Restaurants and Rolph

LINDSBORG — David Rolph did not plan to go into the restaurant business. The young man from Minneapolis, Kan., graduated in 1970 from the University of Iowa with a degree in history.

He wanted to teach college. But first he needed to make some money to pay for graduate school. So he went to work for Pizza Hut, managing stores in New York City and San Francisco. At the age of 23, he was the area general manager for the San Francisco Bay Area.

He and his brother, Darrell, formed a partnership, Sasnak Management, and eventually developed 26 Pizza Huts, which they sold to PepsiCo in 1994.

Rolph’s company now owns 18 Carlos O’Kelly’s Mexican Cafes and 41 Applebee’s franchises.

The brothers developed a real estate investment trust, an REIT, called U.S. Restaurant Properties, which they took public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1996.

His son, Jon, an aspiring filmmaker, agreed to work for his father for six months after graduating from Baylor. Eighteen years later, Jon is CEO of the company, which he renamed Thrive Restaurant Group. They’ve opened three Home Grown eateries and Peace Love and Pie shop, all in Wichita.

Rolph, of Wichita, is chairman of the company.

“I had no idea I had the chops to do this until I started doing it,” he told an audience of mostly students Thursday afternoon at Bethany College. “If you keep your radar out and you see an opportunity and you follow it and apply yourself, you can get some pretty astonishing results. You can evolve the chops to do it.”

Rolph gave the keynote talk for the Carl F. and Catherine Herman Mauney Distinguished Lectureship Series in Economics and Business.

“It’s important that you understand this point, that you cannot tell where you’re going to go,” he said. “You can’t even imagine where you’re going to go, and I certainly couldn’t. The important thing to know is I’m not some savant, just a regular guy that caught a wave.”

The wave he caught was a lot of working women who came home at the end of the day and said, “We’re eating out tonight.”

The restaurant business has become a lot tougher, he said.

One big change is the decline of malls, he said. Central Mall in Salina used to attract shoppers from as far west as Hays and as far north as Nebraska. But with some of the anchor stores — Sears and Dillard's — gone, he said, the Carlos O’Kelly’s Inspired Mex there is facing challenges.

With fewer people coming into the mall to shop, fewer people are eating at the restaurant.

“You have to work really hard to get people’s attention,” he said, “because they aren’t streaming by your store all day long.”

He and Jon are thinking of ways to compensate. Facebook advertising, for example, can pinpoint customers and be cost-effective. When they were sending out coupons, it cost $4 to $6 for each coupon that was returned.

They also institutes a “cultivate kindness” attitude in their stores. The goal is to make somebody’s day better.

"If you start looking for opportunities to help, you’ll find plenty of opportunities to help,” Rolph said.

It was a busy day for Rolph and the Bethany business department. Rolph spoke to two advanced business classes, besides giving the keynote.

The morning started with the renovation of the lecture hall in Nelson Science Center. Besides paint, ceiling tiles, carpet and desks, air conditioning and a sound system were installed.