Multi-Unit Franchisee Magazine Issue II, 2011 | Page 36

P O W E R

P L A Y E R S

“I joke with my wife that, at my age,
at least we’ll get the best parking spaces
at our kids’ high school graduation.”
time to spend time building a family.
I joke with my wife that, at my age, at
least we’ll get the best parking spaces
at our kids’ high school graduation.”
Orlando, who says he’s learned a lot
from his failures as well as his successes,
often talks with his mentor, Charles
Loflin (see www.mufranchisee.com/
article/749/), about the continued chal-

lenges of running restaurants in a tight
economy. “My best advice is do your
homework. Running your own business
is getting tougher all the time. Twelve
or 15 years ago, if you were a marginal
operator, you could make money. These
days, with the cost of food, labor, and
energy, you have to be a shrewd operator to make it.”

BOTTOM LINE
Annual revenue: $2.05 million
2011 goals: Build another store of each brand in the market—4 stores,
$4 million a year.
Growth meter: How do you measure your growth? Overlapping
last year’s sales and profit. Sales should always be up, even if it’s just a little.
If your sales are down a little but your profit is flat or up, you’re still okay.
Vision meter: Where do you want to be in 5 years? 10 years?
A lot of people dream of answering this with “retired,” but I’ll probably
always work. I need to stay busy—it’s my character. When I’m 80, I’ll probably be a greeter at Wal-Mart, just so I have a reason to get up and get out.
How has the most recent economic cycle affected you, your
employees, your customers? It has definitely changed the ballgame:
$3 a gallon for gas, higher prices on almost everything, people out of work.
You have to be one of the places that customers really want to go often. Because of the economy, people have quit going to a lot of places, and I don’t
want mine to be one of them. It all comes down to customer service.
Are you experiencing economic growth/recovery in your market? We have been very fortunate all these years with the military base
being the engine that drives our economy here. We haven’t felt the impact of
the economy as much as other cities and states.
What did you change or do differently in this economy that
you plan to continue doing? I reevaluated all our contracts and services
to save money. Electricity, trash, chemicals, pest control, credit card fees, anything I could think of. I would rather cut anything but service and quality. We
switched our electrical contracts, which happe