POSITION: Principal
COMPANY: Actualized Services
WHAT THEY DO: A restaurant development and franchising consulting firm
REVENUE: Project fees $2,500 to $25,000
NEXT GOAL: Develop the fundamentals of the business and complete the one-year tactical plan
At first glance, you might say that Jamie Griffin is crazy. One day, he is director of business development for Raising Cane’s, the Baton Rouge-born chicken fingers chain on Inc. magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies in the country. The next day, he decides it’s time to strike out on his own.
But Griffin isn’t crazy. He’s just taken the time to figure out what he truly wants in his professional life.
“For seven years I participated in Todd’s dream,” Griffin says of Cane’s founder Todd Graves. “At some point, you step back and ask yourself, ‘What’s your dream?’”
That meant doing something that major corporations do all the time, a retreat. There weren’t any trust-building exercises, and Kumbaya wasn’t sung around a campfire—after all, it was a one-person retreat.
But Griffin did do a lot of the soul searching that companies do in order to be successful. He sat down and made a T-chart. He could stay with Cane’s as it grows and transitions most of its operations to Dallas, or he could go it alone and set out to accomplish his two most important goals—finding out if he can be his own business person and attending an Ivy League business school.
“It sounds simple,” he says “but it’s so important.”
Then he did his research.
“The second step was to gather all the facts and ask myself why,” he says.
Did he want to leave Baton Rouge for the bustling restaurant industry in Dallas? Was it fair for him to juggle his obligations to Cane’s while trying to pursue his dreams?
“It made sense for me to branch off,” he says.
That only left the third step, talking to other professionals. Griffin talked to friends, possible clients and industry veterans, and he got the business necessities in working order.
He also talked to Cane’s about the transition, a process he says revealed how supportive the chain’s leadership was of his goals. So much so that Cane’s now is a client of Actualized Services—the name Griffin has given to his month-old restaurant development and franchise consultancy firm.
“All the effort you put into running up the cliff gives you some comfort that when you jump and take the leap that you’re going to land somewhere with both feet on the ground,” he says. “And it doesn’t matter where you land, because you’ve at least plotted a course.”
