Chris and Suzy Humble, Owner of Casey's Restaurant in Winder GA

Chris and Suzy Humble, Owner of Casey's Restaurant, restaurants in winder ga,

Chris and Suzy Humble, Owner of Casey’s Restaurant in Winder GA

Meet Chris and Suzy Humble, husband and wife co-owners of Casey’s Restaurant in Winder, GA and longtime residents of Barrow County.

Chris, originally from Ithaca, NY and Suzy, from Dallas, GA, are passionate about providing outstanding customer service and food that is cooked from the heart to residents of Barrow County GA.

Enjoy these insights from our discussion with Chris & Suzy

A Lifestyle Burger Business

Our business is really all about time and love, at its core. It’s about our quality of life.

When people ask how I’m doing, honestly, I’m wonderful.

I wouldn’t make any changes. Everything is great. Our quality of life is absolutely wonderful. We have time for the grandkids. We’re at home for dinner with each other every night. It’s great.

When you walk in and say hello it’s a genuine hello you get back. It’s a welcoming atmosphere.

If you just sit and observe what everybody’s doing, everybody’s talking, everybody’s smiling, everybody’s watching Grease or Smokey and the Bandit on VHS.

The babies are in here and they’re enjoying themselves. The chalkboard walls are for the kids. One of the fun things that I love to do is once we get about five, six, seven, eight kids in here, I’ll stand up on the stool and I say, okay, kids, I got to have a vote: Monsters, Inc or Toy Story. And they actually get to vote!

Kids can sit here and write on the wall, eat a yummy burger and fries. You can yell and scream as loud as you want. What a great experience for those kids.

Sometimes we’ll even let the kids come back and cut their own fries. They love to do that. We just try to involve them and make them feel special.

The hugs that we get when the kids come in are just truly wonderful.

We’ve been here 12 years now. So that means a young child who came in here when we first opened is now graduating high school or that’s her first year in college.

We even opened late just for a long time customer to host dinner before Prom. We opened and cooked just for her and her party. She’d been coming here since five, six years old.

Secrets to Success (sort of)

This is my 38th year in the restaurant business. This is the third restaurant in Winder that I’ve owned. When we started, I couldn’t say I knew all the right ways to run a restaurant.

But I guarantee I know a lot of ways not to run a restaurant.

I’ve learned from my mistakes and I know what puts restaurants out of business. So we studied what not to do we simply don’t do those things.

That sounds simple, because it is! But the fact is that 30% of all restaurants go out of business in their first year. Eighty percent go out by their third year.

Our motto from the beginning is it is what it is. And there’s that old saying that in any business.

We often think of the acronym K.I.S.S, which is Keep It Simple, Stupid.

We’re not pretentious. We don’t have uniforms. We don’t have menus. I don’t have business cards. We don’t have a telephone. But it’s worked for us.

We say we can get more done with a high five or hug and a handshake then we can with the business card.

Open for Lunch (and that’s it)

One of the lessons we learned had to do with open hours.

When we looked at the numbers, it was clear that restaurants spend a lot of their open hours completely empty. The problem is that you’re still spending money on overhead like gas, electric, and labour.

So we’ve learned that our busiest time is lunch time. So, we decided we’d only be open from 11am to 2pm.

We’ve crammed a full 16 hour day into a three hour shift. So our goal is to feed as many people as we can as fast as possible in three hours, that way we’re not working 72 hours a week.

We’ve just taken all those hours and consolidated them as best we can into the lunch shift.

And the reason is that people want to get in and out. They’ve got to get back to work. So we can turn these tables over three times. That’s how we’re able to feed about 150 people per day.

Organization, Communication, and Cooperation (oh, and cash)

The real secret to our success is that we’re all one big happy family. Nobody really has one job to do. Our job is to keep Casey’s doors open and all our folks realize that. So whatever’s got to be done gets done by someone.

We’re here to pay our bills and we try to feed as many people as we can and spread as much love as we can. That would be our unspoken motto. Life’s so short, you know, really is.

One of the things we like to do is surprise people by bringing them lunch. We just take over some burgers and fries, chicken salad, whatnot.

It takes a little time and costs less money but it warms somebody’s heart. That’s what it’s all about.

Part of our routine throughout the week is to call the local police departments and invite several of their officers over to the house for dinner.

They’re safe. And they can enjoy themselves for a short time. That’s one of my favorite things is to have a bunch of police officers in your home sharing a meal.

Sometimes they even stop by the house just to say hello. I’d say easily, three times a week we’ll have an officer coming in to say hello. We’ll make them something to eat real quick.

If we know you’re short on money and you’re hungry, we feed you. We feed a lot of people.

And since we only accept cash, if you only have a credit card, we’re still going to feed you. You’re already here. You’ve already ordered the food and we’re already working. We’re not going to let you walk out the door hungry.

We also have a lot of customers come in and leave extra money to pay it forward.

Put simply, this place is filled with love.