The Mother Plucker’s Ramblings

Being the owner of a restaurant can be very difficult at times.  Mark, Sean and I are all very prideful people and we want most every guest that dines with us to have a “WOW” experience.  I am sure that sentence stopped you there for a second.  Why is he saying “most every guest” and not all guests?  Well, over the years we have figured out something that is key to Pluckers being successful.  This essential secret is that we cannot make all of the people happy all of the time.  Most businesses live by adages such as “the customer is always right” or “we will do anything to please the customer”.  At Pluckers, we live by a different set of rules. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, we closed all of our Austin restaurants to celebrate the holidays with our employees at our annual Christmas party.  As one of the owners of Pluckers, I can’t tell you great it is to see hundreds of smiling faces being able to take the night off and enjoying themselves in an atmosphere away from work.  We even had many “Pluckers Alumni” coming back to hang out with us.  No matter how much personal success we may have in the future, Mark, Sean and I take no greater pride than in helping better the lives of the people in our company and watching them grow as people at Pluckers.

We have unfortunately grown to the point that we are no longer able to remember the name of every person in our company. However, it is a great feeling when employee after employee comes up to us at the party to thank us for allowing them to work at Pluckers.  Because this is the only real job any of us has ever had, its sometimes hard for us to understand just how many people do not enjoy the place they work at.  Hearing from our employees is always a special reminder of how much the things we do at Pluckers mean to them and how important it will always be for us to strive to create a better working culture for them.  Here is an email I received last night from one of our newer managers that helps better explain this.

 “Hello Gentlemen, I hope this day finds you with not too bad of a headache.  My wife and I thank you for the opportunity (and good excuse) to get out of the house and punt the children to the Grandparents.  It was a good time with a new flock of co-workers and I had the best time at a Christmas party, that I’ve not had in over 10 years. You all run a refreshing company and I sure am enjoying myself.”

While the title of this blog may seem a little egomaniacal or cocky, I really just wanted to share with you one of the secrets of our success.  For anyone that runs a business or manages people, I would like to think that this may inspire you or at the least give you a better understanding of just how easy it can be to become more successful at your job.  As Pluckers has evolved over the years, we have had the opportunity to meet many people in the restaurant industry and exchange ideas on everything from menu items to accounting practices to real estate.  I’d like to think that people enjoy the food at our restaurant, the plasma televisions, Trivia Night and all the other fun things we do that separate us from the common wing place.  However, the thing I think we are strongest at and what makes Pluckers great is our people.

Whether or not you have worked in the restaurant industry before, anyone who has every held a job knows how rare it is find a place that you enjoy working at.  To Mark, Sean and I, there is nothing we are more passionate about than our people.  We truly believe that almost all you have to do to be successful in almost any industry is to hire, coach and inspire the people that work for you to care about their jobs.  Once you show your people the love, it is almost inevitable that your business will become successful.  Its almost mind-boggling how few businesses today understand this simple concept.  When we talk with fellow restaurant executives at conferences, 90% of the topics they want to talk about are food costs or marketing or reducing labor costs.  90% of what we want to talk about is the pursuit to finding better people to work with us and learning better ways to take care of them.

The people that work for us work very hard and we are incredibly demanding of them.  We do not demand that are perfect all of the time…god knows we mess up way too many of your meals to say we are perfect.  However, we ask them to strive for perfection all the time.  It is this pursuit of perfection in taking care of our guests that we believe allows you to understand when we make mistakes because you know that we care about you.  To get your staff caring about your guests, you have to show them that you care about them.   To let you behind the curtain a little, here are some of the things  we are proud of that are different than most restaurants or businesses.

•          Over the past few years we have taken all of our general managers on an all-expense paid trip to Las Vegas.  And by the way, this isn’t the $5.99 all you can eat buffet way to go to Vegas.  We stay in the best hotels, eat at the best restaurants and take everyone VIP in the clubs.  This year we are headed to New Orleans and we have decided to expand that group to our office employees as well as many other people we work with in business life that help make us successful. 

•          We believe that holding people accountable for their actions is one of the most important lessons you can teach an employee.  We also believe that rewarding them accordingly when they do a great job must happen for them to continue to improve.  Most of our general managers have the ability to make over $100,000 a year with the bonuses we make available to them.  That is about 50% more than the typical restaurant GM makes.  People always ask us why we pay our people so much.  We tell them that we don’t pay them that much, they earn it.  We give them the tools to treat our business as if it were their own and want them to have the chance to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit inside of them. 

•          Every year during the Summer, we close the restaurants and have Pluckers Field Day.  Each of our stores compete against each other in events like the three-legged race, tug of war and the infamous Twinkie eating contest.  This idea was inspired by two of our General Managers who felt that every so often we need to bring out the child inside us.  As hard as they work, Munson Stodder and Todd Winiger spend countless hours each July planning the event for the employees not because they get paid to do it, but because they love the people they work with. 

•          Most of the restaurant industry is a churn and burn type of business.  Our goal is to develop every person that we hire to become anything they set their mind to with our company.  Where many restaurants typically hire people from the outside, a large portion of our staff is from employee referrals because they want their friends to experience Pluckers with them.  In addition, we are proud to say that almost every General Manager at our store started off as a cook, server or delivery driver in our company. 

•          The average Pluckers employee has about 100 hours of training before they are allowed to work on their own.  This includes attending employee orientations, studying for tests, reading manuals and on the job training.  Where many companies talk about cutting training costs to make more money, we believe the only way for an employee to feel good about their job performance is to make sure they have a full understand of our expectations and how to be successful with us. 

Really I could go on and on with this subject, but I think you get the point.  If you want to be successful in business, you’ve really got to spend time building relationships with the people you work with.  When other people ask us “How can you afford to do all of these things for your employees?”, we ask “How can we afford not to?”

If there are two words in the English vernacular that we never want Pluckers to be associated with it is the “Chain Restaurant”.  It never ceases to amaze me to see Americans dining at chain restaurants that look, feel, smell and taste the same in Austin, Texas as they do in Boise, Idaho.  Now I might understand this if the food quality or service at a Chili’s, Applebee’s or Olive Garden was superior to your local eateries.  It is quite possible that back in the mid to late 1980’s, these chain restaurants actually were better than most local places because that was a time that outside of large cities, Americans hadn’t been exposed to other cuisines like Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, etc.  However, these days you have so many choices of where to eat, why would anyone settle for a meal they know is going to be marginal?

For Pluckers, much has changed over the last 15 years as we have grown from a little take-out and delivery restaurant on West Campus in Austin and are now opening our 10th store.  However, we do everything and anything we can do to make each store we open look and feel a little different than the ones we opened previously.  We love the fact that people argue about which Pluckers is their favorite.  Although we may be growing, we promise you that we will never evolve into a typical chain.  What does that mean?  Here is a list of our promises to you loyal Pluckers fan of what we won’t become:

1.  We promise never to lower our prices - We don’t care if there is a recession going on out there.  We refuse to put together a $20 appetizer, entree and dessert for 2 combo to lure you in to Pluckers.  However, we do promise that we will never sacrifice on the quality of our wings, burgers and sauces and to do that means we may need to charge a little more than everyone else.  We do not believe that our guests want us to sacrifice quality in order to save them a couple of bucks.

 2.  We promise never to develop a Pluckers “Prototype” - For those of you outside the restaurant or real estate business, a “prototype” is what the chain restaurants develop so they can build the exact same building in any city in America.  This helps them cut their construction costs because they can repeat the same building over and over.  Boring!  Part of the fun for us is designing new patios, figuring out new ways and places to put our plasma tv’s and creating more interesting dining rooms and bars.  We didn’t get into this business to do the same thing over and over like a factory.

3.  We promise never to develop a restaurant jingle - “I want my baby back, baby back, baby back……”  Ok, so that one is definitely catchy, but we don’t think we need to create a song based on a limited time offer special on ribs to make you want to return to Pluckers.  We think that you can taste the difference in our food and see the genuine caring that the people we hire have for you.

4.  We promise to never allow the masses to determine what Pluckers is - Chain restaurants spend millions of dollars on market research, taste tests and advertising budgets to figure out how they should “brand” themselves in the future.  At Pluckers, the only market research we do is talking to our Pluckers Club members and other guests and make sure we are giving them what they want.  As far as taste tests are concerned, our formula for success is pretty simple…one of us creates a sauce or menu item and if the three of us don’t agree it is great, it doesn’t go on the menu.  We don’t need to sample it to thousands of people to know if something tastes good.  We have highly honed tastebuds developed from years of eating Cajun and Southern cuisine growing up.  And as far as advertising is concerned, sure we have some hits and misses, but we don’t use advertising agencies to tell us how to speak to you.  We use our own judgment and tell you the truth about Pluckers.  And by the way, no ad agency in the world would have suggested “If you don’t like our wings, we’ll give you the BIRD!”

5.  We promise to evolve with the times - Ever noticed how popular chain restaurants hang on too long to their outdated brand?  Walk into a Hooters and take a look at the outfits the girls are wearing.  Are you kidding me?  Those terrible fishnet stockings and orange shorts may have be fashionable in the 1980’s, but so were rugby shirts.  We always want Pluckers to be flexible enough so that our brand never gets stale to our guests.  Sure we like nostalgia too, but we would prefer that it isn’t in what our servers are wearing.

Have you ever noticed that your parents, grandparents and pretty much anyone a generation or two older than you likes to always remind you of how lucky you are?  They run this guilt trip on you like it was your fault that cars didn’t exist in 1920 and they had to walk to school.  The truth is that the greatest technological advances  in America today actually were invented after I was 10 years old.  But hey, you don’t hear us Gen X’ers bitching to Gen Y about “back when I was young”.

If you asked most Americans what the most important inventions of the 20th century were you would hear things like the affordable automobile,  the Space Shuttle and the personal computer.  So as a sports fan, self proclaimed chicken wing connoisseur and pop culture child of the 80’s, I got to thinking about what I considered to be the most important inventions of my lifetime.  Now first of all, I don’t want to hear from anyone about how a prior invention led to any of my most important inventions.  This is my list and if you don’t like it, make your own list.  Now mind you that my thinking isn’t always linear (or rational) without the assistance of mild hallucinogenics.  But after the first puff….all will become not only clear, but it will inspire to re-analyze your own life in ways you never though possible.  Ok, so I am prone to hyperbole. All I know, is that the following inventions have had the greatest impact on my life:

Invention #1 - The Wireless Remote Control

Televisions started finding their way into households in the 1950’s and color tv wasn’t even popular until the 70’s.  However, it is the remote control that changed America.  Let me give you a quick rationale behind this.  Without the remote control, cable telelvsion wouldn’t have been as successful and DirecTV would never have existed.  This is because it would be too much of a pain in the ass to have to walk to your cable box to change channels once there were hundreds of stations available.  So, without cable or DirectTV, there would be no ESPN, and without ESPN, Erin Andrews would not pop up on my screen at least 3 times a week during football season.  The loss of any or all of these would be considered minor catastrophes in my personal life. 

If you are under the age of 35, you probably don’t realize that before the wireless remote control, there were actually two less effective precursors.  The first remote controls actually were attached to a 6-foot wire that stretched out of your television.  What genius thought of that?  Who watches their tv six feet from the screen besides the visually impaired and  grandparents?  This actually may have qualified as one of the dumbest inventions of the 20th century. 

The other form of the remote control had its effectiveness based on how old you were.  For example, my parents got our first color television when I was 4.  As soon as I could read the UHF and VHF dials and understand the spoken word, I was ordained the family remote control.  Dad wants the tv switched from the Incredible Hulk to the Million Dollar Man?  Dave, get off the couch and change the channel.  Grandma wants the tv turned on?  “Dave get in here and come turn on the tv for your grandmother!”  As a four year old, you are only too proud to find anything of assistance you can do to help your family.  All you want to do is earn a little four year old respect.  In today’s world, social services would probably confiscate your child if you had them flipping channels for you all day and night.  In 1976 and in a more innocent time, this was just part of duties of being a son in a house without a wireless remote.

Finally, what man doesn’t love the luxury of being able to switch the channel at 3:00am every 30 seconds between the 1980 Sugar Bowl on ESPN Classic, a Billy Mays infomercial and soft-core porn on Skinamax? 

Invention #2 - NFL Sunday Ticket

When I was growing up, you got to watch 3 or 4 NFL games a week.  This was usually your home team, another 1pm Eastern game, an AFC West afternoon game and then Monday night football.  If your home team was as crappy as my Atlanta Falcons, then usually they didn’t sell out their home games and even that was blacked out.  I know some of you under 35 are thinking, well why didn’t you go to a sports bar if you were such an NFL fan?  The answer is there were no real sports bars until about 1987.   It wasn’t until around that time that people started buying those giant 6-foot satellite dishes and stealing the signal from all over the world that sports bars became relevant.

 In Atlanta, the original sports bar was The Varsity located in dowtown Atlanta.  Not only did they have the world’s greatest chili dog and onion rings, they also had entire rooms dedicated to one television network…and the TV was a 23-inch tube tv.  So as a kid on Sunday’s you could go to The Varsity and run back and forth between the two rooms that had the NBC and CBS games on.  Remember, you would do anything not to have to sit at home and be the human remote control.

In 1994, the NFL was still lagging behind Major League Baseball as America’s Favorite Sport.  It was the combined vision of NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and the NFL owners that forever tilted the balance in favor of the NFL.  What they realized is that Americans love gambling.  Whether its the millions bet legally in Las Vegas, the billions bet illegally or fantasy football we just love to have some action on a game we are watching.  The problem for the NFL was that too many people didn’t get a chance to watch enough of the teams to feel confident enough  to put money on the outcome.  At the time, Rotisserie or Fantasy Baseball was the predominent form of gambling among sports degenerates like me.  As soon as The Ticket was launched, all of the sudden, you could sit at your house and watch every NFL game on Sundays?  Instantly the focus switched to Fantasy Football, gambling on football with your local bookie and doing all of this while sitting on your couch.

 Invention #3 - The Chicken McNugget

Many Pluckers fans that are 25 or younger don’t realize that before 1983, there were no chicken fingers or chicken wings.  In fact, people in America rarely ate chicken at all in restaurants unless it was at a cafeteria.  Luckily for all of us, McDonalds changed the way we viewed chicken forever.  Instead of being a bland piece of overcooked meat, the original Chicken McNuggets were delicious little fried pieces of chicken parts that were smashed into nugget form.  If you are over 30, I am sure you remember the first first few years after their launch with every 6 pack of McNuggets there was always that one nugget in the pack where you knew definitely didn’t have the taste or texture of any chicken you had eaten before.  It was rubbery, tendony and mildly nauseous.  But dip it in some Hot Mustard or Sweet and Sour sauce and even the worst McNugget beat the hell out of mom’s cooking.

Luckilly, McNuggets gave way to chicken fingers and chicken fingers gave way to the popularity of chicken wings.  Sure, the Anchor Bar in Buffalo invented wings back in the 60’s, but no one was interested in any chicken product until the McNugget.

If you have noticed, all of the above inventions are important to my life for a reason.  That reason is because without these inventions, there would be no Pluckers.  So we should all give thanks to these inventions for helping make our lives a better place.

It’s official, the 10th Pluckers will be in Arlington, Texas opening in September.  Our location is in the Arlington Highlands shopping center in a little restaurant row that includes Chuy’s, Bonedaddy’s, Boudreaux’s and Blackfin.  This will be our second DFW Metroplex location and we are excited to be part of all that is happening out in Arlington including the opening of the new Cowboy’s stadium this Fall. 

The new Pluckers will feature over 50 plasmas (as usual), a circular bar and a huge indoor/outdoor patio to chill and watch games on.  If you are interested in applying for a job please visit the employment section of our website and complete an application.  If you are a Pluckers Club member, keep your schedule open so you can cash in on your free meal and first look at the new store some time in late-August/early September.  If you are a PC member that lives in Austin, Killeen or San Marcos, we are considering creating a bus trip that leaves from Austin and gets you up to Dallas before the restaurant opens for a small fee.  If you would be interested in joining us, please email kwollman@pluckers.net.