Most small business owners will tell you that starting a business is about risk and straying outside your comfort zone – but sometimes it allows you to go home again, too. And when the business you’re starting is as well known for old-fashioned American comfort food as Culver’s, that’s a recipe for, well, a comfortable life.
Just ask John Faber, owner of Culver’s of Verona, which was awarded a Dane County Small Business Award at a special ceremony in June.
A decade and a half ago, Faber was working in hospital administration when he decided it was time to change careers. He wasn’t sure where his life would take him after that – he just knew he wanted to go into business for himself. That desire prompted a discussion with his wife that would ultimately prove life-changing.
“I said, ‘Honey, I’m going to get into my own business, I’m tired of working for other people,’” said Faber. “And she said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea. I’m going to start looking.’ So I literally had the entire spectrum out there, and she in all of her wisdom said, ‘If you’re serious about this, you’ve got to look at Culver’s.’
“I said, ‘Why is that?’ I really didn’t know a whole heck of a lot about them. And she said, ‘Oh, they’re great.’ She went on and on about what a raving fan she was of Culver’s, and I said, ‘Okay, they’re on my list.’”
That started the ball rolling, and Faber was soon in discussions with Culver Franchising about taking over his own store.
“The first day I went in to chat with the folks at Culver Franchising, I was sold,” said Faber. “I was so impressed with the organization, so impressed with the what their values were, what their goals were. That was the end of my search.”
Then, as Faber began to learn the ropes through Culver’s franchise training program, a new opportunity arose that was too good to refuse. A store went up for sale in Verona, Faber’s hometown, and Culver’s CEO Craig Culver offered Faber a chance to purchase it.
“I had planned for another location,” said Faber. “And the store was below average at the time in ’96. But I told Craig, absolutely, and the rest is history.”
The people business
Perhaps it’s the fact that he’s doing business in the same small town where he grew up, or maybe it’s simply his desire to nurture the growth of his employees, but Faber stresses that his store is in the “people development business.”
That philosophy is embodied by his two top employees: His general manager, Natalie Marking, started at the age of 14 on the day the restaurant opened in 1996, and the first assistant manager, Nate Gordon, started at 15 in the same year.
“The goal I had early on was to be an employer of choice,” said Faber. “A lot of the seminars I took and a lot of the previous employment experience I’ve had showed me that it’s more than money. You’ve got to create a good work environment. … When you start with nobody working for you and you’ve got to create a staff from virtually nothing, that was a process for me, and it took a good couple of years to really get a hang of what that takes.”
Of course, being in the hospitality industry, Faber soon discovered that the type of people he hired was even more important than their skill set.
“We can teach skills, we’ve got a great training program,” said Faber. “We are not in the rocket science business. It certainly is an intensive business, but you hire, number one, for personality. I’m 100% certain I can teach anybody we hire. What I cannot teach is, you either have the personality or you don’t.”
That training program – appropriately called ButterBurger University – offers what Faber refers to as a “great foundation.” But it’s those intangibles that Faber can bring to the table as the owner of one individual store out of 450 that he will tell you help set Culver’s of Verona apart.
For one thing, working in – and giving back to – the same small town that nurtured him creates a sort of symbiotic relationship that Faber finds personally gratifying.
“I think it helps that I’ve been around here for so long,” said Faber. “Growing up here when we were a town of a couple thousand and everybody knew everybody, well, that’s not the case anymore, but there are a lot of folks that have been around this town as long as me if not longer, and I think that offers some assistance to having connections and so forth.
“I’ve got a very good friend of mine that runs Miller & Sons grocery store, and Carl does an incredible job. … He does exactly the thing that I’m talking about here. If there’s a need by anybody, he’s high on the list of folks to go to, and I took that example to heart because I do feel when you’re in a small community, albeit five times the size it was when I grew up here, that is key, absolutely. Word spreads. It’s still a small town relatively.”
Prospering in tough times
Of course, while the customer loyalty Faber’s store created was no doubt a big part of its financial success – the store’s revenues grew from $900,000 in 1996 to almost $3 million today, while profitability rose during that same period from just 6% to 15% – Faber is quick to credit some favorable circumstances for much of that.
“I have to defer a little to our Culver’s brand on that,” said Faber. “I think we were positioned well to weather some of those nasty, hopefully short storms that we all inevitably see in our lifetimes. Again, I think our pricing and our menu selection just allowed us to do well as people, maybe the word is, kind of stepped down. You know the folks that went to a higher-end restaurant maybe went to the casual dining side, the casual diners dropped down to the fast casual side, and so on.
“Also, I do believe that we’re very fortunate to be in Dane County where, although things were difficult, they weren’t nearly as difficult as they were in other parts of the country and other parts of Wisconsin even, so I think those two things helped.”
Then again, being back home again certainly didn’t hurt:
“Our customer loyalty is very, very high, and they maybe didn’t come out three times a week, but they might have come out once or maybe twice a week, and those that came out once a week prior, maybe they came out every other week. They didn’t give up on us. That was huge.”
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