I guess where we started was we came to the May '06 workshop. With our business we're fairly well established, the business has been there since 1948 and we had a lot of the stuff. Some of our management team came from corporate structure, so we had a lot of the systems in place already.

To be completely honest, we came to the workshop, because my mom Jan the general manager wanted to go shopping and I like to gamble, so we came to Vegas. It was kind of a running joke on the way here I said we're going to get to Palace Station (A) where the hell is the Palace Station and (B) we're going to get here, check in and they're going to say who the hell is David Scott Peters and that we don't have any seminars here.

It was this running joke, so we were definitely relieved when we got here and there was actually something to do.

We went through the workshop for the first time and we did buy into the whole mastermind principle. It was reinforcement that a lot of stuff that David talked about we were already doing. There was a lot of stuff that we weren't doing, so we definitely had work to do when we went back home. We kind of thought hey this is good stuff; it's going to make our business run better and be more profitable.

We did take our membership in a lower category we thought that was right for us, but yeah we were skeptical and I mean the stuff sounded good. Like there might be people in the room that say hey this sounds good, but until you actually get back into the restaurant you don't know if it's going to work.

I'll be brutally honest with you, it looked good on paper, but if you get home and it doesn't work well that's great, you know. We took our membership in a lower category, we went back and we're real, real seasonal, so it was good timing for us, because we were going into our busiest time of the year.

May of '06 we came back and at the end of the month we looked at the P & L and it was good, because we increased our profits $8,000. We were pretty happy about that, but I was still skeptical. I said well the weather was nice in May I said let's look at our sales maybe we were just that much busier and it unfolded that way, but we looked and we were only an increase of sales of $2,000, so we increased $8,000 in profit off of $2,000 in sales.

As it got busier it snow-balled the effect and this was from doing one system and that was the labor system. We didn't think labor ever was a problem; our labor percentage our prime cost wasn't that far out of whack, so it was shaving a few points off here and there.

To make a long story short, by the end of our busy season by the end of September we had increased profits right around $97,000 off of right around $30,000 in sales, which just kind of blew our mind. That's probably when my skepticism went away, we decided that David probably actually knew what he was talking about and it would probably work for us.

That's when we decided to step up to the Elite Membership, work with a mastermind team and actually make sure that we were on the right track to take on some of the other systems and, hopefully, be a fraction of how successful we were with the labor system.

Since then I can only talk about the things that I've personally had go on. The sexual harassment thing is actually what I beat David up on at the last workshop. Two years before we came to the workshop we had this completely bogus sexual harassment-type thing. I won't get into details, because it made me look like a complete ass, because I was the one named in it.

It got thrown out right away, but the EEOC still had to be here. It cost us about $4,000 in lawyer fees and it was the type of thing where we didn't have a system in place for it. It happened, we got the notification in the mail and two days later we were like we better call a lawyer. We have no idea what we're doing here we're going to get fried for this.

I'm talking to David and I said if I would have had that it would have been we'd have had a system and plan and I probably would have saved quite a bit of money. I said I don't know how much you charge for that, but everyone needs it.

He basically said what he said, I'm a horrible sales person and I'm a soft salesperson. I said well you can stand up on the stage and talk about how for your server to up sell it's not you're forcing them into buying something, you're not forcing your customer into buying something and you're enhancing their experience.

My example was everything on the table that David sells and every one of his products that I've seen is A+. For him to offer those here, for him to up sell, he's not going to say it, but I'll say it, you need a lot of this stuff; you're enhancing the workshop experience.

If you go home and say hey he talked for four days about this that's great, but if you have the products, if you have the stuff to boot yourself into it and kind of keep top of mind.

I personally trained with the training programs, a lot of the other Elite Members and other people that have looked at them they'll probably confirm this to, we go from having about 15 people year round to employing about 125, the training programs are spot on, exactly what you need and the employees know what they're responsible for.

This is the first summer we've used them and it saved me so many headaches. I don't know how many bottles of Tylenol I saved, because you didn't waste your time with the people that weren't going to work out, you knew if you're on this step of the training and they're still messing around on the second step of the training it isn't going to work out, so cut your losses.

The mastermind team has helped us. The thing I like about it is it's so diverse; there are all different types of restaurants in the Elite Group with the mastermind team. Like Rob has a summer concept, ours American Three Meal, I can talk to him about that kind of stuff.