Speak Freely Returns With Raji Sankar and Choolah!
Speak Freely is not about talking about business success or failure, it is about sharing your journey as an entrepreneur. That journey sometimes starts in Pittsburgh or ends there or stops along the way. Speak Freely returns this season, organized by Kit Mueller. The event brings influential and successful entreprenuers and local leaders to the stage and invites everyone to watch, participate, and question (free-of-charge). This season’s opening talk at Kelly Strayhorn Theatre featured Raji Sanker, co-founder of Wholesome International, a restaurant development company that operates Choolah and franchised Five Guys.
Traveled Across Countries, Across Markets
Born and raised in India, Raji Sankar was always looking for opportunities to learn more and embark on new adventures. She did her undergraduate studies 6 hours away from home, then moved a 24-hour train ride away to get her master’s degree in mechanical engineering, and finally moved to America to study artificial intelligence. She eventually landed in Pittsburgh at Alcoa and later began an MBA at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.
In Pittsburgh, she slowly started to notice the trends of entrepreneurship and business ownership around her. Orignally, she planned to be an investment banker, but during her first course, Introduction to Entrepreneurship, she fell in love; “starting a business, creating new ideas and products, it all sounded like so much fun.” And what started out as a school project, became an adventure. She and her classmates created multiple internet portals right after the dot-com boom, taking advantage of the momentum to quickly develop these portals and safely exit. Her first attempts at startup businesses may not have garnered any profits, but they taught her valuable lessons on realtionship-building, market trends, and the ups and downs of the startup world.
After exploring the field of technology, Sankar set her sights upon the food business. She wanted to bring her business acumen, her experiences from building internet portals, and the best practices of process improvement to the restaurant industry. She and her business partner, Randhir Sethi, did their market research and found that the Apple of the food industry at the time was fast-casual. They even had a business proposal: Indian fast-casual. They quickly realized, however, it was too early.
Lessons Learned Along the Way
Some ideas fail and some live on, but they are all valuable. After tucking away their dream for an Indian fast-causal restaurant, they franchised two different concepts, one was a flaming failure and the other was a success. The failure was Zing, which is now Bangkok Balcony. They owned the very last Zing restaurant to close in the U.S. and learned many things about management style and supply chain issues from the experience. Their successful operation was Five Guys. They opened their first two stores in 2005, one in Fox Chapel and another in Oakland, and learned another lesson in the process. Do not open in the middle of the school year. The Five Guys in Oakland opened right before Thanksgiving break, and nobody came.
You can’t be remain in ivory towers, you have to get behind the counter. Through their experience with Zing, Sankar and Sethi quickly realized they needed to be more involved in the day-to-day management to truly undertsand the business and its needs. They became an integral part of the operations from supply issues and food production to customer service and employee management. Sethi became the best grill master in the business and Sankar hired every single employee until the ninth store opened.
Timing is everything in the world of startups. Sankar was always conscious of when to launch into a market, and when not to launch. In 2004, she knew the market was not ready for an Indian fast-casual so she held her cards close and waited. And as more and more international cuisines entered the fast-casual market, she gathered resources together to make the leap. Raji Sankar and Randhir Sethi worked on their menu for two years and opened the first Choolah in Cleveland in 2014.
Growing Together with a Mission
It was not enough to have successful restaurants, Sankar and Sethi wanted to change the lives of their employees. One day, they sat down and redefined their mission, “to transform the quality of lives of everyone we touch.” With customers and employees at the forefront, they hoped to revolutionize the food industry. When asked how she upholds the mission on a day-to-day basis, Sankar responded “We have a great community of employees who exemplify this mission and put everything they have into this company.”
Today, Wholesome International operates 16 stores and Sankar is still behind the counter. She continues to do research about emerging markets, best practices, and process improvement. She upholds her mission and ensures her customers’ and employees’ (all 1600 of them) happiness. Her end goal is to put Choolah in every corner of the world, to build a global force and revolutionize the food industry.
Choolah is an Indian Barbeque fast-casual restaurant set to open in East Liberty on January 26th, 2018. Be sure to stop by and have some delicious food!
This event is sponsored by UpPrize and The Forbes Fund. UpPrize is a Social Innovation Challenge that creates cross-sector partnerships to solve some of our community’s most pressing problems. Speak Freely is Pittsburgh’s series of live interview events with notable business leaders frankly sharing the story of their entrepreneurial journey. Follow them on Twitter for more information and upcoming speakers!
