Philip Romano is an entrepreneur who came up with dozens of retail and restaurant concepts. A number of his restaurants grew into regional chains; six became national chains. He usually sold them so he could create another concept.
He’s also an investor and consultant, supportive but demanding of others’ ideas. When he sold one of his earliest restaurant successes, Fuddruckers, he had money to invest. He decided to support two Texas doctors who invented the heart stent but couldn’t get business loans or mentoring. His $250,000 investment turned into a $600 million pay off, about a third of it for Romano.
Romano calls it the best investment he ever made, not because of the money he made but because of the lives saved – including his own. Twenty-seven years later in 2013, as a 73-year-old on a daily run around Skaneateles, he had a cardiac attack. The stents his investment brought to market years earlier were inserted to undo blockages in his arteries.
He’s become a mentor, not just to his son Sam, who played lacrosse for Syracuse University, but to dozens of budding entrepreneurs in Texas, where he founded Trinity Groves, an incubator for retailers, especially for millennials who want to open restaurants and need investment, business support, and mentoring.
He had a lifelong love of art and eventually learned how to paint. Romano sold his first piece at age 68 and has now sold more than $1 million of his paintings.
And he’s a storyteller who loves to share his ideas and tell jokes. Romano put many of the stories in his latest book, “The MAD Entrepreneur: Making a Difference In the World, In Business and In Life.” The 277-page autobiography, available at philipjromano.com, was published this year and lays out his philosophies, his successes, his dislike for big corporations, and how he created and sold so many businesses.
Even though he made it big, Romano never forgot his Central New York roots. He relishes talking about meeting up with his buddies from Auburn. After an afternoon talking about business success and leadership in his home along Skaneateles Lake, the blunt and boisterous millionaire suddenly asks: “When you look at it, what defines success?”
He answers his own question: “Success isn’t measured only by money, right? Success is what a person’s done with his life.
“This past weekend, my buddies and I, we’re standing around, all together.”
Romano pauses, relishing the memory.
“I’ve got friends, man, they got kids, put them off to college, have a happy marriage and all. They’re going along in life happy. That’s success.
“Success is measured by what you've accomplished, not how much money you made, you know?
“Money is kind of applause for doing things people needed. When I make money on something, that makes me feel like I did something that people needed. Success is making a difference.”
Tell me about growing up and early leadership influences.
I was born in Auburn, New York. My mother and father, both Italian immigrants, came here, and I’m first-generation American. In fact, I was born on Christopher Columbus Day, 1939. I asked my mother (Rose) why she didn't name me Christopher.
She says: I couldn't.
I said: Why?
She says: Well, that's the milkman's name. (Laughter)
We left Auburn when I was a sophomore at West High School. My father (Samuel) was an electrician. He wanted to get out of the cold, so we packed the car, sold the house, and off we went to Florida.
I’m going to this strange, strange place. It was kinda hard because I’m losing all my old friends and my persona and whatever.
I decided I could be whoever I want to be down there, because they don't know what I was in the past.
So I remembered the people in Auburn that I looked up to, mentors, leaders and all the people that I followed or I was impressed with. I kinda studied the way they walked, how they talked and what they said, how they acted, the way they dressed, the whole thing. They showed confidence. They were good in sports. They didn't follow the trends, they set the trends. Every time they did something, people would talk about what they did. So we went down there to Florida, and I said, I'm gonna change my personality. I'm going to be one of them.
Well it worked!
Now, I'm an entrepreneur because I think it's survival of the unfittest, not survival of the fittest.
What do you mean by that?
I couldn't hold a job. (Laughter) I don't want somebody telling me what to do, or what not to do, watching to see if I do it. I'm not that kind of person.
I want to make the decisions. If they're good decisions, I reap the benefits. If they're bad decisions, I'll take the consequences.
I don't like to take orders. And so for me to survive, I had to create my own business. Being an entrepreneur means survival of the unfittest. I worked twice as hard than if somebody was watching me work and wanting to make me work.
What made the difference in being an entrepreneur was the paper route I had in Auburn, The Auburn Citizen.
I had 96 papers to deliver every day. I made $9 a week delivering papers. Every Friday, I had to collect the money. Wintertime came, I’m collecting, and I said to customers: How much would you pay me if I put the paper between the storm door and your door? Instead of going out in the snow, going out in the rain, going out in the cold, all you gotta do is open the door and you got the paper.
Some of them said, well, I'll give an extra quarter or something like that. Or I'll give you a hot chocolate. Some said, I won't give you anything at all.
Well, I did it for everybody anyway. I ended up making, I think it was about $29 a week rather than $9 a week.
It gave people something they needed. It made their life more convenient, made it easier. It let them set the value. Bingo!
That kinda became part of my creed. It got me service motivated. When I start a business, I don't think about profit. I think about sales. In the absence of sales, there's nothing but pain.
When I get my sales peaked, then I'll start thinking about how I can make profit out of those sales. Without the sales, you can't make profit.
Sales are more important. So, you think about sales and not about profit. Every business should be service motivated and not profit motivated.
How did you end up in the restaurant business?
Well, I was in college – Florida Atlantic University. I opened up two karate schools, and I was making more money than the professors teaching me. In one Saturday morning class, the father of one of the kids I’m teaching said: You know, I'm gonna open some restaurants. I wonder if you’d take a look at it with me and get involved, be a partner with me.
Now that seemed like a dream – food, booze. I looked at it and said: OK. I like it.
I sold my karate schools and invested with him. The restaurant was a success – it was an Italian restaurant called The Gladiator. And it was good, but he was a real jerk. No people skills. No human dignity.
So I said: Well you got to go or I got to go.
We decided on the price, and I had the choice to buy him out or let him buy me out.
My father said he’d get the money for me, but I told him no. He's a hardworking electrician, and I didn’t know where he could get the money. I said: I'll just let him buy me out, and I’ll go onto something else.
He says: No, no, no. I'll get the money for you.
He came back in a couple weeks and said: I got the money for you – he mortgaged their home.
To this day, I say it's not the sweet smell of success that makes you work hard. It’s the fear of failure.
Give me your advice to be an effective business owner and leader.
Well, it takes caring. You gotta care. You gotta be there. You gotta care about it being right. You gotta get upset when it's not right, and you got to make it right. You got to understand what makes it work. And you got to lead your people, teach them and give them a goal.
You’re setting standards.
I used to drive my son to school and I always told him five things you have to be to be a good person.
Number one, you gotta have principles. Principles are doing what you said you’re going to do, keeping your word.
Next, you gotta have responsibility. You gotta be responsible for making the right decisions, and you gotta be responsible for taking the consequences if it's not the right decision.
The third one is integrity. You gotta be honest, truthful. You don't lie, you don't cheat, and you don't lie to yourself.
Number four, you gotta communicate. You gotta tell people how you feel. Don't let them tell you how you should think. You think for yourself. You express yourself, and you communicate your message.
Number five has three things in it: God, patriotism and charity.
I said: Sam, I trust you because you're my son, and I don't trust your friends because I don't know them. But if you have this value system, you're going to pick people with the same values. And they’re going to pick you. Now, you've got a peer group you could exist in, a peer group that’s a safe haven.
Then I made him a chart, a roadmap, an organizational chart to apply all that. I have it in my book.
You could apply this to your personal life, to any business. It’s back to those five things. A good successful business needs those.
What attributes do you see in poor leadership?
I'll tell you what attributes are missing. Human dignity. You gotta identify with what you're doing, and with the people that you're leading. You've got to understand them, understand what they want, what's going to motivate them and go forward with it. They’ve got to trust you. You got to treat them like you'd like to be treated. If you have to reprimand them, reprimand like you'd like to be reprimanded. You'd like to be patted on the back, so pat them on the back.
It’s gotta be sincere. You got to treat people like you'd like to be treated.
When I want to hire people, I make sure they get an understanding of what they're supposed to do and how to do what they're supposed to do. It’s not implicit. I make it very explicit – I put it on paper, and I make them sign it.
I said, now you know, if you're ever going to be let go from this company, it's not me that's letting you go. It's you. Cause you're not doing what you said you're going to do.
I'm going to give you all the tools to do your job. I'm going to give you the information to do your job. I'm going to give you all the support I could possibly give you.
The leader has the vision of what it's supposed to be. Then, the leader’s gotta support their people.
Does a successful leader get upset when somebody leaves and goes off and is successful on their own?
No. No! I help them. It's like mentoring them or helping them to succeed. It puts a feather in my cap that they were able to do that. You’re helping them to succeed.
I do a lot of mentoring now. I want them to succeed. Do you know much about Trinity Groves? Myself and another guy started buying up land in Dallas. It was all defunct and bad. It had everything – crack houses, old abandoned truck terminals. Everything. We accumulated about a hundred acres. We bought a lot of it cheap – nobody wanted it.
We had all this land and it was like a dog chasing a car. What do you do with it when you catch it?
I'm a firm believer that the velocity of small businesses being created is the basis for our economy. We ended up saying that there is a new market out there. Millennials want something different.
So we got all these old truck terminals and stuff. We divided them up into space for restaurants, 2,500 square feet, some outside dining, seating for about 120 people max.
We had like a Shark Tank. We got young people that want to create their own concept, control their own destiny, who want to be entrepreneurs.
There were certain parameters to opening each one of these units. You could not put more than $500,000 in a unit. It had to be owner operated and had to address millennial needs. They had to do a certain amount of sales, and they had to do a meet a certain profit matrix. No guarantees on the lease.
We made them do a five-page plan. We tasted their food two or three times. Everything.
We finally chose some and say: OK, we’ll let you have a unit.
First thing they say: Well, I don't have $500,000.
We knew this was going to happen. So, myself and a bunch of people in Dallas, other businessmen, we went out and we started an entrepreneurial fund. We put in about $14 million.
So, we said: OK, we'll put up $500,000. We’ll own 50 percent of your concept. We will be there to help make this work for you. We'll charge 6 percent rent and a 5 percent management fee. That's two and a half from you and two and a half from us because we own 50 percent of it.
And we're going to be there to help make you successful.
If they don't make it, they get the hook, and we get somebody else in there. People are waiting in line to come in and open with us. It doesn't cost them anything.
It’s just going bananas. It helps young people start businesses and brings up the tax base in defunct areas. The fund is going on its sixth year and has about 12 percent return.
The weekly “CNY Conversation" features Q&A interviews about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. To suggest a leader for a Conversation, contact Stan Linhorst at StanLinhorst@gmail.com. Last week featured Rabbi Daniel Fellman of Temple Society of Concord.
