Transcript for:
Insights from Alex Smith's Restaurant Talk

I think the struggle is, is that you can't be everywhere at once. I'd very much like to be in every single place we have every day. We have now 50 units open and operating. It's just not feasible. And so it's about not having control over that is, I think, the most difficult part of being a bigger restaurant corporation. My name is Alex Smith. I'm 39 years old. I'm president of Atlas Restaurant Group, and we're projected to do more than $200 million this year in revenue. One of our founding principles is integrity of product. Whether it's the deli and you have freshly shaved turkey or it's a prime steak at one of our restaurants, we always try and put the best product on the table. The biggest expense in the restaurant business is labor. Second to that is food cost. Obviously, it's been difficult because labor continues to increase as far as the cost of labor and food costs continues to increase. Part of the reason things are so expensive is our margins are already thin as an owner-operator. So a lot of that gets passed on to the consumers. Prices go up. But obviously labor and food in the last couple of years, especially with inflation, have been the highest cost for us. They don't share resources with talent. We can obviously plug people in where we need to to help support if there's an issue. We share resources through marketing. We share resources through HR. We share resources through finance. Procurement's a big one. The same lettuce you get in the deli, the romaine, is the same romaine you would get in any of our restaurants. It's the same pepper. It's the same fryer oil. The benefit is, is that you do have a procurement team that is doing group buying to drive bottom line to the restaurants. I was born in Timonium, Maryland and lived in Baltimore, Maryland here the last 17 years. Both sides of my family are born and bred Baltimore people. My grandfather on my mom's side, John Paterakis, he was a commercial baker turned developer. Just a great example of how relentless hard work can beat all. There was a movie theater that was under construction in Harbor East, which is the development that my family's involved in. I just thought that an ice cream store would do great next to the movie theater. So I asked if there was any space available and there was. There was an 1100 or 1200 square foot space right next to the theater. I was certainly intimidated going up there as a 20-year-old and going through the Haagen-Dazs school. Essentially, you learn everything on how to run a small business. You're learning how to do payroll. You're learning how to do inventory, you're learning how to schedule. You're learning about marketing, guest reviews, you're learning how to maintain equipment. And the most important is operations. You name it, we did everything. So the day that I opened that store, I could and did run the store by myself. I always say this to anybody who's in the restaurant business, your second and third location are the most vital, are the most important. Because a lot of people in this business, they have a great first location, and then they try their second location, and it turns out to either not produce what they thought it was or take you in a negative direction, and then you end up losing both. And so in this business, to get the critical mass, you have to be successful on your second and third business. I saw a need in the community for daytime lunch, and so I thought, how can I monetize this? I was ringing up customers and I was making pizzas and I was taking all the deliveries. And, you know, the first year or two that I opened that business. I was there every single day, open to close. So, you know, I just had the confidence to at that point that I got from Haagen-Dazs to operate that business. I didn't know a ton about fine dining. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to hire the very best people that know what they're doing in the community that I knew. I remember working at the deli for lunch service to talk to the guests, and by 5:00 I was at Ouzo for dinner service, and I'd work through dinner service, and I would touch every table and talk to every guest. I knew how to run every aspect of the business, and I was involved in every aspect of the business. I was involved in all the pricing, the menu changes, the day to day operations, everything from the lighting to the sound to the playlists to the music to the candles that were ordered. I touched every aspect of it, and I think at that time I was very confident and I knew that if I focused on this, it would be very difficult to fail because I'm in it. I just had a feeling of, I'm on top of this. We hired a finance person. We hired an HR person. We hired a social digital media person. And we started to figure out what are the departments that we need to execute a larger plan. Which is the only location that we've ever closed and abandoned the location. It was just a location mistake. I was young, I wanted to expand to South Florida. It was extremely hard to do because you just don't have bandwidth down there. It was my first big failure, but it was a learning experience and I learned a lot from it. But Atlas today is very well organized. We probably have 40 corporate employees broken down into procurement HR, entertainment, design and branding, marketing and then operations. I'm heavily involved in conceptualization, designing new projects, looking at menus and spaces, and figuring out what we're going to be doing in there. In addition, I run all the finance, business development, and strategic oversight of the company. Rehoboth is a two-hour drive from Baltimore, so it's something in the region that we can acquire that there's synergy of brands there in seafood, there in sushi. Our same distributors go to Delaware, and with group buying, we can save significant dollars. This is where I was born, and it's where I'll die. You know, I want to make sure that we we leave it a better place.