Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur – It’s Only Work
At the end of the last post, I stated that three businesses were all starting at the same time. This is true but Quinn & Sherry (makers of The Game of Things) was lagging behind a bit, but we still were working at it trying to move it forward. The other two businesses were getting underway in the fall of 2000.
For Sherry & Sherry (A&W in Northgate Square Mall) we started to read franchise agreements and architectural drawings for the new build. The franchise agreement comes in a binder and reads like a legal contract. All legal contracts have their own language and are as dry as dry can be. I have never understood why someone would want to write this mash of alphabetic soup as a living. I appreciate the work lawyers do I just have never understood the attraction to that career. However, I have read and created so many legal contracts since then I think they should invite me into the Bar as an honorary member.
At Stroma we responded to hundreds of RFPs. RFPs read like a legal contract, but they are even longer. There are many times in my career I read the same page numerous times and retained nothing. When reading the page my eyes would glaze over and words would become disjointed. When this happened, I quickly realized that reading it one more time was not going to help so I would put my head back in my chair and have a 15-minute nap. I could nap anywhere at any time. Once I awoke from my nap I could read and understand the legalese and power on. These are really the only coffee breaks I ever took and they made me much more productive. To this day, I still cannot read legal documents if I am tired.
When I got the set of drawings from A&W to review and provide feedback the first thing that came to mind was “I have no idea if these are good or not”. I have never owned or built a restaurant. Yes, I worked at McDonalds when I was a teenager but that is of little help. The square footage of our box in the food court was 361 square feet – 19’ x 19’. The McDonald’s I worked at as a kid had a walk-in freezer about ½ the size of our entire store. We also had an additional storage of 100 square feet located somewhere in the bowels of the mall. I remember thinking this is tight and the storage space seems to be in a weird location, but they must know what they are doing. When building in malls sometimes you need to work with the space they give you. We found a contractor and started to build.
At the same time as all the A&W construction above was occurring, Stroma was awarded the project manager role (me) for the refresh of the Ministry of Correctional Services, which includes all detention facilities and parole and probation offices across Ontario. I also did all the accounting and payroll for Stroma. We hired Jerry, our first employee, to help process all the project orders for equipment and services to be provided at each location.
To help me understand the world of corrections I received a tour of the North Bay Jail. It is a surreal experience. Jail is by no means a holiday. The North Bay Jail was full at the time with two inmates per small cell, enough for a bunk bed and a toilet. Inmates were locked in that space at night. If they are really busy like on the weekends, they put three per cell by throwing a mattress under the bunk bed. During the day the cells opened to a larger space still behind bars and still small and restrictive. For one hour per day the inmates could go out and walk the yard – a desolate space of concrete and walls and razor wire. I am a little bit claustrophobic, and I am not sure I could last in such an environment. Jails are basic and do not have other features that correctional institutions have like libraries or workshops. There is nothing to distract you from your incarceration.
I learned from that tour, movement in detention facilities is slow and intentional for safety purposes and walls are thick (2 feet thick rebar walls) so everything takes longer. You don’t want to drill new holes if you can avoid it. Our plan, if I remember correctly, was to change almost all the computers, servers and printers over an eight-week period. The computers we did not refresh needed to be upgraded. I worked with the Manager of the Local Systems Officers (LSO’s) and the LSO’s who are the Correctional Service Local IT support. Each LSO was assigned to a certain region of the province. All equipment was leased from a third party, so all the old stock had to be packaged up and returned to the leasing company. Information on all these computers is sensitive, so every hard drive for every computer coming off lease needs to be wiped clean.
While all the above is going on Stroma starts to hire employees to work as IT contractors at Corrections. We went from zero to 6 employees quickly as the Ministry was starting to outsource more and more work. Also, during this time, I needed to get trained in how to manage and run an A&W. Normally they send new trainees to Ottawa to get trained in their corporate stores. I could not do that as I was running this Corrections project. So, they sent me to get trained in Sudbury at the Lasalle Street locations owned by one of the best operators in the country. So, the project has started, Stroma is growing and now I need to go to Sudbury to get trained. I would train on the weekends or weeknights.
From an outsider many think how hard could it be to flip burgers. I can tell you it is one of the most difficult businesses to run. It is a day in day out grind as the pressure is constant. From the moment you open you need to be on. Everything is timed and measured. It is all about consistency and speed of service. All quick service restaurants measure speed of service, how fast it takes from the time you order until you get your food. Quick service restaurants are obsessed with this measure because the faster you can be, while maintaining quality, the more successful your business will be. We strived for an average of 60 second service times at lunch and dinner and 90 seconds during other day parts. This is hard to do on a consistent basis.
Now I am driving back and forth to Sudbury, working as the Project Manager for Corrections and doing all the accounting/payroll for Stroma, as well as meeting with my Q&S partners to move the “Things” game forward. I was working about 100 hours per week between the three companies. I remember I had to do a review on our first employee after a month or two of starting and I was doing it in the washroom in the stall, as it was the only free time I had and I figured might as well kill two birds with one stone. I worked like this for about four months until the restaurant finally opened.