From founder and CEO Kent Taylor, the incredible long-shot success story of national restaurant chain Texas Roadhouse, where crazy works.Texas Roadhouse&;s path to global success was an unlikely one. Founded in 1993 by business school dropout Kent Taylor, restaurants like Outback, Lone Star, and Longhorn barely paid attention to this upstart steak and rib joint in its early years. But by 2019, Texas Roadhouse had more than 600 restaurants in 49 states and 11 countries. In Long Shot, founder and CEO Kent Taylor tells the wild story of the founding of Texas Roadhouse, and in the process reveals their recipe for success: embracing unorthodox&;some might say crazy&;business practices. Because isn&;t it a little crazy for a national company to do almost no national advertising? Is it lunacy to keep prices low, even as food and labor costs continue to rise; or to keep the menu basically the same since it opened? Does it fly in the face of reason to prohibit coats and ties in headquarters, or to have a CEO who dresses like he&;s part of the landscaping crew? These business practices might be crazy, but for Kent Taylor and Texas Roadhouse, they&;ve worked. Over the decade from 2010&;2019, TXRH stock appreciated by more than 400 percent, crushing the increases achieved by the S&P 500. What Kent and his Roadie&;s have cooked up is an island of misfits who are cool with being different. They&;re crazy about having fun, but serious about following meticulous recipes to serve up Hand-Cut Steaks, Fall-Off-The-Bone Ribs, Made-From-Scratch Sides, Ice-Cold Beer, and irresistible Fresh-Baked Bread. It&;s legendary food and legendary service, the Texas Roadhouse way. The year 2020 was set to be one of the best in the company&;s history. When COVID-19 hit, everything changed except Kent&;s principles. To keep paying people, Kent donated his entire 2020 salary and bonus to frontline employees. While casual dining restaurants overall saw a 60% drop in traffic during the pandemic, Texas Roadhouse was back in the black a few weeks after shutdown. To understand how this company became a staple of American dining and survived a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, Kent Taylor takes a trip back in time to offer the lessons learned along the way, revealing how a scrawny, distracted kid from Louisville created anything worthwhile at all. You&;ll see it was a long shot. In the tradition of business book classics like Phil Knight&;s Shoe Dog, Long Shot is a classic made-in-America success story.