Position: Co-owner
Company: The Grape at Perkins Rowe
Revenue: $1.5 million projected for 2009
Next Goals: Promote the restaurant piece and possibly open more franchise locations.
The way Linda Perez Clark talks about her first brush with entrepreneurship, it sounds like an extreme sport.
“It was harrowing. It was so scary.”
She’s referring to the plunge she and her husband, Kelwin, made as franchisees into The Grape at Perkins Rowe. Clark, a partner with Kean Miller, had been looking for some type of franchise opportunity and stumbled across the Atlanta-based wine bar/restaurant/wine retail concept. It was a perfect fit for her inner hostess, and a chance to give Baton Rouge something she thought it lacked: a social dining venue for 40-somethings, with a big emphasis on hanging out.
The Clarks visited the Atlanta store, fell in love and then sat on the idea for months, mulling whether a lawyer and an engineer had any business owning a wine bar. A slot opened up at Perkins Rowe, and it was time to decide. Clark signed on the dotted line, and things got real in a hurry.
“It was time to start construction and time to start hiring people, and that’s when we realized we really needed some depth of experience,” she says.
Clark reached out to former Avoyelles Café part-owner Brian Dykes, whom she and her husband knew from the ballpark, where their sons played on rival baseball teams. Dykes warned them against getting into a franchise, but they were committed, and Dykes offered to help. Clark, “in real panic mode,” ran into Dykes one day and proposed hiring him as a consultant. By the end of the first meeting, though, Dykes was ready to manage the business.
“It was the perfect fit,” Clark says. “It took us about two seconds to extend him an offer of employment and immediately thereafter to extend him a partnership interest. He is the glue that binds.”
The Grape at Perkins Rowe opened its doors one year ago, and business is good—though Clark would like to see more people for lunch and dinner. All in all, it’s been a learning experience.
“I think I’ve learned a lot about myself, and one thing is that I am a micromanager and an absolute control freak,” Clark says. “I had some inkling of it. As an owner but not an operator, you really can’t control all of the moving parts. I had to kind of recognize that we have people who clearly know what they’re doing and will manage this. There was a lot of self-growth.”
