Michael Mina Quotes

It's not easy to have success with restaurants in different cities, but I like the challenge.

I'm lucky that my restaurant partners are my wife Liz and Doug Petkovic. We opened our first restaurant over 15 years ago. And we didn't open up our second restaurant for almost ten years. So that gave us a good foundation of employees.

Some chefs go crazy with one restaurant, and if I had 20, I would go nuts.

I believe in this industry as a business, and I want to continue to grow my own business.

When our folks focus on exactly what is needed to succeed in the restaurants, they should be able to lead themselves to restaurateur level.

The rigor and discipline we use in running our business is key to consistently executing our growth strategy. And we systematically applied the same discipline to our investments, including acquisitions.

We have been told many times that we have become too big, but these are things that only someone who has no idea of the size of the competition can say. We are too small.

I remember looking to McDonald's, and, my God, they have 13,000 restaurants in the United States. Well, we have almost a couple thousand Chipotles. What if Pizzeria Locale is a few thousand, and Shod. All of a sudden, we're bigger than McDonald's in the U.S. I mean, that's not an unreasonable way to think about this.

There is a reason companies raise money from investors, which is to invest in growth.

Growth is essential to attracting the best and most sophisticated talent.

When a company gets bigger, when it begins to bring on employees, it naturally goes through this tendency of wanting to control, of wanting to build process - essentially to say not every one of our customers or employees has great judgment.

Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.

Don't wait till you are big before you begin building your brand. Build a brand from scratch alongside your business.

A campaign, like a brand, is not just a number of bits put together - a claim here, a pack shot there, a reason why somewhere else. If we try to produce it by the atomistic approach, we will end up with a sort of Identikit brand. It will be a perfect description of the structure of the brand, as the Identikit can describe the contours of the face. But it won't be the same thing. The brand will never come to life.

Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business

However small a company, its founders should try to expand people's opportunities and choices.

Scale will get you strategy.

We have to do a much better job at keeping our jobs. And we have to do a much better job at giving companies incentives to build new companies or to expand, because they're not doing it.

Ultimately, growth is essential for increasing a company's value.

If you want to scale-up, the first thing you have to do is to expand your own team.

"Growth!" is not a Hedgehog Concept. Rather, if you have the right Hedgehog Concept and make decisions relentlessly consistent with it, you will create such momentum that your main problem will not be how to grow, but how not to grow too fast.

One of the things we have learned in the first year is that if you want to scale-up, the first thing you have to do is to expand your own team.

If you want to grow, find a good opportunity. Today, if you want to be a great company, think about what social problem you could solve.

The quickest way to grow the sales of your business is to grow your people.

In order to grow at this pace, there will have to be a couple of acquisitions along the way. The tricky thing is to grow at this rate and maintain a 40 percent operating margin.