by Mark Sievers
Columnist: The Restaurateur
As one of Kentucky's largest restaurant supply companies, Lexington-based C. Worth Restaurant Supply has catered to the needs of small family-owned restaurants and national chains for more than half a century. In a recent interview with Business Lexington columnist Mark Sievers, Dan Adams, co-owner of C. Worth, shares not only his own history in the local restaurant business, but also the company's recipe for establishing itself as a mainstay in the food-service industry.
This interview is also available as a podcast at the Business Lexington website, www.bizlex.com.
MS:
You and your partner, Lee Burton, bought the company in 1996. Your background had been in the restaurant business as a hands-on operator, which I am sure serves you well today when you are working with operators. Can you tell us a little bit about your early food-service experience?
DA: I was at the University of Kentucky in 1970.
Started bartending at Two Keys - the old places that Dudley Webb used to own - the Upstart Crow, Adams Restaurant.
I was putting myself through school, learning the steps of the bar: how it operates, customer service, how to manage proportions, how to control crowds.
Probably in 1974, I went to Columbia Steak House. I graduated in December of 1975, became a manager and opened up the new store on Alexandria Drive and then became the general manager for Columbia Steak House the next year.
In operations of that nature, I needed to know how kitchens operated, how the hosting had to operate, how the seating charts had to operate, how to do proportion controls and everything that went into administration and knowledge.
I decided that I wanted a little bit more challenge, and Pizza King International invited me to take 56 stores in four states. I had 10 (at) first in Kentucky the first year, and the second through the fourth years, I had 56 stores with 2,000 employees. We developed all these stores throughout Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and that helped me tremendously to arrange the footprint for the design of restaurants all over the United States, Caribbean, Canada. We do them everywhere for clients that have passed through here or architects that need our assistance.
MS: What is C. Worth's total range of geography, products and services?
DA: When you think of a restaurant supply house, the word "restaurant" makes you think that it's only for restaurants, and that's not so true.
For example, we sell ice machines to contractors and lawn care companies that have to buy ice daily to fill up the coolers to go to those job sites. That's something you wouldn't think a restaurant-supply house would have. We sell to veterinarians. We sell stainless steel mixing buckets to the horse farms for special bandages and mixtures of medicine and grain that they have.
We also go to the boat docks, we go to the golf courses and we go to concessionaires.
We do laboratories, and we do alarms on laboratories that have certain medical areas (where they store medicine) and they might need an alarm on to determine if the temperature is off by two degrees. We do dining trains like R. J. Corman and My Old Kentucky Dinner Train. We've designed three times for them.
MS: The sense I get is that your entire employee force truly is a team. So if you could talk a little bit about your human resource organization as a team and a little about your company culture?
DA: When we bought C. Worth, we had four employees. We had one in the office, a part-time in the office, a part-time salesperson, and one in the back delivering, and that was about it. Now we have 20 employees, and we have two who are Latino-speaking who take care of all of our Spanish market. That's very important, because we want to relate on our ground with all the Latino markets. Whether it's a grocery or a convenience store or mega marts or restaurants, we need to make sure that the customer feels confident that we can support their needs, their price level, and all the success - and even if they are having a failure, how can we help them bridge that next step? We've done it for many people. We have to teach our staff that their thoughts are in the 400 manufacturers that we represent. And we have information continuously flowing through our office on new products coming out, new thoughts, new developments, new menus.
MS: Give me an example of a couple of recent projects that you've done.
DA: (We) did Dudley's for Debbie Long, (and) did Eddie Montgomery's, the country western singer down in Harrodsburg.
There was this chef that came from a Boston country club, Bob Helbran. When Bob came, we designed Champions Golf Club - this has to be 20-plus years ago. Bob left there and went to Kraft Foods in Memphis, where he was executive chef. We went down and did Kraft foods in Memphis for him. Then he went to Denver, and he got onto a chain of restaurants on the West Coast that had 107 restaurants there. They wanted new ideas. Bob asked us to go out there, which I did, and designed something. The corporation loved it; we did a lot of theirs. So just in that instance, we went from Boston to Lexington to Memphis to Denver; you can see how that happens.
Our slogan is "Big or small, we cater to all." And it's not the size or the name of the operation, it's the personal touch and success of that operation.
If they have a problem, it's our problem too.