A recipe for success

The spinach-cheddar crepe was a hit. Other specialties, such as various omelettes, were added, often named for the patrons who suggested them. Since there was no money to keep updating the menus, Cora wrote the names of the new dishes on cardboard and stuck them to the walls. Customers were lined up outside, as eager for Cora’s friendly banter as for her gourmet breakfasts.

“My mom had always been very serious and reserved,” says Gigi. “But in that diner, she was so talkative and friendly, joking with the construction workers, the firemen, the electricians. They loved her, and she loved them, and every customer was important to her. I remember once I’d been out dancing the night before and I had to be in at 6 a.m. I was half-asleep and didn’t put my makeup on till about 11. My mom said, ‘Huh! What makes you think the guy who came in at 6 didn’t deserve your lipstick?’”

The restaurant had revenues of $300 a day – enough to pay the bills but with little left over. After 14 months without a single day off, Cora was exhausted. Her kids put their money together and bought Cora her first real vacation – a trip to Paris. She slept for the first three days. On her return, she realized that the restaurant, run in her absence by her children, had done just fine without her, and she started to think, If this restaurant is working so well, why couldn’t I do another one? Her daughter, working full-time as a barmaid in another restaurant, got a bank loan for $10,000, and the family bought a second snack bar in the Montreal suburb of Laval. The week before it opened, a glowing review of the first restaurant fortuitously appeared in the local paper, and the second Chez Cora was busy from the first day.

Most businesses have a vision statement. Cora had an actual vision. One afternoon when she was designing new paper placemats, she envisaged a sketch of the Montreal area with two little Monopoly-style houses drawn in to mark her two restaurants. Then suddenly, in her mind’s eye, she saw a map of the whole province covered with little houses.

“And I started to get the entrepreneurial sickness,” she says. She opened a third restaurant, then a fourth, then five more. “After I opened each store, the only thing that would interest me was where I would open the next one. I didn’t care about the money. But it was like mountain climbing. You think you’re at the peak, but then, oh! There’s another peak!”

When Cora was running nine successful locations, a young woman approached her with an intriguing offer: she wanted to buy a Cora’s franchise. “What’s a franchise?” Cora asked. “You know, like a McDonald’s,” the woman explained. “I use your name, you teach me how to make the dishes, I give you money every month.” Still unsure, Cora spent months reading everything she could find on franchise operations. “I started to realize that franchising for me was a tool to build an empire,” she says.