Tossing up a winner - Lettuce Leaf Restaurant

Nation's Business, Dec, 1987 by Grover Heiman

Tossing Up A Winner

In the 1950s, William Saigh lived out a fantasy.

Clad in a St. Louis Cardinals baseball uniform, he tried his hand at batting practice at spring training in St. Petersburg, Fla. He got wood on a few, but soon wore himself out swinging futilely at pitched balls. As he trudged away from the plate, the old-timers who perch daily in the stands were shaking their heads. Their unanimous opinion: This rookie wasn't going to make it in baseball.

Actually, Bill Saigh wasn't trying to make the roster. He already had a job with the Cardinals' organization--operating the concessions at the ballpark.

"I was between my M.A. in business and doctorate in marketing," Saigh recalls. He would launch a career as a college professor once his studies were concluded.

Meanwhile, he had several hundred people working for him at the ballpark. Peanuts, popcorn and hot dogs, although not the ingredients of a gourmet operation, gave Saigh six invaluable years of food-service experience and ultimately the confidence to go for another dream at the age of 56.

Today Saigh and his wife, Christine, own five very successful Lettuce Leaf restaurants, four in St. Louis suburbs and one in Kansas City, Mo.

Starting in 1976 with $25,000 of their own and a Small Business Administration loan, they opened an unusual restaurant that served primarily salads. The restaurant reached the break-even point in 45 days.

This was before the salad-bar craze raced across the nation. It was then such a revolutionary idea that Bill Saigh, despite the fact that he was a respected associate professor of marketing at St. Louis University, got a cold reception from the bankers he approached for $50,000 in financing.

"When I said I wanted to open a restaurant, they laughed; when I told them it would serve primarily salads, they rolled on the floor. I went to 17 banks and was turned down by all of them. Finally one young loan officer said to me: 'Professor, don't you know the Small Business Administration makes loans? Why don't you try them?'"

Saigh did, got the loan and proceeded to do what he had been urging his students to do during his 21 years of teaching marketing--go into business.

"I had been telling them to go out and try--if they saw an opening and thought they could do a better job than the other guy, to jump in and do it."

For years the Saighs had been dissatisfied with the salads they got in restaurants. They much preferred the ones they made from the produce grown in their 5-by-10-foot garden. When they opened their own establishment, they insisted on only the freshest ingredients available.

"I developed a complete marketing plan," says Saigh. "The whole concept was based on foot traffic in a neighborhood where affluent intellectuals who were concerned about nutrition lived or worked."

So the first restaurant was opened in Clayton, a St. Louis suburb, where some 50,000 people work. The Saighs knew that "not many people are going to drive a long way for a salad," he says.

"We made salads, photographed them and ate them for three months before we settled on our menus," says Christine Saigh. On opening day they had 22 salads on the menu. After a few days they dropped six poor sellers. On the menu they also included sandwiches and soup.

"The salads are entrees," says Bill Saigh. "Served at the table. We offer both hot and cold salads, salads that you don't get at the typical salad bar. That do-it-yourself salad is what we call the American chef salad. However, our salads can be customized, too."

When they came in the door at the first restaurant, customers could look at salads resting on a bed of crushed ice to help make their ordering decisions. Now they view life-size color transparencies instead.

"We had to make fresh salads each day [for the displays]," Bill Saigh says. "This was an added expense of $12,000 annually for each restaurant."

Missouri's Small Business Person of the Year in 1983, Bill Saigh and his wife have been recognized a number of times for their work with the developmentally disabled and hearing impaired.

Today 25 of their some 300 employees are handicapped.

The five restaurants had gross sales of more than $3.5 million in 1986. Bill Saigh believes that the concept will work in any American city. His corporation has been approached by suitors, but a suitable marriage has yet to be arranged.

In the meantime, he has accomplished the American dream and proven to his former students that opportunity in this country is not dead, as many of them believed.

And he learned, too: "If I ran a business school, I wouldn't hire someone for the faculty who had never met a payroll," says Saigh.

Knowing her husband's strong patriotic feelings and belief in the system that nurtures entrepreneurship, Christine Saigh bought him a gift for his 65th birthday at a charity auction that let him live out still another fantasy.

During that year's Fourth of July holiday, music-lover Bill Saigh was guest conductor of the St. Louis Symphony for a thunderous rendition of "Stars and Stripes Forever."