Tad Peelen
This guest grew up in Scottsdale and got his start in restaurants in the 1970's. He attended the University of Arizona before moving to Texas where he worked for American Airlines. Eventually, he found his way back Arizona where he became a partner in the well renowned Joe's Real BBQ, and later Joe's Farm Grill and then Topo. His serves as a community leader in many forms, is a graduate of Gilbert Leadership class 8, welcome, Tad Peelen.
Episode Transcription
Guiding Growth. Conversations with Community Leaders. In this podcast we'll explore the human journey of leaders, their stories of humility, triumph roadblocks and lessons learned. Come join us as we journey together and uncover the questions you've always wanted to know? This podcast is brought to you by the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce providing resources, connections and belonging for business professionals and rocket space, an event and meeting venue in the heart of the East Valley with a full service for person podcast studio Guiding growth episode. Here we go, Sarah, are you ready?
We are ready. This guest grew up in Scottsdale and got a start in restaurants in the 1970s. He attended the U. Of a before moving to Texas where he worked for American Airlines. Eventually he found his way back to Arizona where he became a partner in the well renowned joe's real BBQ and later joe's farm grill and then Topo, he serves as a community leader in many forms and fashions. Is a graduate of Gilbert leadership class eight and a friend of the business community welcomed Ted Allen, thank you indeed, indeed.
Thanks for being here today. We're glad you're here. Lots and lots of things we got to talk about today, but we're here to find out about your path and your growth and so we're gonna start off what we call it fire around. Okay, so you go first, would you rather find your dream job or win the lottery? I would rather win the lottery so that my dream job would be a little easier tad? What is your guilty pleasure? Coffee in large quantities. Would you rather host a party for all of your friends or enjoy dinner for, to enjoy dinner for two.
Have you ever moved cross country? Not cross country per se texas to Arizona is the furthest half country. Would you ever appear on a reality show? I would not. What's your favorite dessert ice cream? What song makes you smile, handyman? James? Taylor. Are you more cautious or bold? Bold. What is your favorite rainy day activity reading? Final question glass. Half full or half empty, definitely full. Welcome to the club. Thank you. Gilbert City Lifestyles is a locally owned publication whose mission is to find and share great stories in our community and help build a stronger, more vibrant local experience, become a digital subscriber at city lifestyles dot com forward slash Gilbert.
All right, so let's talk about the beginnings where you started, where this all came from. Talk about where you grew up. Well, if it's truly beginnings, it's in Michigan where I spent the 1st 10 years of my life moved to Arizona in 1973. So fifth grade and forward, uh, we're in Arizona was a pueblo dust devil school of some acclaim. Saguaro High School went down the University of Arizona until they asked me to leave and right about that time was given an opportunity to jump on with actually with America West Airlines first and I would have been in one of their very first hiring classes.
I would have been in class number two and about that same time I got an offer from Eastern Airlines and American Airlines and I started doing some math and America West was not going to pencil and uh ended up with american and had a great 17 year career. I got a phone call in 1997 from Joe johnston and my brother tim to make the trek west and jump on board with a new restaurant. They had sold chain of coffee houses called the Coffee plantation. And uh Joe and his brothers owned the building that we now occupy with Joe's real BBQ and they wanted me to be a partner in that and I did and the rest is going really well.
Well that's it, show's over. So let's go back a little bit too well growing up in Scottsdale and then somehow you identify an opportunity, you have a, what took you there? Did you go with friends? What did that look like? Tucson was where my parents did not live. Okay, fair enough. And so yeah, I mean it was just a time in my life when I wanted to be out on my own. My brother had gone to um and I knew what it was about and it was, it was great.
I did a S. U. For summer school so it's not that I didn't get the issue experience. But now you have a was a nice opportunity to move just far enough away. I could come home and do my laundry on the weekends and go back and be a little bit further out of the reach of mom and dad and you and your brother close in age, we're five years apart. He's much, he's at least five years much older. So going down to Tucson and getting away from mom and dad.
Does that mean that they were not that influential in your no, they were very influential. Um, I'm hoping they don't listen to podcasts. They probably don't seeing as how they don't have wifi, but this is true. They won't be listening to this one. But no, they were very influential and, and I certainly don't want to cast aspersions on my folks. They did an excellent job of raising me. They, you know, when I look back on all of the opportunities, I had to go in terrible directions and they trained me in and um, I was, you know, I, I realized it's almost impossible to believe, but I was a very hard kid to raise.
And um, you know, it was the number of times they were called to school to, to bail me out and take the handcuffs off and so forth. It was, it was pretty high. So they did a great job of reining me and no, it was just, they were very influential. They were influential in my faith. They were influential and who I hung out with and what I learned and no, they did a great job. Something I don't know about you. Is it just, I always hear tim and tad, is it just you two?
It is okay. Alright. I didn't know that. I mean there are others around us but in my family, yes, it's just my brother and I and then interesting that you raised a bit of head growing up because then you have two Children who are amazingly well behaved and they are successful. They are, it is, it is wonderful when the apple falls far far far from the tree instead of straight down. Yeah. My kids are awesome. And yeah, I don't know how that happened. God is just gracious.
I think sometimes, yeah, that's gotta be the wife. Oh yeah, okay. So now she can listen to this. Okay, so now we get into the airlines industry and how did you get into that? Yeah, I, my restaurant career started at a place that no longer exists but it was, it was pretty iconic back in the day. It was called dale Anson's other place, restaurants at Lincoln boulevard in Scottsdale, kind of restaurant steak and seafood and very old school uh Scottsdale. And it was an, I worked there for seven years.
It was, it was absolutely fantastic. I started as a dishwasher here. I am going to U. Of a and I'm like, well what am I gonna do for money? This, this all costs money. And fortunately Dylan Anderson had another place down in Tucson and I worked at that restaurant for those years. I was down at U. Of A. And it was intriguing to me as I was waiting on people that truly, the only happy people I waited on were those folks who worked in airlines. It was really weird.
You know, you've got the sales folks, you know the chamber folks. All these other folks were generally speaking miserable and disgruntled. And yet there were these airline employees and they loved what they did and they went everywhere and they didn't have any money and they didn't care and they tipped really, really well. And so we got along great and I would get to know them and they're like, well you need to apply with the airlines, you need to see what that's all about. And so I had no idea what I wanted to do in life.
And so I applied to a few and it was pleasantly surprised that came back and I had some job offers and I ended up with american And it was fantastic. I was a flight attendant in 1984. It was kind of the early days of uh men even being in the industry that hadn't been in the industry that long. And I just had an absolutely wonderful time. I met some of my closest friends to this day, I met my wife and so it was all, it was all for good.
All national international. Where'd you go? American at least at the time broke their divisions in the international and domestic and I was always on domestic and my wife was on international. I did retire as a flight attendant. It was unique situation but I was there for 17 years and probably 15 of them. I spent in management and I ran different departments and I ran charlotte north Carolina for a while on the ground. Um, I got to know many, many things while I was there. In addition to being a flag flying was so different back then.
It makes me think about when, when, um, when we would fly as a family, you dressed up my mom or heels and nylons and like you just remember that you would never show up in yoga pants and a T shirt. You remember my mom specifically in her heels and nylon is good for you. But it's just that there was something I always, I wanted to be a flight attendant in the worst way. I love to walk down the aisle and collect trash and hand out peanuts as a kid.
Yeah, it was, it was so cool. On the one hand, it's not nearly as glamorous as it sounded back then. And on the other hand, it was, it was even better. You know, it was the true golden age of aviation was before deregulation, which was 1983 and certainly prior to that time people dressed up and I mean suits and ties and they appreciated the fact that they had this opportunity to do this very special thing. And deregulation came along and You know on the one hand it's an incredible thing that we can all now afford to fly from here to Florida and not even give it a second thought in in many cases because they ran a $79 fare that happened because of deregulation.
But it also opened it up to virtually everyone And that just changed air travel as we know it and it's a little different today but it's still pretty cool and it was a great opportunity to, it was a great job, interesting. Alright so he retires a flight attendant and next step is Next step is jumping back to Arizona. So I grew up in Arizona and then as I said I got a phone call in 1997 about this great opportunity uh that was out there to join with my brother Tim Palin and Joe Johnston and go back into the restaurant business and jumped in with both feet and it's been a fantastic ride.
So I'm making the connection that tim and joe knew each other beforehand somehow. Some way and that's what they did. They did. I alluded to the coffee plantation earlier and that's when they opened their first coffee plantation right around the corner from a. S. U. On mill and it blew up. I mean it was absolutely a fantastic place to be. It was the place to be uh for coffee back in the day. This is before Starbucks had taken a big run nationally and internationally and they did a great job and they knew what they were doing, they knew what they were doing in the industry.
And so um, you know, that gives you uh Much more soulless as you, you're jumping into something new. It's entrepreneurial. You are literally taking everything you own. Okay. I sold my car, I sold my house, I moved to this back to this place and there's the comfort level of family and that was awesome. But everything else was unknown. Okay. How you know, you don't pay yourself until there's money with which to pay yourself and so you're bleeding money. You know, everyone's on payroll for weeks and weeks before we open and everybody gets 14 days of paid training.
That's all just money that used to be yours. And it's frightening in some regard, but it's really energizing and very cool. How old were your Children at that time? Very young. In fact, let's see. My daughter was six and my son, I have a picture. I don't know if anyone in this room remembers. We had a little uh statue that met you in the front of the building for years and years. It was there for over 20 years and his name was Nathan. And Nathan was perhaps 3. 5 ft tall.
My son did not come to his shoulder when we moved to Arizona. I have a photo of he and Nathan back in the day. So he was, he was one and so they literally grew up in the restaurant, they both worked there and they both spent many, many hours there. That's an incredible risk to take with a young family. It is I and um it was cool that they got to enjoy all of that and in fact it's it's it's kind of neat to see things come full circle where later in life my daughter right before she got married and then moved back out of state.
She worked for me as a manager and here's somebody who had worked here literally at the restaurant From the time, she was six or 7 years old, bussing tables getting paid by dad. And then later in life, you know in her late 20's then working as a manager and doing an excellent job in the restaurant industry. So other than the restaurant experience you had in college, was there any other experience before you got into this? Well I had those um I actually started washing dishes in 1978 and then I did the dishwasher.
Uh bus tables, I was a waiter, I was an assistant manager. So I had done all of that in kind of my previous life. My first income, my first iteration uh in the work world was in restaurants and stuff all before the airline stuff and the airline stuff, I served a few people, you know, a little bit of, we used to have food on the airplanes and so I certainly wasn't foreign to it. But yeah, it was interesting to go after all of those years to go back into the restaurant industry.
It was quite interesting. Okay, so now you guys started this new operation, who helped you guys through that process? Or is it just because you guys all had this experience? You didn't? I mean, I'm thinking about mentor, something about guides that you guys would have referenced anybody in your guys fear that would have helped you in that space. Um We did, fortunately we have the giftedness amongst the three of us is very unique. Uh My brother is a foodie and my brother has done um, the menus, the food, um, all of that piece of it.
And joe is what we like to allude to as the concept partner And he can take something that he doodles on a napkin and 10 years later it becomes a reality. And I saw that happen with a great topia, okay, literally where he sketched out where he thought the the farm might remain and then some houses might be around it and there might be a restaurant in this building and so forth. And then that becomes a reality. And so that was a very important, you know, um uh part of the stool to hold it up and my expertise is more in operations.
And so the three of us um get along very well and our skill sets intersect very well and we learn from each other and we, we get along tremendous. I mean amazingly well for people who have just joe and tim and I have been in business now over 24 years and we, we don't have disagreements. We um learn together and coach each other and help each other and prop each other up and that's been great. Now you mentioned mentors, um, we all have them in our lives. I think the early mentor in our restaurant life, I'm just having a flashback to a gentleman named Tom Twitchell who was a senior senior executive with Red Robin who came on and did some consulting for us in the early days.
And it's funny because even now I'll open up a word document and tom Twitchell wrote it and I'm like, really hasn't been in this building in 23 years, but tom was a great help in the early days. We used him as a consultant to ensure that we were going in the right direction. He actually opened streamers. I don't know if any of you remember streamers down at uh next to the movie theater at Gilbert and Warner. So interesting to think that you have such a great relationship with your partners joe tends to be the one out in front.
He tends to get a lot of the accolades and the press is that by design. I, I don't shy away from interviews. I don't shy away from podcasts. I don't shy away. Um, and in fact both my undergrad and my, my graduate degrees are in communication, so it doesn't bother me at all. Um, to have a microphone stuck in my face or a camera, but joe is a natural and their eponymous restaurants, you know, we, we, we own joe's farm grill and joe's real BBQ together. Uh, and they, there is a namesake and joe is it?
And joe loves doing it. And so that has worked well for us and it was very much by design. So barbecue was the first restaurant, right? Talk to me about your barbecue passion because I mentioned you mentioned before we started that, you know, barbecue is something you have a little passion and I'm curious about that, but I also like barbecue. So I wonder where that came from and how did that come about? I do. Um, I mean, first of all, you need to draw some distinction between barbecuing and grilling and I grill at home and we barbecue at joe's real BBQ and having spent all of that time in texas, it's hard not to have an affinity for barbecue done really, really well and it's a craft and We are so blessed to have the people, we do that show up at 5:30 AM. I mean we literally have and I'm not exaggerating.
We have hundreds if not thousands of pounds of meat smoking 24 hours a day every 24 hours a day. I mean it's just, it's an ongoing thing and it's a craft. You know, not a single brisket comes out of that smoker until it's ready. But how do you determine its ready? Well, it takes you a long time to figure that out. And um, so you know, hey, I love eating, I mean goodness, this is a podcast and you know, fortunately you can't see me, but I love eating. I've been told I have a face for radio, I love eating and I eat as much barbecue as I can all over the country.
And there's not a lot of barbecue barbecue is so regionalized. You don't tend to find it internationally. And so while I have found a few places in London and so forth that do a nice job. It's the type of thing that you, you go to texas or you go to Georgia, you go to north Carolina and it's such a regional fare and people do it their way and they're very proud of that. I like that. I like it when people are proud of what they do and we have a, we have, I have my original kitchen manager that we hired in 1997 and he's back there every day, making sure everything is just as good as it was in 1997 or I would say that joe's real BBQ has been um a cornerstone for an example of growth in our community and probably even helped build the heritage district, it was allowed that area in our town to become an attractive destination.
What do you think are some of the highlights over the course of time in the community that you could share? Maybe just a few of those moments in time are real successes for your restaurant. Sure, well, first of all it's humbling to hear that and um you know, it's one thing to be very old and so you know, I've I've seen this all because I've lived this all. The other thing is to know that there were so many people that were instrumental in the heritage district becoming what it did, Greg Tilke being one of those and you know, you know, people who don't get shoutouts or people like the Boy Scout who had a an idea for his Eagle Scout project to paint the water tower, you know, the water tower was very ugly for many, many years until one Eagle Scout came along and I believe I I mentored that project but he just took it and ran with it and he did a fundraiser in the schools where people, I don't know if you remember they were bringing pennies to save the water tower and, and he raised thousands and thousands of dollars and then we got a CdbG grant to finish the job and do some remediation of whatever was going on with the water tower.
Um, but he's safe. The water tower is painted and it's beautiful and we have a water park around it, That type of thing is so key to what downtown Gilbert has become. I mean it is a destination and it's become the icon for the whole town really. It has and it's an icon for the town. And if we're really honest, I think downtown Gilbert's an icon for many of the surrounding communities. They would love to have something like we do and we have the canals feeding into it.
And so people are coming off on their bikes and pedestrian trails and more pedestrian trails are coming and those things were unthinkable, you know, back in night, 1998 And we were, you know, there was a merchant's association in 1998 and people like Sam Bromberg who owned liberty market at the time, he loved Gilbert and wanted it to become something special in a place that people would enjoy going later and come down and listen to music and it's become all of that and more. And it's been very cool, you know, our growth.
Um, you know, we, the first few years we've probably had no more than 2024 employees and we um, you know, we've been as high as 110 and we're growing exponentially, it's it's been mind boggling um, to see what's going on post, Covid, I also know that you're a servant leader and you do a lot of work in our community through not even our community, but even in our region. What are some of those boards or nonprofits that hold a special place to you? Yeah, almost all of them do.
But I really enjoyed my time with the phoenix boys choir. I think arts are unfortunately relegated to a back burner in most communities. And I think the ability to get kids interested in music at an early age is is paramount closer to home. Gilbert talks is something I am very excited about. That was an incredible thing that we were able to um foster and get off the ground and to see that uh I had to step away a couple of years ago but to see that they're still out and about.
And in fact, they had they had to talk Tuesday evening of this week. So it was excited. So it was great to see um just civil dialogue about something that can be a very heated conversation and Gilbert talks tackles that on a regular basis. So well, thank you. It was it was literally founded on the premise that civil discourse is missing um, in our society, certainly not Justin Gilbert, but civil discourse um as we've seen in in the political realm and the international realm is lacking, and to the extent that we could have an impact on civil discourse here in Gilbert, and we were excited to do it, and I'm excited that it's still still living and thriving in phoenix boys choir, Was your son Inquires remember that?
Okay, Yes, well this takes me down Memory lane a little bit, so we should talk a little bit about Shop Gilbert and our efforts back in the day, and somebody walking around in a Gilmore shopping bag, Gilmore walking around as a human shopping bag, downtown Gilbert getting people to come to our stores, you bet, you know, as much progress as we make, and then you look back, you're like, oh we were doing that, we've done that before, so yeah, absolutely, but it's those things are important and um you know, I think local first Arizona has been a huge proponent of shopping local and keeping your dollars um where you live and that need hasn't gone away, you know, and to the extent that we cannot, you know, I always do the easy thing and buy from amazon, and we can actually buy local, we should do it, and to the extent that we, as business leaders can let people know how they can keep their money in Gilbert, I think it's important um you know, and it's not just selfishly that I say, um you know, it's not just changed out there doing great restaurants, stuff.
There are a lot of us that are independents. Um that would love to have you come to know us as well. That's great. So 1980 go backwards. But you ran a marathon? I did and I have the numbers three hours 42 minutes and grabs a pretty good run. Thank you. It was, but you've been on a marathon with this business for a while, right? What's the next lap look like for you guys in this marathon you're running right now? I know it's a lot slower and I know that the more you wait, the harder it gets to run.
Uh and I know that that marathon was literally £90 ago. So, um you know, that was great. I loved running. I love all the people I ran with. Um I ran competitively for a while, but it was, it was an opportunity to get out and do something mindless and I think that's important once in a while. Um and there's a reason I read so much and there's a reason I take time to reflect. Um that's really important. You know, we, we all lived this incredibly busy life and we're on our phones and our laptops and we're, you know, the next zoom call and contemplative time is often relegated to a back burner and that's unfortunate.
And so, um yeah, I love to run and think about nothing for a very long period of time. And so yeah, that was a marathon, but marathons in the future will be much slower. Marathons in the future. You know, you think about it a great deal when you get to my age because you're thinking about other generations and I have a grandchild and we're thinking about their future and what does that look like. And so, um, I think good business, my call from my restaurant to this podcast was all about um, making some modifications to a buy sell agreement because we just, you know, it's something that we created some years ago in an effort to ensure, um, that our businesses lived for a very long period of time.
We want them to outlive us, we want them to have a usefulness to the community. Um, if I were, if something were to happen to me, I want others to be blessed by that money and so on and so forth. And so, um, that planning is always happening. And so, um, we're literally taking that buy sell agreement from the first business venture that we were in together and dusting it off and making sure that it's relevant for today and what's going on in today's marketplace. And um, that's very much what the last few legs of a marathon will look like is taking care of what we have and making it as good as it can be ensuring that other generations can benefit from it down the road.
Any new surprises on that marathon that we can talk about on here? I don't think so. I think one of the, well certainly we're always, you know, the barbecue. Um, while on the one hand, um, it has 95% of the same menu we opened with on january 20th of 1998. And on the other hand, you know, it has high speed wifi and it has Topo Arizona and we, we do change what we do and we do up our game and um, the grill is probably going to be undergoing, um, some changes as well.
We are doing some remodeling. We are upping our game even in terms of smoking meat, which, you know, we've smoked meat for a very long time. We have, we just purchased 2 1000 gallon smoker's um, that in addition to being very cool. Um, they're very cool to look at and so they'll be out where the public can see them will be smoking where everybody can see us in the park. Uh, and that remodel will happen before the end of the year. Um, we need more space to do what we do.
Our curbside business are take out business. Our online ordering business is just thriving and we're operating it out of a very small space and we need to blow that out a little bit. So we're, we've teamed with Colin, take instruction will be doing remodels at both restaurants, hopefully before the end of the year. Yeah, we think so too. So you don't just have a grand baby. You have an adorable grand baby. Thanks for recognizing that. So if you're to give him a piece of advice, what would that be?
Wow. There's so many. I mean that I didn't think I didn't spend enough time thinking about as I was, you know, out busy taking care of me. You know, it's all about you when you're young and if you can think about others and you can think about your future and you know, there's a very simplistic saying about how to get wealthy and I'd say jet as my grandson say jet, if you spend less than you make and you saved the difference for a long time. You can be a very wealthy young man if somebody had told me that.
Well, first of all, I probably wouldn't have accepted the advice, but it is so true. Okay. And it's all about what you can do for a long haul. And so I would encourage my grandchildren. Uh, as I've encouraged my kids to just do small incremental things that turn out to be huge things before you know it. Yeah, that's awesome. Well thank you for being here with us today. Thank you for your investments in Gilbert and making destinations in our community. Um, taking risks when um, it's probably beyond your wildest dreams and, and thanks for spending time, your legend and honor to spend time with.
So thank you. Well, thanks, I'm humbled by your words and encouraged that Gilbert has something that's cool. Thank you. I feel like we just barely scratched the surface on his story, but this was a lot of fun and very interesting. So thank you for that. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Okay, so if you like this episode, you want to hear more, join our tribe, you can subscribe online and get all these episodes right to your inbox as they come through. Thanks for listening today and thanks for being our guest guiding growth conversations with community leaders.
Cigna is proud to sponsor the guiding growth podcast series. Cigna believes when individuals and communities thrive, businesses will too.
