Clyde's 50th Anniversary Book

How We Do Business, Clyde’s Primer For Beating The Odds In The Restaurant Business

by J. Garrett Glover

2013 marked Clyde’s Restaurant Group’s Golden Anniversary, fifty years beating the odds in the tough, fickle business of running profitable restaurants. The most significant feat in the company’s fifty years is, as CEO and partner John Laytham remarks, “I don’t know of too many restaurants who have been around for fifty years or too many restaurant companies who haven’t closed a restaurant.”  All fourteen Clyde’s’ locations are still open and the company is profitable. Not a single Clyde’s fatality in fifty years. “How do they do it?” people often ask considering that one in four restaurants close or change ownership within the first year of business; that fatality rate worsens with time when, over three years, the number increases to three in five.

Garrett Glover has written an entertaining business book and colorful anecdotal account about Clyde's origin and evolution and its wildly unorthodox successful business practices, How We Do Business, Clyde's Primer for Beating the Odds in the Restaurant Business. Clyde’s intrepid performance and success over fifty years make for an awesome case study of how out-of-the-box thinking and a modicum of sophistication can transform a meat-and-potatoes business…or any business, for that matter. For founding partner, Stuart C. Davidson, it was deceptively simple: “Anything worth doing is worth doing well.”  A formidable primer and enjoyable read, How We Do Business showcases the genius and eccentricity of Clyde’s two partners and exposes the ABCs of this perennially bankable independent restaurant company headquartered in Washington, D.C.