Mike Mudrey: Your Restaurant Doesn't Need You

Josh Kopel (0:00)

I'm going to ask you a question that might sting a bit. How many holiday parties do you have booked for the month of December? Not like, how many do you expect? It's how many are on the books right now with the deposits collected and the contracts signed. And for many of you, I worry that the answer is not enough. And here's why that matters. I think that the companies that are going to throw those parties are picking their venues right now. This is a sweet spot between August and September. And by the time you start thinking about December, the decision has already been made. You're not losing those parties in November. You're going to lose them this month. And that's why I built the Private Events Engine. It's a simple three-part system that leverages AI to do most of the work for you. And this month in the Marketing Masterclass, I'm going to walk you through it. It's going to show you how to package events, how to get in front of the people that are booking them, and how to close them without discounting. And you get the whole thing for free. So show up to this month's Marketing Masterclass. Go to restaurantbusinessschool.com today to sign up. Now here we go.

Mike Mudrey (1:08)

I've gotten good at realizing that I don't want people coming to me with every single problem. And this is one of the realizations I had as we went to four and we're about to go to five locations, is that if I have to answer the same question twice, we need to put a system in place to answer that question.

Josh Kopel (1:24)

Welcome to FULL COMP, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators. Served up on the house.

What if the reason your restaurant runs on you is because you keep showing up? Today's guest bought a creperie in East Lansing with no restaurant experience and a corporate job that he had no intention of leaving. Nine years and four locations later, he still has both, and one of his restaurants sits over an hour from where he lives. And never being able to work on the floor is what forced him to build systems instead of habits. In today's conversation, we get into why every question you answer twice should become a system, how prepaid and preselected bookings drove his no-shows and his food waste to almost zero, and why even when owning a creperie, the money was never in the food. If your operation stops working the week that you take off work, this one's for you.

Mike Mudrey (2:28)

The long story short is I got a degree in Supply Chain Management and Marketing. Got an MBA in Operations Management and kind of General Business. I knew no other path than to go into sort of the default.

The Fortune 500, worked for a company for 40 years, career, and I was doing that, doing it fairly well, worked my way up and worked from big companies down to a smaller company that I helped grow over time. And again, long story short is my wife and I had four kids. We lived in Atlanta. All of our family was in Michigan.

In 2017, we made the decision to move back home and we were kind of deciding where to move. We decided it was best to move to her hometown, East Lansing, Michigan. Got here and despite having gone to school here twice, and her being here, we didn't really feel like we had roots. So I spent every Saturday morning and I did what I called Daddy Boy's Breakfast. I took my three young boys out for breakfast. They would go to different local spots and we just would kind of hang out. And one day we got talking and I was like, maybe we should we should have something like this of our own. So I started looking around and I looked at I went down to like, should we get a Subway franchise path? Should we open a pizza place? Should we open a burger place? And kind of realized that I didn't want to give into that. If I was going to do anything, I wanted it to be unique. So I got on BizBuySell, I did not even realize it existed. And then I realized that at any moment you can pull it up and you're surrounded by owners that want to get out of their business, whether it be a restaurant, a bar, gas station, or whatever it is, they want to get out of it for a reason. And there's a sucker willing to buy. And I was that sucker. So we bought in, my wife and I bought a creperie. We figured that was very unique, you know, that a creperie is something that one only one town or one in each town could probably handle and found ourselves in the restaurant world, not a restauranteur, not a chef. You know, my wife's a really good cook. I'm a decent cook. She's got a big Italian family she comes from. So hospitality is sort of in our nature. We love hosting, we love gathering, and we figured we would try our hand at it.