Transcript

The wooden identity and how to build your dream | Bobby Fry | TEDxUniversityofPittsburgh

so the only thing I see in me that I don't see in my peers who are trying to get where they want to go and who aren't getting there is that I'm not afraid to die on a treadmill right you might be taller than me you might be sexier than me you might be stronger than me you might be more talented than me you might have all those other things on me but if you and I get on a treadmill either you're getting off first or I'm going to die I will not be out worked right that's a Will Smith quote from uh the Tavis Smiley Show uh a couple of years ago and uh if nothing else Will Smith is very inspiring right and I was definitely born with work at think it started with my grandfathers came down to my parents and then to me and in high school I was incredibly overweight right and that was a real CH because my mind uh my body couldn't keep up with my mind well my mother cooked very wholesome food for me and she's a wonderful cook uh she wasn't cooking at the corner store by uh the uh bus stop and she certainly wasn't cooking in the school cafeteria um so that that ends part one and what would an inaugural tedex talk be without a confucious quote right so the uh uh it's as fatal as to go beyond as it is to fall short so by the time I got to college right I'd had all that work ethic and I went to college for two reasons pretty much in this order probably a few more after that but uh uh one for golf and then two for economics and I couldn't understand why I was outworking everyone on our Championship golf team and they were whooping my tail on the golf course right uh and it was really damaging it started to really uh bring down what my aspirations are really questioning like why am I not getting uh to the places that I want to be which leads us to part three and a quote from my mother boy I don't know how you do it but you always fall in crap and smell like roses right so on graduation day from college uh my roommates uh father gave me a job on Wall Street with my 2.6 GPA right and it was never an aspiration of mine to be in finance or to be in uh on Wall Street but I'd never been in New York City and I believed in Mr B and his family and he told me uh he said I think you're going to learn the things that you need to learn uh from Wall Street even if it's not something you want to do for the rest of your life so I loaded up my Jetta and tied it to the back of a U-Haul and pulled into Staten Island for my first time ever to be in New York which is a very interesting place um and he was exactly right so what I got to learn on Wall Street was I got to see the world through financial markets and I got to learn I got there in 2007 just the economy was collapsing right and I learned how to as Abraham Lincoln would say right uh if you're going to give me six hours to chop down a tree I'm going to spend four hours sharpening the axe so I started to learn to take that work ethic I had and work smarter I got my Axe really sharp and we're talking about checklists from uh the speaker that we just watched the video from uh that's why I brought my notebook up with me on stage because I take it everywhere and I started to have this really meticulous notebooking process and I started to work really smart get really good at planning so you had work ethic and then a sharp ax and a good system uh for planning so after 3 years I'd actually somehow for the kid that was picking up breakfast and lunch for the whole trading desk and the only one in my 20s uh who they dubbed Bobby two cents and you can kind of see I'm a bit of a sneaker head but um when I showed up on Wall Street so I had to go buy these pair of black shoes right and I go to I think it was Men's Warehouse or something like that and I got like you know whatever was on sale and first day on the trading desk Bobby welcome great shoes man did they just take the braces off those what are those I'm like oh man this is going to be a long adventure right so uh but working through that I had to get in at 5:00 a.m. and I had to write our morning note that went out to all 500 of our institutional customers and I kept refining that making it better uh because I was competitive and I was learning and it got ranked in the top three in Wall Street when I was 24 by Institutional Investor so all of a sudden I kind of got this like head of steam it's like man I don't know I don't I'm not going to stay here forever this is a system that's falling apart and it's not doing too much good for the world uh but I'm starting to understand I'm starting to be me now right I'm starting to come out I'm starting to feel strong um and so I left Wall Street knowing nothing more than a I'd become a food snob in New York and B uh that I wanted to build and create something uh with myself and with a team uh so you saw teams fall apart in New York and you saw week links and and like our previous speaker was talking about with a pit crew uh nobody was going to do the real work they all kind of uh at the top anyway kind of put a lot of more energy into pretending that they were good at some good at something than it would actually taken to be uh great at something so I went to a startup company in Corning New York after three years on Wall Street uh the last two months at least I did not get breakfast and lunch anymore uh but I also hadn't been making much money yet and I took my $600 and went to a startup company in Corning New York and lived in this guy's attic for 6 weeks it was also our office and then I ran out of money so in about six weeks I went from uh a relatively strong prospect on Wall Street to my grandmother's basement back in Greensburg and I sat there I'm like now what am I going to do but it wasn't like in the past where I had failed and whatnot I knew my axe was sharp I knew I was capable I knew my work ethic was on I knew my processes were in line I knew I'd built systems in my own way of teaching myself and I was trying to just figure out where else to go in the world because i' learned so much from New York I wanted to go explore somewhere else and a week later my dad got diagnosed with cancer so uh my best friend in the world Justin his father was sick at the same time and I moved in with him and we started planning uh bar Marco because Justin and Kevin had this dream of opening a restaurant and I said okay well I can I can help out with this and we brought Michael back back and forth from New York to design the first bar Marco and nine months later Justin's dad passed away during my father's funeral service so then we really had nothing to lose you know our fathers uh you know we got to spend a lot of time with them through that process and we really kind of took the opportunities now that the the world was showing us this is where we first started to realize okay it's not just about your natural work ethic and how driven you can be and then how sharp your acts can be but you're sharpening all those things not necessarily for an opportunity but to shape yourself so that you're ready when the world gives you opportunities right um it's all the boring stuff it's all the times when you think man I'm never going to become anything I'm never going to impact the world any good way uh however I Define the world maybe it's my Community maybe it's the world right uh maybe it's going into space who knows but at that point we uh we had planned for five months and had a tight plan for the first bar Marco right and Michael loads up all of his stuff in New York and he's getting on a plane and as he's on his way back here uh the deal fell through so then we're really distraught and what are we going to do well we need a drink before we go to uh pick up Michael from the airport and figure out who's gonna drive us to the airport now and we go sit down and beside us at the bar was a guy that worked with Kevin at First Niagara downtown at the bank Downtown that Kevin works at and he hears our story and he's like Kevin you know my father's got a uh a bar that's coming up for rent in the Strip District and I'm looking at I'm like all right buddy like in the Strip District at that time there's just these giant clubs there it had just gotten over its relationship with uh shootings right or it's it's uh connection with having shootings down there and I'm like well what what is it and he goes it's Embry just dropped my glass so Embry was the first real craft cocktail bar in Pittsburgh it was the hottest pot in Pittsburgh still and KN no one knew they weren't going to sign their lease right so we planned our ax is sharp and all of a sudden this thing uh falls apart or we're still sharp and it falls into our lap and the only problem left was how we were going to to the airport so and then what am I going to tell Michael when I get there he just when he left JFK to take off all of our plans went down right so we call our friend uh mizzle actually and he takes us to the airport I'm like all right what am I going to say to Michael and nobody else would come in with me Michael's taller than all of us he's stronger than all of us uh and I see him coming down the the escalators like waving at me and I just go oh no so he gets down and I said Michael you got to listen to me all that stuff we've been playing for the F last 5 months it's gone but we got to new place he just looks me we start getting an argument in the middle of the airport they lost his bags he had 10 bottles of wine he had brought back they were older than we were right all birthday year wines and we get in the car we don't say a word the whole way there um and and mle takes us straight to what was the firehouse lounge and Emory and Michael gets out of the car being an architect coming back from New York looks up at the building goes oh yeah this will do great walks in says glass Fest people people gone we're going to rip this out drop down ceiling out at this point the place is still open and thriving and so we're walking around this place like everyone's like what are these guys doing right it's engineered wooden tile floors it's a firehouse was built in 1860 and for some reason the 1960s and70s we like to make all these fake materials and and cover up beautiful things right so we still another problem we don't have any money yet so we got a $49,000 loan from Justin's father's Farmhouse that he had been dealt with the problem with that was we got math right $455,000 was the cost of the liquor license and $44,000 were the legal fees which left us again uh with nothing but the landlord was kind enough to uh let us have four months free rent we built everything ourselves built a bar we built back bar everything tables and I lived in the basement for the first uh two months during construction which is great because the water pressure in an Old Firehouse like that is still the best water pressure of a shower I've ever had so uh it's the great employee lounge now so now You' got to see the thing come full circle right you start off with all this work ethic to the point where you're just confused and spinning your tires in the mud and then you learn about sharpening your Axe and how you can uh create your notebook and organize and and uh start to be efficient and then now what oh I think I'm going to go to Corning and it all falls apart and then you come back and uh you understand that opportunities come your way and then it's back to work ethic again in building things uh so whenever we get into um you know what do we do uh from there right how do we continue to affect the environment we got uh two things going forward right that we're really focused on now one uh is uh our our nonprofit food Revolution Pittsburgh cooking club so three years ago uh we started going to the Obama Academy in East Liberty at Pittsburgh public high school we started cooking with these kids every Tuesday right keeping it full circle going back to uh me being the kid at the bus stop right and well what are we going to do with all these kids now every Tuesday now that they're so good at cooking and they're all asking us for jobs uh so we're about halfway to our fundraising goal of $300,000 to buy them their own food truck uh so that there's a gas station right across the street from the Obama Academy where they line up to eat now the kids of the cooking club can earn $10 an hour uh feeding Exquisite food to their friends and uh ripping off the gas station's business and I told the kids we might even start selling gas just to prove a point right uh so and the second thing is the launch of our no gratuiti uh Pro uh policy that we just put in right well that was a heck of a press storm uh especially for a restaurant that doesn't have a a PR team or anything like that and why would we do this thing right why would we not want to accept gratuiti why would we want to just pay uh people more well we even Ted is confused here uh so it's because we made so many mistakes over the first three years that we'd actually become pretty good at our process in proactively seeing problems that could arise and eliminating them before they become a problem so 70% of restaurants fail in their first three years as every Banker reminded us as we were trying to open a restaurant and uh but 90% fail in the first five years so what happens in that span right we just made it past three years somehow and we've got a killer team uh which is you know the next link you start to learn is okay after you start to get all that work done you got to build a team and um you know we've had the team build with us from the beginning so we've got our executive chef uh our lovely executive chef Jamila and she's running a an uh all female kitchen now uh which is a great joke because they say we went from bro Marco to bra Marco um and now the women definitely run the show and we've got this team and what we saw by traveling around the country and visiting all the other restaurants that inspired us and meeting with Mark vetri who's kind of uh you know one of the best chefs in the country and him and his team at vetri kind of taking us under their wing we started to see that these teams that all the people who didn't fail between years three and five built put all of their energy into their people and into their team otherwise what happens between years three and five is you get fatigued you get tired right you're going to be a server who's with us from the beginning Dr Drew our private events coordinator started out washing dishes for us as a favor three years ago now he runs our half a million dollar private events business with a whole team under himself right so we got these people who been with us from the start how do we keep them with us and um you start to look at well you you don't want inconsistent pay right uh people need to know their rent checks going to come du it doesn't matter if it snows and it's a blizzard right and we kind of come up with this thing and you do the numbers and we're Sharp we've got our books and we also have uh something called Excel right and you go and you proactively plan ahead of these things and make sure that the front and back of the house are paid on the same level and that they also all uh get at least 5% of profits now so now everyone's incentivized to work together right all the costs that add up in a restaurant there's another counterintuitive thing that we're prevent preventing right is that most of the time in restaurants the busier you get the less money you make why CU everyone's tired that means your team doesn't have their two hours to plan what they're ordering they order inefficiently right they order alcohol inefficiently and all those little costs set up so uh I'm going to end with uh one more quote and it's a little bit longer uh so I had to pull it out and read it on my phone but it's something that's very important to me and as you guys uh anyone else uh gets out there to take their work ethics sharpen their Axe and uh uh get it to the point where you're building a team and building a a strategy that wins um I think it's something you need to remember because it's not all roses uh along the way and this is from Maran Williams and I've seen it in a lot of movies and whatnot and it's okay that I'm going to say it again because if you haven't heard it you need to and I'm okay with that our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure it is our light not our darkness that most frightens us you're playing small does not serve the world there is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you we are all meant to shine as children do it's not just in some of us it's in everyone and as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give others permission to do the same as we are liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates others thank you