MEET ONE OF AMERICA' FINEST CHEFS

HATTIE: The famous American Chef, Thomas Keller, was flat broke when he found the location that is now his one-of-a-kind, white-tablecloth restaurant, The French Laundry. He pounded the pavement to find cash.

THOMAS KELLER: I said, `Listen, Bob, I really don't have any money. You know, I just started this olive oil company,' and, you know . . .

HATTIE: `Would you take a case of olive...'

THOMAS: `Would you do it on spec?' And he said, `Well, I won't do it on spec, but if you can raise $5,000 as a retainer, I'll do it.' So I said, `OK.' So I went out to all my credit card machines and started...

HATTIE: Oh, you mean ATMs? You went to the ATMs and got some cash?

THOMAS: ATMs and whatever, got some cash, and I gave him $5,000. And he did it all on spec. Now keep in mind also, once this process started, I needed to come up with money to...

HATTIE: Oh, my gosh.

THOMAS: I didn't even...

HATTIE: You haven't even started!

THOMAS: Right.

HATTIE: The $5,000's nothing!

THOMAS: I said, `I don't have any money, Don and Sally. But I'm gonna do this, really. Believe me.' And they had the confidence. They had the confidence that I was going to be able to pull it off. And I gave them $5,000.

HATTIE: From the ATM machines?

THOMAS: From the ATM machines, from my credit cards, yeah.

HATTIE: You spent this money and you still don't have any ownership yet.

THOMAS: Yeah. I still don't have any ownership. It was a big leap of faith for me. It was a big leap of faith for now the attorney. It was certainly a big leap of faith for the Schmidts, because they're going into a position where now they're gonna close their restaurant because they believe that I'm gonna buy it, and...

HATTIE: So they're going to lose opportunity.

THOMAS: They're going lose opportunity, they're going to lose revenues.

HATTIE: And you're going to cause them to lose that opportunity if you don't come through....

THOMAS: Yeah. But everybody believes that it's gonna happen. Nobody knows how long it's going to take, and nobody knew it was going to take 18 months. I mean, we had many dates where, you know, the deal....I was supposed to sign...

HATTIE: You missed them! You missed those dates!

THOMAS: And we'd come back to the Schmidts and say, `I'm close. This is happening, please...' bear with me and believe in me for another three months.' And Don and Sally said, `OK. You know, we'll believe in you.'

HATTIE: Do you think your failures, -- the one at 21 and then the one in Palm Beach, and then the one in New York -- did that teach you? Did that give you courage?

THOMAS: It gave me a lot of confidence, because I had been through it before. But I'd been through it with other people's money before, so that was a little easier. Fortunately, my attorney had a base group of people; he had done this for other restaurateurs. I started sending people to him. And, I sent him out to people that I had known -- Bob, Michael, my two initial contacts...

HATTIE: So the attorney went on your behalf.

THOMAS: The attorney went on my behalf. This was a few of his core group of people that he thought might invest in a restaurant: And I just started making cold calls to people. And I'd ask you...`Do you want to invest?' `No, I don't want to invest.' `Well, do you know somebody who would?' `Well, maybe this person,' and before you know it, you're talking to people that you don't even know. And you wake up in the morning, and you have a list of 10 people that you want to call, and sometimes I'd get through three of them.

Sometimes I would get through all 10 of them because it was a good day, and I had two people that wanted me to send them the prospectus. I'm not even--they're not even saying they want to invest, they're just saying, `OK, send me the document and let me take a look at it, and then call me back in...two or three weeks.''

HATTIE: Thomas, you're selling. You're selling.

THOMAS: I'm selling. Yeah.

HATTIE: You're not being a chef. You're not cooking, you're selling.

THOMAS: No. No. The bank gave us a real estate loan. The SBA gave us a business loan. And then the investors came up with the rest.

HATTIE: OK, so you have how many investors?

THOMAS: Forty-eight.

HATTIE: Forty-eight individual investors.

THOMAS: My philosophy there was to have a lot of investors investing a small amount of money. No one would lose a lot if the business went to failure, and no one could tell me what to do.

HATTIE: Growing your business is a very different story. Sometimes our visions of the future are bigger than our personal assets and our retained earnings. That's when some OPM, other people's money, has to come in.