Winter 2006

Top of the food chain

Ex-NFL lineman Crawford Ker's WingHouse restaurant chain is poised to take over the South. And that's just for starters

By Pete Williams
OverTime

Outside of Florida and Dallas, few people have heard of Ker's WingHouse, a chain of 17 restaurants featuring chicken wings, blonde wood furnishings, and voluptuous young waitresses in nylon running shorts. But if Crawford Ker has his way, WingHouse will soon become a worldwide phenomenon, like another eatery known for its wings and waitresses - Hooters.. That’s ambitious thinking considering Hooters has more than 400 restaurants across the globe, including locations in Singapore and Taiwan.

But before you bet against Ker, whose life has been full of unlikely successes, listen to his story. Though he did not play high school football until his senior year and began his college career at Western Arizona Junior College, he parlayed hard work and determination into a scholarship to the University of Florida. An eight-year NFL career, spent mostly with the Dallas Cowboys in the late 1980s, followed.

In 1994, Ker opened the first WingHouse in Largo, Florida, within 15 miles of where Hooters' birthplace a decade earlier. It might have seemed that the last thing the Tampa Bay area needed was another Hooters knock-off; after all, places with names such as "Melons" and "Mugs & Jugs" had already sprung up around town. But Ker, who had invested in a similar business called “Knockers,” was undeterred. After losing $30,000 a month for a few months, he bought out his partner, re-christened the restaurant “Ker’s WingHouse” and rolled up his sleeves.

Ker wasn't about to repeat the same mistake he made when he invested in a Gainesville, Fla., restaurant called the "Frat House" late in his NFL career —letting others run the business.

“When you put money into something, you have to be on top of it,” advises Ker, now 43. “Nobody is going to watch out for your credit card like you will. Football players are accustomed to having everything scheduled for them. In business, you have to be the manager.”

While the founders of Hooters spent much of the late ’90s battling their parent company, Atlanta-based Hooters of America, Ker quietly built a successful business. The restaurants are similar, though WingHouse features a full liquor bar. In 2003, Hooters of America sued WingHouse for trade dress infringement, arguing that WingHouse had copied its concept. But in December of 2004, a jury disagreed and awarded WingHouse $1.2 million to cover its legal fees.

“If you want to talk knockoffs, Hooters is a knockoff,” says Ker, matter-of-factly, rattling off several South Florida restaurants based on similar concepts. “They had six people that put together a chain with no background in the business. Who did they get their idea from? They stole it from somebody. I bought an existing business.”

At 6-4, 270 pounds, Ker still looks like he could line up on the Cowboys' offensive line, but has no regrets about a career that ended after the 1992 season after five back surgeries. He still talks and sounds like a football player, which he considers an advantage.

“People assume you’re a big football player and that’s all you can do,” he explains. “But I’d much rather be underestimated than overestimated. Nobody ever sees you coming. I always tell [ex-pro football players] that your second career will be harder than your first. You might be 30 or 35 years old, but you're competing on an intellectual level with people who are 19 or 20 because you’ve always had people do everything for you. You have to sit on your ego and get to work.”

Ker says he has applied many lessons from sports to his business practices, especially when it comes to selecting managers and preaching the importance of teamwork. He took business classes both during and after his NFL career but learned his most effective lessons from his former coaches Tom Landry and Jimmy Johnson.

“They were all about goal-setting and hitting incentives,” Ker says. “You have coaches on the speaking circuit earning hundreds of thousands of dollars to come in and do a seminar. I had that seminar seven days a week.”

The discipline and work ethic he learned as a pro have paid off handsomely. Ker has earned more as a businessman than he ever did in the NFL, where he once was among the highest-paid linemen in the league (back when a $400,000 to $500,000 salary earned a guy such distinction).WingHouse generated $33 million in sales in 2004 and Ker says the company will exceed $50 million in sales in 2006.

In November, WingHouse opened its first restaurant outside of Florida, in Dallas. Ker plans to open two more in town, where he still has good name recognition, and has drafted fellow Cowboy alum Ed “Too Tall” Jones to serve as the spokesman for his Texas stores.

As for the future, Ker says he’d like to have 40 stores in Texas alone. “After winning the lawsuit, I've treated this as Day One all over again. We're just getting started.”

© Copyright 2006 Maven Media Group, LLC