¶ Introduction,
so your restaurant is doing really, really well. And as you look around, you think to yourself, well, how can I grow my business? Do I open up another location? Should you, how do you actually scale and remain successful in this post covid environment? Which as we all know is not necessarily very stable. One of the ways. That we've discovered that that happens is by innovating.
To find out, we've invited the president of Wow Bao restaurants Geoff Alexander to join Jim and I to uncover some ideas that you might be able to implement right away, or at least to start to investigate, to expand your business by embracing an innovation. And Jim, I know this is kind of weird because to some innovation's a dirty word. I mean, after all, there is tradition to consider, right?
I mean, some people just have their mindset on a particular way of doing things, and sometimes they can be resistant to maybe embracing restaurant chains or co-packing. You know, now all of a sudden your control is gone. So what, what jumps to mind for you?
¶ Slow Adoption of New Ideas,
Well, I'm, I'm really interested to hear what, what Jeff has to say 'cause he's the expert. But a conversation that I've been involved in a few times is that, that our industry is full of some of the most innovative and resilient people you can never meet. But as an industry, I think sometimes we're a little bit slow to adopt new ideas and change and, you know, step outside the box. So I think Jeff's gonna have some good stuff for us to talk about.
Yeah. That's why I'm so excited about this conversation. My name is Adam Lamb and I'm. The Principle of Chef Life Coaching and I'm here with my co-host Jim Taylor of Benchmark Sixty. And every week we're dedicated to bringing you solutions to the hospitality industry's most persistent challenges.
In this episode, we're gonna discuss real world examples of what's working in the hospitality industry and give you some actionable ideas, tell restaurant owners and managers and not only improve their retention rates, but also grow their brand right after these messages. Welcome to Turning the Table, the Most Progressive Weekly podcast for today's food and beverage industry, featuring staff centric operating solutions for restaurants in the hashtag new hospitality culture.
Join Jim Taylor of Benchmark 60 and Adam Lamb as they turn the tables on the prevailing operating assumptions of running a restaurant in favor of innovative solutions to our industry's most persistent challenges. Thanks for joining us and now onto the show. This episode is made possible by e vocalize. E vocalize makes complex local digital marketing push button easy for anyone.
Empower your franchises with programs that automatically optimize performance and program spending across Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. All from one, easy to use collaborative marketing platform. To find out more, go to Turning the table podcast.com/e vocalize. As always, we ask that you share the show with someone you care about who can find this information useful. Please leave a review on apple Podcasts or iTunes. And if you're on Spotify give us a star rating.
Links to the shows and other things discussed. Always can be found in the comments, in the show notes, and we'd like to all welcome Jeff Alexander, president and c e o Wao Managing Partner. Let us entertain you out of Chicago Spin instructor.
¶ Background of Lettuce Entertain You and Wow Bao,
And Top 25 Casual Executive in 2022. 2023. One of the most influential CEOs in the country as rated by Nation's Restaurant News. Welcome, Jeff. Jeff. Thanks
guys. Thanks for
having me. Great to have you. I have to ask this question right out to Kate. Are you still a spin instructor?
Don't I look like a spinning record? You do when you see a spin? Yes. I've been teaching a one day a week minimum for the last seven or eight years. Which brand do
you work with?
It's a club here in Chicago called F F C Fitness Formula Clubs. They have eight locations and I've, I have one that I really teach out of, but I move around between them. I do you know, the high intensity workouts, you know, I don't do the, the dancing and the pushups and all that, but you know, it's climbs and straightaways and so on. But look, before we get started, 'cause I'm very excited for this conversation. We gotta, we gotta set the table here the right way. Right. Got it.
I appreciate you calling me an expert and I'll do my best, but. You know, I, I, that's a big thing to live up to. And the second thing is to the audience, you should only leave a good rating and a star. Don't leave any other kind of rating or star because my reputation here that is on the line now. Okay. Well we thank you for that support, sir. I'll do my best not to disappoint.
Now, Geoff Lettuce Entertain You and Wow Bao primarily started in Chicago and for those who are somehow living under a rock under the last 30 years, can you paint us a picture of not only Lettuce Entertain You, but your involvement. And where Wow Boa started and where it's at right now. Sure.
So, lettuce Entertain You is a privately held restaurant group based in Chicago, founded in 1971 by Richard Melman. Over the last 52 years, lettuce has created over 250 different concepts. I believe right now we have about 62 concepts in play. About 130 restaurants, I believe were in Chicago Florida, Texas. Vegas, DC and Minnesota. We've partnered with iconic brands like Joe Stone Crab Outta Miami, where we run their Vegas, Chicago, and, and DC outposts.
We partnered with John George Vongo Richton at a New York City to run their Chicago Vong location. I was part of that endeavor and so there's just been a number of different opportunities and I've been with lettuce since May of 93, just celebrated 30 years with them during my tenure. Thank you very much. I know I look 12, so I appreciate you're in shock by 30 years.
We I've worked on a number of different brands from high-end, fine dining, seafood, restaurants to quick serve, fast casual restaurants like we v Wow V started in 2003. It actually started in 1999 as a an idea of an appetizer for one of our other restaurant brands called Big Bowl, which I was involved at the time. And in the tasting that we presented to Rich, he paused in the tasting and said, you know, we could do a whole.
Restaurant just selling these Bao Bao is a soft sweet dough with meat and vegetables inside just by steam. You don't need any H V A C to run it. And in 2003 we had an opportunity to open 384 square feet inside Chicago Iconic water tower place. That was the Golden goose, which is celebrating 20 years in this coming August.
And over those 20 years, I took it over in oh nine, six years into it, and we've grown the, the concept from just brick and mortar to being in college campuses, sports stadiums, airports, music festivals, virtual restaurants, grocery stores, hot food, vending machines, web three. So a lot of different ways we've grown the brand.
That's very, very, very, very impressive.
¶ Growing the Brand with Limited Resources,
And to kind of reference our opening question, you know, for most restaurant operators, I think when they. Talk about expanding their brand, building their business, ex becoming more successful. They might think that their only play is to open another brick and mortar location. And came across Kyle and Sarah's video of you, I think at the National Restaurant Association where you're bragging, kind of showing off all the different stuff.
Which we have a link in the show notes 'cause it's a fascinating quick two minute video. But, There are other ways in which to grow the brand is there not, and, and you had a couple ideas prior to the show about, well, wait a second, let's, let's back up here and make sure that we've got some foundational information set first. So yeah,
I thank you. And I'll explain that. And I think the biggest takeaway that I'll leave the listeners with and, you know, we'll revisit it throughout the, the show is it's not one person. I am honored and thrilled to be the face of the brand, to be here and talking with you and sharing the story. But the success that Wow Bow has is not because of what I've done. It is because of what the team has put together and as the leader of that brand, you have two jobs.
You have to get the right people and put 'em in the right place. And then you have to inspire them, educated them, motivate them, and let them do their jobs. My job is, Hey, I wanna go down this road. Open the door, let them go, and then they might take you off road. But you have to, you have to keep the the focus on course, but let it, let it happen. So how did wow be grow and do all these different things here? Here is the secret to our success as we have, we have grown up with no money.
And when you have no money, that's when you find the best ideas and that's where you are willing to try basically anything. In order to achieve success. And what do I mean by if we didn't have money? The way Lettuce entertain You works as a privately held restaurant group. There's only so much money every year, and we build very large restaurants that do extremely high volume. Mm-hmm. That's our, that's what we're good at. That's what we understand.
So when I took, the brand started in oh three with one store, it opened two more locations in 2007. So for four years we ran one location. Mm-hmm. 3 84 square feet. When I took an over in oh nine, we opened up our fourth location in 2011 and our fifth location 2014. So in the course of 11 years, we got five locations.
And when you don't have access to capital, when you don't have means to grow a team open more stores, it becomes the responsibility of that leader to find ways to evolve and innovate. And that's what we've done a lot of, for instance, In 2010,
¶ Innovating to Expand,
we had self-ordering kiosks. Now people are sort of like big deal. But in 2010 you had self-ordering kiosks in airports, movie theaters and banks. Nobody was using them in Russia. Yeah, not for free. In 2010, we had mobile ordering on your desktop computer. And I know the generation is watching. This is like big deal. We all have desktop ordering. Nobody had it in 2010. No, we, we had an app in 2010 when we had an app in 2010.
There were 300,000 apps in the app store, so we always embraced technology. We got heavily involved in social media in 2009 to get the brand name out there. We had a food truck driving around the city, selling food wherever we could and doing music festivals and giveaways and whatever we could to get the food into people's hands. It was all about expanding the brand name. We became the first brand in Lettuce, entertain his history to partner with an airport.
We became the first brand in Lettuce Entertain History to open up on a college campus. We started partnering with sports stadiums. All of these were licensed deals where we were just selling product out there and training people how to serve our food, but everyone else was running it. So it was a way for us to expand who we were and what we were doing at really asset light because we had no access to capital. So
did you focus predominantly in. In terms of getting the brand going, was the focus mainly on just Chicago in general, or did you go to any other cities? Because we see restaurant groups all the time that go, Hey, I've got one really good concept in this city. I'm gonna open another one. You know, 200 miles away kind of thing in the next town.
Yeah. You know, it was funny because I grew up, I grew up in New York City, move to Chicago after college, and for college I went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. So that's an hour and a half, two hours north of Chicago. Mm-hmm. When I got involved with Wild V, all I thought was we need to have one of these in the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I knew it would do great 'cause I went to school there. Yeah. I chased the c e o of of lettuce for three years.
I found three locations in Madison. Let's do it. Let's do it. He finally looked at me, he said, this is a pipe dream for you. You're gonna go open one store in Madison, Wisconsin. What are you gonna do when the manager calls in sick? Right. Are you gonna get in your car and drive up there? Because a small store like that isn't gonna have four managers. You're not gonna have all these salary people 'cause you can't afford it.
And that sort of opened my ideas, like, okay, I have to really, you have to either carpet bomb the city with a small concept. That's expensive. Mm-hmm. Or you have to find other people to run it for you. And that's when we started doing these license deals with the sports stadiums, the college campuses and the airports. So our focus, my focus for the brand was teaching people what bow is and getting the food into people's hands so that they would enjoy it.
I remember in 2015, so we have a co-packer that makes our product. Which was good that we had it back in 2015 for two reasons. One, the volume where we are now, we would never be able to make it ourselves, of course. And two, we had supply chain built out, and when the pandemic came, we had no disruption whatsoever. But I would take our product and I would knock on my local grocery store, literally a block from our house, say we sell the product in the grocery store.
Then I went out to the suburbs. My wife grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and I went to her local grocery store where she grew up. It was like, My mother-in-law would like, would, would if I could put this on the shelf here so all of her friends see it. Right. And by doing that, eventually me knocking on grocery stores got us to the point where a distributor noticed us, called us up, started carrying our product and getting us some more grocery stores.
And today, a, a year ago today, we were 350 grocery stores. Today, at this moment, we're in about 2000. And in about eight weeks we're gonna be in 5,000 grocery stores. And that's, it's all just by hitting that pavement and working hard to get to an end result.
I think it's really, you know, really interesting and I've gotta give you some credit here, Jeff, like you've received some incredible accolades as a leader in the industry, right? I mean, most influential and some of that kind of stuff, right? And here you are talking about knocking on doors at a grocery store to say, will you sell my product? I think that's it's very cool to hear, actually.
¶ The Journey to Success,
I think that's, you know, I gotta get a high five you for that. I
appreciate that. But no one wakes up one day and they're the most influential in anything, right? True. It's true. No, the, the blood, sweat and tears that we all put into doing anything. Look, you didn't wake up one day and become a, a podcast person and doing this and having all of your listeners, right? Mm-hmm. There's so much of your story. That your listeners don't know, we could probably do a whole show on each of you how you got to be and who you are. Mm-hmm. To do this.
We all have that story and I think that that story is what resonates with the listener. And when you always said, Hey, I literally, me Jeff Alexander, I remember. We used to go to you know, if a new nightclub opened up in Chicago Right. Or a new store opened up down the block, like a clothing store. Mm-hmm. Think about it. If a Lululemon, which I use that only 'cause I think we all know what Lululemon is. Or Apple. Yeah. It's from
Vancouver. Right.
And it's Christmas time and you know, they're gonna be swamped. It's not very hard for you to make food for 40 people and walk it over there and feed the staff because you know, they're not getting a break during lunchtime to eat. Mm-hmm. They're so busy. Now what you did is those 40 people will probably eat at your restaurant tomorrow. And when the shopper's like, where should I eat in the neighborhood? They're like, oh, there's a great restaurant nearby.
No, nobody has the bandwidth for the incredible idea. Right? The moonshot takes a freaking village to achieve. Yeah. It's the little tiny things that we could all do every single day.
¶ Small Actions Lead to Growth,
That, that's what grows your
business. Amazing. It reminds me of you know, I published a couple books almost always self-publishing, but the myth was, you know, you, you need to go to a big publisher in order to get a book deal. And for a long time before the advent of a lot of stuff in technology, that was the way it was going. Now, you know some authors prefer self-publishing. And for a publisher, it makes sense to find somebody who's already self-published because there's already built in audience, right?
Yep. They've already, the proof of concept already exists, and it seems to me that, you know, you and the others from this team as they're going around and bootstrapping and looking for opportunities to expand brand awareness is basically building community one bite at a time.
That is, that is right there on the nose, right? That is what it is. It is. You know, there's a, there's a story that in Let Entertain You, that the very first year that Wow Bow opened in 2003, nobody had ever heard of it, right? Had heard of Bow. Mm-hmm. And supposedly Richard Melman gave away 50,000 bow year one. Don't know if it's true or false, but fast forward to 2011. Lollapalooza is a music festival here in Chicago. It's a hundred thousand people a day, three day event in Grand Park.
It's now up to four days. We did it. We, we had a booth. We've had a booth every year since, but that first year we did incredible business and everyone's like, what is this? How do you eat this? I don't know what this is here. Two, everyone said, I'm so glad you're back. You were my favorite thing at the festival the year before. And we're in the, we're the, the restaurant business is the food business and the hospitality business.
Okay. The food business means you gotta get your food to people because if they eat it, they'll buy it. If you're in the iPhone business, you get someone to use the iPhone, they're gonna go buy the iPhone. We have to be proud of our food in the restaurant industry and give that food to people.
Then you have the hospitality side and the hospitality side is when you are going and finding ways to get the food into people's hands and listening to the feedback they're giving you and being open to that feedback, and that's how you evolve and innovate. We had, we had an idea. In 2017, private equity got involved to help fund the growth of Wow Bow. And in fall of 2019, we had an internal meeting about how do we wanna continue to grow the brand? What's next?
¶ Finding Opportunties in Unexpected Places,
And in that conversation it was like, well, our private equity has a network of restaurants that they work with and people they know. And Lettuce has a network of restaurants within its company and who they know. And the idea we threw out was, why don't we just sell our food? To those other restaurants for them to serve on, third party delivery out their back door. Why are we like trying to find business? We have all these partners. Of course, it was an aha moment.
Hmm. So we started building out supply chain further. We started talking to third party delivery operators. We built training materials, built marketing materials. And I started talking to restaurant CEOs in, let us Entertain You and out. Mm-hmm. And every single person said, you're nuts. Why would I ever sell your product? Why would I do this? This is crazy. I. I had one guy said to me, I'm, tell me more. I'm interested.
And we launched with one location in January of 2020, and then boom, the world shut down and you had no diner delivery only. And in the following 36 months, we've done 700 locations of between the US and Canada of people selling our food out the door. Third party delivery. Wow.
¶ Scaling and Delegating,
Now we got to a scale where we able to bring somebody on the team to own that part of our business. Mm-hmm. That means I now have, can take a one of my eyes off that business and figure out what's next. Yeah, that's, we started working with the C P G to grow that. I said in the last year we've grown from 350 to 2000, about to go to 5,000. Got it. Go into a place, brought somebody on the team. Now they're taking that part of the business and they're running that.
So now I could take, I wish I had a third eye, the second eye off that business and now it's okay. What's next for Wild V? And now I'm having conversations with hotel groups, cruise lines, entertainment facilities about serving wild bow in there. And we'll scale that up. That's what you need.
You have to keep your eye on those previous ideas and those other ways of innovation, and you have to have great people that you'll trust that can maintain it, and you educate them and learn from their ideas about how to keep evolving those opportunities. Can
we, all of this stuff that you're talking about, I think is. Relevant, whether you're a rapid growth company, whether you're a one-off, like it's, it's an more, it sounds like more of obviously an attitude than anything else, but can we go back to this? We have no money spot that you were talking
about. I hate those days.
Well, and the only reason to, sorry to bring you some, hopefully there's no P T S D there or anything. There are flashbacks, but. The thing that's sticking with me about that you said that is, that that's where what 90, 95% of the restaurant industry is at. We don't have money to go and, you know, hire a chief innovation officer or, you know, spend a bunch of money on r d and all this kind of stuff.
So I think there's really powerful message that you've been talking about in terms of things like this attitude around, we have no money.
¶ Thriving with Limited Resources,
Let's think about ways that we could be creative and grow
the business well, and let's not for, let's not forget for a moment that it wasn't necessarily pandemic. But in 2007 with the housing crash, the first thing that happened was the credit market seized up. And for people who were growth-minded, there was no chance. As a matter of fact I was in a startup and we were gonna do these really beautiful movie theaters from coast to coast, and they came to me and said, well, Adam, you know, we can't open up another one.
So there's no point in having a corporate chef with one facility. So, you know, we're gonna have to. Let you go. So these cycles happen to come again and again and again. So even if you have money, there's probably gonna be a point where everybody needs to tighten their shoe laces. Yeah. So,
yeah, and I, I tease what I say. I don't, you know, P T S D to go back there, I still today run Wow. Bow, like we don't have any money. I think that's what sets us apart, right? It's easy to spend money. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's very easy to spend money. The thing that you have to do is you have to be strategic about where you're spending the money. And I said it earlier, we're in the food and hospitality business. The best money you can spend is put your food in people's hands.
That is the greatest thing that you can do. I remember in, I keep saying I remember, I mean, I'm getting that old here now, right? But in 2009, I was sitting at home and my wife was telling about this new thing called Twitter. Now they're calling it right and. Okay. 2009, this new thing came out called Twitter, and I had no idea what that was or how it worked. Mm-hmm. We would send out tweets and no one cared. No one responded. But I remember it was like nine o'clock at night and I'm in bed.
Sorry again. I'm an old man, but I'm square you. You're getting up.
You're getting up to do spin classes for crying all left. Right.
But I remember seeing this, this tweet was going through about this girl who's saying that she's at wow bow eating soup, making a mess. And she helped no one sees. Mm. And so I called the restaurant. We had three locations at the time. One was in a mall with no seating. I wasn't that one. One was in the business District of Chicago, which is closed breakfast and lunch only wasn't that one. So I knew where it was called the manager. I said, find this person and deliver them dessert, right?
Our chocolate B on us. Say, you know, you look great. Keep enjoying your food. And, and I kept getting refresh, right, refresh refresher. And then the tweets started coming in and I saw the immediate power mm-hmm. Of both social media and hospitality. And then we, we went all in. And when I say we, I mean there were, there were three of us I think on, on our corporate team at Wild Bow back in the day. Right. It was me. I had an operations person and I had this like all around catchall guy.
Everybody needs an all around catch catch guy. Everyone needs, you need this person who is just, yeah. Bought into your culture, bought into the brand and just, you know, could do whatever. Go through anything. Yeah. Guy that I had on my team. When we got involved with grocery, he was every Sunday night and Monday night at a grocery store doing sampling. You know, when we were going and I said we were sending food to Apple and Lululemon, he was the guy delivering it, right?
I mean, this was my guy. I'm like, you gotta go do this. Here's what, here's where we're going next and what we're doing. When we had the, we launched the food truck. So in Chicago, you're not allowed to cook food on a truck. This is back in 2010. Mm-hmm. Okay. And when I first took over, wow. We had one, we had three locations. One location made all the sauces and stuff, and we commissary to the other two. Right?
And my chef partner at the time was going on vacation and I said, well, how are we gonna get the food from point A to point B and C if you're on vacation? He goes, use your car and I'm not using my car. That's not gonna happen. So we bought a van, now we have this white panel van, right? That sat in a garage for 23 hours a day. And I said, why don't we put a hot box on it? We'll fill it with food.
Look, throw it in the hot box, drive to the University of Chicago, drive to DePaul, drive to University of Illinois, Chicago, and sell food out of the back of the van. And all of a sudden that launched another marketable because we shrink wrapped the van. And now you had a, a mobile billboard, right? You had a Twitter feed associated with it. You had food game to people's hands. And now how else can you use that van?
We could park it somewhere on the street, we could pull up to a street festival. It, it's just, you have to look at what you have available to you now and because how do you utilize it? Sorry, go
ahead. No, no. I mean, not everybody has, you know, 40 to $80,000 to drop on a fully kitted Food truck. I mean, here in
Asheville there's, well, at 80 it's like 225
grand. Yeah, I'm talking, I'm, I'm talking about second secondhand here in Asheville, it's like the capital of blended service. So very often there's facilities who are building kind of like outdoor pavilions with cattle fences around so that the dogs can come and in the back of the, in the back of the property sits, you know a food truck. And so, I find that there's a lot of ingenuity going on here in the city in sofar as like, I don't have staff to wait on the tables.
Okay, so let's do counter service and give everybody like little signs of something. But just two observations. Number one, the one I, 'cause I had to admit to Jeff that I actually tried to apply to lettuce, entertain you several times, and and got the sweet kiss off, but that's beside the point.
But the one reason why I wanted to work with them is because, Back in the day when I was working in Chicago, there was no other company that was taking chefs and making them partners either within a particular brand or a particular area. And there's nothing like you said that all around guy that, you know, would, you know, go to the wall for wow bow.
I mean that's because of the respect and the admiration that was shown to these folks who perhaps in another organization would never get that chance. And it's served. Obviously let us entertain you very, very well. And also wabo. And then the other thing that came to mind as you were talking about Lollapalooza is back in the day when Jane Byrne was mayor, she started Chicago Fest in Grant Park every year.
And I remember working on at for Farthings Tavern and Grill on Lincoln Avenue with Conrad Yoakum, who's a incredible chef. And I would hold down the kitchen and do all the prep and he would go, And set up tables and just keep pounding the food out. And what a wonderful way to get the message out that like you said, it's all hospitality and like, I want to get this in your mouth right now and I want your feedback, so I'll shut up
while you're eating it.
¶ Importance of Treating a Business Like a Business,
Yeah. And look, what's, what's very important. So any of these things you do, you, you do the food truck, you do the, you know, the, the food at the festival, you do delivery. These are businesses. And what happens a lot is it's an idea because I just wanna do something right? You're throwing crap against a wall and hope it stinks, sticks. If it doesn't stick, it stinks. So I wasn't wrong where I said that, but what what's important is it has to be treated like a business.
And I re, we Baba was the third restaurant in Chicago to partner with Uber Eats when it launched in Chicago. Like we got in very early in delivery. And I remember back in like 2000 and. 1, 19 99 in that realm when delivery was becoming something and, but it was, you would get faxes into the kitchen and you had this small fax and you had to go to the p o ss and ring it up and every single cook in the kitchen hated doing delivery. Yeah. Every manager and expediter hated doing delivery.
And if you really think about it, what was the difference of, of serving table 22 2 entrees and making two entrees for delivery? The only difference was you put in a to-go box on your line and you didn't put in a place window. If you really think about it from the cook standpoint, that was the only difference. But the attitude of the front of the house, whether it was the bartender who had to take the order, the manager had to put it in the machine.
The expediter who had to get the to-go box was so negative that the cook made it negative that they had. Right. Okay.
¶ The Importance of Hospitality in the Restaurant Industry,
For those of us who saw the benefit of carry out, And the benefit of delivery. We made it a business. We said we're gonna do it and we're gonna do it right, and we're gonna treat that customer at home, or person picking it up and taking it home as good as the person who's dining in the restaurant, because we can't fix it if there's a problem. Right.
Can't get them more so if you turn on delivery, if you're not doing delivery right now, you can't just say, I wanna make more money and I'm just gonna throw food out the door. It's gotta be a business that you care about if you're gonna turn on carry out. 'cause you don't do carry. I, and I know it sounds stupid, everyone does carry out. Everyone does delivery. But three years ago, pre pandemic, not everybody did it. No, a lot of high ends wouldn't even think about having their food leave back.
Sure. Restaurant. Right. And you can now just turn it on, but it's gotta be a business. You wanna go and knock the local grocery store to start selling your product. It has to be a business. You gotta take their phone calls, you gotta check in with them. You gotta follow up with them, right?
Everything that you're gonna do, if you want to go outside your four walls, It has to be a business because inside your four walls, if you read a new special tomorrow on your menu, you're gonna make sure everyone knows how to cook it. You're gonna make sure every employee knows how to sell it. You're gonna follow up on the, on your P mix and your p and l tomorrow, and your, you know, on the p o s, see how many you sold.
Check the quality of it, and you're gonna taste it every day with the staff like you are gonna put all in on that one dish. Mm-hmm. Because you're running a special, that same passion, enthusiasm, education, inspiration, motivation has to go into every aspect if you wanna try something new.
¶ Balancing Technology and the Human Element,
When we turned on cell phone and kiosk in 2010, I'll never forget this. We put two machines out and the, the installer's lying on the ground, right? And he's like, tinkering with the wires. And some lady walked up and started using the machine. And she was frustrated. It wasn't working right. She's like, why isn't this, it wasn't on the guy's calling it right? And I was like, okay, well we obviously made the right call by doing this, but it wasn't also, if you build it, they will come.
We had to watch how people interacted with the machine. It was the menu flowing in the right order and. You know, when you updated here, did it update there? And are we selling what we wanna sell? Is the picture right? It wasn't just like, okay, flick the switch and move on to the next project. Mm-hmm.
Well, and all of this stuff that you're talking about, it, there's a, a hospitality connection with all of it. Just take care
of the customer. Well, look, I, I say this a lot pre pandemic. We were in the hospitality business coming out of the pandemic. We're in the food business. And what I noticed is we're all getting hit with high labor and we're all getting hit with high food cost, and we're all getting hit with high rent in a high, high, high. And what we're doing is we're passing on all these costs to the consumer, right? A lot of restaurants have added up absolutely a surcharge. We've raised our prices.
Third party delivery, you know, charges the consumer. These things we need to get back to the hospitality business because our hospitality is not equating to the prices we're charging. Yeah, there used to be managers on the floor that walked around and talked to the tables and made sure everything was, right. Now we're trying to save payroll, so the managers work at the front door and then the manager needs to do a comp or go in the kitchen.
Now there's nobody at the front door and the guest is standing there. I mean, we've missed and forgotten about hospitality. Yeah, and when you mold hospitality into every being, every part of your business, That's when the magic happens, because that's what's said to you and your team and your restaurant apart differently than everybody else.
Adam, weren't you and I just talking about this a couple weeks ago about how technology is just taking on such a big, it has such a big presence in our industry now. I think there's a lot of operators that are trying to figure out exactly what the right fit is, depending on the platform. But we had, we were talking about not losing the human element and the hospitality
side of things. Yeah, I'm sorry If, if technology is an enhancement to the guest and your employee, it's the right technology. Absolutely. If it only enhances one of those two, you gotta figure out the other piece because it can't be a hindrance or. An impediment to the, to both. It has to help your employee. It has to help the guest. So Jeff,
I wanna go back to something you were talking about. You know, when you're flipping on carryout, you're flipping on to go you're
¶ Maintaining Brand Awareness and Packaging,
gonna fill the van with you know, already hot prepared food and take it down to the university or work with a co-packer. The other thing is Is brand awareness and to make sure that the brand doesn't get diluted. So that there's, there's this idea of like, okay, if you're gonna, if you're gonna choose an initiative, then you need to make sure that there's someone on there that's, that's on it and checking it all the time. So that you can pivot and focus on a, on something else.
But the other part of it is like, if there's anybody out there who's considering any of these objectives, you wanna make sure that you're branded everything, because there's nothing better than opening up a refrigerator two days later and seeing a branded to go box, whether that's a sticker. That says, wow bow, or, you know, especially designed containers to be able to carry that experience two, three more days and have them reinforced in your mind like, God, that was such a great experience.
I can't wait to go back there.
Yeah. Look, I think that's very important and we, we have a saying, we have signs in our offices and in our stores. We say everything we do is marketing. Every, everything you do is marketing. How I'm presenting myself on this interview right now, I'm marketing me, myself, my restaurant, my people, my brand.
Every, every interaction you have, every piece of paper, taste of food, the setting of the restaurant, the music level, every single piece that you touch, that you give to somebody to receive is marketing. And absolutely Kyle, I agree with you about the branding is so important when they open up that refrigerator in three days and see it. I'll be honest with you, we have two pieces of to go packaging. Mm-hmm. One is fully branded, one has zero branding on it.
And the reason that is we want the best packaging for our food. Hmm. Now, could I put a sticker on the non non-branded packaging? A hundred percent. I could. Everyone gonna make that sticker absolutely perfect. Or is a sticker gonna be crooked? It would be, you know, smushed and, I mean, sure. Yeah, I agree with you.
And that that packaging that's branded does more for the office worker who opens up the communal refrigerator and sees someone else's lunch and they see the name, the person who owns that food. In their own refrigerator, knows how good the food is and working. Sure. So I, I think everything pointing costs money. Everything's important. What we did during the pandemic was, I remember on every bag that left the restaurant, we hand wrote a note. Right? Perfect. Humans, social creatures. Right.
We commiserate around food, we celebrate with food. We talk about food, like food is part of everything we do. And during the pandemic where you could not see another person except online, we wanted you to say, we wanted to say, keep smiling. Have a nice day thinking about you. Thank you.
¶ Personal Touch during the Pandemic,
Whatever it may be a little mess put up. So if you don't have branded packaging and it's just a clear plastic container. Mm-hmm. Take that sharpie. That's in the kitchen that every one of your cooks has in their sleeve pocket And write, thank you from wow bow, even if that's amazing advice. Pizza place. Write. Thank you from wow.
Well, because you might be selling Wow. Bow the back door, like you said. Right.
Or just to help me out.
Definitely think's, think that's a perfect place to leave it. This has been incredibly informative and I've had a great time, Jim, I know that, like what are the couple things that you, you're taking away from Jim?
Well, there's a few, but I mean, your message about act like you've got no money kind of just really resonates. I mean, from thinking about when I was still in restaurant operations to what I do every day now. I mean that's still, that, that applies to every business, right? I think so. That one is a big, strong takeaway. Funny enough, the, the restaurant group that I was working with during the pandemic You know, I went from wearing a suit every day to packing takeout like a lot of people did.
And I was the one writing on the brown paper bag. Thank you for, you know, I was, I did some of that stuff. So that really brought back a, a good memory for me. And so that's another one I think just to say thank you to the customer. And just the message about hospitality, I think what you said about what you were, you know, we're in the food business now is so true, right? I mean, And just hospitality. We can't lose the human element and the thank you element of of restaurants.
So, so it's so many good takeaways. Jeff. I really appreciate you taking the time.
I appreciate you paying attention
notes down and No, it's, it's good to listen. I mean, you've got lots of really good things to say, so you know, you're welcome to join us anytime you want. We'd love to have you back again. Please
if you would, Jeff. And yeah, thanks for the reminder that hospitality equals humanity. And the minute we forget that we run the risk of probably an overdependence on stuff like technology thinking that it's gonna replace us and really. I, I strongly believe that what we do is a great excuse for folks to come around a table and be in relationship with one another.
So there's a, like a little bit of sanctity for people to actually sit down and share food, and they might not have seen each other for months or years, especially with you know, what's happened over the last three years. So I congratulate you for. Not only the growth, but also the diversification and the verticals that you guys are bringing to bear because wow, Bao is gonna be a brand that not a lot of people are gonna be able to ignore. So thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks guys.
Thanks Jeff. Thank you thanks everybody for joining us for another episode of Turning the Table, and we will see you next week. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Turning the Table with me, Adam Lamb and Jim Taylor. We're on a mission to change the food and beverage industry for the better. By focusing on staff mental health, physical and emotional wellbeing. By proactively measuring and managing staff workloads.
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