Company: Not Your Average Joe’s
Owner: Stephen Silverstein
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Type of business: restaurant
Number of employees: approximately 700
Locations: seven in Massachusetts
Annual revenue: approximately $20 million
When Stephen Silverstein opened Not Your Average Joe’s, he had below average experience in the restaurant business. In fact, it was really below average.
“I had no experience, so the learning curve was very steep,” he said. “But I’m a deal junkie, a business junkie. I had an idea, and I was crazy enough to follow through.”
And follow through he has.
Nine years later, he has seven restaurants employing 700 employees. His business caters to upwardly mobile baby boomers, and rakes in approximately $20 million a year. Silverstein estimates he serves about 2 million patrons annually.
The 44-year-old opened his first restaurant in Dartmouth, Mass., in 1994 while still working for his parents’ department store – Silverstein’s – in New Bedford. His mother said she was so happy there was a family business for her son to be a part of so that he could foster any and all business inclinations.
“She would always ask what was I going to do with myself? At that point, I was in high school and I don’t think anyone knows what they want to do (then).”
He went back to work for the department store after getting a degree in accounting, becoming a CPA and earning an MBA. However, as malls started to come onto the scene, the downtown department store was becoming a thing of the past.
“By the time we celebrated our 100th, we were a dinosaur,” he said.
The one thing that remained the same then and today is the vision he had for his restaurant in the beginning. The vision was to create a restaurant that served food high in quality, like at an upscale urban restaurant, but at reasonable prices that people in his hometown of Dartmouth could afford.
He calls it creative casual cuisine.
“The other choice was chain restaurants, but they are not compelling to me. I made it my pursuit to solve that dilemma … to offer food that costs about $14 a meal in a place where there’s good service, too.”
He said in the first four years he didn’t take a paycheck from the restaurant and for the most part let inertia take control of the operations.
But after those first four years things began to change.
Silverstein’s was being liquidated and the restaurant owner said it was time to shift his energies.
“I was somewhat hamstrung with the other business,” he said. “But once Silverstein’s closed, I went from two to six (restaurants) in 21 months.”
He also mapped out the details of the business from opening to closing so that today the handbooks that were created are too big to carry in one hand. Such an approach is necessary as Joe’s began to grow, he said.
Silverstein began opening restaurants in other suburban locations in Massachusetts including Randolph and Needham. There are plans to open three more this year and to have 22 open by 2006 throughout New England, although mainly in Massachusetts.
“I would like to go to Rhode Island,” he said. “I like areas of South County or maybe South Main Street in Providence or the (East Side).”
However, he doesn’t feel his creative casual cuisine theme would fit well in the center of Providence or Providence Place mall. Creative casual cuisine is an important catch phrase in his business plan.
The theme, which includes his main thrust of providing upscale food at low prices, has caught on with a very desirable demographic. Most of his clients earn more than $90,000 and have advanced degrees.
The three C’s of creative casual cuisine have a built-in dedication of providing food that is new and various while walking the fine line of maintaining a sense of efficiency required to running a restaurant.
Silverstein says in a few years the company will be earning upwards of $100 million, a benchmark that will open the door to a new opportunity – going public.
“My goal is to take the company public,” he said. “In the past year I realized through a number of ways that something great was created, something unique.”
He said he has already been approached by what he says is a reputable investment banker that has created a strategy for taking Joe’s public. However, because plans are still in the initial stages, he withheld the name of the investment banker.
He said preparing a business to go public has made him and his employees take a new look at the level of professionalism offered at the company.
“Whether we end up going public or not is not as important as running the company correctly.”
One thing Silverstein says makes his restaurant better is his attention to introspection. He is an avid reader of the 100 or so e-mails he gets a day about his restaurant.
About one-third of the messages give negative reviews of the restaurant chain while the rest are mostly favorable. He is looking for something in between, in which the happy customers tell him things that didn’t live up to expectations.
“It helps make me look at the standard we are setting,” he said. These business self-help measures are an offshoot of his days at Silverstein’s where customer service was stressed.
He brought with him to the restaurant business a philosophy that you should serve the customers’ desires, even at the expense of losing money at first.
“I tell my staff that you do what you have to do to (impress) the customer, regardless of the cost,” he said. “So if a customer wants a steak and Dom Perignon and they don’t want to pay, get it for them. The point is that we want them to come back.”
He said if a customer comes back three times, as does the average Joe’s customer, than the money spent to keep that person on the first visit is paid for in a couple of months.
Jason Perez-Dormitzer is a contributing writer to PBN.
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