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Claim Jumper's co-founder, CEO strikes the mother lode in the Western states
Scott McIntosh, chief operations officer of Claim Jumper Enterprises, keeps in his office an old picture of an immaculately tidy 1970s coffee shop kitchen. Though easily overlooked as a sentimental keepsake, the picture preserves a profound image of company co-founder and chief executive Craig Nickoloff cultivating his restaurant roots, with McIntosh at his side. Although each man sees different things in the photo, both remember the hours they spent learning the ropes of the restaurant trade at the Nickoloff family's old Nik's Coffee Shop in Long Beach, Calif.
The perfectly aligned coffee cups and gleaming stainless-steel counters shown at Nik's speak volumes to Nickoloff and McIntosh about the importance of observing small details. Clearly, those kinds of details have not been ignored at the enormously popular Claim Jumper chain of California-Gold-Rush-theme dinner houses, which has grown to 24 units with $150 million in projected sales for 1999. Claim Jumper, ending 1998 with nearly $122 million in sales from 23 restaurants, long has been known in its Southern California home market for large, handsomely appointed restaurants. Its fame is also due to the massive portions that inevitably yield take-home-bag abundance as well as to its loyal throngs of customers who are willing to wait hours for seating at peak periods.
Nickoloff credits much of that success to his earliest inspirations. He remembers afternoons spent at Nik's counter, reading restaurant trade magazines, where he marveled at the legendary Norman Brinker's mid-1970s operations, which reported $1.2 million in per-store annual sales, more than twice the Nickoloff family's restaurant takings.
Nickoloff's own chain now rings up a per-restaurant average near $6 million annually. Nonetheless, "I wake up scared every morning that this will all go away," he says, adding, "That's probably a good thing."
Nickoloff is the third, and most successful, generation on his father's side that chose the restaurant business as a lifelong passion. His grandfather, Nicholas, who brought the family from Bulgaria to Michigan and on to Southern California, established the Long Beach coffee shop, which his son, Carl, took over and ran, before he and his son, Craig, founded Claim Jumper.
However, Craig Nickoloff was not always convinced he'd be a restaurateur. But...