Sounds easy. Buy a franchise and you’ll be trained and off you go. There’s more to it than that. Cliff Bramble, founder of Hungry Hospitality, restauranteur, author of several books including, the Business Side of Restaurants, and found of Coursini – an online restaurant industry academy – shares his inside knowledge about what it takes to run a franchise.
[00:00:30] – Intro [00:02:30] – About Cliff [00:04:24] – Marketing a Franchise [00:09:18] – Business Structure and Systems [00:09:42] – Basic Tips on Better Bookkeeping [00:17:38] – Budgeting, Scheduling, and Forecasting [00:18:59] – Hiring the Right People [00:20:45] – Training and Caring for Employees [00:25:06] – Hiring in Non-Conventional Ways [00:28:47] – About Coursini and Cliff’s Upcoming Book [00:31:04] – Closing
“The consistency is key because it is part of training and honestly, part of the reason why I came up with some of these courses is the consistent training. If you hire somebody, and you continuously have turnover, you have to ask the question, is it you, or is it the person training? It’s a consistent message that will keep people employed and hopefully excited about their job.”
Cliff Bramble
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:30] Karl: Welcome to the Capitalist Sage Podcast. We’re here to bring you advice and tips from seasoned pros and experts to help you improve your business. I’m Karl Barham with Transworld Business Advisors, and my co-host is Rico Figliolini with Mighty Rockets Digital Marketing, and he is the publisher of the Peachtree Corner Magazine. Hey Rico, how are you doing today?
[00:00:48] Rico: Hey Karl, great. It’s been a beautiful, sort of a beautiful week. I mean, we’ve had some storms. We’re going to end up in the freeze zone soon, I think. But glad that we’re back on track with the Capitalist Sage with a great guest today. But before we get to that, I just want to mention our sponsor is Peachtree Corners Magazine. The sponsor of the family of podcasts that we do this one, including Peachtree Corners Life and Prime Lunchtime with the City Manager. So check those out. You can find those podcasts anywhere you listen to podcasts, on iHeartRadio, Spotify, and others. Or watch the video podcast on YouTube or our Facebook page.
[00:01:26] Karl: Excellent. Well, Rico, this is our fourth year now. We are starting our fourth year doing the Capitalist Sage and providing information to folks here in Georgia and Peachtree Corners area, as well as out there in the internet world. Just talking business with local business owners and folks that share some of their wisdom and knowledge and experience with our audience. Today, it is my privilege to introduce a return guest, Mr. Cliff Bramble, a local Peachtree Corner resident. And he’s also the founder of Hungry Hospitality, LLC. He’s a local business owner and an author of several books on business and restaurants and many other things. And today we’re going to get a chance to talk about some of the success secrets of operating successful food franchise businesses, and some of the tools that people should be considering and thinking about in 2022 to make their business better, stronger, more resilient than ever. Cliff, how are you doing today?
[00:02:26] Cliff: Fantastic, Karl, thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it.
[00:02:30] Karl: Oh, our pleasure. Why don’t we start off, tell a little bit about your history. Folks that may not know you, tell you a little bit about your background and some of the stuff that you’ve done.
[00:02:39] Cliff: Well, I don’t want to go too far back, it’ll make me look like I’m really old. So I’m just going to start with the last like 20 years. But in the last 20 years, I previously owned Noble Fin here in Peachtree Corners. And unfortunately COVID really shut me down pretty quickly over there. But before that I was a co-founder of Rathbun’s restaurant from 2004 a ll the way until 2020. So that’s about 17 years over there. And it was a great ride. We opened up Rathbun’s, Kevin Rathbun Steak, Krog Bar, KR Steak Bar. And then before that I worked for Buckhead Life Restaurant Group in Buckhead in a place called Nava that was happening for many years. And I’ve owned a couple other businesses before that. And then I was in California before that opening up hotels in Southern California. All the tough parts, La Jolla, San Diego, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert. You know, it was all the tough parts.
[00:03:30] Karl: I hear you. Well, we got you back here in Georgia now, and we’re really grateful for that. Why don’t we jump in on this topic that we wanted to chat about. When I talk to business owners all the time, there’s a large amount of folks that own and operate franchises. One of the most amazing things to me, franchise is a great opportunity for those that want an established structure and brand that they can focus on executing and operating a business, and they don’t have to think of everything from scratch. But one of the key components to success is really just the fundamentals of operating a business and especially a restaurant or a food based business. And so I’m wondering if we could talk a little bit about some of the things you’ve learned in running, especially a restaurant food business that you think a lot of franchise folks don’t really get about being successful. Anything that comes to mind to start?
[00:04:24] Cliff: Well, the first one would be the marketing. Simply because I have had one or two franchise clients over the years, and the marketing is always the most important factor, especially when it comes down to individual owners owning a franchise. So I say marketing is always the first one.
[00:04:44] Karl: Absolutely. Well, let’s talk about marketing for a little bit before we jump to the next one. Most franchises, one of their selling points is we help you with marketing and there’s, whether it’s national campaigns going on or they might provide marketing materials and signage and logos and so on. What are some of the things that you think as an individual local business owner, they should be focusing on and investing in marketing? Why don’t we start about with how much would you recommend people invest? How much of their revenue, or do you have any ideas around that? And then what specific things they could be doing?
[00:05:17] Cliff: Well, yeah, there’s a little percentage wise that people have spoken about over the years saying 1% of your sales really goes to marketing or advertising. I say marketing rather than advertising. But for the local people, the most important part of the franchise and especially being a local franchise. I have not been one, but as far as somebody being in the local, is really knowing your surroundings. And now people can spend a lot of money on marketing, but if they’re doing social media and they’re collecting people’s information. For example, if they are restaurant, and even if it’s a small bread company, for example, or a small little sandwich place. Everybody who’s walking in, if they can get their customer email and their phone number and know them, you know what having that as a social media base and a direct marketing so they can send people information is a huge benefit.
[00:06:07] Karl: When I think about businesses, especially when we look at selling a business, we typically talk about their marketing strategy they do. Something that’s appearing more and more now, they talk about the number of followers, their digital marketing there. So, as an actual asset, it’s not something you can touch and feel, but it is an asset in the business that can be quantified. And what you’re talking about, capturing their information, getting them to follow them on social media, can actually have value beyond just generating more sales.
[00:06:38] Cliff: There’s no question about it. And I’m just finishing up a book called the Marketing Side of Restaurants. And I will tell you, one of the areas in there, one of the chapters is specifically on this. And the reason I say this is because there was somebody who, a client that I had previously, it was a hair salon. And I’ll give a quick example, the hair salon, they were wondering why they were having problems. Number one, they weren’t making enough money. That was the first problem. So I said, all right, let me come in and check it out. And as I looked at everything, I said, okay what do you want to do? And their response was, we want to close this and we want to move up to another place and it’s up the street, because it’s a better location. So ultimately I said alright, where is your database of all your individuals, all your clients? We don’t have a database. All we have are first names and we have some people’s phone numbers. So my response was well, if you move, how are your customers all going to know where you moved? You know, so, in a matter of a very quick time, because they had so many people’s phone numbers, they ended up getting people’s names, numbers, using them on Facebook, using them on Constant Contact, even MailChimp. And it really helped them tremendously.
[00:07:45] Rico: Are you finding anything different over the last year or so with marketing because of COVID even? Has any new innovations happened over the last year or two?
[00:07:54] Cliff: Well yeah, there’s a lot of innovation, especially for the restaurants. You know, for example, when you go and pay at the table now, and a lot of people hand you a little handheld, you can actually punch in your email into some of those as a loyalty program. So the loyalty programs are very good to have, especially on a smaller franchise. Because the loyalty, people feel like they’re getting something out of that too, rather than just writing down an email. But the loyalty side is a good factor. And that has come in, into full force right now.
[00:08:22] Karl: I know the top line of revenue is always important and franchise owners very often will just a hundred percent depend on the franchise to do their marketing. If I’m hearing you right, doing your own marketing and development, they don’t help you with all of it. They may give you the tools, but if you don’t use them, you’re not really going to get the benefit.
[00:08:42] Cliff: Well, you know, it goes back to that whole, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Somebody told me many years ago, if you have a guest in your restaurant, and if you call them by their name seven times within that time that they’re there, they will be back within a week. And that’s a huge factor of getting to know the people. And I know, a lot of franchises will pay the 4 or 5, 6% every single week or every month, depending on how they have it set up. But knowing the local market is very important too. And I think that as the smaller franchisors work in their area, they know their customers rather than the franchisee who may be six states away.
[00:09:18] Karl: So after marketing, what would you say would be the second thing that you see franchise owners of food businesses missing when they’re going out there and trying to be successful?
[00:09:29] Cliff: Well, a lot of it has to do with the structure. People have to have structure in their business and that goes with any area. So they have to have structure of the invoices coming in. They have to have a system and having those systems in place are highly important.
[00:09:42] Karl: You’re absolutely right. Let’s expound a little bit more on the systems that people have. There’s a management of kind of cash and making sure that it’s accurate your financial systems in there. Anything that you think, tips that you’ve learned along the way that helped you to be successful in understanding money coming in and out?
[00:10:02] Cliff: Absolutely. Number one is the first part is the invoicing, because if you don’t have a system on your invoicing those invoices come in, they come in every single day. If you don’t have a system, the invoice comes in, it goes to the invoice box, it gets checked, it gets designated to a special account. And then it gets logged into the chart of accounts into the computer, the accounting program, and then it gets filed. If you don’t have that set up, you’re just going to have a problem because at the end of the month, you might think that you did fantastic. But you may be missing five or six invoices. Knowing that is in my opinion, highly important. And having somebody in the bookkeeping side know about that area is very important too.
[00:10:39] Karl: Well, let’s talk about bookkeeping because that is one huge pet peeve of mine. Oh boy. When you think about a business, I always equate accounting and bookkeeping to your scorecard. So if the data that’s going in is wrong and there isn’t attention to it, what it’s producing for you to be able to make decisions is going to be flawed at best and possibly cause you to fail ultimately. Why is it that so many people have struggled with this bookkeeping stuff?
[00:11:07] Cliff: I honestly, I think sometimes they’re afraid of it, you know. But you’re always afraid of what you don’t know. They always say if you know something, you’re always going to go back to it. So if you were promoted to a chef, but you were first a general manager, you’ll always be able to go back to that general manager. But when you really break it down in the accounting side and bookkeeping, there’s really only three areas that you have to look at all the time. You have to look at your general ledger because whoever’s punching that information in, if they are punching it in the wrong code, for example, it’ll show up on the general ledger. So in addition to that, they also have to look at their income statement and they have to pay attention too, and not just look at the top sales line and the bottom profit or loss. And hopefully it’s a profit. Maybe there’s a fear of tackling it, but only taking five minutes every single month to look at this information, isn’t really enough. You have to look at your balance sheet. You have to look at your general ledger and you have to look at your income statement. But you have to be excited about it too. And there’s not enough people who are excited about numbers, unless they’re making money.
[00:12:10] Rico: Let me ask you something, between industries too is it a little different, little easier bookkeeping? For example, restaurants, point of purchase sales. It’s coming in on the iPad or whatever you’re taking it in on. So it’s going straight to your bookkeeping at some point, right? Automatically.
[00:12:25] Cliff: It goes straight to the point of sale system. So the income goes to the point of sale system. So you can just run a report every single night. But if you own a hair salon, the same exact thing goes. There’s somebody who’s punching in the sale every day. At the end of every day, they run a report on the point of sales. The key to that Karl, is closing out your sales, every single day. You have to do it. If you don’t do it, you’re just going to run into a problem.
[00:12:49] Karl: Isn’t it similar to the analogy of if you have a closet or a room in the house and you don’t clean it every week, and then at the end of the year, you’ve got to go in and clean all of that. That’s kind of how some people run their bookkeeping. They wait until the end of the year they had invoices. They had expenses that have come in, in February. And it has PFL or something. They don’t know what it is. They end up with large miscellaneous expenses because they didn’t track it. But I think your key point, there is a combination of knowledge which can be learned. Talk to us a little bit about how can people get better at basic, you don’t have to be an expert. What are some things that can help them get better at learning how to read enough financial statements so they can run their business successfully?
[00:13:36] Cliff: It’s interesting that you ask that because I just started something called Coursini, which is a, it’s geared to franchises. There’s a whole page that’s geared to franchises as well, but basically they’re online courses and they’re courses on balance sheets. There’s courses on general ledger, it’s really simple information. And these courses, for example, they’re available online. You can take them for 10 minutes, 20 minutes at a time. You can take them on an airplane. But the nice part is, you’re learning something about it. You can read from a book. But I will tell you, in my opinion, the courses are really good. The courses are good and one more thing I want to mention about this is that on a weekly basis, the franchisees or whoever it is running their business, they should have a cashflow statement printed pretty much every single Friday. That will help them a lot. And you know what? It may make them more interested in those reports.
[00:14:24] Rico: As far as the bookkeeping part goes, because I do my own invoicing. But I have a bookkeeper that comes behind me. So every month she’ll spend two or three hours a month to make sure she cleans up whatever I’m doing. And to prep the file, so this way we don’t have that problem at the end of the year, at the end of the quarter. And I use QuickBooks, I can go on my app on my phone. I can see what my balances are. I can see what my costs are. I could look and pull reports right off my phone. And I’m sure even the point of purchase stuff can be integrated into a QuickBooks or some system like that. Where it just comes straight across and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do some of that. Right. I mean, is that?
[00:15:02] Karl: Absolutely. I know ways that people can get their bookkeeping pass down to 15 minutes a month if they set up their chart of accounts. And if you don’t know what a chart of accounts is, you need to learn something, take a course or get a book. The general ledger, once you set up your chart of accounts, you can with Quickbooks Online, and some of the other tools that are NetSuite and others, you can automate probably 90% of the transactions in there. Once it’s set up, you go in and you check to make sure that the numbers are right and so on. And it simplifies the bookkeeping. The other part is a regular cadence, weekly or monthly reviews of it. Whether it’s your bookkeeper that you outsource, whether you do it yourself, allocate an hour to go through that. And there’s the old saying of balancing checkbooks. Nobody does that anymore. Well, each month you should balance out your QuickBooks for the month to make sure you have a P and L statement that’s accurate to reflect that month, the profit and loss statement. But these systems are some of the core things, if you’re in a business, it is your scorecard. And just investing more time, money, resources, to get competent enough to know whether your accountant or bookkeeper is doing it right, is really important to success.
[00:16:18] Cliff: You know, as a business owner, I’m going to tell you this you, you mentioned it right on. The bookkeepers, they’re great. They are doing what they’re doing. The accountants are doing what they’re doing, but you know what, they’re only as good as what the information is that you give to them. So I always say double check your accountant. Because they’re going to appreciate it, and you are too. You may not be able to double check the depreciation side, but at the same time, you can check everything else from the charter, from the general ledger. That general ledger there is your best friend. And if everybody looks at that at least once a month, the information gets punched in from the bookkeeper or the owner of the business. They just have to pay attention to it.
[00:16:57] Karl: And this is an area that franchises don’t cover. When you go on franchise training for two weeks, they do not go into detail on bookkeeping. They say, you have to do that on your own. So finding other courses, resources to get yourself educated is key. Even if you choose not to do it yourself, you should at least understand what a general ledger is, what it looks like. The cash flow statement, balance sheet, and a P and L statement. If you know what those four things then, and the general ledger, you’re in good shape. Let’s go on with structure a little bit more. Let’s talk about the people side. What kind of structures do you see being really important for people to master in running a franchise food business?
[00:17:38] Cliff: Well, the structures, they have to have the budgeting. They have to know about the scheduling. And they have to deal with the forecasting as well. So that’s one area, I say that’s one area all together. There’s three areas in one. If they’re creating a structure with their budgeting and they’re doing the same thing every single week. Every Friday they get their cashflow, every Monday they maybe send out all their checks. And they’re doing the schedules every single week and the schedules are based on their sales. So the sales go back to the budget. It all kind of works all hand in hand.
[00:18:07] Karl: This is the key thing. I think what you’re describing, I typically call a planning function. And if you want to have a predictable output, it always starts with a plan. I’d hate to try to build a house kind of ad hoc. Usually people would sketch out the bathroom should go here and the kitchen should go here and they build it from what’s in the wall first. And then they finish it at the end. With a business, having a plan of knowing what you’re going into, how much labor you’re going to need, what’s your material costs. So each week you can compare it to what you planned, some target. If you typically spend $5,000 a week on food. At the end of the week, you check if you’re 3000, you did better. If you’re 7,000, you want to know why. If you start getting multiple weeks of that, you can make an adjustment or a correction before the end of the month where you now have to register a loss.
[00:18:57] Cliff: Bingo. That’s exactly right.
[00:18:59] Karl: These are critical things. What about on the people side? Hiring, onboarding. I’ve seen franchises give you some guidance of how to hire people, but I don’t know if they do as good a job on how do you onboard people and train them. Especially in the food business where turnover tends to be higher than some other businesses.
[00:19:18] Cliff: Exactly. Well, you know, when it comes down to the hiring. Again, you have to have a system in hiring. Right now, the system for hiring is people just looking for people. They need bodies. And, but at the same time, there’s a lot of people hiring and you’ve got to hire the right person. Because if you hire the wrong person, there’s a saying out there it’s easier to hire somebody, it’s tough to fire them. And in Georgia, that might be a little different as a right to work state. But you want to hire the right people and you want to interview the right way as well. And somebody came up to me the other day and I said, oh, how was your interview? They said, boy, I couldn’t get a word in. And I said really? That’s interesting. I said, you couldn’t get the word in. And uh, you know, I said, it’s supposed to be the other way. So when you hear that, it’s important to hire the right people, make sure they have the right skill set. And also, you know, once they’re on board, make sure you’re training them the right way. And that goes back to the structure as well. Because if you’re not training them and you’re just handing them a key and you’re saying, okay, this is what you do. You know what, those first five days, that new employee is going to make up their mind whether they’re going to stay or whether they’re going to go.
[00:20:19] Rico: The idea that you were saying, it’s easier to hire than fire. When you hired the wrong person that team member poisons the rest of the team. You know? So, that’s one. And that’s hard to reverse. And then the other side of that is, especially in the food business I’ve got to believe, the chef may be doing a great job, but because that server brought it out badly and didn’t get it to you the right way, you might have a bad experience, right?
[00:20:45] Cliff: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And part of the training, and I mentioned this before in my courses online on Coursini, I can tell you that one of them is human resources. One of the courses is human resources, and I had to break it down into five parts simply because of the fact of, there’s one on hiring. There’s one on payroll. There’s one on taking care of the employees. You have to take care of the employees. You have to train them, you have to care for them, you have to have some empathy these days. There’s a lot of variables that are going into what’s hiring and Rico, you asked earlier what’s changed? You know, the hiring has changed too. Because when people show up and they have a mask on, you don’t really know what to do. It’s a little, it feels weird. And then you say, okay, they see you without a mask and they ask you, is it okay if I take my mask off? And so right there, the, you have to have something that kind of lets the casualness come back and feel a little more comfortable because it is a little odd these days.
[00:21:38] Rico: Yeah. That can be interesting, interviewing someone wearing a mask. You never see their face.
[00:21:47] Karl: It is, but I think you’re highlighting something there, Cliff. The owner of the business and most small businesses franchise are operator owned. And they set the tone for the business. So if you have a mask policy and the owner or the manager, doesn’t wear a mask, it’s really hard to get other people to follow it. They’re going to follow the lead of the leader. The other part of that is, is you talked about the five sections of kind of, training around employees. There are some laws out there you’ve gotta be familiar with so that you don’t cross the wrong line. And franchises often don’t cover that in training because every state laws are different. So knowing how to handle unemployment, workers’ comp, how to handle harassment issues and protect yourself, making sure you’re covering labor laws, overtime. There’s a whole bevy of laws that you need to be aware of. You don’t have to be a master of, but you need to be aware of, and you need to let your managers know, and your employees know these specific things. If you’re going to have employees in your business.
[00:22:48] Cliff: The other big part about that, Karl, is right now with so many people working from their home and a lot of people have just said, okay I might be employed in Georgia, but I’m going to go travel. They’ve given up the house. And next thing you know, they’re living somewhere else. So what you have all of a sudden, you have to sit back and say, okay wait a minute. They’re living somewhere else, do I pay payroll taxes in Georgia? Or do I pay it in Texas? Where do I actually pay them? So then they’re going to, sometimes it’s easier to look at, there’s a PEI company where you can actually start looking at hiring people under something else rather than yours. But these days, Rico again, to your point earlier, what’s changed. For a lot of companies and I don’t know how many franchises have individuals who work either out of their office or out of state. But they have to look at and make sure they’re paying people the right payroll tax per state code as well.
[00:23:35] Karl: Absolutely. The other aspect is values of the business. Rico talking about service and so on. If that’s important in your business, clearly articulating the values and service expectations consistently with the employee base is critical. And if you’re suffering from turnover where every, three to six months, you’re bringing on new people, you need a system in place to constantly train and retrain those people. And it’s gotta be something that’s on demand and that’s accessible, et cetera for that. So these are some of the things, investments, that people should be considering in 2022 if they really want to start seeing major shifts in performance in their business.
[00:24:20] Cliff: Well, the consistency is key because part of training and honestly, part of the reason why I came up with some of these courses is the consistent training. If you have, and I’ll give you a good case. If you hire somebody, and you continuously have turnover, you have to ask the question, is it you, or is it the person training? In addition to that as an independent for example, if you’re a franchisee or franchise and you’re doing the training, that’s great. But what happens when you step away? Is somebody training them the same exact way, and there’s no way for you to quantify that or unless you’re having tests and you have a structure. But the on demand courses that are out there right now, and especially what I’m doing with the Coursini, it makes it easy. And it’s consistent and it’s a consistent message that will keep people employed and hopefully excited about their job.
[00:25:06] Karl: I’ve seen some of these systems, people could invest in under $10,000 a year under $20,000 a year, yet avoid much higher costs from either non-compliance or not being able to cover all the topics because managers are doing three or four jobs at a time. There’s a lot of hidden costs in not addressing this training slash putting these systems in place for their business. So it’s definitely something folks should think about and consider going forward. Since COVID has changed the nature of work. And when we’re seeing this shortage of workers and all these other types of things impacting franchise, is there any tips you could share with recruiting and hiring how to find people in non-conventional ways? I understand ZipRecruiter and Indeed, and everything could be done online. But sometimes you find the best people through your networks elsewhere. What are some of the things people could invest in to help with that?
[00:26:08] Cliff: There’s a million different ones online. There’s a few, there’s one I won’t even mention the name, but I know if I put something on there, I’ll get a hundred resumes from a hundred different states in all different countries. And so you want the right one. But the one area that works the best is the employees that are working there. Ask them for their friends, because people like to work with people that they know. And they’re not going to bring in somebody who’s a slacker, for example. They want to work with people who are actually good people. So in my opinion, asking those individuals if they could recommend any friends, is a very important aspect of maintaining, retaining your employees. It has to be people who are good and they want to work with each other. But when you start looking elsewhere, I always say this, you’ve got a 50-50 shot when you’re hiring somebody from the outside. You’ve pretty much almost got a hundred percent shot when you’re hiring somebody, who’s a friend of somebody who works there. But more importantly, you have to take care of all the employees. You can’t go to your employees if you’re just not the best manager. And you’re always asking them to bring people in, because they’re going to say well, I don’t know if my friend’s going to want to work with the person. Treating the employees and hiring, they all go hand in hand. You have to take care of the people.
[00:27:20] Rico: It almost sounds like, if you’re getting it from a team member they’re invested in that team. Cause you don’t want, talking about before, you don’t want someone that’s going to be a slacker, let’s say. And then everyone’s looking at that one person saying we’re doing and all the work he’s like always taking a 10 minute break doing something else. But yeah, no. That makes a lot of sense. I’ve found that referrals from personal people makes a lot more sense.
[00:27:41] Karl: And in our business, we actually pay for referrals. So if one of the team members refers somebody successfully, we pay referral bonuses for folks and as part of that. But I think you’re hitting on the key point. The work that needs to be done first is making sure that you’re an environment that people want to refer into. Think about it this way, if your own employees are not excited to refer people to come work with them, what you’re looking at is probably employees that are at risk to leave. If they’re getting feedback, there was a time where people used to get employee surveys or feedback. You don’t have to hire a fancy company to get feedback, have lunch with your employees, ask them how things are going, ask them their opinion, ask them how you can improve and how the business can improve. Or you can do a survey yourself, but get the feedback so you could improve the things that might be poisoning some folks in that work environment. It could be a manager that you love, but treats everybody else terribly. You need to get that feedback, that 360 feedback, to help address those.
[00:28:46] Cliff: Great points. Absolutely.
[00:28:47] Karl: Listen, Cliff, I really appreciate some of the insight that you shared with us today. I do realize that when you’re operating food businesses, it’s already challenging with very slim margins. You get some help with a franchise, owning a franchise. But we wanted to make sure people realize whether you own one today or you’re thinking of owning one in the future. There’s gaps in the information that you get from the franchise. Not intentionally, they just can’t cover everything. And supplementing that with whatever resources, investment, and time and money to help train yourself and your managers and your team. And Cliff, some of the work you’re doing and sharing out there and what you’ve developed and what other people have developed is really helping to hit that. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about Coursini and the franchise course that you developed? And share how can people find out more.
[00:29:39] Cliff: So they can go to Coursini.Com It’s a C-O-U-R-S-I-N-I.com. It’s really made of mini courses. That’s really how I came up with the name. It sounds like it’s Italian, but I don’t think it is. Basically there on the franchise side, there’s a franchise about 40 different courses in there from finance to marketing, to hiring individuals, to running a business, starting the business. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff in there and so we’ve made them really reasonable on a subscription basis. In addition to that, I’m just finishing this book. It’s called the Marketing Side of Restaurants. This is the last of the two of the series. The other one was the Business Side of Restaurants. This one here is a, it’s a less than a hundred pages. And you know what, it’s all on marketing. There’s so much information in here. And part of it, was again, I go back to the franchise or any restaurant or any small business owner. There’s so many individuals that have a tough time marketing. And this book really tells them what they need to do on a pretty much social media basis, on a publicist basis and also a collection of people’s information so that they can actually get to know their people, the customers a lot more. So it’s a good thing, you know, and the goal is online courses, 24/7, on demand. And through the Coursini classes, I mean, you could be on the beach and taking these courses. And the feedback that I’ve received from the individuals who have taken the courses has been really great. So there’s videos in there, there’s tests in there, there’s all kinds of information and we’re excited to get it going.
[00:31:04] Karl: Excellent. I’m glad that we have someone here in Peachtree Corners that’s helping to share some of the knowledge that they have and more importantly, help serve the business community. If you own a small local franchise or a business, and you have a gap in training and getting information to folks, please do check out and support Cliff here in the community, as well as really look at it for your own self. How are you investing in you and your team to be better in 2022? You’ve survived the pandemic, at least the bulk of it. Now it’s time to thrive in your business. So, we want to thank Cliff Bramble, founder of Hungry Hospitality, LLC. And we want to thank you for your insights and sharing your experience with us once again.
[00:31:46] Cliff: Thank you very much for having me.
[00:31:48] Karl: Our pleasure. Well, today I just want to say Rico and I are glad to be starting off our fourth year doing the Capitalist Sage Podcast. I’m Karl Barham with Transworld Business Advisors of Atlanta Peachtree. Our business advisors are available to help consult on your business, whether you’re looking to improve it, grow it, and exit your business. We consult on your business, help you with evaluation, but really help you with your plan for the future. We kind of think of ourselves as a form of retirement advisor for business owners. One day you may want to step away from the business and having a plan in place and a resource in the community here that can help you with the sale of your business or acquiring a business. It’s just part of the strategy for success. So reach out to us at www.TWorld.com/AtlantaPeachtree. Or you could email me Karl Barham KBarham@TWorld.com. And I’d love to set up a consult with you to talk through any issues you might be having in your business. Rico, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you’ve got going on?
[00:32:48] Rico: Sure. First, I want to say thank you to Cliff again for being on the show. I always learn a lot from Cliff. It’s amazing. No really, truly, I’m serious. And Karl too, because I learn a lot from you too. And I wish I was in the restaurant business, crazy, but yes. I’m happy where I am. So I’m good in publication.
[00:33:14] Cliff: You could get a job though. There’s a lot of people looking for restaurant people right now, I’ve heard.
[00:33:20] Rico: Yeah. Yes. I could do that $15 an hour job. At least they raised the wage a little bit, so that’s helpful.
[00:33:26] Karl: They have.
[00:33:26] Cliff: Don’t be fooled, they make more than that.
[00:33:29] Rico: Yes, I know with the tips and everything. But I’m glad where I am. I publish Peachtree Corners Magazine, and that’s fine for me right now. In fact, I’m looking at launching a second publication. I will have more news about that in a month or so. But besides that I do Mighty Rockets, which is a digital marketing company. So if you’re looking for video production, photography, content, Social media management. You could reach out to me, just find me on LinkedIn. It’s Rico Figliolini. And that’s easy to spell if you know how to spell it, F-I-G-L-I-O-L-I-N-I. I’m one of maybe two or three on there. So it’s easy enough to find me. The other one would be my brother and he’s in Canada. So you can’t use him. He’s not in this business. I’m excited because we’re working on the next issue. We’ve just put out our largest, 88 page issue just this month. Actually beginning of December, we’re working on a next issue right now, which is the best of Peachtree Corners and Reader’s Choice Award. So we’re in the midst of a survey right now. And so far within a week, we’ve had over 400 respondents on it. It’s going to be a nice.
[00:34:31] Karl: Rico, why don’t you tell us how do people access the survey? Where can they find it?
[00:34:35] Rico: Sure. So if you go onto LivingInPeachtreeCorners.com, you’ll scroll down just a little bit and you’ll see a graphic that says Reader’s Choice Award Survey, and you can take that survey there. And five of those that actually participate in this, will get a $75 cash Visa gift card later, drawn at random. So this way, some incentive for coming in. Give your opinion of best restaurants, summer camps. I could have made this a really long survey. So I, but I didn’t. I kept it down to a certain categories. But do that. And the next thing that we’re actually launching right now, and I just posted it online is Faces of Peachtree Corners. So we’re going to choose 20 people, from 12 and up that have a great story to tell what they’ve done, giving back to the community and all that. So check that out also, and nominate someone if you think they’re worthy enough to be there. But that’s where I’m at and this is always a great conversation to have.
[00:35:28] Karl: As I’ve been driving around too, just a heads up for folks, I notice a lot of the local schools are having open houses over the next couple of weeks. I think Wesleyan and Cornerstone, if you’ve got young kids looking for schools, it’s that time of year where people are starting to think about schools for next year, next season. So check out online and all the local schools are having their open houses right now. Greater Atlanta Christian and all the other private schools and public schools. Go check them out.
[00:35:56] Rico: Amazing how many schools serve this area that aren’t even in Peachtree Corners. Woodward academy, there’s a bunch of places, Brandon Hall. So Wesleyan obviously. Greater Atlanta Christian, Cornerstone, of the private schools anyway.
[00:36:08] Karl: Absolutely. Well, we want to thank everybody again. Tune in, we have a great schedule of guest speakers and guests for the show for this year. We’re going to keep doing this and sharing, talking about business. It’s kind like inside baseball, inside business for Peachtree Corners and surrounding areas. So thanks everybody for your support and look forward to talking to you.
Join UrbanEBB host Rico Figliolini for a conversation with Gabrielle Mills, co-founder and CEO of Sourced, a full-service back-office firm supporting small to mid-market businesses. She shares how she and her mother built a company that provides accounting, marketing, HR, staffing, and administrative support—all under one brand.
Learn about the challenges entrepreneurs face with business operations and how outsourcing can provide the help they need. Gabrielle also discusses:
A $12M business that never checked its financials
The importance of trust in outsourcing key business functions
The balance between people, technology, and business success
Sourced’s commitment to giving back to local charities
Timestamp: 00:02:20 – Sourcing Solutions for Entrepreneurs 00:07:26 – Building Trust and Expertise to Serve Clients 00:14:53 – Fixing Broken Books for Business Owners 00:18:18 – Encouraging Diversity in Talent Acquisition 00:19:57 – Embracing Mistakes and Developing Processes 00:23:12 – Giving Back to Local Charities 00:25:34 – Leveraging Technology to Enhance People-Centric Services
Podcast Transcript:
00:00:01 – Rico Figliolini
Hey, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb here based in Peachtree Corners, Georgia. I appreciate you joining us. We’re a little smart city just north of Atlanta. I have a great guest here, Gabrielle Mills. She’s the founder and CEO of Sourced. Hey, Gabrielle. Thanks for joining us.
00:00:20 – Gabrielle Mills
Hi, good morning. Thanks for having me.
00:00:22 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, no, I appreciate you being here. We’re going to learn a lot from you, I’m sure, this morning. And this is one of those freezing mornings here in Georgia that really never happens, like down to 20.
00:00:32 – Gabrielle Mills
It is so cold. I’m very cranky about it.
00:00:36 – Rico Figliolini
Yes, it’s amazing. But it’ll warm up in a week. But before we get to our interview, I just want to say thank you to two sponsors we have that have been with us. Appreciate the support of our journalism, these podcasts, of the magazines as well. One of them is EV Remodeling, Inc. They’re a company that has done work from design to build. whole house renovation, as well as just redoing your kitchen, your bathrooms and such. They’ve worked with over 260 families. They’re based in Peachtree Corners. Eli, the owner of the company, is a really great guy. I think you should check out their website. You could do a virtual consultation with them as well and check out their portfolio. So go to evremodelinginc.com and find out a little bit more about them. Also, our second sponsor is Vox Pop Uli, also based here at Peachtree Corners. They’re a company that takes your brand and brings it to life, essentially. They’re a family business, father, son, other family members in there, another daughter in there handling marketing. And even members of their employees are considered part of the family. It’s just a great, well-run company. We just did a podcast with them recently. You should check that out. But they try to bring your brand awareness out there. They can do anything from truck wraps to print on any object, just come to them, give them a challenge, and they will actually step up to that challenge. You might think they can’t print on it, but God knows they’ll find a way to do what you need to bring to that trade show and to make your business stand out as a retail operation or whatever. So check them out, vox-pop-uli.com, and it’s V-O-X-P-O-P-U-L-I.com. So now that we’ve gotten our sponsorships out of the way, Gabrielle, appreciate you staying with me like that. So tell us a little bit about how you started the business, why you chose the word sourced, and what the business is.
00:02:39 – Gabrielle Mills
Good morning. Thank you so much for having me. So I can’t tell you the answer to that question without acknowledging my business partner, Chrissy Strohmeyer, who is also my mother. So we are a mom and daughter team. We have just enjoyed the heck out of building this company together, but really my stories are her stories and vice versa. We started the business because we wanted to be entrepreneurs and we wanted to help other businesses grow and be successful. We think entrepreneurs are the salt of the earth people. They’re the reason for our economy. They create jobs. They’ve got so many great ideas. And they are the last people that get a helping hand because they don’t always have enough cash, right? That’s why we started Sourced. We actually went to business owners and asked them, because we didn’t have this idea. We asked business owners what they need, where they were underserved and how, if they were to do it all over again, kind of what they would do. And we put all of their answers up on a whiteboard that’s currently in our office. In fact, you saw it when you came over to our office the other day. If that whiteboard could talk, man. And we looked at all of their problems, all of their suggestions, all of the things they were struggling with. And our services came out of that. So Sourced is a back office services company serving small to mid-market companies. And the easiest way to describe what it is that we do is we basically have five businesses under one brand name. So on the fractional side of our business, we are a full accounting firm, full service accounting firm, a full service marketing agency, outsourced HR, administrative support. And then not fractionally, we do direct hire full time placement. So all of those ideas came from entrepreneurs that we spoke to that they needed help. And we said, we’ll do it.
00:04:38 – Rico Figliolini
It’s amazing. All under one roof.
00:04:42 – Gabrielle Mills
Well, we didn’t mean exactly to create five businesses at the same time. That was more of God’s plan. But, you know, here we are.
00:04:51 – Rico Figliolini
No, no, I can appreciate that. I’ve come across a lot of people in different businesses doing different things. So you do look at where your services can expand into. So it makes sense for where you guys are coming from.
00:05:04 – Gabrielle Mills
So you asked me where the name comes from. And I don’t get that question a lot. And it’s actually a really funny story. When I was working my big girl corporate job at IHG, Intercontinental Hotels Group, I had a relative that worked in the company. And she was the only person that knew that I was thinking about leaving and starting my own thing. So I floated the concept to her. And she loved the concept. At this time, we didn’t have talent acquisition. We only had a fractional client or fractional services. And our name was the Atlanta Assistance Group. And we were going to go by TAAG, T-A-A-G. And she was in branding for IHG. And she goes, I have to tell you, that name isn’t scalable. It’s easily forgettable. And you also have TAG, the Technology Association.
00:05:57 – Rico Figliolini
That’s right.
00:05:58 – Gabrielle Mills
And she’s like, I really think that you need to rethink your name. This was seven days before I was going to quit my job and do this and tell them I was going out. In which case they would want to know what the company is, what our name is, all the things. And so the next seven days, Chrissy and I were just on fire trying to think of everything. The amount of hours we spent digging through the thesaurus was crazy. And one day we were, I was driving and I was playing around with the word outsourced, resource, I was trying to come up with a play on words there and Sourced just came about and I called her and I was like, what do you think of this? And she’s like, I love it. And I think we came up with it two days before I quit.
00:06:48 – Rico Figliolini
Wow. And I love the website name though, getsourced.com. I mean, it just like makes sense to be able to do that. So, you know, you’ve been dealing with a lot of businesses, helping them and stuff. Sourcing is an issue sometimes, especially if you’re doing financial fractional work like that. And small business owners, maybe the larger ones like 10 million plus different, or even let’s say 5 million plus different, right? And I’m not sure what your sweet spot is, but the trust process to get a business to trust you to do their work because they’re sourcing it out to you. You’re not in the office. How do you do that? How do you gain traction with that? How do you gain their confidence to be able to provide the services that will make their business better?
00:07:37 – Gabrielle Mills
I think there’s a lot of ways that we do that naturally. First and most importantly, we have an amazing, amazing team of people and they really do the selling for us. Most of our business comes from word of mouth and referral because the people that work with us have such a great experience with our team and our people that that trust is kind of transferred already over because the referrer has had a great experience. That helps. Chrissy and I are involved in every single sale at this point before we pass it off to our team. We obviously have been through the entrepreneurial journey. We’re in our ninth year. We’ve done all the bumps and bruises, made all the mistakes. We’ve seen a lot of other people’s mistakes. We can kind of provide a lot of guidance during the sales process. So I think that builds trust. And not to be understated, the processes and the standards that we’ve built over time, we know how to fall back to the level of our training, regardless of the situation at hand. So we really lean into that when we’re talking to clients or prospects because they want to know how things are going to go. You can have a really good person who’s really friendly, but they may not know what they’re doing. That’s where the processes and our training comes in. We don’t have to do a lot of training because our people are already very experienced. But the way that we do things, we want that to be standardized. So we train on how the Sourced way is. So the client is experiencing something consistent.
00:09:14 – Rico Figliolini
So when you’re training, obviously, that’s an internal thing that you’re doing. There’s always industry trends, right? I mean, taxes is one thing where there’s always an update every year, different things going on. God knows probably this year will be a lot of things going on, accounting and stuff. But how do you keep ahead of some of the trends then or adapting to the needs of the entrepreneurs that you’re reaching out to? Because I’m sure that changes and evolves too.
00:09:42 – Gabrielle Mills
It does. I mean, you keep up with current events. We listen to our clients. Our clients know a lot. Our clients are very, very smart and we’re industry agnostic. So we get the benefit of seeing lots of different things from lots of different people and lots of different industries. So we just kind of like by osmosis learn things. But I think any good leader, regardless of if you own the business or you’re just working in the business or you have some kind of your stakeholder somewhere, I think anybody that is worth their salt is kind of always keeping up with. What’s going on and how does the business need to adapt and how does my department need to adapt and how do we grow and how do we improve? And I think just by having a regular practice like that, where you’re always kind of investigating it and looking at ways of improving, it’s more natural than it is forced to grow and change as the world changes.
00:10:37 – Rico Figliolini
Do you find going through the things you’re going through that, I mean, obviously, The day-to-day work is never-ending, right? It’s a process. Some days, some weeks, it’ll be the same as other weeks. But every once in a while, you get a challenge. You find something that you have to overcome within a business maybe, within your own business. Do you have any success stories that you can share that relates to that?
00:11:06 – Gabrielle Mills
Yes, I’ll tell you my favorite one. And it’s one of the more recent ones too. In our nine years of business, we have seen a lot come through our doors. We always tell people, especially those coming in for accounting. Accounting and talent acquisition are our two most popular services. And we started in accounting. That’s kind of our bread and butter. And people are always very vulnerable about like, oh, my books are bad. I had a bad accountant. I don’t know what I’m doing. We always tell them we’re like doctors. We just want to, give us the real, real, we’ll fix it. Like accounting is not a human body. So like we can actually fix it because it’s just numbers. But we’ve seen a lot of horror stories. You cannot scare us. You cannot surprise us. We’ve seen a lot in nine years. Recently, I think this client came on board early last year. And it was a $12 million construction client. And they have been in business for like 20 years or something. And when we were working on, we got referred into this client and we went and we talked to them and they were having an issue with their accountant that was internal. And they wanted to let that person go, but she knew way too much in the business. So they were like, we need somebody that can fix the craziness that’s happening in the books. And you can imagine they’re large books, $12 million company. We need to create some kind of redundancy in a situation where we need to let somebody go and we can’t, we’re beholden to them. And we just don’t know anything about our books. We’ve never seen them. And the best part of that meeting was that Chrissy asked, or she was talking about the financials, the financial reports. And the client stops her and she goes, wait, why do I need to look at my financial reports? And our jaws just dropped because this is a $12 million company. They’ve been in business for like 20 years. They have done a phenomenal job building their company. They had no idea the importance of their numbers. They didn’t know what their, like how their money was transacting. They, I don’t know how they were running it. And so that was a lot to overcome. It was probably one of our longer onboarding processes, but we got that client off of QuickBooks desktop and onto QuickBooks online so they could see their numbers, right. Their books were done and I’m not blaming this person that ended up leaving. There was reasons why this was, but the books were entirely backwards. So where there were things that should have been a positive, they were showing a negative and a negative should have been a positive. So all their numbers were backwards and then nothing was set up properly. So we had to do a whole setup. We had to clean the whole thing and we just had a meeting with them yesterday just talking about our usual check-in, how things are going. We’re constantly looking at improving this account. And they were just saying they have never felt more secure in an accounting firm. They said, regardless of how our team changes, you guys are our people. You’ve taught us, you’ve changed everything, you’ve done everything. And we just, they were showering us with lovely things and it just warmed our hearts so much because this was one heck of a undertaking. But I also, give them a lot of credit too, because that one, it was not a cheap project. And two, that took a lot of trust in them too, to be like, I don’t know you guys and you have to fix all of these problems at once. And it was a lot of work that they had to do and we had to do. And so they put a lot into the relationship as well. And it was, they’re probably one of my favorite clients now. And it’s, will probably be my biggest success story for a while, just from the scale.
00:15:01 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I have a friend, Karl Barham, who owns Transworld Business. He consults, he buys and sells business for people. And it’s constantly amazing how many, not just half a million dollar companies, but $10 million companies, sometimes their books are so bad that they have to like step away and say, you know what, let’s fix this up. You may have to wait a year before you can sell this business just because the books are so bad. You know, it’s just like, there’s that.
00:15:31 – Gabrielle Mills
We don’t like to see it. Obviously it breaks our hearts and we can, we can fix it. We have the, we can fix anything at this point. But it’s unfortunate because they didn’t get bad because of that person. They got bad because that person didn’t have the support that they needed. Likely that the entrepreneur was not an accountant. They shouldn’t be. They should be building their business, doing whatever it is that they’re doing. Accounting is important, but this is why we went into businesses. You need to go do your dream. We’ve got the stuff that, yes, you need to keep up with, but you don’t need to know how to do it. We can show you, but you don’t need to know how to do this. You just need to know what your numbers look like.
00:16:19 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah, I’m surprised that when their accountant did their work at the end of the year, I can’t imagine it was the same person doing it. It had to be someone else doing it. And no one figured it out.
00:16:33 – Gabrielle Mills
Well, with this particular client, there was a couple migrations in systems that caused that reversal. So they started on one system and moved to QuickBooks Desktop. which reversed everything. And then the person that was working in the office, she would do a lot of things right. But there’s a lot of different ways to do accounting right, quote unquote. But she continued the backwardness because that’s how it had to be done. It was very complicated.
00:17:02 – Rico Figliolini
And I’m sure. And sometimes you’re down a path and you don’t want to leave that path. You just keep going and just figure it’ll work itself out at some point.
00:17:11 – Gabrielle Mills
That happens in accounting of like, we just start fresh. Like right now we’re getting a lot of clients that need cleanups and we only have to go back a month and a half because it’s the 21st today. When we’re in July, we’re like, okay, how far back do you want to go? Or not July, but more like October. They’re like, we can clean up from January or we can just hold off and start fresh in the next January.
00:17:36 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s a tough decision. You said before you’re agnostic business-wise a little bit, but are there types of businesses that may benefit most from what you all do or that you target or that you’d prefer working with? Or have strength in those industries.
00:17:53 – Gabrielle Mills
We have developed patterns of clients that tend to come to us. So on the accounting side, we do a lot of construction. That’s the example that I gave. We have a couple of YouTube clients, which is kind of neat. We do a lot of work for attorneys. Accounting for law is very specialized. So we do that. On the marketing side, they’re completely across the board. There is no consistency whatsoever. Same with administrative support. HR gets thrown into any monthly recurring service that we have. So again, there’s no consistency. On the talent acquisition side, we have quite a bit of consistency. Although there’s randomness throughout. We do a lot in, we still do a lot in law. We get a lot of financial roles. So we do anything from accountants, tax managers, tax seniors. We do a lot in IT, particularly in the cybersecurity market. A lot in finance, some in construction, not really all that much. Did I say finance? Property management in talent acquisition. Yeah, those are about the consistent ones in talent acquisition. But again, we kind of see it all. At this point in our business, we actually get really excited when we see a business or an industry that we’ve never worked in before. So for marketing, I was just pitching a client yesterday who’s opening a shooting sports facility and gun range. I have never done that before. And I was like, oh, this is different. This is unique. We’ve got research. Same with anything in our talent acquisition department. If it’s different, we’re like, okay, this is exciting. Because usually, I mean, we just see a lot of businesses come through here.
00:19:48 – Rico Figliolini
Well, that’s cool. Yeah, especially when you see a lot of different businesses like that. We talked about success stories. As a business person, I think any business person, if they’re honest with themselves, will say, yes, we make mistakes every once in a while. New situations arise that they’ve never seen before and it’s a problem that they have to overcome. Have there been any mistakes in your business journey or that you’ve seen in other businesses besides, obviously, the accounting issue? But anything that you’ve overcome as an entrepreneur, as a business person?
00:20:27 – Gabrielle Mills
No, Rico, we’re absolutely perfect. We’ve never made a mistake.
00:20:30 – Rico Figliolini
I could see that.
00:20:34 – Gabrielle Mills
Oh gosh no. I tell people, people ask me about our journey a lot. They’re just curious about our story and how we came to be. And we love telling it. I always tell people, Chrissy and I didn’t have experience in any of these things before we started. We just had a dream and wanted to be, help businesses and build a business ourselves. All of this we have learned from the ground up, having no experience with the exception of like general business acumen and general sales acumen. But we’re not accountants. We are not recruiters. I did start in marketing, but not tactically. So I always say that I went to the school of hard knocks, got a couple of degrees from there. And that’s how I got to where I’m at because we’ve made every mistake in the book. We’ve had clients that have trusted us and loved us through some mistakes that we’ve made to get us to where we are. I would say the biggest piece of advice or mistake that I made that I learned from was Chrissy came into the business from day one. And she was telling me and our director of account management, Maureen, she was like, we’ve got to focus on our processes. We’ve got to focus on our processes. Maureen and I were focused on the people and just serving the people. And in year three, which was our hardest year yet, we got so many different challenges and scenarios that were really, really difficult. And what Chrissy was telling us from day one finally got through to Maureen and I of like, oh, this is why we need processes and standards. This makes sense now. So it took a lot of heartache to really understand why those are important. But now it has been the secret sauce to our business because we know how to hire off of them. So if people aren’t already operating or have experience with that certain frame of mind, we know that they’re likely not a fit or they have to be at least willing to be coached into that direction. We’ve developed consistency because our process is our standard. We’re always making our processes better. We’re always looking to make them beefier. We never would have gotten there if we didn’t learn that lesson.
00:22:53 – Rico Figliolini
And sometimes you do. I mean, you have to learn your lesson. It’s like bringing up kids. They want to do their own mistakes. They don’t want to be told to watch out for that step. And they’ll do their own mistakes.
00:23:04 – Gabrielle Mills
She was a broken record there for a few years. And then the light bulb finally went off. And Maureen and I were like, oh, okay. Now it took us some tears to learn it. But we got there. Now we’re on there.
00:23:19 – Rico Figliolini
I’m sure. So you’re a local business. Obviously, coming out to meet with you and your mom and the rest of the team was nice to take a tour and find out what you’re doing there. You do give back. I know you’re good people. You’re giving back to the community. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about some of the local charities that you’ve given back to?
00:23:45 – Gabrielle Mills
So early in our business, we decided that we’re not in business, we’re in business for the joy of being in business. We’re not in business to make a gazillion dollars and cash out. While that would be lovely, we would totally not turn our noses up at that. We wanted to at least serve our clients and then serve people that never really came into contact with Sourced and use the business as an opportunity to give back because we believe that if we’re successful, we have been giving blessings and so we should be giving blessings out. So we committed from day one that we were going to donate 10% of our monthly profits to charity. And those charities would be selected by our team of people. So every year, in December, we put out a survey to our team. And our team can nominate a charity that is important to them. And we decided in January, up to three charities that we’re going to give to that year, and every quarter we look at each month that we’ve made profit, take that pool of money, cut it by, divide it out equally across however many charities we have that year and give them out. We have served, some of those have been large organizations, but our favorite ones are the ones that are smaller and local. We started the first couple of years working with an organization called Connections Homes, which is out of Suwanee. They help kids who are aging out of foster care really like with support to become adults, but also they’re not really adults. They’re 17, 18, 19, and they still don’t know how to do the world. That’s an organization that we’ve supported. We’ve supported an organization called Ignite Hope, which is another foster care association. We’ve done neighborhood cooperative ministries, which is a, for those who are local, you guys know that it’s a very large nominal nonprofit here in Norcross. And this year we’re partnering with an organization called Because One Matters, which ironically is another foster care organization. I just realized that there seems to be a pattern. So we tend to give to the kids.
00:26:08 – Rico Figliolini
No, I like that. I like the fact that you’re giving locally and it’s 10% of your profit each month is what you split up, which is great. It’s almost like tithing in a way.
00:26:18 – Gabrielle Mills
Yeah. And that’s how it came about. We wanted to tithe using the business. We give once a quarter based on the months because what we didn’t want to do is we would have one month go to one charity and that was a particularly good month. But then the next month maybe wasn’t that good of a month. So we wanted to balance it out. So we look at all the profits that come in from the quarter and then equally disperse it.
00:26:39 – Rico Figliolini
That is cool. Alright. We’ve gotten sort of to the end of our interview time, but I’m sure that there’s things that we could talk a lot more about. Is there anything that I’ve left out? Anything you’d like to share? Maybe services that you may be looking at expanding into the coming year or anything along those lines?
00:27:00 – Gabrielle Mills
So we’re likely not expanding into other services because we have five already and that’s enough. We are finding that there’s a lot of growth to be had in our talent acquisition department. So we’re eager to see what that ends up looking like through the year. What we really want to focus on in terms of like diversification or innovation, which I think is really where your question comes from, is how we utilize technology to make our services more streamlined and more advanced. We will never not have the support of our people. We are a people business. We will go under before computers take over our jobs. However, there’s a lot of really great technology that if you use it right and smartly, we can make profit margins better, save our clients money, be able to reach more people. So we’re going to try to figure out how we can lean into that a little bit.
00:28:02 – Rico Figliolini
So that’s a great path to go down for a quick minute, maybe. Because AI technology is something that everyone, every business is tackling and using in a variety of ways, right? ChatGPT, Grok3, there’s a bunch of them. Claude, I mean, there’s a whole bunch. DeepSeek, I mean, you could just go on and on with these things. And every business, every industry is trying to figure out how they can use that, right? And some use it badly and others use it better. Sometimes it’s used for support or for research versus making decisions. So are you finding that you have to also look at that to augment or to add a complexity to the service you provide?
00:28:52 – Gabrielle Mills
So what stands out in your question to me is the have to. I think that nobody really has to, but I’m in an industry that if I don’t look at it, my industry will die because it is based on people. And if you don’t lean into the technology, you run the risk of the world thinking they don’t need people anymore. And then you’re obsolete. So we don’t have to do anything. But if we want to stay in business, we should be looking at how to utilize it better. The beauty of our business is these are things that people are always going to need. And computers can’t replace entirely. You always need a person overseeing or creating or some version of managing what the computer does. So we always have a people element to it. What we’re looking at with technology is how do we make ourselves and our processes and how we do things better and faster using technology and use the human brain where the human brain needs to interject.
00:30:01 – Rico Figliolini
Yeah. Okay. Great explanation. Well, we’ve reached the end of our time together. Where can people find out more about your company? Of course, we’ll have it in the show notes as well, but how can they reach out to you?
00:30:14 – Gabrielle Mills
Yeah. So if you’re local, just come and see us. We are off of Scientific Drive in Technology Park, down by the Forum. If you want to check us out online, we are at getsourced.com. We’re on all the socials under SourcedATL, or you can always just look at my name, Gabrielle Mills. Unfortunately, very easy to find out on the web.
00:30:39 – Rico Figliolini
I’m sure. Check her out on LinkedIn. It’d be easy to find her there. I want to say thank you again to EV Remodeling and to Vox Pop Uli for supporting us. Everyone else, you have comments, leave them in the comment section below, depending where you’re watching this, whether it’s Facebook, YouTube. If you’re listening to this on Apple or any of the audio podcast places, Spotify, leave a review, like, share. We’d love if you would support us that way. Gabrielle, thank you for being with us. Appreciate it.
The Peachtree Corners Business Association (PCBA) celebrated the opening of Fifth Third Bank’s new branch in Peachtree Corners with a ribbon cutting on February 20.
Located at 3210 Holcomb Bridge Road, the new location features lobby and drive-thru hours, regular banking, investment services, loans and more.
“We are growing [and] proud to open up our new financial center at Peachtree Corners,” said Randy Koporc, EVP, regional president GA/AL Fifth Third Bank. “Congratulations to Financial Center Manager Jasmine Youngblood and her team, Retail Executive Dewayne King and all involved in getting us to this day.”
photo credit: Keri Zampano; courtesy of Peachtree Corners Business Association
“Thank you, Lisa Proctor of the Peachtree Corners Business Association, for helping us celebrate at our ribbon cutting,” Koporc continued.
Fifth Third plans to build more than 60 financial centers in Georgia and Alabama over the next five years and looks forward to strengthening the communities that they join.
“We love welcoming new businesses into Peachtree Corners,” said Lisa Proctor, president of the Peachtree Corners Business Association. “Fifth Third Bank will be a great addition to our banking community. We can’t wait to watch them grow.”
photos: Keri Zampano; courtesy of Peachtree Corners Business Association
About Peachtree Corners Business Association
The Peachtree Corners Business Association (PCBA) is a business membership organization that focuses on innovative approaches, programs, shared resources, community outreach and opportunities for member businesses and professionals to connect, develop, grow, and prosper.
The PCBA is made up of businesses of all sizes and types who want to expand their reach and grow their business within Peachtree Corners and the greater metro-Atlanta area.
Sequel Coffee Co., a new specialty coffee brand, is set to open its flagship location in Peachtree Corners in the summer of 2025.
The new coffee shop will open alongside shared workspace provider, Roam, at Town Center and will feature a convenient drive-thru complemented by an inviting in-shop experience.
Premium coffee and locally sourced offerings
Committed to delivering an elevated coffee experience, Sequel Coffee Co. will serve freshly brewed coffee and handcrafted espresso beverages with responsibly sourced beans from Valor, a local metro Atlanta roaster.
Interior rendering courtesy of Sequel Coffee Co.
The food menu will feature a curated selection of locally sourced café favorites and convenient grab-and-go options from local vendors Two Chefs and A Seasonal Affair.
Guests can expect a variety of delicious offerings, including breakfast sandwiches, quiche and freshly baked pastries, as well as yogurt parfaits, homemade granola bars and protein-packed power bites for on-the-go fuel.
In addition, rotating seasonal flavors and limited-time menu items will offer new and exciting food and beverage options throughout the year.
Strengthening community connections in Peachtree Corners
A concept created by Roam, the hospitality-focused work and meeting space, Sequel Coffee Co. is built on the belief that coffee is more than just a morning ritual — it’s a catalyst for creativity, productivity, community and connection.
Image courtesy of Sequel Coffee Co.
Sequel’s tagline, “start your story strong,” reflects its mission to inspire the potential in every day by championing stories, embracing moments and thoughtfully crafting coffee.
Sequel seeks to become an integral part of the Peachtree Corners community by fostering meaningful interactions through hospitality-driven experiences. With a brand philosophy centered on people, purpose and belonging, the company aims to inspire customers through delicious coffee and intentional service.
Bringing Sequel Coffee Co. to you
Ahead of its brick-and-mortar opening this summer, Sequel Coffee Co. is currently serving the community through its mobile coffee cart, offering a full-service espresso bar and trained baristas for offsite events.
Ideal for corporate offices, networking events, school functions and private gatherings, the mobile cart provides an opportunity to enjoy Sequel’s signature coffee experience in any setting — before the shop even opens its doors.
Sequel is also currently hiring a Shop Manager to lead daily operations and cultivate an inviting experience for customers. Interested applicants can learn more about the position and apply at sequelcoffeeco.com/shop-manager-job-listing.
About Sequel Coffee Co.
Sequel Coffee Co. is dedicated to inspiring potential in every day through thoughtfully crafted coffee and warm hospitality.
Offering handcrafted espresso beverages, freshly brewed coffee and a curated menu of café favorites — along with a convenient drive-thru and cozy café space — Sequel aims to create a welcoming spot for guests to fuel their day and transform the daily coffee routine.
Roam is a comprehensive workplace solution offering co-working memberships, private offices and meeting space for professionals and businesses of sizes.
Opening in Peachtree Corners at 3847 Medlock Bridge Road in summer 2025, Roam provides flexible and inspiring environments to help individuals and teams accomplish their best work. Now leasing private offices and pre-booking meetings and events.
Food & Drink2 days ago
