Mind The Business: Small Business Success StoriesIn business, every decision you make can change the trajectory of your company - so it’s important to be as informed as possible. The intel you collect as you learn and grow is vital to informing how and why you run your business in the future. On this episode, hosts Jannese and Austin share their own experiences with using data to inform the paths they carve forward as they sit down with Brandon Littleton who started Bag Lady’s Fry Joint with his brother. The two started their business from scratch, with just a family recipe and an idea. Join us as Brandon explains how hard lessons - and hard data - inform the decisions they’ve made so you can do the same with your own findings.
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Welcome back everyone.
This is Mine the Business Small Business success Stories, a podcast brought to you by Into It QuickBooks and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia.
I'm Jenny's Torres.
And I'm Austin Hankwitz.
And we are on the road again, this time in Nashville, Tennessee, to talk to another entrepreneur. But in this episode, we're actually live in a restaurant called bag Ladies.
I joined in Nashville and.
I am surrounded by the delicious smells of French fries.
Not just the delicious smells of French fries, but also beverage machines, French fry seasoning going all over the place here. We've got some really cool memorabilia all over the walls, and we're getting ready now for the lunch rush that's going to happen here in the next call it fifteen to twenty minutes.
I can feel the vibes.
The vibes are hot, the vibes are high, and the French fries are hot.
New Year, New business challenges, new business goals. Were getting excited about everything that twenty twenty five is going to offer us. What are some data points and metrics that you are now saying, okay, I need to keep tracking these. These are the most important and all right time to leave these in the past.
I always love doing kind of an end of year recap on the business, seeing where income streams came from, what was flourishing, what needs more attention. I think there's no such thing as too much information. As a business owner.
I would totally agree with that. All the information that can absolutely be overwhelming unless you have an awesome tool like into it QuickBooks to help you decipher it and take these row numbers and put them to work.
Absolutely all the data is super important and it really shows you where your strengths are what is working for you and also what you need to improve, and all that feeds into how I make decisions about where I'm going to focus my energy as a business owner as well as where I'm going to focus from a profitability perspective.
How about you?
Yeah, I'm right there with you, right.
I think every year something that we like to do as we sit down for several hours, my team and I and we say, Okay, what really really worked over the last three, six, nine, twelve months? How did that move the bottom line? How much time did we spend building this? Was it something that actually moved the needle for us? And then we say, what is something we just don't like doing? Is it a process of the business, is it a product we're selling? Is it a service? Where what is going on that does not move the needle? And just being able to have that wherewithal and the self awareness to reflect on some of that, but more importantly, have the real data in front of you to be able to make those decisions is incredibly important.
Absolutely, But enough about us, Let's introduce our guest. French fries are known as a side dish, but in Brandon and James Lyttleton's family. It was the main event. Their grandmothers, Vessa and Irene, expertly prepared handcut fries, stored in brown paper bags, and seasoned with love and culinary wisdom. So when the brothers decided to go into the restaurant business together, they knew the exact dish they were going to build their business around. But it was a rocky start. Unable to find a bank willing to take a chance on their unconventional idea, and with the COVID nineteen pandemic in full swing, opening an actual storefront location was looking nearly impossible, but Brandon and James refused to give up and instead saved what money they could and.
Started a food truck.
That food truck, powered by their grandmother's fry recipe, took off into such a success that they were finally able to open the brick and mortar restaurant they originally dreamed of. Today, Brandon and James run Bag Ladies, a fry centric restaurant affectionately named after the woman who inspired it, and one that is quickly sizzling its way into the very fabric of Nashville's vibrant restaurant community.
Brandon Littleton. Welcome to the show.
It's a honor to be here. Welcome to the Home of bag Ladies.
This is amazing.
I mean, you've really ducked this place out with some really cool memorabilia, which we'll get into, but let's kick things off with this whole idea of going from recipe from grandmother to now established brick and mortar in Nashville, Tennessee.
Walk me through the entire story.
Absolutely, So the foundation came from our two grannies, So we spent a lot of time with them during the summertimes. And me and my brother have two vastly different taste buds. Like he likes spicy stuff, I don't. I like peanut butter and jelly he doesn't. But one thing that we always landed on was fries. So our granny has had this special process of making fries. They would kind of chop them up, have them brind and then put them in these brown paper bags and then put them in deep freezers. So in the garage there would be brown paper bags everywhere and as where we kind of got the nickname bad Ladies. So fast forward twenty years. We wanted to start a restaurant and Basically what happened was we just kept getting rejected by banks, so it was a little hard to kind of get funding. But it ended up being a blessing in disguise simply because COVID happened. So one thing that happened during COVID, we saw that food trucks kept coming up, so we you know, turned over every cushion in a couch. We scratched up any money that we could purchased a food truck. And you know, on the first day, didn't no one to come. The second day, didn't no one come. The third day was like two people game, and it was like our mom and dad. But then the fourth time, we started to get lines, we started to get awards, we started to be you know, invited to festivals and everything, and then that created the opportunity for our first brick and mortar, which we call our first neighborhood frau joints. So we wanted to be tucked in neighborhoods. We didn't want to be like centralized downtown. We wanted to be like deep in a neighborhood that we grew up in.
That's amazing, And you mentioned you started getting in festivals, and one Awards. What was the process of that? I mean, were people reaching out to you? Were you kind of working maybe with a PR team to try and get your guys on the front cover of Nashville Today?
Right, great question. So a lot of it has been organic. So what we did We started on Gallatin Pike. There was just an area that was just open, So we didn't know the regulations, we didn't know anything like that. Again, we're just two brothers just trying to figure it out, and customers started to come back, customers start to talk. We would run into you know, media outlets that would come and taste the food, and all of that kind of transpired and just created opportunities. So then when we would go to vestivals or have events, that would create opportunities for something else. So it's just kind of just being in the field being active is what created all the noise for us.
What kind of information were you looking at from like a budget perspective as far as like how are we going to set aside money for marketing and how much are we going to set aside for inventory costs?
Like where did that information come from?
So all of that comes from quick books, To be honest, with you. So we look at our p and L every day. We have this just saying that, you know, if we have good days, we're going to have good weeks. We have good weeks, we're gonna have good months. We have good months, were gonna have good quarters. And so we look at our p ANDOL every day to just make sure this aligned with the benchmarks of restaurants that are in our area.
Yeah, I love that, you know, I don't think it's like such a thing as being too involved with your numbers as a business owner, because you kind of got to know what's happening so that you can be reactive instead of, you know, just kind of waiting for things to happen and then figuring out what that solutionship.
Is going to be. Absolutely, in those first couple of months, really first year, we are deering the hairlights. I mean, we didn't really know because we were working in the business every day. We did not have the time. So just having a resource that we can just pull up on our app, pull up on a website and online and just be able to see, Okay, we spending too much on food, so let's dial it back, you know. So just having that information in front of us helped us make more informed decisions.
So looking at your P and L statement every day super important. Some of that does that as well, but I'm curious. Being able to see this information in real time allows you to react quickly, right, So talk to me about sort of the process of you see this information.
Are you someone who's diving deep in the.
Numbers on a daily and weekly basis to try and figure out where, you know, what's causing some of these spikes or maybe trops in revenue.
So that's a great question. And we all know the survival statistics of restaurants and so if you're not on top of your numbers, it's very hard to maintain because we're hear in the news all the time, you know, it's restaurants closing down. So one thing that we do is we, you know, looking at the P and L every day, we do turn those into actable insights. And what we mean by that is, for example, when we first opened, our labor was extremely high and that's just something that we didn't look at at first. So being able to know that you can do more with less individuals helped us, you know, keep our prom costs down and as an actually again, it's just we can have a feeling that is a lot of people in our restaurant, but having just hard data numbers, you just can't refute that.
So that makes a lot of sense.
Do you have any advice for small business owners that doing a restaurant that are listening right now as it relates to analyzing their own data?
So the most common is just prom casts. I mean, so it's labor, it's food, if you manage your prom costs well, if you are always looking at your margins, and if it's going to be a healthy So like you always want to look at what are the benchmarks of similar restaurants in your area, And that's exactly what we did. But also coming from my finance background, I'm benching off of companies that are publicly traded because that information is readily available. So I'm using that information to kind of gauge where we're at. So again, we don't want to just be at one location. Of course, we want to expand, so we want to make sure that our you know, our key performance indicators are performing two publicly traded companies.
To be honest with yeah, I think he has a strategic advantage having that finance background.
I think he does. I think it's the IPO himself.
That's great, Okay, So I think when I, you know, kind of try to balance data with my instincts as an entrepreneur, sometimes there's not a match with the information that you know. You might have data that's saying one thing, but your gut instinct is telling you maybe I should pay attention to something else. So can you talk about a scenario where maybe the numbers were telling you one thing, but you're thinking, I don't know if I'm going to follow this. I'm going to try and see what's on the other side. And maybe you turned out to be right by not just like strictly following the numbers.
Right, So, our relationship with the prime costs and so labor costs and food costs, there was a quarter where our food cost was extremely low, and if you were just looking at that at first impression, you would be able to realize that, Okay, that's very good, keep that going on. But what we found out is that when we worked with a certain food distributor, the quality of the food wasn't as good, and we completely switched that. So just because you are driving costs down, just know that you're sacrificing on a whole other side that you have to be reminded of.
Yeah, and that can have real long term consequences. So just being able to see where that trade off is where it's like, if we're going to serve lower quality food, that's probably going to lead to bad reviews and then we're going to lose our customer base. It's not always a good thing to go with the cheapest option.
You mentioned you're here in a neighborhood in Nashville.
Neighborhoods come with school districts, they come with sports teams, they come with a lot of moving parts. I mean, this is a thriving city. Talk to me more about the information gathering process of foot traffic people coming in and out around the town. How are you guys dissecting this foot traffic, you know, this sort of intangible information to make forecasts for the next call it week, month, or quarter.
Absolutely so. One thing that helps is that we're from the area. The customer frequency of the individuals that are in the actual neighborhood are extremely high and above just the normal benchmarks, and and that's something that we do want to replicate as we grow and as we go forward, that's one of our key performance indicators. That is, when somebody comes in, when's the next time do they come in? That's something that that's in the business model that we kind of accidentally stumbled upon, but it has actually been one of the biggest advantages that we've had.
How are you guys tracking that? Do you have some sort of rewards app or a punch card or something that says, hey, you come back and we'll reward you for it.
Absolutely, so we have a loyalty program. So a lot of that is associated with our POS system. So we have a loyalty program which gives us reporting as well in regards to you know, when they come in, it automatically pulls up their profile, It shows how many times they came in, what they ordered. So all of that information allows us to make more informed decisions when it comes to what needs to be on the mean versus what doesn't need to be on the mean.
That's so fascinating.
I ever thought about it like that, but yeah, I mean, if you have evidence that shows that you know, people come in eighty percent of the time for three specific things, like, let's figure out how to make sure that those specific things are made very well. So these eighty percent of customers want to come back.
And keep it in. Yeah. Yeah, And so that's a mistake that we stumbled upon because if you looked at our menu day one, it look like an Encyclopedia book. It was huge, it was huge. But now if you go to our menu now, I mean it's eight things. So we are definitely streamlined. We condensed it, We limited the choices that consumers can make, and it's just and it's benefited us financially.
Yeah, sometimes less is more, I think, especially when you're thinking about scaling. Absolutely coming up on Mind the Business small business success stories.
Having that information in regards to the customer's email, their phone number, how many times do they come in, and kind of understanding who is your customer. It just helps you build your customer experience, build your experience of your restaurant, and just align with what they actually want versus you just guessing.
We'll be right back, Welcome back to Mind the Business.
Brandon.
So you've mentioned KPIs and a little bit about your finance background, but that tells me that this was not the original plan. So can you talk about how you go from finance to French fries.
Absolutely, I like that. I liked how you said that. So when it came to leaving my cushy finance job, one thing that I looked at there was actually a story that resonated with me. So I have three children, and being in the finance background is very time consuming. And remember that in Nashville there was an eclipse that was happening, and this was not the most recent one, but it was one a little further back, and my wife and her kids, they were at the Nashville Zoo and I was, you know, behind a computer screen, just kind of working and working real late, and my wife sent me pictures and they were just really you know, happy, They really enjoyed it. And I was an opportunity that I was just not there. I wasn't present. And one thing that I always knew, because me and my brother we've always started businesses, we kind of knew that we always wanted to do that, but I just didn't want to be confined in four walls anymore. I love the opportunity to create something and push something out in the world and to see how the world reacts to it. I mean, so again, I've always been kind of that entrepreneurial type of person, and that was kind of the light. It's like, yeah, we gotta change some things.
So yeah, I love it. I think that's called, you know, following your dreams. Right.
And I know we mentioned off camera when we were talking you traded a four hour work week for were working twenty four Stevens.
Yes.
Yes, That's one thing that I will say to any entrepreneur that is out there, especially if you have a spouse, just talk with them about it, because they are experiencing it just like how you're experiencing it, and it weighs on you financially, spiritually, psychologically, everything. So just just be aware of what that journey looks like and just have a conversation with to spouse.
I remember when I quit my job, I had all these people saying, don't do it, don't do it, it's gonna be a mistake, right. I took some very specific steps to make sure. You know, I had sort of an emergency fund figured out, and I had, you know, a business that was thriving and doing well before I just jumped into it. What's sort over those first three or four steps you took to begin to work toward that and achieve that dream.
Good question. So I would love to say that it was very structured. Really, COVID was the kind of the nudge to go ahead and jump. I didn't have a business plan written out. I did have savings just being in a finance background, I did have that, but I got the opportunity need to work with my brother. We just happened to be like, let's just do this together at the same time, at the same moment. So kind of the star is a ligne. So it wasn't like this well thought out strategic plan to jump from the nine to five to the entrepreneurial world, but it just there was an opportunity to work with my brother. So it's cool.
Yeah, all right. So it's not just enough to know your numbers as a small business owner for your day to day operations, but it's important from a tax perspective if you want to get loans and so into it. Quick books is a great tool obviously that you're using for that. Can you talk about what methods you use to track the numbers.
So at the beginning, we were dying it and it just became so overwhelming with managing a food truck and also a restaurant. But actually in quick Books, they have a marketplace where you can find a CPA final bookkeeper. We found one and we've been rocking with them since. So they're the ones that are updating our data in real time, so they're able to foul our taxes, they're able to, you know, just make sure that we're on the up and up when it comes to bookkeeping.
Yeah, and you can reach out to them virtually do consultations and things like that. If you guys have any questions, right, is there something that you wish you'd started earlier knowing what you know now, or what advice would you give to small business owners who are still kind of trying to figure out how to best optimize how they're gathering data.
So it would be customer data. So it's one thing to have your financial statements, and that's great because it gives you just that information that you need. But having that information in regards to the customer's email, their phone number, how many times do they come in, and kind of understanding who is your customer. It just helps you build your customer experience, built your experience of your restaurant, and just align with what they actually want versus you just guessing.
So, yeah, looking.
Back at it over the last couple of years that you guys have experienced this amazing success, what are you really proud of?
So one thing that we were not expecting were the awards we've opened businesses in the past, we've kind of just been on an island and just working every day. But you know, being recognized by our community, being recognized by you know, greater Nashville, it's just something that we just were not expecting. So just having that validation from other people to say, hey, I like your food, it's something that is extremely valuable. Because again that's why I commend anybody that any entrepreneur, when you're putting something out into the world and you're having the world critique it, I commend you because that's very it could be embarrassing, you know, and I mean, but having that opportunity to get feedback from our community, from the market, it's just something that we just weren't expecting, but just didn't know that it was extremely valuable for us.
You mentioned this like growth phase to find that for me.
Yeah, So we just launched our franchise program. So again now we are actively recruiting franchisees right now to expand into the southeast territory, so we want to really be based in Tennessee. We want more locations in Tennessee. But now we're focused on actively recruiting because we knew even when we started the food truck that one unit is not going to let us retire, so so now we wanted to be able to expand it. We've proven that the model works. People love French fries apparently, so that allows us to continue to open up more units.
So it's amazing.
Ken.
We talk about it time where you thought something was going to be like a raging success and you launched it and you're like it was crickets and people were just.
Like ill, oh yeah. So we have many flavors of loaded fries, and we did one that was like a jerk chicken when and we thought it was just going to be a massive success. We spent a lot on marketing, We spent a lot on just plastering things on the windows, and it just was dead on arrival. It didn't do anything. Me and my brother we laughed about it. We would do it again. We would do a new flavor. We like trying flavors out so I mean we were just kind of integrated and to see if people buy it.
Now, Yeah, when did the data tell you that it's not a menu item anymore?
Was it after four weeks? Six weeks? Like? What was it?
Okay, people aren't buying this, we're sitting on this inventory. Was there a specific number that you realized that if we hit this number, it's time to go.
Yeah, so I needed at lest a large enough sample size just to make sure that it's just not a bad day. So what I do is I do it like a two week average. I look at how much we spent on those ingredients. Then I can to how much was sold. That was something again having access to the data. So it's one thing to kind of go with your gut feeling, but if you have the data, it's just like, hey, you know, because my brother he's more of like a gut filling type and I'm more of like an analytical type. So like saying or talking to him about that, he may be like, well, you know, I still like it, but that but you know, if you just kind of give the data there, you know, you can't refute that.
Talk more about that relationship with your brother. I have a co founder as well, And I think that what's really cool about that is I'm not great at being analytical. He is right, and so it seems like you guys have that really cool relationship where you are analytical. He's more gut feelings. To talk about that relationship a little bit more.
We balance each other out. I'm highly analytical, I'm somewhat introverted. My brother is very extroverted. So when it comes to just the design of this whole restaurant, a lot of that is him, because I'm going to just kind of go and just kind of replicate with a large brand is doing so a lot of the core in our brick and mortar restaurant is really going back to the nineties where we grew up, and I think that is one of the best errors when it comes to movies, when it comes to video games, and we wanted to replicate that feeling when you walked into the restaurant. So, for example, we have an area that has afrigerator door and a lot of people don't know what that came from, but that's the first refrigerator door from our food truck, and that's something that again that is his idea. I never would have thought of that, but it also has it surrounded by movies and video games of the nineties, and every single customer that comes in they go directly to that because we've all had, you know, our grandmama's house where you have those little magnets and you kind of type in, you know, you put your name, you rearrange the letters. That's all My brother and I just think it kind of pairs well together to have that creative mind but then also have it backed by the strategic mind as well. It just I think cover all bases when it comes to growing a scalable brand.
I love it. What keeps you going?
It's the why you know, we see that the clearest path to wealth is, in my opinion, business ownership. I knew that a lot of the clients that I came in contact with during my career, they were business owners and they're playing tennis at ten o'clock in the morning. So is that these are things that I wanted to replicate. I saw it, and so I knew that that was the route that I wanted to take.
So I love it all right, This is probably going to be the hardest question, oh to answer.
What is your favorite menu item?
So mine is the classic. It's the chicken bacon rant. So that's something that I like the most. It's kind of the chocolate chip cookie of loaded fries. So individuals that are coming in, they're new to the concept, that's what I always gear them towards. But what pays the bills around here is something called it's a Tennessee thing, okay, and it is a spoke brisket that takes a long time to make, and that is our most popular item. My brother likes a bunch of spicy stuff. I'm very just like, hey, can take some fries. Yeah, so that sounds good. We're going to try that. I think we're gonna to try one of everything.
I want one of everything on the twenty item menu. Oh wow, oh wow, Brendan, thank you so much for hanging out with us on this episode of Mind the Business Small Business success Stories. I can't wait to come back here and just devour these French fries.
Wells and honor. I really appreciate you all taking out the time to learn a lot about bag Ladies. And shout out to my brother James, big brother. He's actively at an event right now, but hey, I love it. I'm sorry you couldn't be.
Here, man, This just gives us a reason to come back and ask absolutely.
Thanks so much. Present.
What an awesome conversation with Brandon. I feel like I learned a ton. But before I share my biggest takeaways, genius, I got to hear yours.
I love how involved he is in the numbers.
You know, I think a lot of business owners can tend to let that kind of fall by the wayside and then be surprised when it's been a while since you checked in with your business. I know I've had that experience multiple times where I'm not really looking at profits and just my P and L statement and then I have a surprise tax bill, for example, because I had no idea what was going on the business. So I think he really emphasized the importance of being involved with the data with the numbers, not just from like a day to day perspective, but just overall. It helps you really make good decisions in your business. How about you, Austin?
He definitely did, And I think it's not just knowing your numbers, but knowing what actions to take depending on what the numbers are telling you. Right, So he mentioned this example of this jerk chicken loaded French fry basket that he introduced. And you know, he said, okay, like the demand is not here, what are the numbers telling us? And what does the numbers say about how long we can keep this on the menu before we begin to lose money in a meaningful way. I think it's not just important to know your numbers, but know when to take action as to what your numbers are telling you when it comes to your business. And Brandon has done that marvelously when it comes to not just opening this brick and mortar, but also keeping this food truck. I mean he looked at the numbers and said, wait a second. We have the opportunity to make a little bit more margin with this food truck. We can do events, We can you know, mark up a little bit more over here. That'llow tell us to now take that margin and maybe reinvest it into a new idea. We can introduce a new product or a new menu item, allowing us to experiment. But then always keep in mind now that if the numbers are telling us we have to go try something or we got to take something away, we need to go act on that information.
Yep.
And it sounds like he's using Into It QuickBooks to make sure that he's got all the information that he needs. So fantastic love this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Jennie's Torres and you can find me on social media at jokhiro Dineto podcast.
And you can find me at Austin Hankwitz and you can follow into It QuickBooks on all social media at QuickBooks. To get the tools you need to start, run and grow your business, head to QuickBooks dot com today.
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