SMALL BUSINESS: Out of the Rough

While driving along a bumpy Texas road one day in 1936, Oklahoma Restaurateur Beverly Osborne and his wife began munching on their home-packed box lunch of fried chicken. When a piece of chicken slipped from her fingers, Mrs. Osborne let out a disgruntled complaint: “This is really eating chicken in the rough.” Osborne brushed aside the complaint because he liked the phrase. He thought it was just the proper slogan to persuade Americans to eat fried chicken in public the way they do at home—with their fingers.

After that, bantam-sized (5 ft. 5 in.) Bev Osborne always served his chicken in the rough. The customers got no silverware, just fingerbowls. They liked it so much that Osborne kept expanding his Oklahoma City restaurant (it now seats 1,100) and built two more. He also trademarked the name Chicken in the Rough, and began licensing other restaurants to use it.

Last week he added 13 more restaurants to the trademarked henhouse, making a total nest of 245 restaurants all across the U.S. that pay him royalties of 2¢ on each order of chicken served. By last week some 335 million orders of chicken had been sold under his royalty setup. Osborne also sells or leases to his franchise customers everything from patented chicken fryers to water glasses bearing his trademark (a design showing a rooster standing in a clump of grass with a broken golf club).

Last year Osborne’s gross from his restaurants was $965,000, his income from royalties and supplies $195,000. This year he expects to take in about $2,000,000, is as cocky as a rooster about the future. Crowed he: “Within five years I hope to see 2,000 restaurants displaying that rooster with the broken golf club.”