We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nick Chase. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nick below.
Nick, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?
They say luck is the confluence of preparation and opportunity. I would say I’ve been very lucky with my employees. I would also say that I’ve spent a lot of time making sure that the people I hire and the attitude they bring to the shop are representatives of a) what the shop needs and b) my desire to create an enjoyable atmosphere for myself and my employees. I’m fortunate that I’m in a position to choose who I get to work with every day and I try to bring in people that, on top of being good at their job, are fun to talk with. I think that focusing on creating that right atmosphere has been extremely helpful in starting to turn some of the positions here into potential careers and not just a line on a resume.
One of my biggest challenges as a small business is keeping employees long term. When I opened I offered very little in benefits. I always tried to push the wages up as much as possible because I couldn’t offer 401k’s, health insurance, or a lot of other benefits. Now, after 6 years, I’m able to offer more. We offer 4 weeks of PTO, store discounts, and we started a profit sharing program to reward everyone for helping to grow the shop. I focus on benefits that provide my employees more money in the short term because … (gestures broadly at the economy, inflation, housing costs, etc) … I think that’s more important at the moment than long term benefits.
I think that strategy has been paying off. My 4th hire, 9-Times, a nickname she earned on her 2nd day, worked with me for 3 years before her housing situation deteriorated and forced her to move out of state. That changed last year and when she moved back I created a position for her here and figured out how to grow the shop enough to accommodate her. Now, she is my General Manager and runs the day to day operation of the shop. She’s amazing and her efforts are allowing me to step back and look at the long term growth of the shop. I believe that my approach of driving my employees’ wages up as much as possible was instrumental in creating jobs where people can learn and grow, and not just positions where they trudge through the day in order to pay rent.
Nick, 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?
I’m the owner of Friendly Nick’s Butcher in Fort Collins.
We are a whole animal retail butcher shop focused on bringing the best meats to northern Colorado. I opened the shop in the summer of 2018. We struggled along for the first year and a half until the COVID pandemic hit. There was a week where we closed and I wasn’t sure we’d ever open again. We did, amazingly, and the pandemic, or at least the economic affects of being an essential business during a time of fear and uncertainty, ended up being a boon for us. Everyone still had to eat and I was able to grow the shop to meet an increased demand. I was able to pivot our offerings to create more value for our customers and that allowed us to grow while many food service businesses struggled. It taught me a valuable lesson I still apply today; that my services need to bring value to my customers. So, despite being focused on the high end of the meat market in both quality an price we create ways for our customers to find value here.
We’re a whole animal butcher shop and there’s a lot of meat on a cow that’s not a fancy steak. My training as a chef allows me to use all of our trimmings to create products like deli meats, bacons, and sausages, and take home meals like shredded BBQ beef, pulled pork, barbacoa. Because we can use every scrap from the animal we can offer unique cuts that you don’t find in supermarkets and offer them at a price that brings value to my customers.
Now, with inflation’s devastating affect on food prices, I still focus on ways to keep the costs down for everyone. We started selling whole, half, and quarter beef and pork. It can save you anywhere from 10 – 15% vs buying each cut through our case. It also provides an amount of relief to know that you have hundreds of pounds of meat available to you no matter what prices do for the next year.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I hate social media. It’s a plague on the mental health on society. I swear if it wasn’t free marketing for the shop I would never use it.
Since that’s my attitude, I never spent much time trying to promote my shop online. I have all the basics: @fnbutcher on facebook and instagram. I have a twitter account I don’t use and at one point I rolled around an idea of flash sales on snapchat. But that takes time and effort and all of mine is spent on making the business great, not trying to convince people online that it’s great. So, my approach to all of it is to just let people know I exist. I rarely promote certain products, advertise sales, or impress people with how fabulous the butchering life is. I tell stupid stories, make bad dad jokes, and sometime I just talk about what’s happening in and around my life and city. That’s how it started anyway.
Now, I try to talk about how the shop runs and the people who run it. There’s a lot of people who dismiss employees who work retail jobs as lazy or unaccomplished, and I focus a lot of my social media efforts on dispelling those notions. My employees are amazing people, very well trained and educated about their craft, and just all around good people. I try to promote them and get people to realize that my employees are people, not cogs, and they are here to help my customers create better meals with better meats. We are not some giant, conglomerate, union busting supermarket. We are just 5 people who live in and support the community. (Admittedly, we support the tattoo parlors in town more than most, but that’s just a reflection of who I hire, not some grand scheme.)
I guess, if you want to define it more, I promote my business through promoting my employees more than my meats. Maybe you could look at it as us selling a meat buying experience. Like finding a good barber shop is about more than just the haircut it’s about the atmosphere, and I promote the people who create our atmosphere.
Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?
I’ve worked 3 jobs in my life that missed payrolls. I walked out of all 3. It’s HUGE red flag that the company is floundering.
I promised myself I would never do that to my employees. Part of that is just not wanting to put them through that stress and part of that is less altruistic. If my employees can’t trust me to get them paid then they won’t want to help me grow the shop. That being said, it came down to about 5 days before I lost everyone.
March 29, 2020, about 2 weeks after the government declared a state of emergency, we shut down for 9 days. One of my employee’s roommates contracted COVID and was hospitalized. At that time there was no testing available and we had been in contact with the employee for a few days before we found out. The timing worked out so there was very little risk to us, but with so much uncertainty, a 1 year old son at home, and 3 other employees that had to take care of their families, I decided to shut down the shop and quarantine. I made the decision to pay my staff fully during those 9 days. I counted up all the money I had and figured I could pay my staff for a total of 14 days before I ran out. That meant that after our 9 day quarantine we had 5 days to make enough to pay off our suppliers and buy more meat, and enough to pay rent, loans, and start saving up for the next payroll.
I wrote the hardest facebook post of my life that night and went home not knowing if we’d ever reopen. I spent the week in the shop cooking anything that we didn’t have room to freeze and handing it out to my employees, and to anyone else that needed help. I know a lot of restaurant industry people and everyone got hit hard so I did my best to support them too. Sometimes I would just drop off a tray of pulled pork sandwiches at a brewery (they we’re still open at the time) and let everyone grab what the needed. Probably not the safest thing to do if we were try to slow the spread of the virus, but I felt fine and it kept me from sinking deeper into depression.
When we did reopen, the support was overwhelming. It was like the end scene of It’s a Wonderful Life. We sold out of meat that day, and the next, and the next. It took us over a week to finally get restocked enough to not run out of meat. I’ve never experienced anything like the support I got from the community for those days. If I’d have hit day 14 and not made payroll my employees would have left. They would have had to. The community saved us and I spend a lot of time thinking about that and making sure that I never take their support for granted.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.fnbutcher.com
- Instagram: @fnbutcher
- Facebook: @fnbutcher
