Having been pushed so far back as to be deprived of his place in the Time Warner executive suite, Turner vowed to return to his entrepreneurial roots. Just why he chose the restaurant-chain business is a story in itself. Suffice it to say that in George McKerrow, Turner found a soulmate for this somewhat improbable sortie. A decade younger than Turner, McKerrow had had his own adventures in the land of executive suites--and he didn't emerge a happy camper either.
Like Turner, McKerrow was an entrepreneur at heart. To this day, he recalls being asked by a seventh-grade civics teacher what he wanted to be in life. "I want to be an entrepreneur," he piped up, "not exactly knowing what it meant but thinking it sure sounded good." Taken aback, the teacher said to him, "That's not a job!" Later, having become an entrepreneur, McKerrow would find it "a crafty way to do what I wanted to do. I was always an adventurer."
Unlike Turner, however, the 53-year-old McKerrow had made his bones in the restaurant business. He learned the trade from the bottom up, starting at the age of 16 as a busboy and dishwasher, flipping pancakes for 90¢ an hour at an Uncle John's Pancake House in Cleveland. Soon after he graduated from Ohio State University, he was proprietor of his own Log Cabin Supper Club in West Virginia. In 1974, McKerrow joined the Victoria Station steakhouse chain. Having been sent south in 1976 to run a VS-owned steakhouse, the native midwesterner quickly fell in love with the vibrant, business-oriented city that was Atlanta in the mid-1970s. Within four years, he was the regional manager.
Eventually, McKerrow hit pay dirt with a chain of his own: LongHorn Steaks. Though he went through bankruptcy before the first LongHorn even opened in 1981, McKerrow persevered on $100,000 in borrowed money--"and worked as a bartender while getting my first restaurant up and going." In the early days, it was strictly touch-and-go. "I used to hide the payroll checks," recalls McKerrow. "I'd say, 'ADP forgot to deliver the checks." The beauty of it, he adds, was that the company's employees "actually believed it!"
The time came, of course, when McKerrow had plenty of money with which to pay his workers. The chain grew, slowly at first, then exponentially: At the end of its first 10 years, there were 31 restaurants; today RARE Hospitality International, as the company came to be known, boasts restaurants in more than 190 locations and includes the Bugaboo Creek and Capital Grille chains as well. Along the way McKerrow became a wealthy man.
And a very unhappy man. At one point, following a sudden drop in the company's stock price, he was forced aside. In his absence, a bitter McKerrow asserts, the company "pandered to the Wall Street analysts, ran up the stock price--and then [went] broke." That left the door open for McKerrow's return. He came back, fixed things up--and got shunted aside once again. "When I decided to retire," he says, "the new bosses I hired to run the company didn't want anything to do with the old guy." Hired management, he adds, "always thinks the entrepreneur only got there through luck."
Soon, says McKerrow, "I was history--in my own company." But, like Turner, he now had money in his pocket--and something to prove. The two men met at a time when Turner was still flying high. "Ted," McKerrow explains, "used to be a customer at one of my restaurants." Gradually, they got to know one another. Turner's son-in-law Rutherford Seydel became McKerrow's lawyer. Occasionally, Turner would have McKerrow over for a visit to his 14th-floor suite of offices in the CNN Center. The first time he set foot in those palatial offices, says McKerrow, "I got real nervous." After all, "Ted was my hero." By then McKerrow was well aware of Turner's "on-time fetish." Turner, says McKerrow, "schedules you for 15 minutes--and that's it." What's more, "he expects you to be not just on time, but 30 minutes ahead of time!"
"Why am I in the restaurant business?" asks Turner. "I got outmaneuvered at a big company.
Turner, meanwhile, had taken up a new interest. America's Cup racing was getting old--been there, won that--and Turner was getting older himself. As a child, growing up in Savannah, Ga., the young Ted had always had interests: Naturalism was one. History another. Collecting coins was yet another. His favorite coin: the buffalo nickel with its evocative, historical images of Native Americans and wild bison. As a man of early middle age with the wherewithal to do just about anything, Turner had begun to buy land out west and breed bison.
At first it was simply another hobby. Soon, it became a passion--and one that was related to his ever more intensely felt devotion to environmental causes. By the turn of the new century, it was also a business: From three bison in 1978 to 37,000 in 2003, Turner had become the owner of more than 10% of North America's 350,000-strong herd. By now too, he had become the largest individual landowner in America, with 14 bison ranches stretching from South Dakota to Oklahoma. The question, increasingly, was what to do with all those bison.
Some, Turner sold for meat--"And, oh, how I cringed when that first bison went to the slaughter." Since half of all bison calves are male, "and since for breeding purposes you only need so many males, well, ..." Turner's voice trails off. "... we slaughtered the poor old surplus males. That's the food chain for you!" He pretends to shudder. "Poor fellers," he says. The market, however, just wasn't there for bison burgers and steaks--at least not at your local grocer. A bison ranchers' cooperative in which Turner was the leading figure, McKerrow explains, "had no marketing plan and had overbuilt the herd. The result was a disaster. There was supply but no demand."
