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Key Takeaways
- What started as a fading marquee turned into a million-follower media platform, publishing company and hundreds of retail products.
- By pulling off a statewide April Fool’s prank with Yeti and the governor of Texas, Ellis Winstanley proved that bold storytelling can lead to authentic collaborations.
When the governor of Texas deploys state troopers to help with your April Fool’s prank, you know your restaurant sign is bigger than a roadside gimmick.
That actually happened with El Arroyo, the Austin, Texas, Tex-Mex spot co-owned by Ellis Winstanley. The marquee was “stolen” in the middle of the night, sparks flying on fake security footage as news crews scrambled to cover it.
Hours later, the governor himself appeared in a staged plea to recover the sign, which was finally unveiled at a Yeti store as part of a co-branded release. Free tumblers and margaritas capped off the joke, but the message was clear: This was no ordinary restaurant sign.
Related: This Former ‘Simpsons’ Showrunner Sampled 200 Foods in 24 Hours — Then Came Back For More
Ironically, Winstanley didn’t see the potential at first. “We didn’t even realize the power of the sign when we bought it,” he admits. At the time, the marquee felt like background noise. The humor had drifted, the tone was stale, and it didn’t seem like much more than clutter on the curb.
That changed when Winstanley and his wife, Paige, took control of the messages. “We started to experiment with making it more connective and more authentic,” he says. Instead of cheap gags, they wrote lines that were clever, nostalgic and funny in a way that people wanted to share. “Less funny mean or funny gross,” as Winstanley describes it, “and more funny like we’re laughing together about this.”
The internet caught on quickly. A few thousand followers turned into hundreds of thousands, and soon more than a million across Instagram and Facebook. What started as a weathered roadside sign suddenly had the reach of a media brand.
Paige turned that reach into a business. When publishers dismissed the idea of a book of signs as “too niche,” she launched Cozumel Publishing Company herself. “She literally put the books in the trunk of her car and drove them around the Texas Triangle,” Winstanley says. From there, trunkloads of books grew into a catalog of more than 300 products in 48 states, nine countries and even on cruise ships.
For Winstanley, it all reinforced a lesson he had already learned as a restaurateur: Food brings people in, but feeling brings them back. The El Arroyo sign just happened to be the loudest, funniest way to share that feeling with the world.
Related: He Was Tens of Thousands in Debt When He Opened His Business. Now, He Has 27 Locations.
Hospitality meets technology
For Winstanley, restaurants came first. He was bartending by 18, running a 24-hour punk rock diner in Austin called Starseeds Cafe, which he later sold in 2018, and eventually bought Cain & Abel’s, a campus bar he still owns.
Over the years, he’s been part of more than a dozen restaurants, from startups to high-volume institutions, and even restructurings of struggling groups.
Those experiences taught him persistence, but also clarity. As he admits, “the biggest one by a long shot is hiring the wrong leader to run our restaurant group, and then giving them way too much control, way too quick. It was a disaster.”
That perspective shaped his next chapter as co-founder and CEO of Axial Shift, a software platform designed for restaurants. Running restaurants showed him how broken the tools were. “I don’t want the manager in the office,” he says. “I want the manager on the floor, learning guest names, helping new employees, sharing information. They can’t do that if they’re stuck behind a computer.”
Axial Shift was built to fix that. “Restaurant tech has been treated like it has to be painful,” Winstanley explains. “Long contracts, clunky systems, managers pulled off the floor. It shouldn’t be that way.” His vision is closer to Shopify: modular, flexible, easy to test and replace. “In 2025, things are moving so fast that you need to have the ability to get better every single day.”
The goal is simple: Give operators insight without pulling them away from hospitality. It resonates because Winstanley is still an operator himself. He knows sales, labor, purchases and culture are the levers managers actually control.
That’s why his company feels different. “I’ve never had a problem staying curious,” he says. “My problem is that I learn things the hard way. But sheer persistence outweighs smarts any day of the week.”
For Winstanley, it’s not about choosing between operator and tech founder. It’s about using one role to make the other better.
Related: He Left His Cubicle to Start a Business With ‘No Plan B.’ Now He Has 10 Restaurants.
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Related: He Turned Failure Into a Massive Food Truck and Restaurant Operation. Here’s How.
Key Takeaways
- What started as a fading marquee turned into a million-follower media platform, publishing company and hundreds of retail products.
- By pulling off a statewide April Fool’s prank with Yeti and the governor of Texas, Ellis Winstanley proved that bold storytelling can lead to authentic collaborations.
When the governor of Texas deploys state troopers to help with your April Fool’s prank, you know your restaurant sign is bigger than a roadside gimmick.
That actually happened with El Arroyo, the Austin, Texas, Tex-Mex spot co-owned by Ellis Winstanley. The marquee was “stolen” in the middle of the night, sparks flying on fake security footage as news crews scrambled to cover it.
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