Matt Couch
Matt Couch began working at Malone’s restaurant in Lexington as a busboy while attending college at Eastern Kentucky University. He continued working for the Bluegrass Hospitality Group-owned (BHG) restaurant throughout school, moving up to become a server and bartender.
When he graduated in 2013, Couch left BHG to join his father, a real estate developer, in his business. “I was with Dad for about three years — he had projects going on all over the country — and then, as my now wife and I were getting more serious and became engaged, we decided to come back home,” Couch said. “The stars aligned that BHG wanted to bring on a director of real estate at the same time I was looking to move back to Kentucky full time.”
Couch is involved with planning and opening all new BHG restaurants, including its fast-growing casual dining brand, Drake’s. Drake’s was founded in Lexington in 2009 and currently has 19 locations across six states, with four to five more opening annually over the next several years. We spoke with Couch about the brand’s growth and what he looks for when scouting new locations.
It seems expansion of the Drake’s brand has accelerated in the past few years. What’s behind that growth?
It’s all about the people — we’re fanatical about making sure we get our people infrastructure right. A lot of our folks, like me, started here in Lexington or at one of our restaurants outside of Lexington and have grown with the company. As time goes on, team members have become assistant managers, and those assistants become general managers, and then those really good GMs are maybe ready to run several stores as a market partner. Having a lot of good people in place gives our leadership team the confidence they need to keep opening restaurants.
What criteria do you look for when considering a new location?
We like to be where the energy is. We’ve been successful in large markets, like Louisville, and Franklin, Tennessee, and also in smaller markets like Bristol, Tennessee. We look for where we think we can fill a void.
There are times you want to fit in with your local surroundings and have features that complement that particular location, like in a new shopping center, but we certainly don’t want to be cookie-cutter. We make sure that we put individual care into every single project.
In a Business Lexington article from 2012, BHG co-owner Brian McCarty spoke about focusing growth within a three-hour radius of Lexington. Is that still the strategy?
We still have a lot of great markets that we’d like to get to within that area, but I would say, at this point, we’re thinking a little outside of that. We have a location open just outside of St. Louis in O’Fallon, Illinois, and we have a couple of other locations that will be in the suburbs of St. Louis. That’s a market that we love and where we think Drake’s will do well.
We also have a location in Burlington, North Carolina, a great town between Raleigh and Greensboro. We think we can do some more out in that direction, and certainly consider markets throughout the Southeast and Midwest as areas where we can grow.
Does BHG prefer to lease or own its restaurant locations?
We have a healthy mix of both. A lot of our projects we’ve bought the land and developed it ourselves, and we have some lease locations.
We’ve put together a team of real estate brokers who focus on the hospitality sector that I think is the best in the business, and there are three or four people across the spectrum of areas that we’re looking at who I really trust and who have a good pulse on their respective markets.
Have any Drake’s locations closed?
We’ve done some experimenting over at the Lansdowne shops, and we’ve tried some new concepts that went away and didn’t come back, but we’ve never permanently closed a location.
The original Lansdowne location is an incubator for the brand?
It’s 100 yards from our corporate office, and we have a very loyal audience around Lansdowne who provide great feedback, but a lot of the changes have happened organically. When Drake’s started, it had a strong nightlife component and after-hours scene. Today’s Drake’s is a very family-driven, suburban concept. There was never any decision to change it; it just kind of happened.