Restaurant Possible

Great customer service stems from an efficient system. From ensuring that everyone in your team is performing at their best to cleaning even the most overlooked places, you have to keep your systems and procedures in check.

Gregg Majewski, CEO of Mongolian Concepts, shares his philosophy when it comes to leading a team and how detail-oriented systems give your business an edge.

“Everybody's obsessed with food and everybody's obsessed with diet. My experience has been that it's really about that person's curated way of eating. One of the big pluses to Pokeworks is you can go a lot of different ways with our menu on how you want to eat. At a basic level, Poke is very healthy.

If you want to go indulgent, you can go indulgent too. But at a baseline, I think Poke is inherently healthier than maybe some other types of fast-casual foods. And it's very obvious what you're eating. There's no like, what's in that? You see the product. You come into a Pokeworks, your bowl's built in front of you.

So you see the product and you know there's no hidden nutritionals behind it that are going to bust your diet. In general, the trends for our kind of mindful consumer, we appeal very strongly to millennials and very much so to Gen Z is clean proteins, managing carbs, a lot of people are into managing carbs, and sort of these omnivorous diets and the pescatarian diet has emerged as sort of the gap between people that don't want to eat meat, but they're not ready to completely give up eating animal protein. That's where we meet a big need out there in the consumer market for those folks that they haven't given up protein, they want to eat healthy, but they want clean protein.”

 – Steve Heeley, CEO, Pokeworks

"Have you ever walked into a restaurant and everybody turns and looks at you and no one acknowledges you? And then they turn back. You feel like you walked into somebody else's living room that you weren't invited to. And it's all about how you make them feel.”

– Mijo Alanis, Owner, Beyond Juicery + Eatery

Choosing which product to offer is one thing. Choosing which product to focus on is another. For Daddy's Chicken Shack founders Pace Web and Chris Georgalas — it’s all about paying attention to that aha! moment, the moment when something strikes you and makes you realize which product to fully offer your customers. After that, bringing together the technology and the promotions will be so much easier.

“I never really thought I'd end up in the restaurant industry but I truly love it because of the people involved and because it is just such a resilient industry.

There is a lot of change going on in this industry, and there have been a lot of challenges.  I took a bite of Pace's sandwich and thought that there was a real opportunity to try something in this new restaurant paradigm. So that's where we embraced the technology and started to really think about how we could deliver a high-quality product through a multi-channel approach.

We were thinking about how to launch Daddy's Chicken Shack. Nobody had ever heard of us! It's a new brand. How are people going to find out about us? We decided to take a chance and put the technology together to try to really meet our customers where we thought they might be at the time, which would be through their smartphones.

In late 2018 we created a website that had an order button that was a first-party ordering channel for us. We had kiosks, we were on 11 apps. We had no choice but to optimize the space, optimize the menu and optimize labor with the help of this tech stack that we implemented on a budget. – Pace Webb and Chris Georgalas, CEO & President/Founder, Daddy’s Chicken Shack Holdings, LLC

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When growing a brand, it’s important to prepare all the ingredients to make the growth a continuing success. For John Dikos, president of Killer Burger, those ingredients include the capital, the plan, the team and talent. While his business has grown, KIller Burger didn’t just magically scale up—it took putting the right elements in place and adding more sunshine and water to continue to grow it.

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"You've got to have a mindset that you're going to be bringing in real partners. Those who will be spending their capital, blood, and sweat to help create the brand, continue the brand legacy, and hopefully, create opportunities for others to succeed in the business.

The organization itself has got to have a mindset that's not just EBITDA-based, but it's also franchise-based, where you're growing the brand with other people and other people's money in a partnership. As part of that mindset, you've got to have the foundation right, and you've got to have the infrastructure set up to be able to do that. That's constantly morphing for us; how better to support our franchise partners and thinking forward now as we have a larger percentage of the restaurants that will be franchised, how we will better support them.

We've done a few things that we've moved along on the infrastructure piece. Having that foundation throughout, even how do we make our IT systems more franchise-friendly or make them accessible to our franchisees to ensure they can share our IT and POS system's robust nature, is a big part of it.

Of course, operations is always front and foremost for us. The operational management partners that are out there helping us and helping our franchisees be better operators, they all come from within."

 – John Phillips, Chief Global Business Partnership Officer, The Habit Burger Grill

When it comes to leadership: are you a buffalo or a cow?

For Paul Macaluso, president and CEO of Another Broken Egg, being an effective leader means being brave enough to weather the storm and embrace change. As a 30-year veteran, he’s seen all sorts of change that could have made him walk away — from changing company structure to leadership and even going through changes brought about by the pandemic. Instead, he decided to adapt while building meaningful relationships.

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“The buffalo will be on the plains with like cows. When a storm comes in, the buffalo see the storm coming. The cows will turn away from this storm and start running, right, as most animals would. You see a storm and hail and snow, and they try to outrun it. What happens to the cows is they're not fast enough. They get tired. They end up staying in the storm longer because they're running along with the storm. They're taking more damage, and they're getting exhausted.

What's interesting about buffalos is when they see a storm coming, they run into the storm, which is super counterintuitive, right. But because they know they're going to get through the storm quicker, they're going to take it. They're willing to run into the storm to get to the other side."

– Paul Macaluso, President & CEO, Another Broken Egg Cafe

Mike Mohammed: “We really pride ourselves on authenticity. So authenticity in the food, as Randy said, it started with authentic recipes. But then an authentic vibe with the people and how we interact with our customers and with each other. For us in our culture, we really value creativity. We value progressiveness, and we value having fun.

So that's kind of at the core of our culture. And then from there, obviously, we have pillars that drive us. For us, it's unparalleled flavor, elevated vibe and an irresistible edge. And when we're talking about the irresistible edge, it's just fun, it's playful. But we want to create a different vibe when you walk in with the music, with the art, with the entire decor.

So it's very authentic to who we are. We're always looking at what we're doing.

Randy Wyner: To me, it's just having fun. It's doing it the way you want to do it. Like when you go into our restaurant, you make it how you want it, and that was a big thing. I'm a picky eater, and I want to make it how I like it.”

Mike Mohammed: “Be who you are.”
Randy Wyner: “Be who you are.”

– Randy Wyner, Founder/President, Chronic Tacos Enterprises, Inc. & Mike Mohammed, CEO, Chronic Tacos Enterprises, Inc.

"You learn very early there that customers like new things, and you've got to be representing yourself to the guests or your customers constantly. The importance of new flavors, the importance of new items, it's vital to people. I stopped going to some of my favorite restaurants in the world because the menu hadn't changed in two or three years. You're looking at the same menu over time, and it just gets stale.

From our standpoint, not just from a culinary perspective, but from a drink standpoint and an environmental standpoint, we always like to be and are trying to find new ways to represent ourselves to the guests, as our guests change and the things around them change.

We think it's critical and essential to what we do."

– Tom Fricke, CEO, Bar Louie