Meet Jim Beatty | Founder, Zell’s Panini & Crepes

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jim Beatty and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jim, how do you think about risk?
If I take a step back and look at all of the risks I have taken over my life so far, impartially, I would have to say that I have a high tolerance for risk. However, if I look at each of those decisions taken one at a time weighing the risk vs reward, they never seemed so risky. I always start by gaming “what is the worst thing that can happen” and try to understand if I can except that outcome and work through it. When you come at risk from this prospective some choices that seem crazy to others make sense. When my friends are overly stressed out, this is the question that I usually ask them. “What if everything goes wrong and you are dealing with the worst possible outcome”. Can you overcome it? This exercise usually shows that the amount of stress they are feeling is disproportionate to the actual worst case scenario.

The first major risk I took in my life was accepting an internship in St. Petersburg Russia in 1994. At the University of Colorado, I was active in a fantastic student organization called AIESEC. AIESEC’s view is based on the fact that the more economically tied countries are to each other the less likely they are to go to war with each other. At CU we convinced companies to hire foreign interns and for everyone we raised one of us could go abroad on an internship. This was a crazy time in Russia filled with chaos and opportunity, however Russian internships at the time were famous for falling apart before they even started. This is where I first developed a strategy of looking at how the worst scenario would play out and deciding I could live with it. I had just graduated, and as I looked at the situation I viewed the worst case scenario that I would arrive into St. Petersburg, no one would meet me and the company would not really exist.

I thought to myself, if my internship fails or is a disaster there, I could either get a job with one of the big (at the time 8) accounting firms or come home. I was young enough that I knew I could financially recover despite the outcome, and I had already secured a work visa for Russia so I had flexibility. Objectively physical danger was less there than many of the big cities in the States so I treated that risk as a wash. As kind of an aside, my worst case scenario basically played out without me even knowing about it. The company that I thought I was going to work for (Audit Service St. Petersburg ASS Audit!) fell through a week before I was to arrive but the AIESEC team found a place with and accounting firm called ALCO. This was very fortunate for me as the partners in ALCO ended up partnering with me through several ventures.

This risk paid off and was followed by a successful career in St. Petersburg where I founded several companies including an accounting firm, recruiting firm and helped to build a private equity real estate from a company with around $10 million In assets to over $500 million under management. During this time we had many ups and downs and some of my ventures failed, but I never took a risk where I couldn’t live with the outcome.

The steadily changing political situation in Russia from about 2004 onwards eventually led me to move my family to Denver in 2015. Covid was the catalyst for me to fully decouple from Russia all together and look to reinvent myself and start a new career at the age of 50.

I guess the safe path would have been to seek a job in finance or real estate in Denver, however we decided to go with our dream. As with a lot of restaurant entrepreneurs, my wife and I have always loved entertaining. Instead of catering company parties, we would invite the team to our house an cook ourselves. We have always wanted to open a restaurant and my wife and I have been preparing to do this for years. We went through Cornel’s online restaurant management classes, read tons of restaurant books and listen to hours and hours of restaurant podcasts. Additionally, working with restaurant tenants in some of our real estate ventures it became obvious the differences between who would fail and succeed. I constantly picked their brains.

We had always thought that there is a market opportunity in crepes and panini in the states. While there are a lot of great crepe places here, most of them focus on the high end and are in general slow and expensive. Our vision is to utilize French high heat crepe makers with batter made from scratch to be able to produce crepes in about 2 minutes each. Our panini’s take slightly longer, 5 to 7 minutes, as they need 4 minutes in the press each. While utilizing high quality ingredients we are focused on speed and trying to keep our prices affordable for students, families on an everyday basis. We have a relatively simple menu with all of our veggies and fruits made from scratch. This is a new concept and our biggest risk, “Market” risk is one that you really can’t fully judge without taking a swing at the bat.

We felt that we could manage the major operational these risks. We hired professionals with expertise in the areas that we needed. Richard Weil and Jared Flowers at National Restaurant Consultants held our hands in everything from kitchen design, suppliers to setting up our standards and operational procedures. We went with a top rate architect for the final renovation and restaurant designs. While of course we met with unexpected setbacks during the renovation, we had the team and plan in place to get through.

Before making the decision to go forward my wife and I looked at the worst case scenario – the company fails and we are on the hook for the lease until the landlord can lease it to another tenant. Would this suck? Heck yes. Would we be able to survive it and find a path forward… It will be difficult and require some lifestyle changes, but yes we can. What is the potential reward – Creating a new exciting restaurant concept with the potential to grow nationally.

After starting renovation on our Highlands Ranch location, an opportunity came up with the former Starbucks location across from Arapahoe high school. Education is one of our 5 core values and our strategy is to open near large good public high schools and be extremely active in the educational community, so this is really a prefect location for our brand concept. We went through the same worst case scenario analysis and decided to take another swing at the bat.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
Continual Improvement – You can either get better or will get worse, it is almost impossible to stay the same! We are driving of continuous improvement at Zell’s

We have been open almost a year at our first location in Highlands Ranch and 4 months at our second location in Centennial. We are learning every day and improving constantly. As a new concept we are spending as much time with our guests as possible getting their feedback on what they like and dislike. Our packaging for our take out and delivery has improved to keep the crepes in the best possible shape. We have spent months searching for the best ciabatta bread for our panini and other ingredients like our aged white cheddar sauce. Until we found the perfect high smoke point composite olive oil we were battling too much smoke on our Krampouz crepe makers at 420 F. Everyday for the last 12 months has been a constant learning and improving process. We have tweaked our prep for our fresh veggies and fruits to highlight their freshness.

We perfected our gluten free crepes and have dedicated equipment to avoid cross contamination. After having half of our clients wanting more fig in our ham brie fig crepe and half wanting less we started putting one scoop in the crepe and providing a second one on the plate. It is all the constant little things like these that will help to drive our quality and service to constantly higher heights.

My friend, Jared Flowers, at national restaurant consulting group, told me that if you look at most chain restaurants, their first five were all different from each other as they develop along the way. Our team has taken this to heart and we are constantly looking on what we could do better and what changes will get people excited.

Mistakes and Learning
We have made some tough expensive mistakes along the way. For example our first POS (point of sales system) was a huge disappointment. Lightspeed acquired Upserve and we received almost none of the support that Upserve was famous for and should have been covered under the contract. On paper it looked great, however in practice it was a disaster. We had to fully enter our menu into the system ourselves and the rewards program they had basically just kicked cash back to our guests’ credit cards. Sometimes guests would call wondering about the credit. It was so bad that we ended up making a very expensive switch to a whole new system with Spoton when we opened our second location. In addition to eating all of the hardware costs for the Lightspeed system we are still fighting to get out of the contract. My advice to anyone new in the industry is to be very careful about all of the contracts you sign. Our industry is full of suppliers trying to force long term contracts for services or software where there really in no justification for it. The change to Spoton has been great for our operations and guests.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I will go with summer for this one and limit it to as far away as Breckenridge. Otherwise there are just too many options in Colorado.

Day 1.
One of my first “go to” events for out of town friends that are in good shape is a trip to boulder and a hike up green mountain. This is still one of my favorite quick hikes in the area and brings back all of my great memories from when I wen’t to CU and lived on 10th street. The view from the top is amazing. After the hike, we would head to the bohemian beer garden on 13th Street in Boulder.

Day 2
Rest up a little and grab a brunch at Zell’s (double egg cheese lover’s panini or crepe), take a walk or bike ride along either the cherry creek bike path or High Line canal trail. Maybe follow up with a beer at Resolute brewing company. Dinner at Shanahans

Day 3
Day trip to Estes Park

Day 4-6
Stay in Breckenridge – Depending on how crowded the hiking trails are we would do Quandary, Grays and Torreys, or maybe just a hike up to the top of peak 10 from the base of Breckenridge. We would stay at Main Street Station, grill out at the pool one of the nights and find time to hit Empire Burger, Hearthstone, Quandary Grill, and of course during an off time grab a crepe at the Crepes Ala cart for fun. We would take a trip to Vail for some great German food.

Day 7 – On the way back to Denver we would stop in Idaho Springs at either Beau Jo’s, Tommyknockers, or the Clear Creek Cidery.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Richard Weil and Jared Flowers at National Restaurant Consultants

Website: www.zellscrepes.com

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Image Credits
I have the rights to the photos provided. James Beatty