We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Wolfgang Schaefer And Whitney McAllister. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Wolfgang Schaefer and Whitney McAllister below.

Alright, Wolfgang Schaefer and Whitney McAllister thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Would you say you are more focused on growing revenue or cutting costs? We’d love to hear how you think about these two critical drivers

An initial response when looking at Profit and Loss sheets is looking at how you can cut back on future costs– and don’t get me wrong, we spend lots of time focusing on labor and food costs, but at some point if you cut everything back and don’t have the monetary structure to support good long term folks working in your spaces and the quality of food that your customer has come to expect at your restaurant, you’re going to lose the sales and the support of the community that is spending money in your space.

The reality is that running a restaurant is expensive, labor and overall costs are up more than ever, so we are constantly trying to balance maintaining a high level experience and the money being spent and being made.

One main thing that we have refocused on is growing our revenue and how to get creative and make more money. There was a moment last year where we realized, we couldn’t keep raising regular service menu prices and at some point a restaurant is making what it’s going to make and if that’s falling short of the overfall spending of having a restaurant with solid staff and good food, what can we do to bring in more income without cutting back on the experience?

We started to think about our space and what it could look like not just as restaurant. Of course this meant focusing on private events and catering services to help our bottle line, but we went beyond that and have started focusing on community classes as well. For example we regularly host dumpling making classes on week day evenings–folks buy tickets to the class and we are able to control inventory and staffing costs while still providing a really special experience for our community.

The biggest encouragement we would give to other restaurant owners is to think outside the box when it comes to your space, what else could you be doing there besides just making and serving food in a traditional sense. We all love “something special” –so it’s figuring out how to bring that to your business and selling it oh, and having the most amazing team to back it all up.

Wolfgang Schaefer and Whitney McAllister, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

With extensive backgrounds in service and retail, and a baby on the way, we felt as though we had to make some big decisions. We both had worked enough for other people, and constantly learned along the way, to realize that we could operate our own incarnations of business. And we wanted a lifestyle that didn’t make us compromise any of the things that really mattered to us in a workplace environment — things like creativity, product quality, and the company’s unique culture.

The timing of our desire to be at the reigns with a conceptual plan that made as much sense on paper as in our dreams, it was time for us to take the entrepreneurial leap and bring our visions to life. We scoured and pined and finally found the “perfect location.” It’s in quotes cuz it’s just a phrase in this case. The location was about as far from perfect as a business location could seem to be. We had taken on the burden of turning a dilapidated old crumbly little brick building — a building that had lied dormant and unattended to for forty years prior to our involvement — into a restaurant, a retail shop, and an apartment.

Somehow we pulled it off. With a solid business plan in hand, we secured a loan from the SBA and got to moving. Assembling our new (old) building was the first step. We built our apartment our first, refinanced, built our retail shop, Orange and Blue Co., specializing in vintage and modern home goods and accessories, refinanced again, and then finished out the restaurant space, Uncle Wolfie’s Breakfast Tavern, which serves down and dirty breakfast and lunch with a killer view of the city.

We’re proud we ever even tried in the first place. It’s tough to take that leap. But, when I see people’s reactions to Uncle Wolfies when it comes up in conversation? Fills my cup. So often I hear stories from smiling customers folks I don’t know or who don’t know me, reminiscing and reveling in their experience at one of our spots, and I get to think, damn, we did it. We did what we set out to do.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

To talk about pivoting in business, and in particular, for a restaurant, it would be silly not to mention Covid, and all the trials that fiasco created. We had been in operation for just 14 months, barely a year, when we were forced to pivot harder and faster than the industry’s ever demanded of anyone. But by the time the smoke cleared, and folks were back to dining in at our tiny spot, we had been a take-out only joint for longer than not — longer than those first 14 glorious pre-covid months. The industry has changed unrecognizably from where it was before the pandemic wreaked its relentless havoc. And it continues to change. The cost of goods and the cost of labor are so very different these days that restaurants, not just us but any restaurant, have all had to pivot again and again. It wasn’t enough to operate as we all did in 2019. And no business is gonna make it if it spends more than it makes. So another pivot to incorporate as many other revenue streams as possible — through catering, events, special dinners, or what have you — was inevitable. The world’s gonna keep us on our toes, and we have to be ready to adapt if we want to survive. We’d rather work for ourselves than anybody else, so we may as well embrace what the pivots demand of us and keep on living.

Any advice for managing a team?

We like to say in interviews with potential team members that “in a perfect world, none of us have to work.. I would love to trade my cheese for your bread and we all go have a picnic by the water together”

BUT, we do not live in that world and unfortunately we all have to work, so our intention is creating a work space that is less toxic than most and set the precedent of mutual respect between all the restaurant’s members.

We have an expectation that we all show up with the same agenda to do a good job, respect our coworkers and the customers and make some money.

We pride ourselves on the fact that we are hiring specific humans, not just bodies to fill roles in a restaurant, we don’t require dress codes or set formulas for how the servers and bartenders work. As long as you are working with the idea that all customers who are not a danger to anyone in the restaurant are welcome and treated with respect, we see each shift as a new scene where everyone is playing their role to provide service for the customers and once again, you know make some money.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.unclewolfies.com
• Instagram: @unclewolfies
• Other: We have two restaurants and a shop so additionally:
  @thewolfmke
  @orangeandblueco

Image Credits

Benjamin Schaefer with Mann Frau @mann_frau