As I walked through a Baltimore hotel lobby, I heard someone call my name.  Startled, I turned toward the sound and saw a man coming toward me.   As I saw him, I remembered meeting him six months earlier in California.  His name was Bill Kling and he was the chief financial officer of The Cheesecake Factory.   As we shook hands, he introduced me to the man he was with, David Overton.  David was the C.E.O. and chairman of the restaurant chain.   More importantly, he was the founder of what was to become one of the biggest – over two billion – and most successful restaurant concepts in the country.

 David had just five restaurants all in California.  But those five were enormously successful.  As I think back to that chance meeting, I can’t recall whether I invited them to dinner that night or they invited me.  But the three of us went to one of Baltimore finest restaurants, The Prime Rib.  I found it odd when we got there that, David asked for the biggest table in the room.   We were shown to a large round table near a piano.  It had sitting room for eight, possibly ten, people.  As the three of us sat down I felt as though I was at a wedding where some people didn’t show up.   It was to be my introduction to the difference between an entrepreneur and a corporate executive.   

The reason we needed a “wedding” table was that we were to order 10-12 dinners that night.  When the food came, it was overwhelming!   The three of us had a taste of everything.  If David particularly liked something, he would write it in a notebook.   Then when he got home, he would go into his corporate test kitchen and try to make something similar.  Can you imagine a corporate executive from Harvard Business School doing that?  It’s a different mindset.    Most entrepreneurs never even graduate from college.  The entrepreneur never really feels secure.  He knows he could fail at any time.

One of the fun aspects of knowing David was I got to see him build his business.  I remember sitting with him at a high top table, ironically, back in Baltimore.  It was his first east coast restaurant.   His main concern was that he might have just a west coast concept (now the chain is throughout the world).   I got off my chair and went to the men’s room.   On the way back, I walked over to say hello to David’s wife Sheila, who was sitting at the cash register by the front door.  The front door had a shade pulled down as did all the windows in the front of the store.   I pulled back the shade and looked out at more than a hundred people patiently standing in line an hour before the restaurant was to open.  

To build a business from scratch requires an obsessive focus.   That was the seminal lesson I learned from reading Chris Zook’s and James Allen’s new book “The Founder’s Mentality.”  But I had already observed it with David Overton.  Years after our Baltimore meeting, I was in one of his five greater Boston restaurants when I saw David come in.  He walked toward the bakery counter, went behind it and came out with a bottle of Windex and paper towels.  He then proceeded to clean the outside of the bakery showcase.  At the time, the chain was a one billion dollar business.  So I was not surprised by the authors’ conclusion.  They found “… the returns to share holders where the founder is still involved are three times higher than in other companies.”

-Francis Patrick Boland