Danny Jacob: Okay so once again welcome to the Titan podcast as I said we have mr. Bert Mueller from California burrito with us and today we are going to talk a little bit about Bert's story and I think Bert's story has been a very inspiring one. So I have titled this podcast as the Paradox Playbook, Bert Mueller's journey from music to food. Bert, I think it's been over 10 years in India for you?
Bert Mueller: 13 years.
Danny Jacob: Okay. So Bert, as you all know, is from America and for 13 years he has been in India and like I was saying, his journey has been so inspiring and it's so enriching and we all want to know the secret details of what's been happening in the past 13 years with Bert. And I think if I have to say one thing that is about Bert's journey, I think it is a story of grit. And it's also a story of passion. But then I think it's a story that is full of paradoxes, right? I mean, he has been in India for 13 years, but he has actually changed the landscape of the quick service restaurant, as we say, the fast food industry in India, right? A person who didn't have any background in food or even in business has been able to create a 200 crore company in India from scratch.I think it's an amazing feat and we all would like to know the details of it. Should we be starting with the first paradox, Bert?
Bert Mueller: Sure, yeah. Okay. What's that?
Danny Jacob: So I think everybody's journey starts with purpose, right? Purpose defines you, who you are as a person. So we'll start with the paradox of purpose. I think Bert came to India with a different purpose, ended up with a different purpose. So yeah, so let's hear it from Bert on the paradox of purpose.
Bert Mueller: Sure, so I, you know, for me, I originally came to India in 2010 as part of a study abroad program. And till 2010, I had been a music student. So I played piano, I played violin and I had gone to school for music. 1So, in fact, I had applied to USC, which is the top, top school in the U.S. for film music. I got in. I think they only let eight people in per year.
Danny Jacob: Wow.
Bert Mueller: And I declined to go, actually. I decided to go to William & Mary because it wasn't only music. So I had already started hedging my kind of my bets in a way where I majored in music and public policy at William & Mary. But then in my third year of school, I decided that I needed to see more of the world. My family had traveled to Europe and the Caribbean when I was younger, but India was this grand place that I didn't know much about other than what I'd seen in documentaries and what I'd had in the food. Indian food is incredibly popular in the U.S. So, you know, I had applied to go abroad. There were only two study abroad programs in India for, I think, the entire US at that time. One was in Hyderabad, one was in Jaipur. And the head of my college study abroad program was an Indian fellow. I think he was from Delhi. And he migrated to the US. He said, you know, when I went to meet him he said why the hell do you want to go to India we're all trying to leave India and I said well gosh that's curious but I wanted to go and no one could tell me no so I came here, studied here and I think while I was here realized that I didn't want to sit in front of a computer all day. I wanted something that was very kind of holistic. It wasn't just one thing. wanted a rich work life after graduating. I think all of us, when we're in college, we say, well, what's going to happen next? Where do I go? And maybe some people's journeys are, I go to a big company, and I work my way up. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I originally wanted to do film music, but after spending time in India, I realized that there's so much more that I'm curious about. I'm naturally a very curious person. And India is like the ultimate learning experience. It's the ultimate kind of teacher in a way. It's my guru, you could say. So, you know, that kind of of that flipped my entire orientation away from doing music to doing business business is a route to travel the world business is the way to come back to india and i hadn't really even thought of starting a company until i had come to india so it totally totally changed my trajectory and here we are. Graduated, I took some business school classes and then moved to India and I've been here ever since. So quite a big learning experience for me.
Danny Jacob: Wow, it's so awesome. So generally, I know a couple of friends who have come from the west to India and they find India difficult. mean, it's not an easy place. It's like a lot of people, I think that's the first thing. And it's also chaotic, right? And it's super fast-paced. So how did you navigate through India like in your initial years?
Bert Mueller: I think that, you know, the skills that we learned growing up in the US, whatever those skills are, are not necessarily usable in India. India requires different skills. And for me, I adapted quite quickly. Also somewhere enjoy, I don't know if it's chaos, but many things happening at once. So for me, that's stimulating. I think for other people, it can be confusing. But for me, and obviously there'll be other personality types, that's a stimulating thing. So India, you know, is super rich in terms of every sense is delighted. The eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue. I mean, Indian food is probably the most tasteful food in the world.
Danny Jacob: Oh, I think that is the real reason, guys. It's the food. It's the food that has kept, you know, birth here in India for 13 years.
Bert Mueller: No, but I often say, almost, if you think of it, the food is perhaps the manifestation of the culture in a very, you know, it's a synthesized version of the culture, the food. And Indian food is not particularly organized. You you Japan you have very organized sushi in India there's curry it flows over the rice you eat with your hand so I often tell people that if they want to come and start a business in India maybe they're from abroad only do it if you like the food because if you don't like the food you probably won't like doing
Danny Jacob: And I think that one thing that Bert just said which makes so much sense right I mean you need to like what you do you need to really feel for it right otherwise it just becomes like the other thing that we that we do on a daily basis right so I think food seems to be like your passion but I still didn't get like from music to food very different genres right so did did you kind of give up on music to pursue food or you still continue to kind of
Bert Mueller: I have done very little work in music subsequently I did one movie in 2018 I've done
Danny Jacob: Oh which movie was this
Bert Mueller: This is my co-founder Galen oh yeah movie so I scored that which is decent it was probably an hour and a half movie Wow but very little commercial work a few ads have done very little commercial work I've done in music subsequently I think running a business requires your full attention yes you can't be diversifying your interests. Yeah. So, I still play piano. I have a grand piano in my house but not commercially doing anything in music anymore.
Danny Jacob: Got it. Understood. So, I think, you know, it's so heartening to kind of hear how a country like India has been able to you know, have a huge impact on your own personal life, the culture you spoke of, right? And it actually helped you navigate through your personal endeavors as well as your journey. So I think it's truly amazing to hear about it. So the next one is, you know, it's the paradox of place, right? I think we briefly spoke about it. But if you can just kind of tell us that everybody speaks about the American dream, right? And Bert is pursuing the Indian dream, which is quite the paradox. So, yeah. So so let's hear about how an American is fulfilling his dream here in India.
Bert Mueller : You know, when I graduated in the US, the US was in a recession and there was a lot of talk of BRICS.
Danny Jacob : This was 2009, right?
Bert Mueller: 2011 I graduated, but probably in my college years.
Danny Jacob: Yeah, that was a difficult period.
Bert Mueller: It was a challenging period in the U.S. And I think once I came to India, I felt this incredible energy, you know, this orientation towards growth. You can feel just interacting with people how optimistic people are about the future. India is also a very young country. So I think I've always been somebody who's a bit of a contrarian. And maybe that manifested in taking an opposite path of what most people would do.Just to see. I know.
Danny Jacob: I know. I've faced this myself, guys.
Bert Mueller: Do people know that we used to work together?
Danny Jacob: They will now.
Bert Mueller: So I think the path less taken certainly is attractive to me, just probably from a default personality type. Yeah. And feeling that sense of growth in India, it's powerful to be a part of that. It's moving to be a part of the change that's happening, people's lives getting better here. In visible ways. Maybe in the US people's lives get a little better. It's already the infrastructure is there.
Danny Jacob: It's very incremental,
Bert Mueller: But here it is. Here it's transformational. 1And just being able to be a part of that is powerful and moving and certainly a reason that I continue to be here.
Danny Jacob: So, like, did you ever think about this? Like, you know what, I mean, I have this huge American dream. Did you ever planned it or this was like, you know what, I'll go with the flow and I'll figure it out?
Bert Mueller: It was more go with the flow. I think when we wrote our initial business plan, the thought was maybe we could do 20 restaurants over five years and then maybe we would look at exiting the business we did do slightly less than 20 restaurants over five years but I think there's no desire to exit the business I'm enjoying my journey in India now we have 104 restaurants. It's been 12 years of operating restaurants now. So we've gone at, some people say a slow pace.Some people say we've gone very slow. But I think we've gone at a right pace and learned a lot along the way. And we've grown as India has grown. I think today, when we look at franchise requests, we get franchise requests really from across India, which tells me that India is growing not just in urban areas, it's growing everywhere. I gave an example of in Dimapur, we had six franchise requests. Now, Dimapur, I didn't know where that was. It turns out it's in Nagaland. 1But I had no idea where that was. Six people requested franchises there. So you know the growth story of India is really not contained to urban areas, it's pan India.
Danny Jacob: And I think it's also a lot to do with your personality. So I know like Bert is an Aries right, a very very strong personality and I think like he was talking about which is very interesting is that he saw a lot of energy in India, right? And I think Bert as a person also draws a lot of energy from people, right? I mean, and he likes to spend time with his people. And I have seen that personally. And I think that also kind of tells us that how the India story has a huge impact on his personal story in defining who Burt Mueller today is. In the entrepreneur community and the investor community, there's this whole debate that goes on, right? I mean, who really gets funding and you know there have been debates about you need to have a certain pedigree you need to maybe work in a particular company or you would have at least founded some failed startups if not anything else right so you need to have some experience or a great kick-ass business plan. So let's talk about the paradox of trust.
Bert Mueller: Sure. So I think the original trust we had to build and funding is often related to trust because we have to trust the person we're giving our money to. When we raised our seed round, we were 22-year-olds. There were three of us back then. And no experience in restaurants, no experience in India, no experience, frankly, working. So building that trust, it took a bit of kind of on-the-ground marketing in a way. We made a blog, and we circulated it amongst friends and family. More friends.
Danny Jacob: What was this blog about?
Bert Mueller: We made a blog and we circulated it amongst friends and family. More friends. What was this blog about? We just showed what the steps were we were taking to build the business. So we, you know, we went to make tortillas. We found a bakery to make tortillas with. And so we took photos of that. We would put that on the blog. We were living in a PG at the time. So, you you know showing that we were being conservative and frugal with our money at the p you know pg they have the they make the nice upma and the rice dishes at night so we would stay in i think the plot core mongol we stayed in a pg there at egypt as well but just kitchen equipment suppliers visiting kitchen equipment suppliers. 1and just demonstrating our commitment to this journey being done right yeah so that was how we built trust with people who didn't know us or couldn't see us um and and people did invest in small checks yeah but so that was probably the first experience in terms of funding and trust i think when we were signing up our first property we actually had a deal fall through with a very which is a great mall we're in it now but the mall didn't trust us so you know they come for a food test but there's who are these guys how long are they going to be here yeah why should we get them a space here and then luckily Embassy Group gave us an opportunity. So whether they trusted us or whether they weren't paying attention, I don't know. But I think they trusted us. And that's another thing. A landlord has to trust that you're going to be paying rent. So somewhere we were able to build that. Now, over the years, I think that the business that we're in is not one that's well-suited to venture capital. At a certain scale, private equity, it makes sense. But venture capital is not well-suited to that. We're in, frankly, a very traditional business. There's only a certain amount you can grow every year and keep the business scaling and sustainable. 1And restaurants have to make money. and sustainable and restaurants have to make money you can't you know there's no good reason that a restaurant maybe at a corporate level it may not make money some years if you're going very quickly if you're building a team but at a unit level a restaurant has to make money we're not in some new tech business
Danny Jacob: Yes
Bert Mueller: So i think but then and
Danny Jacob: and yet a lot of food businesses are not making money in india and I think I personally know a lot of them. I'm sure you do too. So what's been the defining moment for you? Like how did you crack making money like right from the first restaurant itself?
Bert Mueller: We've gone through our own phases, but I think that we've always been incredibly conservative about real estate. Once you start going into hyper growth mode and brand becomes the priority, often investments get made in real estate that may or may not materialize in terms of bottom line. In fact, I was speaking to a large chain that had opened in the UK and out of, I think, 18 stores they had, 16 were losing money, which are all brand stores. The two that were working were ones that were outside of the main city center. So, but different brands will take different journeys, balancing brand, balancing P&L. I think we've always been heavily on the P&L, the focus side. Maybe at the expense of growth, maybe we would have been able to grow faster if we had invested in a few brand locations. And then maybe there's other people at the other side who go crazy on expensive real estate only for the sake of the brand, but then they never build a P&L that works. And if all of the stores are losing money, it almost becomes psychologically justified that this is acceptable, it's for this bigger purpose.
Danny Jacob: That's right.
Bert Mueller: So we've always been on that side heavily.
Danny Jacob: So who taught you all this? Like I know that you have not gone to a business school, you haven't worked. So where did all of this wisdom come from?
Bert Mueller: I don't know if it's wisdom or not. But I think just a lot of practical challenges come up and you have to weigh the pros and cons. And I always say that if I can do it, probably anyone can do it. It's really just think logically about what are the frameworks. Don't overcomplicate it. Have a simple framework for thinking about it. And if you make enough right decisions, gradually it goes in the right direction.
Danny Jacob: So in your initial years, like you were talking about your funding, right? The first seed round. Did the investors that kind of came on board, were they your mentors in some sense? Would you like to talk a little bit about your mentors in the industry?
Bert Mueller: Absolutely. So I think mentors are incredibly important. I've been lucky enough to have really three mentors over the journey. So one was when I went, I did final business school class in the U.S. and the CEO of Bigelow Tees, which is a very large tea company in the U.S., he was a mentor for me on a college project. Stayed in touch with him. He gave advice. In 2017 or 2018, Ajay Kahl, CEO of Domino's Pizza, really took Domino's from 90, I think to 1,200 stores. He became a mentor and he, I mean, to 1,200 stores. He became a mentor. And he, I mean, I learned a huge amount from him. Exactly. I've never worked in a corporate setup. He taught me what a corporate setup is and how do you manage people in a corporate setup? Who do you hire in a corporate setup? Now, 80% of the things are good in a corporate setup. 20% might also not be a right fit for us. And I think I heard some quote from Steve Jobs about you always want to retain the heart of a small company even as a big company. So I think there's a balance between that in terms of the culture you build or in terms of the way you approach things. So you want to balance those things and be true to who you are. Every company will have a different culture yeah and I think he certainly taught me that having a culture that prioritizes the ground level people is incredibly important in the food business not that it wasn't before but he really sensitized me to that and then I'm Rajeev Batra who's the head of Spotify Asia's an investor in our company and and he's been a fantastic you know from a marketing perspective he does a ton of marketing and other other perspective brand perspective and many other ways and I've learned from you as well on. 1marketing you know you've certainly been in somebody's impacted my way of thinking about marketing so I think you know I try and learn from everybody yeah even even though we've had a you know a degree of success now I would still presume that I don't know everything and I can learn probably something from anybody. So always keeping my ears open.
Danny Jacob: Yeah, that's so good. But I think talking about people, I think Bert is really good with people, especially when it comes to hiring. Right. And I have personally kind of seen this. Right. I mean, he knows how to spot the right people. And of course, it comes with a lot of experience. But in your initial years, I know that, you know, you made some key hires which have been there with you, you know, till date, right? They've been around. So how did you go about this entire phenomena of cracking the right people at the right place at the right time
Bert Mueller: So I you know we also made a lot of hiring errors at the beginning
Danny Jacob: so you fail and you learn
Bert Mueller: Well I think it's partly that I think in you know intuitively there are things that as human beings were able to make decisions quickly on and things that we have to think a lot about yeah hiring actually has always been something i've just intuitively felt that this is right and this is wrong like
Danny Jacob : you're vibing with the person or not
Bert Mueller: So somewhere in my gut i get a sense of if i want they're the right hire or not yeah now is this this is this is probably right more than other people so i i from whatever i've seen i'm generally better than other people i seen in terms of, because we can only learn so much from an interview, from a resume, from a reference check, from whatever. So maybe it's a bit of both where there's some natural gut feeling and also there is a experience of hiring some very wrong people at the beginning. We'd hired some people at the beginning of our organization who were very crooked. And so, you know, learning kind of what can go wrong as well is very valuable. And good to learn it early than late into the experience. But, no, we've been blessed to have, I think, great people working in our company and people, you know, who stay with us for a good amount of time. And I think the thing I've learned in the food business in India is that often attitude and not experience matter. Not in all roles. I think marketing is certainly a role where you do want some experience. But in many roles, attitude is more valuable than experience. And I was talking with Ankit Nagori from Cure Foods and I asked him the question, I said what have you learned about the food industry that's different than, you know, he came from Mintra and had a success in e-commerce and it was interesting, he said the same thing to me, he said, you know, people you can't judge, the person who doesn't look the best might be the best. You can't calibrate on the looks and things like that. It's about intuitively who these people are and I think that's something that I would certainly agree with.
Danny Jacob: We now move on to the paradox of experience. So I think Bert never had any experience either in business or food or quick service restaurants but he has built this huge empire which I think is one of the most talked about brand in our country at the moment. So if you can just talk a little bit about the paradox of experience like how did you navigate through the Indian ecosystem not having any experience and still being able to build an empire.
Bert Mueller: I often think that you know India is is such a diverse country and in a way it's whether it's a North Indian opening something in the south or it's even an American opening something in wherever we all face similar challenges now i think that being able to solve these challenges mostly comes down to attitude so if we are very open to learning if we don't give up easily then the sky is the limit here and i think it almost gets back to this notion of hiring. 1Whenever we're hiring we say okay experience this worked in this company. I think at the end of the day the attitude is probably the most important.
Danny Jacob: So next we're going to dive into the paradox of experience. As you all know Bert never had a job, literally. But he has generated like this huge enterprise out of nothing, right? And of course, a lot of time, talent, energy has gone into building this. So let's talk about the paradox of experience. Never had any experience, but rocking it.
Bert Mueller: Now I have a paradox of experience. Never had any experience, but rocking it. Now I have a lot of experience. So I think experience can be good. It can be bad. You know, some people hire for experience. Say, oh, I worked at this company. He must be good. He must have experience. He'll bring good things into this company. Yeah. And sometimes that's right. And sometimes that's wrong. I think ultimately I've learned by doing. And sometimes that's right and sometimes that's wrong. I think ultimately I've learned by doing. And so because of my journey, I would always index on hiring people whose attitudes were aligned to doing and learning rather than somebody who only had experience as part of their resume.
Danny Jacob: That's interesting.
Bert Mueller: Because if I can do it, then probably other people can also do it. It's not that I'm so special here. Because if I can do it, then probably other people can also do it. It's not that I'm so special here. So I think I saw some Samsonite ad. It said, the more you're tested, the stronger you become. Or something to that effect. And it resonated with me. If you keep taking a bet on yourself and putting yourself in challenging situations you haven't been in before, you gain experience, you gain wisdom and you do that by doing.
Danny Jacob: Time under tension. That's how we build muscles.
Bert Mueller: But it takes time.
Danny Jacob: Okay, cool. So we now move on to the next one which is I think my personal favorite right which is really the paradox of product right so I have spent significant amount of time in the QSR industry and the one thing they teach you in every QSR is that it has to be quick it needs to be fast and it needs to be standardized, right? Everything that we do in fast food industry needs to be standardized and they have this thing called SOP, standard operating procedures and I think BERT has kind of twisted it. It is BERT's operating procedures in some sense because I don't think so, you know, there is a set menu that exists in California Burrito but you know and investors often keep asking the entrepreneurs that what is your moat, right? And people might say, oh, you know what, it's design. Somebody might say it's product. And you know what, somebody else, okay, fine, even if you have cracked a product, but anybody can copy it. But in case of Burt, I think it's very difficult to copy California burrito because they keep getting better at it. Like, I personally know that the beans that they've been served they have not been the same they just keep getting better every like month on month because you know there are continuous tastings and rounds of improvement a new batch of crop that has perhaps come in and I think this is truly anti you know SOP in some sense right there's no standardization, so to say. There is, but then there's no standardization of recipe, which keeps improving. So how did you kind of manage the paradox of product?
Bert Mueller: So I think that this format of restaurant almost thrives on fresh food. And the fresher the food, the harder it is to deliver it consistently because it's cooked at the store. India is a place where people get fresh food all the time, at home, street food, everything is super fresh. And so I think my take is that the Indian consumer values freshness over consistency they would much rather have a fresh product that's good 99 out of 100 times then they not so fresh product that's the same every 100 out of 100 times got it now especially if we look at some of the QSRs that have scaled rapidly I think rebel foods is one where you know their whole food production is back-ended to a very large degree.
29:07Otherwise, they couldn't scale as quickly.
Danny Jacob: It's mostly frozen, right?
Bert Mueller: It would be, I mean, it's not produced in the store for sure. It's assembled at the store. And it's not to say that it's bad. It's very consistent. But I think our take has been slightly different, which is that even if we screw up one or two times out of a hundred, people ultimately would ultimately would prefer I mean you even said that you got an order yeah the right amount of food in it yeah you know that's that's almost the imperfection of the model the model is fresh the model is customized there are problems that can arise from that but that is what it is and our energy has gone into improving the quality of ingredients in that rather than investing that in consistency. Could we have our beans cooked outside the store? Yes. Would they be more consistent? Yes. That would have a huge amount of cost on us that we would prefer to invest in. As you said, we grow beans now. Is it cheaper? No, it's not cheaper to grow the beans, actually. Because if you want great tasting beans, you need to get agriculture land that produces great tasting beans. And other ingredients are competing for that agriculture land. Lettuce might be competing. Tomatoes might be competing. Yeah. It depends. Probably not tomatoes. That's a very commodity crop. But other things will be competing for that. So that's been certainly our outlook. And, well, I think in the first five years we did change a lot of recipes, really first seven years. Over time we've tried to focus on not changing recipes too much but changing ingredient quality and keep getting better at it. And, you know, recently we said we're becoming more corporate. We need core values so one of the core values was growing every day and i think that's certainly our orientation is nothing is ever very nothing is ever perfect nothing has reached a level where consistency is the the final it's almost like the final place you be you get to the perfection and you make it consistent. We haven't reached the perfection yet.
Danny Jacob: This is definitely a masterclass for marketers like me and the rest of us because this is truly amazing to hear that you can keep getting better at it. There's nothing called perfection.
Bert Mueller: Never. I haven't seen it yet
Danny Jacob: Superb cool so i think we'll we'll move to the next paradox which is about the paradox of marketing right i think but flaunts that he has built the company without marketing i think pre-covet you did do that? I think that's largely because for those many years, I think you all were trying to achieve product market fit and trying to figure out the consumer, the product, the right price, the right value. And I think you did not kind of invest too much in marketing. So how do you really, you know, kind of go about building a business and a brand at the same time without really investing too much in advertising?
Bert Mueller: So I think pre-COVID, we were heavily indexed on tech part real estate.
32:2150% of our stores, maybe slightly more, were in tech parts. And at tech park, you don't have to market. People will come, even if they don't like you very much, still they'll come because there's only limited options. Mall is similar, and I think 30% were malls. So only 20% of our stores were in stand-alones pre-COVID. Now, once COVID hit, all our tech parks closed. And if you want to rebuild sales how do you do it i read a book at that point in time which said that this is a paradox companies that spend more marketing during a downturn come out doing much better so rather than a lot of companies cut all the marketing expenses especially the brand expenses will go first they cut down the marketing expenses, especially the brand expenses will go first. They cut down the marketing expenses and they do much worse coming out of whatever the depression or recession or pandemic, whatever it is. So I bought that, you know, we have to grow our way out. We can't cut our way out. And that's probably when we first started spending a lot on aggregator, you know, once you had joined us, obviously we worked hard on taco. 1And that was something that you had, you had brought in as a thought process. And that was something that did very well for us. You know, we had Taco Bell was doing very well selling tacos. Lo and behold, we were selling like 2% tacos and you rightly pointed out, you know, why, why? So post COVID, I out, you know, why I'm like this. So post-COVID, I think, you know, marketing and food is certainly, you know, where you talk, but what you talk about. And I think both those things we got better at, which is we spent more money on making sure the message was out there. And then what were we talking about?
Danny Jacob: And I remember your reel went viral, right? You did that famous Tamil reel, right? I mean, it went viral. And I think a reel went viral right? You did that famous Tamil reel right? I mean it went viral and I think a lot of people have seen it and again it just shows the passion and grit right? I mean you're able to do a reel for Tamilians in their own language. I was like oh my god wow that's so cool.
Bert Mueller: Tamil has always been very close to my heart. We have many people in our company been there a long time to speak Tamil and teach me a little.
Danny Jacob: Very nice, very nice.
Bert Mueller: Kannada is also close to my heart. But we had already opened in Bangalore, we weren't marketing then.
Danny Jacob: Cool, so I think next we're going to talk about the paradox of mastery. I think Bert was a master of none and he's been almost become like the master of everything at the moment. So Bert has worked in all functions of business whether it's HR or it's marketing or it's finance a little bit.
Bert Mueller: A little bit.
Danny Jacob: Yeah. And even supply chain, I think initial years you were directly talking to suppliers, trying to figure out the ecosystem, right?
Bert Mueller: Well, I probably spent a good year in each function.
Danny Jacob: Like an induction period. Like a Long induction.
Bert Mueller: Setting it period. So the last department that I still do is BD. Yeah. Business Development, Finding New Real Estate. But I spent a good amount of time running each department. And then I was always thankful when I found someone who's better at it than me.
Danny Jacob: Have you?
Bert Mueller: Yeah, definitely. Okay.
Danny Jacob: Superb. Finally, what feels that there's somebody better at business development?
Bert Mueller: No, BD, no.
Danny Jacob: Not yet?
Bert Mueller: But maybe that's the hardest one also, cause maybe I'm good at BD. Maybe, you know, real estate, we've generally done a decent job at. Oh,
Danny Jacob: Absolutely. Would you like to talk about your run-to-revenue ratio?
Bert Mueller: No, I can't talk about it. My landlords won't be very happy. But I think by spending time in each department, I certainly did master the department, but I think I managed to set things up in a simple way that I could understand, and then whoever came in and took over, the basics were set well. And then it makes me more knowledgeable about what's happening in the department. And simplicity is always the orientation. Keep things as simple as possible. Don't get too crazy with too many metrics. Find the directional ones that are important. But, you have to get your, I think being an entrepreneur, you probably have to kind of do all the jobs in order to hold accountable the people who are then going to do them after you. Otherwise, they can say, oh, I did this, but you don't know any better. This is all, I hear this, I hear non-technical co-founders talking about, you know, they're a tech person. They don't know any better. I hear non-technical co-founders talking about their tech person. They don't know what's happening. This tech guy can run the whole company. So luckily in restaurants, there's not such also a learning curve. And maybe that's the case in most businesses. We probably overestimate the learning curve required to do the job. You've got to do it very well if you want to be really great at marketing yes there's a different way of thinking and maybe that's not how I think I can't get that level in terms of you know thinking strategically but I understand what it is and then once you understand what it is you know what to look for when you're hiring people.
Danny Jacob: Cool so let's do something fun but we're going to do a quick rapid fire with you I'm going to give you two options and you have to pick one option. You can't say none. That's not an option. Okay, cool. So we'll start with the first one. Metallica or Aerosmith?
Bert Mueller: Aerosmith.
Danny Jacob: Burrito or Bowl?
Bert Mueller: Burrito.
Danny Jacob: Undermans or Jaipur?
Bert Mueller: Jaipur.
Danny Jacob: Krithi Senan or Alia Bhatt?
Bert Mueller: Krithi Senan.
Danny Jacob: Gen Z or Gen Alpha?
Bert Mueller: Gen Z.
Danny Jacob: Titan or Fast Track
Bert Mueller: Fast Track
Danny Jacob: Thank you McDonald's or Burger King
Bert Mueller: McDonald's
Danny Jacob: Think it's it's so enriching to know that you know how when we started talking about the purpose and then he moved into how he navigated through India and then how he gained trust and then how he's been able to build the right product for the right consumer with the right marketing, with the right people. It just beautifully kind of come together and I think, thank you for spending time with us here at the Titan company and we were truly blessed and honored to have you here and learn from you. This was indeed a masterclass personally for all of us. So until next time, we will perhaps see you soon on the other side. Thank you, Bert.
Bert Mueller: Thanks, Jenny.
