How this Restaurant Owner Runs 4 Restaurants and Still Has a Life

Hey there, restaurant pros. It’s David Scott Peters, and welcome to the Restaurant Prosperity Formula podcast. For over two decades, I’ve been guiding restaurant owners to success with the proven principles of something I call the Restaurant Prosperity Formula. I originally created the formula based on the daily practices of the most successful restaurateurs I coached, and it’s now the foundation of what I teach restaurant owners like you so you can achieve success.

What do I mean by success? Success is a restaurant owner who dictates the terms of their life and their bank account instead of their restaurant dictating those things for them. Success is a restaurant owner who has freedom from the restaurant and the financial freedom they never thought possible. How you define success is up to you, but I do know the way to achieving it is using the Restaurant Prosperity Formula.

This season, I’m diving even deeper into the core elements of the formula: leadership, systems, training, accountability, and taking action. Along with my insights, you’ll hear from special guests, industry experts, and inspiring success stories from fellow restaurant owners who’ve turned their businesses around and found their definition of success.

In this episode, number 131, our guest is Matt Jacobs. Matt is a restaurant entrepreneur based in western Pennsylvania, owning and operating Ben Franklin’s Taproom and three Jersey Mike’s locations. With a passion for leadership, growth, and community, he built a reputation for cultivating a strong team culture and delivering exceptional guest experiences. From starting as a single-unit operator to expanding across multiple locations, Matt’s journey reflects his commitment to scaling with purpose. He brings real-world insight and a people-first mindset to every conversation.

In this episode, Matt will share his journey from covering line-position shifts in his family restaurant, managing the business, and having a full-time job outside of the restaurant to now owning four restaurants, where he only shows up to meetings with his managers and has time for his family and growing his businesses.

Let’s get started.

Matt, I want to thank you so much for doing this with me today.

Thanks, David. I appreciate it. I’m happy to help and jump on a call and spread some knowledge.

Well, you and I have now known each other, I want to say two or three years. Are we up to three? I think we’re coming up on three.

July 2021.

Oh my goodness. We’re coming up on it.

Four years.

Four years. That is crazy talk. It feels like yesterday. Now, we met obviously four years ago. You were in a very different space. I’m going to have you tell people about your restaurant and where you were in just a second. But I can tell you that, from an outsider looking in, you were, dare I say, a typical restaurant. Family, you grew faster than you expected. In fact, you’ve got a story of how you grew that wasn’t going to be a restaurant and turned into one, which is one of these, ta-da, guess what we’re doing now? All the challenges any restaurant faces, you had them. And sometimes in spades because you’re in a really small town. So when people say they can’t find people because nobody’s there, you live it every single day.

What’s been really satisfying to see is that you not only took the challenge on and became extremely successful at what you do, but you’ve systemized your business. You’ve changed what you do, which we’ll talk about, to a point where you have freed up time. You actually had a second career on top of this, and now you’re a full-time restaurant owner with multiple locations. I don’t want to give everything away, but you’re pretty damn impressive, brother. So do me a favor. Tell everybody a little bit about your restaurant, maybe a little about the story, how you started with your family, how it wasn’t supposed to be a restaurant, and kind of where you are and what it’s like.

Yeah, so we opened our first restaurant in 2016. It’s called Ben Franklin’s Taproom and Grill. I was in school for physical therapy at the time when we opened, and that was going to be my career route. We just opened this as sort of a little side hustle. It was a convenience store and a six-pack shop, so people could come in and mix and match bottles of beer to go, grab some convenience store items, and then hit the road and be out of there.

In order to sell six-packs in Pennsylvania, we had to have a small food menu, but it was easy. It wasn’t anything complex, so it was easy to execute. That’s how our story started. From there, some things changed with the laws in Pennsylvania, and we had to either close the doors or change our concept. We decided to do a full-blown, full-service restaurant. We went with that path because people did like the food that we served, and we thought we could expand upon that and grow it from there.

That was two years after we opened, in 2018. Going from a convenience store to a full-service restaurant is no easy task, and we had to learn a lot. At this point, I had graduated and was working full-time as a physical therapist. My dad was working full-time as a heating and air conditioning guy, and my two brothers were also full-time non-restaurant people. We were operating the restaurant full-time as well. We hit our maximum level of stress, along with everything else that comes with running a restaurant. But anyway, that’s where we started, and we merged into a full-service restaurant from there.

And now, currently, we’re going to have a total of four restaurants: one full-service restaurant and three Jersey Mike’s franchises.

Which is amazing.

So that’s where we’re at.

And you think about it, I want people to understand. Where are you exactly? Where in Pennsylvania? Little tiny postage stamp of a town. Where are you?

We’re in New Castle, Pennsylvania, about an hour north of Pittsburgh. It used to be a bigger town, and then, like every other steel town in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, everybody started moving elsewhere to find new jobs once the steel industry left. So it shrunk a lot, and it’s a smaller town now.

So with that in mind, you started as a convenience store serving food, turned into a full-service restaurant, and everybody’s got a full-time job or career. You’ve got this restaurant that’s pulling at you. Tell me a little bit about what life was like before we met. What were some of your major challenges?

So, major challenges. We were the ones in the store every day making sure everything was getting done. Time-wise, it sucked a lot of time out of our lives. At the same time we were transitioning to a full-service restaurant, I met my wife. It was hard for me to hang out with her or do anything with her. The same thing was true for the rest of us, my brothers and my dad. We had no free time to do anything.

Time was the biggest struggle. As we grew as a business, we kept adding employees. Labor was high, and we did that because we didn’t have enough time. We thought, let’s just keep adding people to the shifts to compensate for that and help us get where we need to go.

So, time and labor were issues, and we didn’t really have any idea of our food costs or anything like that. I’m sure that was an issue, but we never measured it. We never did inventories, and we never had recipes or anything like that. We just ran the business and kept going. We never organized anything into any sort of system, and that shot us in the foot and caused a lot more stress and headaches than anything else.

Now, you had sales, though. I mean, if I remember correctly, sales were not an issue. While we always want more sales, you had enough volume to pay for your debt service. You had enough volume that it should have been a profitable restaurant. Were you making money, or were you just getting by? And if you were making money, was it just because four of you volunteered every day in the business?

We were making money, but we weren’t taking any of it. We were reinvesting it into the business. Because we all had full-time jobs outside the restaurant, we were able to do that. It actually made us grow faster and faster, and we couldn’t keep up.

I think that was our biggest problem. We weren’t making a ton of money, but it was enough to allow us to expand and add a patio one year. The next year, we added a whole new bar and expanded slowly into different areas to make it a better environment for our customers and help grow our business.

That growth over the two to three years when we did all that is what really made us feel like we were lost and needed a lot of help.

So you put in a ton of energy, a lot of effort, a lot of joy in your community and your business, and all those things. You’re three years down the pike. You haven’t paid yourself, but you’ve built a beautiful business. What was going on that made you sit there and say, I need help? And what did you try before you found me? Did you do anything? Did you go to seminars? Did you find a coach? What were some of the things you immediately went after?

I want to say it was 2019 at this point. We were well into being a full-service restaurant. I happened to be bartending, and I knew a guy who owns three restaurants down the road. I was talking with him one night while we were sitting there, and I asked, “So how do you run three restaurants at one time? What allows you to be that organized to be able to do that?”

He gave me a website: RestaurantOwner.com. It was a great starting point for me. It allowed me to start learning some key terminology and get a little more organized than we were. The thing lacking with that is that there are a lot of resources all at once, and it doesn’t give you a blueprint on where to start and where to finish. That was lacking for us, but it did help us get a little ahead.

From there, we’re probably into 2020. I probably messed around with that for six months to a year, just implementing some systems here and there. Then COVID hit. At this point, I was a physical therapist, and surgeries were getting shut down, so there was really nobody who needed physical therapy. I got laid off from my employer.

When I got laid off, I didn’t realize at the time how much freedom that gave me to work on the restaurant. I realized this was a great opportunity to really dive deep into the restaurant and get it organized.

From RestaurantOwner.com, I started listening to several podcasts. I came across one that happened to be talking about Matt Plapp and his marketing program. I reached out to Matt and signed up with him. In his welcome kit, he sent a book written by you. I thought, well, I’m going to read this book since it was free. I read it cover to cover and thought, holy smokes, this is exactly what we need.

I talked to my dad and my brothers about it. We reached out to you, and that’s how we got connected.

Well, I can appreciate the fact that you went to RestaurantOwner.com. I tell everybody they should almost be a member for almost no money. They have every system in the world you can imagine. The downside is that if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll never find it. It’s such a wealth of information.

I happen to know Jim Laube, who’s the founder, and Joe Erickson, who was his partner at the time. I think they’re the salt of the earth. I think it’s a fantastic site, and every restaurant owner should be on that site. You would think I’d want to tear you away from them, but no, they’ve got some great stuff. The challenge is that if you don’t know what you’re looking for, there’s so much there that you may never find it. That’s kind of the difference in what we do. We tell you exactly what you’re supposed to do, and here’s the solution.

Now, on that journey, you start exploring marketing, you find Matt Plapp, you find the book, and you say, okay, I need help and I’m willing to go get a coach. What was that like? A lot of restaurant owners balk at consultants and coaches. They’re thinking, why the hell? In our industry, it’s almost frowned upon. You don’t know how to run your restaurant? You need somebody else to help you?

In every facet of our lives, we have somebody who mentors or coaches us, and we’re much more successful. But as a restaurateur, it’s almost frowned upon. What was that decision like as a family to say, we’re going to reach out, and this guy potentially is going to coach us?

For me, it was an easy decision. I listened to a lot of podcasts, and they all say that you should always listen to outside sources to help you grow your business because they give you a view that you sometimes can’t see.

For me, it was an easy decision, but I also had to talk about it with my brothers and my dad. For the most part, they just had a few questions. What really sold them was that I thought this would give us the freedom we needed from the restaurant. That allowed them to get on board with it.

I have no issues learning from people who are smarter than me in an area. I realized at that point that we didn’t know how to run restaurants. I was a physical therapist. My dad was a heating and air conditioning guy, one brother worked in heating and air conditioning, and my other brother was an engineer. Between the four of us, we had zero restaurant experience. Anybody who had run restaurants longer than us was somebody we could have learned from.

I knew I wanted to do it. I convinced my dad and brothers to do it because of the freedom we thought we could get from it. That’s what allowed us to jump on board.

Now, I think a lot of people listening are thinking about the family aspect. We’ve got two brothers and a dad involved. It can be chaotic and heated at times in many restaurants and families. But I take my hat off to you and your family because they gave you the ability to run it, whether willingly or not.

When you got laid off and became the key guy there, with the exception of some menu things your dad held on to, they gave you the freedom to make decisions. There were some things where I’d say, “Get rid of that,” and he’d say, “No, I’m holding on to that for Dad.”

I think that’s really important. When you’ve got family involved, one person still has to make those decisions. Would you agree that’s kind of how they set you up for success, by being willing to let you go and do it?

Yeah, 100%. If they wanted to argue every little bit of the way, it wouldn’t have worked at all. It would have caused more problems than good. They knew that if I signed up for something, I was going to execute it, and they were okay with me taking the reins on it. Obviously, I’d consult with them along the way on certain decisions if they were more important.

It’s crucial for everybody to be aligned and on the same page, allowing one person to move forward with things and work toward the betterment of the restaurant.

I think that’s a critical lesson for people who have families and run businesses. The majority of our members are family-owned businesses and independent restaurants. When you’ve got people who aren’t on board with change, it ain’t going to happen. It just becomes drudgery to come into work and think, I’ve got to sell this thing, and somebody’s going to tell me no and explain why it can’t be done.

The truth of the matter is, I’m going to guess you’ve made some decisions that didn’t work out, but the ones that did work out were freaking home runs. That’s kind of what entrepreneurship is, right? You’ve got to make a decision. You’ve got to make change. If not, you stagnate and die.

What were some of the first changes you made when we started working together?

The first thing was going through the whole restaurant and making checklists for everything. That allowed us to stop retraining people every single night on how to properly do their tasks.

Instead, when you make a highly detailed checklist for each position that explains what employees are supposed to do and how good the work should be when it’s finished, it frees up a lot of your time to focus on other areas of the restaurant.

The checklist was the first thing we knocked out and implemented. Our general manager, who is still with us, was our implementer. We both worked on that, and that’s where we started.

When did you start seeing some changes? I preach checklists all the time. I talk about Jolt, how we buy a year subscription for all of our members to Jolt. While it’s fancy and online, you could do it on paper. The realization is that there are some advantages when it comes to accountability.

People don’t always look at me and understand why I keep preaching checklists. They say checklists don’t work, and so on. I think every time we meet with a member, the checklists come up because they truly are the keystone to all your systems.

I always say that if you can’t get a manager to follow a checklist, what the hell makes you think they’re going to wake up on a Sunday morning excited about taking inventory accurately and on time? It ain’t going to happen. It’s about changing that culture.

As you started implementing checklists, you eventually got into key-item tracking, waste tracking, recipe cards, menu engineering, and just about all the systems, including dollars for labor and hours worked. You’ve been with me for a long time.

In those early days, when did you start seeing results? When did you start saying, “Hey, my main thing was to get me the hell out of the restaurant,” or “My main thing was to make money that everybody could take as a distribution”? When did you start seeing results, and what was that like?

After the first couple of weeks, we started seeing results from the checklists. They freed up our time to focus on other things.

The biggest thing we noticed after that was that we needed to organize our kitchen and focus on that. We created recipe-costing cards and made sure everything was prepared the same way every time so the customer received a consistent, delicious meal.

We got that out of the way, and I think that’s when we started noticing results. We were able to walk away from pretty much all the shifts three to six months into the program, somewhere in that time frame. It was great. It freed up a lot of our time and allowed us to focus on growing the business even more.

I’d say three to six months was the timeframe, and the biggest thing we saw was that we were no longer working the shifts. After that, we started focusing on getting our labor under control, seeing where we needed to put people and how many people we needed on each shift. From there, we became a lot more profitable.

Were there any unexpected changes? You were looking for freedom and money, but was there something you didn’t expect that happened as you went through the program?

You’re making me think back now. That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a great answer off the top of my head. We’re talking four years ago, David, so it’s hard to remember something super specific.

The biggest thing for me was getting my freedom back. That’s the main thing I remember. Getting my time back to enjoy life again was the biggest surprise, and I wasn’t expecting it to happen so quickly.

All right, let’s talk about that because it segues into two things. In those four years, you’ve grown your family. Now there are children in the picture. You’ve also decided to become a franchisee with Jersey Mike’s.

I can tell you, I used to be a franchisor. You and I had conversations as you were looking at it, going through the discovery process, and discussing the legal side of things. We talked about the business of franchising and so on.

You sold me on the fact that this was the right move because I initially thought there was no way in hell you wanted to be a franchisee. You’re an independent restaurant operator. The truth is that you found a good franchisor, which isn’t always easy to do. It’s a solid economic system and a good brand.

You’re doing so well that, in a very short period of time, you’re looking at opening your third location. Two are open, and you’ve got a third coming.

How does that happen? You go from running day-to-day shifts and bartending to now having four restaurants, like the guy you were talking to at the bar. How much time do you spend in the restaurants today? How is it possible to have four restaurants and the freedom you were looking for?

I think the biggest thing is that you have to have a great team and training program to allow you to do that, along with systems that help your team run the restaurant properly.

You have to have all the systems in place and run those systems every single day. You train your team to run them, so everybody knows how to manage the restaurant properly. That allowed us to step back and examine what we wanted to do.

In February 2022, my daughter was born. That’s when we went to get some food because we didn’t want to eat hospital food. I went down the road and saw a Jersey Mike’s. It was the first time I’d been in one, and I fell in love with it. I thought, this is a great concept.

I never would have been able to do that without great training systems and key people in the places we needed them. That’s number one: the team, training, and systems.

From there, we realized how much less time we were spending in the restaurant. I still do the bookkeeping for our restaurant, so I have a little bit more to do than most people. If I were to get rid of that, I’d probably go in a couple of times a week just to have meetings with the managers.

For the most part, at our family restaurant, we have a solid team. They’re great, I love them, and I couldn’t do it without them. They give us the freedom to continue expanding and make other people’s lives better as well.

One reason we wanted to continue expanding was to grow a bigger business and allow people to be promoted from within.

I kind of got lost rambling there for a second, but that’s the main thing. You have to have a good team in place. That freed us up, and now I’m only in the restaurant a couple of hours a week, just having manager meetings. Once I reached that point, I knew we were ready to start other adventures. That’s when we jumped into Jersey Mike’s.

And you’re crushing it. Let me ask you real quick about Jersey Mike’s. You bought a franchise. They come with systems and support. Were you better prepared for that as a franchisee? Do you find that what you’ve learned in this program is helping you as an owner there, perhaps in areas they don’t cover? What’s it like going from being an independent operator to being a franchisee?

Obviously, Jersey Mike’s has a lot of its own systems already in place, including training materials. For our first opening, I was almost overprepared because I knew everything that would need to be done in advance to run a restaurant successfully and keep my time free.

Some of my systems are a little more specific than theirs, so I still used some of your systems, though maybe not all of them, and translated them over to Jersey Mike’s.

I’d say the biggest thing I get from this program is accountability and holding people accountable to the systems. That translates to any business. As long as you have systems in place, you can use them with any type of franchise, any independent restaurant, or quick-service restaurant. It doesn’t matter. The same principles apply.

Yeah, in fact, the systems you’re using at Jersey Mike’s are the same stuff. It’s theirs, but there’s nothing new in the restaurant business.

I try to tell people I’m not the smartest guy in the world, and you and I have been drinking, so you know that. You’ve seen me in Vegas. But the fact of the matter is, it’s math. It’s counting stuff. You may call it something else, but there’s really nothing revolutionarily new in the restaurant business.

It comes down to deciding you’re not going to run the business the old way. The old way says the more hours you put in and the harder you work, the more successful you’ll be, but that can turn you into a prisoner of your business.

Instead, you can actually run one or more locations without having to be there daily. You have to lead the business, hold people accountable, and make sure you’re leading your team, but you don’t have to physically be there seven days a week to make it work.

Whether it’s a franchise or an independent restaurant, the same principles apply. The difference is how much responsibility falls on you versus the brand, a proven system, and marketing that will hopefully pay off and bring customers in.

What’s your life like today? Just life and business.

Today, my wife and I have two kids, and a third one on the way, due in October. I know. Life’s going to be great. We’re also due to open our next store in October, so my life is going to be busy that month. But I’m preparing now to get ready for it so I can spend less time in the stores.

Going back a little bit, a lot of people at Jersey Mike’s said to expect to be in the store for six months to a year before getting organized. One thing I want to highlight is that, because of all the experience we gained from this program and learning how to run a restaurant properly, I was off the schedule at our first Jersey Mike’s within one month.

I thought that was absolutely amazing. I’m aiming for the same thing with this next location so I can spend time with my wife and newborn at home in October.

We’re also always looking to improve our current businesses. We strategize a lot. We have weekly meetings as owners to discuss which direction we want to take the business.

For the most part, I have manager meetings every Thursday. That’s my main meeting day. Outside of that, the other four days during the week are for research and development and figuring out new things we can do to grow our business.

That’s my day-to-day. I love working, so I don’t really have a whole lot of hobbies outside of that. My wife and kids are my hobbies outside work. Other than that, I work and hang out with my family. That’s where I’m at today.

That’s phenomenal. I also want to share with people that you’re one of my Mastery Plus members. They’re probably wondering why the hell this guy would stay for four years.

You started as a Restaurant Transformation Intensive, or RTI, member. You were a top performer and got invited into the group, and so on. It might blow people’s minds to think that you joined a program, yet you’re here four years later.

Why are you here four years later? You’ve learned all my stuff, right? What keeps you coming back and continuing to work with the Mastery Plus group and us as coaches?

Every day is different. New things pop up within the business that you’ve never dealt with before. When you have a group you can go to, ask questions, and bounce ideas off, that is key. That is everything.

They might have already run into the same issue and could save you time and money simply by asking the group or the coaches a question.

Every day is a new puzzle, and sometimes you have to figure it out with help from others. That’s why I’m still part of the group. It’s a great community we’ve built together. We’ve gotten to know each other really well, and it’s great to have that support.

Plus, when you talk about community in the restaurant business, you may have friends who are entrepreneurs, but they don’t understand the restaurant business. The only people who understand what you’ve walked through are the ones who walk in your shoes. I swear nobody else understands.

Exactly. Restaurants are their own beast.

Absolutely. Two more questions. The first is, what would you tell somebody who’s been circling for a while, listening to my podcast, looking at my YouTube videos, reading my book, or maybe reading the blog, but hasn’t taken action? What would you tell somebody thinking about joining my program?

I’d say just jump in and do it. It’s worth every single penny.

The money we’ve saved from learning the systems, and not only the money but the time as well, has made us thousands and thousands of dollars because we’ve been able to pursue other ventures and grow our business.

It’s also helped our employees. We were able to improve their lives because we could give them promotions as our business grew. That’s a great feeling. It’s not just about helping yourself, but also helping your team members who are always there for you and willing to help whenever you need it.

It’s great to do that. I think that’s another thing I wasn’t expecting from this program: the ability to help your team grow with you and support them throughout their lives. It’s a great feeling.

I’d say jump in and hit the ground running with all of your systems.

I appreciate that. Last question. This has been great. If there’s one thing we didn’t talk about that you’d like to share, a favorite book, a quote, or something that can help everybody who’s listening, what would it be?

The most recent book I read is called Traction. It’s a great book. It’s another business book, but it helps us organize communication within our management team now that we have multiple locations. It’s something we can add to the systems we’re already using.

It’s called Traction, and it’s about the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS. It’s a great book.

It’s a phenomenal system. I think we now have three members using it, and another three are about to jump on board. We had a coach come out and speak at our Mastery Plus meeting. You weren’t able to make it to that one because you had a store opening.

With that said, we’re operating it internally in our business as well. What I tell people is that EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and the book Traction are must-reads. It takes what we do and puts it on steroids.

We’re the restaurant-specific operating system. We help with culture and management, and so on. But I always talk about the first piece of the Restaurant Prosperity Formula being leadership. The EOS system is leadership on steroids. You can’t help but lead your company forward because you’re specific and clear about your core values, who’s the right fit for your team, your rocks and goals, your to-dos, and your challenges.

There’s an actual system to make sure you’re paying attention to those things on a quarterly basis. I can’t wait to see your results because I think you’ve been using the system for a few months now. I’ve seen the results other members have achieved, so I’m going to back your recommendation 100 percent. That book, Traction, is a must-read for any entrepreneur.

Absolutely.

Dude, I want to thank you so much for doing this. I couldn’t be any prouder to see the changes you’ve made. Just like your family was willing to trust you because you would take action, it’s a pleasure to see what you’ve done.

You even talked me out of talking you out of being a franchisee. You’re already on fire, so it’s very difficult for people like you to follow somebody else’s system. But you’ve done exactly what you’ve done with me. You said, “I’m going to follow the damn system, and it’s going to work.”

It’s pretty incredible to see your success, so I appreciate you very much.

Thank you. I appreciate you, and I appreciate you inviting me to jump on the call and spread some knowledge. Thank you.

Hey, that was an awesome episode. I want to thank you for taking the time to take action on building a better, more prosperous restaurant.

Before you go, I want to give you three thoughts.

By combining leadership and taking action with systems and training, all checked by accountability, you’re on your way to creating prosperity for you and your restaurant.

I also have something I need from you. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you happen to listen to podcasts. By leaving us a review, other restaurant pros seeking this information will be able to find it. I read the reviews, and hearing how this information has benefited you does wonders for me.

Finally, if you find any of the discussions helpful, share them. The more restaurant pros who have access to them, the better we become as an industry.

For more restaurant resources or to get in contact with me, connect with me at DavidScottPeters.com.

Be passionate about what you’re doing. Be persistent, but more importantly, become better and help everyone around you become better, and your restaurant is going to kick some ass.