#5 – Restaurant R&M with Chris Martin

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Episode Summary

For this episode, we sit down with Chris Martin of Finney Hospitality Group.  Chris is responsible for Operations for Finney, and brings his 30+ years of hospitality expertise to the show.

4:09 – The importance of asset management

8:08 – Chris’ view of preventative maintenance

17:15 – Using data to identify trends in R&M

25:00 – Inventory management and the impact on the customer

Episode Transcription

5-Restaurant-RM-with-Chris-Martin


Introduction:

Welcome to another episode of the modern facilities management podcast brought to you by Stratum. I'm your host, Griffin Hamilton. This is the show where I interview industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights into modern day facilities management, from hospitality, to commercial real estate, and everything in between. We'll learn what it really takes to succeed as a facilities manager. 


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Thanks for joining another episode of the modern facilities management Podcast. Today I've got with me Chris Martin. Chris, how are you doing?


Speaker: Chris Martin  

I'm great today. How are you Griffin?

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

I can't complain. It's Friday. 


Speaker: Chris Martin  

Yeah no doubt, which just means middle of the week for us restaurant people.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

That is very true. So sorry to rub it in. Well Chris, to lead us off tell us who you are, and what exactly you do.


Speaker: Chris Martin  

Chris Martin, and here in Indianapolis, Indiana, and run a small regional group of restaurants and really have been in the restaurant business for 30 plus years, and all levels in all different parts of the industry. I’ve been frontline restaurant manager, multi-unit, President of a small regional company, and then, sort of behind the scenes and recruitment and HR and training and some operational stuff from that perspective, too. Pretty all over the place, and all over the United States as well. I’m that poster child, if you will, from the 90s when they asked you to move and you just said yes, and you moved and I was one of those guys in all different kinds of brands, Steakhouse, sports bars, casual theme, Mexican, barbecue, you name it, I've dabbled in it a little bit here and there somewhere along the line.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

With all the different types of restaurants you've run operations for, what has been the easiest, and what's been the most challenging?


Speaker: Chris Martin  

What's funny is the easiest is the most challenging, and it was just crazy but like barbecue, if you want to talk food, barbecue is the easiest food to cook and it's the hardest. Just getting it perfect and having the right amount and not too much and timing and every day the same product, it's really tough but I don't know. I mean, I've opened a lot of restaurants, I've inherited a lot of shit, if you will, as well along the way. The thing I enjoy the most the thing that's the most frustrating is people and that's what you spend most of your time doing is working with managing, developing, helping people, whether they're your guests, or they're on your team and so that's kind of interesting that we're talking about inanimate objects that don't talk back to you and are easily managed sometimes that take you away from what you mostly enjoy which is people so the most rewarding thing certainly been the people. Hardest thing, certainly opening a restaurant, but it's fun. It's an adrenaline high. It's like opening days like the Super Bowl. If you do that a lot and do it successfully it's a pretty, pretty awesome, rewarding thing for sure.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah and with regards to I guess the difference between taking over an existing restaurant, opening a new one, from an operation standpoint, what is the most challenging piece of that and do you have a preference between the two?


Speaker: Chris Martin  

Well, yeah, opening, I mean, everything's brand new and if it doesn't work, you call somebody and they fix it for free, that's a joy. But still if you don't set the standard, when you open a restaurant, a good equipment can be dead in a year so if you're still not cleaning and maintaining and taking care of it, brand new piece of equipment can deteriorate as fast as you allow it. On the flip side, if you take over an existing restaurant that hasn't been maintained, it's really not that difficult to get it back up to a standard where you're running efficiently, and you're not spending a lot of money. I definitely love opening new restaurants and the newness of everything but certainly I have a restaurant now that's almost 10 years old  is that every day project from a repair and maintenance and people in the whole nine yards. It's kind of fun because you're constantly trying to stay a step ahead or outsmart it or try to learn something to apply to the other restaurant so it doesn't happen.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Let's dive a little deeper on the assets and the equipment that you typically manage in a restaurant. How are you go about making sure in an existing restaurant, for instance, that you're staying on top of it, they're going to run efficiently and for the long haul, so you're not constantly having to repair them.


Speaker: Chris Martin  

Well if you think you have a really small number of sort of very large mechanicals that you can't live without, you're not going to function if you don't have them. If your restaurant has a hood system, you have to have that hood system. Having a strong partnership with somebody who's going to come in and clean it and maintain it and safety certify it and things like that. But even your team members cleaning the baffles, and keeping as much grease out of it that they can maintain for sure and even, we work with a company now which is Restaurant Technologies, RTI so we have an enclosed grease system, but they also have a media filter system that we've put up in our hoods, that's made a huge difference. But doing things like when you have your hood cleaner come out, clean your hoods, they should always replace the boat, or the belt on the motor in the fan up top on the rough, and leave the old one. If one breaks, you always have a backup and that $7 cost on your cleaning is minimal. Everyone should have that in their hooking contract is that there's a new belt on the fan assembly every single time and you probably are going to have a lot of hook problems. But having a regular schedule, whoever handles your dish machine coming in, and making sure it's working, having somebody at least every six months, come out and check your major refrigeration, walk in freezers, things like that, the pressure’s right and they're clean, wherever the condensers are inside, outside, whatever because if you take care of those great big things, one of the biggest expenses and two, they're the things you can't really kind of live without, and then makes everything else pretty easy because everything else you got is on wheels, or it's right there at waist hand level and so you can keep it clean and move it around and clean around it and things like that. And really, I think it goes back to people just teach people what you want them to do and give them the ability to do it. Labor is such a big thing in our industry that people always blame labor costs as the reason they don't maintain things. I kind of say, hey, that's bullshit, and I don't want when you're stocking or opening or closing that should just be part of your routine, just figure it out and show and help and get involved. But I think over the years, what's become the most frustrating is refrigeration equipment, for sure. One of the things I do I teach new managers are things like the gaskets got to be cleaned and maintained and when you have a bad gasket, it's better to replace one quickly than not, because when you got to replace 10 or 15 in your kitchen, it's very expensive. I have a gasket guy who can come out and make custom gaskets for our refrigeration doors, and it just extends the life of that piece of equipment because it runs more efficiently. But the quality of some of those pieces of equipment and things like that are not great and they're small little systems, and most average restaurants probably got 5 to 10 to maybe 15, small little refrigeration restaurants or systems running in the restaurant and most of us have one in our household so it's 10 things you got to keep track of and sort of keep an eye on.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Everything you just mentioned really revolves around the idea of preventative maintenance and I know you and I were just discussing this before we hit the record button, and you have a little bit of a different outlook on preventative maintenance.


Speaker: Chris Martin  

Well, some people might say it's a little jaded from 30 years in the business but you're really never going to prevent a whole bunch from happening if it's kind of one of those things if it's going to happen it's going to happen but you can be better prepared for it put yourself in a position to know what you're going to do. I fully believe in having a partner that helps you make sure your equipment’s up and running and clean and in the best operational order that it can possibly be but I think one of the things that's almost unfair to them is to call it a preventative maintenance program because all they're doing is trying to extend the life of the piece of equipment that doesn't mean a belts not going to break or a solder and in a copper coil on a compressor isn't going to weaken and get bad or whatever, again, a dish machine motor’s going to get a straw in it and burn up and that's going to always happen on a Saturday night, what you got to do is put some system in place where you limit that. Whether it's you going through and making sure things are clean and condenser coils are cleaned off and wiped off and things like that, that things aren't obstructed, that's what's really cool because it's the same thing you maintain your building, you sweep the carpet, you mop the floor, you clean the restrooms, you do all those things. You're not preventing anything, you're just making sure there's an order in place so that you can properly run your restaurant run your business and so I believe the same thing when it comes to equipment. If you keep it for front and just part of your process, you're not calling a repair guy a whole bunch, and then when you do you have a good relationship with them, because you're not stressed out about cost, you're not stressed out about the fact that they're in your building every day or whatever, it's a positive relationship and then I think, takes them off the defensive and puts them on your team and they try to help you and suggest things. We talk all day about which piece of equipment to buy and things like that but in most cases, we're stuck with what we got, and we need to figure out how to keep it up and running.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

A lot of folks that get into the industry just don't understand and don't really bring it to the front of mind as they are running operations, the importance of  that daily upkeep, throughout their facility and some people might not be able to understand the long term impact on it. Do you have anything from your experience, you can quantify the value of that regular upkeep?


Speaker: Chris Martin  

From a very high level business standpoint, if you operate or what I would say is a pretty average size restaurant, you're going to have a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of equipment in that thing, probably not including the hood that your company has bought or you've personally bought, and you're hoping you're going to get X many years out of that piece of equipment. It's one of those things we pay for up front, you depreciate it over time, but that money's out of your pocket, so how fast you want to turn around and buy a new piece of equipment, are you going to drive your car 30,000 miles in five years, or 100,000 miles in five years and do you replace it every five years, it's kind of the same mentality. The long term cost is that most of these equipment also not going to stay the same price it's going to appreciate in cost. What you pay $10,000 for today in five years might cost you $15,000 and if none of us really in the restaurant industry do a great job of setting money aside, so to speak for that equipment refresh or whatnot, some of the big chains do but that's when they go in after the building's been around for 20 years and completely refresh it. The other thing is time is money.  I'd rather invest collectively as an entire team in a building an hour a day cleaning or maintaining than having a manager wasted hour trying to get a service call scheduled, which could easily happen or having that service call not be very effective, because they've not been a part of what we've got going on, they aren't where the equipment, they weren't in good communication, we didn't give them the information needed so that they do whether they're parts available, and things like that. Anything that surrounds time is going to cost you money, and then certainly replacement costs. It could be as simple as in the old school restaurant days, I taught employees what a plate cost and a fork cost and a ramekin cost because they were getting thrown away or broken and it wasn't so much you were admonishing them for those things naturally happened in the course of the shift. But if they were aware of what the value was, they seem to value it more and so I think the same thing If you told most of your team members or managers that hey, this piece of equipment cost us $15,000, and we have five of them, they can do the math probably pretty quickly and go, Wow, they spent a lot of money on this equipment, maybe we should take care of it. They bring it to our attention when maybe something's not running right, or something's not working. We can catch it early on in the process. Some of it could just be awareness and communication and education and then find it, allowing some time in our busy schedules to actually worry about it.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

It's those little things that just add up and if you compound that over 5, 10 or 15 locations that you have, I mean, those forks and plates, they add up and with restaurants already on slim margins as it is, it's imperative to take that into consideration and have total buy in from every level of your organization. I think a lot of folks are kind of pushing away ownership from those routine items, and they're being hyper reliant on vendors. What has your experience been as far as taking ownership, having a facilities manager or team members in the organization that take care of just daily facilities operations?


Speaker: Chris Martin  

I think it's scale determines what you have. If you have one or 5, 10, 15, 20 restaurants somewhere in that scale, you have a need for somebody who Hey, that's a part of their job is to help keep track of what's breaking, what's being repaired, who's repairing it, what are they charging us and come up with a plan and be inspired and proactive. Before you get to that scale, then certainly I think you need to partner with somebody you trust. What I found is if you can find a restaurant mechanical repair company that can kind of do it all and become very familiar with your restaurant, so you're not calling five different vendors and or whatever works or again, you have a company that sort of helps you oversee it all, and they may still not repair it but one of my cities where we have multiple restaurants, we have one company, they do anything that's plumbing, they do anything from an equipment standpoint, electrical, gas, refrigeration, HVAC, they maintain our ice machines, there's not a whole bunch that's going to break inside of a restaurant, that we're not going to have this person. So then, as an owner, or a multi-unit person, or even a GM, that person has good communication with me, and you get quotes, and you're very aware of what's going on, there's an open line of communication, and you build some trust, I think, as you scale up, things are going to get lost. So, having someone that really has a tool in place to track what equipment is where and when we buy it, and looking at trends, and why do certain things break? and why do certain brands break and, you name it. Why does something break in one part of the country, another part of the country, I've seen that before and certainly in the Northeast, where it gets great, very, very, very cold, you would think, wow, it'll never be a problem to have a refrigeration issue up there, it's just the opposite. Sometimes the worst refrigeration problems are in the coldest environment but having somebody very aware of that and part of it, and I would think a lot of the people who are going to look to you and these podcasts for help are the ones who've got, hey I got three restaurants, and I'm spending these 1000s of dollars of bills, how do I get ahead of it, the way to get ahead of it is to draw a line in the sand and say, hey, get everything working and then track everything you do from there, from that point forward, and when it becomes cost prohibitive to continue to repair it, you make the investment and know that you're not going to have to make that repair over a long period of time. But if you just completely continue to ignore it, like that, changing the oil, you're in a car, or rotate your tires or whatever, at some point, tires are going to fall off your car, your motors going to stop working, so you have to spend the time and spend some money as well to care for these investments that we've made.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and you hit it on the head there as far as identifying trends and that can be rather difficult for a small operations team, as they continue to scale up so you step back and look at okay, for the last five years, I've just been doing it as is, and calling so on throughout emergencies, or to resolve emergency repairs. I don't really know what's occurred other than the fact that that fryer in the corner has been repaired 150 times I’m not going to buy that brand again. I guess the importance of data is something that shouldn't be overlooked.


Speaker: Chris Martin  

No, not at all. Story I was sharing with you a little bit earlier, again, the regional restaurant chain 20 restaurants was involved in we put this facilities manager in place to say, hey, we're just spending way too much money. Let's figure out why and we went through the process of inventory and cataloging every single piece of equipment, every single restaurant with serial numbers purchased a whole nine yards and then he went back through the accounting system and found every repair on every piece of equipment, and who did the repair and how many hours it took and what was the rate and was there a specific part that broke all the time? Was there a specific restaurant that had problems and then you put all that data in a database and start sorting it and split it up just like you do food cost or bar cost or try to figure out how to write out a schedule with multiple departments and day to day, you hopefully find some trends that you can get out of it, fryers always break into you, hey, let's make sure everybody cleans in the right way. Are they all gas right or Ignite, and so go back and look at several things and then like I expressed to you we found there were very specific brands that we had bought that just didn't hold up to our business and so as we were remodeling or replacing or helping folks buy an open new restaurants we were like, here's the brand that's lasted the longest or incurred the least amount of repairs, it's still going to need to repair at some point but if you can extend that life because just the quality of workmanship or because it works better for you. I think that's the other thing, people get tied up sometimes and whether it's a this thing brand or that name brand I think you also got to know whether it works for you, doors on refrigeration, is it going to be open all the time open and open and open and open, then you probably ought to look for one that's got a self-closing door, you know what I mean? Or you should be very intent on checking gaskets on a regular basis. But I think that the trend ought to be that at all levels, somebody ought to catch it, your bookkeeper, your accountant, your controller, whoever ought to catch that, we keep spending a lot of money with X, Y, and Z repair company, what's going on? If you have stability in your management team and communicate well, it's like, hey, there's a problem. It could be the repair company, it could be the piece of equipment, it could be the way we treat that equipment and figuring it out. Do things break in the winter? Do things break in the summer? And as their volume? (inaudible 20:51). If you're really busy in the summer, and everything breaks, well, in March, why don't you do have a program where you go through every piece of equipment and make sure it works, because it's probably going to spend some money to save time and headache and frustration and people quitting because things are breaking and guest being upset because you can't execute your business.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and I think looking at it were a concept is scaling, I'll ask you this, how much does it typically cost to open a restaurant half million, a million dollars?


Speaker: Chris Martin  

Well, I mean, just in equipment again, I think on the low side, probably a quarter of a million dollars, and on the high side a half a million dollars and that doesn't include heating and ventilation that probably or may not include the hood system, and the exhaust system, that doesn't include your point of sale, that's just refrigeration, gas cooking equipment, electrical pieces of equipment, things like that. It is a huge investment and there's a lot of ways to, again, to kind of skin that cat, sometimes it's you got to spend 250, you're going to spend 350 if 350 last longer then it's obviously probably a better investment or if it's going to make your business more efficient. One of the big problems out there is this, the technology of equipment hasn't necessarily expanded, you know what I mean? The technology on a fryer, or a flat top grill is pretty much the same as it was 30 years ago which tells me, there's not a lot of evolution even built into that piece of equipment. I think as you go through that process of scaling and you figure out how much you invest that ought to be equivalent to how much time and energy you put into it.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

That just makes it that much more important as you continue to add locations. Again, it's a game of numbers, frankly, where you want to have an empire and you want to have more locations, and $10,000 here, and there doesn't seem like all that much in the grand scheme of things. But if you add that up over time that's a pretty significant chunk of change there.


Speaker: Chris Martin  

Well as your restaurant gets older, if you figure those first two or three years, your repaired maintenance line ought to be a fraction of a percent of cost, as you get your hoods clean maybe your grease tap empty maybe somebody who comes out and just does an inspection, but, as you fall through whatever progress, you're going to spend more money and so one of the dangerous things out there, that happens in the restaurant industry, especially for big chains is that all of a sudden, they get mature and the majority of their restaurants are 10 years older and their half a percent RNM line has inflated to three and a half percent. I mean, you take 3% off the bottom line of a $30,000 restaurant, you're taking a third, maybe even more of their entire profitability out of the bank. That's the other thing that everybody just ought to realize with age you need to manage that cost because are your sales going to be as high as they are, if you've done a good job with a staffing your labor rates going to be higher, inflation and commodities, your food cost may be higher, there's so many things that will inflate over the life of your restaurant and if you're spending money maintaining it at a very high growth rate, then the math’s not going to work. At the end of the day, you're going to be like, Yeah, I've got to figure out how to spend less money on repair and maintenance. Well, if all your equipment are old and you haven't maintained it for the first 10 years, there's only one way to fix that problem that's just replace it all, so you get back to zero which is a hard thing for smaller chains or single unit operators and things like that big chains can do it, purchasing power, a lot of stuff but the dollars and cents of it are just pretty simple. If you're not making any money early on, and you're restaurant ownership or management of a location, it's only going to get worse because stuffs going to start breaking and things are going to inflate from a cost perspective.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Go back to the beginning of our conversation, you alluded to the exhaust fan bell, and that being part of the contract, have that replaced. That kind of leads me to inventory management and having just different items around either in a warehouse or at each specific restaurant. In your Hospitality Group, what's the importance there?


Speaker: Chris Martin  

Sometimes it's problematic because depending on how you've grown, you might not be able to buy a single compressor that's going to work and enough of your small refrigeration equipment that you always have a compressor on hand but all my restaurants have at least one backup fan belt for every exhaust unit. We always have a compressor on a shelf somewhere. So you always buy one ahead. It's not an expensive thing, but it's a tie, again, time is money. So if your cooler goes down, if your freezer goes down, if one of your main reach ends off on a pizza station goes down, you need that thing up. So you don't want that lag time of waiting. We have a hoodless exhaust system and one of our restaurants as an example which is the biggest money suck pain in the butt you're ever going to see. But if this was reverse engineering in the fact that what would it have cost us to engineer the building and put a traditional hood in, we can run with these untraditional, ventless hoods for 20 years and still not spend the same money. But they're very frustrating because they must always be air negative and the minute they become or don't have the ability to pull negative air out of that, and smoke and things like that they just shut off and the equipment shuts off. So it's not like the hood just stops working, the fryers underneath the hood stop working. We always have extra filters, we always have extra sort of grease collection tubes and things like that, we always have that stuff and it only takes a onetime pre purchase for you to be in that position. I think it's you go back and again, you look at Hey, what will put me out of business, meaning I have to shut my doors, I have to stop selling a certain type of food, I have to not wait until the repair guy gets that part and then I buy those parts or I'd ask that supplier to have those parts, which a lot of them will. Some of my repair guys keep parts that I'm like, you have that part in there, like yeah, we've been here before, it takes forever to get that repair part. There are some pizza ovens that are that way that again that have an electronic control board that just the heat and things like that they'll go bad and they burn but that control boards like $350, is it worth not selling pizzas for three days waiting for that control board to not pre spend that 350. Again, it's going to take some time and effort on somebody, kind of inventory and what you have and saying what do we need. A long time ago I used to keep some gaskets always in inventory and when one tore or whatever, screw the old one out, put the new one in. Again, I would urge everybody to find a gasket guy in your market and he's just got big rolls a gasket and he can measure it and cut it and the rubber weld together and throw it in and get him on a program where he had just replaced one or two every month that are really bad and every once a while maybe you don't have to replace one. It's no different than freaking recovering the seats and chairs and booth covers and things like that. If you wait till they're all bad, you guys will just buy new. If you got a guy come help you every month and it’s still the same. There's something else that actually I just thought of that we keep an inventory. One of our concepts we have probably 30 or 40 booths, they're all the same size. But my vinyl repair guy always has three or four booth covers made so if something really, really bad happens, he just comes in takes the old one off puts the new one on and he's in and out in 15 minutes. Then he’ll make another one and that'll be on the bill, he'll charge me for that but instead of him having, is it that one okay well I'll make one tonight or tomorrow and then I'll be in a couple days no, it's like hey Ben I’ve really bad rip, can you come fix things like yeah, I'll be there in a couple hours and so that makes a big difference.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah and all ties back into the customer experience because I think that is our role in hospitality is make sure the customer experience is top notch that they keep coming back and at the pizza of an example if you're going there specifically to buy a pizza and it's not working and you've got someone that's driving an hour and a half in rush hour traffic to go get that piece of equipment and then repair it. It just is a bad experience and as a customer I’m probably not going back and so it's those little things that add up, not only at the bottom line for the restaurant, but for the customer experience and make all the difference. 


Speaker: Chris Martin  

Yeah no doubt, I also think it's an obstacle to retaining a really good employees. The best employees do not work someplace that has a restaurant that's falling down around them, they go away. That's why you see so many team members in the restaurant industry pop to the new restaurant all the times because they, hey, nothing breaks. I think a really good mentality about your equipment and your facility as a whole also removes a lot obstacles and operating the restaurant really well. It all comes full circle without a doubt, and again, a lot of people are like, I don't have the time, I don't have the money, well, you're got to spend a lot of money if you don't take the time, and you're going to lose a lot of money, your guests or employees, which are going to cost you money. Again, I give you all kinds of tips and tricks on every little piece of equipment on how to maintain it, or how to fix it, or how to do it but my real tip and trick from an operation standpoint, and probably any industry, whether you're at GameStop, which is in the news every day right now, or you're in a Olive Garden, or you're in one of my restaurants, you have to invest the time in your people and then the equipment, the facility and all that stuff, so that you have good people and you're not affecting your guests and the operation run dry.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Frankly, you can't afford not to take the (inaudible 31:32). Well, Chris, I've got one last question for you and I asked this to everybody. Who or what has made the biggest impact on your career and operations?


Speaker: Chris Martin  

Wow, again, I'm lucky in the fact that I've worked with just some freaking amazing people so I don't know that I could pick one individual person out because one of the people I didn't mention would actually watch this. Or say, What the heck, I thought I was the guy or I thought I was your favorite. But to be honest with you I had someone I was new to the corporate level out of operations role, really, and was working a lot with recruiting and doing new restaurant openings and new restaurant openings training and on the road a lot and talking to all the operations guys and doing a ton interviews and making hiring decisions and hey, who's going to go run a new restaurant, things like that. My boss sat me down one day and said, Hey, I don't think you realize how much influence you have over this entire company and how important that is from a leadership standpoint for our success and I was like, what are you talking about? I'm like, I'm just a cog. I'm just a well-greased, well-oiled piece of the machine that knows what to do and she was No, I mean, your advice, things you say, things you do, the way you act, the way you make decisions, influences how other people do things and that's real leadership and I think that is pretty crazy. I was listening to a football coach literally two days ago, and he was talking about, hey, the reason I'm a head football coach at a college is because I want to influence how these kids make decisions and grow up and become men and things like that. So I think that as an owner of a business, like a restaurant or retail, where you're going to deal with a lot of employees and a lot of guests and things like that, I think we all should take the huge level of responsibility of fact that the way we act and talk and the decisions we make, and from a business standpoint, personal standpoint, all those things really influence and can influence a lot of people. That piece of advice to me, again, when a lot of times I was sitting on the phone at a desk in a room where I would never saw guests never saw a restaurant, but that was a huge part of what I did. They just made a big impact for me. I will tell you that I would never do well in a position where I didn't influence a lot of people, but I don't think the word influence is really the important part I would never do well, if I wasn't in a position where I couldn't lead other people. Again, that 10 minute conversation with me changed the trajectory of it went from me sitting at a at a desk in my house in T shirt and shorts every day to sit in between the CEO and CFO, the other major brand in the United States every day. That's a pretty profound statement or advice from somebody that propelled me. Though that advice was given to me long before I was the president of a company long before I was running 10s 30s 50 100 million dollar companies that I've been doing now. So yeah, that would be it.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

I absolutely love that. Well, Chris, definitely appreciate the time. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. I appreciate the insight.


Speaker: Chris Martin  

Absolutely, Griffin. Thanks a lot. Thanks, everybody.


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