A Quote by Steve Ells

When I told my friends and family that I was leaving Stars to open a burrito shop in Denver, they thought I was crazy, but not long after the success of the first Chipotle, I knew I had to open just one more, so I opened a second one on Colorado Boulevard, which turned out to be even busier than the first.
My undergraduate degree was in art history! Raising money for Chipotle was really my MBA. The money for my first restaurant came from my dad, the second from mostly cash flow. The third was an SBA loan. After my dad invested $1.5 million to open a few more, he suggested I raise the money myself for the experience.
The first time I ever got recognized, I was at Chipotle eating a face full of burrito, and a fan started filming me and said, 'Oh my gosh, that's the girl from 'Nerdy Nummies!' They kind of waved a little, and I waved back with a burrito in my mouth.
From the first day we opened Wynkoop, my brewpub in Denver, I knew I'd be ten times better running a restaurant than I was a geologist.
The first Chipotle was intended to be my source of funding for a full-scale restaurant, a means to an end. But it turned out to be more successful than I ever imagined.
Before we started writing we did feel pressure because of the success of the first record. One of the first songs that we wrote was "Out Of My Heart" which is the first single. As soon as we wrote that, we knew we just set the standard and every other song had to be as good if not better.
Chipotle was wildly successful, and I thought, 'Well, let me open one more.'
The ticket out of the Depression was an education, a college degree. It really didn't matter if you knew anything. You just had to have the degree. My dad, up until the last two years of his life, thought he had failed miserably with me 'cause I didn't go to college. I mean, you've seen postgame interviews with the star of the game and the players always talk about how proud his parents are because he's the first guy in his family ever to attend college. I'm the first in my family not to! I'm the first of my family not to have a degree. It's thrown everybody for a loop.
Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in. Meaning: you already knew how deep the love was, how instinctually you felt about someone. What happened in their first five minutes? Time stopped.
Chipotle never lets me down. I feel like, in the middle of nowhere, Chipotle is still there, and my burrito bowl is still going to sustain me. So Chipotle, for convenience and reliability.
When I first decided to open a restaurant, I was turned down by several banks. It was the late 80's and many restaurants were failing. I refused to give up because I knew I had a good concept.
Visiting any shop for the first time is exciting. There's always that buzz as you push open the door; that hope; that belief - that this is going to be the shop of all shops, which will bring you everything you ever wanted, at magically low prices.
Always my fallback is - I'm gonna move to a poor town and open a scone shop... Sometimes after some bad auditions I think, you know what - time to open that scone shop! Let's start baking.
The first series of 'Open All Hours' came and went without much fanfare because the BBC, in its almighty wisdom, put it out on BBC2, reasoning that it was 'a gentle comedy', better suited to the calms of the second channel than to the noisier, choppier waters of the first.
I had a trial run with Norman Ross for 21 years, from '61 to '82. I didn't have it in mind to open a chain like Harvey Norman. I opened one shop, but then the next thing you know, I've got another shop and then another shop.
My very first competition was at the end of 2005. Honestly, I just looked it up online and tried to find something local, because I had no idea how to do it or where to start. I did Denver's Strongest Man here in Colorado, and I won.
Just take Germany and the suffering of Jews during and after the Second World War. It would be legal to ridicule and to laugh at this suffering, but since it was such a trauma on the European conscience, no one is going to do it. It is an open scar, an open wound, an open reality.
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