Owner & President – Specialty Food Market, Graul’s Food Market

>> That's a great question. Well a thing that I've always been passionate about is food. I've always enjoyed great food and I-- and I also enjoy wine, particularly. I'm not, you know, I drink other-- other beverages, but I find wine something that just really pairs beautifully with food. I love the concept of-- of-- of figuring out a meal and the wine pairing that goes with it. I think that's-- that's really cool. Love to travel, which is another real love of mine, which dovetails nicely with food because you find, you know, you think you understand food until you travel to another part of the country or another part of the world and you're really exposed to, you know, different preparations, different presentations. You know, in particular parts of the world food is, you know, people get out of bed in the morning and literally their feet aren't on the floor and they're thinking about what's for dinner. And you know, sometimes, you know, we're so busy and wrapped up in our worlds here, it kind of brings me back to my basics, you know, self, my roots, and say boy, you know, food is really important. There's an adage, you know, people sit around a table and they're eating together and dining together, you know, it's-it's the bonding experience, whether it's with family or with friends, and I think food is that common denominator. So having an exceptionally good meal at the same time that you're enjoying it with good friends kind of only enhances, you know, that-- that experience. So I'd say my, you know, my passions primarily revolve around food, wine and travel. If those are the things I got to do the rest of my life, I'd be a very happy person. That being said, you know, every business comes with challenges. I think, you know, we, you know, we're challenged in a couple ways, you know, I would say the hardest part about running a business of our size, we have about two hundred employees in in two locations, and the biggest challenge is finding and maintaining a really quality work team, you know, team of associates to work in our stores. We do a lot of organizational development work, where we work with our-- our team on mission, and on our values, and on our operating principals, and try to get them to understand from a very, you know, core level, they don't have to ask me what the right thing to do if they know our missions statement. They're going to know the right decision to make when they're dealing with a product, a vendor, a customer, you know, what have you, and-- and those are the kinds of things that I try to do on a-- on a basic level, you know, in introducing people. But ultimately it's up to good raw materials. You know, you can take good folks, you can continue to teach them your company's values and hopefully find a little bit of passion for food. People who enjoy people. So I'd say that that's probably the biggest challenge is finding the people that really enjoy our type of business. I think other-- other challenges we have in the business are maintaining rel-- maintaining our relevancy in a marketplace that's crowded with other people selling food. If I look back fifteen years ago, I just did this analysis the other day, one of our stores that's located in a-- in a newer-- newer community, that's been there for fifteen years, as I said, they-- they've had a five hundred and sixty thousand square feet of new supermarket retail space open up in the last fifteen years. In a community that's had pretty moderate growth. I mean, you know, low single digit growth. So what's happening is the pie seems to be getting sliced thinner and thinner, more and more people are out there doing what we do. So, part of our other challenge would be maintaining our relevancy. You know, we've-- we've been around for almost a hundred years. We're the longtime player. We should be the guy to knock off the mountain, but you know, they sometimes are the shiny new penny that just showed up and we've got to continue to keep ourselves out there and relevant with-- with our customers.