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And so I went in there, and the gal says you’ve got one to three years to live.Īnd (they) said, well, the only good thing is you’re a good candidate to get a stem cell transplant, but it’s a 60/40 percent survival rate.About the author: Jonathan D. Well, over the next 15 years the bone marrow started wearing down, and that’s (when) my red counts … they started going down. I’ve never been in a hospital a day in my life.” “Something’s wrong with your blood.’’ … Instead of being oval, like normal blood cells, mine were teardrop-shaped with a little point, so they wouldn’t last as long. You found out about your blood disease when you signed up to donate bone marrow for a child with leukemia, you say.Īnd I got picked, and all of a sudden they said, “We can’t use you.” I said, “What do you mean, I’m healthy as an ox. You’re not making more money, you’re just trying to keep up. That’s just to even try to keep up with what we were making before. I think, just talking to my industry friends, you’re going to see restaurant (prices) go up 10 percent. So if both food and labor go up, we have to pass that on just to be able to keep them open. … Usually in the restaurant business your wages are 30 percent of your costs. Our profit margins are 15 percent on a good day. If you don’t have the clip, you can’t do it.Īre restaurants going to have to raise salaries? We have the bag, but we don’t have the little clip that goes on the bag.” … Little things ruin the whole deal. The guys who make our pita bread said, “Nick, we can make pita bread. In 10 years we’ve never had a shortage like that. They have to wait two weeks for another order of baklava because it’s coming from Tarpon Springs from Hellas Bakery. I just got a phone call: Our stores in Dallas, they’re out of baklava. Right now, you can’t get employees, you can’t get food. How are you affected by the worker and supply shortage? Sometimes some people just aren’t cut out for the business. But, generally, if you’re not good, we find someone to buy you out. If a franchisee isn’t doing well, it tarnishes the image of the whole chain, doesn’t it?Ĭorrect. Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started. We train them, we provide an opening unit support team, and then we provide ongoing support. We help them design it we help them build it. We find the location, negotiate the lease. We sell a franchise model and they pay a fee - usually right now $30,000 - to kind of get the rights to open a store. And then most restaurant chains are franchises - Taco Bell and McDonald’s and all that. They own them, they sign leases, they build them. There’s companies like Outback that open all their own restaurants. There’s two different kinds of restaurants. So we sold the company in ‘08 and when the economy turned, a lot of stores closed.
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It was ‘07, ‘08, the economy was booming, and the construction costs jumped up. You pick locations, “Well, it’s close enough.” The cost to build them got high. We were doing 50 stores a year, and what happens is you start rushing the locations. That’s one of the mistakes we made, I think, at Beef ‘O’Brady’s. What are the risks of expanding a chain restaurant? Can you do it too quickly? We were not very well-respected at Cornell University.
#I'm literally the guy in the picture how to#
We were the guys, “What is your test, how to set a table?” We literally would be walking up the hill with chef coats. At Cornell, we were considered the knuckleheads. My younger brother and I both (majored in), they called it hotel administration. Vojnovic, 62, of Tarpon Springs, talked with the Tampa Bay Times about the chain restaurant business and the disease that would have killed him.