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The $342 in first-day sales at his original Skeeter's neighborhood grill suggested an upside of perhaps $100,000 a year, but today Gary Adair controls restaurants with annual revenue of $50 million.
All that from a longtime Houstonian who has climbed his way from the bottom rung of the managerial food chain.
Indeed, Adair got his first taste of the restaurant business as a busboy when he was a 15-year-old student at Houston's Westbury High School.
Years later, he founded Skeeter's as a single cafe in 1988. The West University restaurant was launched by Adair and his wife, Betsy, in shoe-string fashion.
"I was the grill guy and she was cashier," says Adair.
Today, the 48-year-old restaurateur is majority owner of three concepts whose 13 Houston-area locations employ about 350 people.
"We serve 6,500 customers a day," marvels Adair. "We changed from a restaurant to a company."
The transition to multi-concept restaurant operation from a single mom-and-pop cafe hardly came overnight.
"Seven years later, we only had three restaurants," Adair remembers.
By 1995, seven years after his mesquite grill made its debut in West University, Adair was sticking to a slowgrowth model for the Skeeter's concept.
So the 14 years of Adair's ownership reign can be divided into two halves. The first half was marked by cautious expansion of a single concept hatched during a severe slump in the Houston economy.
Then there's the flip side: Over the past seven years, Adair has opened or acquired 10 more restaurants. His three-concept operation now stretches from The Woodlands to Sugar Land.
Los Tios and The Flying Pig remain side dishes to his center-of-the-plate Skeeter's chain.
Despite the high death rate for start up restaurants, "there was never a time that I didn't think we were going to make it," says Adair.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Mesquite-grilled fajitas have always been a hot seller at Skeeter's.
But the most popular item at Adair's flagship chain is chicken tenders. This top seller, a variation of breaded chicken fingers, points up a lush source of testmarketing for Skeeter's: Adair's own family.
After some serious arm-twisting from Adair's now high-school-age daughter, high-school-age son and second-grade son, the restaurateur added chicken tenders to the Skeeter's menu.
"They kept saying, 'Dad, you need...