Page 247 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

228 The Disney Way

we opened the new bakery, nothing was going right. The machinery wasn’t
working, but my mother was determined and stayed up for something like
36 hours, just to get an order out. If she hadn’t done that, we might have
lost the account. She had employees who followed her lead and worked
nonstop until the baking was done. We didn’t lose the account because of
my mother’s sheer will. So, I guess I got a lot of that from her.” We don’t
guess, we know.

Dare

What kind of person decides to try out a new restaurant idea without any
restaurant experience (David Overton never even worked in one.) under the
microscope of Hollywood and doesn’t get egg on his face? One who sees
risk as “innovation,” David told us. “Sure, there was this 5 o’clock moment
when we were doing the Beverly Hills deal. I knew that if I did nothing, it
would not have gone forward. And I asked myself if I really wanted to do
this. Of course, I pushed forward. At that moment, I could understand how
some people would feel overcome by failure.” But David’s excitement and
desire to build a distinctive corporate culture laid the groundwork for The
Cheesecake Factory’s incredible record—from individual stores’ generating
in excess of $3 million annually to the company’s surpassing the $1 billion
revenue mark in 2005.
With a solid foundation and a proven model that baffled the restaurant
industry, David was ready to expand his horizons. In the mid-1980s, the
Marina del Ray and Redondo Beach locations took David in a new direction
with the opening of his first full-service bars. David and Linda worked for
hours trying out new drink ideas and giving them names such as Typhoon
Punch and Flying Gorilla.
Then one day, a friend of David’s enticed him to open in Washington,
D.C., and bring the “quesadillos and guacamole”—two words that, back
then, required explanation for those in and around “the D.C. beltway.”
David was ready, but he knew this would be a real test. Things would be dif-
ferent in D.C. with a 13,000 square foot, bi-level, glass-enclosed design and
a clientele with a reputation for receiving preferential treatment. On opening
day in January 1991, a major snowstorm hit the northeastern United States.
D.C. was almost totally shut down. Some people called to find out if the
restaurant would be open in such inclement weather; others called to find
out if The Cheesecake Factory was just a bakery. “I had 33 servers and we