David's Photo David Rutkauskas

Life is Beautiful when you are your own boss. There's nothing quite like it. Hello, I’m David Rutkauskas, Founder, President and CEO of Beautiful Brands International. Everyday my company helps people with an entrepreneurial spirit like yours live a beautiful life by creating wealth and sustainability through franchising. Through this blog, I want to show you how I do it...with my personal experience and advice for success. You are welcome to email me your questions to: askdavid@davidrutkauskas.com and I will answer some of them in my future posts.

  • The Logic of Success Not Always Logical

    February 19, 2012

    When you really look at the deals BBI has done over the past years, I think you get a sense of my deep-seated philosophy as a business creator: what’s successful as a concept doesn’t necessarily jibe with conventional wisdom.

    The truth of that idea has basically played itself out in almost every successful franchise we’ve undertaken as a company. The concept that seems too far-fetched to work is often the very thing that ends up being our most successful.  

    Case in point: Camille’s. No one thought a restaurant located underneath an escalator, specializing in healthy, delicious food, would thrive at a mall. The odds were against it, logically speaking, because it ran across the grain of what others had tried before, in a fast food dominated environment at least. Today, Camille’s is our most successful franchise to date and pioneer of fast casual. Why? Because we dared to re-invent the mold.

    Few could have imagined the success of resurrecting the Rex’s Chicken brand either... OR filling the niche  for Italian fast casual or pioneering the comeback of frozen yogurt franchises, the list goes on and on. Now, they seem like low hanging fruit just ready for the plucking. It really shows how willing people are to climb on board IF you can provide them with a clear and tangible vision first.

    Take any of our concepts, from fast casual sandwich to fast casual sushi cuisine, and you can see how conventional wisdom shrieked and screamed to go the other way...until the concept was formed and shaped. 

    In my mind, the fact that no one else has thought about a new kind of food or an innovative business model...may be the very reason you need to churn it over in your mind. Getting the creative juices flowing and seeing where it takes you is never a wasted effort. 

    Not every idea will pan out, but at least you’re not afraid to think outside the box and break the paradigms we all tend to build up.

    Remember, being too laughable to be truly viable...is often the nascent form of a transforming idea. Any of the BBI brands will show you that. Don’t be too quick to toss it aside.

    It may be the very thing that awakens the creative impulse within...and knocks down those walls to forming your own future.  

    David