Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?
At the risk of angering Goldy Gopher (my husband and I are both University of Minnesota alums and our son is a freshman there), I’ve got some wisdom from two restaurant founders to the east, who served on a founders’ panel I moderated recently at the Restaurant Finance & Development Conference.
Their companies, Toppers and Culver’s, are headquartered just a couple dozen miles away from each other in Wisconsin, and their stories are instructive to their western neighbors, too.
Scott Gittrich is the founder of Toppers Pizza, with 84 units in a chain with a sensibility aimed at 20-year-olds.
“We like to talk smack about the competition. I used to be the demographic,” he said about the company he founded at age 28. “The first restaurant I managed, I was 20. Everybody stayed 20 and I got older.”
Today he’s 54, and he said keeping that irreverent — some would say obscene — edge in the culture and the marketing is not easy. At one point his brand’s message became muddy.
“It was easy early on,” to keep the smack-talking voice. “Then I started triangulating toward the big guys, which is easy to do.”
He met a marketing pro who said, “This is not Toppers,” referring to the advertising the company had drifted to, which was basically promoting discounts and coupons like the big three pizza brands. The marketing pro had interviewed Toppers’ customers to see what they thought of the brand. “He said, ‘look at these people. They’re rabid fans. If you would just step up and be yourselves, it would cut through.’”
Keeping authentic is paramount, and difficult.
“Gosh, I’ve learned that lesson again and again, and that was huge,” Gittrich said. “We operationalized that inclination, that voice, that true North. Once it connects, it becomes powerful.”
Craig Culver, the founder of Culver’s and home to the Butterburger,
has built the burger-and-frozen custard chain to more than 640 units and in October attracted private equity investor Roark Capital to take a minority stake.
But the early days were not auspicious. He went to college for a biology degree, and then told his father that restaurants were not for him. “I grew up in the restaurant business. That’s why I didn’t want to be in it,” he said. His father told him “You go find your dream, and I didn’t have a clue what my dream was, and it ends up I never left the industry.”
The first Culver’s store they opened, though, was a bust at first.
“Right across the street from us was Hardee’s, the biggest burger place in 1984,” he said. On the other side was a Dairy Queen, where the Blizzard was going gangbusters. Yet “no one knew what a Butterburger was, or what custard was,” and often times their own parking lot had just a few cars in it and the neighboring lots were packed.
“We thought we were so good at the business, but we came inches away from failing,” Culver said.
“I don’t know how much money we lost. We kept at it, and the third year we made money.”
Keeping at it, for more than 33 years, is Culver’s bottom-line advice.
As for other nods to Wisconsin, as I write this the Vikings are trying to make a run at a Super Bowl being held in their own hometown, and the Packers are not, so I’ll leave it there. Wisdom from the east only goes so far.
