Otis's Dream

Owning a dream business wasn't what he expected.

Otis had a dream. Mac & Cheese. He didn’t just love it; he made the best damn mac & cheese in the state. His momma even said so. To be fair, everyone else who tried it agreed with her.

“Momma,” Otis said one day, “I’m gonna open a restaurant.”

“And serve what?”

“Why, mac & cheese, of course.”

“Oh, my sweet baby boy. Don’t you know nuthin’? Everybody loves mac & cheese, but it’s a side. Nobody gonna go to a restaurant just because it serves mac & cheese.”

Otis was not dissuaded. He opened that restaurant; called it Otis’s. Alas, business was slow. The first few weeks had a trickle of curiosity seekers, and they all loved the mac & cheese, but they weren’t coming back. Eventually he conceded that momma was right. Yet he didn’t quit. One night he lay awake in bed thinking about the struggling business. Mac & cheese is comfort food, he thought, like pizza. Hmmm… pizza has toppings!

The next day Otis ordered various meats from the restaurant supply store. He made mini meatballs, and ground sausage. His mac & cheese had three flavors now! He even made a tomato sauce instead of a cheese sauce for the ground beef. The customers liked it, but their numbers didn’t really increase.

“Too bad they don’t have buffalo-chicken,” he overheard a customer say.

That night Otis found himself creating a hot sauce recipe and soon buffalo-chicken mac & cheese debuted.

“Where are the vegetarian options,” one of his friends joked.

“I’ll add one when I can walk into a vegetarian restaurant and find a meat option,” Otis replied.

Yet he knew his friend had a point. The menu quickly diversified to include peppers, onions, and tomatoes. Just like pizza, you needed a great foundation, but the customers cared most about the toppings. The customer base grew, but not much.

Otis started to advertise. He joined the chamber of commerce. He sponsored a local little league team. He even partnered with a local BBQ restaurant and featured their pulled pork in his mac & cheese. The word of mouth helped. It took almost a year, but Otis’s finally turned a profit. It wasn’t long before Otis opened a second location. A third followed not long after.

This allowed Otis to move out of momma’s house and get his own place. A wife soon followed. The bank eagerly lent him money to expand further. The next year, twenty new Otis’s opened. Yet they all mattered to Otis. This was his lifeblood. His name was on the front. He hired a regional director away from Chic Fil A to instill customer service skills in his staff.

For all his mistakes in the beginning, he persisted. He learned. You could now buy Otis’s in fourteen states. And each step of the way, Otis made sure his restaurants stayed just as active in their local communities as his first had. He avoided politics and refused to donate money to either party. Because he didn’t move in political circles, he was never invited to party at private islands. Not that he would have accepted. His wife kept him happy. Instead of spending on “lifestyle,” Otis created a foundation which supported a variety of apolitical philanthropic efforts.

Then Fortune magazine came calling. They wanted a feature on the man who single-handedly changed mac & cheese from a side course to a main dish. The story gave a flattering portrayal. It even compared Otis’s to Starbucks and Samuel Adams. Starbucks had changed American coffee culture from a can of Maxwell House to a fifteen-dollar latte. Sam Adams had kicked off an entire revolution in craft beer. Otis, in his own way, had also shaped the American palate.

No one could say why, but after the article Otis’s reputation peaked. It then began a steady decline. He still had a loyal customer base, yet he wasn’t chic anymore. In fact, it seemed as if people resented what he’d done for mac & cheese.

A few months later, Otis attended a conference with other entrepreneurs and he mentioned his failing popularity to a famous television chef. The man's face drooped. He looked at Otis and said, “that’s America. The sad truth is, they don’t want you to be successful. I’m not sure if it’s the people or the media but they build you up just to tear you down. Just look at sports – they love the underdog, until he wins. Then they turn on him because he wins too much. Then they’ll likely accuse him of cheating.”

Otis didn’t know what to say. The man continued. “Business is the same way. When you’re a small business and you’re struggling, it’s because you don’t know what you’re doing. And yet people go out of their way to put you on a pedestal. It makes them feel good to support small businesses. Then you get it figured out and you become profitable. You grow. It’s still the same business they loved, but now is a “big evil corporation.”

“I never thought of it that way,” Otis answered.

“It’s sad, yet true. It’s easy to dream of success, yet it’s extremely difficult to achieve it. Most people don’t. It’s easier to just be jealous and tear down the successes of others. You’d think we’d outgrow it, yet perfectly normal adults are as catty and unsupportive as middle-school girls. Just look at what they did to Elon. He didn’t change. The only thing that changed was the medias portrayal of him. Anybody with half a brain saw it coming.”
Otis didn’t want it to be true, yet he knew it was. When he left the conference, he hired an underwriter to take Otis’s public. He made millions from the offering, immediately sold all his stock, resigned as chairman, and went back to making mac & cheese in his house for momma and his friends.

985 Words