Owner turns franchise around to one of Buffalo Wild Wings’ 10 best 

By Tom Blodgett
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Twitter: @sp_blodgett

Gayle Schmidt likes to say you can learn anything by reading. Her latest venture in life is proof.

Schmidt spent 30 years as a dental hygienist, calling it her passion in life, but when she pivoted careers and opened a Buffalo Wild Wings in Gilbert in 2004, things did not go as smoothly as she figured they would.

“I thought ‘I could do this. It’s a people business,’” she said. “I made every mistake you could make. We failed so bad.”

It came to a head one night when her two lead cooks were out, ticket times were an hour, customers were ticked, and she ended up comping nearly everyone’s meals and firing her managers.

“I remember crying all the way home, going, ‘Whoa, this is awful, what do I do?’” she said. “And the next morning I come in, and I go, ‘Wow, we’re never going to have another day like that again, are we?’ And my staff said to me, ‘We better not, or we’re out of here.’ And I believe it because it was a disaster.

“It took me two years to resolve the nightmare of that night. Two years. I didn’t even want to wear my logo out in public because it was, ‘That place sucks. Buffalo Wild Wings sucks,’ and it was true. It was awful. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

So Schmidt dove into reading, taking classes and learned how to run a restaurant.

“Then once I did and hired the right people to run it and controlled costs and learned about it, then I went, ‘Wow,’” she said. “And that’s when we started going up.”

So much so that Buffalo Wild Wings has chosen the Gilbert franchise as one of the company’s 10 best. Schmidt, General Manager Shanna Ambrosius and a team of employees from the restaurant competde Oct. 8 in Nashville to be considered the best. Her bartender, Desiree Oreaboe, came out as the No. 1 bartender, and the team also had the No. 1 cocktail, “Liquid Passion.”

Schmidt credits her background in dental hygiene — “I don’t settle for sanitation. I like sterilization,” she said — and high employee standards for the success. She has rules.

“We have side work,” she said. “You can’t stand around, can never be on your phone. If you have some spare time, talk to your table or and just attend to your table, make them feel valued. If the floor is dirty, don’t walk over it, pick it up. Pride of ownership, have that.”

She teaches her employees things, too, like smile before you talk. Some leave because of the rules, Schmidt said, but “they always come back.” Former employees sometimes visit or email. One even sends her a gift card every time he is promoted in his career.

Ambrosius makes staff a homemade meal every Friday. There is a turkey dinner at Thanksgiving and an Easter egg hunt, too.

“We treat them very nice,” Schmidt said. “Staff is important to us.”

Tom Blodgett can be reached at tblodgett@iniusa.org or found on twitter @sp_blodgett.

Tom Blodgett
Senior News Editor | Gilbert
@sp_blodgett

tblodgett@iniusa.org

Meet Tom
Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.

Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.

Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism. 

Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.  

Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).