Mark Clark: a newcomer to Highlands Ranch, Colo., but an old hand at sales and staffing success

Nation's Restaurant News, Jan 26, 2004 by Dina Berta

Celia Morden has been a server at the Red Robin Gourmet Burgers in Highlands Ranch, Colo., for only six months, but the restaurant, she says, is vastly different from any other restaurant she has worked at in the past 12 years.

Here the focus is not on what employees do wrong but on what they do right, she says, giving general manager Mark Clark the credit for the way the restaurant is run.

"This is the best management staff I've ever worked for; they really care about you," says Morden, while clearing a table during a recent lunch rush. "Mark surrounds himself with good people."

Clark is out of earshot of Morden, but when asked to explain his success as general manager at Red Robin, he says almost the same thing.

"You need to surround yourself with people who share your values and can make an impact," says the 38-year-old Clark. "I've been fortunate in my career to always work with successful people."

Success, which has followed Clark like a shadow from restaurant to restaurant, comes from his enjoyment of his work and the people he places around him. He is quick to praise his team of four assistant managers, including kitchen manager Jeremy Lyle, for the restaurant's performance in Highlands Ranch, a sprawling suburb, south of Denver.

About 80 percent of the sales in the 400-seat restaurant are from food, and for 2003, after Clark's first year there, total sales rose 7 percent to more than $4 million. Bottom-line sales rose 10 percent to $1.3 million. Clark's restaurant is now the highest-volume store in Colorado and among the top-five stores in the 215-unit gourmet-burger chain.

Clark has trained 24 management candidates at the Highlands Ranch location and a total of 40 managers in his Red Robin career. Two of the managers he has mentored in the past year have been promoted to general managers of their own Red Robins. And, showing his support for the restaurant company, Clark lent out six of his hourly trainers last year to help open new stores.

"Mark has a real zest for life and love for what he is doing," says Bob Merullo, senior vice president of operations for Red Robin, which is based in Greenwood Village, a Denver suburb just east of Highlands Ranch. "He doesn't fool around with people who don't want to be successful, but he surrounds himself with people who want to do better, who want to contribute, who want to do well for their families, themselves, the company."

Clark started out as a busboy, working his way through college at a Black Angus restaurant in San Diego. Halfway through his pursuit of a computer science degree, he realized that he was bored with computers and that restaurants were much more interesting.

He stayed with Black Angus for 12 years, working his way up to general manager of a high-volume store. He was in training to become a regional manager, but when a headhunter from Red Robin came calling, Clark agreed to an interview. He was impressed when he met the company's president and chief executive, Mike Snyder, a former Red Robin franchisee who recently had led a buyout of Red Robin's parent company.

"We clicked pretty well, and I decided to come to Red Robin," Clark recalls.

What Snyder remembers from that initial interview was Clark's compassion for people.

"We have a values-based culture at Red Robin," Snyder says. "It's what really separates us from a lot of other great casual-dining concepts out there. Mark really does share our values."

Those values, to "aspire to live with honor, integrity, continually seek knowledge and have fun," are stitched on the sleeves of the employees' polo shirt uniforms.

"Mark is one of those role models for our team members who aspire to live those values," Snyder says.

When Clark joined Red Robin, he was put in charge of a Red Robin in Del Mar, Calif., just north of San Diego. The unit had the lowest volume of business in the chain. That was a change for Clark, who was accustomed to a much faster turn of customers at Black Angus. But he didn't alter the way he managed. In 14 months sales at the Del Mar Red Robin jumped 58 percent.

Clark later took over the Red Robin in Escondido, Calif. That store, located in a popular shopping mall, was already a high-volume restaurant, and it was the chain's busiest during the holiday season. The previous general manager had sworn that the restaurant had achieved the highest sales it could at Christmastime. The first Christmas Clark managed the Escondido store he proved that manager wrong by setting an all-time company record for monthly sales up to that point.

His management secret?

"Have the right people and enough of them," Clark says simply.

At Escondido he added more employees during the holiday shopping season. More employees could handle more customers. More customers meant more sales.

At Red Robin the right people are people who share the company's values--the message worn on their shirtsleeves, Clark says.

Sometimes, however, to get the right people, a general manager has to let go of wrong people.

"The toughest Dart of this lob is haying to fire someone," Clark says. "Every time you do it, you hate it."