My father and two of his brothers had been owners of Liuzza’s Restaurant, a very successful neighborhood restaurant in mid-city New Orleans founded by their parents in 1939. A few years after they had sold it, they decided to re-enter the restaurant business through becoming a Louisiana-based franchisee of California-based Sizzler Family Steakhouses. The first unit was initially very successful and grew rapidly. That eventually led to several unsuccessful locations and outgrowing their organization’s management capabilities.
At that time, I was a successful commodity futures broker and office manager for ContiCommodity Services, the nation’s largest commodity futures broker. As the family’s Sizzler business turned from very positive to very negative and the family’s personal guarantees at risk, I left my position at Conti to become Interim CEO of the Sizzler franchisee company with 5 profitable restaurants and 6 unprofitable ones. Although operations quality was improved, it was not enough to overcome the losses of the poorly located restaurants, which we were unable to sell or lease to others. The only option for those negatively performing restaurants was to create a new restaurant concept more suitable to those locations.
I brought in outside expertise to assist in creating our Cuco’s Mexican restaurant concept. Outside minority capital was raised from professional investors to remodel one building and for initial working capital. The assets were placed in a new entity, Cuco’s, Inc. We remodeled the building, created new operating systems, and hired and trained staff for the new concept. Initial opening revenue was very high and grew from there. All this resulted in converting our worst location, losing over $100,000 annually to making a profit of $150,000 annually. We followed up with two more similar negative locations and had results almost as good.
With that success record, two regional stock brokerage firms were interested in taking the Cuco’s public in a national initial public offering. This was the first successful Initial Public Offering with a NASDAQ listing of a Louisiana company in 10 years.
Truly, a Transformational result.
