Watch your time
Anything worth doing comes at a price, and branding is no exception. Yet, it’s not the corporate wallet that takes the biggest hit when building a new brand. “The biggest cost is time,” Mitchell says. “One of the things I’ve learned is there are two forms of capital: mental capital and physical capital. Mental capital has a price to it. If we’re spending all our mental capital over here, we’re not spending it over there. So what does that cost you?”
Mitchell points to his latest branding concept, Marcella’s, a Tuscany-themed wine bar set to open in the Short North this month, to illustrate his point.
“It’s going to cost us in the ballpark of $1.2 million to open Marcella’s, which is very inexpensive for a restaurant,” he says. “Typically, we spend about $2.5 million. But I think the physical expense kind of pales in comparison to the amount of mental capital we’ve put into it. Our corporate chef is in the test kitchen for six weeks working on the menu, another two weeks for the opening, another four to eight weeks following up on that, so our corporate chef is spending four months of their time on this project. That means four months they’re not spending on other projects within the company.
“There’s a lot of energy devoted to it. I think that’s the far greater cost, because you basically have to put the rest of the company on hold for a little bit while you’re doing this.”
That’s why it’s so important to be sure the brand you are pursuing truly fits with your company and is worth the labor-intensive effort.
“I opened a little bread company that ended up taking up way too much of our time,” Mitchell says of his 2002 purchase of Tapatio Bread Co. in the North Market area. “It took 20 percent of our time for 1 percent of our sales. I pulled the plug on that in about four months.
“If I had it to do over again, I would be more focused. For a while we were just all over the place. But that happens in organizations. You get teams of people together, teams get off on a tangent, and one thing leads to another and before you know it, the whole team is over there for one reason instead of being over here. That’s where leadership steps in. I try to keep myself above the fray so I can have some clarity of vision, but even with me, I get sucked into it sometimes.”
That’s why keeping your company’s philosophy in the forefront at all times is imperative.
“Anybody that’s involved in working in your company has to know your brand promise and be able to execute that,” he says. “You have to know your vision and be able to articulate your vision to anybody.”
It’s a formula that’s allowed Mitchell to grow from a single American bistro in 1993 to a 28-location, multibranded empire that’s on pace to do $125 million in 2007.
“You have to have the patience and the discipline to stick to your guns,” he says. “Not that you can’t change, but remember where you came from. What is the brand promise?
“I’ve learned a lot over the years. Probably one of the biggest is the power of the concept.”
HOW TO REACH: Cameron Mitchell Restaurants, (614) 621-3663 or www.cameronmitchell.com