CAVA CEO Brett Schulman shares the blueprint for the chain’s early growth

55% of Gen Z and millennials say social media reviews are the top reason they try a restaurant, and 73% have visited a restaurant in the last three months because of one. Do you have timely reviews working for you? Quick turn influencer review campaigns from Bell Communication can fill tables fast. Visit bellcommunication.com/influence to learn more. Welcome to Takeaway with Sam Ocus, a podcast for leaders of growing restaurant companies who are looking to take their businesses to the next level. In nearly two decades covering restaurants, I've gained access to some of this industry's most influential decision makers, and I'm letting you in on the conversations. In today's episode, you'll hear from the CEO of one of the most exciting restaurant chains in America about how he and his partners successfully grew their business, and you'll get a step-by-step process for how they funded that growth. Brett Shulman is the co-founder and chief executive officer for Kava, the Mediterranean fast-casual concept that has grown to more than 400 locations across the U.S. Brett sat down with me at our recent investment summit portion of the Create event for emerging restaurant tours, where he shared the blueprint for Kava's remarkable growth, which started back in 2010 as a fast-casual offshoot of a full-service Mediterranean restaurant. In this conversation, you'll learn more about why you should be patient to find the right investor, why setting expectations early is critical to building a business, and why the things you say no to are more important than the things that get a yes. If you learned something from this episode, go follow Takeaway wherever you're listening and leave some feedback. It's the best way to get those lessons to a fellow restaurant leader. Jumping now into my interview with Kava CEO, Brett Shulman. Also, don't forget to stick around after the interview, as I will share my six takeaways from this discussion, actionable insights that you can take with you on the go. Hey, everybody, say hello to Brett. Maybe you've heard of Kava. Brett, before we get started, 400 restaurants, around 400 restaurants, Kava's at right now? 417. 417. So, I think a lot of people in this room aspire to be Kava. You guys have been one of the hottest things going in the restaurant industry now for a few years. Obviously, this is the investment summit. This is an event where we're talking about how to finance your growth. So, I want to go back and start there. You've been with Kava since the beginning. Tell us about how you financed the early growth for Kava. Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me. It's great to be with a room full of entrepreneurs and industry leaders. We were, every situation's got its unique aspects. For us, my partners actually co-founded the brand back in 2006 with a single full service restaurant, Kava Mese. When I joined them, they had asked me to help with their CPG business. They were in about eight local Whole Foods, so this fledgling CPG business. We hit it off. They said, "Brett, why don't you be our fourth partner?" I said, "Great. What do you think about taking what you're doing in the full service and what we're doing in the packaged goods and really bring this amazing cuisine to the world in an accessible health-based format?" Then they said, "Sounds good. Let's do it." At the time, they had opened their second full service restaurant. The brand had some credibility in the local area, and they had a lot of fans and customers who were approaching them and said, "Hey, we want to invest in your next full service restaurant." We got them all together and mocked up the food and showed them the business plan and said, "It's not a full service, but here's what we want to do," and then we spent the next three or four months scratching and clawing a lot of friends and family checks and checks from some of those customers and people we had networked with, really with the idea of funding two to three locations to prove out our thesis and prove out our concept. I should also add, if you guys want to throw it back there on the screen, we are also welcoming questions from the audience. I know you guys probably have a lot of questions for Brett. They will come straight to me, so feel free to throw some questions in there if you have any questions for Brett as well. If I think back to those early days, I remember when Kava burst onto the scene, obviously that was fast casual, became this really sexy side of the category. You guys tapped into that really early on, so you start to pick up some steam. How do you then start to sort of formalize how you raise? I think you went through a couple of raises. What did that look like? Well, first, we had started to prove out the first three locations, and we didn't want to raise more money that would be too dilutive, and we then got a bank loan, and we personally signed all of us with all of our wives, personally guaranteed the bank loan to open the next two. That allowed us to then raise another friends and family round, because we had started to get some momentum. It was after our fifth location in late 2013, we started to get our first calls from more institutional capital. The ironic thing was, one of the folks we had gotten connected with on that original friends and family round, and this is how you raise money, you use your network. Our architect, on our very first restaurant, had made an introduction to me on someone who he had designed their office space for, who turned out to be the managing partner of Swan and Legend, which was the venture capital fund we eventually partnered with. They also co-invested locally with Revolution, who became another partner of ours. When we started to get inbound calls, the friends and family investor reached out to me and called and said, "I heard you're getting calls. We would be interested in doing something out of our fund." We had a number of institutional investors that were calling us at the time. We didn't need the money, so we opened the next three or four restaurants and really started to get in momentum, and we decided we were going to do an institutional round. Swan and Legend and Revolution said, "Well, we'll propose this offer." Then Invis, who became another partner of ours and had been one of the early phone calls, said, "We want to invest. We typically do majority investments with founders, and we are the single investor." We have these two very different paths, and they were very intriguing offers, but ultimately we decided that we didn't want to do a majority sale at that point, and Invis said, "Okay. That's typically what we do. We understand. We appreciate it." We're going forward with Revolution and Swan, and I get a call like two weeks before closing and Invis came back and said, "You know what? We love what you're doing. We want to be a part of it. We'll do the whole round as a minority investor," and we said, "Well, actually, we've got this other deal on the table," and I think this was a critical point in retrospect. We went to Revolution and Swan. We said, "We'd love to have Invis. We think very highly of them. We've really gotten to know them and like them. We'd love to have them at the table," and it did two things. One, it created a really great eclectic group of investors that all had deep pockets that could potentially fund future growth, and also Invis had a philosophy that Revolution and Swan at the time lined up with, that we also lined up with, that they wanted a very vanilla structure, a single preference at the expense, potentially, of maybe pushing valuation, which I think is a critical decision for a lot of entrepreneurs. Sometimes you can get a larger valuation, but it comes at the expense of what we call bells and whistles or participating preferred or dividends, and this was a very clean structure, and the philosophy was that everybody would be holding hands in the same class of stock. Ultimately, when difficult decisions came down the pike or we were faced or confronted with difficult choices or a financial raise, everybody's aligned, and everybody's in the same boat looking at from the same perspective versus competing classes of stock or different financial interests, which I think really played out over time as we did subsequent rounds, which that group ultimately funded for the large portion of our growth, in fact, all of our growth to different magnitudes. Don't you hate it when you have multiple investors just fighting, tripping over themselves to invest in your brand? Well, I tell people, I say, "Listen, if you have a good product, you have a good brand, you've got a good team, money typically will find you." I think the bigger question, the bigger challenge is, who do you want to partner with? Because I've seen situations go the wrong direction when there was a misalignment of what the investor's outcome or expectations were versus what the entrepreneur or the business owner's expectations were, and then ultimately that led to challenging situations. You talked about that alignment across just the founders. I'm sure a lot of folks in here are co-founders and have business partners in their ventures. Let us into the room of those early conversations. Take us back to those early days because you have multiple options, multiple paths you can take with investors. Of course, I'm sure at some point you thought about franchising. You have all these different paths you can take. You have these really pivotal moments in the Kava's history. What were those conversations like? What were some of those pivotal moments that you can remember where you guys had to really come together and make that decision? Yeah. I mean, one was even when an investor was offering to buy a majority of the business. It would have been, at the time, for us financially rewarding, but then it's you're giving up the upside or the potential of what we thought could be much bigger. Certainly the Zoe's transaction was an incredibly pivotal decision and a very difficult decision that my partners were very skeptical of, but gave me incredible support when I really pitched them that it was going to be the right thing to do. I think the other thing throughout is always this push and pull of dilution. I said to my partners, "Do we want potentially 10% of something incredible or do we want 100% of something tiny or that doesn't work out?" I think every situation is different. You have to look at your brand, what you want to be, ultimately, what's happening in the marketplace, the economy. For us, we felt like we wanted to establish this category, that this was going to be a quickly emerging category, that we wanted to get clear leadership position in and being corporate-owned, which was another decision we made, would be capital-intensive. To be able to do it with operational integrity and be able to hire the operators ahead of the growth versus waiting to be able to afford to pay them, and then it can be too late, that raising capital would be the right thing to do and that almost in a sense getting escape velocity. Again, in retrospect, when you look at a lot of the fast casual brands that popped up, we started in 2011, January, with our first location, but ones that came on the scene in '13, '14, '15. Some of them, I think, struggled to get to that scale that was required to get escape velocity, which all the capital we raised allowed us to do it and allowed us to do it sustainably. This is probably a nerdy food service journalist thing to say, but I remember when the news dropped that you had acquired Zoey's Kitchen, I was at a red light. I was safely parked, or I wasn't driving. I wasn't driving. I was at a red light. Somebody texted me, did you see Kava bought Zoey's? I said, surely you must have gotten that backward. That doesn't make any sense. I mean, that's a pretty, that's a big swing, acquiring a much larger competitor. Walk us through why that was the decision you ultimately made and how that ultimately set Kava up for success. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, it actually went down at RLC. Oh, okay. There you go. So, you know, we had been growing, we were on a great growth trajectory. This was early 2018, and we had just raised our Series D. And so Ron Shake, the former CEO, founder of Panera, now leads Act 3, his fund, had been a personal investor in Kava. We got connected. I got connected with Ron. They had called on us when he was at Panera early on, and he had made a personal passive investment. We sold Panera to JAB and stood up his Act 3 fund. He wound up leading our Series D round, so he became another, you know, kind of institutional seat at the table, even though it was his, basically, family office. And we, I had built a relationship with Ron. We had always met, you know, probably twice a year, just grab lunch or dinner, and, you know, he served as a mentor, and at the time Zoey's had approached him about potentially advising them to try and help turn them around, because they were struggling as a public company. And Ron came to me, and this was at RLC, and he said, you know, we had dinner with a whole group, and then he's like, "Do you have a minute afterwards to talk about something?" I said, "Sure." He said, "You know, Zoey's has approached me," and I said, "Well, they're a Mediterranean, you know. You just let our rounds." You know, they say they're a Mediterranean brand, and he said, "Yeah, but, you know, that business needs what you all have. And what do you think if we put together, went to our investor group, and put together the capital to buy that business and give it to you?" I said, "Well, that's a big idea. That's not quite what I was thinking about doing." I said, "Well, let me think about it, and as I thought about it, you know, it goes back to that escape velocity. We felt scale was going to matter more than ever in the industry. That technology was a big driver of kind of bifurcating between the haves and the have-nots, as well as the business model scale and resiliency to withstand cogs and labor pressures, which has certainly manifested themselves in recent years." And then as we looked at the real estate portfolio, this was a portfolio of real estate in a part of the country we were really trying to get into, the Sun Belt, the South, the suburbs. Zoys was pretty much 100% in the Sun Belt, the suburbs. And we also knew that we were across the street from six or seven Zoys locations doing two X the revenue. So we're like, "This is good real estate, but it's really underperforming its potential." And then we'd go and we'd see that they had an end cap opposite at Chipotle or Panera. Same situation. So we said, "This could be an interesting way to accelerate our growth because we also saw that as we built out markets, we hit critical mass and it was kind of this rising tide lifts all boats when we got to five or six units in a market. And this was a way to compress that curve and that we could unlock significant dormant value in the real estate doing a value added or low-cost conversion that would be half the cost of a new build." So that was our hypothesis, the real estate and the scale. That has obviously really played out. What we got wrong, that we used the metaphor that Zoys was melting ice cube. And we said, "Okay, we just need to make sure it doesn't turn into a puddle." Because we were using some of the restaurant-level EBITDA to help underwrite the cap structure to be able to do all the conversions, well, it started to melt very, very quickly. If you knew me in 2018, I had a head of black hair, and that quickly started to turn gray. And we spent 2019 really, really triaging that business to stabilize it. But going back to the financing part, we did get our investors to put together the capital and Invis and Ron really led it with swan and revolution participating. So again, having those multiple parties at the table allowed us the financial wherewithal to do something transformational and atypical of what we normally would have done than just kind of plugging along on the organic growth path. Well, it's interesting, because already this morning there have been a couple of mentions of this idea of not scaling too quickly, trying to protect that pace of growth. That was the opposite approach. I mean, you guys multiplied, seemingly overnight, the size of the business. We could do a whole other session. I'm sure in the lessons you learned from that, but how did you suddenly, how did you balance that sudden scale that you had that you were really aiming for at the time? A lot of pain and suffering and blood, sweat, and tears. I like to say I got a PhD in business that year. It was incredibly difficult, but obviously transformational for our business, I used the metaphor. I was like a 10th grader in high school, and I had to be a grown up adult overnight. And going from kind of growth company, small growth company, to buying a company three times your size, and now your enterprise scale, and running a public company where a lot of that leadership left pretty quickly. Whether there was redundancy that we weren't looking to keep those folks, or a lot of people that left on their own volition because they said, "Who's a small company buying us, and I don't want to climb this next mountain?" So it was really, though, getting back to what I think is so fundamental in our industry, and it's solving the problem in front of you. I think having the resiliency, and it's so easy to get overwhelmed or get demoralized by the challenges of running restaurants every day, but it's really just about solving the next problem in front of you. I gave credit to some of my board members. It was the middle of '19 where we were kind of firefighting, and just kind of holding the line on stabilizing the Zoe's business, and we got in a room, and they challenged me on what are the five things that are going to turn around the business, and we distilled that down, and they said, "Brett, your name can only be on one or two, and who else is going to run these pillars?" That became some speech to the org, and it's incredible where you can look at the comps flatten out and then turn back up at that point, or like a month later, where just getting the organization really coalesced around the five things we're going to work on and nothing else, and stabilizing the business to then prove out the conversions, which we did, to then really gain the momentum to go forward. All right, so speaking of aggressive growth and scaling, you opted for corporate growth. You guys chose that path. We just heard from Matt at the IFA on the benefits of franchising. Again, I'm sure a lot of people in the room are thinking about that, but a lot of people also wanting to stay corporate growth. What went into that specific decision for you and your co-founders? Yeah. I mean, part of it is a byproduct of just how we all view the world, but also how the brand's origins had evolved. We were running two full-service restaurants with really high-quality, respected food. We were making consumer packaged goods that were sold in local Whole Foods using imported Greek feta, olive oil, and we had a real belief when we leveraged the walk the line format that people were going to be as discerning about their calories as they were about their dollars going forward increasingly, and that when we looked at the labor productivity of the assembly line model, it afforded us to invest in food quality. We really wanted to protect that food quality. We wanted to protect the brand. At the time, when we were hatching this fast-casual idea, the concern was, would it sully the full-service restaurants? Yeah. Would it hurt the reputation of the full-service restaurants? It really started there that we wanted to protect and build a brand leader in a category, and to do that, that we felt like corporate-owned was going to be the right thing to do. As time went on, I think the cash on cash returns proved that that was the right thing to do, and not only the right thing from an economic standpoint, but the right thing to continue to do that because those returns were so attractive, why would we want to franchise that out? Sure. All right, so 2023, let's fast-forward a little bit here. You guys went public. You filed your IPO. What is the point at which you know that we're going public? That's what we are going to do next. That's the path for us. Yeah. It's another great example of, I think, the good counsel I was fortunate to have around the table and to kind of challenge our thinking, the pressure test ideas. If you remember in 2021, the window was pretty wide open. A lot of companies were going public. Some maybe shouldn't have gone public, but in all industries, and there were SPACs, and the SPAC craze was going on, and so the board posed the question to us, "Hey, do you guys want to go public? Do you think you're ready to go public?" My CFO and I said, "No, we're not ready. We just don't feel like operationally we're as consistent as we want to be. We don't feel like internally and in the finance function where it's buttoned up, where we're closing the period as quickly as we would need to be." And so then they asked the next question, "Well, what would you need to feel that way?" And so we created a whole list of things that we would want to do. And they said, "All right. Whether you wind up going public or not, why don't we get into the fashion of operating as a public company? It will be beneficial for us anyway to get more disciplined." And we started to do things like mock earnings calls and mocked up press releases. We hired a chief accounting officer. We did an internal audit on our controls. And we worked on really getting our scatterplot of operational performance tighter on the access so on the line. So as time went on, they would come back every core. We'd talk about it. They wouldn't push the issue. But then finally in early 22, we're like, "Yeah, we feel like we're ready." We had visibility to the end of the Zoe's conversions, which was another big thing. It would be kind of a cleaner story and we would have cleaner visibility to the business and that that would be behind us and we'd be in more of a normal rhythm. So we started to prepare. And then later that summer, at the board meeting in August, we greenlit the process. And as an emerging growth company, you can do the confidential process so you can test the waters and to see. So it wasn't a predetermined outcome. But then as we went through the process, it was positive. And then we moved to an IPO in June of 23. And that's been pretty successful for you, I think. That's gone well. I think that was the right call as evidence has shown. Reminder, if we could again throw up the QR code. If you have questions, we have just one more questions for Brett. A few more minutes and if you have questions for him, scan that code and send them over to me. Brett, I want to talk about the fact that you guys, Kava, you guys really see yourselves as a mission-oriented brand. And I'm interested in that because, I mean, you're under an intense microscope now being a public brand. Obviously, for any viable business, you also have to be very mindful of financials. How do you find that right balance of minding your financials and being a healthy business and ensuring profitability, but also being mission-oriented? Yeah, one of the biggest challenges we face today. Our mission is to bring heart, health, and humanity to food. And it's really our guiding compass on how we think about the business. And one of the things, again, when we were talking about going public, we also wanted to make sure that we had the strength of the balance sheet and the operating model that we felt like we had the cushion to go public, that if a rainy day did come or business conditions got more difficult, that the short-term challenges or quarterly results would not unduly influence us into a very short-term, financially-driven decision, that we would have the air cover financially on our balance sheet and from our unit economic model to be unwavering on our long-term strategic vision. And we're seeing that play out a little bit right now. We had a quarter, last quarter was the first quarter that we didn't meet expectations. And then we all know in this room the macro is pretty challenging out there. And just a little example I'll give you. About a month or two ago, our team came to me and with the tariffs moving around, they said, "Oh, well, this ingredient we sourced, the tariffs going up in this country, we can go source this other one, this other ingredient in this country and mitigate that." I said, "Yeah, but we've tested that. We don't like it as much. What would we do if we were a private company?" I said, "Oh, we'd stick with this ingredient. We wouldn't change it." I said, "Well, there's your answer, right?" And so to be able to have the courage to do that, though, you have to have the business in the position, again, where we've got defensibility from the short-term nature of the public markets, which is the pressures that everyone faces that's a public company. So it's staying focused on that because what we like to say is those quarterly results are a byproduct of everything else. They're a byproduct of the decisions you made two and three years ago. They're a byproduct of how well you've trained your teams. How well you support them and operate them, how well you take care of them, how well you take care of the guests. It's not the other way around. I think too often the natural instinct is to, you know, when things get challenging is to cut costs, and it's very difficult to cut your way to prosperity. And so, again, it's like, how do you set up the business to have that air cover insulate yourselves and then remind everyone, you know, when things are good, you got to kind of bring people down whenever as good as we might think we are, and when things are tough, whenever as bad as that may appear, and lift people up and try and stay in that middle pocket and stay focused on taking care of our teams, taking care of our guests, because, say, a happy team member equals a happy guest equals a happy P&L and a happy quarterly result. So, you know, and the bigger you get, right, the more that inertia pushes against that idea. So it's making sure you continue to reinforce your organizing principles. And for us, we call it MVC. It's our mission, our values, and our competencies. And we want all 12,000 people in our business to understand those very clearly and know how to show up every day and what that means to us. And that is a never-ending work in progress. All right, so similar, you know, finding balance, innovation. Right now, innovation, everybody's trying to get customers' attention. Traffic has been brutal across the industry. I know you guys haven't totally been immune to that either. So innovation becomes the solution to try to get the attention of the consumer. How do you, again, sort of mind the, well, we've got to kind of hunker down and be a smart business today, but we've got to also push the envelope. You guys are driving Mediterranean fast casual. What role does innovation play in that? I think much like the pressure of the public markets, if you're a public company, the pressure of the industry and what's happening around you, especially in this 24/7 social media world, and it is so challenging, but it can, again, influence you into bad decisions. And it's like, how do you stay the course? Because what you often say no to is more important than what you say yes to. And the bigger you get, right, I'm not driving a little speedboat anymore. I'm steering an aircraft carrier. So we can't do things quite the way we used to do, and we've got to be very clear about where we're going and very precise about where we're turning and how we're turning. And so, look, we face these challenges all the time. I grapple with this in our business all the time. We are not perfect, but we are always trying, and I'm trying to push to say, should we be doing this? Is this something we want to do, or is it something we need to do? And again, I'll give a plug to Ron's book, Know What Matters. With operations, with our teams, you can only push so much out in a given year. But when social media and trends are going, and how do you take advantage of those trends and stay relevant and stay in the conversation, that's the push and pull. But I always say, you can't market your way out of a bad operating experience. And always trying to remind yourself of that, and not get caught up in too much in what people are doing around you, and stay focused on what's right for you and what matters for your business in that moment, and then say no and not chase too many shiny pennies that can get you distracted, and then your team does a lot of stuff not really well. Sure. I want to quickly touch on sort of the people part of scaling. Last chance here, QR code, if you have questions for Brett, send them in. Of course, scaling in a corporate-owned model requires to have a really big, talented team to accomplish that. You're entering a lot of new markets, very excited to say, you're about to crack into Columbus where I live, very exciting. But I'm sure there's a lot of work that goes into it, having a talent pipeline ready to come in and fill that market out. Tell me about Kava's culture and building this pipeline that can sustain the growth you guys think is possible. Yeah, it's a lesson I learned in the Zoys acquisition. I mean, we had a great energetic culture. As we were a growth brand, we were a hot concept, and we were 65, 70 restaurants roughly when we bought Zoys. And then we bought this company three times our size that was struggling and tried to mesh those two cultures, and it was like a gut punch to our culture. You had a lot of Zoys folks leave, and then you had folks at Kava be like, well, why do we buy this business that's not doing well, and I don't want to work in a big company anymore? What are we doing here? So they left. And we had to rebuild our culture. And we came out, and that's when we re-established our mission, our values, our competencies as this new collective. And now, fast forward, and we've tripled in size, and that's a very different business. And I think the hardest thing for me, and I think the hardest thing for any leader, any manager, is when you have a business that's relentlessly growing, is understanding when people may be, or the business may be passing people by, or people hit a wall. And they may not be realizing it themselves, and they may be better off at a smaller company or better equipped for that. And how do you confront that, and how do you not damage your culture? People that have been culture carriers, or people that have been put a lot of effort into the business. So it is important in the way that those people exit respectfully, but it is important in the way you continuously internal develop, whether that's at corporate, whether that's in the restaurants. And make sure at the end of the day, the restaurant team members feel like you have their back, because it is so easy for that to get lost the bigger we get and the more degrees of separation we get. And it's also about how you invest. You think about, do I want tighter spans of control, so my operators can be in the restaurants more frequently. I'm going to spend my money, or I'm going to spend my money over here in a different area. So, again, I think having the organizing principles and finding ways to reinforce those principles on how you want to show up every day, and then making sure you have the right leaders at every level who are espousing those values, and not being a gatekeeper, and not being heavy handed. And that's relentless effort. Yeah. All right, question here from the audience. How much do you hate the term "slot bowl?" It is a pejorative, right? I know our food's not slop, so I try and have thick skin against it. And look, it's our job to communicate that, right? We're a culinary brand. We were born out of a full-service restaurant. Our products are sold in some of the best grocery stores across the country because they're made with fine ingredients. You can make 17.4 billion combinations, and we think we have layers of flavor in that bowl. It's not slop. So, you know, everybody wants a funny clickbait headline on social media today. We just got to continue to keep our heads down and prove that to be the opposite. Journalists, I tell you. I know. I know what they're doing. I'm in your corner, Brett. I hate that term. Alicia can validate from you wherever you are. We were able to against it on the podcast. Okay, last question I have for you. By the way, I think Brett has a few minutes after. If you have any questions for him, I'm sure you'd be happy to answer. A lot of the attendees here are in the same position you were in 15 years ago. And they have these dreams of maybe not Kava-type success, but, you know, maybe something similar. What is your advice to those in this room who are scaling their businesses? I think this is the beauty about the restaurant industry. There's so many paths to success. And I often say, like, just ask yourself the question, what do you want to be when you grow up? And there's no wrong answer. Do you want to be a creator and then sell it to somebody else to scale? Do you want to create a family legacy and keep it private forever? Do you want to create an idea and franchise and let other people scale it? Do you want to do what we did and grow it and take it public? I think that's the most important thing because when you have clarity on that, it will really help inform who you potentially take money from, what that capital looks like, how your cap structure is, and what's right to fulfill those aspirations. So I think that's really the main question to answer to set yourself up for success in the future. That's good advice. Give Brett a big round of applause. Thank you. That was my interview with Kava CEO Brett Schulman. So what should you learn from this interview? Here are my six takeaways. My first takeaway is that if you have a good product, brand, and team, money will find you. That's something that Brett said about the early days of Kava, is that in those early days they had a lot of investors basically tripping over themselves to invest in Kava. This seems like a really nice problem to have, but as Brett said, they had spent a lot of time coming up with a great product, building a great team, and developing a great brand. These things did not, they didn't just snap their fingers and have all these things kind of manifest. They had worked on this for a while, and once Kava gained that momentum, investors took notice. So that's Brett's most important advice for if you want to raise funds for your own growth. Start with your brand, your product, and your team, and once you get those into the right place, you should find that the money is coming after you. My second takeaway is that you should be patient to find an investor who is aligned with your interests. So going back to this idea that investors might try to run and throw money at you and want to invest in your business once you've gained some momentum, well, you then have to decide which of these investors am I going to choose. Look, I get it, not everybody's going to be facing this situation, but it could be you. You could have multiple options for growth, and you are going to have to discern what is the right one for you. As Brett said, you have to find the investor that is most aligned with your own goals. You're going to have some investors that want a majority stake. Maybe you don't want to give up a majority of your business. That was one decision that Brett and his co-founders had to make early in the stages of CAVA. Maybe that your investor wants to grow aggressively and you don't want to do that. Well, that's a red flag. Think about what the potential investors want out of your business, how they want to accomplish it, how they want to work with you. Make sure that there is an alignment there. As Brett said in the interview, he said he's seeing deals where the investor came in, it wasn't aligned, and it went sideways pretty fast. You don't want that to be your business. Make your decision for your investor very, very carefully. My third takeaway is that you should set your expectations early for the kind of business that you hope to build. Again, you're going to have this pivotal moment potentially where you're raising money, an investor comes in and wants to give you money, and they're going to want your business to be a certain thing in a certain timeframe. What if that, again, doesn't align with your vision for the company? Or worse yet, what if you don't know what you want for your company? What if that vision doesn't exist? That's a real problem. As Brett said, he and his co-founders at CAVA, they set some expectations pretty early for what they wanted out of this business. Early on, they decided it was going to be corporate owned. They understood that that was going to be capital intensive, but they were really committed to this quality level. They didn't feel like they could pull off in a franchise business. They also knew that the cash on cash returns in the corporate owned structure were pretty lucrative and so that that was the direction they wanted to go. If you set that expectation early for what you want to get out of your business and then you stick to those expectations, you're going to have a good compass for making certain decisions, not only what investors to go with, but maybe what vendors to go with. Maybe what franchisees or partners, operating partners you want to go with. Set those expectations early because once you know what the businesses you hope to build, that's going to serve as your north star going forward. My fourth takeaway is that you should consider how you achieve escape velocity within your market. This term's a little new to me, but Brett brought this up in our conversation and I looked into it and I love this concept of escape velocity. If you don't know, basically, escape velocity means you want to get to a point where you have enough growth that you are kind of propelled beyond your initial market restraints, constraints. Early on, for example, if you have an emerging pizza concept, if you have an emerging burger concept, some of the constraints facing you are just going to be competition. You're going to have trouble finding real estate, finding new customers, having this opportunity to differentiate yourself in the marketplace. There are all these constraints against your growth. Brett explained that when Kava was in its early days, they understood that they had the opportunity to really set the pace for Mediterranean Fest casual and kind of own the market early. He talked about that idea that they got some escape velocity with their investments and with that early momentum they had to push them out ahead of the field and kind of beat those constraints. Now I'm sure Kava can walk into markets and maybe not have the pick of the litter when it comes to real estate, but they have a significant seat at the table because they have established that position for themselves. Brett also said back then, scale meant a lot. Scale was pretty significant for a growing business, and so they wanted to achieve that quickly to, again, have that escape velocity. I think the point here is to understand what escape velocity could mean to your own business. It might not mean growth. It might not mean racing out ahead to a certain number of locations to beat all of your competition. There might be something else that you are trying to achieve, that you are trying to get out from those constraints and be free of that gravitational pull that those constraints represent, and you need something to propel you there. Think about that. What can propel you there? How you can achieve that and what it could ultimately do for your business. My fifth takeaway is that restaurant leadership is a matter of solving the next problem in front of you. I really loved this, as Brett explained. He was talking about this in terms of the Zoys acquisition. That Zoys acquisition, by the way, was another example of them getting that escape velocity because when they acquired Zoys, a much bigger business, they immediately achieved scale and just kind of pushed them out in front of everybody else. The next thing that happened, as Brett said, was, well, he was suddenly the CEO of a much bigger company, and he felt kind of in over his head with so many of the decisions that had to be made and the scale of this thing. He said, all he knew to do was make the next right decision, to solve the next problem in front of him. He has always stuck to that, as he said, and that's a great leadership lesson because sometimes we find ourselves in these positions where, as he said, running restaurants can be hard and demoralizing and just feel impossible. When you are in those positions and you feel down, just make the next right decision. The problem that's right in front of you, solve that problem, then move on to the next one. If you do that, you should find your way out of whatever trouble you're in. My sixth and final takeaway is that what you say no to is usually more important than what you say yes to. When Brett and I were talking about innovation and this sort of pressure to develop new items, new campaigns to get customers' attention, Brett made the point that Kava is no longer that little nimble speedboat. It is now this massive aircraft carrier, and doing anything requires so much time and attention to make that kind of change. As such, they cannot get distracted by bells and whistles. They cannot chase potentially fruitless paths because they are such a massive company now in a public one at that. Kava has to say no to a lot of things. As Brett said, those are going to be more important than the things that you say yes to because you might say no to a lot of things that you want to say yes to, but you've got to filter it through your values, filter it through whether or not this is right for your brand. At the end of the day, if that, when you filter through those things and it just comes out not feeling right, you have to say no because you cannot distract your business. Those are all my takeaways for today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe to Takeaway wherever you listen to podcasts and leave your feedback. You can also email me at [email protected]. Thanks again and talk to you next week. 55% of Gen Z and millennials say social media reviews are the top reason they try a restaurant, and 73% have visited a restaurant in the last three months because of one. Do you have timely reviews working for you? Quick turn influencer review campaigns from Bell Communication can fill tables fast. Visit bellcommunication.com/influence to learn more.