News

March 29, 2004

Entrepreneurial drive leads Chandler to "in his blood" restaurant
chain

Ask anyone to spell "barbecue" and you’ll get a litany of responses, ranging from the slightly incorrect "barbeque" to the lazily abbreviated "BBQ." But ask barbecue maven Bret Chandler if he ever wanted to be anything other than an entrepreneur, and there will be only one answer.

"There was no question about that," said Chandler, founder, president and chief executive officer of the Tulsa-based Rib Crib. "I always wanted to do my own thing. It didn'’t matter what it was as long as it was something that could grow and I could do again somewhere else."

A petroleum and land management major at the Michael F. Price College of Business, Chandler's future was partly paved for him when he graduated in 1983 and found the oil business "had softened a bit." Instead of entering the oil business, he opted for pizza, becoming a franchisee of Mazzio's for five years in Tulsa.

In 1988, he started his own construction company, but by 1992, the entrepreneurial bug bit Chandler hard. And out poured barbecue sauce."I was overwhelmed. At the end of the day, what you do is either in your blood or it’s not," he said, "and it wasn't, so I got out of it. Sometimes you have to walk away to realize what it is you enjoy. And I would advise anyone wanting to be an entrepreneur to find something they enjoy doing." For him, that was a return to the restaurant business, as he was attracted by the pace, atmosphere and people, not to mention the opportunity to stay in Tulsa. This time, however, it would be his restaurant business - not someone else’s franchise. The only question remaining was, what kind of restaurant?

Rather than go back to the pizza he knew well, the entrepreneur in him researched the market. "At the time, the only decent barbecue places in Tulsa were way out on the outskirts of town, pretty much your single-unit atmosphere. And the food could be good one time and awful the next. There was no consistency," he recalled. "I realized there was a niche in which I could apply the restaurant discipline to barbecue. Everything else had been done - hamburgers, Italian, Mexican, pizza - but barbecue was the last segment that had not been duplicated, or at least not well.”

Thus, Rib Crib was born. Currently, the chain operates nearly 30 restaurants in nine states, with units soon slated to open in Cleveland and San Francisco. Within the last year, the chain started franchising as well, and Chandler hopes to have 100 restaurants within the next three to five years. Rib Crib is a consistent favorite among consumers, winning accolades in newspaper readers' polls year after year. But it wasn’t an immediate success.

"It was a building process for sure," Chandler said, noting that initially, he ran the first location and his construction company simultaneously. "There are a ton of things I’d do different today. But when you start with zero, you don’t have the luxury of doing certain things from a technical standpoint - we didn’t even have air conditioning when we first opened in May that year and didn't get it until the following fall. Operationally, things like that are driven by economics. "But it's all worked out ok, and that’s part of the fun of it." According to Chandler, such an entrepreneurial spirit can be “different things to different people," but regardless of the person in whom it dwells, one element is constant.

"You have to have an overall vision. That’s the No. 1 thing," he said. “If you have six or eight things going on, you can’t get caught up in too many little details and overwhelmed by all of them. Then you get bogged down on your overall big picture. You have to hit on all eight cylinders all at once, and there’s a definite personality that thrives in that situation." It's a situation he likened to athletics - team-oriented with a coach calling the shots. "Some people would never try it, but some do," he said. That is why he believes people who are thorough and detail-oriented often have a hard time as an entrepreneur. "Certainly some people are better at it than others," he said. "You have to be able to delegate authority instead of micromanage. You've got to have people working for you who are very specific and goal-oriented, whether that be in food cost or labor control. It's extremely difficult otherwise. If you don’t have that element, you don’t have it takes to be an entrepreneur."

If there's a downside to being an entrepreneur, Chandler said it's the responsibility you have to your employees who depend on you. "That's huge, to feel the burden of not only your business, but all the people involved. You feel responsible for your employees and want to provide them with all the possible opportunities for them to grow," he said. "And I wouldn't necessarily call that a downside, but a constant, nagging thing. It's just part of the overall equation."

That equation began at the University of Oklahoma, where Chandler - who played football for one year - found that the thing he took away most from his education was the relationships he had built. "What I learned was how to deal with people, and that the relationships that you develop with the people you meet are as important as anything you learn," said Chandler, who no doubt has put that philosophy to good use with the approximately 2,000 employees under the Rib Crib banner.

"As with anything else, you have to surround yourself with good people you enjoy being around, because you’re going to spend a lot of time together," he advised. "If you do that, a lot of positive things will happen." One of those people surrounding Chandler is one of his two teenage sons he has with Rocci, his wife of 19 years. Today the boy serves as head dishwasher at Rib Crib’s 81st and Yale location in Tulsa. "He’s finally seeing a bit of reality of what we do," Chandler noted.

Perhaps the young man will one day be part of the next crop of would-be entrepreneurs. To that group, Chandler would stress that "the main thing is believe in yourself, for sure. Apply the business savvy you have versus just finding something that may be a money-making thing. If you do something you enjoy, other things come a little easier.

Rib Crib. Where Bold Began.

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