Have you had a slice of humble pie lately? To help celebrate Thanksgiving, we think it is important to give thanks and show gratitude. By the way, gratitude is the first step to humility.
Austin Evans is the Co-Founder of Lean Kitchen Company having taking it from just a couple of locations to now having nearly 40 in just three years! Austin is also a franchisee and an independent investor in small businesses. He shares some remarkable wisdom for accomplishing as much as he has and still being a young professional.
You can connect with Austin by:
- Follow Austin on Instagram: @austin_evans7
- Checking out his company at: www.LeanKitchenCo.com
If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/contact or by calling Big Sky Franchise Team at: 855-824-4759.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
You’ve worked hard to build your business and now it’s time to grow. Welcome to the Multiply your Success podcast. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, serial entrepreneur and the CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. I would really like to sincerely thank you for being here today. We are coming up on Thanksgiving and this is my favorite holiday of the entire year. It has been ever since I was a little kid. I just love giving thanks and being grateful and if you haven’t stopped to give thanks for a while, please, please, please, please make sure that you do. Stop what you’re doing. Turn the phone off, your computers, even paused the podcast here. I’m willing to have you do that for a few seconds, 30 seconds, a couple minutes to give thanks.
Be thankful. Be grateful to be alive right now in the greatest time period in all of human history, be grateful. It’s an amazing opportunity and this whole idea of giving thanks spills into our episode today, where we talk about this idea of an ego and do you have one? I know it’s a little rhetorical. A lot of my goofy questions are here, but we all do, but when’s the last time you put it in check, you set it at the door? A lot of times when you’re the boss, the leader, the CEO, the captain, the person in charge, it’s easy to leave it unchecked. So maybe this Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to have a slice of humble pie and give thanks to those loved ones, those staff members, those people in your life, the things that you have, the experiences that you’ve had and give thanks and be grateful for those.
Today’s guest, Austin Evans, talks a whole lot about having humility, checking your ego and how those things have helped him go from a franchisee to starting a new business, franchising it, growing to roughly 40 units and still expanding on a national basis at a very rapid pace, to now being a serial entrepreneur and a business investor. He’s been doing all of this at a very young age, a very accomplished young professional. So I am very pleased and grateful and thankful to have Austin Evans on our interview today. So without further ado, here is my interview with Austin Evans.
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
My name is Austin Evans. I’m one of the co-founders of Lean Kitchen Company amongst other businesses. I just love business, so an entrepreneur for a few years now. So rewind five years ago, I franchised a supplement store, think GNC style, like a supplement nutrition store, sports nutrition and weight loss, and opened it up in my hometown here in St. Joseph, Missouri, just north of Kansas City. We’ve had competition here before. The other supplement stores didn’t really do so well. The idea of what we wanted to do is really, truly help the customer, create a lifetime customer, which is what my motto is is all my businesses.
Whereas, what you typically have, and I don’t say this to non-competition, it’s just the truth. You have a GNC that everybody knows who they are, but they don’t really take care of the customer or there’s the other end of the spectrum, which is complete nutrition, which grew astronomically fast in the franchise world. But their goal was to get a $500 ticket and go in the back and high five and never see the customer again, because you’re not going to get $500 worth of results in a month because that’s a lot of money. So we had a whole different concept which was, really take care of the customer, educate them on how to eat correctly on what they really need, not just trying to sell them fat burners and high margin products and ultimately, had really good success from that early and was wondering how can I get customers to be even more successful?
Well, the biggest thing they struggle with is their diet and what’s the biggest struggle with their diet? We educate them on how to eat, but we can’t get them to take the time to make the meals. So I sat down with a guy named JR Roberson, who’s now my business partner and we sat down, he was doing meal prep on the side to a full-time gig he had. I was getting ready to get into it. He was very good at details, at processes, at get a kitchen going. I was very good at scaling and bigger picture and bringing customers and marketing. So we partnered up, made a great partnership. We dove in head first in the back of our store where we had a bunch of dead space, built out a kitchen, which I spent double, triple what I can build off the kitchen for now. I knew nothing about the food business and the model changed multiple times.
It was the craziest thing. We started with order by Friday at midnight and we’re going to deliver your meals to on Sunday morning. My idea was we were going to scale by having all kinds of pickup locations throughout the Midwest and blah, blah, blah. It was a bunk idea. So changed paths multiple times, eventually started just selling meals out of the cooler in the storefront, literally we would set up 10 meals. Well, they’d sell. So then we got a little bigger cooler, set up 20 meals and they’d sell. So it got to the point where we put a big cooler in and it went really well. So ultimately, it started snowballing and honestly, way, way, way too early, I thought, “I’m going to franchise this.” I say way too early, because we didn’t have any systems. It was not, at the time, a scalable deal, but I don’t know. I just saw a bigger picture for it. I thought, “There’s nobody doing this big picture all over the place and there’s potential.” So-
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
Well, and I’ll interrupt there for just one second on that point, Austin, because I think, to your point, you kind of knew you were early in the process to consider franchising because I remember speaking to you back then. However, you also recognized that there was no franchise that was operating in your space. There were maybe some venture-backed groups or company-owned locations, but nothing that was a franchise opportunity. So you had that opportunity to really be that first to market from a franchise standpoint, so that’s the risk, that’s that balance that you’re always trying to find where, “We’re not quite ready, but if we don’t someone else will.” Right?
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
So-
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
[crosstalk 00:07:07] too early, but risk-reward, the payoff, that’s what made it worth it, was the first mover advantage opportunity. No, for sure. Good input. So August 2017, I sat down one night. I got a hold of Tom DuFore and man, we talked and I was like, “Okay, well, we’re going to franchise this thing.” So anyways, I’m going to give you a fast-forwarded version to here recent. We ended up, and then I’ll leave area for you to ask questions, so there’s pockets. I opened multiple locations. I opened up in Maryville. I opened up in Lawrence, which was a big failure that there’s great lessons learned there I can tell you about, a million lessons.
I opened up in Topeka. So now I own three corporate stores myself and then JR and I began franchising like crazy. In 2019, we began franchising, ’18, ’19, sold over 30 locations really fast and then got to a point in late 2019, early 2020 where we really hit the brakes like, “Oh crap, what have we done? Do we have something here?” I don’t know, it was just a little bit nervousness. There’s a huge risk level of responsibility you have for employees when you own a business. That’s a big level of responsibility that most people will never understand. There’s an even bigger level of responsibility and weight on your shoulders when people are franchising your concept, when they’re putting their retirement on the line for your brand.
So I really reined things in, paused new franchising, wanted to make things more comprehensive, wanted to make sure these franchisees that were signing on changing their life, making massive life decisions, that they were going to be successful. Again, I’m giving you the quick version here, Cliff Note version, ended up through Tom, making a connection to Bruce Reed who owns a chain called Bruster’s and networking, networking, yada, yada. Anyways, we ended up hiring a CEO to help guide our brand and he’s been guiding our brand now for a year. We’ve gotten to where we were doing our 2021 planning here recently.
I feel really, really good about where the brand’s going, turning back on new franchise sales as of a couple of months ago. We’re doing things for 2021 that most franchise brands never do and that it’s a very comprehensive approach, sending out quarter one and quarter two, quarter three, quarter four, their whole marketing packet, everything they need with events they’re going to run, all the information for our storefront posters, doing things that very mature franchise companies do that we were only able to learn from working with a CEO. So that’s the Cliff Note version. I could go on about in pockets forever. So go ahead, Tom.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
Well, no, I appreciate that and thank you. For the audience here, would you just mind giving an overview? You kind of gave the idea of how you came into the business, but just talk about Lean Kitchen Company and what it is you actually do just from a customer perspective, just to fill the audience in on that.
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
Yeah, for sure. So Lean Kitchen, so what we are is we’re fresh prepared meals. So it comes in a little green container. I wish I had one sitting here. It comes in a little green container and it tastes very, very good, tastes home cooked, meals that are macro friendly. They have all your nutrition on them and you can come in, you can buy one, you can heat it up in the microwave and you go. You can buy 20 and have all your meals for the entire week for your family, so a really cool concept.
I think that this sounds cheesy, but I think we have a chance to really impact the health of America if we get enough of these things out there, so that’s really cool. It creates very profitable and meaningful outcomes for our franchisees. What better feeling than when your people come in and that your customers come in and they’re down 100 pounds, they’re down 80 pounds, they’re off diabetes medication? It’s a very meaningful outcome for a franchisee, which is one of the biggest things that’s been a selling point for us was the franchising.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
Interesting. Well, and one of the things you mentioned early on, Austin, I’d really like to take a second to talk about is you had mentioned initially getting into the franchising business and you kind of skipped over it pretty quickly, but your first venture into it was as a franchisee. [crosstalk 00:11:29] Did I understand that correct? So you started as a franchisee, saw this opportunity, created the new business out of it and then looked to take that to franchising now. Is that right?
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
Yeah. I have what I think is an interesting perspective that a lot of franchise owners probably don’t have is that I have been a franchisee and I learned a lot of what to do and a lot of what not to do. I’m a person that’s big on, you can learn a hell of a lot more from mistakes and what not to do than you can from what to do. So I’ve taken a lot of stuff I’ve learned over the years from that.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
Great. No, I appreciate that. I think that’s really, really interesting. As you were talking about bringing on the CEO into your company and putting the brakes on and you could have kept selling. You could have kept growing, but you chose to put a pause on it. So I think that takes a lot of self discipline. I think that takes a lot of humility and recognition, internal recognition and kind of putting your own pride and ego off to the side that I think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with. So would you mind talking through that process that you went through for that?
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
Yeah, absolutely. So I agree completely. It takes setting aside your ego. So I guess the whole reason we stopped selling was because we didn’t have our thumb on the pulse of the company well. That’s the thing that the CEO has taught me more than anything and I’ve applied it to all my businesses because I have other businesses from what I mentioned. I was looking at P&Ls before, but I wasn’t analyzing them super properly how you should. I wasn’t running my business by a bank account, so I’m happy to say that, but I wasn’t really analyzing the P&L the way it should be analyzed.
I thought I knew our numbers, but you think you know about your company and then somebody comes in and says, “Well, what’s your food cost down to the percentage? What’s your packaging cost? What’s this?” You start stumbling and realizing, “Well, I know it within a few percent.” Then you might get into things and realize, “Well, within 8%,” 8% is a massive number. So it was a big wake up call to have him come in and say, “Hey, we have to pause this. Here’s why. We need to make sure the concept is good.” Like I said, there’s a level of people have all their faith in you and you don’t want to let people down. So that was the reason why we stopped.
Now, as far as was it difficult, as far as just different things that might be worth sharing, I think somebody could get value out of this, is I think entrepreneurs make a big mistake of having their ego get in the way. They don’t want to step aside and think that they don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t want to ask questions. I’ve talked to multiple companies, whether it’s the CEO or other ones that they’ve gone to manage brands, to offer to manage brands. They’ve been in very good partnerships where they’re managing brands and the trajectory is up in a very good path for these companies and then the company goes and cans them. It’s like, “Well, why’d you get rid of them?” “Well, it was an ego thing.” So I have this thing I always say ever since I heard, so have you ever heard of Jesse Itzler, Tom?
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
Yes, oh very much so. I follow him.
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
Good. So I love Jesse Itzler and anybody who’s listening to this, if you don’t follow Jesse Itzler, oh my gosh. You’re missing out. Go listen to his podcast with Tom Bilyeu. It’s fascinating. He’s a fascinating, very successful, humble, awesome guy and I got the pleasure of hearing him speak once. He said, “I didn’t have time for experience when I was growing a business,” and it resonated, it echoes inside my head all the time. I don’t have time for experience. I want to go big. I want to go fast and the last thing I’m going to do is drag my feet out because I have an ego and let Lean Kitchen either never make it to what it can be, let somebody pass us up.
I’d rather bring somebody in, pay them, give them a piece of equity if I have to, if things are going well and grow the company exponentially to what I think it can be. So what did I do? JR and I, and my partner, JR, I’ll say right here, this is a podcast first person, so I say, I a lot. My partner, JR, pulls his weight and is worth every percent of equity the guy owns. He’s a great, great partner. So I just wanted to throw that out there. But anyways, I didn’t have time for experience and so what did I do? We brought in a CEO that has over 35 years of experience in franchising, franchising food brands, two different ones. One from 400 to 4,000 plus locations and one to 205 locations in three countries. He’s been doing franchising longer than I’ve been alive. That’s massive value and that’s worth paying for. That’s worth giving up some equity and that’s, I don’t know. So whatever you can get out of that, hopefully, you get something out of it.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
No, I think that’s great. Look, it’s a consistent pattern I see in just even in our time working together. When you wanted to get into a business you weren’t sure of you decided to buy a franchise. You were willing to pay for the experience of learning about that. When you wanted to franchise your company, you hired an expert. You brought us on board to help work with you. When your company started taking off and kind of outgrew faster than you were able to keep up with it, you said, “Boy, we need to bring some support in here,” and you did it. So I think that’s a great pattern and it’s a great indicator for your franchisees in the system. I think it’s phenomenal. Well, and Austin, to get into the little formula of the show here, we always like to ask every guest these questions about misses, makes and multipliers. You’ve actually touched on several of them here, but would you mind sharing maybe a miss or two that happened along the way and what you learned from it?
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
Yeah. So I’ll give you a couple of big misses because like I said, I think you can learn so much more from what people don’t do well, what they failed at. If we could sit down Jeff Bezos, we’re going to learn a whole lot more from all his failures than we are from any success. So I think the miss is, I love that format to your show, and I think the miss is the most valuable thing. So I’ll give you two. One, I posted today on my Instagram, so you can find it on there also. But anyways, I took cashflow 101 is what I called it, big business lesson. When I was a couple of years in the business, I had 75 grand in my account. Man, that’s more money than I ever had.
So I have $75,000. I’m like, “Gotdang, I’m doing well. This is great.” I was proud. I wrote on my post, I felt big balling. I got 75K. So I go and I paid off a $55,000 debt that I had on the business. Fifty-five grand, paid off, right? Make a smart move. Pay off your debt. I think that’s smart. I’ll have 20K left. I didn’t take into consideration cashflow. So I paid off 75K, I paid off 55,000. I got 20,000 left. Payroll comes out the next week and I’m living frugal still. I’m not paying myself big, so this is my employees I’m talking about. Payroll comes out. I got to do weekly reordering, eight to $10,000.
Sales tax hits a couple of weeks later, payroll taxes for the month and before you know it in about three weeks time, I went from $75,000 to 600 bucks in my account. Scary. So cashflow, you got to know what it costs to run your business and this doesn’t just apply to your business. This applies to your household. People think that they can afford things all the time, “I can afford it.” Just because you can pay for it with a credit card or even if you could pay cash, doesn’t always mean you can afford it. So you got to realize what the decisions you’re making, even if you think you’re making the right decision, paying off debt.
These decisions, every decision, you have to think it through all the way. You have to pay attention to your cash flow because I’ll tell you what, to go from 75,000 and big balling, in my opinion at the time, to 600 bucks in an account is not a good feeling. So anyways, a massive cashflow lesson there, a big miss. Another one I’ll share, Lawrence. So I go into Lawrence, Kansas. I have a successful location in St. Joe. I had a successful location of Maryville. I go down to Lawrence, Kansas and I open up a drive-through Lean Kitchen, healthy food in a drive-through, right? It’s genius. You’re going to go through, you’re going to get your healthy food. It’s going to be great.
Where can you get healthy food in drive-through? I thought it was going to kill it. I got 100 lessons from this one, but I’m going to focus on a core couple or a few of the core reasons. It failed. It failed miserably. I lost 60K in 10 months, 70K in 10 months. So number one, you don’t have any time to build a relationship with a customer in a drive-through. So our stores were very relationship-oriented focused. We, “Hey Tom, I’m Austin here, blah, blah, blah. Well, thanks for coming into Lean Kitchen. Let’s talk through your current diet.” So there’s a lot that goes into it. You’re building a relationship. You’re building rapport, trust with a customer. There’s no time for that in drive-throughs.
So all of a sudden it’s real hard to get a lifetime customer. Number two, and I learned this in very hindsight in working with my current CEO that we brought on, but number two, brands need to be very, very established before they go into drive-through business, very established. An example here is this, Chipotle is still not really in the drive-through business. They’ve recently started opening some Chipotles, but when Chipotle was brand new, I think it was 1998 or 2000 was it? I don’t know if you know, Tom. Anyways, their first location was about 20, 25 years ago. As Chipotle started expanding across the country and they got their influx of cash from McDonald’s and that went crazy, I met a guy out in South Carolina here recently at one of our franchisees openings and he worked for corporate Chipotle back in early 2000s.
You know what his job was? Stand by the door and teach people the concept because nobody had been in a restaurant where it was through a line, a cafe style, where you’re through a line you’re picking out, “I want beans, rice, this, that,” nobody had done that. So this guy’s job was to stand by the door, be a greeter and say, “Hey, welcome to Chipotle. Have you been here before? Here’s how it works.” Now, 20, 25 years later, they still aren’t really in the drive-through business. They could now, I think, because now Chipotle is so established, so I think they might have a couple. They have pickup lanes for their order. But my point is, is you have to be extremely, extremely established, especially if you’re anything other than, “Give me a burger in a foil wrapper in a bag.”
If you’re anything other than that, you have to be extremely established. Otherwise, you don’t have time to educate your customers. So what happened to me was I went from customers coming in and so one of the most remarkable things about our franchise and I’m very proud of it. I love pitching this whenever I talk to prospects is we have an extremely outrageous average ticket. People are coming into our stores spending on average $49. That’s an average ticket. For example, just for a reference of what’s normal and Tom, you know this, I have an ice cream business. Lean Kitchen, healthy, ice cream. I have this local ice cream business here in St. Joe and our average ticket is 8 to $10 and that’s a pretty typical average ticket for most businesses.
We have $49 in store average ticket. We have an $86 delivery average ticket. Outrageous. Whenever I opened Lawrence, nobody knew the concept. They weren’t coming in, getting a chance to explain how this works, getting to teach you that most people buy a 10 meal package, 10 meals, 80 bucks for your week. You have all your lunches and dinners for the week. They were simply coming through the drive-through looking at the menu going, “How does this work? Can I get the chicken bacon ranch wrap with no tomatoes?” “No they’re pre-made.” They’d get pissed and then they finally said, “Just give me this meal and a Bang Energy drink.” So now I’m getting $9 average tickets. Well, $9 average tickets, I need a whole hell of a lot more customers than the $49 average tickets. So anyways, those are some massive things I learned from that big miss in Lawrence. So those are two big misses with some lessons.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
Phenomenal, phenomenal lessons and thank you for sharing those. I agree with you that the successes and wins along the way and makes are great, but I agree that you learn more from those misses and along the way. So let’s go ahead and turn that around now and let’s talk about a make or two that you had as you’ve been running many businesses.
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
So the make I’ll give you is this. I’ll give you a make on my ice cream business. I own a business called Kris and Kate’s. It’s kind of one of, in my opinion, and most St. Joe residents’ opinion, we’re in a town of 80,000. It’s one of those iconic businesses in St. Joe. It’s been here for 23 years. It’s a big, pink ice cream cone building on the Belt Highway, our main strip through here. So this business has been here for 23 years and went for sale, well, now four years ago. I tried to buy it four years ago. They wanted way too much money for this business, but I loved it and I thought this was a cool opportunity to own an iconic St. Joe business. I’m born and raised here. I want it.
So I sat down and had a meeting, sat down and had a meeting, the owner says, “Hey, it’s making 60 grand a year.” I said, “Great. Give me the tax returns and let’s keep talking.” We get to the next meeting, he says, “It’s actually making 30 a year.” I said, “That’s fine. Give me the tax returns and let’s look at it.” Didn’t have any tax returns. I go to the third meeting. He says, “It’s making 10,” and he has some documents that kind of show it, but kind of don’t. I said, “Man, give me the number. I need to know what this thing is.” So we have a fourth meeting and it ends up being, and I’m not kidding you, the conversation ended up being this. “It’s not making anything on paper, but it’s a cash-intensive business, if you know what I mean,” literally across the [inaudible 00:25:58] weekend.
I’m like, “I’m out.” So three years passed and now I’ve become a lot more mature in business by this point. This is early this year, actually, so very beginning of 2020, end of 2019. I’ve become a lot more mature in business and I was able to recognize the opportunity. I said, “This thing is distressed. They don’t care about it. They have one star Google reviews for the last year or two starting, probably kind of piling up one, two, three star reviews and it’s iconic. It shouldn’t have that.” I knew from when I was looking at it previously, the little bit of financials I did see his food cost was high. So I was able to go in and shave 6% there and it was not marketed at all. They weren’t doing any marketing for it. They were just solely relying on the fact that it’s the big, pink ice cream cone on the Belt Highway.
Now, it was iconic. That was another thing. So it was distressed. The food cost was high. I knew I could fix things like that. Marketing hadn’t been implemented and it was an iconic business. I knew what they were asking previously. I didn’t care to sit down and have all the meetings. It was three years ago. I just shot called the broker and I said, “Hey, listen, give you X,” and it was about 60% of the asking price. I said, “I’ll give you X. We’ll close in 30 days. I’ll buy it cash. I’m ready to go. No BS, no back and forth.” I just, “Do you want to do it? Take it or not?” Sold. So I took this thing and we opened in April of this year. We’re sampling being open for our first full year. They’ve always been March to October, so we’re going to be all through the winter.
So their average sales, Tom, for the last 23 years have been 197 to $215,000, trending more towards that 197 this last several years. We are trending right now for 515,000 in sales for this year, so huge make, spotted a distressed business as an opportunity. A lot of times when you see those distressed things, people want to run. I bought it and everybody in their brother in town goes, “I was going to buy it. I was going to … ” Everybody was. Wasn’t everybody going to buy it. I’m not kidding you. I can’t tell you how many people told me that, but they got scared away by all these negative factors; whereas, I saw it as I loved it. I wanted it because of those things. So that’s my make.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
I love it. What a great story and now you’ve got the big pink ice cream cone in the middle of the town.
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
Yep. When people want a cheat meal, they go to Kris and Kate’s and when people want eat healthy, they come to Lean Kitchen.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
I love it. That’s fantastic and let’s talk about the idea of multipliers here. Is there a multiplier you could talk about that you’ve used in your business career?
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
Yeah. So I’ll give you two multipliers. Number one, is just going for a walk. I’ll pace and walk. I’ll walk outside. I’ll walk late at night, just getting out and going for a walk, either listening to a podcast or a YouTube video that’s self-development or just even just checking out and thinking. I go for walks and the walks help me a ton. I’m going to give you three, actually. My second multiplier is podcasts and self-development. I’m never shy to spend money on coaches, on business conferences, on anything self-development. I think that it’s people don’t invest in their self. They like to think they do, but they really don’t. When it comes down to it and there’s a $1,200 business conference where Jesse Itzler’s going to be there. They think, “That would be so cool. Ah, $1,200? I’m not going to spend $1,200 on that.” Trust me, it’s worth every penny. You agree?
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
I do. Yeah, no. I did the same thing to go see Jesse Itzler. So we may have been at the same conference, who knows? [crosstalk 00:29:44] What’s that?
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
Arete Syndicate.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
No, it was a different one, a different one.
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
If you get a chance to go to Arete Syndicate event, Andy Frisella and Ed Mylett, worth every penny.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
Ah, okay. All right. I went to one, the one he spoke at was I think it was in Miami. I flew down. [crosstalk 00:30:02] It was a 10X Conference. I had been to one the year before, out in Vegas.
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
So, and then the third thing, which is probably the biggest of all. It’s the whole thing we talked about in the beginning. Man, you cannot be ego-driven. You got to set your ego aside, ask questions, seek guidance, people know way more than you and I know. You have to seek guidance. So find an expert, find somebody who’s been there before, because if you can find someone who’s been where you want to be or been very successful at something, and I’m not acting like I’m anything, but if you’re thinking about making your restaurant and drive-through business, learn second hand from my failure and apply that to whether or not you should be doing it yet, because failure is a whole lot cheaper second hand and quicker.
So, and if you can get guidance on what to do from somebody who’s done it successfully, then take that guidance. But you got to set your ego aside and be willing to learn and be willing to reach out to somebody and get help. That’s everything, man. Everything. I wouldn’t be half as far as I’ve gotten today and not I’m not even far. I’m not far at all, but I wouldn’t be half as far as I’ve gotten today if it wasn’t for other people and seeking help, so …
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
Great advice. Great suggestions. The final question we like to ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
Man, that’s an awesome question because so I’m a super deep thinker and I don’t know. You may think this guy’s weird. People listening might think this guy’s weird, but I’ll tell you anyways because I love him. There’s a guy named Alan Watts. Listen to his YouTube videos. Have you ever heard of Alan Watts?
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
I’m not familiar with him, no.
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
A-L-A-N W-A-T-T-S, Alan Watts. He’s a early 19OOs weird dude. He’s got a lot of weird religious beliefs and stuff, nonetheless though, he makes you think. I laugh [inaudible 00:32:06] because I’ve been on this ridiculously deep quest to, “What is success for me?” And not only that, but hand in hand with that, what is happiness? I’m trying to figure it out exactly man, because there’s a lot of things that can motivate me and I think of a success. There’s a lot of things that make me happy. Something that drives me nuts is people try to be on their moral high horse and say, “I don’t care about money. It’s not, money doesn’t matter to me.” Well, if you notice the people who said, “Money doesn’t matter to me,” and repeat that and repeat that and repeat that, and “I don’t care about money,” usually they’re the people who never have any money.
I’m a big believer in the law of attraction and what you put in the universe. So if you sit here all your life on your moral high horse saying, “Money, doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care about money. I don’t care about it,” then don’t be surprised if you never get it. It’s not that money physically matters to me, but the freedom money gives me matters a lot. The ability to, if there’s a health issue in it and money can solve the problem, money matters a lot. So there’s a level of money, freedom. I want to have a work-life balance, but what is work-life balance, man, because I enjoy the hell out of work? So people are like, “You work too much.” “What if I enjoy it?” I want to be ridiculously present wherever I’m at. So when I’m at home with my family, I’m at home with my family.
When I’m here at this podcast, I’m here at this podcast. I can’t stand when people go on podcasts as guests and they’re over here doing this on their phone whenever the other person is talking and then they’re back on the podcast when it’s their … I can’t stand that. So I’m present, present here. I’m present when I’m in a meeting. I’m present when I sit down with my parents. Whatever I do, I’m ultimately, very present. When I go on my walks, I am present in the fact that I’m with myself and I’m in tune with doing what … so super long-winded here, man.
But I don’t know, man, I guess, and maxing out my potential of what I can be in life. I don’t know. So I don’t really know what I would define it as. I’ll tell you I’m on a just ridiculously constant search for it and my opinion on it changes time to time. I have a stronger faith, but I’m not just going to believe everything I’m supposed to believe because you’re supposed to. I want to figure it out for myself, so I don’t know, man. I think that happiness and success are, you can’t really define it in one thing. It’s so many areas of life and finding the way to commingle all of those into the proper balance and this and that and whatever else. So back to the freedom thing.
There’s a level of freedom you want to achieve, but at the same time, I don’t know where you’re at exactly, but I’m going to assume here, and not that I’ve made it to where I want to be. But there’s already for us a level of freedom. I don’t have to come in to work today. So it’s all about the freedom has been reached, so then it’s like, back to what makes you happy? I can work from home. I can pretty much make my own schedule. I [crosstalk 00:35:11] I can, but now I want to go do more. I get endorphins and a rush out of the newness of a business. So it’s a weird journey, man. I’ll say one more thing that I think this might resonate with you since you think of this deeply. Alan Watts, and like I said, super weirdo dude but I think you’d like his videos. I’ll send you a-
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
I’m going to check him out. I did. I listen to a lot of podcasts and audio books and all that stuff.
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
His voice is soothing, so I love it on my walks. But he says in one of his videos, he says, “What if what you desire in life is desirelessness? If you can get to the point where it’s, what do you want in life? I want nothing. I have everything I want.” I don’t know where to go with this. I’m just putting it out there because it’s crazy deep to think about, what if you get to a point where you want nothing and you have what you want and you’re happy and you’re grateful and all you can think about is gratitude and you’re content. You’re happy.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
I’d like to make sure that you have the opportunity to share anything that maybe you didn’t get to have a chance to say, anything to share with the audience before we close out?
Austin Evans, Lean Kitchen Company:
I’m all right, man. I just hope somebody got something out of this. If you did, message me. My Instagram is Austin_Evans7. I only say that because if you got something out of this, Austin_Evans7, hit me a message. Tell me you enjoyed it because I like knowing if I had a little speck of impact on you.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team:
All right, Austin. Well, thank you so much for that fantastic interview. I really appreciate your time and just some amazing nuggets of information in there. So let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So the first key takeaway from Austin that I really like the way that he said this was, to get your ego out of the way. Get it out of the way. Put it off to the side and think about real solutions that you can put your pride to the side and take some large doses of humility along the way. I think that’s really important, which then, that spills into the second key takeaway here, which is to find someone else who has the experience.
If you don’t have the experience, he said, “I don’t have time for experience. I don’t have time for experience,” and if you don’t have it, find someone else who does. Austin did that when he bought a franchise to get into a business that he didn’t know about. He did that when he hired our company and he hired me to help support him in franchising his business. He did that when he hired a CEO and other experts he’s brought in along the way to learn from people who know more about a specific subject than what he does. The third key takeaway is to be willing to take a risk when you see an opportunity. Be willing to take that risk when you see an opportunity.
He talked about that with the ice cream business that he recently purchased and then also, when he franchised his business and seen an opportunity to have that first mover advantage. Now it’s time for today’s win-win. So today’s win-win is to be willing to invest in yourself also known as personal development. Develop yourself. It is the one asset that no one will ever be able to take away from you. It is something that will help you and improve every aspect of your life, personally, professionally and spiritually. You will be a better person and in turn, that will make all other things and people involved in your life better. It just will. So that’s today’s episode, folks. Thanks for tuning in. Please subscribe, share this with your friends, family, anyone you think could benefit and we’ll see you back here next week. By the way, Happy Thanksgiving.
