ABOUT ME

Birth til 1994 BRADLEY AVIATION 

Growing up the youngest of 4 children and to the parents of small business owners I learned the value of hard work at an early age. Mom owned a restaurant and Dad owned an aviation company.   He also like to drag race cars on the side. I was turning wrenches, working the flight line since I was like 8. I had my first flight lesson when I was 11 years old (and yes, even though I was used to flying talking the controls for the first time was scary for an 11year old).  My 3 older sisters were a pain in the butt and wanted nothing to do with the family business.  As I got older, we moved south (where you can work/fly airplanes year around), I felt like Working for my parents and running the family business was going to be my life. I got my pilots license, I worked with my mom in the interior shop/wood shop.  When slow I would go to the paint shop and work over there.  If dad needed me, I would work in the engine shop, or I would help just run the business with employee’s time, answering phone calls about the flight school or aircraft sales.  I was the middle guy between the workers and my parents.  So, I learned business from 2 different views.  The worker bee and the supervisor/ owner. I guess we will never know where I would have ended up but mom and had to close the business down a year after my father passed in 1998.  We tried but customers knew our name, my father’s name and business was too slow to keep open. The airplane business takes a lot of money.

What started to change my mind from getting away for the family Business? 

1993-1994 Glynn Academy

During the teen years I was became a football player in high school. I became a starter on the varsity team by my senior year.  I had some 2-aa school’s looking at me.  I had a scholarship offer to a school.  Beside the fact my father always wanted me to become an airline pilot he could not have been prouder of me becoming an OK football player and that I was going to chase my dream of playing football.  WELL, third game in my senior year, both my knees got blown out and I was done with football.  5 surgeries to fix them.

1993-2005 Delany’s Bistro

Well with football done I needed to do something with my life.  I had already decided to try to move on from my parent’s business. My best friend (yes, he was a football player) and I were talking during art class one day.  My teacher Ms. Edenfield over heard me talking to him about how much I used to love to go to my mom’s restaurant and that I loved to cook. She told me about a famous culinary arts school Johnson and wales University.   Well, the rest they say is history.   I applied to 2 schools.  Georgia Tech for their aerospace engineering degree and Johnson and Wale’s. I got accepted too both.  My parents made the offer to pay 100% for culinary school, OK culinary school it was.  

The reason I tie this into the Delaney era is the fact that Tom Delaney went to J&W.    He was the tutor of Emeril Lagasse.  He took me under his wing and monitored me and became like a 2nd father to me. I spent 12 years under him.  This is where I learned to really cook.  Not J&W, learned FOH and BOH management, scheduling, ordering, waste control, customer service. I started as a grade Manger, to Sous Chef then Executive chef.  I became his second caterer, meaning he could now schedule catering during business hours because I would run the store f he went, or he could send me to the catering site.  I also helped him buy his second restaurant, I would help however he needed me too.  But mostly he wanted me to grow Delaney’s.  We went through a lot Tom and I did.  I worked for my parent’s part time the whole time after college.  I started working as lunch sous chef at another famous restaurant in town.  Which hosted much the same clientele.  I grew more and more popular to the point I was being recruited by all restaurants and Sea Island. I even left Tom for a while to become the executive chef of a popular restaurant called Cargo Portside grill.  Again, this restaurant basically had the same customer base, but I was more in the open now and those very rich customers got to know me better.  Tom wasn’t ready to lose me yet or open my own place, so he called me one day.  We meet and he made me that offer I couldn’t refuse.  Money and power and he would go to the FOH and step out of my way and let me do my thing my way.  This is where I got my first and real food cost/restaurant way of doing business.  Tom had me cost out the menu one week.  We sat down after service with a nice meal (made by me) and a nice bottle and wine and I went over all my findings.  One item was our New York Strip Buffalo steak, now every meal came with a house salad and 2 sides.  I think we were charging something like $48 a plate for a 16 oz buffalo steak.  The food cost was at 58%.  I was like TOM, we must raise the price.    He asked me, “Jerry how much a plate do I make on the dish” I told him he made $13.02 a plate profit.  And I will never forget those words…. “” Jerry I can take that $13.02 to the bank, I can’t take that 58% to the bank” Than he reminded me about overhead, labor, utilities, paper goods etc.…  I was still like but 58%?  Tom than asked what the lowest food cost item was.  I told Chicken Milanese was at like 13%.   He was like do you get it now? It all comes out in the wash.  So, I slowly started to understand I asked him about lunch.  Simple question was asked “do I lose money at lunch?”  I told him no, but it was a wash. Not really a profit ether.  He told me that’s why he did it, to keep the wife’s, friends etc.… of customers happy by providing then a place for a light lunch at their favorite place. I will never forget that night and I have used it as a training tool in the past.  We have drilled into our heads far too often that it’s all about that bottom line that sometimes we lose sight of the top line and what we really take to the bank.  

2003-2004 Cargo Portside Grill

So, a few years have gone by, my father past in 1998, my mother and I kept the business open for about a year, but the customers knew our name but knew it as Max Bradley’s name not so much Barb and Jerry’s name.  Prefect show of customer service and what it meant. My mother had moved to Illinois where she stayed in the aviation world and has a great job. So, I was working solely for Delaney’s Bistro.  Of course, I loved the hours and the money that came with it.  But it was getting harder and harder to get lunch time hours, they couldn’t afford me.  So, I took a second job with this famous chef that came down from Atlanta.  She opened this restaurant called Cargo Portside grill.  She brought some chef with her from Atlanta.  I became the “lunch Chef” so the other guy the “executive Chef” could focus on dinner time, menu writing building the business, etc.  Well it didn’t take long for everyone to figure out I was a lot better than this guy.  Next thing you know I am “helping” with the 2 of them with cooking classes, interviews, catering etc.… Alix would introduce us as “Behind every good woman is TWO good chefs behind her”.  Well the executive chef couldn’t take it and got in a big fight with Alix and said it was him or me.  Alix chose me and fired him.  The next day during lunch she made me my 1st salaried position offer, and I thought it was the best thing to ever happen to me.  I was 24 years old and making $30,000 a year.   Even though that was in the early 2000’s that wasn’t a lot of money.  She played me knowing I would take it and I did.   I did all the same stuff from Delaney’s, wrote more menus.  I was opened to a lot more and different foods. She loved Pac Rim style foods and we had a lot of seafood (of course being on a coast with a port).  This was an important time for me to see and learn this since Delaney’s was a classical French Style Bistro.  I enjoyed my time at Cargo and with Chef Alix, but that day came.  Tom Delaney called me.  We set up a meeting and Tom offered more money, he needed me back.  She was not happy because now that we had a lot of the same customers, they followed me back to Delaney’s.  That’s when things were good, people talking funding me a restaurant, Tom making me promises etc.…

2005-2009 the Illinois Period and back to Georgia at the end

• Qdoba

• Hilton 

• Hooters

So I married in 2004, and with business deals drying up (people wanting not to invest in me and instead investing with another chef, Dave a friend of mine) and with a clear picture that I was getting nowhere with Delaney’s because his kids were older and he was setting it up to give both of his restaurants to them.  My wife and I decided we needed a change.   So, we loaded up the dogs and moved to Illinois to live in my mother’s loft apartment.  No jobs waiting for us, we just went. My wife got a job first, witch lead to an awesome career for her.  I meet a couple guys with money, and they were opening a Qdoba.  Now they know they couldn’t afford me, but they almost begged me to help open the store with their young managers.  Well at least it was a job ($11 per hour), and I had never experienced a store opening.  So that was a very good experience for me.  I really enjoyed learning how that was done and how these chain restaurants did things.  It was kind of a fun job.  Maybe 3 weeks after the open I found a real chef job at the Hilton of Springfield.  I got hired as a garde manager.  The executive chef and the food and beverage director saw my talents very fast.  The hotel had 2 restaurants and 3 bars inside it, and I ended up helping everywhere including catering.  Now I thought I knew catering.  I didn’t know hotel catering.  4-5 events going on at the same time in different ballrooms.  Wow that was a lesson.  This hotel looked like a large airport tower in the middle of downtown.  On the top (30th floor) was a jazz bar and a fine dining Italian restaurant.  They were having troubles with the chef up there.  So, they slowly moved me up there to work and help fix things. It was nice to be back to fine dining, I was learning more and more cuisines (Italian, Mediterranean).  The chef quit one day.  The weird part is, he quit the same day I gave notice.  Two weeks prior I got a call from a recruiter. It was for management at Hooters.  My wife and I laughed, we never thought I would work for Hooters.  But I went to the interview, I saw room to grow.  I was promised 2 days off a week, WHAT?  That never happened as a chef, the money wasn’t bad, I needed the benefits (my wife was pregnant with our first child), and I wanted to manage and do operations, put down the knife for a while.  The F&B from the Hilton begged me to stay and told me he would get me places (yeah, I had heard that before).  So, Hooters, I was a MIT for 6 weeks and I loved every second of it.  I knew how to cook but learning the business and just running operations for a change and man was I good at it.  Even though my titles may not have shown it I have really been only running operations since then even though I might have a title of executive chef.  I moved up the ladder very quickly.  I was a General Manager in less than 2 years.  I skipped manager 2 level and AGM levels.  Once back in Georgia I got my first store, I had 3 different regions wanting me.  I stayed in Savannah and made it the #2 store in the company.  Only behind Huntsville Alabama, a store 3 times the size and in a better location.  I was netting $60,000 to $70,000 to the bottom line every month and max bonus every quarter.  I made downtown Atlanta look bad and that was the VP’s store and again a store 3 time the size of mine.  I found what our demographic was.  It wasn’t Savannah, it was all the small towns around me.  They had no restaurants, so they were used to getting on the interstate and driving.  Well I got them to drive to me.  I would help with corporate events and store openings. I was in line for a regional job as regional training manager.   Here I got my first taste of working multi-unit.  There were 7 stores in our region.  I became the “call Guy”, another GM would call me before they would call a regional boss.  I got access to all (but 1, downtown Atlanta) their PnL’s.  Our regional manager Todd would call me and tell me to fix their problem and help them.  I developed what I call “the paper Clip Effect”.  Meaning if you can’t afford paper clips in your office supplies budget than you need a complete re-write of your budget and you need help with your demographic and managing your declining budget daily. Now I know what you are thinking. If things were so good, why did you leave?  That is something I choose to discuss in person and in private.   And I will explain exactly what happened and why.

2009-2015 JDL Investments/Houlihan’s 

So, I left the corporate world (Hooters was corp. HOA), never thinking the franchise world be as good as the corporate world.  Both are very good just different.  Working for JDL I was working for a well-known Savannah family.  We saw them almost every day, I became their go too guy.  Again, I got multi-unit experience, they owned 12 Wendy’s, 3 Atlanta Bread Company’s, Houlihan’s and a famous BBQ joint called Johnny Harris and Johnny Harris BBQ sauce (retail).  I helped them do a cook book. I wrote a new business plan for Johnny Harris, I consulted for the other businesses, I trained a lot of the new people.  I worked with the grandkids and helped them get into the business. The old man would only eat lunch at Houlihan’s if I was there to handle their food personally.  I would cook them dinner to bring home and I would get $100 handshakes (not why I did it he just wanted to give me something). Houlihan’s I was basically the General Manager, Stephen the GM was always doing something else.  I ran all operations daily and basically did it my way.  I even fixed a couple flaws in the Houlihan’s specs. This was great food and a great concept, and I loved being there.  I made it very profitable but here is one of the differences between corporate and franchise, the bonus program was very weak.  And we would only be able to see parts of the Pn’L because they would take money from us and pay for other restaurants that weren’t making money.  I understood it was the family’s money, but it made our bonuses smaller.  They also paid well under the standard. I was brought on for the re-build.   The building had burned down so I was there for construction, did the mass hire and the opening.  I did all the training for the LTO menus both FOH and BOH. Shortly after I started my wife had our second child, so my life was busy then, her career was going VERY well she got transferred to a store in Statesboro, about 60 miles away.  So, for 6 years I did the hour drive each way every day.  I built up the catering program and had a great relationship with those customers (they wished they could have followed me here to Statesboro). I trained some of the best line cooks in savannah, there are still servers there I hired from the original open. I left because I got offered the Executive Chef Job at Georgia Southern University.  A job in the same town I lived in (so off the road), and as you can tell something new to my resume, a new type of operations and culinary I haven’t done yet.  I am VERY proud that I can say now I have done and see all the aspics of the hospitality/culinary world. From fine dining, high volume, store openings, cook books, hotels, chain restaurants (corporate and franchise) and university dining. 

2015-Present Georgia Southern University 

Well, I wanted to work closer to home and I wanted a new challenge and boy did I get one.  I can honestly say the university dining is like no other beast.  I run the main Dining Commons which is basically 9 restaurants in 1.  I serve between 7,000 and 9,000 people a day.   I am also tied to concessions, catering and conference services.  Also add in there working with the administration and of course athletics (mainly the football team).  This is truly working a multi-unit job, I also reach out and help with the other campus like Savannah Armstrong campus.  This job is your typical government job. Lots of meetings, meetings about having meetings.  Things move very slow on the business end because administration aren’t foodservice people and don’t understand how it works.  It has been a fun and eye-opening experience to say the least.  I enjoy making the students happy.  We do a lot of cool events that I create.  We are not a contracted company, so we have the ability to change things how we see fit.  The main problem is the business model was built with the students as a main function of the labor.  I recently had to re-write our business plan and present it to the associate vice present.  Kids these days don’t want to work, and by the university system of Georgia students cannot work more than 25 a week.  They are considered students first before employees. The old business model also makes it very hard to get hired on, it is a long drawn out process. Most kids give up on the paper work, so they never get to work.  Also, in general working for the government means low pay grades.   This is at all levels of employment.   So, retention is very difficult.  This is one of the main reasons I am looking for a new job.  Government jobs used to live off the business model of yes, we pay less but the benefits are worth it.  This day and age more and more people don’t care about the benefits.  The benefit of working for the state quality of life.  I came here to make a difference, make things better and grow.   Well I am 2 out of 3.  Growth is the problem, the main ways to get promoted is someone else moves up or retires.  All my directors are of the same age as me.  Meaning there is nowhere for me to grow.  I wanted to finish my career either as a multi-unit/regional manager or as an administration director.  I am not sure the wait is worth it, and I know there is so much more inside me to give the world.