Many people dream of owning their own restaurant.
And because so many restaurants closed due to the COVID-19 restrictions, now many people dream of owning their own restaurant again.
Own Your Own is a new company that has launched a nationwide competition to find a new restaurant owner. It’s a pretty good deal – the winner of the competition receives $1 million to design and build a new restaurant.
However, there is a catch. The new restaurant has to be built in downtown Burgaw, North Carolina. Burgaw, the county seat of Pender County, is right off I-40 about 30 miles from the coast and 30 minutes from downtown Wilmington. The location of the new restaurant is right across the street from the historic Pender County Courthouse.
Burgaw has a population of a little over 3,000, and one of its selling points is that it has a well-preserved downtown area that is making a comeback.
The million-dollar restaurant contest is the brainchild of Richard Johnson, who founded Hotjobs, which he took public and then sold to Yahoo.
Johnson has already built two new eateries in Burgaw: Fat Daddy’s, a pizzeria, and the Burgaw Brewing Company.
Rather than build another restaurant in Burgaw, Johnson decided to provide the funding for an entrepreneur to build it.
In the press release, Johnson said, “I guess it’s not every day that someone comes up to you and says, ‘Can I build you a restaurant?’ But it works. I find someone who wants to own a restaurant, build it for them and hand it over with a reasonable lease. They get their own restaurant, and the town has a new gathering place.”
Johnson says the best part about his model is that it can be used to help other small towns and that’s why he launched OwnYourOwn.com, a site where would be entrepreneurs can enter to own their own restaurant.
Anyone who is interested can go to https://www.ownyourown.com/ to get all the details about entering the contest to win $1 million to build their own restaurant in Burgaw.
It will be a seven-figure failure in this backwater.
This will be a bad investment for Burgaw. The people that live here in Burgaw eat at Hardee’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Bojangles or McDonald’s. This is not a rich town, pretty much all the people that live here are happy by the places they eat at here. Maybe this idea would be better for Wilmington since Wilmington is lot’s bigger and has around 293,000 people. But to put a seven-figure restaurant here is a waste of money.
We need something up scale in Burgaw. We are tired of $8 dollar hamburgers and lousy service by all the burger joints.
Agreed. You see how these burger joints are run, and who is running them.
You are so right. Was in Carolina Beach recently totally shocked at prices. Simple burger with lettuce, tomato and onion the price on the menu $16.00 that was the price fries were extra at $6.00. This was at a sports bar we’ve been going to since they opened not anymore.