Welcome back to the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. We all have our own restaurant story, where it all began. Mostly it’s deeply rooted in passion, and a vision, and an inspiration for what our place could be, what we want it to be. Well, this episode I’m speaking with Dave. Dan and Connor Sullivan, two brothers who, left their gigs, Corporate America, and had a dream to start a neighborhood pub, a really comfortable, relaxing place, and it’s deeply rooted in family history, it’s named for their grandfather, and we talk all about what it’s like working Brothers side by side, staying in your lane, but sharing a vision and sharing best practices and strengths, and it’s all about putting the team in place and just creating a successful place in arguably one of the most competitive food cities in America, fast growing Charlotte.

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You’re tuned in to the Restaurant Rockstars Podcast. Powerful ideas to rock your restaurant. Here’s your host, Roger Beaudoin.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back. This is the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. So glad you’re here and Dan and Connor, how are you today? Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Roger. It’s great to meet you and we’re excited to, to be on the podcast. Doing great.

Yeah. Brothers from speaking to us from Charleston down in the Carolinas, and they are the co owners and founders of Bumpa’s.

And first of all, let’s talk about Bumpa. Bumpa’s your grandfather, right? And he sounds like he was an interesting guy. Tell me about him.

Yeah so growing up he’s our dad’s dad and we just had this larger than life kind of vision of who he was and one of the sweetest men you’d ever be able to meet.

Quick with a story, loved a good stiff drink and so when we started coming up with our concept, we knew for the pillar of atmosphere, we wanted to make sure it was a place that he would have felt. At home, sitting at the bar and sharing his stories and. Having a good old fashioned.

Yeah, I think we did have some reservations with the name bumpers like is that’s gonna alienate anyone that doesn’t understand what that means right off the bat but we decided there was, a mystique to the nickname itself and it’s actually very surprising how many people have come in to have their own Bumpa.

Not only a grandfather they admire, but actually that went by the name Bumpa,

I love it.

The calculated risk paid off.

Yeah, that’s great. Quite a renaissance man from what it seems. He won some illustrious boat race in 1962. Yeah, he was the oldest,

oldest man to runner up. The Queens Cup sailing race.

So we, we named a drink in his honor and we like to think he’s up there, smiling down and wondering why we did all this in his name,

yeah. He’s lending good energy and positivity to your space and everything you’re doing. I’m sure he’s very proud. That’s awesome. So tell us, you have different backgrounds outside the restaurant business and you got tired of that, frustrated, call it what it is, but you always had this idea.

You guys put your heads together and you’ve always wanted to own a pub. So where did the, who had the idea first and why restaurants?

That was Dan. It’s his fault. I always say that, I, we’ve been talking about this, in a very abstract way for years and years, maybe the majority of our, certainly the majority of our adult lives.

And, we come together over holidays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, et cetera. And Dan would always ask me like, is this the year? Are we doing it? Are we doing it next year? And yeah, one year the stars aligned You know, we decided, why wait? We have the resources it’s Let’s roll the dice.

Excellent. So you had a planning process, I’m sure, and a timeline. I was talking to Dan earlier and he mentioned that you guys put a business plan together. In retrospect, looking back at that business plan, did it pretty accurately follow the vision of what you wanted to do? And did you take any twists and turns along the way, or did it pretty much come out like what you had in your heads when you decided to do this?

I would say a number of factors made the final draft of the business plan defunct by the time we were ready to open. Chief among those was COVID, of course, the entire industry. So a lot of the numbers that we had that we felt like we could use as a good measuring stick for the business. We just couldn’t use them.

We didn’t know what the market was going to look like at all. And so we had to do a lot of changing on the fly, as they say. And just rolled with the punches and did the best we could. We just decided, let’s go for it and see where the numbers come out.

Yeah, I will say though the core concept of what, how we wanted it to look and feel and even a lot of the elements of the menu as it is today, four years being open, that was all there.

So there’s, it’s shocking. There’s a shocking amount that actually has made it and is still A cornerstone of the restaurant itself. But yeah, like they said, financially we have to throw that playbook out the window, sadly.

So you started early in 2020 then? Did you actually open your doors before the pandemic hit?

We were scheduled to open April of 2020 and ended up opening In June.

Wow. I remember those times, and so many restaurants literally had to pull all the seats out of their business, and you couldn’t serve people sitting down. Different states had different requirements, of course. What was it’s South Carolina Charleston?

Yeah, that’s correct. So what was your state mandates like back then, if you recall? What did you have to do immediately I remember it was like a light switch going off. It’s one minute, everything is normal, and then March, it’s boom, what? What’s going on here? And no one had any answers.

And is this a temporary thing? Is it going to be two weeks? Or is it going to be two years? It’s nobody knew,

right? Yeah, exactly. Dan just said, we were Yeah. We were all set to go. We had an opening date. We’d send invites out for our soft opening with people that were going to fly into town.

And then we had a really hard conversation with our manager, like two weeks, before the shutdown, we came to the conclusion that, we’d have to wait. But, to your point, we were like, should we wait to open until this whole thing passes? We had no idea how long COVID was going to be up there.

But, once we got the green wall and restaurants started opening, even in limited capacity again, it was something we had to figure out on the fly, like Dan said, but yeah, there were occupancy limits, so literally a, a hard cap on amount of bodies allowed in the restaurant, everyone had to be sitting down bar service was restricted and, the bar was the whole point of us doing this thing.

So yeah, it was pretty wild.

Yeah. We had a curfew at night things of that nature. I always point to two things that really made the difference for us. Obviously the biggest advantage is owning the building. We didn’t have a lease that we had to pay hanging over our heads. So our runway to getting open was really just dependent on when we were ready to do that.

We were able to pay our management team through the shutdown and gave them a lot of homework. And the idea was. When the doors are able to be open, be prepared, have everything ready, know who we’re talking to, know where our vendors are, and we can hit the ground running. And I’d say the other thing was we had met a lot of friends in the business, a lot of other bar owners, and never having done this before we weren’t sure how we were going to be received.

Is this going to be a A rivalry are we taking business from people? How does that look? And to a person everyone said it, it the amount of effort and money that we had put into our place was a good thing for everyone. It, we’re all trying to do the same thing. When they started opening back up, we were sharing secrets and sharing awesome and tricks on how to get through it.

And that was just a wonderful source. You’re

welcomed with open arms. It was a healthy collaboration, not a competition. Absolutely. That’s awesome. So originally you’re from Pittsburgh. What drew you to Charleston and what made that decision? Did you fly down and suddenly say, here’s the place we’re going to bring our vision to life, or how did that story go?

Yeah we’ve been, this place is was first home away from home for a very long time our family our parents relocated down here 20

years ago, just about 20 years ago,

And I moved around a lot, but it was, again, going back to my dad’s time Dan’s master plan of getting us to go into business together.

A big part of that was doing it down here, because this is essentially what became home. When we go home for the holidays and be down in the Charleston area to see our parents and we’d unite, the family again all these years later. And it worked, but yeah.

So Charleston was always. A really pivotal part of, again, the business plan. It was always Charleston, and here we are, several cities later, several years later, but yeah. As

a matter of fact, our first draft of the business plan specifically was what, it was what if we put the pin in the map in the French Quarter part of Charleston?

Never thinking that was a reality, and here we are, right there it’s almost like it manifested itself. It’s supposed

to happen, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Very

interesting. It was fate. Connor found the building.

I want to, yeah, tell me about that story, because I’m really interested I was telling Dan, I was on the website looking at the space, and it’s just beautiful, but he tells me it’s a historic property.

But it had been neglected. It had been multiple concepts before. It had been closed and you found it. So what jumped out about it and why that location?

Yeah we knew the building which helps when it did come onto the market, but yeah, Dan may have mentioned it’s a 300 plus year old building.

Unreal.

Oh, wow. That’s history.

Phosphate warehouse. The waterline came right up to the building so ships could, offload and load back up before, going back out. And

awesome.

A lot of history right there, but yeah, it had been several concepts over the last couple of decades. It had fallen into a bit of disrepair, needed a lot of love.

But yeah, we were still Fishing, let’s say for not only the building, but even the neighborhood, where we’re looking all up and down the Charleston peninsula, the dance part, we never thought we’d wind up in the French quarter, which is really the most historic part of the town.

Right.

We were just getting real estate flyers sent to us every day.

It was pouring through them and the building five Cumberland, knew it stuck right out. And I was like, I can’t believe. I can’t believe this, this is available for this price to buy. It seemed too good to be true. It was like Paul Dan, he got down there like an hour later and we were

negotiating.

Sign in the dotted line, huh? It was amazing. It was I had been down here for a year. I say we were, The advanced guard. So I’ve been down here for a year just our brokers were taking us to a different property every week. And I had seen a zillion buildings and, everything had something I could spin, but nothing was really quote unquote perfect.

And that morning, He called me, he said, you’re not going to believe this, but you need to contact this broker right away and see if we can get in there because it’ll be gone. And so we called our guys, I said, no way is that for sale? And we met the owner and I think he liked us. He’s from Ireland.

He Oh, excellent.

Yeah.

That helps a lot.

I think

he likes the luck of the Irish. There was on your side,

two brothers of Irish descent were really trying to do something special. And I think, I really do believe that made a difference. I think. He had waited a little longer. There could have been a higher price tag on it, but I think he was happy to to hand it to somebody that would carry it on and keep it special.

Yeah.

So you mentioned this French Quarter, part of Charleston. Is it a vibrant sort of local and tourist draw? It’s a lot of traffic, foot traffic, drive by traffic, high visibility. I’m guessing because that’s all a benefit for your business, clearly.

Absolutely. It’s. It’s the eastern side of the peninsula almost southeast side of the peninsula.

So Broad Street is a major street that sort of leads to East Bay Street, and that’s going to be your main street going through the French Quarter, and there are a ton of really terrific restaurants, bars art galleries, things like that. A lot of folks walking and and car traffic. And we’re just off of East Bay on a little street called Cumberland.

We can see the bay from our front door, so we’re close to the water. And yeah we just, we’re trying all kinds of different things to pull people away from East Bay and come down our little street. Yeah,

for being half a block away from the main drag we are surprisingly tucked away. And.

Yeah, especially with the architectural review board in town, there’s a lot of deliberate measures taken to, to keep the city feeling as authentic and old. As

they should, yeah.

Which is awesome, but the drawback is there’s only so much we can do to the, In terms of signage.

Yes. Yes. The sign ordinances, and it’s got to be a certain size and it’s got to fit with the character of the town or the neighbor. Yeah. I’ve been down that road too, but I’m sure you’ve made it work. Yeah. We have the largest sign we’re allowed to have right down to the millimeter. Like it’s as big as it can be.

We’ve got some colorful tables and chairs out front to attract attention. We’ll know that there’s a restaurant down here and we’ve got some beautiful window boxes that we have someone that keeps those up and make sure that they’re always vibrant. So it’s, if you get that half block down the street, you’ll feel very welcomed.

And that’s really what we’re all about.

Let’s talk about your vision for the food and the ambiance. Is it inspired by, say, any Irish pubs, either on the Emerald Isle or ones you’ve been to? Was that always the idea? It was going to be an Irish pub?

Yes and no. I think when we first started, I think we almost resisted the idea of being fully an Irish pub.

I think that’s More or less where we landed, due to our culture and, even the feel of the building itself, the way we decorated it, got a bunch of black and white photos on the wall and a nice, organically driven mishmash of of items that adorn the walls.

But yeah, I think, that influence is clear, even if, that’s not exactly how we market ourselves. And yeah we’ve borrowed from, a few favorite establishments from both Pittsburgh as well as as Ireland, like we have a Scotch egg on the menu, which you can find that any, just anywhere.

So I think

we’re the only one in town with a Scotch egg, which is but fish and chips we didn’t want to be pigeonholed into. Bangers and mash and shepherd’s pie all the time. We wanted to be able to serve the food that we had come up with. I’d say that the french fry piece of our menu, which is a very large section of the menu is

definitely I saw that too.

Yeah, the fries. That seems like a huge specialty of yours. Like multiple ways and all kinds of gravies and different, yeah, different influences on those fries. It’s got to be a huge seller.

It is. It’s it’s top them how you want or we’ve got four That we’ve come up with through the years.

In fact, one of our best sellers is named after Conor. We call it the Condor. Oh,

I was wondering why. I saw condor, but I didn’t know why and what the relevance was. Now I know.

Yeah, we were

at this place

where you can do the same thing. And Connor said, let me do this. Let me pick the toppings.

I said, absolutely go for it. And they were just so delicious. And he said, when we Open our place one day, this is going to be on the menu and here it is. So sure.

Yeah. I’m all about interesting, creative, even funky names for menu items. And I see you’ve done that quite a bit and you got a drink called the Morino Hera and all kinds of stuff going on and it just captures the public’s imagination and it draws people to certain items that you want to sell.

Maybe they’re profitable, highly profitable to sell. But either way, it just makes things like really inviting and interesting. So you’ve done a lot of right things to the concept to make it work. So you’re a finance guy, Dan, and I’m curious, are you obviously running the numbers every week? Are there certain KPIs you’re looking at?

Are you taking inventory and costing out the menu and really, dialing in your profit? Roger, there’s a reason I got out of finance. Oh, you hate numbers. I never want to see a number again.

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Conor is absolutely the risk guru

and No kidding. Okay. Conor, answer that question. That’s interesting.

There’s a twist there. I wouldn’t have expected that.

Stay in your

lane.

Yeah, so I’ve, I’ve got a sales background. I’m still in software sales currently and, Yeah, I’m used to, managing a business on a spreadsheet. So that part of it came pretty easily.

Good. Somebody’s got to do it.

Somebody’s got to do it. And I don’t know. It’s almost like a, it’s like a stress reducer. And every time I look at the numbers, I just.

And see, I’m the opposite. Every time I look at the numbers, I start to sweat a little. But it’s a terrific division of labor. Connor has such a terrific vision for the big picture, and I tend to gravitate and concentrate more on day to day and maintaining the quality and the atmosphere and I think in that way we really work terrifically together and you trust no one more than you trust your own brother, so it’s great we’re in this together and we can rely on each other.

And

most of the time you agree or agree to disagree and how do you resolve any issues where, nah, I think we should do this, nah, we should do that. Does that ever happen?

Yeah yeah. I think generally we agree. Sometimes, the disagreements can feel bigger, even if they’re fewer and further between.

But I always like to say we have a we have a safety word. Things are getting too heated.

Yeah.

One of us drops the safety word, okay, nothing’s worth this fight, we gotta just back off, breathe, come at it, maybe, after a few

Guinnesses I was gonna say, your your ideas become very precious to you, and you don’t want to lose them, but over four years of doing this, Something that we always parrot to each other is no pride of authorship.

We, as long as the message or the idea is coming from us as a unified ownership team, that’s all that matters. And, when we first started I think I was a little bit of a nightmare. I think I was micromanaging things and not letting people do the things that we hired them to do. It’s, it was a big learning for me to be able to be wrong and hear out somebody else.

And yeah, I think we, these things are rare, but we do it very well, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Our general manager name’s Corey Schaaf. And she likes to say, you gotta put your aces in their places and trust them to do their job. And. Yeah, I think maybe it took a little while to relinquish some of that control, but I think we’re happier that we have.

Did you find her right off the bat? Has she been with you since the start of the business? Or you guys did a lot on your own and you just suddenly said, Hey, our bandwidth is like shrunk and we need to find someone to help us run this business. Like where did that decision come from?

So she joined us about a week after we had opened.

We we had a bar manager they moved on to do something else pretty much right away. So we hired her as the bar manager. She had done that before for years, and she was very familiar with all of our vendors. And eventually after a couple of years of her doing that, we could tell her ideas were both terrific And more and more, we came to rely on her to lead whatever effort we were putting forth.

Yeah, key hire. So about two years ago, we said, why don’t you, why don’t you take over the GM ship? The big job. The big job. And, I’m still there pretty much every day, but I’m not having to actively manage the situation. I’m there, I can walk around, touch tables. The two of us Cory and I work really well together on different things, so it’s nice.

She’s still there. She’s meant to do this. She’s a terrific person and great leader. Great leader. Yeah,

absolutely. That’s the magic word right there. Lead by example, recognize talent, develop that talent, move people up, inspire people. That’s what’s going to lower your turnover or keep your, your team growing forward.

And that’s fantastic. I’m glad you mentioned that, because everyone needs those key people that run the businesses if they owned that business and had to pay for it themselves, and that’s such a rare thing to find, but when you have someone like that in your business, you never want to let them go, because you just get out of their way, you trust their vision, you trust their judgment, and they build your business, Boy, there’s so much pride that goes into that.

And it’s also a collaboration, but I think that’s true. That’s terrific. That’s awesome. So what’s made the biggest difference? In your success, you survived the pandemic. It’s like you’ve approached this with a business standpoint in mind. You’ve hired key people to help you move that business down the road, but you’re in a competitive food city and granted you’re in a very busy, high traffic neighborhood, but.

Is there any specific things that you’re doing that you would consider to be a competitive advantage or a real draw? I’m a big believer in hooks, what makes your business stand out, make it unique, make it capture the guest’s imagination, that sort of thing. Is it a combination of all those things?

I don’t want to answer for you.

Yeah, I think a lot of the combinations from a business standpoint, as I said before, owning the building is that already puts us on a much It gives us a huge advantage in terms of not having a lease and a landlord to answer to. Yes, that sort of baked in.

But I think what makes Bumpa special and this will go back to the people as well, but our voice is Very specifically cultivated. You mentioned you, you read the menu you get that there’s a sense of humor behind

the

menu and the little stories that we put in about

Bamba.

So we’ve passed that on to our employees, many of which have been with us for years now.

And and so when people come in, they, there’s an instant feel of atmosphere this sort of tongue in cheek. Very fun, very comfortable place. We’re not going to try to turn the table quickly. We want you to stay there as long as you’d like and have a drink and watch some sports or whatever, listen to live music.

So I think it’s the atmosphere.

Yeah, the vibe. It’s definitely got a vibe. You walk in the door and it’s it feels it’s inclusive and you feel like you belong. And I’m sure let’s talk about the service because you obviously have people that have been with you for years, like you mentioned, and they understand the culture and they understand hospitality.

And I’m sure you want to deliver amazing service to each and every guest, because whether they’re tourists or locals alike, you want to treat everyone like they’re The most important person in the place because in the age of online reviews and just as a point of pride, that’s what you want to do.

Yeah,

absolutely.

Yeah, 100%. That’s, and again, come back to the business plan.

Yeah.

The number one tenant is just to, treat everyone with respect. Your peers, your coworkers, your guests. Yeah, it’s gotta be copacetic all the time. And to your point, I, one of my favorite things that, that has happened more times than I can count now is, we’ll have some folks come in for a lunch one day, and then we’ll see them back later that night, and then again the next day, and they’ve just ingratiated themselves.

They’re in town for three days, and they’ll come spend time with us each of those three days, and they’ll ask for bartenders by name, and just seeing that hair on the back of my neck standing up, it’s a really Special feeling.

You got a regular sitting at a barstool that’s called Norm.

We have regulars.

We have we have a huge industry following, which is just, that’s the biggest compliment I think we could receive is the, when the folks get out of work. They come to your place. They come to our place. We’re open just a little bit later. Our kitchen’s open a little later. So they can come in and I know they can have a drink.

They can have a bite to eat and they’re in. A space with like minded people and that’s a huge compliment. Um, we’ve been called the cheers of Charleston a couple times and I think we lean into that and we do two things. When you walk in the door whoever’s greeting you for the first time, you always get a welcome to Bumpass.

And then our bartenders will not start a tab without getting your name first and usually a handshake along with it. Oh, that’s great. Yeah, it’s Personal service, yeah. It’s, and then, we have a bartender named Neil, he’s he’s worked in this building as a bartender for decades. And people come in after a year and he’ll remember who they are.

I love that.

And they’ll remember him.

And they’ll remember him, absolutely.

I notice you’ve got quite a few craft beers or, the tap handles, 10 or 12 or so, which is awesome. Do you guys have a mug club?

We don’t. It’s something we’ve talked about. And now that you’ve brought that up, it’s, we haven’t talked about it in a minute, but yeah, we do have, we have 14 taps.

Everything’s going to be local, regional, except for the Guinness and the High Life. Yeah, that is something we’ve discussed, but we’ll have to revisit. I’ve forgotten about that one.

Oh, we can talk about it after the podcast. I can help you with that. What about marketing? Do you have to spend much on marketing?

And the things you do, are they trackable? Are there influencers in the community? Like you just mentioned, like all the employees that got out of work, they must be brand ambassadors saying, hey, go to this place as opposed to maybe where they work.

Yeah. Especially when we first opened, we did not have a budget for marketing or PR or anything.

So that kind of word of mouth and support of the, of our industry friends was critical. Gave us a good boost of business right out the gate. As we’ve matured a little bit, we, we have budgeted for marketing and PR and we use a local firm here and they’ve been fantastic partners for us.

And, they’re pretty good showing ROI is well it’s Dan and I aren’t great social media creators, creators, but they are, and they can point to, certain posts that, drive, so much attention, and can even point to, some actual tangible, bottom line results, which is just fantastic.

So I think it took us a while to get there. Took us a while to, again, be able to afford that budget because, it’s an expensive part of our business. No

question.

I think it’s very worth it.

Excellent. If there was a question about whether or not this was worth it, I think we would have by now probably shut that down.

But these these ladies are just aggressive in a positive way. They stay on top of us when they need deliverables from us. And some of the little social media things, the Instagram stuff that they’ve put out has gotten just a wild amount of views. So it’s Stuff we don’t know how to do.

We’re not, we’re really not good at self promotion. But they’ve done such a terrific job for us and we can see the increase in body coming into the building. So it’s been a terrific partnership.

Excellent. They got my attention and here you are.

Let’s talk about the building again. Is it a one story standalone or are there apartments upstairs or are there any other spaces that you as an additional profit center?

Just one standalone building. Pretty much a zero lot line. So where the wall ends that’s it for us. It’s It looks like an old warehouse.

It looks like it did in the 1800s. You can actually find it on really old maps from the 1800s, which is really neat. But it’s it’s got a lot of character. Big, large ceiling that we were able to reveal. Um, the beautiful copper roof on top. It was Oh, that’s nice.

Yeah, and it’s only about 3, 000 square feet.

And, again, we may have gotten the building for a song, but with the understanding that a lot of work was going to have to be done. So

certainly.

There’s good and bad in that. Obviously, there are a lot of growing pains. Even though it was a restaurant, a lot of work had to be done for the kitchen and HVAC system, grease trap, good lord.

But the good part of that is, to Dan’s point, zero lot line, no room to spare. We accounted for every single square inch of that space. We’d debate over literal quarter inches, behind the bar or in the kitchen. And so it was amazing to be able to optimize.

It was a long road. It was hard. How many seats do you have? Our tenured kitchen staff are used to it now, but new people come in, like, how do you do this in this, In this space and yeah it’s really is we have to be efficient and mindful of how we store, how we prep, how we order because there’s not a lot of extra space to, to hide things.

That’s a good thing in many ways, too, because it keeps you efficient, right? It keeps you on top of your game, all those things, and you got dialed in. Storage is an issue in my businesses as well yeah. You gotta operate with the resources you have, but I think it makes you stronger overall. That’s terrific.

How about retail? You guys sell any retail merchandise?

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Yeah, we got hats and shirts.

Sell them to a lot of those bumpers that, Yeah. Connor mentioned we’ve got a whole wall full of black and white photos and some of those are our family, but most of them now are other people’s grandparents or family members that had that sort of same relationship.

One of those black and white photos is a family reunion they call their grandfather Bumpa, and they surprised him for the family photo. They all came out in t shirts with his name on it. And It’s just neat to see that up on the wall and it feels like we’re still connected to those folks in some way.

Yeah. Bet you have a hell

of a St. Patty’s Day party.

It’s always the biggest time of year, we call it our Christmas. Yeah, the elves all have to be there and have to be ready. And yeah It’s

banana. Yeah, it’s pretty insane. I can

only imagine. I remember those days. Do you do any other theme events or parties on other, either holidays or just out of the blue, you create events?

Do you do any of that?

We have a a new thing that we’re doing. It’s called Third Thursday and it’s a play on what is it? Second Sunday up on King Street? Yeah, so King Street, they’ll close down King Street. And this is a good idea because we have a lot of local vendors that are just a few blocks away from us and people can walk on the road and local vendors can go out and sell their crafts and what have you.

And our GM Corey came up with this idea. Why don’t we have a third Thursday? Where we’ll have a drink sponsor and local artisans. It’s set up only during a couple hours during happy hour, so it’s minimal impact to us, but it also gets eyes on different business people in our town, and it’s a fun way to get locals to connect with different folks, and we have live music happening during that, and yeah, that’s our newest newest venture, and it’s, I really enjoy it.

Enjoy it. It just

Makes the business fun for the guests and for your team and gives people things to look forward to and their marketing events. I think that makes a lot of sense. I’m glad you’re doing those things too. What about we were talking finances a little while ago. How has inflation hit your business and rising costs and volatile cost of goods, markets, and all that kind of stuff.

Have you had to change the menu much or raise prices much or change ingredients much? What have you done there?

Good question. I think that word volatility is the most frustrating part of it. Especially coming out of COVID and, the supply chain still so very messed up.

Yeah, for sure.

Every week there was either a shortage or something spiked, 100 percent in price and yeah, we do some bobbing, weeding with the menu. Yeah. You can’t really change a cheeseburger too much, like you got to bite the bullet and buy the beef. So yeah, sometimes we’re stuck, but trying to account for it and forecast for it is still been a real challenge, I think.

We know what to look out for and, there’s certain times of the year, certainly certain times of the week that, we can expect, more revenue, but. Yeah, it’s still, it can be very lumpy which is, again, it’s just tough to account for.

Yeah, and you still have to, like you said, offer value, and not lose that value for the customer, because there’s only so much that they’re willing to pay, and there is a ceiling to things, and that’s when you’ve got to get really creative.

Awesome. Yeah,

we are a cheaper option in the neighborhood, too, and really want to

Maintain that reputation, and offer quality at a reasonable price, so that everyone can come in and not feel You know, like you can’t go to Bumpa’s cause.

Cause Americans drink so much.

How about staffing? You’ve got some great people.

It sounds but as this whole labor crisis thing affected you at all since the pandemic, are you doing pretty well?

It did. For, I would say about two years ago would talk daily. I described it as a waking nightmare because we would get there in the morning. And you just didn’t know who was going to be able to come in and cook and do the job.

And the schedule was just, it almost didn’t matter because people would come in for a day and then leave because either they didn’t enjoy it or somewhere else was offering a higher wage, what have you. We’ve had to, we’ve had to get more competitive with how we pay our kitchen.

And whether that’s the reason or not we’ve been able to keep a great deal of our staff. We’ve thought to plug holes here and there, but I’d say for the most part, we’ve got Some real key people that we very much count on day to day. And, um, they’ve come through and they’ve been consistent and accountable and but yeah, two years ago, you just didn’t know.

Yeah. For early days was tough. I haven’t thought about this in a while, but there was a, quite a long stretch of time where we had one server and then you’re looking at the other two. Yeah, that was. Hiring to say the least. And we’re not good servers.

we’re, if you give me more than two tables, ,

I’m in trouble.

I’m in the weeds. But you probably still see some of those people that you served and you made it fun for them. And they came back anyway ’cause they were pulling for you.

Yeah, we definitely do. And it’s always great to see those familiar faces. And now the following is really there too, because they like the servers that have been there for a couple of years now.

And that’s, to me, that’s more gratifying than, seeing me. I think it’s terrific when we have servers that have made a connection with folks and that’s one of the reasons they come back in.

That’s fantastic. Any plans to open another location or another restaurant?

We’d love to.

That’s always been the goal. And I think the biggest question is, Do we do a second Bumbas, or do we come up with a whole new, different concepts? These are, exciting conversations that we have behind the scenes.

Yep. Not

ready yet. I just had my first kid.

Dan has two daughters. Congrats. feels like another child a lot of the times. Oh

yeah. I get that. . You’ve done a lot of

things right about place number two and for many different reasons. We’re not there yet, but yeah it’s still something we’d like to make work and make a career out of.

And and, there’s nothing more fun than getting to work with. With your brother on it. So

that’s terrific. Yeah, that’s fantastic. Like I said, you have done quite a few things, and it’s very gratifying to you to watch your vision come to life and for it to be successful and to work together with your brother.

It’s a family business. I’m sure you treat your team like family and your guests as well. And yeah that’s also satisfying and it is a business of relationships, pride and passion, and that came through in this episode. So thanks for being great guests.

Thank you. Love to hear it.

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