YouSaid · the spoken record

Antonio Swad

lines on the record: 91
first: 2026-04-06
most recent: 2026-04-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“He could get people to believe in what he wanted him to believe in and then work towards it. And in my life, I look at, I've built two amazing teams and I was able to convince them to look out the window, look at the vista, and help me row towards it. And when people can see it and they believe that you see it and I do see it, they're willing to play above the rim and pull out of themselves abilities and things that they didn't even think that they had inside of them. And nobody achieves anything great alone. And I certainly didn't. I've in many, many great people in my life. And I'm grateful for all of them.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prior to that, he was the sales manager for playtex bras and girdles. This was years ago. And in this book, he said he had the best sales team because he would sit him down in a chair and he was able to paint the vista. He'd make him look out a window and he'd call it painting the vista.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I attribute it to the ability to attract and maintain real excellent people. You know, I read a book years ago by Victor Cayam, the guy that bought the Remington Shaver Company.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's amazing, and I'm happy for them. And people ask me all the time, aren't you sorry you sold that company? Not completely, because I tell you, these guys, some very smart people were involved. They were able to grow it. They continue to grow it. And I'm happy for them. I'm not filled with regret in any way. I really don't think of it that way. I'm more living in the moment. And, you know, when you live in the moment, you kind of take responsibility for what are you doing today? Not what I did years ago.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you have to develop these relationships with people you haven't met before. You have to believe that you can trust them with your baby, which is your brand. And it's not for everybody, quite honestly”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't. And this is, it really comes down to franchising. You know, franchising isn't just about the food or the product in as much as it's about relationship management. You're managing the relationship with the franchisee and the franchisor and the franchisee believes that they've invested all this money and you get your money first, whether they're profitable or not. So inherently the relationship kind of has a little bit of a feeling like you're getting over on me. And obviously that's the result of a lot of litigation in franchising. I sold a very healthy company to a guy that really, it's a great guy, but franchising isn't for him. Developing these relationships and actively selling franchises, it's not for everybody. I think he's more suited to own company-owned stores.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes. And at some point in your life, you get to the point and say, man, I love the pizza business, but man, 32 years is long enough. And I thought Charles would be a great fit. And we came up with a number. He immediately had 22 company-owned stores, my 11 and his 11, and became the franchisor. And that's kind of where it stands today.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Charles, yeah I thought that, again, I'd been in the pizza business for 32 years. This goes, the pizza business, I was always in the pizza business. Right back tonight.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me point out one difference is with Wingstop, I had two company-owned stores, one of each model, the Dynam model, with the pizza business, I continued to open up my own stores. And at the time, I personally owned 11 stores. And I had another franchisee in the system that also owned 11 stores. He owned the stores in Phoenix. He owned the stores in San Antonio. So he came to me and said, listen.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was the perfect fit for this particular pizza that we had developed. So it was these kind of things. You know, in the pizza business, I was basically at war with some of the largest companies, the dominoes, the Papa John's. We didn't have the funding to do that. We had to be inventive. We had to come up with things that didn't cost a lot of money, but got thousands and millions of brand impressions. And we were successful with that. And I attribute it all to the team that I had working with me.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, what's interesting is that became the story, the story was no longer the pizza. The story was why won't you let us say the name of this pizza? And we were able to convert that to mentions, to build the brand. And again, it was the kind of thing that the customer resonated with, they say it commonly. It's a common thing. And it's not a derogatory thing. It's actually when you use that expression, something's changon, you know, she's a fine, fine lady, you know. It's a term of endearment, to be honest with you.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. And by this time, you know, things have advanced with demography has. Got to the point where you could just put in a you could put in your parameters in any city in America and it would show you the best locations to achieve that density of population that is foreign-born, predominantly Hispanic. Here's the income I'm looking for. So you develop a formula. And the stores generated significant volume relative to their investment. And that's one of the, in any successful franchise program, I mean, there's a relationship there. There's a relationship between sales and investment. And both of these concepts were very favorable.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got a lot of attention, global attention, and it catapulted the brand and the franchising program into a light. I couldn't have couldn't have bought that much publicity at any price. And that's when we really started to go. But it galvanized that customer base to this brand better and faster than anything else we could have done. It basically said we stand with you. We know that you travel back and forth. And just like a lot of us, they come back from foreign travel, you always come back with a little bit of a currency left over. And what do you want to do with it? Well, you can turn that into a hot.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was unique or different because we focused through, we focused on that customer, that Hispanic customer, majority of them foreign and first generation. Many of the things we did, how we generated business were things that resonated with this particular customer base. I don't know if you can remember. We had three very successful promotions that made national news. The first one was the Pizza Ferpes program.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And it's the meaning of one word in the document could change the entire spirit and intent of the document. And man, I learned the lesson the hard way.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And with that, the meeting adjourned. And they got up, all these guys got up. They went downstairs, got in their car, and drove off. My next call was to Marty, my lawyer, I said, listen, I just had this meeting. These guys have no intention of ever honoring the agreement in any form or fashion. And you have to understand, the idea with this SBIC money is they buy a company, they grow a company, and then they flip it. And the whole plan is to sell the company in four or five years, make an ungodly amount of profit. And move on to the next deal. We were able to keep the litigation wheel turning with me and one lawyer, one guy. That it was, they were starting to think, I think, that this is going to be hard for us to work our plan and flip this company if it has all this litigation attached to it.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it took me a moment to comprehend what the guy's trying to do. I said, wait a minute, you want to give me $2 million, but you owe me $12 million. Is that right? He said, you know, one of these faces like, yeah, you could look at it like that. He said, but I want to buy your note. And I tell you what, I said this and I don't think I've ever had, I've never said this before, and I don't think I've ever said this after. And I looked at him and I said, let me tell you something. I said, I'll spend every dollar I have collecting every dollar I'm owed.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The principle of this group contacts me and he said, Hey, I'd like to have a meeting with you because I said, what's it about? He said, well, it's about paying you your money. I said, well, I've always got ears for that. So by this time, I had bought a building and had a corporate headquarter building for Pizza Patrone. And I'm getting ready to roll this amazing franchising program And he comes in with Lawyers and all his minions. It's like an entourage of people. And we go upstairs at the Pizza Patron office building. We sit at the conference room and I said, okay, you said you were here to talk to me about. Paying me my money He said, I think I'd be able to buy your note from you. My notes for $12 million. They've paid nothing on it. He said, I think we can give you $2 million for it”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well Me in that one lawyer, we sued him. Keep in mind, they owed me $12 million That's a lot of money to a. Young man from Ohio who started off at the dish machine, you know? So I sued I sued him for my money.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at this point, I was still a little optimistic, but it became clear as the months rolled on that they had no intention of paying me. They had no intention. Instead of using the money to make the payment to me for the company that I built, they took the money and they built corporate stores with it, which was They made sure there was never any money left over”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So buried in the documents was this little provision, and it's just this is a great lesson for people, the use of how a word is used. It came down to, it said that payment would be made Based on available cash flow, available cash flow. So when we got into the documents, basically, well, it's based on available cash flow and there's no cash flow available. There's not available.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the second month comes, nothing. And in this interim, I'm getting Pizza Patrone ready for the big stage, reworking the logo, reworking all this stuff. I mean, I know what to do now. I'm a dangerous man. I got a little bit of money and a lot of knowledge. And I love the pizza business. I love the concept. I'm seeing the explosive growth of the Hispanic community. So my focus is over there. Third month comes, no money. So I get another, I'm introduced to another lawyer who ended up becoming one of my dearest friends. He's a litigator. He's not a franchise specialist or anything like that, but he's just a general litigation lawyer. And we started to dig into the documents. And you have to understand the documents were so voluminous.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the deal closes. Shortly after the deal closed, They fire George, the guy sold the company to. They had in the documents that they had the ability to get rid of him. He wasn't in the seat two weeks They unload him and they bring in their own guys, they bring in some of these Boston guys. And the way I set them up, when they took control of the company with the amount of revenue the company was doing based on only royalty revenue, if they didn't sell another franchise, they would have enough money to make my payment. First payment comes due. Nothing. Go to the mailbox. Mailbox is empty.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The closer they get you to closing on a transaction like this. At this point, you're emotionally kind of already there. You might even be spending the money in your mind. Here's what I'm going to do first and all that. And pretty soon at the end, the deal is. Not exactly the same deal that you Lived in, but by this time you're kind of emotionally bought into it. You might have even mentally moved on. You're no longer owning the company. What are you going to do next kind of thing? And I knew what I wanted to do next. I wanted to, now I'm armed with some money and franchising knowledge. And I was going to go back and get my pizza concept turned up, get it ready for primetime.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A pretty fat payment, you know, when you finance $12 million over 120 months. I mean, it's still nice check. And I thought, man, you talk about mailbox money. This is going to be great. And I was kind of a babe in the woods, you know. I didn't know about M&A attorneys and people that specialize on transactions like that. And there's a lot of money at stake here. The lawyer that I used was back to my franchise guy, the guy that did the franchise documents. It's only lawyer I knew at the time. You talk about, you know, what is that expression taking a knife to a gunfight? I mean, what I had was like my Boy Scout pocket knife. And these guys, they rolled in with big law firm out of Houston and all this stuff. And I didn't realize it at the time, but my lawyer was pretty overwhelmed. Wait, I learned this technique where”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it would only give me 10 million at closing. And that was part of the reason that we bumped the price up by 10%. Then I would carry the note for 10 years on the $12 million for 10 years. I never had that much money in one pilot together in my life.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this guy, his name is George. He said, I'm going to line up the funding. I'm going to be able to raise the money for this. We're going to do this. I said, all right, George, you know, if you can do it, if you could raise the money He did. He brought in some guys from, I believe they were out of Boston. And they were at SBIC, you know, small business investment corporation, the division of funded by the SBA. And I had had great success building this company with SBA money And I sat there and watched him, and George sat there and watched him. And he's just hoping that they're going to say yes and fund the deal for him to buy the company. So the deal that we ended up with Was this twenty million turned into twenty-two million? The deal got sweeter”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100% owned it 100% But you know, he said $20 million? He said, yeah. I said, well, I don't know. Let me think about it. So I did think about it. And I eventually said, okay, if you could bring me that, you know, I would certainly look at that. And he brings a guy to meet me, and I like the guy right away, experienced restaurant guy, and he turns out he had been watching Wingstop for a number of months. And I was shocked at how much he knew about my company. You know, he drove an old Lexus and we walked me around to the trunk of his Lexus and he popped the trunk open and he had files. He had a file on every store that I had opened. You know, he had built this file. And he was like really, really into it.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess so, yeah, sure. I'll have a conversation with him. Sure enough, a couple days later, this guy comes into town and we sit down and he said, hey, listen, I think I could sell your business. And I said, oh, really? You think so? And then he said, I think I could get you $20 million. I'm like. $20 million. You think it's worth $20 million? He said, I think it is. I just couldn't imagine numbers like that.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, man, I don't know. You know, it seems like we're rolling pretty good. But inside of me, I had this little tick, you know, this thing bothering me. He said, well, listen, I got a guy, a friend of mine, that's coming into town in a couple of days, and he's got a lot of experience. He's bought and sold a lot of businesses. And I remember the one thing he said about it is that he's the guy that took Burger King to Saudi Arabia. He's an American guy, lives in Tennessee. And that gave him credibility, I guess, in my mind. He said, would you sit down and at least have a conversation with him? I said,”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was a lone packager for SBA loans. So I broke for lunch and I called him back and I said, Hey, yeah, what's up? And he said, hey, I'm just going to ask you, and this is kind of out of left field, but I want to ask you, would you ever consider selling the company? And it's the first time this ever came up.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of those only in America stories for sure. So, about two weeks later, from that football game, I remember where I was defining moment. I was on a ladder doing the interior decor at the Marsh Lane wing stop. And my phone rang. And I looked at who it was, it was the loan packager guy.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well When I give you the rest of the story, I think it'll come into focus for you a little bit more. At that moment, I didn't decide, oh man, I got to sell this company. I got to get out. I mean, I wasn't necessarily thinking that. Yeah. And I was loving the growth, and I realized that I really had finally had a concept that had legs. And I was fulfilling my dream of...”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it would only give you 520 cases of wings. And that's not very many. And the vision to me was kind of horrifying and haunting. And I kind of held it to myself because it was ridiculous. You know, it's ridiculous. And I had arguably one of the best restaurant concepts going with phenomenal growth, tons of development agreement signed, lot, lots of stores under construction, but I was kind of haunted by that vision. And I felt like a huge hypocrite as someone that didn't eat chicken.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That there was a chicken on every seat instead of a person. I'm just trying to get my wrap my head around 65,000 chickens. And I started doing the mental math. And keep in mind at this time, you know, I was feeling more and more like a hypocrite growing this company that sold nothing but chicken, not eating chicken myself, and knowing what the industry was like. You know, it was football Sunday. It was the busiest day. And that thought of killing all those chickens, if we killed every chicken in the place, it wouldn't be enough to supply even half of the use of the time it took to watch the game.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, give me a moment to tell you the story and I'll tell you the defining moment. And, you know, it was never about the money, which is funny usually when people say it's never about the money. It's usually always about the money. But in this case It wasn't. I had a defining moment, a vision, if you will, at a football game, Dallas Cowboy football game, Bernadette at I went. And usually at the end of the third quarter, they came on the loudspeaker and they announced the attendance of the game. And this stadium held about 65,000 people. And so I'm sitting there. And I started to imagine that 65,000 people and I'm looking around and you know it's a sellout.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fair. It was fair. And the higher their sales, the higher the royalty that they paid. So, you know, I had a vested interest in having every one of the stores do well, do extremely well. And nothing sells franchises better than successful franchisees. And eventually it got to that point where the number of franchise leads that we got was just darn near overwhelming because the stores did well.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And the money that I was seeing, most of the money was the profit from the stores, the company-owned stores that I own. But then started to see some royalty revenue. And royalty was 5% of sales, 5%. I'm sure.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The store that I owned, it quickly continued to grow, it eclipsed a million dollars in sales. By the time the franchising program was in full swing, the store was doing well.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Louisville, Texas, just north. Now that is a suburb, and that is north of Dallas maybe 20 minutes, and it was owned by two women. One woman was a school teacher, Phys Ed teacher. She cashed in her retirement as her down payment. That along with an SBA loan, she was able to fund the store. And like many of the original franchisees, they went on to become own multiple stores and become multimillionaires in many cases.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple things here that 20,000 was just for the fee. It was the franchise fee that included the development fee and the franchise fee together was $20,000. You still had to fund the construction of the store and furniture fixtures and equipment. But even saying all that, all in, you could open a store at that time for about $125,000.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they would say, I want to open a store, and they'd pick an area, and then you would define a development area and say, okay, you can look between here and here and here and here. And once you found the location, it was up to us to approve it or not approve it. But that's different than picking it out for you.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By saying this is a good spot, you'll do great hair. You never said that. You never want to say that in franchising because there's so many moving parts. And at the end of the day, it comes down to human behavior and human performance.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they would be responsible for finding it, and this is a very important point. If you find the real estate for them, you pick up some contingent liability, almost assuring their success. And this is something I learned early on.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$20,000 at first. It was $20,000 and $7,500 was divided into two fees, $7,500 called a development fee. And you paid that up front. Then you started to look for a location. And then after you found a location, you paid the balance of $12.5.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, in a lot of ways, as wing stock grew, you know, we contributed greatly into the popularity of wings. I got a lot of competitors, a lot of people opened wing concepts of their own. And then eventually the price of wings certainly went up a lot. But when we opened the store, 10 piece wings were $2.99.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was trainable, and I'm selling a widely consumed protein with proprietary sauces that you could only get if you walked through the door of a wing stop.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anybody that achieves anything doesn't do it alone, and I certainly didn't do this alone. I had some key managers. They ran the stores. They ran the pizza stores. And I spent very little time in the pizza business. I was 100% focused working at the wing stop, listening to customers. And so the pizza business was kind of on, I don't want to say autopilot, but it was for me because I had these key people that knew the business. They both were bilingual. And it was only four stores, you know. So we had a pretty tight little operation and it kind of took care of itself during the early years of wingstop.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was it. And in the early stories, too, I sold beer, but it was like 3% of the sales. But I put beer in the store to position the concept as an adult concept and not fast food. Because I wanted people to think of it as a place where it's okay to spend more money than you would spend in a typical fast food restaurant. We had music. I had the lights down low. But the majority of the sales were to go sales.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, they were rolled. They were sauce. And this is important. This is an important part of making wings. You have to sauce them as soon as they come up out of the fryer. Because I don't have any scientific evidence of this.”
2026-04-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wingstop: Antonio Swad. A Brilliant Idea — And a Nail-Biting Exit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT