Lots of obstacles got in the way and with location being a big one, Dave Anderson figured out how to become famous for Bar-B-Que.

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Dave Young:
Welcome to the Empire Builders. Dave Young here, Stephen Semple right there.

And you told me just before this started that I’m really going to like this one. Famous Dave’s. And I’m thinking, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to talk about me.”

No wait, Famous Dave’s. That rings a bell. Wendy’s? No, he was famous, but … Different Dave. Famous Dave’s is a barbecue place.

Stephen Semple:
That’s right. Famous Dave’s BBQ.

Dave Young:
Yeah, I met that guy at the Dave Convention years ago. You didn’t know. You probably didn’t know all Dave’s get together once a year.

Stephen Semple:
You had mentioned this one time previously. And what was confused is that you were not the keynote speaker. I figured you would be the keynote speaker at an event like that.

Dave Young:
Well, there’s a lot of Dave’s.

Stephen Semple:
So Famous Dave’s BBQ. It’s actually a pretty wild story, and it’s one of these ones where his experience that he had through his life really led him to this restaurant. And so that’s the part I want us to really focus on when going through this.

Because basically it’s a pit barbecue restaurant. It was founded in 1994 in Hayward, Wisconsin, which is a little town of 2,300 people literally in the middle of the state. And if you know anything about Wisconsin, when you’re in the middle of Wisconsin, you are in the middle of nowhere, by definition. And today it’s one of the largest barbecue chains out there with 180 locations. It’s listed on NASDAQ with the symbol BBQ, which I think is actually pretty cool for a barbecue place.

Dave Young:
Before you get into the whole origin story, my big, big question is, did he come out of the gate calling it Famous Dave’s?

Stephen Semple:
He did not.

Dave Young:
That would take some balls, wouldn’t it? It’s like, “Nah, I was Famous Dave’s from the get-go.”

Stephen Semple:
Slightly different than that and you’re just going to have to wait.

Dave Young:
All right. I’m on the edge of my seat.

Stephen Semple:
But here’s the thing that really caught my intention.

Here they are, this little barbecue shack, six miles outside of Hayward, which is in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin. He’s not even near an interstate. It’s almost three hours from Minneapolis.

Dave Young:
Can I point out that he’s a thousand miles away from barbecue country?

Stephen Semple:
He’s three hours from Minneapolis, four hours from Green Bay.

And guess what? They were getting 6,000 customers a week.

Dave Young:
Holy cow.

Stephen Semple:
In a town of 2,800 people.

Dave Young:
This is called ‘the destination.’

Stephen Semple:
Crazy, right?

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
And when I heard about this, I went, “Man, what did this guy do?”

It was founded by Dave Anderson. And Dave came from a working class family. And hearing and researching Dave’s story, I feel like there’s four things that really led to his success: his family background, influence of an art teacher, meeting Zig Ziglar, and his involvement in Vegas. And this really all came together.

So first was family background.

His parents were Native Americans who grew up on reservations, and his parents were taken away from their family and put in Indian boarding schools in Canada. We call these residential schools.

Dave Young:
Right.

Stephen Semple:
And this is where his parents met.

The idea of these schools were to mainstream Native Americans, to remove their culture, and they really were quite terrible and something that I really hope that we would not tolerate today.

And this is pretty recent history. Like in Canada, we continued to use these into the ’70s. It’s really, really quite terrible.

But this is where his parents met. His father was an electrician, his mother was a secretary.

And he grew up knowing his family was different. He grew up in Chicago, and instead of his kids going out to get pizza, they would go to the south side of Chicago for ribs. And these were African-American restaurants run by African-Americans who brought this cooking style to Chicago along with blues music: two things that heavily influenced Dave.

His parents also set up a small food stand to make extra money selling Native American foods, and this is where he learned this whole idea of cooking outdoors.

And Dave really struggled in school. He discovered later that he has ADD, which again, in the day was not something that was ever diagnosed. And he had this art teacher that really saved him. He struggled in all other classes, but she said one thing to him that stuck with him for his life: “You see things that others do not see.” And that stuck with him, because she shared that with him as a gift. “You’ve got this gift. You see things that others do not see.”

The next big life change happened was when he was dragged out to a Zig Ziglar sales training for this fuel additive company; MLM business, right?

Dave Young:
Sure.

Stephen Semple:
But this deeply changed his life.

He learned something from Zig Ziglar. He learned that no matter what your background, you can be successful. That was a big part of Zig Ziglar’s training.

And for those who don’t know who Zig Ziglar is; massive sales trainer, bunch of really great books. Look it up, read some of them. They really are very, very motivational.

But the other thing Zig taught him was no matter what your background, you can be successful, but you have to work at it.

There’s a five-day training program, and what Zig would do; would tear you down, tear down everything you thought about yourself, and then build you back up.

And he learned important things, like shaking hands and speaking with authority. Because he was very shy. He would practice shaking hands, he would practice smiling in front of a mirror. He would practice putting out a candle with his voice.

Dave Young:
Hmm.

Stephen Semple:
And it’s really interesting, in terms of this practicing your craft; when I worked in the investment industry, I first struggled when I was in the investment industry. And what my manager learned was I would stumble when it came to this whole idea of delivering the price, “Here’s what it would cost for these services.” And he said to me, “Here’s what I want you to do. Before you do your next presentation, I want you to go home and I want you to say the price a hundred times in front of the mirror and record it.”

And you know what? Once I started doing that, I had huge success. Because guess what? I never stumbled on price again. I delivered it with confidence. Because when it came to price, I’d already repeated it like a hundred times.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
So sometimes I think we learn, we forget that we got to work on our craft.

Dave Young:
I’m thinking what the psychological reason for that particular one is. And so often it’s the salesperson is asked to name a price that you can’t personally afford, and so you hesitate because you think, “Oh, gosh, who could write a check this big?”

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Dave Young:
And so if you practice it just by rote repetition, like you said, you sidestep that issue. Right? You get to the point where you can just say it as something that you say instead of this internalized-

Stephen Semple:
Totally.

Dave Young:
… Emotion-ridden concept.

Stephen Semple:
I was selling insurance policies, like these key man insurance policies and things like that, where the annual premiums were over a million dollars a year. And I had never seen a million dollars.

Dave Young:
Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
So yeah, there was that big thing.

So he learns that from Zig.

He gets a job at Eddie Bauer, where he gets involved in opening stores. And in the process of working at Eddie Bauer, he met someone who had a [inaudible 00:08:36] business. So he ended up getting into the [inaudible 00:08:39] business in Chicago.

But he got wiped out in the blizzard of 1979. This was a crazy storm. Look it up. It took over two months for all the snow to get removed.

O’Hare Airport-

Dave Young:
Thanksgiving blizzard of ’79. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. O’Hare Airport was closed for 96 hours. Four days. Closed.

And the problem was Dave’s customers were flower shops. They got wiped out. He lost the business.

Dave Young:
Wow.

Stephen Semple:
So he went on, worked in a few sales jobs, then he got a consulting job with Native Americans. So remember, he’s a Native American himself.

Dave Young:
Hmm-mm.

Stephen Semple:
And he noticed that all the Native American businesses were failing. And what he also noticed is they were not thinking about growth or profit. They just didn’t have the right mindset.

So he took them down to Zig. And this was deeply resisted by the leaders of the community, because there was big money being spent on this, and where was the hard skills you were going to get? And he did it anyway, and it transformed them. They became entrepreneurs.

Within three years, all of these businesses were making money. And Dave’s work got recognized by President Ronald Reagan. That’s how much it stood out.

And from this, he was asked to help a tribe with a bingo hall. And he knew nothing about bingo, but remember what his teacher said to him? He sees things that others do not.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
And he figured out that large jackpots brings in lots of people and they will spend more. And he did that with this bingo hall, and it was this huge success.

And he got known in the Native American community for helping with Bingo halls. So he set up a consulting company to do this, and then went on to work in casino gaming. He became the co-founder of Grand Casinos in 1990. He took it public. They built eight casinos, including Stratosphere in Vegas.

Dave Young:
Hmm. Okay.

Stephen Semple:
Big deal, right? It was sold to Hilton and later merged with Park Place Entertainment in ’98.

But after opening Stratosphere, he left the gaming world. He didn’t want this to be his future. He didn’t want to be known for building casinos in Vegas.

Dave Young:
Hmm-mm.

Stephen Semple:
But his experience in Vegas taught him something that he carried with him, and you’ll see that when he opens Famous Dave’s.

So over the years, he had always been experimenting with barbecue recipes. His dad had exposed him to the great ribs and he decided he wanted to really learn how to make barbecues.

So he started doing it, inviting friends over, and eventually they said, “Wow, this is really great. You should open up a barbecue shack.”

So he decided to build a barbecue shack outside Hayward where people don’t know barbecue, and he was told, “Are you nuts? Go south where people know barbecue.”

Dave Young:
Okay. I like this. So he picked a place where practically zero chance of success if anybody else starts a barbecue place there.

Stephen Semple:
Right. But remember what the art teacher told him.

So he decided, “I’m not going to go where the competition is. I’m going to go-

Dave Young:
Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
” … Where there isn’t, and I’m going to expose people to this.”

Dave Young:
The thing I thought of when you mentioned that he’s there is like, “Oh, how could it not succeed?” You’re in this wasteland, this desert wasteland of nothing but roadside places that have salad bars and hotdish, right?

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
And now all of a sudden, people have a choice, even if they have to get in the car and drive, which a lot of them apparently did.

Stephen Semple:
They did.

He decided his goal was best ribs, best baked beans, best cornbread. He had this list, and he would go anywhere on the world if he heard … I heard an interview with him and he said if he had heard a rumor that there was this little place in Alaska that had the best baked beans, he would hop on a plane and fly there.

And he had been working on this recipe for 20 years by the time the restaurant opened.

Dave Young:
Wow.

Stephen Semple:
And he called the shack Famous Dave’s, but he didn’t really. The name was an accident. And here’s where it came from.

The road leaving outside of town had all these little stores: Dave’s guns, Dave’s boats.

Dave Young:
Oh, really?

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. So he wanted to call it Dave’s Famous BBQ Shack. That was the name. The business cards were printed wrong. He gets the business cards and the business cards say Famous Dave’s BBQ.

Dave Young:
Nice.

Stephen Semple:
And he freaks out. And his wife says to him, “Calm down. Just leave it. It might be okay.” And it turns out to be the right thing.

The name was an accident.

When he opened the shack, he was obsessed with a lot of things. He had a hundred things. He created a list, wrote it down, of 100 things that they wanted to be best at, including bathrooms.

So I also want you to think; there’s six miles outside this little town, they’ve got this thing that he’s called a barbecue shack, and here’s what he’s got in the bathrooms: imported rose marble basins, 24 carat gold faucets, imported wrought iron crown molding.

Imagine if you did that today in the world of social media. But the word of mouth that you create, right?

The music was all hand selected by him. It had to be the right type of blues. He wanted it to feel good, get in a groove. He wanted sensory overload. He was obsessed with how the place smelled, how it sounded, the touch, the look. All five senses were being bombarded. He understood this from his time in Vegas.

Dave Young:
Hmm-mm.

Stephen Semple:
And you’re three hours from Minneapolis and the place is getting 6,000 people a week. People are coming as far away as Iowa.

And how did he know this? People would say to him, “You got to open one of these in my town”, and he’d go, “Well, where are you from?” “I’m from Iowa.”

Dave Young:
Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
It was word of mouth on steroids.

Dave Young:
It’s how you do it, right?

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
I mean, we teach this. We teach this. It’s how he did it at Stratosphere. There was nothing like Stratosphere in Las Vegas until Stratosphere. And you couldn’t ignore it because it’s the tallest thing in the desert. He knew.

Stephen Semple:
He knew. He knew this is what you do. You make a splash.

And his first expansion was of course into Minneapolis. They took over a small abandoned gas station, and they opened up with a lineup around the block. And by 1996, they have four restaurants and they took the company public.

Now he’ll tell you it was a mistake going public: long story, but he lost control of the business. The new board did a lot of things he did not like. They opened larger stores.

So for example, they’d say, “Oh, we got this big long lineup. We should make our stores bigger.” And he’s like, “No, we should keep them small and keep the lineup. That’s what makes it special.”

And they also tried to run it as casual dining, and he was like, “It’s not casual dining. It’s something different.”

He felt he was never respected by the corporate people. He was just an entrepreneur and he would mess things up.

So in 2003, Dave steps down from the board and he joins Indian Affairs in Washington. He goes to Washington. And at the end of his term in Washington, he tried to return to the board, but the board had no interest. He continued to be the face of the business, but they wouldn’t let him on the board or give him any input.

There were a bunch of shakeups, and then the business was then run by an ex McDonald’s guy who really tried to change it to more of a McDonald’s feel, like McRibs is really where they tried to take it. And Dave got so sick and tired of the changes that he severed all ties in 2014.

Then along comes 2016, and Dave Anderson gets a telephone call from a couple of people on the board who say, “We want you back.”

And it’s amazing how often we see this happen.

Look, this happened with Starbucks, right? Where Howard Schultz founds the company, he leaves the board, it’s being run by a Walmart guy, things go terrible, Schultz is brought back.

Apple Music drive out Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs is brought back.

And even a Wizard of Ads customer, Spence Diamonds, has had this happen.

Now, in this case, it was bought out, the founder leaves, things done as a mess, founder buys it back for pennies on the dollar and the thing is successful again.

So we’ve seen that story over and over again.

Dave Young:
I mean, we’re recording this shortly after the new year, and I’m thinking Southwest Airlines probably wishes Herb Kelleher was still alive.

Stephen Semple:
Hey, yeah, no kidding, right? Holy smokes.

Dave Young:
Because they’d bring him back in a flash.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, they may be trying digging him up right now and trying to resuscitate him.

The other thing I found that was so interesting is Dave’s Famous BBQ was really a chapter in the story of Dave Anderson’s life, from the music teacher saying to him, encouraging him, “You see things different.”

Stratosphere was different, doing a barbecue place in Wisconsin was different. At the time, doing large prizes in bingo halls was different. And he embraced that and he ran with it.

And this belief in himself that was instilled in him by Zig Ziegler. And then going to Vegas and seeing how, if you do something where you really manage all the senses … Like in Vegas, they manage all the senses. What you hear, what you touch, what you see, what you smell is all part of the experience. And he learned that, and he applied that to this barbecue shack.

So it was really not an overnight success. Even though it opened and was massively huge, it was not an overnight success. It was a chapter in the journey of the things that he had learned and had applied to what he was doing.

And I think sometimes we forget about the old lessons because it would be easy to go, “Well, that was Vegas. “

Dave Young:
That was those techniques. There’s no doubt about it,

Stephen Semple:
24 carat gold faucets in a place in the middle of Wisconsin? That was Vegas.

Dave Young:

That’s what gets people talking.

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Dave Young:
And so all of those things that you just mentioned make me believe that Dave’s Famous BBQ would’ve been successful for all of the same reasons.

The accidental magic of getting it named Famous Dave’s, all that does is switch your attention a little bit from the barbecue. So if it’s Dave’s Famous BBQ, you’re like, “Oh, whoa, this must be pretty good barbecue.” But if it’s Famous Dave’s BBQ, you go in a different direction in your mind and you’re like, “Who the hell is this guy? Who is this famous Dave?” Right?

Stephen Semple:
Right. Yes.

Dave Young:
And so there’s actually a little higher level of intrigue there, because you can say your barbecue’s famous; I’ll decide if I like it or not. Right? You know, McDonald’s is famous. Do I like it? I’ll eat it. Do I like it? I said I’ll eat it, because there’s nothing else, so I’ll eat it.

Probably the magic of the name change gets people’s attention, but that’s not where the magic really lied. The magic was in the restrooms and in the list of a hundred things that he was going to do better than anybody else.

Because any one of those hundred things depends on who the customer is. If you like clean restrooms, you’ll tell people about that place, right?

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
“It’s in the middle of Wisconsin, Marge, but the restrooms are unbelievable.” Right?

And so anything on that list, just do those things better than everybody else and be more generous about how you do them, you can’t help but succeed. The name was just the cherry on top.

Stephen Semple:
It’s that little bit of an unusual pairing that makes it interesting. But as you said, it wasn’t the name. The name certainly helped because there’s an intrigue to it, but it’s all of these things that he did and he embraced that made the place the blowout success that it was.

It’s really, really quite incredible. Quite incredible.

But I think often … I’ve worked with lots of people who’ve opened locations and how many of them have created lists of, “I want to be the best at this.” Often it’s more of the same.

We have a client, Rick Showers, who has an RV place out in Edmonton, Canada, used RV store. And what he did was incredible. He went and he hired an artist and they painted inside the building all of these outdoor scenes. So you step from the parking lot into this building and you feel like you’re stepping into the woods. You’re stepping into a camping atmosphere for buying your used RV.

That gets word of mouth, right?

Dave Young:
You can’t go wrong doing stuff like that.

Stephen Semple:
And today-

Dave Young:
You really can’t.

Stephen Semple:
… People will post about that. They will take selfies and post about it. And that creates this massive word of mouth and positive experience because it’s fun and it’s different.

I get so frustrated. We throw around today the word ‘engagement’, but that’s engagement. Engagement is grabbing ahold of the senses, creating things that people will talk about. That’s engagement.

Dave Young:
I love this story. I love it so much. I’m going to track him down at the next Dave Convention and-

Stephen Semple:
Shake his hand. All right. Well, shake his hand for me as well.

Dave Young:
Make sure you don’t have barbecue sauce on it.

Thank you for sharing this one, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:
All right. Thanks, David.

Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review.

And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com.

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