“Man, everyone knows what a cheesesteak is. Most people will say, ‘Yeah, I had one at a mall, and it sucked.’”

So says Texadelphia franchise owner and neighborhood resident Tom Landis about one of the secrets of his success in bringing the Austin chain restaurant to Dallas. Of course, he did add one important caveat: “But if you get the rolls from S. 55th Street in Philadelphia, Amoroso’s rolls, that’s like Mrs. Baird’s times 10. Man, that’s it.”

The 5-foot-6-inch, blonde-haired power player is a bundle of nervous energy and encyclopedic in his knowledge of business and social trends, interspersing seemingly unrelated statistics into the conversation every chance he gets.

Before he even sits down at the Texadelphia booth in the Old Town shopping center – one of two owned by Nodak Restaurant Group, of which he is the president and CEO – he’s on a tear about catering for pharmaceutical reps.

“Man, in Dallas, Texas, there’s pharmaceutical firms that have $1 million a year budgeted for buying doctors’ offices lunches…I’d argue that the most exciting place to be in the restaurant industry at lunch time is at a hospital.”

But the more you sit and talk to this overachieving 37-year-old, the more it seems the most exciting place to be is inside his head. After catering, he talks about the exploding population of the Hispanic community (“Hispanic buying power is going to expand 50 percent in the next five years.”); literacy among DISD parents (“Sixty-six percent of DISD parents have English language deficiencies.); then moves on to the sad state of the restaurant industry (“[It] has an average turnover rate of 300 percent.”)

Finally, he pulls it all together, and it becomes obvious that there is a unifying thread. In addition to opening and running new restaurants, including three Pizza Patron locations, he has been working with the Bill Priest Institute on an ESL program for restaurant workers. He provides laptops to his employees so that they can learn English through distance-learning classes during their down time at work. His efforts earned him the Center For NonProfit Management’s “Social Entrepreneur Award” in 2004, and in 2002 he became the first non-Latino to receive the League of United Latin American Citizen’s “Businessman of the Year Award.”

For Landis, it’s just good business and part of his common-sense approach to life.

“It doesn’t seem like a lot of people think long term. I’ve had guys working with me eight, nine, 10 years. The first guy I ever hired is still with me.”

Landis’ road to successful businessman started in Bethesda, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C. He says he began thinking about coming to Texas after buying a pair of cowboy boots to serve as his formal footwear. His friends joked that he should go to college in Texas. Landis loved the idea, but couldn’t get accepted at the University of Texas.

“And then I really wanted to go there,” he says.

Through some persistence and a little help from his congressman, he eventually got in. But if college was “camp for grown ups,” as he describes it, reality set in soon after graduation.

He graduated with a degree in journalism on Dec. 12, 1992. Four days later, he was laying on a hospital bed with two newly installed metal rods in his back and a large chunk carved out of his hip, the end result of years living with scoliosis. Oddly enough, he says that’s where a lot of his optimism and drive to succeed emanates.

“I was in ridiculous pain. I was going through rehab and feeling sorry for myself. And then I looked at the guy next to me, and he’ll never walk again. Never. And I stood up, and it hurt to walk, but I started that process.”

And finally, with his last statement, Landis’ stream of consciousness finally distills into the words of someone who has been driven to success down a hard road.

“Man, you aren’t guaranteed a tomorrow.”