Made From Scratch

The Legendary Success Story of Texas Roadhouse (Where Crazy Works)

Kent Taylor

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982185725
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Activité entrepreneuriale

* An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller * From founder Kent Taylor, the incredible made-from-scratch success story of Texas Roadhouse. In Made From Scratch, the late business maverick Kent Taylor tells the legendary story of Texas Roadhouse and in the process reveals its recipe for success: embracing unorthodox business practices. Because isn't it a little unusual for a company to do almost no advertising? Is it wild to give away free peanuts and rolls and keep prices low, even as costs rise, or to keep the menu basically the same since it opened? Does it fly in the face of reason to prohibit coats and ties at headquarters and to have a CEO who dressed like he was part of the landscaping crew?These business practices might be unconventional, but for Kent and Texas Roadhouse, they worked. What Kent and his Roadies cooked up is an island of misfits who are cool with being different. They love to have fun, but are serious about following meticulous recipes to serve up hand-cut steaks, fall-off-the-bone ribs, made-from-scratch sides, ice-cold beer, and irresistible fresh-baked bread. It's Legendary Food, Legendary Service, the Texas Roadhouse way.To show how this company became a staple of American dining and survived a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, Kent took a trip back in time to offer the lessons learned from his pathbreaking life, revealing how a distracted kid from Louisville, Kentucky, created anything worthwhile at all.

PART I THE SKINNY KID FROM LOUISVILLE

CHAPTER 1 BORN TO RUN

The day I set foot on Ballard High School soil in 1969, I was a five-foot-two-inch-tall, bespectacled, 110-pound freshman, barely fourteen years old (and looking all of eleven), and desperate to prove myself. I had just moved to Louisville, Kentucky, from Richmond, Virginia, and figured the fastest way to make my mark was to become a straight-up, albeit tiny, football star my sophomore year. What kid my age didn’t know the names Jim Brown or Johnny Unitas? Hell, what girls my age didn’t know about Broadway Joe Namath?

I didn’t have any real illusions about sporting panty hose on TV commercials (à la Namath), but if I could at least get a foot on the field now and then, in my mind, I’d have it made.

I was quickly cut from the team (big surprise), but somehow I convinced the JV coach to give me a second chance, and I took the final slot on the third-string JV team, playing defensive back. The coach liked my attitude and hustle. The bigger and more athletic kids were told to “work as hard as that punk over there.” Think of me as Rudy, just smaller. I then spent the entire year riding the pine at the far end of the bench. I was so far down there I made friends with the other team’s mascots. After my sophomore season, the football coach sat me down and said, “Taylor, don’t even think about coming back next year. If I ever let you get into a game, they’re going to kill you. I mean you could die. I can’t have that on MY résumé, now, can I? Why don’t you go try the track team, where a skinny little kid like you can maybe do something!”

The football coach had already spoken to Dick Bealmear, the new young track and cross-country coach, and it was all arranged. I found my new mentor in his broom-closet-size office. Only a dozen years removed from high school himself, Coach Bealmear smiled and encouraged me to take a few laps around the track, away from the refrigerators on the gridiron. Then, after timing me, he confided, “I hate to say this, Kent, but you apparently have no natural speed or talent, so your only likely option is long-distance.” I’m like: Gee, Coach, don’t hold back, just tell me straight.

I finished my first race near the back of the pack, getting lapped by the better runners. And I got laughed at in the process by kids in the stands. I wouldn’t say that I was embarrassed. I mean, I sure as hell wasn’t afraid to show my face the next day. Quite the opposite. I wanted more than anything to prove to the other guys, my coach, and the grandstand guffawers that they were wrong. To this day, I’m not sure why I stuck it out with the other slow runners on the team, the outcasts, the never-going-to-make-the-big-league guys, but I enjoyed the camaraderie. I was part of a new group. Yeah, one of the nerdy, slow guys, but I had a place, and I was okay with it.

DICK BEALMEAR, track and cross-country coach, Ballard High School (1971–77)

Kent was this very awkward kid, and I think at first even half the shot-putters could have outrun him. I suggested he try the two-mile; eight laps around the track, where even the least talented runners could improve if they trained hard enough. I was thinking he could improve from awful to mediocre, which for a lot of kids is a self-esteem builder. Yes, sure the other kids laughed at him; his form was so awkward, and he was so gangly, but he always had this strange positive attitude, no matter the poor result. And, by the way, two years later no one was laughing. Most of those who had laughed at him were now eating his dust.

By my junior year I had a new problem. I had grown about eight inches but had only gained ten pounds, so I was a gangly five-ten, 120 pounds, and easily blown over by a strong wind. I was so tall and skinny I could have slipped through a grate of a storm sewer. My new track coach nicknamed me “Snake.” As you are well aware, snakes slither on the ground and get stepped on. Other guys on my team got nicknames like Bull, Muskrat, Bear, Horse, but there was only one reptile—me, the Snake. Based on my lack of speed, they might as well have called me “Worm.”

I ran six to eight miles a day the summer before my junior year, more than probably half of the cross-country team, and surprised quite a few people with my improvement. My form still sucked, but I was able to gut it out and slowly that season graduated from the back of the pack to the middle, now joining the average runners and finally escaping the laughter and those comments that plagued me my sophomore year.

After that junior cross-country season, a group of us traveled down to Knoxville, Tennessee, to watch the NCAA cross-country championships, featuring the trifecta of Oregon’s Steve Prefontaine, Villanova’s Marty Liquori, and Western Kentucky’s Nick Rose. I will never forget Prefontaine powering through that tough hilly course, challenging anyone to catch him as he picked up the pace on each rise, daring all comers to endure pain only he was capable of enduring. Steve won the race, no problem, and wore about him afterward an aura of extreme confidence that captivated me. Still, to this day, I can remember that look, as if he wanted his challengers to bring on whatever they had, and he’d find a way to bring that much more.

After the race, I followed him around like a puppy dog as he was interviewed by several reporters. I finally built up the confidence to ask him to autograph one of my brand-new Nike Cortez shoes (Nike’s first). Later, I asked Marty Liquori to sign the other Cortez. He was gracious and did sign but chuckled, as Nike was not his sponsor, and said to me, “I’d rather sign an Adidas next time.” The following week—after I’d showed off my trophy shoes to many—someone busted into my locker and stole them.

At home, my mom tried to console me, but to no avail. To soothe my soul she clicked on our RCA stereo, which was almost always on at our house. Usually she played Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, and the Drifters, or Motown artists like the Four Tops and the Temptations. Whether doing the laundry, cleaning, or cooking, she always seemed lost in the music, singing along and dancing as she worked. I caught the music bug early, too. I had received my first clock radio in third grade, and after my parents said good night and turned off my light, I would put the radio under my pillow and listen to WAKY AM, a Top 40 channel, falling asleep to the latest hits or The Casey Kasem Show.

When my dad came home, the music would shift to Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Herb Alpert, or Elvis. Music was part of my life from day one. Sometime around 1969 we were lucky enough to get our first color TV. Talk about a game changer. On Sunday nights National Geographic came on in full color, showing the wonders of our planet, and then The Ed Sullivan Show. Super cool.

That spring, in addition to my many grass-cutting gigs, I applied at the Captain’s Quarters seafood restaurant in Louisville and got a job working part-time as a busser: clearing tables, filling water glasses, delivering bread and butter, all in my white busser top and dark slacks. It was my first taste of the restaurant business. The owner, Dottie Mahon, was as nice a human as ever walked the earth, yet she held everyone accountable. For some reason Dottie took a liking to this gangly kid busing her tables. So now I was getting positive vibes from my parents, my track coach, and my new employer, which was very cool.

I had a fairly decent track season—nothing outstanding—but the summer between my junior and senior year I learned what would be my greatest lesson in running, something that would eventually help me in the early days of Texas Roadhouse: that ladies dig letterman jackets. Actually not, just kidding. The lesson was: If you outwork the other guys, you will eventually get where you want to go and be somewhat luckier than others think you should be.

Case in point: One of my teammates that junior year, Steve Bullock, had just won State in the mile run and was one of Kentucky’s best cross-country runners to boot, so I asked him if he’d mind me tagging along on his summer training runs. I figured if I chased him all summer I could improve vastly and pick up some of his confidence. And trust me, he wasn’t just confident, he was cocky, with a badass swagger to go along with it (albeit in knee-high, white tube socks, but who knew better back then?). I wasn’t signing up for full-on cocky or looking to develop said swagger, but I figured a little more confidence couldn’t hurt. He said, “Sure,” with a bit of a laugh, but I needed to know that his plan was to run twice a day and put in more than one thousand miles that summer, as one of our teammates’ dads said he would give a one-thousand-mile T-shirt to anyone on our team who accomplished that feat.

I said, “I’m all in.”

Steve said, “Rest up, hell begins tomorrow.”

Bullock was a robotic runner, a machine; barrel-chested, relaxed stride, he almost flowed. He had built up his cardiovascular strength from many miles of training along with a naturally strong mental toughness. And for the first month he pretty much dusted me, but with every mile we ran, with every stride, I was reshaping my body. Over a very hot, muggy summer—when pollution levels in Louisville were off the charts thanks to leaded gasoline at twenty-two cents a gallon—I learned to endure more pain than I thought possible. I’d start the run thinking, Today I’ll gut it out and push myself and stay with Steve for three miles of our ten-mile run. A week later I’d try to hang for four miles. And so on.

I learned to push myself through ungodly amounts of agony, picking up the pace on uphill inclines, which by midsummer would piss Steve off. For me, I was creating a mini race with each hill. I usually died at the top, but it felt good to torment my mentor.

Sometime in late July, we both passed the one-thousand-mile mark, with me cheating and running a third time a day, about three times a week, without Steve. I wanted to put in more miles than he did. At the end of the summer, when we all turned in our logs, three of us on the team had passed the fifteen-hundred-mile mark, which equated to fifteen and sometimes twenty miles a day.

I had been building up the muscles in my heart, and by cross-country season was able to pump blood farther with less exertion, increasing my lung capacity to bring more oxygen to my leg muscles. Most importantly, I was expanding my brain’s ability to tolerate pain and push myself beyond what I had felt possible. I was reshaping myself and my destiny.

DENNIS HADDAD, Ballard High School cross-country and track teammate, retired senior director of product development, running shoes, Nike

When they started, Steve Bullock and Kent running two-a-days in the summer, it was secretive. No one knew about it. Kent was obsessed with putting the miles in, and it was one of the hottest, most humid, polluted summers I’ve ever experienced during my years in Kentucky. Not only were they doing two-a-days; I later found out Kent pulled some three-a-days, absolutely crazy. Pure guts and determination.

Now in training with Steve, instead of finishing a dozen Love Boat lengths behind him, I was usually within sight at the end of the runs. We both started to realize that with our improved running—plus a few other guys who improved while earning their one-thousand-mile shirts—we just might challenge the two Catholic-school cross-country powerhouses across town and maybe even pull an upset and earn the Kentucky cross-country championship, which would give our new high school its first-ever team state championship. All for the price of a few T-shirts. Go figure.

As that senior cross-country season started, I was approaching six-foot-one and had gained ten pounds of muscle over the summer, drinking protein shakes and adding raw eggs—“Yo, Adrian”—and basically running my ass off. As I began the season, I was finishing in the top seven to ten in the big meets, usually racing against more than a hundred other runners. Steve was typically a few spots in front of me, if he wasn’t winning. Most of the elite guys thought I was a transfer in from another state. They’d never heard of me and certainly hadn’t noticed me finishing well back in the pack the year before.

With each race, my confidence, speed, and endurance grew. My new strategy was to accelerate up the hills where the pain was the greatest. I found guts and endurance could help me overcome the runners with more pure speed than I had.

Then, about halfway through the season, a miracle of all miracles happened. I beat my mentor, Steve Bullock, in a race not once, but a couple of times—always on courses with the most hills.

Running in the lead pack, if not outright winning races, revealed an unexpected pleasure. Being in contention, dueling with someone to win, it was a rush. How cool is this? I felt good, I felt fit, and I was ready to tap into my potential. No substance on the planet can rival a rush like that.

By the end of the season, I was All-State. I had as many medals and ribbons as a Russian general, and our team pulled the ultimate upset in the state meet, despite me (and others on the team) having the flu and not running a great race. Big thanks here to my other one-thousand-mile buddies for coming through.

DICK BEALMEAR

The morning of the state cross-country meet, over at Creason Park in Louisville, Kent was really sick and having a severe nosebleed from blowing his nose constantly. His lungs must have been full of mucus. I wasn’t sure if I should run him, but he insisted. So, I’m like, okay. With the amazing season he had just had, why not? And another one of my boys, Jim Beck, was also sick, as the flu was going around. They both ran and had horrible races. As we were one of the team favorites, I’m thinking we’re done—as Kent would normally be in the top five. In a big meet you enter seven runners and score your first five, and whatever position you finish, that’s how many points you score for your team. It’s like golf, low score wins. We did win, but it was a lot closer than it should have been if Kent had been healthy. In the Ballard High School Distance Hall of Fame, there are many sub-ten-minute two-milers, but Kent still has the fastest time on record in the two-mile category.

Honestly, I should have been home in bed that day, snug in my fifteen-hundred-mile T-shirt. But as miserable as the state final was, running with a 102-degree fever and Kleenex jammed up my nose from the gusher, I felt good that even in the worst condition of my life I was able to compete with the best in the state. It taught me that you can train your mind to overcome any obstacles. Much of my confidence was instilled by Coach Bealmear. He was the first person I’d found in sports who continually used positive, not negative, reinforcement and truly believed that anyone, through the power of thought, could achieve more than they or others believed was possible. If I had a bad race, he always found some positive words and reminded me to push forward and not dwell on the past.

Most people don’t think of cross-country or track as team sports, but Coach helped us bond and ensured that even though we competed with each other individually, we truly wanted everyone to be their best, always. We were a tribe—a band of brothers.

The only time that changed was when the race started and running became an individual sport. Then it was me against the clock, me against the world, even me against my teammates, and definitely me against my competitors. For them I had no mercy. I had trained like I had never trained before; and when I lined up and waited for the gun, I was there for one thing: to be my best, endure the most pain, make sure that on every hill or on every lap I would crush my rivals. It was nothing personal.

Before a race, I would usually warm up for about a quarter mile, walk over to my cassette player and put on “Hold Your Head Up” by Argent, and get myself pumped. Just the anticipation of the starter’s pistol set my heart to racing. Then off in the distance I’d usually hear my mom cheering something like, “Come on, Kent. Let’s go. You can do it,” even before the race started.

It was time to be “Takin’ Care of Business.” BTO was also on my playlist.

MARILYN TAYLOR, my mom

Do you know what they said to me after he left high school? “Marilyn, it’s so much quieter now that Kent has graduated.” Because he was a distance runner, he ran around the track so many times, I’d start up in the bleachers and I’d practically end up right down where he was coming in by the end. I didn’t miss any meets at all. I was there every single time, c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Part I: The Skinny Kid from Louisville
• Part II: Perfecting the Roadhouse Recipe
• Part III: A Leader’s Tool kit
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Afterword
• About the Author
• Copyright