When Dan Brown sold Leonard’s Pit Barbecue last year, it was to Wendy McCrory, mostly because he liked her.

“I had other offers. Everyone was going to pay me the same amount of money, but I just felt so comfortable with her,” he said. “She’s unbelievable.”

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Maybe that’s a fair assessment; this is the woman who bought the first franchise to Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken when she was 25 years old.

Yep, 25, when most people are still calling mom and dad for money every month.

Gus’s, if you’re new in town or somehow haven’t heard, didn’t actually start on South Front Street, but in Mason, Tennessee, on Highway 70, about 25 miles after it stops being Summer Avenue. 

Even those in the know might be unaware that Gus’s started as Maggie’s Short Orders in 1973 by Maggie and Napoleon Vanderbilt, and that even before that, the Vanderbilts sold their chicken from a tavern Napoleon opened on a side street in the tiny town in 1953. When they died, they left Maggie’s to Napoleon’s son, Vernon “Gus” Bonner, who changed the name to Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken in 1984.

And soon, it was. Word spread up the highway and folks from Memphis started to make the drive. McCrory was one of them.

“I approached the Bonner family and said that I’d like to open a Memphis Gus’s, but they didn’t know me so I had to earn their trust.”

Wendy McCrory

McCrory was a teenager when she started doing office work for a local manufacturers’ rep for the steel industry.

“I’d do invoices, help answer the phones, clerical work,” she said. “My mom worked there so I got to spend time with her, but I wanted to get out, be in sales. The guy I worked for would tell me, ‘Nah, you’re just a kid.’

“But my mom quit when he was out of town. I kept showing up and I just started acting like the sales job was mine, and somehow I just ended up with it. I’m not sure it was ever even official.”

However it happened, she ended up out in the field and part of her job included entertaining clients. When she found out about Gus’s, she started taking them there; everyone else was taking out-of-town guests for barbecue.

She knew Gus’s was special. She wanted to be part of it.

“I approached the Bonner family and said that I’d like to open a Memphis Gus’s, but they didn’t know me so I had to earn their trust,” McCrory said. “For a year, I’d get off work at my full-time job and drive out to Mason to wait tables. I worked Friday nights, Saturdays and Sundays.”

After a year of waiting tables there, she approached Vernon Bonner again. By this time, the family had their franchising plan together and they said yes.

So she had the go-ahead. The problem was she was 25; she didn’t have the money. But she had a history of working hard, and it hadn’t gone unnoticed. As a manufacturer’s rep, she sold steel for several companies, and the owner of one of them came to her.

“I would never have asked anyone for a loan or money, but this guy just said ‘Do you want me to give you the money for it? You can pay me back when you can.’ It was a no-document, no-interest loan, and that’s how I started.”

He loaned her $200,000; $75,000 was for the franchise rights and the rest for the expenses for the restaurant on South Front Street.

“It took me a while, but I paid him back every penny,” McCrory said.

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Today, she’s 47 years old and has 34 Gus’s across the country; there are 36, but the Bonner family still owns the original Gus’s in Mason and one in Dyersburg. And now McCrory owns the oldest barbecue restaurant in Memphis; Leonard’s turns 100 this year.

But success didn’t come overnight, and it was earned through hard work.

“I opened the restaurant — it was Nov. 15, 2001 — but I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know how to run a restaurant,” McCrory said. “A smart thing I did was stay in the steel industry until 2015.”

For 14 years, she continued to work two jobs, brokering steel for bridge spans and Walmart construction sites on one phone and talking chicken on the other. She bought a second franchise from the Bonners and opened it in Collierville around 2006. The other Shelby County locations, also franchises, were opened by other people.

“Around 2012, somehow we started a conversation about me buying the brand. I was happy being an operator, the Bonner family was happy, but we started talking about it. We didn’t do anything about it right then, but the idea was there,” McCrory said.

She partially bought in while working out a trademark issue, but in 2014, the Bonners sold Gus’s, except for the two locations they still have, to McCrory. 

That’s when the Gus’s rocket launched. There was a guy in Little Rock who wanted to open one and another in Austin.

Her now ex-husband, Matt McCrory, had another job but was helping out. She had a few other people but it was a small crew and once again, McCrory said, she knew she was in over her head.

“This time it wasn’t that we weren’t organized,” she said. “We just didn’t know what we were doing.

“We were in Austin for weeks and I didn’t pay my guys the whole time we were down there because I didn’t even think about it. It was a really cool moment to see how loyal these guys were that they didn’t even say anything about it. I mean, it was terrible that I didn’t pay them, that wasn’t cool, but we were just so wrapped up in what we were doing. It cemented us as a team, and we’re still a team today.”

But Gus’s were hatching all over and she needed help with the money. She turned to Brad Turner, whom she knew because their kids were in school together. He worked for an accounting firm and she asked him to take a look at the books.

“I had an accountant I’d used since Day 1, but I’d outgrown him. He was the one who told me I needed someone else, so I told Brad and he took a look at everything. He said, ‘I want to be your guy.’”

Turner had to get through tax season with his previous employer, so he started part-time and in October 2016, became the full-time chief financial officer for Gus’s.

“She needed me to clean up the house to get ready for the growth,” Turner said. “When I got there, there were 16 locations. At that point, we only had two company stores. Now there are nine. They’re technically franchises, but they’re company stores as we control them, we operate them. All of those stores are controlled by Wendy. Some she owns 100% and some she owns 75%.”

Dan Brown has left the building, and his key ring, too

And while no one knew it mattered at the time, Turner’s college gig waiting tables at Leonard’s is what connected McCrory and Brown.

“That meant something to me,” Brown said. “I always liked Brad and we stayed in touch a little, he’d come by and we’d visit over the years. So that was how I met Wendy and again, I knew I wanted her to have Leonard’s. I felt like she had the best chance of success and that meant something to me.”

To his surprise, McCrory wrote a clause in the sales contract giving Brown a percentage of Leonard’s — the existing one and any others that might open — in Shelby County.

And as he was moving up north to be with his son, she gave him a Delta pass to fly home whenever he wanted.

“She didn’t have to do that,” he said. “We can come home to see my sister-in-law, my sisters, whoever, and I can go by Leonard’s if I want to or not if I don’t. I just think she’s great.”

McCrory is a fan of Brown’s, too, and makes no excuses for her generosity.

“I make decisions with my heart and I don’t apologize for that,” she said.

In the next month or so, they’ll open a Gus’s in Metairie, Louisiana, and when the dust settles around that, Leonard’s will get a little more attention, Turner said.

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“We’re actively looking for another location around here so we can move,” he said. “After that, we really don’t know. It’s possible we’ll open more here, possible we’ll have some around the country and maybe even work out a way where we can have a Gus’s and a Leonard’s in the same building.”

Anything, in fact, is possible, as McCrory has proven over the past 20 years.

During all this, she’s twice battled cancer and come out ahead of metastatic melanoma both times. She’s the mother of a 13-year-old daughter and if she’s not working, she’s with her.

“She’s the love of my life, the greatest person in the world,” she said.

Her ex-husband lives close by and is on her executive team.

“He’s still family,” she said.

And while he might be closer family than the others, she says all Gus’s employees are her family.

“I’m the luckiest girl in the world because I get to do what I love to do every day, and I love the people I work with. I put in lots of 14- and 16-hour days, but I get to work with people who work so hard to get it right,” she said

But she’s not all work. She loves snow skiing, and just finished a trip despite a torn calf muscle. She’s discovered rock climbing, a new passion she gets to indulge when she visits her stores in Arizona, and she’s crazy about deep sea fishing. She’s having a big mahi she recently caught in Hawaii mounted and sent to her, though she’s not sure what she’ll do with it. She also likes heavy metal music and raves about a recent concert, where she saw System of a Down and Korn together.

“And I love good food, good bourbon and dogs, just like anyone,” she said.

She’s lucky and she knows it, but she’s smart, and knows she’s earned her success.

“I am wherever I need to be and do whatever I need to do. This isn’t a rags-to-riches story. It’s been hard, I’ve been in over my head, there were times when I would be praying to make payroll, times I’d offer to cash paychecks and hope that we’d get enough money in the during the day.

“But it’s also been fun.”