Nation's Restaurant News - November 2, 2009

Matt Haley HAVING WORDS WITH

FOUNDER,

SODEL CONCEPTS

When Matt Haley was in rehab for drug and al- cohol addiction in his 20s, he wrote down a list of goals, which included owning his own restaurant and living on the beach. Now he owns five. And he lives on the beach in Southern Delaware.

Now 48, Haley, runs with partners a restaurant group, SoDel Concepts, and a management company, Highwater Management, that together do about $30 million in annual sales.

SoDel Concepts was recently named to Inc. Magazine’s list of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in the United States. The group includes five full-service restaurants in Southern Delaware and employs more than 200 employees year-round and close to 400 during the busy summer months. Haley expects the growth to continue.

HOMETOWN: Rehoboth Beach,
Del.
PERSONAL: single
HOBBIES: “I like to fish, and I
love to read and write about
cooking.”
EDUCATION: “I am self-taught,
but I always went to work with
great chefs whenever I had the
opportunity.”

When you wrote down your goals, did you imagine it would lead to being part of a restaurant group that is this successful?

At first, no. I knew that I would realize my dream [of owning a restaurant]. Something just kicked in, and I was surrounded by a bunch of good, healthy mentors. The important thing is just to have a vision and put it on paper. I felt, about five or six years ago, that we — not I, that is important — we could get to this level.

And I want to go on record with this: I believe that in five to seven years we will be a $100 million restaurant group, between SoDel and Highwater. I put that out there because I want to challenge myself.

cided to go after it and just become better at every aspect of what we do and not fold up and wait for a sunny day.

So what did you do? We just attacked the economy, and it worked for us. We just kept hiring and training and doing better. If something was broken, we fixed it.

You did not have to cut back at all?

We are in a resort area. We obviously lose some people in the off-season. So we have always had cutbacks, but they are self-imposed cutbacks. Our company also spends a lot of money in the off-season to keep people employed, and a lot of restaurants think that we are crazy. We put it in our budget to keep people in the off-season so that when in-season comes around we don’t have to retrain and reteach people to put out our style and quality of food.

How does it feel to be recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in the country? It was nice to be a part of that as a company. Everybody involved has worked really hard to get to that point, put in a lot of time and effort, so not only to get recognized for it, [but] in this day and time, in this economy, made it even more special. It made it great for the whole company to share, because when the economy started going south, we made the decision to just say no. We are not going to fall down and be at the knees of the environment and economy, so we just de-

How much can traffic go down in the off-season?

If you are doing 100 percent in July and August, by November you are down to 20 percent. After years of being involved in this we know how to control the ebb and flow. We are planning for September and October in July, when we are busy. It is amazing how much money a restaurant can lose when it is busy. They are not focusing on pennies and nickels and dimes. They are just happy that they are making money.

— Mike Dempsey

Checking ID every time protects operations, only bothers minors

All the bars in the town where I went to college had a reputation for being real hard-asses about checking ID, and they were so good at spotting fakes that almost nobody ever tried to use them. As bars in a college town, they knew there would be underage kids trying to get in, and they could get in a lot of trouble for serving them, so they were extra vigilant. The restaurants were a completely different story.

Some of the restaurants in town didn’t card at all, and a lot of the servers who did were just going through the motions and would accept any sort of vaguely card-shaped object as a legal form of identification.

Of course the kids are at fault in these situations, but that won’t get the restaurant in any less trouble if it’s caught serving minors, so it’s important to train servers to check IDs every time. Kids talk, and the last thing any place needs is a reputation for being “that place that doesn’t check IDs.”

One of the first things to confirm is that the person pictured on the ID is actually the person ordering the drink. I know that sounds obvious, but one of the main ways kids get fake IDs is to just steal the ID of someone who looks kind of like them. If called on it, they say something like, “Oh, I changed my hair.” But they can get tripped up if asked the full name or birth date on the license.

Some of the cards that are accepted as valid

IDs are downright laughable, if you aren’t the one accepting them. A 16-year-old once took my high school ID to a Mexican restaurant and used it to buy margaritas and tequila for all her friends. She didn’t look much like me, and a high school ID isn’t a valid state-issued license. Also, I was only 18 at the time, and if the server had looked carefully, the ID said so.

I also heard about a group of girls that went to a restaurant and ordered drinks and appetizers. When asked to show IDs, one girl threw a tantrum about how she was mortified that the server would call her a liar and not just accept her word that she was older than 21. She threatened to sue, walk out and tell everyone how awful the restaurant was. She made such a huge stink that the manager came over and gave the whole table a round of free drinks. If that behavior sounds childish, it was. The girls were 15. Conversely, a few weeks ago a server asked me for ID, and I complied happily. My friend got upset and said, “Aren’t you going to check my ID?” So he did. My friend is 24.

Really, it is never a bad idea to check IDs. At an airport bar a few weeks ago the server asked for my ID, and that of the gentleman behind me who was clearly in his 60s. It might seem a little silly, but it makes sense to have an “always ask” policy like that, because the only person who is going to get upset about being asked for ID is a minor. ■