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Article from Hilton Head Monthly (March 2003)

Once upon a time there was a young man from Atlanta who thought the perfect day was a round of golf, a bucket of icy, cold beer and plenty of great wings. He moved to Hilton Head where the golf was great but, alas, there were no buckets of beer, no great wings.

So one beautiful day in June, the young man opened Wild Wing Cafe on the island paradise. Thousands of wonderful people, young and old, flocked to the Wild Wing, for they, too, dreamed of hot wings and buckets of cold beer.

Or so the legend goes. And like most legends, this one has some basis in fact - as well as an interesting story, some kind of moral and what looks like a happy ending (or, at least at this point, a happy middle).

Yes, there was a young man from Atlanta named Cecil Crowley, and one day in February 1987 he and his wife Dianne were returning to their Atlanta home from a vacation. The Crowleys owned and ran an advertising firm, and Cecil was tired of commuting in the Atlanta traffic and did indeed dream of a better life - maybe even one where the perfect day was a round of golf, etc.

So, after one of those "Are you happy? . Could you be happier? . But where would we go, what would we do?" conversations that are the stuff of any good legend, the Crowleys decided to sell everything and move to the beach. By Thanksgiving, they were living on Hilton Head (and Cecil was playing golf).

Cecil still owned a business, Executive Courier, in Atlanta, and Dianne did various marketing projects for both local and regional clients. But for some reason they thought they might like to own a restaurant.

But a restaurant that specialized in chicken wings? First of all, the Crowleys liked wings - among their favorite spots in Atlanta was the Three Dollar Café, known for its wings. And Dianne was a pretty good wing chef herself. They had hosted what had become a legendary Super Bowl party every year in their Atlanta home. Dianne's flavored wings had developed a reputation of their own.

"People told us we should start a restaurant," she said.

As legend would have it, a company in Atlanta made Cecil an offer to purchase his courier business, so they had some money to invest, they knew something about marketing and Dianne knew how to cook. They had everything they needed to start a restaurant. (Or so they thought.)

"I remember when Dianne told me that she and her husband were going to start a restaurant that just served chicken wings," said WLOW radio personality Monty Jett. "Being the honest guy that I am, I said, 'Are you out of your mind?'"

But the Crowleys soon convinced Jett (and the whole town).

"They invited me over to their house one evening and served wings. After a few hours of conversation, I looked at the table and there was this huge mound of chicken bones," he said. "I started thinking this might just work."

After investing $250,000 in equipment, renovations and advertising, and finding a partner with some restaurant experience, they opened Wild Wing Cafe in June 1990 on the duck pond at Coligny Plaza, where Steamers is today.

"In retrospect, we had no idea what we were doing," said Dianne.

Over 300 people showed up that first night, "and it was a disaster," said Cecil. (Cecil's actual description was a bit more graphic and perhaps not appropriate for a family publication.)

"We had no system for expediting orders, so our waiters were literally fighting over plates in the kitchen," he said. "We only had a dozen or so salad bowls, so we were picking them up and washing them before we could get the next orders out, and our bartender ended up auctioning off the last beer in the house. We ran out of everything."

Being a Friday night, they couldn't get any orders until Monday, so they went to Sam's Club and bought a few thousand chicken wings and sent their friends to Savannah to buy salad bowls so they could open the doors on Saturday.

And Cecil soon discovered that his partner with the restaurant experience had indeed been successful in the industry - as a personnel director for a large chain. He had never actually run a restaurant.

But at least he had hired some good staff.

"When Cecil and Dianne first opened, a lot of the staff, including me, had worked in fine dining, so we knew some of the common sense little things that make a customer's dining experience more positive," said Jeff McPhail, today the vice president of finance for the company, and an alum of that opening weekend. "Customer service was part of the philosophy."

Cecil sat down with this group of experienced waiters and cooks and asked them what he needed to do. And in a matter of hours, he redesigned the systems and opened the doors to even larger crowds than the night before.

Dianne's background in broadcast advertising enabled her to create a distinctive advertising presence. Her ads, using the '60s song "Wild Thing," have also become legendary in their own right.

"I was in a store recently and the song came on the radio. I heard a teenage girl say to her mother 'I didn't know Wild Thing was a real song.'"

An aggressive ad campaign for a simple concept - "hot wings, cold beer, good times," - captured a niche for the little Coligny restaurant, and people flocked (pardon the pun) to their doors. The tiny restaurant only seated 80 people, so the customers spilled out to the patio by the duck pond in all kinds of weather to enjoy the food, socialize and listen to live music.

"We were more successful than we ever imagined," said Dianne. "The only problem was, we had no idea how to be profitable. We were doing a huge volume and not making any money."

Cecil remembers seeing lines outside the restaurant and thinking, "I wonder how much we're going to lose tonight."

Dianne brought in a restaurant consultant, Trish Unremovitch, to give them some advice. "She worked with us for two months. We closed for a few weeks, re-worked our menu and repriced everything so we could make some money."

With some solid - and at times painful - experience behind them, a taste of success, and a belief that they were on to something, the Crowleys decided to take the concept to other markets and in 1992 opened a restaurant on Market Street in Charleston.

"It was after Hugo and the building was ravaged," said Cecil. "People told us it would never work. But we loved the city and wanted to be part of it."

"When I first saw the building, I said 'Are you kidding me?''' said McPhail, who moved from the Hilton Head restaurant to work in the new location. "The building was a mess, it had been flooded and you could see the water line on the walls - which was over our heads. And it was located at the north end of the market where there was not much of anything at the time."

Today that section of the market is lined with restaurants and bars and the cars fight for parking spaces on a Friday night - even in February.

"Now everyone wants to be where we are," said McPhail. "I attribute a lot of our success to Cecil's vision. He seems to be able to see what will happen in the future."

Cecil admits that the vision hasn't always worked for him - he opened two Wild Wing Cafes that didn't make it - one in Statesboro ("it became a college bar with kids looking for 50¢ drafts - I didn't want to own it") and Myrtle Beach ("location, location, location . Broadway at the Beach came in and killed everything else").

But two other company-owned stores - Mt. Pleasant, opened in 1996, and Greenville in 2001 - have proven that the concept has legs (or is it wings?).

In 1996, the Crowleys moved the Hilton Head Wild Wing Cafe across the street to its present location outside the Circle Center. A TGI Fridays had opened and closed in the location and it offered a larger space and more visibility.

While they had moved full speed ahead in opening new locations, Dianne was uncomfortable about moving the flagship restaurant from its duck pond site.

"Moving across the street - how scary was that?" she remembers.

"But Charleston had proven that Wild Wing Cafe isn't in the building - it's in the heart," said Cecil. "I knew we could do it."

And on recent a Saturday night during the "off-season" the place is hopping with a diverse clientele of families, college students, golfers and a few groups from Sun City.

"One of the great things about Wild Wing," said Cecil. "On any given evening, we might have a 6-year-old, a 16-year old and a 60-year-old all celebrating their birthdays here."

The Crowleys are also franchising the Wild Wing concept through their company, Wings Over America. They first got into franchising in 1995 when J.K. Kenny - a former beer salesman who had them as clients - wanted to open a Wild Wing Cafe in Marietta. Kenny and his partner, Les Hendricks, added an Athens location in 2000 and after that, the Crowleys started aggressively marketing the idea.

From the corporate headquarters, located a few blocks away from the Mt. Pleasant restaurant, the Crowleys and a team of professionals - most of whom, like McPhail, have been with the company since the beginning - provide comprehensive training in every aspect of operations, as well as long- term support in areas such as advertising, promotions, personnel and financial controls to franchisees.

Cecil and Director of Operations David Clark - also a Hilton Head Island Wild Wing alum - assist the franchisee with all aspects of restaurant design and operations, even meeting with architects and reviewing plans. Dianne and her marketing team create menus, print ads, radio and television commercials and provide direction in creating promotions and booking entertainment.

Three additional franchises are scheduled to open in the next year. Among the new franchisees are Dean and Wendy Tapp, who plan to open a location in Suwanee, outside of Atlanta, this spring.

The Tapps own a manufacturing business and Dean will continue to run that while Wendy oversees the Wild Wing Cafe. She has hired a management team with restaurant experience, and on a recent afternoon, Wendy and members of her staff were training in the Mt. Pleasant restaurant, doing everything from food preparation to cooking to waiting tables.

"We started going to Wild Wing ten years ago," said Dean. "Our son brought us to the Charleston restaurant, telling us it was the best bar in town. We've been Wild Wing customers ever since."

"Every one of our franchisees came from a customer orientation," said Cecil. "These are not just people who want to run a restaurant - these are people who understand what Wild Wing is all about."

In addition to franchising, Cecil plans to continue to open company-owned stores - a Bluffton location is scheduled to open within the next 18 months.

"But I can only open one every two years or so - that's all I can handle at my age," says the young man from Atlanta who turned 50 last year. "The real growth for Wild Wing Cafe now lies in franchising."

How does a young man from Atlanta (and his wife) - neither of whom knew a thing about running a restaurant -- go from the duck pond at Coligny to Wings Over America?

"I've thought about it a lot," said Dianne. "The most important thing is that to this day we are still surrounded by the people who helped us open 13 years ago. They get the concept - it's a lot like a family business."

"And our food is good," said McPhail, one of those 13-year veterans. "Everything is homemade and we work hard to maintain that quality."

"But we never take our success for granted," said Dianne. "We've tried to be part of the communities where we have restaurants -- to give back. And we continue to advertise, keep up with what's new in the business, make changes and add to our menu. We started with seven wing flavors -- today we have 29."

And they owe a lot to the people on Hilton Head Island.

"It was the attitude of the people here. They let us make mistakes and try new things. I don't think we would have been as successful in another community," said Dianne.

"No matter how big Wild Wing grows, our roots will always be here," she added. "This is home." T