Speaker 1: 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, an operations and guest recovery platform for multi-unit restaurants that gives all the answers without annoying guests with all the questions. Learn more at OvationUpcom. And today we have an exciting one-two punch. The one is Mark Braver, who this is his first time on the podcast. He is the director of operations and partner at the 50-50 group, which I'm excited to jump into a little bit more, and he's got such an illustrious background in the hospitality industry. And then the two comes from Ken McGarry, who is back on the podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:47

You may remember him from one of our favorite podcast episodes discussing the table touch and his book, the Surprise Restaurant Manager. For those of you not listening I mean those of you listening, not watching I just held up a great book. And for those of you who do like to listen, ken just told me that this is all on Audible, so look up the Surprise Restaurant Manager on Audible. It has what I was talking about before we hit record here the best chapter on the TableTouch I've ever read, and this is coming from the guy that owns the trademark for Digital TableTouch. So anyway, ken Mark, welcome to the podcast. How are both of you Good, zach?

Speaker 2: 1:25

Thanks for having us. Good to see you, Ken. Mark, welcome to the podcast. How are both of you Good, Zach, Thanks for having us. Good to see you, Ken.

Speaker 1: 1:28

Always good to see you, ken and Mark. Great to meet you. First of all, ken, what inspired this podcast? Because I think this is an interesting. I got an interesting email from Ken saying, hey, I got an idea for a podcast and I was like yes, love it.

Speaker 3: 1:52

Would love to hear the backstory of that. Well, the elevator version of it is that I've had my own consulting firm for six years and just recently was acquired by the Mighty 5050 Group, which we'll go into in to in much more detail. But being able to have an arsenal of chefs and CFOs and marketing and analytics and everybody that does all the things that I'm not great at, has just been an absolute godsend of our ability to actually help out restaurants in totality.

Speaker 1: 2:23

So are you still consulting restaurants, but just in the umbrella of the 50-50?

Speaker 3: 2:29

That is correct. So Corgan has been acquired, which means that at this point I'm running the consulting division for 50-50.

Speaker 1: 2:38

And if someone goes to the 50-50 website, to the 50-50 website, they may get greeted with a just bevy of colors and logos and things and it's the 50-50groupcom. First, 50 is spelled out. Second, 50 is numerical. Talk to me a little bit about the 50-50 group. What is it? How do you explain it in a nutshell?

Speaker 2: 3:11

Because, you know, going to the website, I'm just thinking, man, this looks fun. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack on our site, zach, for sure, we're a hospitality group. We've been around for about 15 years and we currently own and operate about 20 concepts in Chicago and New York. We were founded in 2007 by Scott Weiner and Greg Moore they're our co-founders and leaders still and we own and operate restaurants, bars. We have a very complex group of concepts, so we do everything from fine dining to wholesale baking, to pizza shops, to party bars, rooftop bars and fancy cocktail bars. So a little bit of everything under the sun.

Speaker 3: 3:47

And cannabis. Don't forget that, yes.

Speaker 2: 3:51

Absolutely Three cannabis dispensaries as well.

Speaker 1: 3:54

Oh yeah, I like how you just forget about that, mark, okay. So we know who the redheaded stepchild is. But thinking about it, Mark, I know you can't have favorites, but I've got four kids and we all know that's not true. So who's your favorite?

Speaker 2: 4:11

Oh boy, somebody asked me this last night.

Speaker 1: 4:13

Let me put it a less offensive way. This is how I put it. When people say who's your favorite kid, I always say if I was on a boat and I had to throw one kid off, I don't know who it would be, but I know who it wouldn't be Okay. So if you had to throw one one of your restaurants off, the boat who?

Speaker 2: 4:31

wouldn't it be? You know what? I'll answer this very politically. My favorite one is the one that that I'm in, and I'm in all of them every day. So you know, I just I enjoy being around our people, our staff and our guests and guests. And so, to be political about it, my favorite restaurant is the one that I'm in that day.

Speaker 1: 4:48

There we go. Do you have a favorite dish though?

Speaker 2: 4:52

Boy I had. Last night I was at Kindling in the Willis Tower and I had the rotisserie chicken, which is absolutely amazing and I haven't had it in a while. My wife ordered it and reminded me of how delicious it is. So, yeah, I think right now the rotisserie chicken at Kindling.

Speaker 1: 5:07

OK, can we just take sorry, can we just pause the podcast? I mean not actually pause it, but 30 seconds. Can we just have a quick discussion, publicly still recorded on the podcast about rotisserie chicken? Because I got to say honestly, since I, like you know, became an adult and got a Costco membership, I have not gotten a rotisserie chicken at a restaurant because the Costco rotisserie chicken is so good. How do you make a rotisserie chicken, like you know better than Costco.

Speaker 2: 5:38

Well, you have a James Beard award winning. Chef, Jonathan Sawyer, make it.

Speaker 1: 5:42

All right. Well, I guess I guess that that may be the secret ingredient there. And, Mark, I'd love to get your thoughts on what was it that had the 50 50 group by a consulting arm? It seems I haven't heard of a restaurant group doing that. What was it that? You know? Where did the idea stem from, and was the first time that that was brought up in a meeting? Was it kind of like? You know, I have a bag of orange circus peanuts behind me, like those little marshmallow ones, and I think of the first time that somebody brought that idea to a boardroom of like, hey, let's do a marshmallow. Great, that's shaped like a peanut Wait what? And colored like an orange and tastes like a banana. And the board was like, yeah, who came up with the idea to buy a consulting arm and how was that first greeted with the leadership team?

Speaker 2: 6:34

Yeah, I mean this came about very organically. You know we. You know occasionally someone asks us to help diagnose a problem or look at a deal that they're looking at and, to be honest, you know we need consultants sometimes too, and we had reached out to Ken a couple of years back when we had some specific things that we wanted him to take a look at. Ken's been a friend for a long time and a friend of the group.

Speaker 2: 6:55

Morgan Ken's wife used to work with our group, so we've all been friendly for a long time. And, you know, after we worked with Ken and realized what he can really bring to the table, we got to talking you know, our leadership team and Ken about how we could help each other, and so we arrived at this kind of organically. You know we thought consulting is something that we could do well at and help out with. Ken comes with a bunch of years of experience doing it on his own, and you know we needed his experience and he needed our kind of depth of people, and so it was an easy match, to be honest.

Speaker 1: 7:28

That's awesome and you know I've been a big fan of Ken's for a long time. Ken, how?

Speaker 3: 7:33

did we first meet? Well, I think we first met because of looking at Ovation. That was my original conversation with you because of I utilize Ovation I still do in a concept that I own out of Oklahoma that I'm using it because that's a QSR chicken check that we're trying to do a lot of incubator work on and have an understanding of how we're going to roll that out, and that's why we put Ovation in. But I think we put Ovation in gosh, I don't know, half a dozen years ago, and that's how you and I began to connect up. And then, for those of you who don't know, zach wrote a great book about dating and so, since he bought my book, I bought his book, which is weird when you're married and you have a book about dating that shows up at the house. But then my wife ended up reading and she's like this is a really great book, and so she's actually passed it on to a friend.

Speaker 1: 8:26

So that's good. There we go. I think that that, the reread of books, the recycling of books, I am all for, because I think I get paid like $1.75 per purchase at this point. So you know, it is my ongoing dating money. So when the check comes in the mail I'm like, hey, we're going to go to a party tonight, anyway. But then I remember I've got four kids, so we end up staying home with some old Cheerios. But let's talk a little bit about the guest. And, mark, I'd love to get your thoughts on the guest experience. Obviously, you've got a lot of different concepts, really focused on a lot of different demographics and a lot of different occasions, and so, as you're looking at the restaurants that you have and then, ken, I'm going to flip this over to you from a consulting perspective what do you think is the most important aspect of guest experience?

Speaker 2: 9:18

Yeah, I think it's interesting these days. It's kind of back to the basics. It's feeling like you're in an authentic situation with the people that you're dealing with at a restaurant. Back in the day, when Ken and I were working in restaurants, on the floor all the time to me it just seemed obvious to look somebody in the eye, say hello, greet them warmly. And I think, you know, there's probably a bit of a generational shift, maybe pandemic induced a little bit, where we're back to teaching those basics of how to make somebody feel warm.

Speaker 2: 9:49

When someone walks to the host stand, you don't wait for them to talk to you, you greet them with a smile, you look at them in the eye and you ask them you know, how can we help you? And those are things that I think are somewhat lost these days. And so, to me, the most important part of the experience like if I put myself, if I'm in my own shoes, going out to a restaurant, what do I want to feel? I want to feel like someone authentically is happy that I'm there. That goes such a long way. You know there's obviously there's food and beverage, quality ambience and service and all that stuff, but you know, without somebody making me feel like they're happy that I came to see them or happy that I came to spend money at their business. You know, some of those other things just are less important, and so I think the feeling of authenticity is paramount right now.

Speaker 1: 10:40

I think that is so important, and when you look at the, you know average listeners of this podcast can probably quote this with me. But the way that I define hospitality is proving to the guest that you care. And does the guest have enough proof to say, yes, they care, knowing that the scale of proof is very off-centered, where you have to get 100 things right to prove that you care, but if one of those things flips over to the other side of the scale, boom, these people don't even care about me. Forget the fact that we have our James Beard award-winning chef. Forget the fact that we spend thousands of hours on training. Forget the fact that we, you know, have our James Beard award-winning chef. Forget the fact that we spend thousands of hours on training. Forget the fact that we've sourced the best ingredients possible. Yeah, your food came out six minutes late, you know like sorry, but that's how it feels to the guests, though. Right Is that there's such an uneven scale of hospitality and it's not in the restaurant's favor.

Speaker 2: 11:39

Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you a story. I was out in the West Coast at a resort not too long ago, last month and I was there for four days and I probably walked past 100 employees. Every single one of them looked me in the eye, smiled and asked me if I needed anything, or just said hello, good morning, good evening. And the way that it made me feel was to immediately come back to work and let all of my team know about this experience and how we can do that. But that didn't happen by accident. That was trained Right, and even though I know, as somebody in hospitality for a long time, that that came about by training, it wasn't just happenstance.

Speaker 2: 12:20

It still made me feel like I was having an authentic experience there. It made me feel like every single person there cared about me, and so I think sometimes we look at training as creating these like rote exercises of hello. My name is this, these are our specials tonight, yada, yada, yada. But if you train people to give really true hospitality, it does feel authentic. So for us, we're going back to training the basics, so that it's something that comes naturally to all our people.

Speaker 1: 12:50

And I think the word that you keep on using, which is so critical, is authentic. Because I think when you walk into a restaurant and you hear this hi, welcome in, and it's like, oh, okay, great. So if I was a secret shop where I could check the box, where I was greeted with a hello, right, like that, it needs to be that authentic. And even though it's a little bit cheesy now, I think we all know the hey, welcome to Moe's. There's even a way that they say it and a volume they say it at, but I think that there's something magical about that word authentic and I love your, your belief in your tactic of, of training, cause I think that it's so true.

Speaker 2: 13:31

Yeah, I think the more you train it actually, the more authentic it becomes, not the other way around, like when we train servers. We train them over and over again to know the ingredients, know how your, how the plates are prepared, know where the food comes from, because once they know all that stuff, it becomes a conversation with a guest, not a regurgitation of ingredients. And so the same thing with at the front desk or looking somebody in the eye and smiling, the more you train it and the more you know it, the more natural it becomes. And that's where the authenticity comes from from somebody who's trained it, done it a million times and now it's just second nature to them who's trained it, done it a million times and now it's just second nature to them.

Speaker 1: 14:15

So, from the guy who's got a whole bunch of restaurants to the guy who consults a whole bunch of restaurants, where do you agree? Where do you push back, Ken?

Speaker 3: 14:19

No, totally agree on authenticity. I take it from. I'll give you an example of a current client that we have and I've seen this many years before is that it'll be a mom and pop shop that'll be run by the owners, and their level of engagement with every single person that comes in is the reason that people continue to come. It's that they've built the culture. People are excited. They say hi to them by name. I was even on an assessment and literally I overheard one of the owners call because someone always puts in the same order each week and found out that half the order came in and wanted to make sure that it wasn't incorrect. He called the person at home and found out that the person had just had a death in the family, so that they had gotten a small order and were setting out to the funeral. And he was like oh my God, I'm so sorry. Let me go ahead and send you an extra dozen of you know our product so that you can you know, so that you can have something when you come back. And it was just an amazing level of engagement and it's the reason that this place has aligned out the door every single day.

Speaker 3: 15:30

The challenge is is that they want to expand. Like most small restaurants, they're like okay, I want to do spot two, three, four, et cetera, but they can't be in every single restaurant, they can't be in every single shop. So, as they're expanding, how do you replicate that? How do you have somebody who cares as much about your business as you do? And that's the trick, because all the authenticity comes from genuinely feeling like you're being associated with something that matters, or you're working for people that truly care and value as an equal. As an equal. And if that doesn't exist, then as much as you can rah-rah and train and do whatever, if you're not in a space that is truly authentic, because the ownership is, they know that if they're not doing a good job, it's because of those people that they know personally and feel that they have a connection to, then it won't work. So that's a lot of our training is if you're going to scale, how do you keep your culture?

Speaker 1: 16:29

And I know that right behind me. I got Will Gadara's book and he's coming on the podcast here fairly soon, and one of the things that I love about his book is when he talks about making it cool to care right, because in high school it's so cool to be like oh I don't care, like whatever right.

Speaker 1: 16:47

But in a restaurant, how do you make it cool to care, like, how do you get people to actually really like, want the success of the business? And you know, at Ovation, for example, we have people who really, really care now and the people who don't are no longer at Ovation. But it's like it's hard to understand. It's kind of like they either are the type of person that cares because they intrinsically want to build value and make this world better, or they just like don't.

Speaker 3: 17:18

Zach, how many people do you know at Ovation that you know their names, you know their families, you know everything about them. You welcome them, you talk to them, you engage with them. You do all of that. I know that, and because of that, people want to do a good job for you, because they realize that not doing so is going to let them down as well as letting you down. And once you build that level of respect and mutual appreciation, that's the key that will make people say, okay, this is why I'm going to stay connected.

Speaker 3: 17:50

I mean not to go to the COVID days, but one of the reasons that I love 50-50 is that when everybody else was shutting their doors, they converted all of their restaurants into commissaries for the neighborhood and a lot of people, including myself, were standing out passing out meals 500 meals a day to anybody in the neighborhood who needed food. And because of that they built a culture and a hospitality where people say, oh, they actually care, they're not just here to be for themselves, they're going to take a situation and build the community, and it's those things that make people say, okay, this is authentic, this is a good place to be, and because of that I can give authentic service.

Speaker 1: 18:33

I love that, and this is man. I wish this conversation could go on for another half hour. We don't even have time to get to the second question. We'll have to do a part two to this podcast, but I would love to figure out one question, though, which is Mark, let's start with you. Who is someone in the restaurant industry that deserves an ovation? Is there someone that you think we should be following?

Speaker 2: 18:54

Yeah, you already plugged him. It's Will Godera. You know that was the most impactful book I read last year, hospitality or otherwise.

Speaker 1: 19:02

Well, because you read the Surprise Restaurant the year before, that Stole my line.

Speaker 2: 19:08

But it's true, I did read Ken's book the year prior. Yeah, I think Will's book is really inspiring. I had the audio book as well. I listened to it a few times and he's just such a great storyteller. He narrates it himself, and I had a chance to go see Will speak at the Welcome Conference here in Chicago as well. You know just an amazing outlook on hospitality. And I would also say I'm going to plug one other group of people, and that's people that it's not necessarily restaurant driven, but people that work in food pantries and kitchens. I have a chance to volunteer with a group here, Friendship Center, every week, and those are the people that really need, they need a hand and they need a hand and they need to be praised for what they're doing. It's food pantries all across the country are really important right now, and so if I'm applauding somebody, my hat's off to them.

Speaker 1: 20:01

Awesome.

Speaker 3: 20:01

And what about you, Ken? Well, that's hard to follow up on, I'm not going to lie. I think individually. Somebody who shares our understanding of hospitality is Jonathan Stranger, who again uses Ovation because he and I partner on a chicken concept out of Oklahoma, and he's a person who is in a state to where you're still paying servers $2.13 an hour, but he gives every single person the opportunity to have insurance, to get medical, to have a. He gives people balance.

Speaker 3: 20:33

He is a chef owner that is not only in the restaurants but on the line on every Friday and Saturday simply because he likes to be shoulder to shoulder with his team. So he has an understanding of how everything functions. He is a completely holistic, centered individual and I think that you would be. And he also got up, he cut all of his teeth in Michelin star restaurants. I mean, he worked with John George, he did the, he was, he came up in every single possible conceivable way and has created a really, really wonderful culture. So if you're looking for somebody to have a conversation with, he's great, Awesome. Well, thanks, Kenneth, wonderful culture.

Speaker 1: 21:12

So if you're looking for somebody to have a conversation with. He's great, awesome, well, thanks, ken and Mark. And where can we go?

Speaker 2: 21:17

to learn more about the 50-50 group. We're the 50-50 group F-I-F-T-Y-5-0 group on all of our channels. So any social channel, 5050groupcom, you can find us there.

Speaker 1: 21:27

Well, mark and Ken, you guys might be in the 50-50, but you are 100-100, authentically awesome, and for that today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Give an Ovation. Thanks for having us, thanks.

Speaker 2: 21:39

Zach.

Speaker 1: 21:40

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.