Steele Platt opened his first restaurant in Denver in 1985 at age 25. Its failure was the best thing to happen to him.
“You need that first lesson about what went wrong to do it right the next time,” Platt said.
For Platt, the next time came in 1995, when he launched the Yard House restaurant and bar in an abandoned waterfront building in Long Beach.
With little money, Platt said he talked his way into a favorable lease and upgrades to the building. From there, he won over investors who bought into the idea of a restaurant built around food, beer and rock ‘n’ roll.
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Yard House in Irvine: the chain’s largest |
The Yard House did $3.2 million in revenue in its first year. Now Yard House Restaurants LLC counts $65 million in yearly revenue, nine restaurants and 1,900 workers.
Platt was among the honorees at last week’s Excellence in Entrepreneurship Awards luncheon put on by the Business Journal.
In 2003, Yard House was ranked among the top 100 grossing restaurants nationwide by Restaurants & Institutions magazine. The publication also ranked Yard House among the top 400 restaurants with the highest percentage of alcohol sales in 2003. About 40% of sales come from booze.
Yard House also was ranked No. 13 among the fastest-growing restaurants by Restaurant Hospitality magazine and last fall was named a restaurant chain with the best beer list by Nation’s Restaurant News and by Cheers Magazine.
The Irvine-based company is one of the bright spots at the troubled Triangle Square in Costa Mesa. Yard House has a second Orange County location,its largest,at Irvine Spectrum Center.
Its Rancho Cucamonga restaurant, which opened last fall, took in more than $300,000 in its first week.
Platt said the idea,hundreds of beers on tap and slogans such as “Got Beer”,took about three years to build.
“That was the biggest challenge in the beginning,” he said.
In Long Beach, his goal was to cram as many beer taps into the bar as possible, ending up with 250.
Multiple beer taps, extensive menus and rock music became features of Yard House.
(The yard part of the name comes from the 36-inch-high beer glasses first used by stagecoach drivers so they could quaff a few brews without letting go of their horses).
Platt and partner Harald Herrmann, president and director of operations, hope to continue growing the privately held chain.
Restaurants in Brea, Phoenix and Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., are slated to open this year. The company hopes to open two more in Arizona, one in Las Vegas and one in Kansas City.
Platt’s personal goal: $100 million in sales in 2006.
Helped by bar sales, Yard House ranks 10th in the nation in average sales per restaurant, at $6.3 million. That puts it among some of the country’s best known chains, including Claim Jumper, Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. and P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, according to Restaurants & Institutions magazine.
As the company grows, Platt said the hardest thing is finding people and training them to keep up the standards of the company.
“It’s always about the people,” he said.
Platt said he loves being in the bar and entertainment business. But be wary of success, he said.
“It breeds complacency,” Platt said.
“Every day and every minute you think (you’re successful), your standards and sensitivity to (business) issues fade and you focus on success instead of the business,” he said.
The Newport Coast resident does admit to some down time, mostly on his boat at Lake Havasu or on the golf course, where he says he carries about a 12 handicap.
“It would be four if I wasn’t an entrepreneur,” he said.
