My Story

My first night at McDonald's, they put me on the grill and basically left me there. I was seventeen and I struggled to keep up the whole shift. But by the end of the night, everybody was telling me they couldn't believe it was my first one. Six months later I was an hourly manager. I stayed at that job longer than the pay deserved, and the reason was simple — I loved being good at it.

That's the thread that's run through my whole life. Not the title. Being the best in the room at the actual work.

I waited tables and bartended through college, got told I was the best waiter a manager had seen in all his years, tried a "real job" selling cell phones, hated it, and came running back to restaurants the first chance I got. Somewhere in there I knew I wanted a place of my own someday.

So I built one. At twenty-seven I helped start Blue Plate Cafe in Memphis — hours and hours up at the restaurant, making pancakes and biscuits fifty times over to perfect the recipe, designing the kitchen, hiring and training a staff. It became one of the great breakfast spots in the city and lasted over thirty years. Building it was the most alive I'd ever felt.

Then I learned the hard part. I sank my own money into a little bistro downtown. Our opening year we were voted Best New Restaurant in the city. We had full weekends, full lunches, steady weeknights — and then the 2008 housing crash ate our sales down to nothing. We kept breaking even, but I didn't have the working capital to ride it out, and eventually the doors closed. That one ripped into my soul. It was my creation, and I hated admitting the failure.

But here's how I've made peace with it: the tuition I paid in that restaurant became the curriculum I teach today. The wrong location. Not enough capital for the lean times. A lease I should never have agreed to. Those weren't just my mistakes — they're the same three mistakes that close most first-time restaurants. And it's not a failure if I can use what it cost me to help you avoid the same heartache.

After that, I went to Chili's and made it a comeback. I took over a struggling location full of good people who'd never had real direction, and we finished #1 in the company out of more than a thousand restaurants. Then I became the fixer — walking into broken restaurants, some being considered for closure, and not just reviving them but taking them to the top. Along the way I helped build a breakfast concept called Stak's that grew to five locations and is still going strong.

Here's what all of that taught me. I've done this at every level — the big chains, the mom-and-pop startups, the ground-up builds, the turnarounds. A first-time owner usually has to assemble a whole team of specialists: a chef here, a numbers person there, a marketer, a POS guy. You don't have to with me, because I've been the whole team.

I'm building Your Restaurant Blueprint to do one thing — take you from "someday I'll open my own place" to opening the doors with the systems, the numbers, and the plan to actually make it and last for years. I believe doing right by your people and your guests is how real success happens, and that conviction is in everything I do.

I'll work for your restaurant like it's my own. That's not a slogan. After a lifetime in this business, it's just how I'm built.

Let's open your doors — and keep them open.

— Eric Bush

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” — Walt Disney