Business Q&A: Terry Maxwell from TL Maxwell's Restaurant & Bar
| Saturday, Nov 28 2009 12:00 PM
Last Updated Saturday, Nov 28 2009 12:00 PM
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Felix Adamo / The Californian Terry Maxwell of TL Maxwell's Restaurant & Bar.
Terry Maxwell's wife knows the routine: Every time there's some major mishap in Bakersfield, the owner of TL Maxwell's Restaurant & Bar says he's leaving.
Well, it finally happened: He left, sort of. That is, he's back. Mostly. Keep reading.
The impetus was not a crime or bad weather but a game of high school football. His friends' son was playing in a state championship game in Jackson Hole, Wyo. He and his wife flew out to see the game and ended up taking a drive to ...
Q: Polson, Montana?
A: Right. I had done some research and I figured that Missoula is the place. We'd go, we'd fall in love with it, we'd find some land and we'd put a home on it. We got there and said, "It's a college town." So my friend from Wyoming and someone locally had said there's a lake -- they call it "the lake" -- north of Missoula and I really ought to go visit it. It's called Flathead Lake, and it's the largest naturally occurring body of water this side of the Mississippi River -- it's 28 miles long and 16 miles wide. It's huge. So I googled it and I looked and I saw it was about 60 miles north of Missoula and there's a little town called Polson on the southern tip.
Our first night in Polson I went down to the lobby and asked the women there where's a good place to eat, and she said, "We don't have one." And of course my wife could hear the big gears going in my head.
Q: New place much like TL Maxwell's, is it?
A: Very much like it. The socio-economics don't dictate that we can have the exact same menu. We have all the same great desserts, but the actual menu has a flatiron steak and a top sirloin, a few more chicken dishes -- just things that are a little bit less expensive. Now the building there was built in 1908. The (TL Maxwell) building here was built in 1895. They're both brick buildings. They both have downstairs basements. They both at one time in their histories had illegal gambling downstairs. And they both have ghosts. So with all that in common, it was almost like we're destined to have a restaurant in that building.
Q: So running a business is as easy in Montana as it is in California?
A: Yes. Opening it is tough. They make it very tough for you to open a business in Montana. You have to jump through a lot of hoops and go over a few hurdles. Once you have opened your business, they really get out of your way and allow you to be a capitalist. What I say about California is, they will bend over backwards to help you to open a business, but once you open it they'll make it almost impossible for you to make any money.
Now, our business plan is this: We love Bakersfield, we love Montana. Our hope is that we start making the kind of money in Montana that we need for what we want to do in Montana. We already have a restaurant in Bakersfield that already gives us the income for what we want to do here.
Fortunately, in the summer in Bakersfield we slow down a little bit so we should be able to spend most of our time in Polson -- not 100 percent, but most of our time there.
And of course, in the winter that's when it slows down in Polson, and that's when we want to spend our time in Bakersfield, because we're very busy in Bakersfield at that time. Christmas is our busiest time here. That's when we make most of our revenue.
