The yin and yang of Friendly Toast ownership

Eric and Tyler Goodwin share their business acumen

Eric Goodwin, right, talks about the work of owning and operating the Friendly Toast restaurants, as well as working with his son Tyler, left, during a CEO Forum Series breakfast hosted by UNH’s CEO & Family Enterprise Center. (Photo by Paul Briand)

Eric Goodwin’s purchase of the Friendly Toast in 2014 was a self-described “passion project.”

At the time, he was a recruiter, having started Goodwin Recruiting in 1999.

But the world of restaurants was not unfamiliar to him. As a boy, he was a dishwasher at the former Green Ridge Turkey Farm in Nashua, which his dad owned and operated. In college at Plymouth State University, where he graduated in 1987, he worked for The Common Man restaurants and eventually went on to run a Chili’s franchise.

By his own admission, restaurants were in his blood, often in a conflicted way. He worked as a dishwasher, standing on an overturned milk crate to reach the sink, as a way to be close to his dad, who Goodwin recalled was not close to his family.

“My dad was one of those old-school restaurant guys who was never around and wasn’t present in our house,” Goodwin said. “But it does inform me of who I am today.”

Today, the Friendly Toast has grown from its two sites in 2014 to 14 today with plans to grow to 18 and establish a national presence beyond New England.

And that is thanks in part to his son Tyler, who joined his dad in 2021 in the creation of Goodwin Family Management, which Tyler heads as CEO, overseeing operations at both the Friendly Toast and Goodwin Recruiting.

Father and son shared their business experiences and their experience working with each other for about 80 people at the CEO Speaker Series, hosted by the CEO & Family Enterprise Center in the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. The breakfast event was held May 14 at Three Chimneys Inn in Durham.

The Friendly Toast is an all-day breakfast/brunch restaurant with a unique vibe of offbeat decor, mismatched plates and cutlery, and attitude but not in a provocative way. Its flagship on Congress Street in downtown Portsmouth remains today, the original and locally well-loved standard by which all others are measured.

The recruiting business, which Eric Goodwin started as a way to stay close and connected with his own family, was doing very well, and it gave him the opportunity to look at ways to grow his interests. When the Friendly Toast purchase came into view, he couldn’t look away.

“I was a dishwasher when I was 8 years old, and I love hospitality. It’s in my blood. I’m very passionate about it. And I missed, strangely, hospitality, and I missed operations,” Eric Goodwin said.

He saw the Friendly Toast as having “an elevated experience” that other breakfast/brunch restaurants didn’t have.

“And it was wild, and it was way harder than I thought,” Goodwin said. “I thought I could, without losing this edgy coolness, put professional structure and systems and culture in place. That turned out to be very hard to do, but ultimately we did that, and then we started to grow and found our way a little bit, and we’re able to find some traction.”

Ants in the pants

There is a yin and yang to Eric and Tyler Goodwin.

While Eric Goodwin admits to being “a kind of ants-in-the-pants guy,” Tyler Goodwin is more settled, more pragmatic.

“I was, sort of, investing in certain things, and had all these companies, and it was very disparate. I’m more of a swashbuckling entrepreneur, and I’m not afraid to fail. I’ll try anything, essentially. And then Tyler joined along the way,” Eric Goodwin said.

“Tyler has brought to us a philosophy around making sure that our support group — accounting, legal, finance — we’re connected and networked with high-level people,” he added. “So Tyler’s done a really good job of giving all that structure and putting meat and potatoes behind our plans.”

From Tyler Goodwin’s perspective, he said “it’s never been a relationship where he knows everything and I can’t contribute, or doesn’t take my advice seriously or anything like that. It’s always been very collaborative.”

“I think because we have different strengths, I think we are honest enough with ourselves about what those strengths are, and we’re able to stay in our lane and focus on those areas,” he added.

Their operation has three primary components: Goodwin Family Management (GFM), the Friendly Toast (TFT) and Goodwin Recruiting (GR).

The management company provides the support structure and services for the restaurants and recruiting efforts. The future hope is to expand the restaurants nationally and double to 700 the number of recruiters.

The Goodwins have in the past and will continue to look at investment opportunities.

They already have an interest in NOBL and NOCA, both beverage companies, as well as Firecrawl, which describes itself as a web-scraping application programming interface (API) designed specifically for artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

All were founded by students at the University of New Hampshire, where Tyler Goodwin earned his undergraduate degree and his MBA in 2019.

Tyler Goodwin gave a shoutout to Firecrawl, saying, “They’re crushing it right now in Silicon Valley.”

He added that investments like that are “more opportunistic and passive in nature there. Right now, we’re moving into a stretch where we’re reinvesting in our own businesses, especially the Friendly Toast as we prepare for our next phase of growth there.”

Family business challenges

A family-run business has its challenges with family, according to the Goodwins, in terms of management and succession.

A former CEO of the Friendly Toast side of the business was Eric Goodwin’s niece, his godchild, who had worked her way through the ranks from assistant manager to general manager to area director.

“I felt like I set her up to fail, because I kind of over-promoted her based on the wrong reasons,” Goodwin said. “So I take responsibility for that, I own that, and I have explained that to her as we’ve had to essentially demote her to or put her in the lane that speaks to her strengths and complements the company.”

The Friendly Toast CEO is Shawn Utke, a former executive at Tatte Bakery & Café and Panera Bread, having officially taken the role in December 2025.

“He took Tatte from $100 million to $250 million,” Eric Goodwin said. “For us to be able to have someone like Shawn leading us, the Friendly Toast, for our next phase of growth is a real coup.”

Eric Goodwin’s daughter (Tyler’s sister) was part of the recruiting side of the business, and did well, but found it wasn’t what she wanted to do long term, instead leaning into her college degrees in psychology and working as a mental health therapist.

As a business philosophy, they share the feeling that they need and expect the best people in the jobs best suited to them.

“I think our focus now is on making sure that we’re unapologetic about having the best people in the right seats with a very clear job description, very highly compensated and aligned with our future,” Tyler Goodwin said.

“Hire the best,” Eric Goodwin said. “It’s all about having the right people in the right seats who are smart and motivated.”

As for his future, Eric Goodwin said, “I don’t see myself retiring. I’m interested in having enough on my plate to keep myself challenged.”

In talking about where he goes from here, he harkened back to the boy on a milk crate washing dishes.

“I’ve grinded really, really hard, and I want better balance at the end of the day,” he said. “So, we’ll keep GFM intact, and we’ll see how that goes. My daughter will probably stay in her lane, and we’ll keep her involved as much as possible, but Tyler really directs it all.”