Episode #22
Ep. 22 - Building Snooze And Changing The World With Pancakes with Adam Schlegel | Gross To Net
Adam Schlegel and his brother Jon opened one breakfast restaurant in Denver's Ballpark neighborhood in 2006. Jon sent Adam the business plan back in 2000, and it took six years of pitching, hunting real estate, and getting turned down by investors and banks to get the doors open, which Adam describes as proving to the world that something that doesn't exist deserves to exist. He quit a consulting job at KPMG to help out, figuring he would give his brother a year or two and then go get a real job. He was twenty six. Twenty years later Snooze is roughly seventy restaurants in ten states doing over two hundred million dollars a year, giving away one percent of sales, composting nearly everything it can, and still closing every single day at 2:30 in the afternoon. Most of this conversation is about how a company keeps its soul once other people are running it. Private equity arrived in 2012 when Snooze had six restaurants, a professional CEO took the seat for the next twelve years, and both brothers stepped away in their early thirties. Adam's explanation for why nobody ever bolted on dinner is refreshingly unsentimental. The one daypart already worked economically, so they never had to touch it, and adding those shifts means new managers, new inventory, and a whole new marketing motion for a business that was already best in class at what it did. We also get into building culture before scale, since the first restaurant ran alone for two and a half years, and what it takes to co found a company with your brother and still like him afterward. The whole partnership is explained by an old StrengthsFinder result. Jon's top strength was Belief. Adam's was Input. His read is that a founder's first job is to be the believer, and that his job was always to be the one asking whether the thing actually works. Then he left, which he calls severing a limb, and moved his family to Melbourne while Jon moved to Italy and came back a winemaker. Adam spent the decade in orbit doing boards and food policy work and opening Chook, the Australian style rotisserie chicken shop he started in 2018 with James Beard winning chef Alex Seidel. Coming home from Australia most recently he sent two emails, one to the mayor of Denver and one to the company he co founded, and Snooze hired him back as a project manager. He is now Chief Growth and Strategy Officer, or as his email signature puts it, Consigliere, and he finally explains on the record what that means and why he and his brother consider The Godfather the best business book they never actually read. Find Snooze at snoozeeatery.com and Chook at chookchicken.com. Adam is not online and would like to keep it that way.
