personality, and the concept was so unique that thousands of people going home at night took notice of the Brickell Bridge Restaurant and this wonderfully new and unique little boy with a big smile ringing the dinner bell. I had finally come up with a clever idea to get the public’s attention, but the question was, would this build traffic? I decided to advertise a bargain steak dinner.
I ran a series of advertisements in the Miami Herald featuring a picture of “Dinner Bell Charlie” ringing his bell outside of the restaurant. The advertisement read:
JUST A REMINDER
Little Charlie is still ringing the Dinner Bell to welcome you to Miami’s greatest steak value.
A full pound PRIME SIRLOIN STEAK for just $1.95
Other Complete Dinners from $1.40
Join the crowd—watch for
LITTLE CHARLIE WITH THE DINNER BELL
BRICKELL BRIDGE RESTAURANT
550 Building
550 Brickell Avenue
Dinner Served from 5 until 9, 7 days a week
PLENTY OF FREE PARKING SPACE BEHIND BUILDING
The price of $1.95 for tender, top-quality steak served with a baked Idaho potato, salad, and beverage just represented my cost. I would be able to do nothing more than break even on each sale. The steak was absolutely first class, and although I knew I couldn’t make a profit selling it, I did feel that I could build traffic, which was the most pressing problem. My plan was to train our waitresses to suggest other items such as lobster thermidor, veal parmigiana, fried shrimp, calf’s liver, or whatever else I had on the menu, because these other menu items were profitable. With Charlie and our advertising pitching our big-value steak dinner, sales and traffic increased dramatically.
This unique promotion created another phenomenon in Miami. Often at dinnertime, we would have lines of people standing outside our restaurant even during the summer months when many other restaurants were closed and boarded up. The success of this extraordinary promotion even surprised me. The pressure came off when I finally realized that I had a good chance of making it after all. I had turned a losing proposition around by coming up with an innovative marketing idea. I was on the winning side once again and it felt great.
The marketing success was one of the great learning experiences of my business career, and it served me well in helping build the Burger King business. The lesson was a bit of marketing wisdom. You can read about things like this, but you really have to experience them if you want the learning to be indelible. The message and the lesson learned was very simple: If you bring a product or service to market, it needs to be done in a way that attaches a unique, highly individualistic message along with it. The great steak dinner at a rock-bottom price was appealing, but that wasn’t enough to attract a big wave of new business. I had to attract the reader’s attention to the advertisement itself. People needed to read what the advertising suggested, and Dinner Bell Charlie did that. He sold the steak, and he told people where they could get it. In addition to that, he invited others to see for themselves what this new personality really amounted to. There would be similarities in building the success of Burger King’s Whopper.
Unfortunately, at the same time the Brickell Bridge Restaurant began to perform very well, the Colonial Inn was heading downhill. The manager I put in charge had taken my very simple food-service concept and complicated it by adding all sorts of items to the menu. The result was that our quality had been compromised as an image of a well-managed, short-order restaurant specializing in hamburgers. Sales declined and so did the restaurant’s profitability. During the early years of the Brickell Bridge Restaurant’s struggles, the profits from the Colonial Inn had kept the wolf away from the family door. Now with that restaurant in trouble, I had to contend with problems caused by the management I had left in charge.
I had the good fortune at the Brickell Bridge Restaurant to meet a young man named Bill Bilohorka. Bill was a recent graduate of the Penn State School of Hotel and Restaurant Management, and one day he just walked in off the street and asked me for a job. With sales at the Brickell Bridge growing steadily, I was able to afford to take him on as an assistant manager, and he did a terrific job right from the beginning. I turned to Bill when things at the Colonial Inn started to go downhill and asked him if he would be willing to go to Wilmington, take over the restaurant, and try to sell it for me. It was obvious that absentee ownership a thousand miles from home was not working.
The urgent requirement to change management at the Colonial Inn occurred at a most inopportune time. Nancy was pregnant for the third time, and we were still living in our small, rented home. As July of 1953 approached and business at the Colonial Inn continued to deteriorate, I received ultimatums from my manager that I would have to sell the business to him on his terms or he would simply walk out on me. He assumed I was in a situation where I had no other choice.
Just as we reached a critical period in our negotiations, Nancy went into labor and I rushed her to Jackson Memorial Hospital on July 14, where she delivered a wonderful, healthy baby boy on her own birthday. We decided to call the baby Sterling Whitman McLamore. When I went to the hospital, I told Nancy about the situation in Wilmington. I had to leave that night and Bill Bilohorka had agreed to go with me and take over the restaurant. I said goodbye before heading to the airport with Bill. These memories of Nancy’s strength and character will always remain closely fixed in my mind.
When Bill and I arrived in Wilmington, I fired the manager and put Bill in charge of the restaurant, confident the Colonial Inn was in good hands. I returned to Miami a few days later. Nancy took on the responsibilities of managing the home and looking after two young girls and a new baby boy as if nothing had happened. I went back to my regular schedule at the Brickell Bridge Restaurant—sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. Business was good and getting better all the time. I kept my fingers crossed that Bill would be able to sell the Colonial Inn.
Of particular interest to me at the time was this new son of ours. I felt bad leaving Nancy alone to look after things while I was in Delaware for a few days. Ever since we were married, I worked long hours in restaurants struggling to make a success. Our growing family was very important to us, and I was looking forward to spending more time with them.
Bill was fortunate enough to find a buyer who paid us a reasonable sum for the business to close the deal. I retained a young attorney, Andrew J. Christie, newly graduated from law school and just starting in practice, to draw up the papers and effect the sale.
After Bill sold the Colonial Inn, he returned to Miami and rejoined me at the Brickell Bridge Restaurant where business was going well and profits satisfactory. By early 1954, I began discussing the possibility of joining Dave Edgerton, whom I had recently met, in the Insta-Burger King business. For some time, I had been thinking about starting a chain of restaurants myself. Dave’s enthusiasm for an idea to establish a chain of limited-menu restaurants intrigued me enough to investigate the matter. I liked what Dave showed me, but it was obvious that I needed to sell the Brickell Bridge Restaurant in order to come up with the capital necessary to get into this new business. It was Bill Bilohorka who came up with the money to buy the restaurant from me during the spring of that year.
Nancy and Bill showed me just how much the right partner could pave the way toward success when one might be floundering on their own. If you’re going to take on a partner, trust and a shared vision for a common goal is tantamount to both your successes.
With the sale of both the Colonial Inn and the Brickell Bridge Restaurant, I was ready to take on new and different challenges. I didn’t realize that the road ahead was full of potholes.
Dave Edgerton, cofounder of Burger King
David R. Edgerton, Jr. was brought up in the