Beef O' Brady's

Where's the Beef?
By Jonathan MazeAs published in: Franchise Times - August 2008
At a glance
Beef O'Brady'sHeadquarters: Tampa, Florida
Franchise fee: $30,000
Initial investment: $280,000-$550,000
Royalty: 4 percentThere is a big problem in the casual dining sector these days: too many restaurants. So what's a casual-dining chain to do these days when it wants to expand?
For Beef O'Brady's, the answer is simple: Go where the others don't - cities like little Alachua, Florida, a small suburb on the outskirts of Gainsville that boasts all of 7,500 residents. "We can go into those markets and be quite successful," said company President Nick Vojnovic. "Big markets like Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago are overbuilt. They have too any seats."
Beef O'Brady's has used that strategy to build a strong presence in Florida, where it has more locations than Applebee's, Vojnovic said, and to blossom from 157 to 260 locations in the last four years - a period when many of its competitors were struggling to hold their own.
The chain was started in Tampa by Jim Melody, who until then had been an insurance guy. "He had no vision of building a chain," Vojnovic said. "He was trying to feed his family."
The first restaurant was 1,200 square feet and served a simple menu of steak and fries. The name came from his mother, whose maiden name was O'Brady. Business didn't do well at first, but three things happened to give the restaurant a big boost.
First, the Boston Red Sox drafted Jody Reed, a kid from Tampa who would go on to play 11 years in Major League Baseball. The restaurant already had a television, and customers suggested a satellite dish so they watch all of Reed's games. Then the company served beer and wine and added a game room, becoming one of the area's first sports pubs.
Nick Vojnovic, president of Beef O'Brady's, which is focusing on suburbs on cities' outskirts.The last big break came from a friend of Melody's from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who had a recipe for chicken wing sauce. At the time, wings were a novelty item at best in most of the country, especially in Florida.The wings took off. Today, the chain sells 80 million chicken wings a year, and wings are the most popular dish in the Florida restaurants. They're still popular in restaurants outside the state, but some other items are more popular, Vojnovic said.
Melody grew the chain until it had about 30 stores, mostly around Tampa. By the mid-1990s Beef's had grown too large, so Melody sold the chain to a pair of casual-dining veterans, Chuck Winship and Gene Knippers, former Chili's franchisees.
They immediately took steps to bring the franchise to the next level. The new owners updated the décor and expanded the menu, which until then had been "very basic," Vojnovic said. Beef's has a typical spots pub menu, with burgers, sandwiches, ribs and wings. The changes allowed the new owners to accelerate the chain's growth.
O'Brady's focused on owner-operated units in smaller towns, where they became part of the community, holding fund-raisers for churches and Little League. While it's a chain of sports pubs, it caters to families, so units don't have pool tables, dart boards or cuss words. Units are built in strip centers anchored by grocery stores in residential areas, rather than commercial areas with large concentrations of restaurants. The idea is to give families a more convenient dining option.
The company is test-marketing additional alcoholic offerings in the Midwest, where some customers have clamored for more options, but they're trying to keep that to a minimum, with no tequila signs or happy hour pricing to keep out hard drinkers, Vojnovic said.
Yet the additional alcohol sales have helped boost revenue at stores where the drinks have been offered and the company is bringing them to more restaurants. "We're eliminating the veto vote" among diners who don't want to go to Beef's because of its limited drink selection. "We've been under more pressure to add a liquor component."
The chain is adding units despite a tough environment for casual dining, but the company is moving aggressively, planning to double the number of locations within the next five years. "It will turn," Vojnovic said of the restaurant environment. "We want to keep growing."