It's Friday night after a long week at work and the last thing you want to do is spend hours in the kitchen. A better plan? Chinese food. Sure, you could order takeout from your local Chinese restaurant, but if you want something a little nicer — and a night out of the house — P. Chang's will likely satisfy that craving. The national chain currently has more than locations across the United State, according to P. Chang's' website. Enter restaurateur Paul Fleming.
He's living in Arizona running a successful restaurant concept, but his favorite Chinese place, called Mandarette, is in Los Angeles. There's one question that he just can't get out of his head: How does restaurant owner Philip Chiang make only three ingredients taste so tantalizingly delicious? He couldn't let these recipes stay secret for long. With a handshake, they agreed to share the magic and P. Since inception, P. He joined the company after leaving his posts as president of Brinker International's Macaroni Grill unit chain and president of BI's Italian concepts.
Like Fleming, he came to the Chinese restaurant market with no experience in oriental foods. In fact, unlike Fleming, he had never really acquired a taste for it.
He did bring managerial experience, however. He was a cofounder of the Grady's Goodtimes concept, which originated in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was bought by Brinker International in Vivian, who signed on in April of , also came to the company from Brinker International, where he had been vice-president of investor relations. With venture capital provided by out-of-state backers, the company began accelerating its growth near the end of , when it opened restaurants in Las Vegas, Houston, and Denver.
The managers were testing new markets, moving into new locales after careful demographic analyses of their prospective customer pools. They wanted to avoid the fate of the China Coast, a chain of Darden Restaurants which tried to expand too rapidly and failed. In fact, P. The company made its IPO in December of Moreover, to the surprise of many analysts, the company's stock fared extremely well.
Of course, the chain had already been growing. It had also opened its second Arizona restaurant in Tempe. By the summer of , when it announced plans to make its IPO later in the year, it had grown to 15 units.
In that year, P. Chang's also emerged from the red, though barely. The stock windfall allowed the company to begin accelerating its growth as well as pay down its debt. Plans called for adding an additional 21 new restaurants by the close of , bringing its total to 36 units, and an additional 15 openings in They also called for new, untapped market incursions, in, for example, large metropolitan areas like New York, Washington, D.
The company stayed on target for the most part. Although in it actually put just 13 new units into operation, by July of it was running 39 restaurants, with a geographical spread over 30 states, and was still planning to reach a goal of 54 units by the end of the first quarter in
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