OWNERSHIP: Inputs and Outcomes - Mike Novogratz, Larry Morrow, Rick Ross Interview

I'm ready. Let's go. Yeah, so, to get right into it, first of all, thank you everyone for joining us at Southern Hospitality Weekend. Give a quick round of applause for Larry M for putting this together. Hardest working man in New Orleans. And this panel is titled Ownership, Inputs, Outcomes, and Everything in Between. Essentially this panel is designed to surface real moments from each journey, decisions made with limited resources, imperfect information, and real downside. The goal is to have y'all walk away with something actionable. I watch a lot of panels, sometimes I take away things I can apply, sometimes it's a little fluffy. So for this one, we're going to be all action oriented, learn through the stories of these gentlemen. This conversation is about the inputs, what they produced and how it evolved their brands. I want to start with Larry. First and foremost, before you open multiple restaurants, you've created so many concepts, all successful. Take us back to a time when you were building when you didn't have leverage, because now you have notoriety, resources, relationships. Take us to a time when you didn't have that and how did you navigate it to still see success?

Great question. I would say when I opened my first restaurant when I was 22 years old, we opened Larry's Poor Boys and Wings on Canal Street. How many of y'all remember Larry's Po Boys and Wings? That was the first restaurant and back then I didn't have the finances, resources, none of the things I have now. It was tough to open that location because I didn't have the brand I have now. When we did open, it did great, but we didn't have the financials to sustain it for those slower months. In the industry you need capital to sustain yourself past those crazy months. That was something I was unaware of. At that moment I realized I wasn't able to continue, and I felt like it was a failed success. Fast forward to 2018 when we opened Morrow, I went into it knowing I needed more cash flow, sustain myself for a few months if things were slow. I had the finances to support it, and it was a big hit. I learned so much. When I was able to build my brand and have financials to support it, I saw the most success. It's not that you don't have a great concept, it's just the timing or you can't sustain through those tough months. That's why I'm doubling back to open Larry's Poor Boys at the end of this year. Now that I'm in a position and we built a strong brand, it's easier to build on top of that.

Great question, great answer. To transition and pivot into Rick Ross. You're also in the restaurant business, you own the Wing Stops. Before you owned this and went into consumer businesses, it was a time when you were the product, selling your music. How did that transition into you selling product, deploying capital, and dealing with employees?

It's just all about understanding value transactions. As an artist, I was creating music, doing performances. I understood the transactions. As an artist, I understood this is really global. A lot of times we think because we making a mixtape, this is just for the hood, just for the homies, just for the block. No, it's not. They'll be bumping your shit in London, Switzerland. You are not local. This is not a local game. Once I realized that, I stepped out with my first Wing Stop. I love the lemon peppers, all flats. I just wanted to pull up in the sports car with my date, let her see this is yours. That was the vibe until I began to understand the dollars. We start with one, go to five, go to ten, went to fifteen. We kept going until we saw a lot of success, but you also learn and gain experience. You got to have an amazing team.

Amazing as Larry is, as winning as he is, he got to have that number two, that number three person, those people on site making sure. In the restaurant and hospitality business, number one is repeat customers. You can't wake up trying to reel in a new customer from out of town every day. You got to get the ones that are right around you and make sure they understand and rock with you.

Yeah. You know what I'm saying? So,

Repeat customers, guys.

Repeat customers. Remember that, y'all.

Repeat customers.

So Mike, Mike Novo, early in your career before scale and institutional backing, there were decisions that put your personal capital and reputation at risk, especially getting into crypto as early as you did. Talk a little bit about the actions you made early on that made you stick with it in the midst of so much volatility and distrust in the market.

Right?

I really like that. To pivot on how we got into the network with my company, Jamaround, which we just sunset last month. Rest in peace. It was a good journey. We got into the network with Idea Village. At the time, we had two big exits. Patrick Comer exited Lucid at a billion dollars and Scott Wolf exited Level Set at 500 million. They put up a big pot of money for this competition and we won. It was the largest pitch competition in Louisiana history. We won around half a million dollars, and that came from being in networks. The guy who recruited me tried to email me for a year and I didn't hit him back. He thought we weren't interested. But after crypto started crashing, I got out and we went into the startup game and got into those networks. That transitions perfectly into my open-ended question to y'all. For someone with limited capital, no leverage, in New Orleans we're 50th in pretty much everything. How do we get access to capital if you don't have the plane tickets to go to the park?

I'll say I'm a person who has been able to scale our company privately, no funding from investments or anything. Been blessed to recently build a strong relationship with the bank to get some funding. Prior to that, it was strictly grinding and positioning yourself. You got to be intentional. Like Mike said, I would show up in New York, so many different places, to network and build relationships. I know so many people here in New Orleans, but if I want to go to the next level, I got to position myself. I would constantly travel around the country and be in different rooms. When you're in a room, you got to have confidence. As I scaled my company, my confidence grew. When I go into these rooms, I'm not the guy sitting in the corner. I'm the guy in the room because I belong there. I connect with different people, network, and when you get those relationships, you get opportunity. You might meet people like Mike or Dave or Ross that may want to invest. I think that's how you do it. I've seen so many things become available to me because of the rooms I put myself in. If you want to grow your network, you got to get outside and network and show up. Nothing's going to come to you if you're sitting at home.

Anybody else want to take that question?

Rick, do you want to take that? For someone with limited capital, no leverage, what do you think they should do?

When it comes to limited capital, no leverage for myself, what's always been something I lean on is I'm going to come into the room with the idea, with the concept. Your idea, your concept. A lot of times that's the most valuable thing you own, you control. Don't be afraid to create a partnership. Know what you're good at, find the other person who's great at what you need to make it happen, and bring it together. You can create different businesses and start new businesses. I've done that many times. Have an idea. 'Yo, I got this idea. Yo, you the one who manufactures air fryers? I want to do something like this with the chicken.'

I like that. Another question back to Rick. We're transitioning into outcomes. We talked about inputs, things that were created to develop results. When you started extending beyond music into restaurants and consumer brands, what did those actions produce at first? Was it more credibility, cash flow, pressure? Talk about the outcomes of your first investments.

When it's time to cut the checks, make the moves, then it's the things you never put thought into. I wanted to own Wing Stops. I never knew I needed an amazing list of managers. I never realized it. I just knew I want a hundred restaurants and I want Checkers for the orange French fries. I went and bought them. But when you're sitting back and your team tells you, 'Yo, this shit could be doing a lot better. These seven Wing Stops are all million-dollar franchises. What's in common? Look at these two managers. They run these. I can't find nobody else like them. I'm going to pay them to go train all my other managers to do it just like this.' With experience, you learn. You got to deal with a few people stealing chicken out the back door. Ain't nobody told me that comes with the game. They didn't tell me someone might want to come slip and fall every six months. Same shit in the same spot. That's something you got to learn. And I learned it.

Never. Right.

That's good. To Larry, I want to direct the question to you real quick because we're talking about building companies and I really want to talk about the people because you do employ a lot of people. When we think about hospitality, it's how you treat people. Hospitality is in every business because you deal with customers and employees. When things started getting big for you, Larry, were there any adjustments you needed to make? How did you adjust how you handle employees and customers to make sure things didn't break?

I mean, it was a fast process. From 2021 we went from one location to now 2025, we opened six locations in four years. It was fast. We didn't get a chance to perfectly do it. We were flying the plane and couldn't land it, just kept making adjustments. It made us want to bet on our operations because as you grow, things get tougher. You got to create systems and a blueprint to scale. It became extremely tough. To deal with that, we started hiring more people. We went from 20-30 employees to over 500. You need managers, marketing directors, HR, all these things. Like Ross said, somebody slips and falls every six months. As we grew, every day we had a different problem. We had to have an attorney on standby because people come into your restaurant and sometimes accidents do happen, but sometimes people initiate those accidents. We learned fast and had to adjust, hire more managers, hire better, build a stronger foundation. If we weren't willing to pay more money for better employees, we wouldn't be here. As fast as you build it, you can lose it even faster if you don't keep the people's trust by having the right people in place.

And Mike, I want to know what was an outcome from an early risk that forced you to fundamentally change how you view scale and responsibility. You could talk about the data centers, but what is something that made you switch up how you thought business worked?

Yeah, clap for that. Clap for that. And it kind of brings me into an interesting transition of, you know, how do you create the culture? But in New Orleans, we have so much culture by default, you know, the oldest city in America. My question to y'all is how do you leverage existing culture to build brands? Because I think in the audience, a lot of us are New Orleans entrepreneurs. We have so many verticals from music to hotels to restaurants. How do you leverage existing culture into your products and your brands in order to be successful? I guess Larry, you could take that one first.

I would say one of the things you got to pay homage to the culture in everything that you do. So when we're creating concepts and when you talk about culture, New Orleans has some of the best cuisine in the world, you know, we have our own cuisine, right? And when you look at our restaurants, a lot of people, and this is a secret for restaurant tours, right? There's a lot of people who open up concepts in New Orleans that may do well, may not do well, but I know when you're attracting people, what's one of the things that tourists come to New Orleans for? New Orleans food, right? So I noticed when we opened up one of our concepts, Monday, we didn't have oysters. When we first opened up, it wasn't too much New Orleans food. But one of the things that we did when we realized that everyone was coming asking for oysters, they were coming asking for just New Orleans dishes, we pivoted. And the moment we did that, our sales increased because we gave the people what they want. You know, if you're coming from out of town, you don't want to come down here and the first stop you make may be a Mediterranean restaurant, right? You come to New Orleans, you want to get New Orleans food. So when creating different concepts from Morrow, right? That's a New Orleans style restaurant. When we opened up Monday, we made the pivot, but when we opened up Sun Chung, we didn't just want to serve Asian food, right? I wanted to pay homage to my grandmother's culture while also paying homage to New Orleans culture. So we did an Asian Cajun concept, right? You got gumbo dumplings, you got crawfish etouffee dumplings, crawfish fried rice, Korean fried chicken, crab rangoon dip. You got so many things that embody New Orleans and this culture to where if you're a tourist, you're intrigued by this concoction. So what where two decades we could go after this? No, but we created a concept that embodied New Orleans and it's so unique. Like where in the country have you heard of an Asian Cajun concept, right? Like we didn't take this from anywhere. We created it, right? So then we went to after that we opened up I think it was Morrow Steak and Morrow Steak is just us showing that we can pay homage to just New Orleans traditional dining but elevated in a sense and show that we can also get into this elevated dining scene and succeed at it. But then after that, when it came to opening Spicy Mango, we were like, 'All right, cool. We're known for doing fusion concepts.' We did a Creole Caribbean fusion. You got oxtail red beans. You got oxtail dirty rice. You got the etouffee. You got all these Caribbean dishes, but we got to go eat. We're infusing New Orleans culture into it. They say oxtail dirty rice. Yeah. So we're infusing all these different, you know, we're infusing New Orleans culture into this Caribbean culture and we've seen a lot of success at it. Like right now before you open, before we open up, we got a line outside. So I think just understanding what the people want and giving them what they want. So if they want New Orleans cuisine, it's okay to have a different concept, but just try to give them a little bit of what they want, right? And I think that's how we really have utilized the culture and where we're from to really the success of what Moral Hospitality is.

Yeah. And it's so funny because we're usually the ones who export culture, but it gets monetized without us retaining ownership. And to kind of piggyback off your fusion concept, we did the same thing on Newgrounds, but we did it musically where we had jazz music, which is a traditional New Orleans genre. A lot of artists have been taken advantage of over the years in jazz. I think laws didn't get passed to where you can monetize someone after they passed away until like 2022. So you had people selling Louis Armstrong shirts and Allen Toussaint shirts and the family wasn't getting ownership. So that same thing with bounce music. Bounce music is a really popular genre, but it's like a copyright nightmare because it's a culmination of 10 different songs in one. And we created Jazz Bounce as a fusion redesign of bringing these two cultures together. Let's monetize it correctly. Let's own it. So we trademarked it nationwide. And now we're paying artists. We're paying staff. We're reducing records. So that type of fusion concept also goes into how you monetize the actual culture. So I did just get a word over there that we want to open up for some Q and A. First off, let me tell you, great job with that, right? Because you merged the two cultures, the jazz and the bounce. You created a new genre in New Orleans, right? So, uh, and Mike, I know you love jazz. I know you love bounce. He had every time I go to his house, he got a New Orleans jazz player. He got I done seen Big Freedia, you know, there like he really love New Orleans culture.

I want to give a shout out to my guy Devel Crawford. He actually introduced me to New Orleans music. He's out there somewhere in the audience.

Devel.

And let me say this and not to get too personal because me and Mike we had conversations and you know he loves New Orleans so much and you know one of the things he told me like man I want to figure something out for New Orleans. He said I love this city. He said I want to invest about $500 million into New Orleans communities. So y'all give it up for that. Right. And it's just something that he said that he wanted to do it in the future. He hope he can do it. Well, you can do it. He's worth a lot of money, but you know, it's something that he aspired to do and just really wants to pour into our city because he sees the opportunity and how much room there is for growth. And so he loves this city so much. And I like when I called him like, 'Yo, Mike, I need you part of this panel.' He was like, 'All right, cool. Just send me the dates and you know, I appreciate you coming down there.'

Yeah. So we're going to do a quick transition into Q&A. So anyone got any questions? Yeah, we got a couple questions right here.

And Larry, I just want to say thank you so much because being here, I just owe it to myself to take this information and just keep going. And speaking of ownership, like Mike, I want to be in private equity, but that can take a lot of money to get into. So I have a company called Firm235 Marketing, and I realized that I can trade my marketing services for equity in a company versus just taking the money up front. So that's what I've been able to implement. And so being from Louisiana, we all know a lot about hurricanes and Ross, I was able to read your book, Hurricanes. Legally, I understood why you couldn't do it, but you had me on the edge of my seat talking about the shootout scene that you didn't get to finish. But it's a question for all of you. With hurricanes that could be like dark moments in our life, what helped you guys get through hurricanes in y'all's lives?

Any of y'all want to take that question as well? Oh, y'all want to?

Yeah. I would say for me it's really just facing my problems. Anything I dealt with in life, just face forward and get through it. Like I would have my big brother Ken and Jasper or Kenny Burns, they've been great mentors and brothers of mine and anytime I dealt with anything, I would call them and just ask for advice on how to get through it because them being much older than me, they've experienced things similar to the things that I've experienced and they were able to guide me through it. And a lot of times people try to run from their problems instead of running toward them because to start a new chapter, you got to close one. And I was speaking to a friend the other day and he was just so stressed and felt like he couldn't go on with his life because of what he's been dealing with and what's been hanging over him. And it was hard to tell him this, but I'm like, man, you got to face that problem. And even though it may hurt, if you face it and you're able to close that chapter, you're able to start a new one. And that's when you can start a new beginning.

W you got anything for hurricanes? Any advice?

You know, when I look back at all the trials and tribulations I've ever faced, honestly, I know I can't remember 98% of that [ __ ]

I love that.

So what it lets me know is to remain confident, you stay alive, and you keep going. God is great. You won't remember this [ __ ] in six months. You won't remember it. You know what I'm saying? And that's just how I approach everything that I deal with. Straight up and down. Let's go. Whatever we doing, we go hard. You know, when it comes to myself, what I do, my partnerships, how do I know you'll make a great partner? Are you willing to sacrifice at all to make sure we win? We got to win. [ __ ] if your toe hurt. [ __ ] if your back hurt. You got an ingrown toenail. [ __ ] that [ __ ] boy. We got to win. And whatever we got to do, let's make sure we do that. We'll thank ourselves later.

Right. And just to piggyback off of that, a lot of the problems I use as fuel to the fire. And people want to know how, like friends of mine, how do I deal with what I deal with, but I use it as fuel. Like I may go work out and it may sound like, oh, you may go work out and you just feel better. But I really pour everything into what I do, my work. When I got my heart broken as a teenager, I went harder and that solved the problem. You feel me? And same thing in life when I deal with something, it's fuel to the fire and I go harder. Like I work out even more. I align my spiritual, my physical, and my mental. When you got all three of those aligned and you're dealing with what you're dealing with, all you're doing is strengthening your core. And so when you do face those challenges, it's like you prepare for them. You built yourself up. So it's nothing that can really stop you. So you just got to keep going, man. Just use it as fuel to the fire because that's really helped me get past everything I've dealt with. And I almost feel like at this point, it's not too much that can get to me and I'm able to overcome whatever gets in front of me as long as I just keep my faith intact, keep my physical and my mental and my spiritual aligned.

Yeah. Yeah. Appreciate that. Appreciate that. I'mma send you his phone number. All right, we have our last one.

Hello y'all. My name is Courtney Williams. I made the pivot from being a television news reporter to now owning my marketing agency. One thing that I feel like every single one of y'all talked about is building your brand and really telling your story. Tell me, how important is it for all of the different entrepreneurs out here to really tell that story and market your business? How important is that?

Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. I throw something in real quick. So Neutros is a marketing agency. We work with companies like Live Nation. We've done some work with Red Bull and I tell every company that I work with that your story is your greatest asset. Usually when you have nothing else, you do have your story. And how do you leverage that to get what you need in life? When we did that competition and we won that prize money, we went up against companies that were way more successful on paper than what we were doing. We had no product. We had no users. We had no money. But we had a story. And that story allowed us to get the relationships and build the leverage so that we could do the work that we did. So I always want y'all to realize that your story is your biggest asset. If you have a company, you can meet with me afterwards. We can talk about how we can sharpen your story up. Maybe get you some visibility on Neutra Grounds. But I want y'all to lean into that more than anything.

As far as, you know, I love storytelling because I know that everything that we do, we like to do it with feeling. Like I don't just want to open up a location that can just generate revenue. Everything that we've built has come from a feeling and wanting to express ourselves in a certain way. And so with Sun Chung, that was probably the location where when we opened up it was so emotional, just the process because I got to connect with my grandmother in a way I never got to connect with her. She got to tell me even more about her story and I got like hour videos of just me secretly recording her and her crying. And just going through that process was a beautiful feeling. And when we opened up this restaurant, it wasn't just about serving food. It was about telling a story and inspiring people from all over. Because my grandmother, she comes from Korea and she left Korea to come to America because at the time her family didn't accept the fact that she had a daughter that was African-American and mixed with Korean. And so she decided to leave and come to America and build her family. And for me that was one of the greatest honors just to have a grandmother who put so much aside to come to America and just build something for a family. And so I'm like, you know what, I don't have a relationship with that side of my family.

And so but that's where you get your good looks.

Yeah, you're probably right. Am I down? No. Let me shut up. Let me shut up. But nah. And so when creating this restaurant, it was about legacy. It was like I haven't met nobody on that side of the family. So it was about preserving that legacy and telling the story so that my kids' kids can look back and say, 'Hey, this is what my great great grandmother was from Korea. She came to America and she established a family and from there my mom did X Y and Z. And from there, the son took it over.' And from there, it's the greatest feeling ever just to know that my mom's proud of me, my wife's proud of me, my kid, my grandmother, and we're able to build something that's deeper than money. And when you're doing it from a place like that and you're able to tell your story, that's what people fall in love with. When you're reading the book, you're falling in love with the journey, the process, the story. And even myself, I'm so passionate. I like to put so much feeling into the things that I do. So I make sure that I'm not just doing stuff just to make money. I turned down a lot of money, turned down a lot of investments. I turned down a lot of opportunity that people presented to me just to preserve what we're building and to do it in our own way. And I'm so proud of how we're doing it because we're controlling our narrative and we're able to tell our story so that the world could hear from the horse's mouth. One more thing, there's a guy Noazine, Derek Ogden, he wrote an article about me the other day for my birthday and he said, I read the article. I'm like wow. I dropped some tears while reading it because out of every reporter blog, nobody told the story how it actually was. They left out a few parts, but Darren, him seeing the journey since I started, he was able to tell the story word for word from the time that I started when I was 20 years old to now. And when I hit him up, I said, 'Man, out of everybody that ever wrote an article about me, you've hit every point and you covered everything because he's seen it.' And because of that story, people fall in love with your brand. People fall in love with who you are. And from there, that's how you build community and gain that support.

Congratulations, my brother. We wish, we support, and we see nothing but continued success in you and your brand, Belina.

I appreciate y'all. Thank y'all, man.

Give it up for Lenny Moto. So, yeah, that concludes our panel, everyone. We're going to take a couple pictures.

Actually, Larry, one of your friends just dropped in from Houston. He wanted to come drop some gems on the crowd. Junior Martins, come on up.

Oh, what's happening, baby?

He was a little late to the show, but he wanted to come out and speak a little bit. So do you want to give him an introduction? Let him know who we have.

Big man, take my mic. Every day I'm hustling.

We're going to do a group picture real quick. Y'all go ahead and do one. You want them all? Okay. Okay. Go ahead. Oh, no. Everybody stand up. It's all right. Let them do your group picture. Do your group picture, Rose. All of y'all in there to take a big man. Yeah. You're too big not to be in this space, right?

Sorry, Mike. Mike, get Mike some glasses, please.

Ros, Mike is your biggest fan. Like he is all about you.