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Welcome to The People of Work, the podcast where we explore the unique journeys that bring people to their careers. Every episode is a deep dive into the twists, turns, and surprises that shape how individuals find their career paths—whether they’re engineers, artists, baristas, CEOs, or anything and everything in between.
It’s not about the destination; it’s about the story. Through honest conversations, we’ll uncover the moments that define careers, the challenges overcome, and the lessons learned along the way. These are real stories from real people, celebrating the diversity of work and the individuality of the people behind it.
Join us as we break down stereotypes, embrace the unexpected, and shine a light on the human side of work.
[00:00:00] Mike Cunningham: When people choose to degrade and diminish restaurant experiences because of something that happened to them, I really wish that consumer would be more graceful and more constructive in their criticism and maybe it’s a reach out to the location itself and say, Hey, I had this experience and I want you to be aware of it so you can fix it.
[00:00:22] Ami Graves: You are listening to the people of Work, the podcast that dives into the real stories behind what people do for a living and how work shapes who we are. Hi everybody. We’re back with the People of Work and I’m really excited for today’s guest, Mike Cunningham. Mike is the owner of Cunningham Restaurant Group, CRG. Headquartered here in Indianapolis, but actually has locations in other cities that are close to us as well. We’ll dig into that. Mike has actually known, I’ve heard this, Mike, I don’t know how you’re going to feel about it, but it’s like the king of restaurants or the King of Mass Ave. I’ve heard this term a couple of times, so I’m really interested in how you feel about that.
[00:01:05] Mike Cunningham: Well, you certainly didn’t hear it from me. I’ve heard it as well, and it’s flattering and it’s nice and everything, but it’s not a term that we use around the office or anywhere close to my daily life.
[00:01:16] Ami Graves: No, of course.
[00:01:17] Mike Cunningham: It’s flattering, but it’s not something that we throw around.
[00:01:19] Ami Graves: Well, that’s one of the things that I’ve always enjoyed about you. I mean, obviously you and I, we’ve had a chance to meet prior to today and I’ve learned a lot about your story and CRG, so I have kind of personally picked up on that, but also just by doing a little recon for this discussion. And I know that that’s not the kind of guy you are, which I think that just makes you pretty unique in the industry, but we can kind of dig into that later. So thank you for joining me today, Mike. I’m really glad you’re here. I think you’ve got a great story and I think our listeners are going to really enjoy it. So let’s kick it off first, just want to take it all the way back. I know your story started in Cincinnati. I just have to know though, did you always know you were going to work in kitchens and restaurants?
[00:02:03] Mike Cunningham: I think when I was a little kid, I was really interested in architecture. I used to remember I would doodle and draw buildings and when I saw buildings as a little kid, it was something I paid attention to. So there was a creative, I think, bug in my early childhood. I played sports and did things like that too as a kid, but I think when I was a little, I really thought I would be an architect someday. Part of my job today in building restaurants and developing concepts and things like that, I get to do some of that, not the actual structure part of it, but the creating space and decors and environments and it’s really a fun part of what I do. So I think I’ve carried that on through my childhood all the way up to today. Yeah, it’s been part of my job that I really enjoy.
[00:02:52] Ami Graves: Yeah, I think CRG is known for that, that creating, it’s not just food, it’s definitely creating an inviting space for your guests to come in. So you get to use a lot of your interest in decor and interior design in a lot of your spaces. Do you have a favorite in terms of design?
[00:03:13] Mike Cunningham: That’s a tough one. They’re also different, so I don’t think I could say I have one specific favorite. I think we’ve done some really cool things in some beautiful historic buildings. I think a livery, downtown Indie is a spectacular building. We have a brew in the Greyhound bus terminal building in Evansville, Indiana. And so the building themselves bring the cool factor in the character, and then we just try and work with that and create the best space we can. It’s always much more fun to do something that starts with a lot of character. And then building on that,
[00:03:46] Ami Graves: When you were thinking about architecture as a kid, give me some frame of reference. How old were you? Were you thinking about going to school for this or not?
[00:03:55] Mike Cunningham: Well, I think I was maybe at eight or 10 years old and scribbling images of buildings and things like that, I think I figured out pretty quickly that I was good at simple math, but I wasn’t good at geometry and algebra and things that you would need to do to carry on that sort of secondary schooling. So I wasn’t a great student and didn’t really enjoy school that much, so figured out pretty quickly. But by that time I was in high school and cooking in restaurants and working in restaurants and really, really enjoying what I was doing. I never felt like I was going to work. It was always just something I looked forward to going and do. By the time I finished high school, I went to college in a community college for two years, got an associate’s degree in hospitality. I knew what I wanted to do. I mean, there was never a question what I was going to do, but I didn’t know where that was going to take me. I just knew I wanted to work in the industry and really enjoyed the challenges that came with it.
[00:04:50] Ami Graves: In your household, was there talk about going to college? Was there talk about specific career paths?
[00:04:57] Mike Cunningham: No, our family, my dad was a professional musician up until his early forties, and then he met my mom and they got married and had a big family and he had to get a job that kept him in one place. So he worked for the post office. He was a mail carrier. I have eight siblings and I don’t think any of us have a four year university degree. The vibe in our house was go to work and make some money and support and help the family unit. And so as we were kids, whether it was raking leaves or paper out or shoveling snow or anything, our deal was you had to whatever you made. So if I raked leaves for eight hours on a Saturday, if I made 10 bucks, I would go home and give five of that to the family and then we would keep $5 for ourselves.
[00:05:43] Mike Cunningham: That was our deal, and we didn’t know any different really, and was never a point of conflict in any way. It was just like this is what we did. And it helped that. My parents lived in a very nice house for that time and shared a bedroom with three other brothers, and my mom and dad had nine children in eight years with two sets of twins. So we were all very, very close in age to this day. We all are pretty tight still with this family. I see my brothers quite often, and it’s not uncommon where four or five of us are together and walk into a bar or a restaurant and people have a double take because we all look the same and we’re all bald and look exactly alike. So it’s kind of fun to do that and people are just like, do a double triple take and what the hell just happened? There’s five guys that look just like each other, walked in the building.
[00:06:28] Ami Graves: I heard that your first, outside of Breaking Leaves job at a place maybe outside of the neighborhood or down the street was at a Skyline Chili where you were busting tables. Did you calm the waitresses into this? You were eight years old, so how did you even manage that?
[00:06:44] Mike Cunningham: Yeah, so it was a time where child labor wasn’t really something that was watched very carefully and it was a family owned Skyline. It was the second Skyline Chili ever. It was at literally a block from our house and all nine of us had our first jobs there, so I’m the youngest of nine. So I was recruited to come in and help out when there was the need, and then the servers were responsible to bust their own tables, so they liked me and thought I was cute. So they said, Hey, if you stay here and bust our tables all day, we’ll give you $2 for a 10 hour shift on a Saturday or Sunday. And I felt much more like a king then than I do today. Okay,
[00:07:26] Ami Graves: That’s great. So I’m curious too, I mean in the industry of restaurants, I don’t know I guess what the stats are, but I would imagine that a college degree isn’t necessary. It’s really kind of experience and talent. You decided to go to college and get a degree. What made you make that decision?
[00:07:43] Mike Cunningham: I was kind of pushed into it a little bit. I probably would not have gone to school, but my dad was, as I mentioned before, a male carrier and he had an accident on his route. He was jumped by a dog and actually broke a couple vertebrae in his lower back and he was forced into an early retirement, 63 years old. And because of that situation, I was eligible for a Pell Grant to go to school. Basically was, it’s again a community school, so it wasn’t overly expensive back then, but there was a grant available for me to go to school and I wasn’t going to cost me anything. So I thought, well, I should probably do that. And of course, I worked 40 hours while I was going to school. I was still working and there’s some benefit from that. But I agree with you that most of what I’ve learned in this business was on the job.
[00:08:32] Mike Cunningham: And even when I went to school in college, I had already been working in restaurants for several years. It came very easy to me, like culinary classes where it was hard to pick up anything. I already knew how to use a knife. I already knew how to, the basics and stuff like that. So it was a good experience for two years. And then it also allowed me to roll. I finished school at almost 20, almost 21 years old, and I was working for Ground Round, which was a chain on the east coast of the country owned by Howard. I think they’re non-existent now, but I was able to move into a management program right at 21 when I was able to handle liquor. I’d worked with Ground Round for a couple years while I was in school, even had worked there, left and worked at another place and then came back. They basically told me they would move me into management immediately at 21 years old, which was sort of unheard of at that time. My specialty was running kitchens and I was a good back of the house guy, and then that’s how I ended up in Indianapolis. They transferred me from Cincinnati to Indy when I was 21.
[00:09:30] Ami Graves: Would you say that you did gain something out of that experience of the two year program?
[00:09:36] Mike Cunningham: Yeah, I think the most valuable thing that I learned in school was that there was a class about building a business model, business plan, and I probably didn’t know what a business plan was prior to that. So I think that was valuable in today’s world, that’s something you could pull out of a book pretty easily, but back then it wasn’t that apparent. And then there were accounting classes and things like that. There was some value to it.
[00:09:57] Ami Graves: So let’s talk about your move to Indy. So you came to Indy with Ground Round as a manager, you were, I guess, were you opening a new location here in Indy?
[00:10:07] Mike Cunningham: Indianapolis was a region of, I think six or seven restaurants for Grand Round, and they were having some problems in their kitchens. I was identified as a guy that could fix some things, and our regional guy invited me to transfer to Indy, my now wife of 38 years we were dating, and thankfully she agreed to move up here with me. That was my assignment, was basically spend some time in all six or seven of those locations. And then I eventually landed in one as a manager. My story is Ed, Sam and I were both kitchen managers of Ground Round, and Ed came to me when he had an opportunity to open his first restaurant and said, Hey, I’d love you to do this with me. And so that’s how he and I opened the original Sahm’s Restaurant, and that kind of put me on a trajectory of doing an entrepreneurial type of progression.
[00:10:53] Ami Graves: Ed’s, Sahm’s, catering, that’s the same person,
[00:10:56] Mike Cunningham: Same company, yeah. There’s an Ed senior and an Ed Jr. And Eddie Jr. Is sort of doing a lot around the city now. I think he’s got half leader and a handful of other places. And then Ed Senior, I think he’s still running the flagship stuff that’s been around for I guess going on 40 years. Yeah.
[00:11:15] Ami Graves: So at some point you transition out of working for somebody else and gaining a lot of great experience and decide to do your own thing. Tell me about that.
[00:11:26] Mike Cunningham: My wife and I got married and I was working a lot. I mean, ed and I back in the day, lived that original Sahm’s Restaurant and enjoyed every minute of it, but I knew it wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t good for a marriage, wasn’t good for a family, and my wife and I wanted to have children. So in 1987, TCBY yogurt, it was hot commodity at that time. People were lining up to get this fat-free frozen yogurt, ice cream kind of product. I just remember thinking to myself, wow, this is easy compared to what we do typically. And so I put a business plan together and approached a couple of Ed’s partners who were investors with the soms restaurant, and then those two of those guys, John Rush and Larry Hoig ended up being my partners all the way through today and Larry’s deceased, but John still, he’s sitting in a room next to me right now, and John’s been my partner since the beginning. I break often on my partners, but we had such a great relationship over the years. Never a tense word ever really. That was sort of my opportunity to break away and do something that I wouldn’t be working six, seven nights a week and be away from home. So I proceeded to do that and opened five of those yogurt chops over a 10 year period.
[00:12:42] Ami Graves: You were operating franchise TCBY?
[00:12:44] Mike Cunningham: We did our round, it was called the Big Chill. What
[00:12:45] Ami Graves: Was it called? The
[00:12:47] Mike Cunningham: Big Chill. The Big Chill, that’s right. And we totally ripped off the movie title back in the day.
[00:12:51] Ami Graves: Love it. Back day. We
[00:12:54] Mike Cunningham: Just
[00:12:54] Ami Graves: Get away with so much.
[00:12:56] Mike Cunningham: Well, it was a yogurt chop. It wasn’t a movie. So I think you can pull that off
[00:13:01] Ami Graves: For sure.
[00:13:01] Mike Cunningham: But anyway, it was a great opportunity for me as a young person too, kind of cut my teeth on business on a small scale. And when you are able to do that, it’s a luxury to do it on a small scale and because your wins and your losses are not as magnified. If you invest $3 million or $4 million in a restaurant, full service restaurant and you make mistakes, sometimes they’re tough recover from. But if you’re doing something on a smaller scale, there’s more forgiveness and there’s a less at risk for sure. 10 years of that. And then I jumped back in with Boulder Creek, which is our first here at G Restaurant in 97.
[00:13:35] Ami Graves: Let’s talk about that. So you closed the Big Chills, you just decide you want to do restaurants versus frozen yogurt. Is this the transition
[00:13:43] Mike Cunningham: Of the five locations? There were some leases that expired. There were some leases that were bought out by neighbors that wanted the space. We sold a couple of them, but the one thing we had that was sort of a win for us was the Edinburgh Outlet Mall for those in central Indiana. We remember we had the original food court in that mall, and we had a 10 year run there before all the out lots were built out. And before Nike and the Gap came in and kind of bastardized the food hall, we had several good, really good years there. That kind of on paper made me look like I knew what I was doing, but it was more of a luck. It was more of a stroke of luck than anything, but sometimes they say it’s better to be lucky than good. That was certainly a thing that nobody knew what outlet malls were, and we kind of jumped in on that, and it turned out to be something really great for us for a good number of years before it kind of changed on us.
[00:14:34] Mike Cunningham: But our Avon store was a big show. We relocated that and called it. We were selling more food every year and less yogurt because yogurt was all of a sudden available at McDonald’s and available in the grocery store and things were changing, but we were, thankfully we had food and I was a food guy. So it evolved into chilling and grow and then that chilling grow. We were able to operate for a couple years after Boulder Creek was open, and then I eventually sold that to a local guy that turned it into something else. And so there was a very multiple steps in how we dissolved what the yogurt shop business was, but got out without hurting myself too much. So
[00:15:10] Ami Graves: That’s good. That’s good. So Boulder Creek is in my town where I live and grew up. It is a staple here in this community for sure. It is the restaurant to go to if you’re looking for a nice place to go with your family. So thank you for that. By the way, I’m curious how the name came about because Boulder Creek is your very first restaurant in the CRG restaurant, the Cunningham Restaurant Group. So tell me how you named it. I’m always curious how you come up with all of these names for your restaurants.
[00:15:37] Mike Cunningham: So at the time, my wife had family in Colorado and her brother lived in the Denver area in Broomfield. And we would often go visit and we would go to Boulder, Colorado. There’s actually a Boulder Creek that runs through Boulder in my, I guess, research of building restaurants. I was really enamored with Richard Melman out of Chicago, Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants group. Richard was a concept guy, and he was somebody that I sort of studied and was most impressed about the creative side of what he was doing in Chicago. And that company still exists. I think his kids are operating it now. But in studying Richard, I knew he was a guy who created spaces to make people feel a certain way. And so that was something that really interested me. So when we did Boulder Creek, I wanted for the community of Brownsburg, I wanted to create a restaurant space that made them feel like they were on vacation in Colorado when they came in.
[00:16:32] Mike Cunningham: Anybody that’s been to Colorado or been on vacation anywhere for that matter, they are excited. They feel like it’s almost a celebratory kind of feeling. I think it’s part of our success, understanding that early, and I thank Richard Melman for that of understanding that creating spaces is just not about four walls and paint and carpet. So Boulder Creek was we were going to create this environment that made people feel like they were in the mountains of Colorado. The dining company of tagline was interesting. Larry, my landlord and who I consider one of my early mentors, and Larry’s still doing his thing at mid 80 or 85 years old today. He’s a developer in Brownsburg, and you might know the Cranfield family, but he was a fan of Colorado in sort of a cowboy at heart and out in Colorado. There’s companies that use the tagline, a mining company because there’s a bunch of mining places out in Colorado, old mining places. He suggested using that, and we obviously took the M off and put the D on there. So what’s cool about that is it’s stuck for our 28 years later. People still use the dining company reference. It’s not just something that it’s much cooler than Boulder Creek restaurant, right?
[00:17:44] Ami Graves: It elevates it. I’m curious, when you opened Boulder Creek, did you have a vision like, this is my first restaurant and I’m going to build 50 restaurants, so I’m going to open a whole bunch, or were you just kind of taking this one step at a time and hoping for success or you knew it’d be successful? Tell me about that.
[00:18:02] Mike Cunningham: Yeah, totally. One step at a time. I would never have dreamt of having the dream or the ego to say that I was going to open 50 restaurants, but getting Boulder Creek open, it was successful out of the gate. Brownsburg was starving for that service. It just lacked in that community. And so two years later, we opened, Charon was in Avon, and I think it speaks back to what I was talking about, the concept direction in Richard Melman’s influence because at my second restaurant, it would’ve been real easy to put another Boulder Creek on the south side or the north side. We wanted to do different things and out of the gate, and that’s what was driving us even early on. And that’s probably why we have 20 concepts today and soon to be 46 units. I think our team enjoys doing new things and creating, and certainly I enjoy that part of it. Boulder Creeks, it’s the only one, and we wouldn’t change it. And again, it’s 28 years now. And thank you for mentioning that. It’s sort of a staple in Brownsburg because we really feel like it is the community restaurant there.
[00:19:07] Ami Graves: Yeah, it definitely is. It really is. Yeah. I’m curious about your business at CRG. How many employees do you have in total? And how many restaurants now?
[00:19:16] Mike Cunningham: We’re 45 units right now. We have a brew, a 17th brew opening in Greenwood on July 14th on Shiloh’s Crossing, which is Stone’s Crossing Road and 1 35. We are up to 20 units. We have a 21st unit under development in West Lafayette on campus at Purdue. It’s a partnership with Purdue Research Foundation. We’re putting a restaurant in an old historic barn that’s been relocated to campus in the park. It’s going to be called the Lawrence, and that is slated to open in February of 26. But under construction now, I think your question originally was about employees. I think we’re up to about 27, 2700 I think.
[00:19:57] Ami Graves: Wow.
[00:19:57] Mike Cunningham: Employees. Yeah.
[00:19:58] Ami Graves: Yeah. That’s incredible. And you’ve got locations outside of Indiana too, I think in Cincinnati and maybe in Kentucky, is that right?
[00:20:05] Mike Cunningham: Yes. We have three locations in Kentucky, Louisville, Lexington, and Oregon. Kentucky, which is sort of a suburb of Cincinnati. We’re in Columbus, Ohio. We’re in Cincinnati with four locations. And in Indiana we cover from north to south, Fort Wayne, south Bend, all the way to Evansville, Lafayette, Bloomington.
[00:20:25] Ami Graves: Are there other outside of what’s under construction right now, and you have planned for February and Lafayette, are you kind of thinking beyond that with another new concept?
[00:20:35] Mike Cunningham: We have some deals working. They’re not ink, so I wouldn’t want to mention them, but there’s room to grow for us. We’re underserved in certain markets of Indianapolis. We are focused more in central Indiana right now because I think it’s just a less risk for us to do things close to home. And we’re in a little bit of uncertain time, so we have to be careful to do things responsibly.
[00:20:59] Ami Graves: So I’m just so curious, with the growth you’ve had, I mean, how have you continued to develop all these unique concepts over and over again and not, I think turn into something that feels like a chain? Because every time I go to a CRG restaurant, they all feel different. They all feel unique. They have very different special, not just the food, I mean the food, the environment, all of those things together. How do you continue to do that?
[00:21:24] Mike Cunningham: Well, that’s the fun part of what we do. We have a formula. We have a partner P and design. They’ve done all of our work for the last 14 years. Lori efforts, the principal there, and we have a culinary department that is assigned. Once we figure out a direction of what we’re going to do, they have to go out and create. The team has been in place for some time, and there’s a lot of consistency and continuity to it. So once we chart a direction, then all energies go towards that direction and creating something we think the market will enjoy and want to support. And a big part of what we do at CRG is our vision statement is in the communities we serve, we want to be the restaurant of choice to delight our guests. That starts with community. So when we talk about hoping our community supports us, we have to be mindful of how do we support the community as well.
[00:22:19] Mike Cunningham: So that’s the formula. It’s the teams in place for the most part. And then we have a formula of how we engage and how we connect with community. And all of our restaurants were built in the suburbs originally as we want it to be where people lived, and we wanted to support that community and have our places be the place for them to go and connect with the rest of the community. And then in exchange, we would do whatever we could we could afford to do or whatever we were passionate about to help support the community in that way as well.
[00:22:49] Ami Graves: Do you personally test out the menu or is that just the culinary team that does that? I’m like imagining.
[00:22:55] Mike Cunningham: There are a couple of concepts, and I think of Vita Thomas Melvin, the executive chef at Vida, sort of has free reins to do whatever he wants, and he’s earned that over the years. But our culinary team, chef Carl Chambers, who heads that up, chef Colin Hilton, who’s kind of our creative force in the RD side of what we do, along with Carl, we schedule for new concepts. There’s menu tastings, there’s multiple tastings to see what the menu, how the menus come along, and I attend every one of those. Sometimes I joke with my wife and she tells me I have to lose a few pounds, that I’m a professional eats more than anything,
[00:23:30] Mike Cunningham: But I do want to know what’s on the menus. Somebody has to guide the ship. And when we are looking at menus, I have to work with the chefs and try to find something that fits the market that we’re trying to hit. I learned a long time ago that chefs can’t produce for their egos or for themselves. They have to produce for the market. If you’re a chef and you want to show your vision, and Thomas is a perfect example, Thomas Feed is a very proud location restaurant for our company. I consider it the best restaurant in the city, and that’s no slight to anybody else, but it’s the only four diamond. It’s the only one in the city. But even Thomas understands that you can push so hard, you can’t do things that people are spending good money to go there and don’t put something on the plate that they’re uncomfortable with. So that’s always the challenge. There are opportunities for people to go and have experiences that really push the envelope as far as food, what’s on a plate. You got to understand what the mass appeal is for a concept that you’re working and try not to intimidate people with food or description and find that right comfort zone for what the market wants. So it’s a challenge.
[00:24:41] Ami Graves: This might sound like a dumb question, but I think our listeners want to know. I definitely want to know, do you ever eat at restaurants that are not CRG when you’re in downtown Indianapolis?
[00:24:50] Mike Cunningham: Yeah,
[00:24:51] Ami Graves: I don’t know if I ever would. You’ve got so many to choose from.
[00:24:55] Mike Cunningham: So my wife and I live downtown. We live right off of Mass Avenue, and we have nine restaurants within walking distance, different restaurants. So we’re very centrally located. For listeners that may not know, we have a lot of our home bases downtown Indy, and we have a lot of options downtown. And we don’t cook at home for on vacation. We may cook, but we’re typically in one of our restaurants every night. And then on occasion, we’ll go out and it’s usually something new that’s opened up and I’m curious as to what it is. And it’s kind of fun. I like to see what’s out there and compare, but also not even so much the food, sometimes it’s a test as to what the culture is for that new restaurant. And I’ll give you an example why I’ll do something. I did this years ago because it’s this restaurant that no longer exists, but it happened to be in Brownsburg, and it was a new restaurant probably 15 years ago that opened up.
[00:25:49] Mike Cunningham: And my wife and I had dinner there, and I’ll do things like ask them. They had ribs on the menu, barbecue, pork ribs. They had it as an entree. And I asked them if I could buy a rack of ribs and cut it in the small bones as an appetizer for, I think there were three or four of us at the table. And it’s really just to see if they’re accommodating. Oftentimes in this case, this restaurant said, well, we can’t do that. And so then it was kind of a mental check that, okay, it tells you a little bit about the leadership of that establishment and where they may hit some walls as far as having success in the community when they say no to something like that. So I do like to do that a little bit to see where the culture is, but you can learn a lot just from eating in a restaurant and seeing how the staff’s trained, what the environment’s like. Again, it’s all about what do people feel like when they walk into your space, hit ‘em with great service and hit ‘em with great food. And that’s the three lanes in our business, the three buckets you got to fill. And so it’s always interesting to me is how they view those things. We always want to know what we’re competing against, so it’s definitely worthwhile doing that. So
[00:26:55] Ami Graves: You’ve been working in this industry your whole life, a lot about it. And the indie scene, not even just an indie, just in general, the restaurant industry and space, anything that you would change about it or would like to influence?
[00:27:06] Mike Cunningham: The one thing I would want maybe the public and the consumer to understand is restaurants are community meeting places. And I’m not a social media guy. I’m not even on social media, but I know this exists and happens out there. When people choose to degrade and diminish restaurant experiences because of something that happened to them, I really wish that consumer would be more graceful and more constructive in their criticism. And maybe it’s a reach out to the location itself and say, Hey, I had this experience and I want you to be aware of it so you can fix it. But for people that tear down what we do, be careful what you wish for because if you didn’t have what we do, you would be sitting on your couch seven days a week. So if I could change anything, I would want people to be more graceful and more constructive in what they do out there. In the social media sphere of our world, people work hard in our business and they for the most part try to do well and just not a productive thing to rip that apart.
[00:28:12] Ami Graves: Impactful advice for lots of industries and spaces that get feedback on the internet. Feedback is a gift to an extent. If it’s constructive, it’s a gift. Right. There are limits. Okay. So Mike, I want to wrap up a couple of more minutes with you. What’s next for you outside of the restaurant world? What are you doing in your life? Do you have free time? You’re a busy guy.
[00:28:34] Mike Cunningham: I do. My wife and I, we travel quite a bit. We just finished a three week stint in Europe. We had a family friend that had their son get married, so we went to a destination wedding in Portugal. And then my youngest daughter, Maddie, was finishing up a master’s program in Milan. She’s in fashion, and so we were able to go over there and watch her final fashion show. She’s coming home. So we have our three daughters and two of our older daughters live downtown Indianapolis. Our oldest daughter, Allie, married to Darren, and they have a grandson, Theo, for all those people that have always said grandchildren are amazing. It’s right. You don’t really realize how great it is until you have it, but we’re fortunate to have them close by, so we spend quite a bit of time with them. So my free time is mostly spend around family and work and family kind of intermingle for me.
[00:29:25] Mike Cunningham: My family will tell you that I’m never off of work because if I’m in a restaurant eating dinner, I’m still sort of tuned in. And even when I’m on vacation, I’m locked in and I’m answering emails and connected. I mean, my role in this company today is really being available to our team to make sure they can do what they need to do to be successful and keep moving forward. So I don’t ever tune out completely, which is, it can be, I guess problematic, but I do a pretty good job of dipping in and dipping out and making sure I’m available.
[00:29:57] Ami Graves: When you’ve got a really good team around you, it gives you the peace of mind to be able to do that. That’s the key, right?
[00:30:02] Mike Cunningham: It’s everything. I always say that when I meet with the executive team, I sit in a room with seven people and each one of those people know more about what they do than I do. So it’s a luxury to have that. And I’m a big believer in letting people do what they’re good at and let ‘em do it. And I’m not a micromanager in any way, shape, or form, but when they need me, I’m available and I’ll put my 2 cents in. And when I need to make a decision, somebody has to, and I’ll be the guy to do that, but I have a complete confidence in what they’re doing. And that’s a great feeling.
[00:30:35] Ami Graves: Yeah, that’s great. Okay. Quick hits. Tea or coffee?
[00:30:38] Mike Cunningham: Coffee.
[00:30:39] Ami Graves: Coffee
[00:30:40] Mike Cunningham: And tea. Tea at lunch. Coffee in the morning.
[00:30:42] Ami Graves: Oh, okay. Okay. Alright. I like it. Do you read?
[00:30:46] Mike Cunningham: I read on vacation. I don’t have a lot of time to read when I’m home. I’m not a big reader. My wife’s a big reader. I think there’s a book that most people are familiar with. It’s called Good to Great. And if there was a book that had an impression on me, and for those of you that have not read it, it’s a study of I think 11 different companies. Companies that succeeded in the same industry and the ones that failed and they studied why one succeeded and one failed. And my big two takeaways from that book was the common thread of the leadership for those 11 companies was a consistent characteristic of their leadership. And it was a sense of humility and a sense of allowing people to do their thing and not micromanaging and not being the figurehead of somebody that seeks out media and seeks out attention.
[00:31:36] Mike Cunningham: And I thought that was really interesting and it’s been my style my whole life. So that was kind of confirming that, hey, I think I’m on the right track when it comes to that part. The other thing that I really, I think applied to what we do is I think the term they use in the book is flywheel. There’s a momentum that a company gets. I mean, certainly coming out of COVID, we applied this to our business model. COVID was a once in a lifetime unique kind of challenge for our business, and we had to decide how we’re going to navigate that, but we also had to decide how we’re coming out of it. Up until 2020, March of 20, we were growing steadily over a decade of maybe anywhere from two to five restaurants a year. We had to decide were we going to kind of bunk hunker down and tighten up?
[00:32:22] Mike Cunningham: Are we going to kind of come out of this thing wanting to capitalize on the momentum we built? And we chose to do that. I think it served us well and we made some really good decisions during COVID where we kept our leadership and our management team together, keeping 20 of our 33 restaurants at the time open with carryout and it kept our team in place When things fired back up, we were in a good situation to run out of the gate instead of kind of limp out of the gate. And I think that book was well worth reading if you’re in the world of business.
[00:32:53] Ami Graves: That’s a great one. Last question for you. What do you do in the summer? Anything fun?
[00:32:58] Mike Cunningham: We have a lake house in south of the city. We like to go down there on the weekends when we’re available to do that. Sometimes it’s not enough of time, but having Theo, our five-year-old grandson, we find ourselves poolside at somebody’s house. Every once in a while. We don’t have that, but we’re either in, we like the water, whether it’s in a pool or in the lake, and then we’re always good for maybe a trip out to Colorado in the summertime. My wife and I love the mountains in the summertime, she having family out there. We’re able to visit family and jump up there and enjoy the cooler temperatures in the summertime, in the mountains.
[00:33:34] Ami Graves: Any parting advice for our listeners? Our listeners are maybe looking to explore a new career or do a career pivot, maybe just deciding how to even kick off their career. What would you say to them? What advice would you give?
[00:33:47] Mike Cunningham: You’re listening to a guy who learned the restaurant business as a young man and enjoyed it and loved it. So take my advice with a grain of salt because I’m not a worldly knowledgeable person of multiple different industries and businesses. I just found something I loved and kept doing it. So I think there’s something to that. I think in the restaurant business, if we’re talking specifically about the restaurant business, oftentimes people, they romanticize the idea of owning a restaurant, how they would feel walking in as an owner, take it from somebody that owns a lot of restaurants. If that’s your motivating factor, it’s probably not a very good one. I would never get in a business that I don’t understand. And I think a lot of people that get in the business, whether it’s their investors at a later age, they need to understand the pitfalls.
[00:34:30] Mike Cunningham: You have to, if you don’t understand the business, you have to count on somebody that does, and you better be sure that person you’re working with is somebody you can count on because a lot of people will tell you exactly what you want to hear, but they don’t necessarily are going to execute at that level and care about it as much as you want them to care about it, be aware of those pitfalls. But other than that, my approach to business over the years has just been you got to love what you’re doing and if you love what you’re doing, it’s quite easy to work hard, but you have to work hard and you have to be passionate about what you’re doing. And then you also have to remember, you have to treat people the way you would like to be treated. I think we’ve all had experiences in our lives where somebody has treated us poorly and we know how that makes us feel, and why would you want to turn around and do that to somebody else?
[00:35:19] Mike Cunningham: So I think there is a way to build a business and not step all over people while you’re doing it. I’ve been asked this question before, if you could sum it up in a few words and my answer was, work hard and be kind. And it’s not tough to be kind. It’s very not difficult to do that. And then working hard. It comes easy when you love what you’re doing and hopefully if you’re lucky enough to love what you’re doing, life can be very good. If you hate what you’re doing, I suggest you try something different.
[00:35:46] Ami Graves: That’s great advice. Great, great parting advice. Mike, thank you so much for your time today. I am very appreciative. One of my most favorite aspects of you as a leader in the city of Indianapolis and the leader at CRG is your humility. I think it is unique for business owners and I think executives and your humility and your humbleness is, it’s very refreshing and I think it’s a really good message for our listeners. So I don’t want to embarrass you, but the King of Restaurants, the king of Mass Ave. I know you would never call yourself that, but I just thank you for your time today. Thank you for your wisdom and your story. I appreciate you sharing, and I look forward to seeing you at one of your restaurants. I’m probably going to hit Vita next, so
[00:36:32] Mike Cunningham: Thanks. It’s been a pleasure.
[00:36:35] Ami Graves: Thanks for tuning in to The People of Work. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow along and share it with someone who loved these stories too. Do you or someone have a unique job or an inspiring work journey? I love to hear about it. You can find me on Instagram at the people of work or visit thepeopleofwork.com. And if you’re navigating a career transition or just need support in your work life, I’m here for that too. From personal coaching to leadership and HR consulting, I’d love to help head to thepeopleofwork.com to learn more and get in touch. Until next time, thanks for being a part of The People of Work.