NYLP: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod, a podcast on your startups, businesses, and openings in the New York City area. I’m Hal Coopersmith and in this episode, we are talking all about New York’s best sandwiches found at Untamed Sandwiches. We caught up again with the founder, Andy Jacobi, and a lot has changed since we first spoke in July of 2015. Here’s Andy reflecting on the company’s growth.
Andy: The best thing that I do, not in terms of the thing that I’m the best at, but the thing that I most enjoy about the job is the fact that we have been open for four years. I’ve gotten to see so much growth in our people, and I’ve gotten to hire for positions that we never would’ve been able to hire for when we were just getting off the ground. The growth in the business has also encouraged the growth in our team, in the individuals that make up our team. That is definitely the coolest thing about where we were when we first started to now opening up our third shop. The fact that we now have 40 employees, multiple managers, many people that have been with us for a long period of time is very gratifying.
NYLP: How has Untamed Sandwiches managed to grow so much? What are its challenges, and how does it get and keep great people? You can find all that out and more in our series called How You Doin’.
Stepping back onto the Launch Pod, we have Andy Jacobi, the founder of Untamed Sandwiches. Welcome back, Andy.
Andy: Thank you very much, Hal.
NYLP: How does it feel to be back?
Andy: It feels great! How you doin’?
NYLP: When we first had you on, you had one store. Now you have three stores. How did that happen?
Andy: The easy answer is that we built them. This was always part of the plan, but a lot of hard work goes into it, and not just hard work, but a lot of ups and downs and backs and forths go into building a network of retail stores. It’s definitely not as straightforward of a process, and I think especially in a city as competitive as New York, when you are building a business in a very grass roots way the way that we have, it’s a learning process. We’ve never done this before. I’d never built a second store before, and then I’d never built a third store before, and I’ve never built a fourth store to this day. In each case, it’s just about learning from your mistakes and continuing to plow ahead. This was always part of the plan loosely. We just didn’t know exactly how it was going to come to fruition.
NYLP: It seems like you’re focused on the negatives a little bit, but obviously, now you have three stores. That’s a bigger deal. How is that feeling?
Andy: It feels great. I think I am a realist. I do focus on the negatives maybe more than I should. I’ve tried to at least as we’ve grown compartmentalize my negativity. I realize that, and I’ve heard a lot of much more successful entrepreneurs than myself talk about this, that there’s so much stress that goes into building a business, and yet one of your jobs is to be the cheerleader, to be the one that can walk into a store or a room full of your people and just project a vibe and project a sense of positivity and a passion for what we do that other people can feed off of. There have certainly been times over the last four years where I have forgotten that, where I’ll walk into a shop and immediately just start pointing out mistakes, rather than remembering that I can compartmentalize that.
If I’m going to compartmentalize that right now, we’ve just opened our third shop. It feels awesome. I would say probably nothing ever felt more awesome than opening that first shop, and yet looking back on that now, that felt like such an accomplishment, and yet it was only the beginning of the amazing amount of hard work that goes into building a business the way that we have.
NYLP: Aside from the downside, how about you be a cheerleader for a little bit more? What are more of the positives?
Andy: Positives, there are lots of positives. I don’t mean to sound negative. I think-
NYLP: You were, and it was very disheartening.
Andy: Okay, to get negative for a second, just for a second, and then I’ll give a positive.
NYLP: We were going to go negative after that, so I wanted you to go positive first.
Andy: One of the hardest things I think about growing from being just a concept or a small business to being a bigger business is that you as the entrepreneur need to do a lot of changing yourself. Most entrepreneurs are not capable of it. They might be capable of figuring out how to hustle to get a business off the ground, or figuring out how to build something or see a vision, but they’re not necessarily excited about managing that vision. They’re not necessarily excited about managing people. Making that leap from the person who can see a vision, figure out the early problems, figure out a business model that’s going to actually at least get you through the beginning, to the person that is managing people and really figuring out how you’re going to grow as an organization, as a team, those are two very different skillsets.
I actually think that I’ve probably always been better at the latter, at working with people, at managing people, as negative as I’ve sounded in these first couple of minutes. The best thing that I do, not in terms of the thing that I’m the best at, but the thing that I most enjoy about the job is the fact that we have been open for four years. I’ve gotten to see so much growth in our people, and I’ve gotten to hire for positions that we never would’ve been able to hire for when we were just getting off the ground.
The growth in the business has also encouraged the growth in our team, in the individuals that make up our team. That is definitely the coolest thing about where we were when we first started to now opening up our third shop, the fact that we now have 40 employees, multiple managers, many people that have been with us for a long period of time is very gratifying.
NYLP: Well, I’m glad that you brought that up, because when you had one store, you probably had an office downstairs or behind the kitchen and you could be onsite and see everything that’s going on. There’s only one Andy Jacobi. Now there are three stores. How do you manage those three stores where you can only be in one place at one time?
Andy: Yes. I heard a great quote the other day, which is, “The only way to learn how to trust someone is to distrust someone.” I think that that’s something that I’ve had to learn is that everything that feels scary about giving up control, once you’ve given enough thought to, “How am I going to do this? How am I going to delegate this, not abdicate responsibility, but delegate and feel good about it?” Once you do it, you realize it wasn’t actually that scary to begin with.
That’s another, for me personally, an area that I’ve grown and transformed in is my ability to get comfortable delegating and get comfortable giving responsibilities to people and stepping away and trusting people. As a result of that, our team has gotten stronger and stronger and people really do take responsibility inside our shops.
Even when we had just opened our second location, I made it a point of saying, “I’m going to spend a significant amount of time in both shops every day.” Now, there are plenty of days where I will go to a shop, primarily not so I can check up on things, not so I can surprise people, but because I actually have to meet with our managers there or I’ve scheduled an appointment with someone and we decided to do it in one of the shops.
Other than that, I’m oftentimes working from home and it’s that kind of ability to stay connected to people without watching over them and showing them that you trust them and that you’re in this with them that I think enables people to take on that responsibility and allows me to step away and take on other responsibilities.
NYLP: One of the most important things about delegating is finding the right people. In the food industry, which is what you’re in, obviously, it attracts a certain type of person, a wonderful person, but it also presents a challenge in terms of finding stability for the business. How have you been able to find the right person for Untamed Sandwiches and be able to delegate that responsibility?
Andy: We have gotten better and better at hiring, recruiting, training, and retaining people. We’ve gotten very disciplined about it. As a result-
NYLP: What’s the secret?
Andy: I really think that companies need to understand what their culture is. There are good cultures and there are bad cultures, but I think the worst culture is one that’s just inconsistent, where there’s not a clear idea of who are we, what is our mission, who do we need on our bench to be successful. That’s one thing that we have really honed in on.
We have an interview guide where every manager is looking for the same things. They’re given a list of questions that is very long and they can choose how they want to ask those questions and what specifically they want to hone in on people, but there are five things that we look for in everyone that we hire. We call them the five Ps.
I stole three of these Ps from a book called Prime to Perform, and we came up with the other two ourselves. It’s nothing revolutionary or unique, but in my opinion, it’s what makes our team understand how to all act in one way. The five Ps that we look for are passion, play, potential, purpose, and poise. Throughout the interview process, any manager that’s conducting an interview can ask any number of questions, but at the end of the interview, they have to be able to answer, “Does this person have each of the five Ps? Do they exhibit each of the five Ps? What is my confidence level that they’re going to exhibit those five Ps?”
As a result of that, I think we have been tremendously successful in cutting out the negative hires, cutting out the people that clearly were just not a right fit for the culture. There are people that we’ve hired where they haven’t been able to pick it up fast enough or they haven’t been able to actually do the job, but we have gotten much better at recruiting people that I think are a good fit for what we call the Untamed Way.
NYLP: What is the culture that you have? What is the Untamed Way? What are you standing for?
Andy: Also as part of this activity, I guess as we’ve grown, we’ve started to realize, this is all part and parcel with growth. When you are one location, you don’t really need to think that much about who are we and what is our culture, because it’s kind of whoever the leaders are who are there six or seven days a week. We are the culture, but I think the challenge as you grow is that you’re bringing on so many people. You’re bringing on new leaders, you’re promoting new leaders, and you have to start really defining what it is you stand for.
As part of this, we came up with what we call our four principles and values. I think a lot of organizations come up with these, and I don’t think that necessarily any one is better than the other, but in our case, these are four things that I think we’ve always stood for, but actually putting them down on paper and talking about them and actually coming up with the terminology, the Untamed Way, and constantly saying in the shop, “Is this the Untamed Way? Is this not the Untamed Way?” has been really helpful.
The four principles and values that anchor the Untamed Way are as follows. The first one is leadership and excellence always. The second one is respect for every person, animal, vegetable, and sandwich. The third one is walk like you own the place, and the fourth is asking for help makes you stronger, smarter, faster, and better.
These are four things that I think myself and our senior leadership team have always tried to embody, but again, putting these down on paper and discussing them with every single member of our team has been really helpful. Again, I think it’s a way that the five Ps are very helpful in our hiring and our recruiting processes. This is very helpful in our training and our retaining processes.
NYLP: Employees in any business are extremely important. How are you finding your employees, and what’s the turnover rate been in an industry that certainly is notorious for a high turnover rate?
Andy: We use various job search sites. We’ve found success with a handful of them. We don’t necessarily have one that we only choose from. It depends partially on the position. I’ve found some sites are better with back of the house people, some are better with front of the house people. In an industry that is, as you pointed out, notoriously a high turnover industry, I’ve heard a statistic that the average restaurant turns over its entire staff in a year, so 100% turnover.
We should be keeping track of what our turnover rate is. I don’t know what it is. It’s low. If I had to guess, I would say it’s closer to 30%. A lot of those are people that I think self-select out. We tend to lose people early in the beginning. We don’t lose a lot of people that have been with us for a while. The most frequent reason that we lose someone is that they just didn’t cut it and either we realized it, they realized it, or we mutually realized it very early on, or we hire a lot of young people too, so someone goes off to school, goes off to grad school, moves out of town with a significant other. We’ve had instances like that, but we have been tremendously successful in terms of not losing our core people, our best people, our people that have been with us for at least nine months to other jobs, to other restaurant jobs.
NYLP: Well, it’s great that you’re certainly creating a culture where people want to stay. We talked a lot about your expansion, but we didn’t talk about where the new restaurants actually are. Where are they?
Andy: Thank you for bringing that up.
NYLP: How about you plug them?
Andy: As you mentioned, we now have two relatively new restaurants. We opened up our second one in Dumbo, Brooklyn. It’s on 60 Prospect Street in what’s called Dumbo Heights. That opened up a little over a year ago now. Our third location, which we only opened up a few weeks ago, is in what we call
Midtown East. It’s on Lexington between 54th and 55th Street.
NYLP: When you launch one of these new locations, what do you do? How do you ingratiate yourself in the neighborhood?
Andy: It’s become more and more challenging to do that. I think today as I look back even on opening up our first shop, I don’t know if we could’ve opened, as a mom and pop operation, a very grass roots, self-funded operation, I don’t see a lot of restaurants like that opening up in New York today.
Even as we opened up our second and our third, we still face lot of these same challenges of an unbelievable amount of competition, an unbelievable amount of retail turnover in New York City, such that I think New Yorkers have become spoiled with how many new things there are and how many restaurants there are, and how many restaurants are focused on some of the things that made us so unique when we first opened up, this focus on quality ingredients, this focus on convenience.
We still focus on I would say some of the legacy things that you do when you open up a new restaurant. We do PR. We try to get a lot of reporters to come in and write about us. We also are very active on social media. We talk to a lot of social media influencers and try to get them to come in.
We do all this in a very grass roots way where we’ll throw an event for influencers or an event for members of the media. We will also just do some of the pound the pavement marketing, so we do a lot of sampling when we first open. That’s actually a relatively new thing, but I found that to be incredibly beneficial for us, because a lot of people will walk into our restaurants, and if you look at our menu board, we are more expensive than the average fast casual restaurant, but most people that try the food understand it and say, “Okay, that was worth it. I get that that’s not a bodega sandwich, and I get why that should’ve cost $11.” A lot of people that just walk in and look at it say, “No, I don’t want to spend $11 or $12 on a sandwich,” but if they get to try a quarter of a sandwich or an eighth of a sandwich, they’re very likely to come in.
I think that as we’ve grown, one of the things that we’ve really focused on how do we get people to just walk in the door, how do we get people to the register, because if we do that, we have four or four and a half star Yelp reviews at all of our shops, we do tremendously well with the people that actually get to try our food, so how do we get more of those people?
NYLP: Well, I’m glad that you brought up launching as a mom and pop versus subsequent locations, because I found that interesting, because people may not necessarily be excited for the sixth location of a restaurant or a seventh location, but the first one and you’re new to the neighborhood and you’re their first ever location, it seem like it’s certainly a different vibe.
Andy: I think that’s very true, and I’ve heard some friends who are a little bit further down the path than we are talk about this too, about how do you drum up excitement for the 10th location of a successful restaurant. It gets harder. I will also say, though, that I think one of the benefits of opening up multiple shops is that a lot of people start to recognize you. Eventually, you do become a little bit, I wouldn’t say a household name. That’s going way, way too far, but for example, in opening up our shop on Lexington Avenue, where we’re not too far away from our original shop, which is just south of Bryant Park, we had a lot of customers that came in in the first few weeks who said, “Oh my god, I saw you guys were opening and I was so excited because I used to work right by Bryant Park and I loved you guys, and this is so cool that you’re following me. You’re now a block away from my new office.”
That was something that obviously you don’t get with your first shop. No one trusts you when you’re one shop. They might come in and check you out, but they’re not necessarily going to get excited about who you are, and also I think that as you grow, people start to trust your brand a little bit more. I know that I certainly think if I’m going to a restaurant that has three or four locations, I start to think, “Well, enough people like them to get them to two or three or four locations, so they must have something good going on. I’m sure I’ll find something I like here.”
NYLP: Are you still looking for the same things that you were looking for in your previous location? Actually, when I ask this question, I want to cut to a quote that you said previously.
Andy: We’re looking for places where there’s really a big lunch rush. We know that we do lunch really well, and we want to find more office workers who maybe have a couple more dollars of disposable income to spend on something that’s particularly good, and where there’s a dense concentration of those office workers.
NYLP: Are you still looking for that type of volume business?
Andy: We are. Actually, if anything has changed, I don’t think it’s been us. I think it’s been the rest of the fast casual restaurant world, where we still focus, today we’re at three locations, eventually we’ll be at more, but we’ve gotten pretty good at knowing who our bread and butter customer is, which is an office professional, someone who makes enough money to spend a little bit more on a really high quality lunch, and we need to be in locations where that is the case.
Part of our value is that we are providing the quality of food that you would expect to find in more of a fine dining establishment, but we have this unbelievably focused menu and we have thought so much about our operations that we can have you in and out the door in less than 10 minutes. That’s the value that we provide, and I think that that value is maximized in high density office markets.
As I said, though, I think what’s really changed about the fast casual landscape is that now, everyone thinks that way. There’s a lot more competition for those spaces. Once upon a time, it was considered strange, and that was something that I actually remember discussing with you, or Ricky actually mentioned, is that Midtown used to be known as this food wasteland. Now that’s not the case. Since we opened our Bryant Park shop, I can’t even tell you how many really high quality fast casual establishments have opened up within a three square block radius of where we’re at. It’s made for a much, much, much more competitive market than when we first opened.
NYLP: Don’t tell me who else has opened up, because we don’t want you promoting your competition.
Andy: I intentionally didn’t.
NYLP: I’m glad. What are the other locations that you might be looking at?
Andy: We look at a lot of things. There are a lot of brokers out there. There’s way too much open real estate on the market. We’re constantly being pitched on new things. I think that there’s still a lot of room to grow in Manhattan. I think that that is likely where you will see the next two or three Untameds.
Actually, I haven’t talked about this yet, but along with our second shop, when we opened our second shop, we also built a commissary. That commissary was designed to support five or six locations. The idea is that our executive chef is in one kitchen, unlike with a lot of restaurants, which I think move towards this commissary model as a means to try to cut costs, for us it was actually a way for us to ensure quality.
Our chef can be in one place overseeing the most important part of the process, which is the five day braising process. It doesn’t take him any more work or more effort to oversee the process to braise 50 pounds of meat at a time than it does to braise 300 pounds of meat at a time. We’re able to be efficient. There is a business reason why we did this, but also, we’re able to maintain quality such that the process that we use to braise, and even actually the people that are braising today in any of our shops, in our second or our third location, are no different than the way that we were doing it originally with one location.
As a result of that, we are looking to find additional spokes around our commissary hub, and I think realistically, those will probably be in Manhattan. We’ve looked in the financial district. We’ve looked in Tribeca. We’ve looked around the Nomad area. We’ve looked in Midtown West. I think there are really a number of places where we could end up where we would not be cannibalizing sales and where we would find a lot of success.
NYLP: For people who didn’t listen to your original interview, obviously they’re the worst. They need to go back to episode six and listen to the original interview, but what is a commissary kitchen, and what is braising?
Andy: Sure. A commissary kitchen is simply a big commercial kitchen. It’s a place where a lot of commercial cooking is done. I think that’s just the basic definition of a commissary kitchen. A lot of fast casual restaurant concepts, as they grow, start to think about, “Can we create a commissary, because that will help us to lower costs and measure quality and ensure quality across multiple locations.”
What I think a lot of fast casual concepts start to realize is that the benefits that they thought they would get from the commissary model don’t exist. A lot of it has to do with the business model or the operational model. If your business is overly service-intensive, that is not right for a commissary, because if the majority of the challenge of the business and of the steps in ensuring that the customer leaves happy are in the service as opposed to the prep work, then you’re not able to actually centralize those activities, whereas in our case, the core of our menu is braising. It’s that five day braising process, which I’ll describe in a second, but because that is so core to what we are and who we are and because there are so many scaled benefits to doing braising in one place, it allows us to really take advantage of the commissary model.
In terms of the expectation of the business of how we would build a commissary eventually and how it would support multiple locations, we’re still fine tuning how we operate that as efficiently as possible, but in terms of the scaled benefits, the ensuring of quality, the scaling of labor, the scaling of food costs, we have realized all the benefits that we expected to find.
Getting back to your question about what is braising, so braising is a slow cooking process. It involves a wet heat cooking method. It’s I guess somewhat similar to barbecue, but whereas barbecue, you are slow cooking something, smoking a meat in a dry environment and allowing it to take on the flavors of the wood that it’s being smoked in, braising requires a braising liquid. You can also cook a braising cut, which are very similar to barbecue cuts, for a very long period of time, but it’s sitting in a braising liquid.
In our case, our braising liquids start with our double brown chicken stock. We call it our double brown chicken stock because normal chicken stock requires taking chicken bones. We use free range chicken bones that come from the same chicken that goes into our chicken sandwiches, and we pour water over it. We add in the mirepoix and we simmer that down, but then why we call it the double brown chicken stock is that what we do is we then after we’ve reduced that first chicken stock, we then drain it, and then the second day, we cool it down and then we put it over another set of chicken bones. It makes this incredibly rich, dense chicken stock. To that, we add various other ingredients depending on the braise. For example, our lamb neck sandwich is braised in red wine, so it starts with the double brown chicken stock, but we add red wine, a whole lot of spices, and that is our braising stock for the lamb neck sandwich.
That is what braising is, and the beauty of braising is that in addition to just the fact that you’re taking these unbelievably flavorful cuts of meat and imparting even more flavor from the braising liquid is that from a fast casual perspective, we can put 50 pounds of meat in on the service line, and it is going to have the same quality three hours later as it had when you first put it out, because it’s continuing to sit and simmer in those braising liquids. It’s not drying out. It’s not getting overcooked. It’s just getting more and more tender over time.
NYLP: Once you cook it in the commissary kitchen, you send it to your different locations and then they heat it up, they continue to soften the meat?
Andy: Exactly. What’s interesting about that is actually, the process that we use even just to serve food in our, I guess you can call them satellite locations, the ones that are not right next to a commissary, is exactly the same as the way that we served and prepped food when we were at one location, because of those five days, the last two days are you pick the meat off the bones after it’s done braising, you put it back into the braising liquid, and then you put it in the refrigerator, and you let it soak back in those delicious juices.
Two days later, it’s ready. You bring it up to 180 degrees, you put it on the service line, it’s ready to make sandwiches like that. For us, that process has not changed at all. We can ship it in a refrigerated truck, and it arrives in our shop the next morning, and we bring it up to 180 degrees and we serve it just the same way that we did four years ago when we were at one location in Bryant Park.
NYLP: It sounds absolutely wonderful. Restaurants are notoriously a very capital-intensive business. You have obviously all of the back of the house equipment. You have a lease. You have employees, all those sorts of things. That to me is why you’ve seen the rise of food halls and more shared food environments. You’re expanding. You’re needing a lot of capital. How are you able to manage the capital that you need as you expand? Are they the same investors? Are you pulling in new investors? What are you doing?
Andy: We have been very lucky to have a core group of friends and family and angel investors since day one. We brought on one quasi-institutional investor in order to expand in this most recent expansion, but we have continued to benefit from the relationships of our initial investors since day one. It’s still been a very gradual process, and I think we’ve learned a lot from it.
A lot of restaurants that grow, or I guess grow up in New York City these days, are incredibly well-funded, such that mistakes don’t hurt, basically, whereas with us, we’ve had to pinch every dollar that we’ve raised. As a result, when we make mistakes and we go over budget on a construction project, it most certainly hurts, and that has happened to us. That has happened to us twice, and yet we’ve learned from it. I think our investors have been understanding of that. They have seen the growth in the business and they believe in the concept and they believe in our team, and so they have been forgiving of some of those mistakes.
It is a very capital-intensive business. One of the things I think are our investors like, though, is that we’re not as capital-intensive as a lot of other restaurants. This decision to build around a commissary is also very beneficial in terms of build out costs. In our new restaurants, in our third restaurant, our newest restaurant, is actually the first that is built in the model that we’re going to build all the future Untameds, which is that there’s no gas, there’s no ventilation. It’s a 100% electric kitchen.
As a result, we are able to build out spaces much faster, much less expensively, and because we don’t have all of the “disgusting” things that landlords hate, we have access to a lot of spaces that landlords would not rent out to other restaurants. While a lot of what you mentioned in terms of the capital intensiveness of restaurants, it hits all of us, we are well-positioned to deal with that.
NYLP: Obviously as you add new locations, your sales have grown, but an important metric I imagine in terms of business and in terms of evaluating the restaurant industry is, you know what I’m about to say, same store sales. Your first location, Bryant Park, you’ve been around for a few years now. How are the same store sales?
Andy: It’s interesting. It is really our only mature store.
NYLP: Mature?
Andy: Yes. At this point, I think you have to call it mature. It’s been around for four years. Certainly the growth has slowed, but we are still seeing year over year same store sales in a market in which restaurants on the whole have started to decline over the last two years because in spite of the larger economic growth, the rate of growth of restaurants in New York City, as well as nationwide, is much, much faster than the rate of growth of the population. What we’re seeing is that at a time when the rest of the economy is expanding, and maybe the restaurant industry is expanding, individual restaurants are still struggling. You see this in all the public comps.
For us, though, we have managed to grow in kind of unique ways. We’ve managed to grow the business in different ways. We’ve grown a really successful catering business that’s become a real engine of growth for us. We’ve managed to grow deliveries a lot, and we’ve really focused on how to penetrate deeper within our existing customer base rather than worrying about all of the customers that we’re never going to reach.
This is a little bit contradictory to what I was saying before about how do we get people to just walk in the door, but I think one of the things that we’ve also been focusing on in addition to that is reminding people that we exist, because our reviews show that people love Untamed, but yet there’s still a million different options in a place like Midtown. How do you remind people that we’re there? We’ve focused a lot on loyalty, on email marketing, and actually on the combination of those two, and how do we make our customers feel special.
NYLP: How are you making them feel as special as they feel?
Andy: I use that euphemistically, I guess. The flippant way of looking at it, not the flippant, but the casual way of looking at how do you make customers feel special in the restaurant business, which is you give them more reasons to come in. You market to them better, but I also think that a lot of making people feel special in this business, and I think especially in a market where there are a lot of new businesses, but in my view, there are a lot of businesses that open in New York City these days that have a lot of money behind them and no soul. People can feel that. You can walk into a place and say, “I think that tasted like a chicken sandwich, but I don’t really trust where this is all going. I don’t really understand where the food came from. I don’t really understand what these guys are trying to do. This just feels like I’m being marketed to.”
That’s always a challenge of us is how do we actually make people understand that we believe that what we’re doing is special, but also that part of our mission is to make them feel special. It’s a lot of little things. It’s owning up to your mistakes and really making sure that, managers really, are focused on making sure that every single person that walks out the door has a smile on their face, that we’ve done every single thing that we possibly could to make people feel good, that if someone’s not happy with their meal, we change it out very quickly or we refund them or we even give them a gift card to the guy down the block, just the little things that make people realize that you actually care about making them feel special.
We did something the other day. I was really impressed with this, because I didn’t even know we did it until after the fact, but one of our regulars in Bryant Park loved a sandwich that we took off the menu. It’s called the Frere Jacques. It was a brisket sandwich. It was meant to be like a deconstructed French onion soup. It was really good, but we replaced it with another brisket sandwich that’s also equally as good called the Hot Goldie.
This one regular loved that sandwich, and so our manager talked to someone in his office and then talked to our chef and got our chef to specially make 15 Frere Jacques, which is actually very difficult for us to do because we only put eight things on the menu intentionally because we are making them at such scale that to make 15 of something just doesn’t make sense. When we are making something, we’re making it to make 1,000 of them. As a result, making 15 is really challenging.
I saw the email that he sent afterwards about how happy he was that we’d done this, that he got how difficult this was and how special this was, that this was a sandwich that we hadn’t had on the menu in a year, and yet we made this specially for him because we knew it would make his day.
Those are the kinds of things, and what really makes me happy about that is that it’s not just me paying lip service to the fact that we try to make people feel special. It’s the fact that one of our managers talked to our chef and they collectively got together and said, “Let’s make this guy feel special.”
NYLP: That is a fantastic story. Obviously you encounter all sorts of different challenges as you expand, and you’ve encountered one challenge where you’ve certainly made the customer happy. As you expand, you have the challenge of requiring more food, and I want to do another callback to your first interview where you talked about your food standards.
Andy: For us, we have certain standards or certain definitions that we use. We only use 100% grass fed beef, 100% pasture-raised pork, 100% free range chicken.
NYLP: As you require more food, how are you able to work with your suppliers?
Andy: I think I said this in our first interview, too. When we choose our suppliers, for the most part, we are looking for people that can grow with us, too. We’re looking for them to meet our standards. We also want to work with people that we like and trust and believe in what they’re doing and understand the integrity that they put into making great food, but we’ve also always looked for people that can be reliable and can grow with us.
One of the other cool things about growing is that that has actually happened. We have yet to outstrip a supplier to say that, “We can’t work with you anymore because you’re not able to supply us,” but we have just been in very close communication with some of our suppliers and we have gotten to the point where we are one of the biggest accounts for a lot of our suppliers, and yet they have benefited from our growth, as well.
One great example of that is ciabatta, the only bread that we’ve ever served at Untamed, comes from a bakery called Grandaisy Bakery. Their production kitchen is in Tribeca. We have been in very close communication with them about when stores will be opening, when we need more bread. That’s one of the closest relationships that we have. I hope that they grow as fast as we do and I hope that they open up bakeries in every location, every future city that I’d like to put an Untamed in.
Even if that does not happen, that’s actually one of my larger fears about expanding is that what happens when we have to source a bread that’s not Grandaisy, because I think that their bread is so good, and it is a part of who we are and what makes an Untamed sandwich.
NYLP: What do you see your biggest obstacles to expansion, aside from these suppliers?
Andy: There are so many obstacles to expansion, any one of which could trip up a growing business. You can make bad real estate decisions. You can make bad people decisions. You can make bad capital decisions. I would say that we have an overall vision for where we want to be, but not necessarily a timeline for when we’re going to get there, and not necessarily all of the tactics figured out for how it’s going to happen.
I think that we try at least to keep the overall vision and the overall mission and the overall principles and values in mind at all times, while sending out a short-term strategy or a set of tactics that will get us to the next level at each stage. Right now, we’re really focused on growing our three restaurants in New York City and eventually finding a fourth and a fifth and a sixth, and then we’ll see.
Once we are at capacity with our existing commissary, then we’ll have a decision to make. Do we want to continue to grow in New York City, or do we want to do it all over again and build a commissary in an adjacent market and start building the spokes around that hub? I think that there are a lot of challenges with that. I think there are challenges with going into a new market. Yes, you might be a New York brand, one of the top rated New York sandwich shops.
NYLP: Which you are.
Andy: We are. We’ve been fortunate in that regard, but I don’t know how that’s going to play in Philadelphia or in Boston or in DC or in LA or in San Francisco. Some people might find it a positive. Some people might not. Some people might not care at all. As we grow in New York, I know that we are developing local brand equity, that people as they start to see more Untameds, they start to know us and they start to trust us. Well, that happened as we expanded. It’s going to be a challenge and something that we have to address.
NYLP: Ultimately, what do you want Untamed Sandwiches to be? There are a lot of food brands out there, a lot that have expanded. Think about Chipotle and how they started with a mission in Denver and then expanded nationwide and internationally. What do you want Untamed to be, and what’s your inspiration? We’re getting philosophical at the end.
Andy: Yes, inspiration. I have really enjoyed and benefited from the camaraderie of the restaurant industry, that there are so many restaurateurs who are so much more successful, so much further down the path than I am who still take an unbelievably generous amount of time to set me straight at times and to share shop talk with me in ways where I am clearly more the beneficiary than they are, such that I would call a lot of those people inspirations in different ways. I look at Luke’s Lobster, I look at Dos Toros, I look at Kava, I look at Sweetgreen and I look at a lot of these brands that have become big businesses, big brands, while still sticking to their core mission and their core values.
That’s really my only goal. I don’t think I have a number of stores or revenue target or even an amount of money that I want to make. That’s much less my concern than building a great business, growing not for the sake of growth’s sake, but for the sake of allowing for more opportunities for our people and for more opportunities for our partners, our suppliers, and making Untamed as positive of a force as possible. Whether that means we get to 10 stores or 100 stores or 1,000 stores, I don’t think that’s as important as growing the right way.
NYLP: That’s where it starts.
Andy: Yes. I’ve never met the founders of Chipotle. I’ve heard podcasts from them. I’ve heard them speak. I don’t know exactly when things change, when does it become more about running a business and less about being able to feel the energy coming off your people every day. That’s certainly something that drives me today, and I would imagine that if Untamed becomes like Chipotle, I wonder if I’ll actually, I’m not going to look very hard here, that that would be an amazing thing, but I almost wonder would I feel more detached from the day-to-day business and too detached.
I wonder if in a way if some of the problems that Chipotle has faced has come from the fact that you still had the founders running an enormously large business and maybe not being the right people to focus on 2016 and 2017’s problems when they were certainly the right people to be focused on the problems for the first 10 years based on the success of the business.
NYLP: Well, that is a wonderful place to end this episode. Andy Jacobi, how do people find out more about Untamed Sandwiches, and where are the locations again?
Andy: Our shops are on 39th Street between 5th and 6th, just south of Bryant Park, in Dumbo on 60 Prospect Street, and our newest location is on Lexington between 54th and 55th. You can find us on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook. Our email address is WWW. I think you’re still supposed to say www.untamedsandwiches.com.
NYLP: We’ll provide a link regardless.
Andy: Yes.
NYLP: Well, Andy, it’s been wonderful to see your growth. Thank you for stepping back onto the Launch Pod and sharing your time with us. You make a fantastic sandwich. We actually had some sandwiches before you came on, and that obviously influenced the interview. It obviously influenced the tone. They are great. Thank you.
Andy: Thank you, Hal, and I have also really enjoyed seeing your growth. I’m not just a spokesperson, I’m also a client. I also listen to all of our podcasts, and so being one of the first people to get invited back for a second run is very special. I hope that I’m the first person to be invited back for a third one.
NYLP: Wonderful. We can’t wait. If you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod and get transcripts of every episode, including Andy’s first interview and this one, you can visit NYLaunchPod.com. You can follow us on social media @NYLaunchPod. If you are a super fan like Andy Jacobi, you can leave a review on iTunes and Apple Podcasts. It does help people discover the show and it is greatly appreciated.
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