 3:31

Like nobody wanted to feel like that back then because you I went for a little while because I was like it's kind of the same thing. I'm going, well, uh, you know, maybe this is what you're supposed to do. I want to teach myself about business. Maybe I'll go here.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

Man, I was dying to go to college.

SPEAKER_04 3:41

Man, I lasted three or four months. It was terrible.

SPEAKER_03 3:44

And my college experience was it wasn't bad. I just I I work better under pressure. So of course I would study, study, study, not retain anything until the exam date is set. And then, you know, two days before the exam, it's like dumping everything. It's just not healthy to work like that.

SPEAKER_04 4:03

Um so you you do four years, finish, yeah, go back home. What's the plan of that?

SPEAKER_03 4:09

Worked with my parents for a little while. Uh my dad got diagnosed with like he was very far along in diabetes, uh, but he didn't he didn't know. So he was developing cataracts and doing so he needed to step away for a little while to like focus on himself. So I jumped in and, you know, worked around that and got a little bit more familiar with what type of restaurant? Uh just like mixed American. It was just like a kind of like a little bit of everything of a s like a small town restaurant that you can kind of go get steaks or pasta or sandwich burger, like whatever, um, a little bit more elevated. Um so I never wanted to do it, but as a child, like growing up, it still looked really cool. So like I would always beg my parents, like, you know, before I was 16 to, you know, go in there and wash dishes or go in there and roll silverware, or go in there, and like I they I had to like beg them because they're like, you can't really do it until you're 16. And then finally they were like, you know what? Like I I noticed that at the end of the shift, like part of their side duties was rolling silverware and they hated it. They they just it was like the end of the night and they all wanted to like go out or like get off work, do whatever, and it's 11 p.m. And I would notice that the bus boys would um do their sidework, like they would roll the silverware and they would take it, like they would put out a tip jar for like anybody that would they would cover their sidework for like whatever 50 rolls, 100 rolls of silverware, they'd be like, Here, I'll purchase that from you. And um I asked my parents if I could do that, and I did that like pretty consistently. It was like my little side hustle that I enjoyed doing, but it was a way for me to grab, you know, like 15, 20 bucks in a night. That was like a lot for me, be you know, under under 10 years old. It's like, oh wow, that's a lot, it's a lot of money. Um, so I always wanted to be in there just because my I think my parents were always in there and always seemed cool, and it was always like a younger crowd that was working in there, so it seemed really cool. A lot of people were coming back from college and they were, you know, working on their summer or whatever. So you always want to hang out with when you're a freshman, you want to hang out with seniors. So it was like kind of like that mentality, I would say. Um, but I could see how much work went into it. You know, parents are always either at the restaurant late or having to go to the restaurant late or go to there super early. And my parents are like, yeah, you just you don't want to do that, and we don't want that for you. So would you go take your ass to school? Um and came back, and that was when barbecue s really started booming, I think, in 2012-2013. Um Aaron moved out of the trailer at Franklin's barbecue in Austin, and John Lewis and Leanne Mueller and uh Allie were starting law barbecue out of a trailer in Austin as well, and they were kind of um that big movement of like people waiting in line in the summer heat for like three, four hours was like just starting to take off, but it like got me super curious, and I went and had that experience and went through the motions, and I was like, man, it wasn't the food that got me, like the food was really, really good. Like the food was especially if you have craft barbecue for the first time, I I'll still consider it like in my top five meals, I would say. Um, because it was like all the barbecue that I had had growing up as a child, and then this new version of it, I'm like, man, this is not not the same at all. It's like when you have a you know, like a nothing against a saltgrass steak. But if you grew up on saltgrass or like any of those like restaurants that have a nice ribeye, and then you go to a steakhouse, it's like yeah, pretty life-changing.

SPEAKER_04 7:58

This is a huge difference.

SPEAKER_03 7:59

Yeah. Um, but it was more the culture that got me of like everybody standing in line and like talking about all their experiences and then talking about times that they had barbecued and like family memories that they shared and like people that they brought to the restaurant. So I thought the culture aspect is what really drew me in. Um and then from there I I had an uncle, just like I tell everybody. Um, everybody has somebody that barbecues in their family, and they usually are the best in the family. And uh my uncle was a welder over at he worked at BASF um and he welded a pit and it was really, really nice. Um, and I asked him if I could borrow it, and and he let me borrow it, and I went and just got fixated on it after that. And it kept going and going and going.

SPEAKER_04 8:52

Well, then what gave you the idea to open the first location? So you got the pit, you started barbecuing, started master trying to master.

SPEAKER_03 9:00

I think I think it was at that point it became a game, and it was like get a job where I have like a nine to five, or like I'm in an office or something. Because like the dream was I always thought it was super cool when pharmaceutical companies would come into the restaurant and they would wine and dine all the doctors or medical sales. I was like, man, these guys are ballers. Like they're just they're like, no, no, we got the check. Like they're so I always thought I was like, man, there's definitely some money to be so that was the direction that I really wanted to go into because I saw them like rent out private rooms, they would do it, and they would do the whole song and dance and like do the pitch. And I was like, man, that seems not too bad. That doesn't seem like that bad of a job.

SPEAKER_02 9:39

I can't imagine you as a salesperson.

SPEAKER_03 9:41

Um, yeah, because I I would I don't think I'd be good at it.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

No, it's hilarious. Like it's not your favorite thing to do at all.

SPEAKER_03 9:47

But it just seemed like really, really easy money, like money grab almost. Like it was like, man, I get to take these people out, show them a good time, and they just buy stuff off me. Like that was my thy thought process of sales. Um, and I like kind of weighed the two out. And and at that time, barbecue, I was like reading all the books, like all the things, like and it's like you read all the business books and like all all those, like they're only guidelines. Like they're just telling you a certain guideline. There's not a specific formula, you have to decipher that formula and apply it to your business in order for it to work. And the same thing with barbecue, like there's all types of cookbooks, but you're not gonna have the same equipment, you're not gonna have the same tools, you're not gonna have the same, you know, produce, proteins, whatever. So those all play a variable into the big picture.

SPEAKER_04 10:34

Um depends on your first location that you decided to open. Why Brenham, or why was it the location that you chose, like why in that part of Texas?

SPEAKER_03 10:46

I bounced back and forth from Houston and Austin, and that's like there wasn't like a lot of craft barbecue in Houston at the time. And I mean Austin.

SPEAKER_02 11:01

It was needed to be. It was kind of like the Austin.

SPEAKER_03 11:04

There was like a gap between you know all the places going to Austin if you were traveling to Houston. So there's like a barbecue trail if you're going up on 290. There's a lot of s older places like Snow's and Louis Muller's and City Market and all, but there was like a gap in between Houston and Austin. Um, so there was that that part of it. Um, and then it was also like Austin was like Houston Rockets when Elijah won and Drexler and all like that championship. So not really a pond, you just want to jump into immediately. So my my fear was like just getting drowned out. Like these guys are already established and they've like started this movement of craft barbecue. And I just didn't want to be another person or another restaurant that was just like kind of in the mix. Um, and the money was definitely not there.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

So Brenham was affordable. Was and white space. We call that white space now.

SPEAKER_03 12:03

Was the was the location already there and he just lease it? Yeah. Uh it was a it was uh previously a barbecue restaurant, and um he wanted to sell it and uh it had been in the family for I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 12:18

It was a long time, something like 20 years, but you you have to say like restaurant. You know, it was previously a place that definitely served barbecue that the community loved. Yeah. But it I wouldn't, you know what I mean? Like it's it's so different, especially like what you ended up going in there doing.

SPEAKER_04 12:33

I was about to say, how big is it? No, the actual re the location that you picked.

SPEAKER_02 12:40

Yeah, it's about the size of this room.

SPEAKER_04 12:41

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's tiny.

SPEAKER_02 12:43

It's literally, I think, exactly the size of the like if you bump out that wall for the closet and just go to that back wall.

SPEAKER_03 12:49

That might be the front dining room, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:50

Right. Like where the cameras are, this would be the front.

SPEAKER_04 12:54

There was two tables and Leonard would cut and you used to have like a cooking area in the back that's covered, and it would be there's a pit outside on the outside with like a like a lean to.

SPEAKER_02 13:04

So the did he have a pit before? Because you brought your own pit.

SPEAKER_03 13:07

Uh it was all direct heat cooking, so it was like a big it was like a big rectangle box. I think it was like probably 15 feet long or so. And it was a much different style of barbecue. So he would load like B and B charcoal on the bottom of the box, put the grates over the top. He would load it about three o'clock, four o'clock in the morning, then put briskets on, and then they'd be ready by you know, service at 11 a.m. So it was super hot and fast and like almost almost grilling to a certain point. Um so when I went in there, uh the transition was very rough, I would say.

SPEAKER_04 13:44

Because so the first day you take over, what happens?

SPEAKER_03 13:46

Uh the first day you open for business change of name. It was it was good, it was positive and negative feedback. Um, you have some customers. I mean, Brynham was very, very small. If you would ask me now if Brynham was gonna be the like the downtown and everything was gonna be the way it is now, I would have been like, no, not a chance, not a chance. Like it was much older crowd.

SPEAKER_02 14:05

It felt it felt so different back then. I mean, yeah, it felt like it was always gonna be that. I used to run the register for him on the weekends because he couldn't afford to pay anybody. Burnham felt so different. Now Brennan, Brynham almost feels like cosmopolitan. I would move there.

SPEAKER_03 14:18

Brenham feels hipster, like there's a lot of younger people, there's a lot of cool shops that are going in there.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

Tons of cool little hipster restaurants.

SPEAKER_04 14:24

My cousin has a hotel downtown under contract, a historic one.

SPEAKER_02 14:27

Oh, I saw the I saw I didn't realize you were late. I saw the post. They're gonna do that's a great place. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:31

He's a great investment. He has that and he's doing a huge expansion on it. So it's gonna be beautiful. He's he's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 14:37

And that whole area where they're located, like he's a rock star.

SPEAKER_04 14:40

He said the same thing, it's just close to round top, like if it's close, it's outside Austin, there's just like no places.

SPEAKER_03 14:46

There's a there's a gap. And and especially like if you want to stay somewhere, it's it's far enough from Houston where the scenery changes, so you get a little bit and same with Austin, like they like the drive change. But then if you want to hop on the road and get to Austin, it's like an hour 15 minutes away. So it's like I know what happens.

SPEAKER_02 15:01

I just told Laura, I'm like, I can't wait to tell Leonard that I'm ready to open another short-term rental property on Round Talk.

SPEAKER_04 15:07

Did you all have one?

SPEAKER_02 15:08

We did. We had um we bought a place called so when we were in Brenham, I moved down here from New York City, which was big culture shock. And and we had gone from like dating to living together, and we were living in Austin, and Leonard would drive to we were living in downtown East Austin. Leonard would drive to Brenham on a Tuesday night to start, or like a Tuesday to start. He'd receive the briskets, he'd trim the briskets, he'd season the briskets. So if you're a one-man band, which he was, you know, it takes you three days to prep for your your days of being open.

SPEAKER_04 15:46

And so are you open Friday, Saturday, Sunday?

SPEAKER_02 15:49

Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So, you know, for Friday, you're cooking, you're going on at 6 a.m., 5 a.m. 4 a.m. on Thursday morning. So Tuesday and Wednesday were all prep, you know, seasoning, trimming, doing the whole thing, getting the brisket ready, but also ribs, sausage, pork rib, uh, pork ribs, beef ribs, pulled pork, turkey the whole nine. And then he cooked it all. And he slept on a cot in the in the restaurant in front of the counter. And he would sleep every two hours, rotate the brisket, and then go to his parents had a farmhouse like on the way to the Kenny store in Brenham, like past the Walmart. And he would go there and shower. So I we were long distance. I moved down here, and I would always say that I was a a barbecue widow because I moved here to be with my boyfriend and like make a real go of the relationship. But he was in Brenham five days a week, you know, because he went from, you know, prep and cook straight through to service. And then Sunday night he'd get on the road about 6 p.m. And so we'd we'd literally have dinner on Sunday night. He'd sleep for most of the day on Monday because he was so exhausted. And by Tuesday, he's going back, right? And I was still working my job at Samsung. So I ran the register for him because at some point I was like, well, I'm only gonna see this dude if I go down to the restaurant and like hang out in there with him. And so then I started doing that and I would stay at the farmhouse on the weekend so that we could like see each other. I'd be like, let's just go to let's just go to dinner at 96 West. And he'd be like, I I can't. I have to cook briskets. And I'm like, can't you just leave them? Like, can't you just leave them on the pit? Like, it's just an hour, and I'd be like pulling teeth. And so that Brenham to today and that round top to today is very different, but it introduced me to like all of Central Texas way of life, and I fell in love with Roundtop. And several years later, the opportunity to buy property came up and it had a bunch of cottages on it that um much like Brenham, Leonard and I literally went in and by hand remodeled in the course of seven months. We we put like 250K into this whole, it was like three-acre property, five units, and we named it Hotel BB, Byron Botello, and uh ran it for four years. We just sold it a year ago. I did tell Laura, I was like, I'm looking at listings. Don't tell Leonard.

SPEAKER_04 18:13

She is too. She's really trying to do it.

SPEAKER_02 18:15

Well, because we talked about doing something together for a long time, but we ended up selling it because we were like, man, truth is growing. Houston is so massive and it hasn't reached its peak. Like, we're not on the top of the bubble yet in Houston. Brenham went from I I want you to tell Sean because I actually don't remember the answer to this. Like, how many people do you serve your first day? But from whatever like you went from on your first day to where Brenham is now, it was all just so big, and and we were expanding and doing the Texans partnership. So it was like, man, running your short-term rental, especially when it's Airbnb in a in a travel town like that, is just like running a restaurant. And we had to let go of one.

SPEAKER_04 18:54

Yeah, focus to feed the others. It's super hard. Like I'm I'm terrible at that. I try to always do too much, and uh that was my biggest downfall. Same in my 20s.

SPEAKER_02 19:03

Yeah, same.

SPEAKER_04 19:04

So it's there's a better way for sure. And uh if you if you focus on something, I can usually become really great.

SPEAKER_02 19:11

He's he's the focused one, like he's like I'm disciplined and focused, but like I have ideas. He was so focused on barbecue, like you could have stayed in the Brenham store forever.

SPEAKER_04 19:22

Yeah, eat just refining, eat, sleep, yeah, make barbecue. I like for mood. Well, for everybody listening, that's what an overnight success looks like. 10 years of eating and sleeping and breathing what you're trying to do, and then it were will it will work out one day. Everybody's like, it's it happened kind of quick.

SPEAKER_03 19:42

I'm like, and there is happen kind of quick. I was like, but it feels tight. Tell it to the guy that was sleeping on the floor 10 years feel like 35 plus years. Um it wouldn't it went slow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:52

So how many people ate at that restaurant the first day?

SPEAKER_03 19:55

I mean, we gotta think like I think it was like we would probably cook like three to five racks of ribs, maybe five briskets, like maybe like a handful of sausage. Like we're not talking about Did you sell out? Hundred, no, it took a long time like to build up to that sell out model, and like it just it was hard because they were so used to the barbecue that they had previously had, which was hot, fast, a cheaper cut of meat. So I'm not I'm not gonna say it was uh drier, it was just not cooked fully. It was different style. Very classical.

SPEAKER_04 20:28

Whenever you come in and change anything anywhere that people have been doing for a long time, whether it's food or anything else, there's always people that are mad. Yeah, don't like change. And we'll say it's it's it's everything. Yeah, the neighbors don't like something. It even if it's better, even if it's better for the city, even if it's better for the community, even if it's like better food, anything, people just don't like change.

SPEAKER_03 20:47

It's like there's gonna be a handful of people that yeah, it was it was familiar for them, and they they knew what they were getting. So when started sourcing, you know, much higher quality product that comes with much more fat internally and all the muscles, and it's very, very rich. So when you're comparing one to the other, yeah, one seems much more greasy than the other. So it seems too fatty, it seems too greasy, it's just not what they're used to.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

But it was you had to do a lot of education. I feel like that was your first two years in Brynham, it was like it's the same but different, you know, like we're doing different things.

SPEAKER_04 21:25

What was the moment that you realize it was, you know, growing out of a passion project and and turning into a real company? Probably like a week ago.

SPEAKER_03 21:37

I think I think that I I think it like I think that thought process is still there. So it's always hard for us to it we always have to take a step back and like remove ourselves from it because we still think of it as that two table restaurant. So you never feel like you need the things that you actually need. So you have to constantly remind yourself that you have. outgrown that or you're at that position that you're talking about, even though you don't actually feel like you're there.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

And I think that's a big hurdle that a lot of people I mean, I personally, we both personally because you're like, when did when did it grow from a passion project?

SPEAKER_04 22:15

But when it sort of turned into like a when you when you that had that feeling. It was always a remote.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

He's right. Like we didn't actually have that mindset that like, oh shit, this is like a very large company with with a large revenue you know number. And I think that happened like 24 months ago. Yeah it was it was that we kind of woke up and say yeah it was very recent because we always were like how many people that were for me you're not that was part of it.

SPEAKER_03 22:44

It was like oh we've got 70 we've somebody let us have 73 employees why you just are so and I'm sure you've you've been in this it's like normal normal like you you you're in the growth phase so it's normal to you and you're just going through it and then you just wake up you're like wait when did we get all these people? When did we why do we need all these positions? Why do we and then you're the restaurant the barbecue but then you you also have to realize that you're coming a little unhinged because you are pushed to the max.

SPEAKER_02 23:13

Very unhinged.

SPEAKER_03 23:14

So there's you know I'm sure hundreds of different ways to do barbecue what made you decide that like that was the exact way to cook it or the type of smoker or like explain that I don't think there was um and I always I think I found this out this past year uh talking through therapy. Um when I was a child I had crippling OCD like bad OCD like I would like um would wash my hands like until they were dry like I had to flip light switches on a certain like even numbers like I like would keep me in line.

SPEAKER_04 23:51

I was pretty bad but I wasn't I didn't yeah I wasn't to that point but gentry always messes with me. I I got better over time.

SPEAKER_03 23:58

Yeah um so you probably did the same thing that I realized that I did um so mine were like I had to tie my shoes a certain amount of times or like I always felt like something bad was going to happen. I knew nothing bad was going to happen. And so as a child I was like I know this is wrong. I know this is like super weird when you're looking at me doing these things. So I would like try to change them and I think over time I decided to turn it off but I turned it off in ways that people couldn't see it and didn't realize it and then it rolled into other things and then it rolled into barbecue where it was like super like it has to be right here has to be in the same line as the next one and the next one has to be right and the next one. Because barbecue is all it is is keeping a perfect environment for twenty four to you know twenty-six different briskets and cooking them all the exact same even though they're all completely different.

SPEAKER_02 25:01

And also that environment is never going to repeat itself. It's a different perfect environment you have to create every single day.

SPEAKER_03 25:08

So I think that OCD like that comp like that obsessive compulsive like it's got to be like this got to be like this it created more discipline and more structure in that but I didn't realize that it was just I never got away from it. It just bled into a lot of other things.

SPEAKER_04 25:27

You know what uh you know a lot of people I've interviewed a lot of people that I'm friends with you know a lot of really successful entrepreneurs actually have some form of like that or ADHD or just something that when they do yeah when they do find something it's like it's the channel really right but like hone in on it.

SPEAKER_02 25:46

Yeah and then you can do things for a long period of time when it's boring when nothing's working out and then you can just like work through the rest like he he was so you talk about discipline all the time he was so disciplined and that's how I was when I started something I was like I I can do like I can do this one thing for a long time.

SPEAKER_03 26:06

Well it's because you can I think you can you can see the finish line so you know that there's going to be a gap between between it and your thing is just how long is it going to take me to get over this hump? Yeah. Because I already know the results and I know the key that's going to get me there.

SPEAKER_04 26:21

So that's everything I've always been good at like I I I you know the path changes a little bit but I'm like I I still see the outcome yeah uh you know and you pivot and things change kind of and and figure it out but it's kind of what I'm doing with the online thing. Like I I know the outcome right but it's like learning and you know different things change but yeah the part's the same thing the the the part that sucks is the middle part of like all the learning that's where everybody gets up but that's where everybody gets that work and it's I'm not doing as good as I thought I was like nobody likes it. It's like and then you still keep going and then you still push through it and then you I feel like we're still in the middle you know like people and I and I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel that way like people wouldn't maybe look at truth barbecue on the outside and be like oh they're still in the thick of figuring in it out you know they wouldn't we're we're 11 years old um last week actually we're 11 years old at the Brennan location and we'll be eight at the Houston location in January and I feel like we're still in that middle every day because it's like uh the job is never done you know you can always improve you can always improve in our business there is something that we can tweak fix adjust make better every single day and that can be a functional or executional item you know as it relates to cooking or that can be our service model and the way we're relating to guests that can be you know our leadership model it's it's everything so we're stronger stronger in the middle stronger culture stronger everything absolutely especially in hospitality like you said earlier where like everything matters so much about how that when the person the experience when they go into the restaurant and it's like how do you recreate that all the time all day long between every single customer that comes in there which seems extremely hard but you know y'all let me bring the boys camp that I did you know teaching them about life skills and and financial literacy and a little bit of business but but mainly life skills and what was cool is they got to see the morning like team meeting and then saw your general manager like how he fired everybody up and how he got everybody motivated and then announced like quick wins and then announce things you can improve on and like but everybody was and then he's calling on people to answer questions about the company's history and then he's you know a lot of really awesome stuff that uh I y'all had a great culture there.

SPEAKER_02 28:42

Yeah that's it that's a new tool that we we've all it's called pre-shift in restaurants and we we've always done pre-shift I'd say for like I don't know four or five years. We didn't do it in the beginning because we're so small and we still had that mindset of like we're so tiny and this is what you see at like this is what underbelly does you know that this is what's happening at Uchi right when you have these big staffs that you have to unite and get on the same page for like a service shift. But it was all always kind of like I mean in the beginning it was Leonard and and one or two other people and and like me, you know we're not doing pre-shift and we finally started doing it in Houston because we were like oh we need this we need this tool we need to communicate in a certain way with the staff and not everybody comes in with their game face on and so you got to help them sometimes we'll never right you know if you want to help them get there. When you have that many people working for you everybody has a problem that day somebody's getting divorced somebody's getting divorced somebody's getting pregnant somebody had a miscarriage like it's just so I'm asking a lot of these guys it's just so much life I don't I don't think most of us restaurant workers, owner operators even corporate hospitality teams I'm not sure that any of us in our industry that we rail against some of the injustices you know that our our companies can face our our employees can face. I'm not sure we were talking before COVID about how hard it is for our teams to do their jobs. Meaning be the person, the main point of contact with every customer from every walk of life in every state of mood or what have you every day.

SPEAKER_03 30:25

And no matter what happens in your personal life always keep a smile on.

SPEAKER_02 30:28

That's right. You're supposed to be so happy and somebody you know COVID really like laid bare that everybody was having a hard time with something and everybody was angry about something and we you know we want to say things like we're more united than we are separate. But like COVID made it hard for certain industries to really feel that and so when we started doing pre-shift which was after COVID and it wasn't in relation to that I do think we'd started as an industry of of operators and owners and general managers and you know leadership teams looking at our employees in a light of their job is so much harder than you know that that um communication and that interpersonal aspect is so much harder than anybody thinks it is. And so when we do pre-shift it's not just about getting everybody on the same page it's like getting everybody ready for battle.

SPEAKER_04 31:26

Yeah that's what it felt like and it was really awesome for the kids to see that. Really really awesome because it's one thing to go into a business and learn to check out people and they're learning like you know each job that somebody does but it's it's another thing to like see like the teamwork and how the manager's like le trying to lead someone and uh all the things that go into that to like get somebody ready for battle which is the business day.

SPEAKER_03 31:48

Yeah. And we have so many people that I mean not just us all around the hospitality industry because even when we were going to college and even before that I mean it was even worse before that it's like well I can't get a job anywhere else I'm gonna work in a restaurant and a lot of people don't realize now like that job that you're thinking is just an hourly job whether it's a bus or whether you know what it whatever it is you know wherever you're starting that I mean if you go into the right organization there's so much I mean it's just like any other you know any other job that you can you can grow into a position that you didn't even think was available. And that pre-shift is a little bit more about empowering them to use their voice of like what they're seeing, you know, keeping that culture and making them feel a little bit more involved so they're looking at all the same things. If you're just in there pounding your chest during pre-shift they're just doing exactly what you're telling them to do and not looking at you. Just going through the motion they're not really looking at it you know from their point of view as well which might be a gap that you have.

SPEAKER_02 32:56

We want them to have passion for it too like we understand we talk about this a lot we understand exactly what Leonard was just saying that sometimes when you're passing through the hospitality industry which there are a lot of you know pass throughs it's a formative experience when you're younger you know it can sometimes be a bridge when you're older if something's going on and maybe you leave your career maybe you move you know in my other line of work maybe you have a child that's sick and so you you're working part-time at night there's a lot of reasons that I think the hospitality industry has a little bit of that negative connotation about it kind of being a band-aid but you know our generation and I and I think the culture in the industry right now is we're trying to develop these teams to be really passionate and see a really strong career path and growth opportunities. You know, I was a waitress my first job was bussing tables at like a French restaurant when I was 15 because it was the only job my parents would let me have because it was two blocks from my house and I could walk to it and they could stop by anytime make sure I was at work. And so I like waited tables and cocktailed and bartended and did all these things through college and I said to a friend that I worked with one time at an Irish pub, I've told you this story, but I said to a friend one time, you know, I was about to graduate from college and I was like well you know like when I get my real job and she had just gone through a divorce she was really young. She'd been a dental hygienist um you know great career in healthcare and had a had a degree from dental school and she yanked me I was like probably like 21 she yanked me into the wait station and she said little girl let me tell you something and she was like a real job is a job that pays the bills. Don't come in here telling people this is not a real job and like you know she really like schooled me she really educated me and I was like too young to absorb the lesson but I've never forgotten it. You know I never thought that I would end up in this life with with him where I would be building this for my own team and and saying like you can be proud of this and like if you have other dreams and other goals we're gonna help you get there and we're gonna support you. We're gonna give you skills in here that you can use out there. But also anything you want in this arena we can help you build and get you to management, get you to sales, get you to the creative side of the industry you know if you want to do menu design and you're a graphic designer, you know, and I I think that's really important when it goes back to why we do something like pre-shift.

SPEAKER_03 35:27

Yeah you're not gonna get the passion that you want out of hourly employees if they're just coming and looking at it as a job versus an opportunity to and they think that you just think that they're there to fill a gap.

SPEAKER_04 35:39

Yeah goes back to the old days where you thought when you graduated college you're gonna get your real job.

SPEAKER_02 35:47

Yeah I'm still waiting I got told and what's so funny is I wish I wish that um I knew where she was now and I could talk to her now because I'd be like whatnot you know you know but that that thing has always stuck with me and I think it um we both have reasons for what informs us about how we approach like our team and and leadership and what we're trying to do to like mentor and encourage and grow. And I I think it's all rooted in in the idea that like this is such a valuable industry and and people are valuable. So you've got to show them that.

SPEAKER_04 36:18

You know as I was talking about how that AI job thing was happening, you know, as we're saying you know restaurants are one of the hardest business in the world and it it it it truly is like I I mean me and Gentry go all on the time I I have a lot of friends that are uh restaurant owners and so I know how hard it is and I also had run businesses in every other industry and I couldn't even imagine like that that has to be one of the hardest for sure. But it's funny how the new world will probably like these will become more valuable the uh the experiences and I mean look at the restaurants and stuff. Yeah like major food group you know the just the experiences I think that um restaurants just become more and more or like you know a a customer service hospitality based restaurant in in certain style food of course you're gonna have like the fast casual stuff that's just gonna be robots and like different but I think people are going to pay a lot of money for for the experience. If someone was crazy enough to want to get in the food industry don't do it. Well let's say they are let's say they worked in restaurants and they want to start should they start with a a food truck should they start with catering should they go and try to open a restaurant if maybe it's a chef or something always asked like this.

SPEAKER_03 37:26

And I think I've always thought that just anybody in general not even being interested in going into restaurants when we're talking about those trade schools or we're talking about electives like in high school and junior high I always tell people that the younger generation going through school before they even get to college like an elective should be having to work in a restaurant because if you wait tables or if you're a cashier for you know even for a month you really get a new perspective on life and you really slow down before you start climbing down somebody's throat you you know you really pivot well.

SPEAKER_04 38:08

Any sale in any sales in customer service when you're young like just good experience. I think it's good for rejection I think it's good in general for like communication skills amazing like anything that you can do like that when you're younger is going to be beneficial forever. But getting started?

SPEAKER_02 38:22

Yeah you know in a restaurant business today like go in with your lowest lowest risk possible that's what we would say today. I think like years ago we would have been like you just start you you just you just go do.

SPEAKER_03 38:38

I mean we're both years ago there's different movements. So there was the food truck movement is still it's bigger in Austin. I don't really see it here in Houston as much it's different here.

SPEAKER_02 38:48

It's in like pockets and communities but in Austin it's still a food trucks are still a major dining destination. The biggest question we actually have um two employees that are married um that are also close friends that are leaving our organization two weeks and they're two managers. And so and I think that's how it happens a lot of times they're moving to they're from well they're from Houston but they've been in Austin they came back to kind of work with us for a while and they're going to start their own venture and you know for them they started thinking about a brick and mortar and ultimately landed you know it spent a lot of time really thinking and planning for a brick and mortar but ultimately you know landed on the idea of a food truck and I think for somebody looking to get into the business it makes a lot of sense your your entry cost if you're crowdfunding it if your parents are helping you if you have a little money saved up your entry cost to doing that and starting your own business is so significantly lower. And it is something that feasibly you could do on your own like like our friends are they're doing it by themselves.

SPEAKER_04 39:53

You're not guaranteeing a five year lease and if you go under in year one you're you owe the rest of the the landlord's going to sue you.

SPEAKER_02 39:58

And that that once you get the operation going that overhead is so significantly different. So I think you know asking that question today we would be like manage your risk know what you're getting into because the like anything you know a restaurant is like a vintage or a classic car. It requires like the physical space requires constant maintenance and something is always broken.

SPEAKER_03 40:26

And I think it's it it applies to different people. So I a lot of people think that pop-ups are the way to go. I think pop-ups are they kind of pigeonhole you because you have all this control over everything you can make the highest quality product that you can do. You're in a bubble and you're in the finite time you get to control what days you're gonna pop up, what when you feel most comfortable when you're on your best rainy you don't have to do it. When you're at your best that you always get to control that. So if you're controlling when you're at your best all the time and that's what your food is reflecting then you go from pop-up and then you go into a food truck or restaurant where you have to be on all the time that's what they're expecting. Every pop-up that you did where they had an amazing experience they're expecting that Tuesday through Sunday now. So while it might work it's a double-edged sword it's a good way to grow and to see you know like your pars, your traction, your you know your customer interaction but it it opens up the doors to a lot more and then you have less control. You're out you're adding in variables of employees you're adding in variables of of a building you know how many customers are you taking in at one time. So it's it's very difficult to say what's a good entry it's it's like she said it's like which risk do you want to take they're all risky.

SPEAKER_02 41:46

An important point that we talk about with our team a lot because we've had a lot of employees come to us over the years and say like this is this is my dream. And it's not barbecue always um in fact it's mostly not barbecue.

SPEAKER_04 41:57

We've had a couple of our team members come through and say like well I want to open a barbecue joint one day but most of them are looking to open fine dining fast casual maybe a really curated concept whenever whenever I walked in the back I was like I don't know what the hardest job in the world is but it's already a hundred degrees outside feels like 110 in Houston and then you have a pit that's like three something the pit and the guys are back there 25 degrees and you're like holy shit like this is hard. Like this guy's here for 10 hours it's it's really really hard.

SPEAKER_02 42:31

So but I think man puts it a lot of stuff in perspective I was like this guy is like but that's the thing I think if somebody is gonna like I think restaurants are the only business I really think the only business where as an entrepreneur your best path is probably not just do it. Your best path is probably go somewhere where you can learn the business I agree with first. Do all the things right like okay maybe you don't really need to bust tables right like but go somewhere and work multiple positions and like understand food calls or go to your owner and be like I want to learn everything like will you teach me we've had a lot of people come through with that and they've either gone on to be executive chefs at other organizations you know in town they've gone on to open their own places they've gone on to go be partners in things in other states that to me because we're always about managing risk now of course we are we we the egg got too big. We are always trying to protect it but if somebody was coming that's the I I don't think that really applies to most most other industries. I think it's really in the blue collar space where it's like you kind of gotta learn the nuances you gotta you gotta crawl before you can walk and run.

SPEAKER_04 43:50

What's w when they do start what's something a first time restaurant owner underestimates you think insurance.

SPEAKER_02 43:57

Insurance oh my God that I spent Two years unwinding. Thank you, Mari, who's never going to listen to this unless I send her the link. But two years unwinding what we had, what we needed, how drastically underinsured we were and exposed to the world of just we we literally could have gone out of business at any minute just over insurance.

SPEAKER_03 44:20

I mean, there's so many things, just like in in your businesses where it's like people that get started, they think it's just about the food. But all the other things that are around it that can affect you being able to do your job, at that point, all you want to do is create the best customer service that you can. That's the one thing that you control. But then you think that everything else is not as important because you're trying to build that part of the business. But all of those little things that surround that little bubble that protect that little bubble are just as important, if not more, in order for you to do that job. And a lot of people, including ourselves, overlooked a lot of those things. And, you know, you learn lessons, and there's still we have to have conversations with people that want to, you know, get into restaurants, whatever. You know, we're like, have you lined out this insurance? Have you lined out like that?

SPEAKER_02 45:13

I'm like over here a one like one woman promotion, you know, circus of please get an umbrella policy. Yeah, please get a cyber policy. You know, I think the other thing we underestimated that comes in your growth phase that we never saw coming. And I think most of us entrepreneurs don't necessarily have like a team of advisors, you know, saying, hey, watch out for this. You don't necessarily have mentors. Um was the first year that we were taxed on our profits as owner operators. And we were like, hey, this is takes all your money out of it. This is really, this isn't right. You know, we we were talking to our accountant. I guess this is like um I went back. It was it was COVID years, you know, it was like five, six years ago. We got our return back from our accounting firm and we were like, oh, hey guys, we think you made a a big mistake. And they're like, What do you mean? We're like, what do you mean? You know, and all of a sudden we were on the hook for our restaurant profits, and we don't, you know, we we pay ourselves as employees and we pay ourselves as restaurant employees. And that was a that was a gigantic learning that we were not prepared for.

SPEAKER_04 46:21

My first e-com business that was a shocker to me because it was a heavy, it was heavy on the inventory. So we were doing really large volume and we had a ton and ton of inventory. And I remember the first year where we like grew like crazy, and I'm putting everything back into inventory because I'm like keeping up with growth. And this is early 20s, and they sent me a tax bill, and they're like, This is how much you owe. And I'm like, I spent it all on inventory.

SPEAKER_01 46:49

It's like, but they're like, where do you want that money to come from?

SPEAKER_04 46:52

I was like, it's a c it it's an expense. I spent it on inventory. Like, no, no, no, no, you chose to spend it on inventory. That was profit that you bought more inventory with. I'm like, well, that's all the money in my account.

SPEAKER_02 47:04

You know, for for very smart people, which the three of us are, and I I think most business owners and entrepreneurs, like, you know, there's a certain level of of intelligence that they have. You get surprised by things that seem like they should be so black and white, and they're not really.

SPEAKER_04 47:21

Well, go back to like the stuff I'm teaching these kids in my kid. It's like a lot of that common sense stuff, you know, nobody ever taught you. Like, nobody ever taught you anything.

SPEAKER_01 47:30

We don't have a tax class in high school, you know.

SPEAKER_04 47:34

Yeah, there's nothing. And so you ex uh that you kind of would expect that people wouldn't really know until they actually go through it and make a bunch of mistakes, and they're like, Oh, I'm not gonna do that anymore, or I'm gonna pay attention to it.

SPEAKER_03 47:44

That algebra really would have come in handy if there was a next course after on how to apply it.

SPEAKER_02 47:50

How much how much of your biology are you using in your I don't I don't I don't think I use anything from well, I might use my college degree a little bit more than most because of my what did you go to school for? Well, I got a journalism degree, you know. So I uh my life is in communication.

SPEAKER_04 48:05

I feel like communication is probably the the probably the best thing you could do anyways because you're gonna use it forever. It's you're gonna be, it's it this it's a skill that you're gonna use no matter what business you start.

SPEAKER_02 48:15

It served me well, but like the you know, when you're going into college at that freshman level and they give you those core competencies that they want you to take. It it it's shocking to me that in the last two decades the institutions haven't changed and said we really need to be graduating people with like financial literacy.

SPEAKER_04 48:32

I I think I think AI is gonna force a little bit of the change. I think it's not gonna be so, oh, we're gonna make you take all these just random stuff so we can drag it out forever.

SPEAKER_02 48:40

I did not need that PE course, you know.

SPEAKER_04 48:42

I think c I think colleges turn into more of like very specialized lanes. And so when you pay for something, you're like, I'm going to get this skill.

SPEAKER_05 48:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 48:50

Instead of just like all these general studies and then not really knowing.

SPEAKER_03 48:53

I think you're gonna have like I don't I think when we were doing it, and especially like you doing the stuff with the kids, I when we were going through college, like it was like you had an idea, and it was like, I think I know what I want to do. So here are all these classes, and then you gotta figure out.

SPEAKER_02 49:10

But like, unless you were going to be a lawyer, a doctor, yeah, also nobody pressured you to be like, um, this is the time that you gotta grow up and make decisions. I mean, I my brother and I changed our majors so many times. Everybody does that. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 49:24

Everybody on new did that. It's because you don't know, and you know, I tell that to a lot of people too, is it it should really shouldn't be that way because when you graduate when you're 18, you have no skill. And so how do you expect somebody to know what they want to do? Like they do nothing.

SPEAKER_02 49:37

They're so you also have no awareness of life.

SPEAKER_03 49:39

You're starting over from zero.

SPEAKER_02 49:41

You haven't been exposed to that.

SPEAKER_03 49:41

If you would have pitched me on finance when I was 16 to 18, I would have been like, oh yeah, I will a hundred percent go to school for that and I will do that.

SPEAKER_02 49:51

You don't realize that at finance, you would have been really great.

SPEAKER_03 49:54

You don't realize any of those, like any of those jobs that you think like you're not thinking about that at 16. That's why I think the thing that you're doing with the kids is good because it opens their eyes and they're like, oh, this is what they do.

SPEAKER_04 50:04

This is the that I just real life stuff that'll benefit them forever, and I think it'll give them a better shot at when they're 18 of knowing what a general idea of like, oh, you know what, I'm more interested in this and I've learned all these skills. And so it's like actually, you know, I think I do want to do this for life. So I don't know, it's hard for to expect an 18-year-old to know when the traditional system's really set up to like job comes in, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:26

After school job comes in.

SPEAKER_04 50:28

Like working early and in and working for an industry that you would like that you like and you want to get into. I tell parents that all the time, like, my kid's gonna lose, I don't know what he wants to do. He kind of thinks he wants to do real estate.

SPEAKER_05 50:38

I was like, tell him let him get a job.

SPEAKER_04 50:40

Well, I said, tell him to go work in real estate, tell him to go work for I said the best thing to do is work for a smaller company that you can be either close to the top management or the owner, or and that is the absolute best way. And then they're gonna even figure out if they like it or not before they go to college. And then if they do like it, they're gonna figure out the roadmap to do it, what not to do, because there's probably a handful of things that that company that they see is like, uh, you know, I could do these three things a lot better. And so you just get so much experience if you work for a small company. If you go work in the mail room for a Fortune 100 company, that's like it's not gonna really do much for you. But if you work for like a small company, like you say you have all these people that come in and they're like, hey, I want to teach teach me everything and I want to open my own restaurant and like they're learning everything about the business.

SPEAKER_02 51:22

We also have people come in that like they come in and they're like, Well, I wanna, you know, I want to work on the line. I really like dealing with people. Maybe they want to be on the cash register, maybe they want to be a bartender. You know, we often find an art organization that once they've kind of gotten culturally acclimated and you know, they're really enjoying their job at truth, they start thinking about like, I think I want to go work in the kitchen. I think I want to learn to cook, or or really the longest wait list in our company is to get into the pit room and have the hardest job. Everybody wants to work in the pit room.

SPEAKER_04 51:55

They they find it like when I walk through there, I'm like, these guys have the hardest job in the world. It's fulfilling. Uh you know, and I'm yeah, and I'm sure like you definitely have to like it.

SPEAKER_03 52:04

It sucks. It's a hundred and twenty five, hundred and we did a video with Bonapet came and shot for 24 hours at the restaurant from start to finish, like, went through a cook. I think they were about eight hours in, and they're like, We gotta we gotta take a break. And they're like, Why do you like this? I'm like, what do you what do you mean? They're like, why do you like doing this? I was like, I don't. They're like, so why do you do it? I was like, ah, it's like it's like cross-country running. Like, I don't think anybody actually enjoys training for marathons and going through marathons. Like the outcome. Yeah, it's like it's like when you get done at the race, it like feels very fulfilling. Like you finish a cook, you have a line out the door, you get to see the product, you get to see the interaction with the customers of like them being super excited about being there for the experience and trying that food for the first time, and then it's like, oh, all that work did pay off. So while it is very hard, it feels very validating at the end of it. But by no means is it fun at all. Like how do you divide responsibilities in a between you and her? What's what's the rules? She's more the communicator. I'm more of the hands-on like I I like to visionary. Yeah, I like to I I like to be able to do things. Like I can't I I'm very bad at delegating because I want to be able to like go through it first and do them and know that I can do them. Yeah. And it also helps.

SPEAKER_04 53:30

That was the case.

SPEAKER_03 53:30

Yeah, it it helps maybe.

SPEAKER_02 53:32

I do most of our like business operations and and it's the stuff that for some people like is gonna bore you to tears. And like for him, it would be like kryptonite. Like, he doesn't want to talk about HR or you know, hate that shit so much. Yeah, like our benefits program, our 401k, our business insurance. For me, hate all of it. And I think we've talked about this a little bit, but like I'm big on strategy and everything that I do. I'm a natural type A. I'm very planful. So those things kind of naturally, and with my corporate background anyway, they're not the most entertaining, but like I actually do get a lot of satisfaction out of working on that part of the company because I like really good infrastructure. I like really good organization.

SPEAKER_04 54:16

You're like gentry. She's uh opposite of me. Um, she's very, she plans everything, she's really good at operations, like just like the detail stuff to like set up systems and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 54:28

The communication like has to go hand in hand with that. I hate it.

SPEAKER_04 54:30

Yeah, I'm not good at that stuff, and I've learned that over the years. And not that I in my 20s I had to do everything because when you first start, you're kind of have to do everything. But that's where I got capped out, and that's where I love business so much, but you start not liking it because you're doing all these things that you're like, I don't really like to do any of this stuff, but you end up doing stuff you don't like. And then when I got out of that and I didn't, I'm like, I love everything again. This is great.

SPEAKER_02 54:53

Well, when when we were growing and I was always behind the scenes because I kept, you know, I was working on my own career in the corporate world and doing different things. You know, my my background is PR and marketing and like product launch. So I would always just like help him. And then we got to this inflection point where we'd just grown so much that it would be like, oh, we we need a website. And then it would be like, oh, we should, we should probably add this, we should probably do that. And then we started doing things like working on our our packaged goods line, like selling our our products outside of just like the experience in the restaurant. We started doing different things that naturally fell a little bit more into my wheelhouse and like covering, I think, those gaps so the business could grow. But like for Leonard, you know, his his thing is it doesn't, it can't like run without like a visionary, you know, that's behind it that's constantly reminding everybody like your your big thing is like the why, you know, and I think my big thing is the how, you know, and then stitching that together and working on that like brand story and working on, you know, what does the organization look like from the outside is kind of how we ended up dividing it, but we we fell into it and it was very imperfect and painful in the beginning, you know, because we're still just like chipping away at it, and like you learn to date and then you learn to like live together, and then you learn how to like be married, but like learning to do all those things and then learning to work together is a totally different ball game.

SPEAKER_04 56:24

I I don't know what it would be like if me and Gentry worked together. I always tell her I could never come into this business. I mean, she's at it for 15 years, it's just not something I would ever do, nor she would want me to do. But I always tell her, I'm like down the road, I was like, You're so good at everything I'm not good at. If if we ever had a business together, it would do really well. I'm telling you. Um, because it is, it's kind of the same situation. What did it actually end up costing when you first open that first? I'll call it a restaurant, but like the shack in Brenham, the the 400 square foot, 500 square foot building.

SPEAKER_02 56:57

Well, there's the price tag on the land.

SPEAKER_04 56:59

No, did you buy it? Yeah, uh eventually, but it was uh at least it was least owned like okay. Hey everyone, real quick, I just want to let you know this podcast is 100% independent. No ads, no sponsors, just real. If you're finding value in whatever we're doing here, the biggest help that you can give us is hitting subscribe and sharing this with someone who you think needs to hear it or someone that it will provide value to. That's how we continue to grow. And if you did that, I would really appreciate it. What was the startup cost? Did you just use your own capital?

SPEAKER_03 57:31

It was yeah, bought the pit, had your uncle weld the no, that pit was found on Craigslist and it was built in Houston, it was in Cleveland, Ohio. Um, that pit was 2,000 bucks, and it was I mean, you can buy that pit today and back then. So maybe $25 plus thousand dollars. And that was like one of the one pit makers that was making stuff back then, and it just happened to be in he was out of Houston, so I was looking for that pit and then uh found it in Cleveland, Ohio. And it was this elderly lady that was um going to it had been on Craigslist for a long time. Her husband had passed, right?

SPEAKER_00 58:10

She wanted to let go of it.

SPEAKER_03 58:11

Yeah, he retired and he wanted to go into like competition barbecue, and he only used it twice and he passed away, and we got up there and it was like all the grass was overgrown over the pit and it wasn't rusted or anything. It just was dust, like it just hadn't been used. It was outside, and she was like, I was literally contemplating scrapping it for metal this week and just cashing out on that. And that was a cool story because she just passed away like two and a half or so years ago. So that pit, she got to watch like the whole that was the And it it's still in service today in in the Brim. It's in front of it's in front of Brynham.

SPEAKER_02 58:54

So what else I mean you kind of did you just save up a little bit of money from working with your parents?

SPEAKER_04 59:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 59:01

Yeah, it was saved up, and then most of the stuff was like I always joke with Laura when she's doing like that tearing stuff apart and like painting, it was all that.

SPEAKER_02 59:11

Like I mean, I bet you started Brenham with like literally five thousand dollars. You didn't you have to understand Brenham early days No no I yeah, um all the all the equipment was like I mean it was like a Home Depot refrigerator that was 10 years old that came from you know it like it's funny because I don't think you can do that now. I think that it you could do that in another really rural small town, like somebody's gonna have that opportunity, but it's so much rarer. But like the stove was probably 10 years old, the fridge was probably you started with a stove, a fridge. How much did it cost to get that equipment that you had on the line?

SPEAKER_03 59:45

It wasn't much, but like I think it was it was purchase use, so probably like twenty five hundred, three thousand bucks, maybe, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 59:54

Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna I mean the tables and chairs were salvaged.

SPEAKER_03 59:58

Everything was refurbished, so didn't do anything to the building.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:01

His mom painted it, his mom painted the inside, you guys painted the outside.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:06

Yeah, a lot of cutting, a lot of things.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:08

We would just collect things over the years and like hang it in there. You know, we didn't have things on the tables for like napkins and stuff. We would just find it.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:16

Was there ever months, you know, at any point where you were didn't think you were gonna make payroll?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:21

We didn't have paper, yeah. Yeah, back then there was no payroll. We only had like one employee.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:26

He still works for us.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:27

Yeah, he still works for us.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:28

What about during COVID?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:30

COVID was scary, but it helped us learn a lot. Like because we're talking about a restaurant that wasn't open past 4 p.m. ever. Um we're talking about a restaurant that didn't do to go ever.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:42

And also Houston was only starting its second year. We'd only been in business for literally exactly 12 months.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:48

We didn't have any of the data for to go back on. You owe you still owed the lease. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:54

We weren't the yeah, we weren't getting like any our landlord wasn't negotiating, but it we we were still on the hook for everything. But like also COVID was interesting because we had two very different businesses all of a sudden. Like they were the same product and they were the same name, but they were two incredibly different businesses.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:12

So like yeah, it forced us out of our comfort zone. It was all the things that I was gonna do. It was all the things that we didn't want to do. Like our it was always like we want the customer interaction going through the line, trying to buy the brisket for the first time, eating it in the dining room so it, you know, it's not being packaged up and they're taken home and the experience changes. So we wanted to be able to keep all of that in-house and control all that in-house as much as possible. And then COVID hit, and that was off the line. You can't do that. And luckily for us, people were super loyal to barbecue during COVID because it was a familiar product and everybody knew that it held very well. And then when we started to think about it, we're like, well, we're already wrapping up everything in butcher paper when people come through line that they want it to go. So it forced us to do curbside, it forced us to do online ordering, it first forced us to do. I mean, we had a pivot. The whole business changed.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:10

The whole the whole business changed like almost overnight. I remember, I remember the day, everybody remembers the day. We were pretty much all sitting in front of ATV somewhere, right? And I it was like roughly like March 13th. And Leonard was at work, and I was working for Brigham at Wastewell. I was his VP of marketing. And so I was kind of already in the thick of it on the health side, right? Because Brigham was one of those early visionaries that kept seeing the gaps 10 miles before everybody else did. But Wastewell had decided to send everybody home like a few days prior. So we were kind of already starting that work from home space. And I was sitting on our couch in our brand new house, by the way. Our first flip that we have spent all of our money on. I've cashed my 401k out for the whole nine. And um, we'd been in that house for three months.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:01

Yeah, I think when we'd been in the restaurant for 12. When that hit when that like announcement came on TV. I'm like sobbing in front of the TV. I came out, it was like, oh fuck.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:12

You came home, you came home from work really because we were still sellout model and everybody died off in line. So you came home from work super early that day. It was like two o'clock. Normally he would get home like six, seven o'clock in the evening. And I'm like crying on the couch, and we're just kind of like staring at each other like, what the F are we gonna do? We stayed up until like four o'clock in the morning working on a website, which I had always led teams building websites, and I had passing knowledge of like WordPress and Square, but like, but we did it, and um like Leonard said, the whole business changed overnight. But I feel like the first like the first five, six maybe months of COVID were like pens and needles. You know, and then all of a sudden I think we just hit our stride, and we didn't talk about it for a really, really long time because our story wasn't common in our space, you know, and so we we were just always like hyper aware of what our friends in the industry were going through. We were hyper aware of concepts that weren't able to pivot as easily as we are. I mean, barbecue saved us because for most of America outside of Texas, barbecue is a carry-out model. It's not the way we treat it here. And Texas has been eating barbecue since the dawn of time. So they had no problem remembering what it used to be like. But that was a really interesting thing because it re we ended up redoing the blueprint, not on purpose.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:48

Yeah, it was forced, so it was scary.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:50

Like it was like it was just like we just kept shipping away out, and it wasn't even like we were able to sit down and say, like, okay, what's our strategic plan?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:57

I mean, for the first you just had to do six months, it was like is this gonna be it?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:03

Like I think for like I remember one time I was at a I was at a party and a couple years after COVID, and I I think as a restaurant owner, but I think many business owners, many people, we all have a lot of kind of PTSD from COVID. And so it's still like a sensitive subject, a tough subject. And I was at a party and Misha Reina and Ali Shell came up to me and they were like, We used to drive to truth during COVID and tell our families that like we were going to get dinner for everybody and pick it up curbside. And they would stay and sit in the parking lot so they could have like a mom break for like an hour, and they would order an extra tater tot casserole and they would sit in the car and just hang out the two of them and just get a break from their kids because everybody's trapped in the house and just like have a mental health break and eat their tater tot casserole and then like go home, feed their families, have the barbecue, do whatever. And it's It's things like that that make you realize that when you're fighting so hard for like every single day, we never got a chance to stop and think about what maybe we were fulfilling for people on the other side of that. We were like, did you wear your mask today? You know, is somebody afraid to come in here? Is my staff protected? Can we afford that was when we started worrying about can we afford to make payroll?

SPEAKER_04 1:06:27

That was a lot of rest.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:28

When we were taking payroll out of, you know, we were paying D $10 an hour out of a tip jar in Brynham. You know, we had no idea what we were doing. And that was how we did it. You know, COVID was really when we had to go through that.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:43

Yeah, it was scary because then you realize that you're responsible for families and people.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:47

Yeah, that was the big thing for us. We we wouldn't furlough anybody, we didn't lay anybody off because we were like, we were watching our our friends have to make those really tough decisions. And we the flip house that we had at the time, several super popular restaurateurs in Houston lived on the same street and all had super popular restaurants in the heights. And it was like the first weekend. So the announcement had been made. All the restaurants, the whole world had been dealing with the shutdown and these new kind of ways of living for like four or five days. And we're kind of commiserating in the middle of the street with all of our roadies because that was kind of that was what COVID was. And you you talked outside in your front yards type deal. And, you know, these guys were like light years ahead of us in longevity, legitimacy, branding here in Houston. Their institutions still stand today and are, you know, just as awarded as ours are. And um we were standing there when they were telling us like we had to let go of 300 people today. We had to make these decisions. And at the time, we only had like 30 staff max, max, max, max. We hadn't come to that decision yet. We were still kind of thinking like owner operator. Our Brenham location was staffed by people in our Houston location that would like rotate and go up there. His dad, you know, would always be the one to kind of run the shift and like unlock the doors up there after we opened Houston. So we knew his we knew, you know, big wasn't going anywhere. But um we made this really conscious decision, like we can't we just couldn't bring ourselves to tell somebody that they weren't gonna be able to feed their family. We just we couldn't do it. So we made this decision where we aggregated everybody's hours to make sure that everybody got somewhere between 20 and 25 hours, and it was the best we could do, but nobody would have to lose their job. But that COVID is kind of like it like a boys to men situation, you know what I mean? Like it it made us in a lot of ways, as far as like business decision making, our choices.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:00

So today you still have lines out the door. I was there when it opened, still line all the way outside. And how what percentages like online versus actually that varies physical people like physical people coming in the store?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:14

There was a point where takeout, I guess.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:15

I don't know, online yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:16

I mean it's but like takeout curves curbside. There was a point where it was it was last week it was like nine percent. Right. There was a point where it could creep up to like 35, 40 percent, and that was you know is it like certain days, certain times of year or something that it that was in the years post-COVID where it was just still still still all the way back to work and but also we we made a conscious effort to dial it back. We wanted the service to be there, but Leonard's core thing was experience.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:42

So we still control online for the most part, so that way it still stays fresh. So there's usually like 15 spots per time slot. So that way it's like going in and out, and you're not like forcing, you know, it's it's still when they're getting done cutting it, the people are pretty much pulling up, so it's like in, out, in, out, that was the biggest thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:04

We had to figure out how to do it to keep logistics, yeah. Learn's big thing was like it has to be the same as the experience when you get it on your plate, and it took us a lot of years to refine that.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:14

Yeah, but if you leave it wide open, then you take the risk of like just running this to go guy ragged, he's cutting nonstop all day, then it bleeds into the the customer experience.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:25

Yeah, when they come in if you run out of something.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:27

Yeah, you really and that's always been our biggest thing is it's like you really gotta you really have to it's a fine line you have to dance with how much offering service but not changing the business. How much you you can't always think in dollars. Like if you think in dollars, something's gonna get destroyed along the way because you're just thinking about cranking, cranking, cranking, cranking, cranking. That will end up eventually coming as long as you stay consistent and the quality stays the same. So if you take one above the other, I mean it's a risk.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:00

But to your point, we do have seasonal times because obviously, like you get to the holiday season, you you have a very large volume of like carry out. We kind of cover it under carryout, and then there's another category, you know, for us that's catering. You do have the seasonality, and then um, you know, your mother's day, your Easter. We're close on Easter, so we have a large volume going out like the day before.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:22

Yeah, which makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:23

But we we manipulate it at the end of the day, and I would say that's the thing that we do by always being in the business is we're consistently manipulating everything because brisket's not like a burger, you know. That's what Leonard's kind of honing in on. But burger bodega, trill, like they've got this formula, you know. Um 98% of the time, they're gonna hit that formula at a hundred percent, right? We can't do that. We have to build Leonard spends his time building in like that muscle memory for our team of like everything changes all the time. So like you have to be able to pivot in the moment, make these decisions, understand muscles, fat, how that happens with the heat, you know, some of it you're going by feel it's like it's like medical almost, you know. So we manipulate everything a lot to consistently make sure that if you ate at truth last week on a Tuesday, and then you came in, you know, this week on a slam and Saturday with a three-hour line, you're having the exact same experience.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:34

How do you deal with the fluctuation of like the inflation and the meat prices have gotten insane? And so how do you We cry a lot? I know it's like how do you do it in a way to where you can still make money, but then also still it's very hard for a business to raise prices sometimes because you're you know your customers are used to a certain price, and but at some point you have to or you can go out of business because you can't pay anybody.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:58

I mean, there's three ways to skin that cat, but Leonard Leonard's gonna talk about what he does with beef and then I mean I would say what I'm gonna do.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:05

When I was in there, I'm like, man, it has to be insane right now. Just at Central Market, I think a filet is like $50 a pound now. Ground beef is nine dollars recently. I think if it's organic, I think it's like $14.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:19

If you get if you get bison elk or venison, it's eighteen to twenty bucks a pound right now.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:23

It's byproduct, like it's pieces that they can't even use, and they're making a ton of money off of it right now.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:29

Um tell him about restaurant 365 because that's one of the remember, that's one of the pitches that the just because it's huge on our beef pricing.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:39

I mean, USDA puts out all of their information so you can track it. So everybody has to stay in line with let's I mean, let's compare it. Like if if there's a main you know person that makes shoes, so Nike, Adidas, Reebok is ever everybody's getting from the same factory. They still have to stay in line with where they're getting the shoes. The same thing with B prices. So you can track those trends on USDA of where they're going to be at and see where your you know your distributor is at on pricing. Um and on a smaller restaurant, you can definitely shop around. You can shop pricing. You can go and say, well, I don't want to use this brisket because it's 15 cents more, so let me go to this one. But with a bigger one like ours, we have to buy blocks, which makes it difficult.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:28

Like I'm sure you also have to have a certain quality of meat. You can't just go spend less and get a less quality meat because it's not going to taste the same in the restaurant.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:35

Yeah, so it's a lot harder now, post-pandemic. What the pandemic triggered was nobody was buying beef during the pandemic because the prices skyrocketed. They laid so many people off from the packing plants, the you know, the price of corn went up, which affected the cows, the everything affected everything. Gas went up, everything, everything messed everything up. But then when COVID ended, um, prices dropped. So they had to slaughter more cows than normal, and they had to kill off a majority of the herd, and it takes two to three years to get those cows back up to where they can, you know, make other cows and and be processed. And and so we're feeling that now. I was about to say it feels like I don't want to say higher than it ever has been, but it's it's it's we're feeling it now because they had to hold those cows to get them back up to that slaughter, you know, age and weight. And what they're doing now is they are holding the cows even longer, so they're putting on more weight, so the quality is dipping. So the months the muscle, you know, density versus the fat, it's not the same as it was before. There was a sweet spot before COVID where you know the cows were grown to this age, to this weight, they were slaughtered, and this is the quality that you got. It was very transparent of prime choice and select. Now they've all kind of blended together. You're not really still getting a true, true prime product because even the prime products on the beef side are getting the cows are getting too big. So the the fat content is still there, but it's not as as big as it was previously. Um and it's just thrown everything off.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:22

How how do you how do you deal with it in the restaurant though? So if your point how how often does it change? Does it change by month? If like if prices are going up or by week, by weekly weeks, yeah. Bi weekly usually they put up so you can't just change the prices every week.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:36

So I know so you just eat the margin and you have to.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:39

I mean, like, it's a loss leader, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:41

The barbecue, like our community is pretty tight. Like I can call Grant Pinkerton or I can call you know somebody in Dallas, I can call somebody like and see what they're trying to. We all stay within the same price range. Like, but in order to do that, um you have to do yield tests on the brisket once a week. So you have it in the package, you weigh it, you trim it, you weigh it, you season it, you weigh it, then you cook it, and then you weigh the final product so you know how much you're yielding from start to finish.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:10

I think what your true cost is.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:11

Yeah, your true cost on that, and then you compare the numbers versus what you're purchasing it at, and you you just kind of just try to dial it in. I mean, you can't really raise brisket.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:22

Like I was about to say, to the to the point on like, you know, consumer-facing pricing, it it's it's a double-edged sword because people think, even Texans, that brisket is supposed to be cheap. And and it's just not. It's not. I mean, it was eons ago, but it's not. So craft barbecue, because of the labor aspect, is a that's another level plus the beef price.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:49

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:49

Like we could charge a different rate if we were, you know, if we cooked in the vein of like hot and fast, which is a popular way to cook, you know, in kind of east and central Texas. But, you know, so you got the labor aspect of it. But then, you know, the third layer to that is like he's talking about with Grant, or like if you think about Fegis Barbecue, you know, any of our um colleagues in this space in Houston and in Austin and Dallas, we're all looking at each other's pricing. You know, we're we're looking at what Corkscrew is is charging, you know, because customers are expecting us to all charge within the same range. So we're kind of in this unofficial, like, you know, handhold together in the industry. You might go somewhere and see brisket for $40 a pound. It's not unheard of. And it's what it probably should be priced at.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:40

Yeah, it should be priced above.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:41

We'll never be able to price it above $37 a pound. So the management of that comes down to what he's talking about, like with the yield tests, managing your distributors, staying up on what's going on with USDA so that you have bargaining power and negotiating power, right? For us, luckily, the blocks that we're buying gives us a small, you know, area of like negotiation. But that's where then we have to focus on the menu mix, which is even harder for us because there's a lot of barbecue joints out there that are serving like a lot of great different types of barbecue dishes. You know, like Lori and Lewis and Austin is a phenomenal barbecue joint and they serve all types of proteins and different kinds of barbecue. But for us, we're known for brisket. So like we we don't get to manipulate and kind of say, like, okay, we're gonna reduce. I'll I'll never forget this. Like, this one of the smartest people we know, Chris Shepherd, he said to me like a year ago, we were talking about um, we were talking about brisket prices. He's like, Abby, come on, you guys can cook less brisket. And I'm like, you go tell Leonard.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:50

We actually we've actually tried.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:51

I'm like and people you go tell Leonard that we're gonna cook less brisket because people that's what they're coming from.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:57

They get upset.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:59

You know, so we don't get to manipulate the menu as as much, but we do offer other things.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:03

How do you decide what goes on the menu? Like when to bring in something new. I mean, outside of like the staple stuff.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:08

That's the hardest thing because it's like kind of pigeonholed us because it's been our gift and our curse. But now we like a whole idea was like to come into Houston and then you get off the airplane, you need barbecue, you go to truth.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:20

So you see videos of it's always but it's but it's also the people that do it like really well and just simple is but there's a thing to that too, because you're not trying to have a million things, you're just doing these five things. But I think that's the thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:34

Like we he he's kind of talking about like it it can be a little bit of a stop gap for us because people trust us with tradition, you know. Truth is traditional Central Texas style barbecue, so they trust us with when I go there, I'm getting the hits that I grew up on. I'm getting the tater tot casserole, I'm getting the collard greens, I'm getting the mac and cheese. You know, they so they have this level of expectation about that consistency that we've built over time. I always get the brisket and the jalapeno cheddar sausage. I never miss beef rib Saturday. So that makes it challenging for us to roll something out because it takes a really long time for them to adopt it because they come for their favorites, they have their repeat orders. But over time, when we've added things like the Smash Burger or the Bon Mi or like fried chicken, it's always come from a place of like inspiration and something that we we really want to eat. And if we like it, we're like, well, well, we know. So they're gonna want it because it's something we love. We won't just like like we won't put pasta salad on the menu because it's springtime. You'll never have that experience at truth. But do we think that you should have like the best fried chicken as part of your Sunday barbecue dinner? Yes, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:57

But then everything outside of brisket ribs and sausage usually takes about four to six months for it to catch on.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:04

Catch on.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:04

And then it becomes discouraging. You're like, do they like to find it?

SPEAKER_02 1:22:08

Now it like sells out every Sunday. You know, it took a while for people to notice the burger, and now people are like, I don't get a burger anywhere else. And it's funny because we're a barbecue joint, you know, and the burger came about to manage the brisket, you know. That was our trim. That was reinvesting that meat byproduct and making our own burgers to reduce cost, right? And actually, the burger's great. We we had one of the key people in barbecue media come in, Daniel Vaughn. He writes for Texas Monthly a couple of years ago. He came in and I happened to be in the restaurant that day. So I gave him a burger on his plate to try it. He ends up talking to me afterward. And he has a good relationship with Leonard and I, and he's always been, you know, very kind about the things that we do or whatever. But he said, Abby, he was like, that's the best, the best Smash Burger I've ever had. And I was like, Daniel, it's just a burger. Because I'm not like a Smash Burger person. Leonard loves a Smash Burger. He's like, No, it's like perfectly salted, it's all these things. So when he was giving me this feedback, like that's kind of our route on everything. If it's not something that is going to be like so cravable and that people are just going to adore, because it has to be those iconic things that are nostalgic for people.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:24

I would agree with that.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:25

Then we don't do it.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:26

What's the most expensive business mistake that you made?

SPEAKER_02 1:23:31

HVAC, not replacing our HVAC when we built out.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:34

Or just the biggest mistake, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:36

Most expensive is probably HVAC because it's a it's a instead of recurring revenue, it's just a recurring expense for eight years.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:42

I know. HVAC's always an issue.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:44

But what's the biggest mistake we've made?

SPEAKER_04 1:23:46

Yeah, maybe the biggest mistake too. Um or you think that you made looking back.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:52

Uh probably and there's still a lot of people that do that that do this. Um, was I didn't even really deep dive into it until I went to the packing plants and went to the farms and saw how much work went into you know, raising those cows and going through that process and how brutal of a process it is. Um I think taking the time to gain the knowledge of all the work that goes into it before we even get like we're so used to going to the grocery store and just picking up something off the shelf and being like, ah, the price is the price, like it is what it is. But people throw their arms up when gas prices go up. Um but they don't realize that the gas prices affect the feed, the cows, all the things. So when I started to really deep dive into all the nuts and bolts of everything that gets that goes into barbecue before it even hits us, um, all of the trim, everything that can be repurposed all the way down to, you know, like I said, the the trimming down the briskets, they got to be a certain shape and size for them to cook uniformly on the pit. We would throw away that excess trim. Um, we would only use enough to make our sausage bars. Um, there would be an excess of fat. Now we use all the fat and use it and to uh we grind it and cook it down into fry oil.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:16

Um that was a that was a big mistake that I think you're right. Like so many restaurateurs are probably still making like for a long time, a lot of these organizations that write about or award restaurants or like the industry um have categories for things like, you know, an award for being a really green restaurant, an award for being like a zero waste restaurant, and it's it's cloaked in like environmentalism, right? Which is not wrong, but that doesn't resonate necessarily with with all restaurant owners. So, like, so maybe you're not really thinking about it, but really from a business perspective, you have to try to do everything in your power to get as close to zero waste as possible, especially just the margin for your business to actually be healthy and profitable. So I think that's like I do think a lot of people do that.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:05

And it makes you look like it goes with any business. Then you start to look at like just that water bottle, for instance. It's like, how many can I reuse that? Is there a different way I can use that? Is that the only purpose for that?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:19

And how many menu items can one ingredient go into?

SPEAKER_03 1:26:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:23

Right? How do you how do you maximize that? But I would say like from my perspective, the biggest business mistake we ever made and continue to make, even though it's something that you're like growing out of over time, is we didn't build we we never really thought about like what we were gonna grow into in the future. We thought about every day as it came, we thought about next week. So our infrastructure, whether that was hiring, whether that was, you know, something like benefits, whether that was, you know, equipment, our infrastructure has never been on the same trajectory as our business growth. And I would say that from my perspective was our biggest mistake because I one time we were talking about I'm the risk taker in the relationship. And so I'm also somebody that like, if I see something that needs to be done, I want to attack it right away. Whereas he's a little bit more like, well, yes, that has to be done, but we have these other five things too, and we need to prioritize. And I'll be like, rip the mandate off and fix all of it so that it's off our plate and it's gonna make everything run more smoothly. So I'm not worried about the investment because that's gonna come back faster. So we kind of view things differently like that. But we were having a conversation where I was like, we have to double down and invest in like X, Y, Z. And I had this whole thing laid out for him about what I felt like we really needed to invest in to continue to build the infrastructure that we need, you know, to support the weight of the company, because it's the two of us really supporting the weight of the company. And it's vastly outgrown us and it's outgrown our skill sets. You know, and my pitch to him was like, Elon Musk is not sitting here being like, when we when we make enough money in third quarter, we're going to hire, buy, build, sell. I'm like, we have to think like him. We we gotta, you know, do the sunk cost now. We'll figure it out. Because at the end of the day, our approach has also always been, we are always gonna figure it out, come hell or high water, which is why I'm comfortable taking risks. But that would be, I think from my perspective, our biggest mistake because it it it's just constantly recurring.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:33

That's what true entrepreneurs do. That's like the ones that make it or the ones that just always have you have to figure it out. There's no other choice to keep feeding everybody, to keep making sure everybody, you know, all the employees have a job. Um you you have to figure it out.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:48

There's like there's there's no other choice. It's hard to pinpoint like the biggest like business decision. I I I like if I probably asked you like how many times did you buy something not realizing, like thinking about what you were gonna grow into, like the the this podcast equipment that we're talking like we were talking about earlier. You're like now you think of like just get the best one because you you know like you're gonna grow into it. Like that's the goal, obviously. And thinking about all the times previously that you're like, I just need this for right now, and just thinking in that moment of what it fix fixes, you don't realize that that is a big b a big business decision that will affect you financially in the long haul, whether it's like just in that moment, that's the piece of equipment that I need, but you actually need the one that costs like double three to five thousand dollars more so you're not having to spend the money on repair, repair, repair, or grow, grow and buy end up buying another piece of equipment.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:49

Like we're all fighting the same battle, which is if you had your preference, you you would do everything right, you would order the best of everything, you would, you know, cross every T and dot every I, but you're dealing with pocket change and you're investing, you know, just like you with the e-commerce company and like the inventory, you know, Leonard for so long, I was like, we're never gonna be able to buy a house because your W-2 looks like you don't exist because even even when we structured the business to where we were taking salaries, Leonard was putting his money back in the business. And I'm like, we we don't do that anymore. But like you all do that.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:31

I've been there a hundred times. Yeah, like you're using your pocket to get away. We still do it to this day.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:34

It's like and then you make enough at point A to then use it again to get to point B. So like it's kind of a catch 22 because you're like, well, if you could avoid it, avoid it. But like most of us can't. It's more I think about take that hindsight from somebody else, you know, and apply it and say, Okay, I need this right now, but I need to go ahead and start preparing myself for the fact that I'm gonna need this much sooner. You know, stuff like that.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:02

So you went from two people working at a very, very small shack of a restaurant, and now you have a bunch of people. What was the biggest hiring mistake that you think you made? You don't have to say they're named.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:14

We need we need another podcast for that. No, no, no, it's it's not a person. It's I think it's a it's a mindset and it goes back. We literally just had this conversation. Who were we having this with the other day? I can't remember, but the biggest mistake that we made was watching somebody come in and take on a role like being our general manager, for example. And they ran with it and they did it, and we were like, they're crushing it, okay. That we need we need one manager for this store, and not realizing over time that we needed to add a second, then there was a third, that we needed to bring somebody in in-house in accounting, that that was like the biggest hiring mistake, and it kind of goes back to that infrastructure. But when you're both workhorses, when you're owner operators, you forget very, very fast that nobody else works like you, and that you're not allowed to expect them to work like you. And so we we had this great manager years ago, he's part of the family, still very close with him, and he was like us, he could just go forever until until one day he couldn't, and it and it wasn't fair for us to ask him to go forever, and he's like, Man, I gotta, I gotta see my kids, I got stuff going on, you know, and so we started building out the team differently, but that took a long time to get right, and that's a daily, that is a daily maintenance thing. I I wouldn't say that we even still have it perfect. You're always learning, you're always tweaking on that hiring matrix per revenue, per amount of people you have in the company, also layering the skill set, what you have and what you still need.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:10

Have you ever heard somebody that probably wasn't qualified for the position you put them in, but ended up becoming one of the best people that work for you? Yeah, a lot of them.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:19

Surprisingly. Several. I mean, Reed was one of them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:23

And you experienced Reed the other day. Yeah, he's great. And I was watching your videos, and like I'm I'm like, man, I'm so proud of him and like the way he's grown and like the leadership. And no, he's great. It's why I asked him to do it in Out Leonard. I mean, for so long.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:35

He cooked ribs for graveyard shift for three and a half years. He worked overnight midnight to 9 a.m. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:44

Overnights by himself.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:46

He definitely looked like the leader of the day I was there. It was awesome.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:48

And and he is, you know. Um his he's a little bit different because we didn't we didn't hire him for something he wasn't unqualified for, but then became the best. We hired him for something so different.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:58

And then he wanted to learn more and more and more.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:01

He wanted to learn more, and we accidentally opened. We never we never like really sat with him and said, like, let's talk about your career here. It happened organically, it happened over time, and and you know, normally I would never let people come into the restaurant and have an experience that Leonard wasn't leading. And Reed was the first person about three or four years ago that I started tapping, you know, because he could he could really do it. And now he asked me the other day, he's like, Hey, is Leonard come into this? And I was like, Oh, I'll ask him if you want me to. And Leonard was gonna come so that he could see you guys, but he ended up having a a conflict with the meeting or whatever. But Reed just does it so great.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:41

You came from the PR world. What did you what's the main, I guess, marketing strategy for the business? Or, you know, what is it always word of mouth, or how did you how did you, I guess start marketing in different channels if you did it all? It was exposure.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:59

Well strategic. Yeah, it was very strategic. I I literally was just at a at a conference talking about this where I was speaking on this exact subject as it relates to truth because I broke every rule of my own training. You know, I came from major I I started in television and radio, and then I went, you know, into major course corporate hospitality brands in New York, and then I went into tech with Samsung. And so I, you know, being in the New York matrix, like you're trained in advertising and marketing in in such a different way. Like I I probably already have a business school degree just from that like training, you know, and that experience that I gained there with those companies. And when it came to truth, um, and I was really starting to help Leonard out, and he was really, we were at the point where he would actually take my feedback. Um, it was really important that we earned everything organically. So I got on board with this idea because when Leonard first started, you know, Texas Monthly has this list, it's super important, it comes out every four years. Top 50 barbecue joints in the state. And, you know, we've got at one time it was more than 10,000 barbecue joints in the state. It's probably like 15 or 20 now, right? So if you make that top 50, you know, which is a project that is done by, you know, 30 to 40 um voters and editors that are part of the Texas monthly um organization. And it happens over the course of you know, 12 to 15 months where they fan out in regions across the state and they keep hitting, you know, these barbecue joints, they keep testing them. It's not a you stopped by once and you're like, truth is it. Like you, you've had to earn that and you don't know when it's happening at Secret Shop. So Leonard wanted to be on the list. You know, he got into this, he had the passion for it, and he's like, I'm not doing it for the pennies I'm making. I'm not doing it, you know, I love the barbecue, but like I'm gonna make something of this place. So he wanted to be on the list. Well, you don't get on the list, you know. Well, you get on the list through like the quality and the output of what you've provided, the experience that you've created. It's all very authentic. So when he got on the list the first time, he was very young and he got on the list very, very fast. And he didn't just get on the list in the top 50, he was listed in the top 10 for his first list. So I was like, okay, we can't be out there like advertising for people to come in. Like, we have to build this machine of like word of mouth, getting to know Leonard. The one thing that I identified when I moved to Texas and watched Leonard every weekend while I was ringing up the register was people loved barbecue at Truth. Yeah. But people loved Leonard more. They wanted to talk to him, they wanted to tell him that they had seen the article, they stopped us in H E B all the time. Um, hey, I see you're wearing that truth hat. Like, um, are you the owner? You know, like people loved Leonard. And I was like, okay, we're not doing digital marketing, we're not doing Facebook marketing, we're not putting out ads anywhere. We didn't even put out ads to hire people. All I focused on was we're gonna tell the story. And and you've heard me talk about this. We're gonna tell the story. And so I enlisted, you know, strategic help with a really great PR firm out of New York. And I treated it the same way I treated my job at Samsung. I came in, I gave them a strategy, I gave them the pillars and the tent poles, and I said, here's our targets. Like this is what I want you to go after. We educated them on barbecue, and we worked really hard to expose him because at the time the barbecue space was getting very exciting with like fusion and different cultures coming in and making Texas barbecue their own because they've been raised in Texas, but you know, they have a cultural background where barbecue was also important in their history. And so there was all this great new barbecue coming out, and we were traditional. We were kind of different, you know. And even if you look at the Texas Monthly top 50 list now, it reflects Texas, it reflects our cultural makeup, it reflects like all these people that have moved here, been raised here from different, you know, ethnicities and you know, countries and backgrounds. And there's probably what, 10, 15 really like solidly true traditional barbecue restaurants, like still on that list. And, you know, staying core to that was a hard story to tell when there's really exciting things happening with like, you know, brisket and you know, via Cajun and all this kind of stuff. So we went to events, we focused on the culinary side, you know, the difficulty, we focused on the quality. Um, and we just met people. And so that that was the thing. And I only focused on like always on. And to this day, you know, 10 years later, I do the same thing. You won't somebody told us one time, like, you really need to put a billboard up so that they know that you're like right here off of I-10 and like right here at heights. And I like looked at the guy and I was like, that is a good idea. But they know. They know we worked so hard to say, like, this is destination dining. I said to him several years ago, we want people to get out, and he just kind of referenced it, you know, when you get off the plane, if you say barbecue, you're saying truth. That was my first brand brief, right? That was all I preached. And so I kept telling my PR team, I want to be in Charleston, I want to be in Nashville, I want to be in LA, I want to be in New York, I want him everywhere that you can put him.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:51

Yeah, I think the PR team gave us the roadmap, but then we had to go and execute the work.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:57

So and then those people in all of those regions, Atlanta, Chicago, every single food festival we did. Guess what? Houston is a travel hub for business. Yeah. They were getting off that plane, they were coming to the restaurant, they were dropping their suitcases, and they were saying, Hey man, I met you at do you remember we we talked about my smoker? I met you at Atlanta Food and Wine. I sure do.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:18

Yeah, there was not an event that I sure do remember you. I was too big or too small or above.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:24

I was like, I mean we were on the road like eight months out of the year.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:29

So just traditional it was just grassroots. I think it was shaking hand mostly.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:33

Meet him, eat the food.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:35

It was it was networking and still to this day, I think like that the food always tastes that much better. If anytime a customer will stop me or her in the building, we'll sit there and we sit down with them, we hang out.

SPEAKER_04 1:41:48

You know, because you want to be able to remember that experience and that, like I said, I think uh old school restaurant still do that, like being paccos and galvos and pocket, like stands out. Yeah, because like people's a lot of old restaurateurs they want to feel like it's like mattress maxing at the front of this building every single day, and like they want to feel relatable, you know, like they and they want to know they matter.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:13

Like a big thing internally for us was always like we don't lose power at truth, you know, because we're on the fire station grid and H E B is across the street from us. Like, so we freeze, hurricane, flood, you name it, we don't lose power. It's awesome, you know. So the big thing is we've never closed any of the unless it happens to fall on a Monday, you know, because we are closed on Mondays, but like we don't close, we're still serving, you know.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:35

Um why on Monday? You have to like a prep day?

SPEAKER_02 1:42:38

I'm just curious, longevity of the of the cooking and all of that, you know, with the kids, it's kind of the way the schedule works.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:46

Yeah, it gives the guys at least Sundays, they're not having to do a full cook day. So they're still coming in on the case. I figured it is yeah, it's just like a breathing day.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:53

So it's like we were always like, if if the community supports us, we have to always be supporting the community. And we do that in in such a variety of ways. But one of them is that gratitude of like you care enough about eating here at Truth that you actually want to like meet one of us or talk to one of us. We're giving you the time. We're spending the time with you because for some reason you care about that. You know what I mean? And and so we like to get to know these people and we like to hear about, you know, they want to talk to you about the other barbecue restaurants they've eaten at. They want to know what your favorite barbecue restaurants are. Have you eaten at that place in Seattle? Have you tried the one in Chicago? Like we have, we know those people. Then you start in ending up in these like barbecue chains where you can help them go experience somewhere else, where you can send them to Snow's and give them the blueprint for like how to have that classic experience at Snows in Lexington. So everything we did and still to this day do is grassroots. And we have a lot of, now that we're larger and we have a lot of you know partners that help us with things from content creation to the website to whatever, PR. They want us to do more, you know, be on TikTok, have billboards, do this, do that. And we're I break all of my own rules and we're pretty firm. And I'm like, I'm not sending superfluous emails. I send four a year. I don't want to be on TikTok. I'm already on TikTok. You know, we're there, we're talked about. Um, it's huge. I I don't want to put up a billboard. We don't want to do t-shirt drops because we lose the brand equity when we do that, you know, and and I have all these very smart people sitting around me that I've worked with my whole career saying, Abby, why we don't understand. And the the why today is is because what we do today really, really works.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:47

Yeah, and it was it was staying true to like it's very authentic from the from the beginning and not keeping up with the Joneses, I would say.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:56

It's also not your personality. That was the other thing. It's not Leonard's personality to like try to splash him across something, you know, and make him into like a celebrity chef. That was never gonna work.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:08

And then I know recently, I don't know what year it was now, it hasn't been that long where Michelin finally came to Texas, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:45:14

Yeah, 24.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:15

It was 24. Okay. Yeah, I knew it was it was recent.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:19

And I think that they how many did they give out? How many, I guess, Michelin stars?

SPEAKER_02 1:45:25

So they gave out, I don't know how many Michelin stars they gave out across Texas. Um, since we Houston hosted the ceremony for the whole state both years. Um, we were we were really lucky in that we were awarded a Michelin Bib Gourmand two years in a row. And their Bib Gourmand status, that's so they have a star status, and there's a, you know, that's you know, generally related to fine dining, or it's related to something that's like really pushing the boundaries. So they did give four stars to four barbecue restaurants um that are, you know, back to what we're talking about, very different than what we do, and we're very, very traditional. They're pushing the boundaries, they're doing very different things in barbecue. We got a bib gourmand, and that designation is for restaurants that are meeting, you know, excellence in service, excellence and experience, excellence and culinary. Um, and there's a price point. Um, I want to say that it can't go like above 60 bucks. So, so that Bib Gourmand designation is important because you're talking about the being able to hit the majority of restaurant diners with a recommendation that they can afford, as opposed to like, you know, you have these major behemoth institutions like March, who has the most beautiful dining experience you've ever had, and it's coursed and it's gorgeous, and you know, but it might not be in reach for a great many diners because of what you really have to charge to create that experience for them.

SPEAKER_04 1:47:00

Me and Gentry eat out a lot, and we're not the the whole seven-course. We aren't Michelin star thing. And we like eating out with people, and man, by the end, you're like, I'm kind of ready, I'm really ready to go. This is a this is really it's just not our thing. And then the food is just it's good, but it's just different. I don't know. We're it's very different.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:19

It's kind of like going to a museum, it's like watching a kitchen museum.

SPEAKER_04 1:47:22

Like, I get it. I it's just not for us, and we like to eat out. It's just we've been to been to a bunch in San Francisco, we've been to, you know, the the coup a couple that were here. Like it just every time you go, I'm not gonna say we regret it, but by the end, we're kind of like it's such a different experience.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:37

I think it's an experience.

SPEAKER_04 1:47:39

We just got so different. I don't know. It's just like we're the same way.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:44

It's like I think we like places that are like ours. We like, you know, hole in the walls, local joints, places with history. We like places that are mom and pop, they're huge generation owner operator.

SPEAKER_04 1:47:57

Houston traditionally has been pretty good about the restaurants that do really well weren't the chain restaurants. That's right. We're a big community of restaurants. People don't support like those big chains that come in. I mean, they support the local ones, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:48:11

Like if you're talking about Levi Good or Paphas, like we've got to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_04 1:48:15

But I'm saying like the big the bigger ones, like a nationwide chain that has this like very, very big name and they come in and say, oh, the only one in Houston. And I don't know, it's just not like the traditional.

SPEAKER_05 1:48:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:31

And I think, you know, we've got some really great food media right now, like Bow over the Chronicle, that are working so hard to highlight all these different pockets in Houston that are serving amazing food. You know, that's different, I think, than a lot of cities.

SPEAKER_04 1:48:48

Every time I travel, I'm pretty disappointed because we're like just it's not Houston, just has so much diversity, but so many good restaurants, not like four or six. It's like there's so many. And so me and Gentry travel, and we're like, uh, it's alright. We base our travel around eating now. Yeah, and so do we. Gentry's a big foodie, so she's like, oh, we can go here, we can go here, we can go here. And it's still not as good as Houston. I don't know if it's just there's that many good restaurants here, but we're always let down a little bit. Like and there's still some good places.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:21

I think it's the trend of like the bicostals always getting all the credit, and then you go But there's there I hope nobody from San Francisco listens to this, but unpopular opinion is San Francisco. It it doesn't hit us the way it hits some people, right? And like we really struggle to eat in that town. Whereas we went to we went to Dolph New York.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:44

We went to all those Michelins and we're like not one time, we're like, man, that was amazing.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:48

I don't know, it's just it was a but I think also the culture is like your socks are blown off when you have something simple that you're not expecting, I think. That is so good that you're like, I didn't even know that like I didn't even know. Sandwich could taste that good.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:01

Yeah, we have a lot of good restaurants here. Uh, pretty much in every cuisine, every culture. Like it, I mean, there's one in in every single category. It's like amazing. Outside of the restaurant, I mean, y'all work together, y'all live together. What's the biggest thing you learn about being partners and being married? Like business partners and being married?

SPEAKER_02 1:50:24

Business partners, I'm super like I'm very type A. I'm very authoritative. Uh, I make decisions relatively easily. So I don't, I don't really have like a lot of patience and I don't have a lot of breaks. You know what I mean? I'm like all gas, you know, all the time. So for me, I would say like in our marriage and in our working relationship, it's definitely been, you know, a journey of learning that like we are not the same. We don't process the same, we don't receive the same. I cannot like I cannot be fully the way I am without respect to like how is this gonna go over with Leonard? What is the best path forward? And also like, what is even his opinion on the matter? Because I am naturally a steamroller. Gentry, you know, I mean she's like learning that back and forth and how we can like, and I do still steamroll sometimes because you are who you are, but like that was my thing. It's like patience and like learning like what he responds to and works with best, I think was the biggest change from my perspective that made it work, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:51:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:38

And we did stop there was a point where we really started to make a conscious effort to like not talk about work at home. We still do, but like I it's significantly reduced.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:49

Yeah. I think when we kind of defined our own roles of where we were good, our pros and cons for both of us, so what she was better at, what I was better at, what I was weak at, what she was weak at, and like filling those gaps. Um, that definitely helped. And then try not to talk about work when we get to the house, I would say. But I know that we have a pretty strong marriage because when we do fight, it is probably based off of the business. So it's not a true but it's also fast.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:23

They say it's not about like if you fight or how you fight. I mean, I think there is a how you fight aspect, but it's how you like how quickly you recover.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:31

And I think like even when we have heated debate, it's a dis I would say it's a disagreement, and then we both go back and look at it and be like, oh, that's what they were saying. That makes sense, and then we both learn from it. So what is the biggest disagreement that you had about the business?

SPEAKER_05 1:52:46

About the business. One of the major ones.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:48

I think we both overanalyze every single step. So we're both presenting like 15 steps to each other of how something can go wrong.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:57

And I think our biggest disagreement over the business has probably been leadership style.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:04

And paint colors.

SPEAKER_02 1:53:08

That that was a really big one nine years ago.

SPEAKER_04 1:53:11

I just hire Laura for everything now. I don't even want to even, even when Gentry's talking about it, I was like, unless it gets too crazy, I don't even want to know. Just figure it out. That gives me that stresses me out.

SPEAKER_02 1:53:22

Well, we're both creatives, right? So I'm not, I am not creating art on a plate. In fact, when Leonard came into my life, and I I was once a really good cook, you know, I once cooked the way Gentry did, like making fun dishes and trying new things out. I used to cook dinner for him almost every night when we were super poor. I don't touch anything in my kitchen. I will design him a kitchen, I will make it beautiful because I have one thing in mind, which is don't ever make me go in there anymore. You know, but we are both super creative people. And and mine is through like, you know, design and interiors and stuff like that. But I think, you know, certain things like we both have such strong opinions on. One of the early days one was I felt that the location in Houston coming out of Brynham should evoke something that felt a lot like Houston and it should evoke something that felt a lot like Leonard. And Leonard's like always in all black, he's he's quiet, you know, he's reserved, he's he's kind of confident. There's a little air of mystery to him because he he doesn't talk a whole lot and people are always kind of trying to figure him out. So I was like, this building's got to be black. You know, the building in in Brynham, the outside is that, you know, traditional like countryside brick red and the inside is like Tiffany blue, very, very round toppy, right? And it made sense for that location. It made sense for like where he was in his journey, how that that building was decorated, the whole thing and the vibe that we were putting out there. But I was like, man, we're going to Houston. We got to keep that grit. We got to keep those beat-up tables. That was super important to him. We got to keep, you know, the unpolished aspect of who we are. That was a defining part of truth and the whole kind of brand fabric, even though he didn't know that, you know, before I put a moniker to it. But I was like, this building needs to be black outside, inside. And he was like, mm-mm. Oh, my dead body. He did not want it to be black. Um, and and then there's a cinder block wall, and you've seen it, those neon sides are hanging on it. Um and he really wanted the center block exposed. And I was like, that looks terrible. That looks horrendous. It looks unfinished. Well, Sean, you were in the business last week. What color is the building?

SPEAKER_04 1:55:31

I don't even remember.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:32

It's black.

SPEAKER_04 1:55:33

And the inside isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 1:55:35

But um I don't remember the but that center block wall is like still exposed. And I remember we were in there, we're like fighting in front of our GC, Josh Wiseman from Contexts and Concepts is in there. Like, we're like having a knockdown drag out in front of our GC about this paint, and he's so mad at me.

SPEAKER_03 1:55:54

That that was like early days of very big They pulled, yeah, they pulled down the drywall off the wall, and all the CMU was exposed of like all the previous businesses that had painted over it. So it was like all patina, and I was like, Oh, it's gorgeous. And she was like, it looks disgusting. And then like a couple months ago, some customer was like, Did you guys paint this? And I was like, No, why do you ask? And he was like, It's beautiful. And I was like, Yeah, it is. He's like, Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:21

It happens, um, it happens more often than you think. People comment on that wall a lot.

SPEAKER_04 1:56:25

Let me go ahead and record this. Can you say that again?

SPEAKER_02 1:56:27

But in my defense, I'd like to say that when Alison Cook reviewed us for the Chronicle after we opened, she said it was the most beautiful barbecue restaurant she'd ever been in. So we both got a win out of that one. But that was such a so funny. It's so funny. It was such a silly thing, but it was such a blowout. Um, but I think now we mostly I don't know that we disagree about leadership style, but our debate always centers on leadership because we lead in two different ways. Um I over-communicate, I am direct, and I really hold people accountable.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:02

I think you and Gentry are the same person.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:04

And and Leonard doesn't not hold people accountable, but Leonard gives rope, gives rope, gives rope.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:11

Leonard and I are the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:12

Yeah, you guys are super similar. Like he gives a lot of rope, and then there's gonna be a point where that rope is gonna snap and his goodwill is gone.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:18

And I'm like I told you, you should you should have put it in writing. I don't know. I just want I I don't know, I want people to succeed in there's no right I know, but sometimes even when I know in my gut and I let it go too long. I I mean it's probably one of my things that I've been great at.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:38

Um you want to give everybody the opportunity. I know, and it and just in and most of the time it just but sometimes they just need like this is the hard thing about business is you've got to keep all these boundaries, you gotta keep all these emotions outside of it. But like sometimes they just need parenting. Your organization needs parenting and stewardship. And sometimes you do have to be tough and say, hey, the deadline for this was this date, and you you agreed to it. And so now there's a consequence because you haven't, you know, done the steps to get to where I think if you do communicate it in the right way, um, it's definitely a lot better.

SPEAKER_03 1:58:15

I think it's those were other fights we had, like, it's easier for her because her communication is very black and white. It's like very black and white. So if it doesn't work out, she communicated it to the best of her ability, and it was communicated very clearly. Me, I am like, I'll walk you through it, I will do it with you. I know you can do it, I've shown you how to do it. And then if they can't meet the moment, I'm like six months later, I'm like, man, did I let them down? Did I not show them properly? Did I not spend enough time with them? Yeah. And she's like, Well, did you communicate it from point A to point B and make it clear? I'm like, I think I did. And I literally put my hands on their hands and showed them. So I always struggle with the the aftermath of it of like not giving enough, I think.

SPEAKER_02 1:59:02

Because we've learned that like the the hard balance and where where we've disagreed and like kind of learned through it and then changed the organization because of the results of our disagreements is you have to do both. I'm not a trainer, I'm not a like soft and cuddly, I'm gonna like walk you through this. I'm looking for self-motivated, ambitious, can really think for yourself. You can think independently. I'm gonna give you the tools, I'm gonna give you great written directions, I'm gonna give you a roadmap, and I'm gonna send you on your way. Not on your first day, but if you've been in the company for a good while, like I should be able to trust you with this. Leonard is a great like trainer, mentor, you know, he he's like the gentle giant. And so he does that, but really they have to have both. They have to have the written, the roadmap, you know, the the setting the stage and dissertation of like, here's what I'm gonna want you to do, here's what the project is. And then they do have to have somebody come in and say, Let me help you get started, let me show you how. But after that, my fuse gets short when we do invest so much of that effort and we just don't move the ball down the field.

SPEAKER_04 2:00:18

I think that's every business stuff. Hey everyone, real quick, I just want to let you know this podcast is 100% independent. No ads, no sponsors, just real. If you're finding value in whatever we're doing here, the biggest help that you can give us is hitting subscribe and sharing this with someone who you think needs to hear it or someone that it will provide value to. That's how we continue to grow. And if you did that, I would really appreciate it. Uh Leonard, what's something that Abby does behind the scenes that most people never see? Uh, everything.

SPEAKER_03 2:00:55

Um strategically, probably delegating tasks, communicating, and making sure that they're getting executed properly behind the scenes. It's like um I don't know, everything that's happening behind the curtain at a play, I would say. There's so many moving parts that are behind just the surface aspect and the cooking aspect of the restaurant that goes on that a lot of people don't see until she actually starts talking about and they're like, oh, that's how the restaurant got to where it is. Uh it wasn't just the food. Like the food can only get you so far. Like the food, the story can only get you so far. You gotta keep that momentum, and the only way to keep that momentum is everything that's happening in the background, I would say, for the most part. Yeah, it's hospitality.

SPEAKER_04 2:01:40

It's you gotta be everybody's gotta be on their A game.

SPEAKER_03 2:01:43

Possibility of the lift, if not more, than the food and the customer part of it.

SPEAKER_04 2:01:50

What do you think? Something that Leonard you think he that nobody sees? Uh maybe that he deserves more credit than he gets.

SPEAKER_02 2:02:02

Well there's a running joke about the fact that I I probably love my husband too much. Um, I think and so, you know, temper this answer with that. I've often felt that Leonard deserves more credit than he gets. And I I really say that delicately because he's a very recognized and very awarded pit master, and we're lucky to even say that considering the saturation of this industry and where we are, right? Um I think the thing that he doesn't get enough recognition, and again, I'm saying this so delicately because Leonard gets a lot of recognition, and I don't want somebody to think that um we don't appreciate and aren't grateful for it, but I think the thing that people have come to expect versus appreciate is what it takes to be consistent in a small roadside joint like Truth Barbecue Brenham that's open four days a week, that does, you know, actually I'm not gonna count the briskets out, but like, you know, what it takes to do it at that volume, consistently managing that customer service experience, creating this moment that people want to, you know, preserve on Instagram or preserve through purchasing something, or just like preach like you gotta go to this place, is incredibly different than what it takes to do that exact same thing at our Houston location down the street. Um you're talking about a 12x variable uh across the board. Um you you're talking about going from really honing three or four people into the sharpest knives in your toolkit and making them experts at what they do to trying to apply that to a team of, you know, on any given day 72 to 75. You're talking about having to steer a ship of, you know, five independent, um, creative, strategic senior leaders, managers, corporate office people, uh, you know, everybody has a hand in it now. Everybody has a hand in what we do at Truth Barbecue, and they have a you know, piece of skin in the game, and they got a little stake in our success, and they all have their own things. So where I think it it maybe is is not recognized as easily is that consistency and that quality and that the same today as it was five years ago, as it was 10 years ago, and still meeting the moment for these, you know, awarding institutions and food media with the volume we're doing that is insanity. It's insane. We shouldn't be able to still do that.

SPEAKER_03 2:04:54

I don't think it's about um accolades and credit. It's more about what did what was the first company that you started?

SPEAKER_04 2:05:01

Uh we talked about it. I founded a company, but I bought into a fitness center. But then the first company I found was the e-commerce company. We were buying and reselling basically.

SPEAKER_03 2:05:12

The e-commerce, but that one grew, right? Pretty big, yeah. Pretty big. Yeah. So nobody really talks about all the pain points of the growing part of it and the credit of how much uh I think the probably the overtime hours that you worked in between. That's tough. Yeah. Um I mean, that's that's the teacher broke up with me. Yeah, and that's the only thing that you really want them to acknowledge, probably. Yeah. It's not like, oh, you got a new car. Like, well, yeah, the business, you know, the business crew.

SPEAKER_02 2:05:39

It's like the interpretation that you're supposed to be.

SPEAKER_03 2:05:41

They notice they noticed the accolades and all the stuff along the way, but the what you really want credit was for all the work that you put in when you to get that when you slept on the cot.

SPEAKER_04 2:05:50

Yeah. Outside of the case.

SPEAKER_02 2:05:52

I will say I should amend that because the one person that has said that to me over the years, the last Texas Monthly list was three years or two years?

SPEAKER_03 2:06:03

Two years.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:04

So for 10 years we've been in the top ten, which is a insane feat. Um, but you know, rankings move and new players come up and and people are taking crowns, and that's what's supposed to happen, right? So uh we were what are we right now? Number nine?

unknown 2:06:20

Nine.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:20

We're number nine. Ten.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:22

So like three, nine, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:23

Some people might think that like you've dropped. We're like, we're happy to still be in the conversation because other players are coming in and and you know, LeBron can't be at the top forever, right? We're not LeBron, but you understand the analogy. But one of the first people that ever wrote about Leonard, two guys, um, Andrew and Brian from Tales from the Pits. They're first people that ever wrote about Leonard back in 2014, and and they had this blog, and um they were Texas barbecue.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:54

Treasure hunter.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:55

Treasure hunt. I was leaving out treasure. Very small readership, you know, but cool guys, really watching what was going on in the industry. And they were like, man, if anybody's reading this and you're serious about barbecue and you you got on for board with like the Aaron Franklin movement, like you need to watch what this kid's gonna do. So they've been big, big, big supporters and friends for a very long time, you know. Um, and right when that last list came out, and you know, we were at number nine, as opposed to like uh, you know, number three, number four, you know, staying in that kind of same area. I think they thought like, we're gonna console you a little bit, you know, we're fine, we're number nine while also achieving a Michelin Bib Gourmand, while also doing some other things, like we're just excited to be in the conversation, we're thrilled. Um, but Andrew had said to be 10 years in and doing it at this level, that you're still in this game, you're still in the top 10, you're still considered, you know, in this space, this elite space where you're considered, you know, wow. And I think that's the one person that I can think of over all the years that was back there from the cot sleeping days, knew the whole thing, and said, Hey, you're you're still doing this. This is crazy. Like, you should be so proud. I think that's the thing that you know, you don't really need the pat on the back for it, but I think a lot of people you sacrifice a lot. So every now and again you want somebody to say, like, I see what you're doing. Yeah, instead of being like, I see that you didn't take your ball and go home.

SPEAKER_03 2:08:28

It's so amazing that you got that award. Sometimes you just want to hear or be asked, like, how fucking hard was it to get X and like that part be acknowledged.

SPEAKER_04 2:08:39

I think I don't think people understand how much stress and how hard it is. They only see the end result, especially now with uh social media and and the way media is now, which is social media, uh, you only see kind of like the end result of somebody's and I already I know how hard it is, but a lot of normal people don't know how hard it is.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:57

So they just think sacrifice is lost on them.

SPEAKER_03 2:08:59

So when we're talking about Brandon Houston, it's like, oh, yeah, it's this they're like, yeah, it's it's the same thing, but it's not, it's not the same thing. It's so much bigger. It's like when you went from the e-commerce and how much it grew in between, and you're like, they're like, Yeah, but it's the same original business, but you're like, it's not at all. It's not. There was so much pain that went into the pain. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:09:19

I I think the trap, the trap, I think a lot of entrepreneurs have to feel this way. I know a lot of, you know, we're friends with so many people in the industry, so many restaurants that, you know, owners, operators, you know, even management teams that are side by side with us fighting these battles in their own spaces, spaces we support, you know, spaces we, you know, cheer on from afar. It's a very tight-knit community. And I think what's not talked about is like, it's not the sacrifice of the time. It's not the sacrifice of the sleeve, it's not even the sacrifice of the money, it's the personal sacrifice. There are things you're going to give up in your life, things that you would never consider giving up in your life. Things that if somebody told you at the start of your entrepreneurship journey that, you know, well, you're gonna have to take that one off your off your wish list. If you're gonna do this, that's not happening. If you knew that, you would say, oh, no, we're still gonna do all we're gonna do it. You know, I think that's the thing that a lot of entrepreneurs just want to be able to talk about or want to hear somebody say, I see what you gave up to make that to make this happen. And like, we just appreciate you being here. We appreciate you serving barbecue or having this business or being the bike shop in our neighborhood or like whatever it is, you know? I think that's the thing. Everybody struggles with that.

SPEAKER_03 2:10:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:10:39

Being seen as a human, yeah, not a business.

SPEAKER_03 2:10:44

Out of all the businesses that you started, no matter how much how how successful all of them were, if I would go back in time and be like, would you do it for if you had to sacrifice X, Y, and Z, you'd probably be like, no, not a chance. Like if I presented it like that. And yeah. A lot of people don't think of it like that. Like that they think that it just naturally happened, but there's so many sacrifices along the way that if you were presented from the get-go, you'd probably be like, or they think that the trade-off of like success, whatever that looks like to somebody, whether it's you know, money or vacation or car or or whatnot is that you would trade that, right?

SPEAKER_02 2:11:22

You would you would trade one of these things. But I think the human element is like people want to be successful at something they care about. Success means a variety of different things to different people. You know, you just want the validation of like you do something really well. And it's it's it's seen, it's noticed. But like if you were to like Leonard's saying, you know, pick pick something you want so bad and take it off the board so that you can get over here to that, you'd be like, Well, I don't know if maybe success is so important. You know, it's kind of going back to the same to that same debate about where college versus real world experience and being able to build something for yourself comes into play. Do you want to spend $100,000 on college if I can't guarantee you that you're going to walk into a $100,000 year job? You might be like, well, now that you say that, I don't I don't think so. I think I might want to do something else. So that's the interesting part of like the battle to be in the fight as a business owner consistently.

SPEAKER_04 2:12:21

What do the next five, ten years look like?

SPEAKER_03 2:12:26

Trying to get off of that hamster will.

SPEAKER_04 2:12:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:12:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:12:29

I was gonna say I think that changes daily for me.

SPEAKER_03 2:12:34

It's hard because you you find a s I I think a space, like a safe space of like it's repetition. Like you know what you're good at and that you feel comfortable. So like you feel filled with it. But you can't do that for forever. Because it creates burnout. So being able to balance that and find that and then move on to whatever the next thing is. And uh it's more so, I think probably the next five to ten years is more so. Where do you draw that line of finding peace versus you know, going on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing?

SPEAKER_02 2:13:08

I mean, I think people expect us to say scaling. Yeah, you know, I think people expect us to say like, well, we got five truths planned, you know. Um and certainly that opportunity exists, but I think that we've uh chosen a hard industry and we've been in the space long enough to say, like, well, what do you really need to be happy? And on the flip side of that, to afford that happiness, because life has to be paid for, but what do you need to maintain that? And I think that's what's, you know, really providing that kind of roadmap and outlook for where we're gonna take the business. Do we need 10 truths? No. We've got friends that have 10, 15, and they're like, you don't want this crazy. And we know what the crazy is with what we have here, so we don't need 10 truths. Um, do we have different interests? We do. Is the business growing in different ways that have viable like revenue streams that we're gonna, you know, pursue? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's brilliant. But it's all in the service of like how do you do more with less? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:14:15

And balancing that out.

SPEAKER_02 2:14:16

Like it's not in the service of let's put one in every metropolitan area. And we'd have to repeat the recipe, right? And Leonard and I can't repeat the recipe for five or ten years at each location to get, you know what I mean? It does it just it's not gonna work that way. So it's growing the business in a way that is balanced to get against, you know, the life we want to lead because we've sacrificed a lot of that life to get here. And now we do want to go on vacations and we do want weekends off, and you know, we do want to see our families and travel more and all the things. So yeah. It's growing the business, but it's probably not in the way people think. And it's probably a lot slower and a lot more conservative than people would think. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 2:15:08

I mean, a lot of problems come when you have, you know, 20, more problems. It's a whole nother set of problems for sure.

SPEAKER_02 2:15:16

Well, David Chang said something, you know, at the end of COVID, he was being interviewed, and he was like, COVID taught every restaurateur in the world that you can't just rely on your restaurant and never should you again. And he was like, even my company, you know, and so I'm not doing I'm diversifying everything. And so we I would say like three ish, three and a half years ago.

SPEAKER_04 2:15:42

Although I don't think the same thing would happen.

SPEAKER_02 2:15:44

I I don't think it's about preparing for another. If that if they tried to shut down the country again, I think he was just saying more like restaurants are so I had this conversation recently. I said, tell me, tell me a place where you do everything that you do in your home, but not at your home. Actually, I'm trying to remember if I had this conversation with you and gentry. It might have been that night at dinner. It's restaurants. Yeah. You you cry in a restaurant, you grieve, you get engaged, you celebrate birthdays and Mother's Day and holidays, you meet your friends, you hang out, you relax, you get me time, like you do everything in a restaurant that you do in your home. I think at the time when when David Chang gave that interview, he was he was definitely talking about like batting down the hatches and we got to prepare because we were all caught off guard. Of course he was. But I think the lesson that we took away from it is over the years, since barbecue has had this kind of cultural explosion, not just in Texas, but across the US, you know, us, just like a lot of our friends and colleagues in the space, have been approached almost nonstop with expansion opportunities. Leonard and I could be in 15 states right now and none of it on our own dime if we really wanted to. And we kept turning it down and turning it down. We never felt like it was right for us. And we got to a point like three and a half years ago, where I was like, man, we keep kind of like going on to the bigger thing. We keep getting these opportunities and doing them, but like it's exhausting. It's great when we get to the finish line, but then we got to maintain it. And it's exhausting. And that was three or four years ago. It's still just the two of us. And so I had gotten really curious. We'd been talking about expansion for a really long time. We'd been talking about a third location. Um, and I had gotten really curious about, but what if we didn't? What if we just doubled down on Houston? I'm like, we're not serving all of Houston. What if we just continued to build what we're building in Houston? And I think that was, you didn't ask this question, but I think that was the smartest business decision we ever made, you know, was to continually look at the restaurant and say, Because we're still learning on the day-to-day basis. Do you add an extra hour? Do you add the fried chicken?

SPEAKER_03 2:17:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:17:59

Do you give the people a burger? Do you do the rodeo party every year, which was not something that we were doing? That was so smart for us. And so we started to apply that to everything. You know, we just bought a new house, same footprint, very similar layout, probably just the paint colors changed. Didn't we bought the house because we were like, how do we do more with like the same, more with less? Well, we we really just needed a big yard for our dogs, you know. So I think our our ethos in like the business planning, the personal planning, and like maintaining what we've got in Houston and in Brenham, and you know, that was kind of where the Texans partnership came from. It was like just do more of what we're doing. There's there's a ton of growth there that doesn't take the human capital that it requires for us to go outside of the nest and go build another location, even though that is on deck for us, but it would probably be our last location, you know?

SPEAKER_03 2:18:59

Yeah, it's difficult. You always want to you always want to grow, but you you see so many places that grow a little too fast. And there's so many times like we look back three months, we look back six months, we look back a year, like, wow, I can't believe we learned that. I can't believe, like, if we would have gone and opened another restaurant, we would have had to, you know, learn that lesson X, you know, 2X, 3X, whatever that is.

SPEAKER_02 2:19:25

Lose money, fail somewhere. I mean, we fail every day, but like there's failures that you can mitigate, you control, you can pivot and learn from, and then there's failure, like the growing too fast. Like that that happens a lot in our industry, right?

SPEAKER_04 2:19:38

You know, you street you strike gold with a great concept quality, and yeah, it's really hard to scale restaurants.

SPEAKER_02 2:19:44

Yeah, that's our biggest fear. So, like people, people didn't really understand it, but we were like, if we can't do it like this, we can't do it. We won't do it. We won't do it. That was that was the rule.

SPEAKER_03 2:19:57

Yeah. It's a difficult decision. Always presented every day.

SPEAKER_02 2:20:02

10 years, I hope, I hope our senior leadership team is running our company. That's what we're building them for. I've got my my director of finance career mapped out. I've got Reed's career mapped out. You know, like I I have I tell them all the time, I have goals for you. You know, I want you to have a piece of this pie. Um, I hope that's where we're at in 10 years, maybe sooner.

SPEAKER_03 2:20:23

Yeah. We more so look at it now, especially of how do we create growth for people internally that we want to be with for 20 years, you know, 25 years. It's so exhausting to have to retrain somebody, re, you know, help them understand you uh over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_04 2:20:40

It's also the only way to, as an owner, two step away is is have really key leadership and it's the only way to share equity, right?

SPEAKER_02 2:20:47

And that's so important. You know, uh that's a conversation that the longer your business goes on, that one of our mentors and great friends, Pat Martin, he's out of Tennessee. He's very smart. He's got what, 13 barbecue joints plus burger concept, plus breakfast concept. Super smart. You know, he tells us all the failures he had and all the successes he had. And, you know, these are the conversations that we have to think about now so that we can get there, so that we can keep that great talent retained, because that's difficult in our world. You know, it's hard for a hospitality to, you know, create longevity in one company for a really talented candidate, you know. So you have to work really hard to start building those those models out. And that requires not killing your brand by scaling too fast.

unknown 2:21:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:21:39

Well, I appreciate y'all coming on. Sorry we took so much of your time.

SPEAKER_01 2:21:45

That in a nutshell, that is the difference between Leonard and I. I'm like, this is great. We can go forever. He's like, oh, I feel bad. It was fun.

SPEAKER_04 2:21:53

Yeah, no, it was awesome. Thank you.