The Science Behind Location, Location, Location with Max Sheets

Zack: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Give an Ovation, the Restaurant Guest Experience podcast, where I talk to industry experts to get their strategies and tactics you can use to create a five-star guest experience. This podcast is sponsored by Ovation, a two-question guest feedback platform that gives restaurants all the answers without annoying their guests with all the questions. Learn more at ovationupcom.

Zack: 0:23

And today we have a good friend and just icon in the industry, max Sheetz, the Foundering CEO of ChickenMax, and I wanted to have him on, not just because he's an awesome guy with good hair and we have a lot of fun together at trade shows, but because this guy knows growth and especially when it comes to real estate and where to pick how to grow. He's done his VP of real estate at Freddy's Smashburger Ted's Montana Red Mountain Management before that. I mean he's just got decades of experience with real estate and growth and thought that he would be able to provide some really great insights, because we've had so many good conversations over the last year or two, max, and excited to bring you on and talk about the guest experience and how growth affects that, so welcome.

Max: 1:07

Well, thank you, happy New Year everybody, and great to see you, zach, and it's been fun and I've been looking forward to this, so, yeah, let's jump right in.

Zack: 1:16

Likewise Okay, so tell me about, as you've grown, these brands. What has been some of the most important things to remember as you're growing, as you're picking out locations. What has your thinking about expansion plans?

Max: 1:29

Yeah, it's a huge investment so we have to be careful. And it's changed a lot over my many years in the industry. It's changed a lot since 1992 in terms of all of the data that's now available, and it used to be pretty simple. You got one, three, five mile demos and you looked at traffic count, you look at retail generation and you still look at all those things. But now you've got ways to plug things in and build more progressive models using AI now and other things. So the platform of data and interpreting it has really, really changed and is changing fast right now.

Max: 2:10

But ultimately it comes back to having feet on the ground. You can use Google Earth all you want, but ultimately you've got to go and you've got to look at the site. You've got to be around it and you can read about traffic count, you can read psychographics, demographics, but personally I want to see who's in the cars and I want to see how fast the cars are going and I want to see where people live. I want to understand drive times so that I can better understand trade areas. I follow who I think do a great job in real estate in terms of traffic generators and people who come to our brands and then it's a matter of okay, what does this retail generator do compared to that? And then you throw all that together into the mix and you've still got to look at the other things that are different in every area.

Max: 3:01

Years ago there was a site in Aurora, colorado, and I did it with George Bakaro for TEDS. We had a company come in and do site evaluations for us and they'd look at us and said why? First they said who picked that site? You know, I kind of sheepishly, kind of went me. They go, why in the world would you ever go there? And I walked them through it. I said well, it's a rapidly growing area, it's the right consumer base. Because we had done a lot of studies to understand what was driving traffic at TEDS, which is a bit different than most brands because of the bison aspect. And then what they never saw, what they couldn't pick out from a remote area, in other words, just looking at numbers was the fact that we were surrounded by hotels and all these hotels filled up Monday to Friday with training and they were all on expense accounts.

Max: 4:00

And TEDS is, I would say, fine, casual. It's a step below fine dining, but it's a step above casual dining. And all of a sudden, this became, you know, one of our very best units because we took the time to go look and understand the market. So you still have to do your homework. There are just amazing resources out there today that we have to embrace and use them, and that way it reduces our beta. Right, that's the key is let's not make mistakes, because they're expensive mistakes.

Zack: 4:29

Yeah, it's like dating and marriage. Right, you can make expensive mistakes there, and sure, there's dating apps and everything, but at the end of the day you gotta sit down and you gotta have some frozen yogurt with someone, you gotta have some hot cocoa with them and get to know them. That's always good to go on a few dates before you get married. So I think that's great in terms of being there on the ground leveraging technology, and there's some great companies out there that really help out with that, and one of my good friends, Taj. He's got a great company, Leasecake, and they do some amazing things there. But it's not a matter of let's put it this way, Tony Stark still needs to go there. It's not just the suit, Tony.

Max: 5:06

Stark is the superhero.

Zack: 5:08

So I think that's a great reminder there, max, now, with this in mind, because you're not just someone who cares about real estate, you're someone who cares about the guest experience, and so what do you think is the most important aspect of guest experience nowadays?

Max: 5:21

Not even nowadays, but the most important aspect is always your people and training.

Max: 5:26

Well, it's all about selecting, hiring, training your people, because we get all of our results by and through our people period. End of conversation. You can have the best concept in the world, but if you don't have the right people executing from the back of the house to the front of the house, it doesn't work. It always boils down to people. You can have the best technology in the world, we still want to have people. I personally think that the consumer still wants someone there to greet them, serve them, thank them and create that experience of hospitality and with that experience of hospitality then they will come back.

Zack: 6:05

Yeah, amen. And I think hospitality also has changed over the years. Hospitality back in the day, like when I worked at Friendly's hospitality, was the manager going up to the table and just saying how is everything Now? Hospitality that still exists, that one-to-one engagement, but it's just expanded and expectations have expanded. And, as 60%, 70% of some businesses aren't even done in the restaurant, we have customers who are doing millions a year and they've got like three tables in the restaurant per location. So it's like the core has remained the same, but how it's accomplished has changed.

Max: 6:44

Yeah, and it all comes back to not all, but a lot of it just comes back to progress.

Zack: 6:50

Yes, and marketing.

Max: 6:52

I mean, look, I've got a degree in marketing and I hate to admit it in 1983. Let me tell you something I am not relevant with that degree today, and the same goes with hospitality. So we still need to treat people kindly, with respect, being polite. The guest wants to be engaged. Marketing today, hospitality today, is about guest engagement. That wasn't part of my curriculum when I went to college and that is how we have progressed. You either get left behind or you embrace change. I decided years ago that I was going to embrace whatever changes came. I do that. It's a matter of engagement. Your company makes it even faster. That's the other change in hospitality today is people really are looking for speed.

Max: 7:46

We live in this instant society. I grew up in what was called the ATM age. Nobody uses an ATM hardly anymore. We Venmo, we do things and it's instant. The guest likes that.

Max: 7:58

Your app. I say this not just to pump your app, but we've seen just incredible improvement as we've gotten better using your app and understanding the functionality of it. We've barely touched the surface, but by that fast engagement to guest, you're fresh in their mind and all of a sudden they go wow, they care. They got back to me on this. If it's a great review, we said thank you. If it was less than stellar, we addressed it. We asked them to come back and we said, hey, let's make this right, Help us get better. That kind of engagement has never existed before. And those are the things as an industry you either engage or you get left behind. And that's what hospitality has become A lot of engagement, guest engagement when they're not sitting in the booth, when they're not in the drive-through but what do we all do? What drives our lives today are our phones, and that's where we are, and that has become a new platform for hospitality.

Zack: 9:02

Yeah, thank you for that. First of all, and it's amazing because the one thing that we found around who chooses Ovation versus who chooses some other long-form survey it's typically around people who care about the guest experience. If you care about the guest experience, you want them to have a good experience in giving you their feedback, and if you just want one person every blue moon to take a 50-question survey, then sure that's not Ovation, right.

Max: 9:27

Yeah, and look, that's not the society we live in today. That's just not it. We live in instant. People want to know now, and I'm good with that. I don't even know all the new generations out there X, z, y.

Zack: 9:40

Alpha's the new one. Yeah.

Max: 9:42

Okay. So we've got all these generational changes and I think that people my age I think sometimes we can not me particularly, but I get kind of tired of hearing the crankiness of it oh, you know, they want this, they want that. I don't agree with any of that. I don't think that those generations want anything differently than what I wanted at their age. I think they expect it to happen faster. That's not their fault, that's the environment they grew up in. That's what they're used to. They're used to speed. I embrace that and what we have to do is get better at helping them succeed in that. We have to use those tools that. It's about understanding that that engagement creates hospitality in the people's minds, Cause all of a sudden we're seen as the people and the brand that cares. We've done a lot of that.

Max: 10:37

I had this theory in December. I had this idea that the American consumer you know we're going into an election year. That's always rough waters and there's always uncertainty. There's a lot of financial uncertainty out here in the world today. We've been through the pandemic, which we didn't shy away from. We stepped up during the pandemic. Our philosophy was we're not closing, we're not furloughing, we are going to lean into this, that we're going to take care of our people and it's our people that take care of our business, because they take care of our guests. In this time of uncertainty, we aren't backing down. We're going to figure out ways to help our people, and we did. And we never closed, we never missed a shift, we never furloughed an employee, and I'm very proud of that.

Zack: 11:26

And so now we come out of that.

Max: 11:27

Everybody came out of COVID going, huh, I want out, and we saw this huge surge right and people had money in their pockets. They'd been trapped and I mean everybody in the industry. We got to enjoy that as people were going back out. Well, that's kind of tipped over now and slowed down. Guest counts show that industry-wide other than about the last 30 days. But I had this philosophy that in December that hey, people are sick and tired. I think they had some understanding for a while of high prices. They had money in their pockets, they understood COVID, they understood supply chain and we got a pass. But I think a lot of brands took advantage of that and continue to.

Max: 12:12

I don't mind naming names, just the little guy on the block, really little guy. But I think people get tired of going to McDonald's and going give me a double quarter pounder with cheese, regular and iced tea and you get the bill and it's 15 bucks. That's not the McDonald's I grew up with. That's not value. And I happen to believe that if we don't take care of our guests, they vote with their pocketbooks and they're gonna go somewhere else and in this day and age they're not going there later, they're leaving. Now. They're doing it through third party delivery, they're doing it through the drive-thru, they're doing it online. They've got a zillion ways to choose who they want to dine with.

Max: 12:52

In December I said look, I think the American consumer is worn out. They're tired of paying these high prices. They're tired of taking their family to McDonald's and spending $85,. I had friends calling me. So I said look, we're gonna do Bogo gift cards and we're gonna do them for three Tuesdays leading up to Christmas. We've done it in years past. It's one of the best values in the industry, right? I mean, you come in and give me 50 bucks and we give you $100 worth of gift cards, and they're great stocking stuffers. So I said you know, if my hunch is correct, we're gonna find out real quick. And on the first Tuesday in December, we equaled all of a year ago's December sales in one day.

Zack: 13:36

No way.

Max: 13:38

Again, we have to engage our guests. We have to engage them and appreciate what they're living through, and if we do that, then they reward us. The next step of that was okay, we're going to take our family meals Because people are feeding their families, right, like I said, I had some friends calling me going. Hey, I went to McDonald's wherever, and you can't believe what I've spent to feed four kids or four people. And so we took our family meal, which is 12 tenders, two family sides and bread or biscuit or bread or corn bread or your choice, and it feeds the family of four and it's normally 35 bucks On Sundays we discounted it to $30. And I raised my hand and said listen, I understand where we are, I understand the market conditions in our raw products. Let's get out in front of this thing and we're gonna discount these tender family meals to $25 seven days a week through the end of January, and I mean quadrupled in sales.

Zack: 14:42

Shoot man. That's almost worth the flight to Wichita just to go twice of it.

Max: 14:47

It's back to you. Talk about guest engagement. We have to engage our guests. We have to take care of our guests. We have to hear them. We're not a big public company here. I don't have millions of dollars of advertising budget, so I've got to be able, thinking ahead, value engineering in the back of the house and purchasing. You put dollars in the bank and not percentages, and we need to take care and if we do that, we are seeing that people appreciate it and reward us and our customer counts. Do this, our loyalty program does this and we see success. Along with that, I will shout out to our marketing of Peter Nolan and Caitlin Wettstone and Lindsey Mayhew, who have just these two, caitlin and Lindsey. It's a great story.

Max: 15:32

And Lindsey came to work for us. She was a fifth grade school teacher and dissatisfied, and I had a great restaurant background and I said Lindsey, why don't you come in and just take over training and write these manuals and start teaching. Just start teaching with what you're really good at our people and let's take care of them? She wrote this incredible pathway to promotion. She teaches classes, she's in the restaurants and so I said this is working great. She started to do a little marketing. She'd post stuff on YouTube and all of a sudden, this engagement is starting to happen.

Max: 16:09

So I said, lindsey, I really need someone who's young and energetic, has a contemporary degree in marketing instead of an old degree in marketing. And do you know anybody? She calls me back in about 15 minutes and she goes. You know, as a matter of fact, I got just the right person. She's got a degree in marketing, she can work remotely and she's my age, in fact, max, she's seven minutes older than me. She's my twin sister, caitlin. Oh, no way. So we're having a lot of fun with the twins. And to top it off, I think you met Kathy Carrier, who is our head of catering and who is kind of a legendary icon in the Wichita market through radio. That's their mom. Kathy's their mom.

Zack: 16:58

Oh, that is cool.

Max: 16:59

It's just a really feel-good story of understanding that I don't know, and if you don't know, you don't know. You surround yourself with people that are better than you, and a rising tide lifts all ships.

Zack: 17:11

Amen, I love that. So, max, wrapping up here, who's someone in the restaurant industry that deserves an ovation, who's someone we should be following.

Max: 17:18

George MacCaro, absolutely George MacCaro. He deserves an ovation. He's the founder of Longhorn Steakhouse. He's legendary in the industry. I'm gonna shout out right now and say listen, everybody on here that hears this needs to advocate for George getting a gold chain award. He deserves it. He is just an incredible human being putting people first. He is a big proponent of the Giving Kitchen, which is great for our industry and our workers in our industry. He's the founder of Longhorn Steakhouse. Ted's Montana Grill has canoe and aria if you ever get to Atlanta. It's just an icon in the industry and, I am proud to say, a dear friend and mentor to me. We need to give an ovation out to George MacCaro.

Zack: 18:03

Amen. He's done so much. He's just incredible guy, very fun, very talented. So, yeah, love that. And Max, where can people go to learn more about you? And or ChickenMax?

Max: 18:15

You know chickenmaxcom Check letter in maxcom and we're franchising and we'd love to entertain you and show you what we do and introduce you to the brand and become part of the team. We feel like we've got a long runway and a high ceiling and we've got a lot of combined years of experience and we'd like to see this thing really grow.

Zack: 18:34

And check out my Instagram if you want to see the story, a reel that I did about my experience over there at ChickenMax giving a menu sampler. Awesome, awesome food, incredible service, great brand. So, Max, for pushing my love of chicken to the Max, today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on. Give it Ovation, my friend.

Max: 18:54

Thank you have a great 2024. Always good to see you.

Zack: 18:58

Likewise Thanks for joining us today. If you like this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We're all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by Ovation, a two-question SMS based actionable guest feedback platform built for multi-unit restaurants. If you'd like to learn how we can help you measure and create a better guest experience, visit us at ovationupcom.