Give an Ovation: The Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast with Zack Oates
Give an Ovation: The Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast is your backstage pass to the minds of hospitality leaders, innovators, and operators who are redefining what it means to serve. Hosted by Zack Oates, founder of Ovation, each episode dives into real-world tactics and inspiring stories from restaurant pros who know how to create five-star guest experiences—both in-store and off-premise.
From fast casual to fine dining, catering to curbside, learn how to drive loyalty, empower your staff, and deliver hospitality that hits home. Whether you're a restaurant owner, operator, marketer, or tech partner, this podcast will leave you with practical insights and plenty of reasons to celebrate and Give an Ovation.
Give an Ovation: The Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast with Zack Oates
Slam Dunk Loyalty with Josh Halpern
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Today's episode is with the CEO of Big Chicken and Beer Park, Josh Halpern, from whom we learn all about the good and the hard that comes from a star-backed brand. Sure, Shaq can bring them in. But how do you get them to stay? Stay tuned to find out, and learn some valuable lessons about loyalty for your restaurant.
Thanks, Josh!
The Importance of Brand Loyalty
Speaker 1Welcome 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 . Today , we not only have a legend in the space , but we have someone who is a mentor . I would consider him a friend Josh Freikin Halpern . What's up , my man ?
Speaker 2Man , that's big expectations right there . I don't know about legend or mentor , any of those things , but we've definitely had more than our fair share of fun times together , talking to the business , that's for sure .
Speaker 1Yeah , If you ever , if anyone that's listening has the privilege of being able to sit next to Josh at a dinner , you are in for a good time and make sure to bend his ear , because this guy , he's the CEO of Big Chicken , the CEO of Beer Park , the former VP at Anheuser-Busch . He has a career that spans CPG to restaurants and you've done a ton of stuff . One thing that I really want to , the thing that you probably get asked about the most and the thing that people think when they hear that you're running Big Chicken Shaq's a chicken restaurant is it easy or hard to run a brand on top of another brand ?
Speaker 2Meaning like is it easy to run a brand that's Shaquille-backed ? Yeah , is it like does that make it easier or harder ? No , it's amazing . But it is tough right , because , on the one hand , shaquille is a tremendous partner . For him , this was really about his legacy . It wasn't just throwing his name on something , right ? In fact , we're in the process of putting signage up in every restaurant with Shaquille telling the story as to why he started this . It's really because of his mom , lucille , and everything else Because of Shaquille .
Speaker 2What I like to joke around and I've said this to him , so it's okay if it gets back to him . I have 99 problems no one else has because of Shaquille , but I also get 99 things done for me that no one else gets because of Shaquille , so it works itself out . But we are definitely not building big chicken with like the . This is the way you build the chain way out the window , but we're having fun . I've never dreamed our third restaurant would be on a carnival cruise ship . The first ever prize we ever won as a company was Best Fries at Sea from Borders Travel . That doesn't happen , right ? The fact that today we're in more arenas than we have brick and mortar restaurants is a weird one . We're going to close this year in four different countries , despite feeling like I'm just getting going . We're growing it in a very different way because we have to kind of embrace the craziness , the wonderfulness , the authenticity of Shaquille O'Neal , which is truly my privilege .
Speaker 1And it's tricky , though right , because being such a tall brand , it may get people to come in , right , you've got a draw that other people don't have , but the expectations are also higher and there's a desire to kind of like shoot down the big man right and take these cheap shots sometimes , and so you've got both sides of it . You get more people coming in , but you've got more people looking for things that are wrong , right ? I ?
Speaker 2think there's just I don't think it's people shooting us down . It's that Shaquille stands for excellence and Shaquille stands for caring for people . Right , and people know if it's not a great experience if their food was cold , these things it's not living up to like Shaquille's brand right .
Speaker 1Yeah , that's a really good way to put it .
Speaker 2But no one comes in like , haha , how can I write a Yelp review that will embarrass Shaquille O'Neal , right ? It's really more like I'm coming in because I genuinely love this guy , I appreciate this guy , I respect this guy and I hope that the food that he's putting his name on has that same expectation . And , truthfully , that's probably the thing that keeps me up most at night is just , you know , I respect the world out of Shaquille . I've gotten to know his entire family Was at his Jersey retirement in Orlando the other week and his mom's hugging me and his kids are walking up to me and it's incredible right To be a part of the O'Neal family in a way , at least a very distant cousin , right . But you don't want to let them know because they're such great people and they've really taught me the meaning of the word authenticity and it's hard to find someone as authentic as Shaquille O'Neal and Lucia O'Neal .
Speaker 1I think that's a really good way to put it . It's like they're not there to shoot you down . You just have higher expectations than other people because he's got such an incredible brand . I mean I remember when I came and I spoke there , I had looked it up and interviewing Perry Rogers , his agent . I mean he's one of the top , I think , 50 biggest brands , biggest named individuals alive on the earth today . I mean , everybody knows Shaquille .
Speaker 2Everybody knows . Yeah , and I mean you mentioned Perry Rogers . I mean talking about excellence , he's the only sports agent to ever do three Nike deals with three different players , so he's serious . Shaquille is serious Like , yes , we have big fun it's four to who we are but the brand itself is a serious brand . It's a serious business and we treat the business really seriously . Well , we have fun himes and do some goofy things , like our Blue Origin stuff last year and a Mac , a chicken restaurant and outer space and some other things .
Speaker 2But it really comes down to are you living up to your brand's potential and to your point ? In our case , not only do we have to live up to big chicken's potential , but we have to live up to Shaquille O'Neal's and we have to live up to Perry Rogers and we have to live up to the rest of our board . It's a dynamic board and , truthfully , I've done a lot of good things in my career in CPG and restaurants . Is it living up to my reputation too ? And these are the things that keep us up at night , because it's the legacy that we leave is what we do in every role that we're in , in every vendor relationship , franchise relationship and everything we touch .
Speaker 1Amen . And now , because all of this boils down to the guest experience . And so what do you feel like is the most important aspect of guest experience nowadays ?
Speaker 2Yeah , it's funny , and you've heard me give this feel before right Like if you go and you Google the word loyalty just loyalty you'll see people holding hands and you'll see hearts , and you see love and you see care and all these nice quotes written in cursive which no one under the age of 18 can read , because they don't keep cursive anymore on how beautiful loyalty is . And then you change it to restaurant loyalty and everything is apps , apps , apps , ipad . Free food , get free wings when you sign up , or free fries or whatever , and it's like holy crap . Somehow as an industry over the last 10 to 20 years , as we got more technologically savvy , we lost the heart , part of loyalty a little
Enhancing Guest Experience for Loyalty
Speaker 2bit .
Speaker 2I think the thing with the guest experience that really defines whether or not you truly grow loyalty is have you given someone the reason why they should care enough to say that's where I go ? Right ? So it's funny , I lead Big Chicken . Big Chicken . We have 33 locations today , which is crazy , because when you were at our national meeting back in August , we were at 18 or something , but 33 , between non-traditional brick and mortar , cruise ships , et cetera , but Beer Park we only have one , but it's at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas . Half of Murtec will end up there at some point because it's right there At Beer Park . The number of people that have said to me over the last three years people I know every time I'm in Vegas I go to Beer Park . Well , why ? Because your wait staff is so knowledgeable about beers . They make things fun , they make the experience fun . It's cool to look at the number of people have told me I don't even remember what beer I drank or what food I ate , but I still remember our server's name .
Speaker 1And it was interesting right .
Speaker 2So for me , guest experience is really like when you walk out was your food , was your service memorable enough , where you say look , that brand's now in my heart . And let's face it , you get to younger consumers Gen Y , gen Z , gen Alpha . They view themselves as brands , right ?
Speaker 2Hell , you view yourself as a brand . That's why you have your own podcast . I don't have the time for it , right ? But because you're your own brand , you have to ask yourself the question what brands am I gonna cross collaborate with ? And to me , that's the guest experience . If the guest says I'm a big chicken person , I'm a chick-fil-a person , I'm a raising-hands person , whatever that looks like , you've won , because they're basically doing a brand collaboration with you . Long answer to a very simple question , but- .
Speaker 1No , that's so interesting , that perspective of are they're doing a brand collaborate , especially because , like you know , people like me , we like to post our food online and when I post my food , it's like there's a lot of times I'll take the video of the food and then I eat it and I don't post it . Right , I just had a restaurant experience where I didn't post it because I waited an hour for the food . I ate it and it was good . It was worth a five minute wait and they told me it would be a 20 minute wait and it ended up being an hour . So I ended up not posting it . But there was something else I got from them that was really good and so I did post that . But because I didn't wanna recommend something to people who may have seen that even though it may have been 5,000 , it may have been five I didn't wanna represent something to them that I didn't believe in .
Speaker 2You did not want your personal brand , in that brand , to interconnect and that's .
Speaker 1I've never thought of it that way , but that's such a really that's a really interesting perspective to have , and I think that if restaurants thought of it that way , what changes would we make ? What would we do differently , right ?
Speaker 2No doubt about it , quite honestly , the other thing that I think we're getting a little wrong on the guest experience as an industry , and it's something I feel passionately about , coming from CPG . In CPG we think all the time about who your shopper is . Who's the person going in with the credit card to Walmart , not necessarily who's the person eating the frozen pizza or drinking the Bud Light on the couch . I ran global shopper marketing for AB InBev and Anheuser-Busch InBev . The restaurant industry is a little bit of a flip . We think a lot about the consumer but it's not the dataset that we have . The dataset that we have and why we make decisions is based off of who puts the credit card .
Speaker 2There's a fast , casual burger joint in my town and I won't say which one because the CEO heard me drop their name so many times . The guy asked me to stop . My kids are obsessed with this chain and they're solely obsessed because my oldest son the most popular kid in his grade that's his burger joint , so all of his friends go to that burger joint . Meanwhile , don't feel bad for the grade above . They go to a different burger joint . But it has nothing to do with the food , the service . It has to do with this belonging to a community .
Speaker 2Anyway , this burger chain doesn't get that , so they keep serving me advertisements saying hey , you don't come in during the week for lunch . If you come in during the week for lunch , we'll give you a free shake with your burger . There's a reason why I don't come in . I'm not your consumer . I have no problem eating your food when my three sons ask to eat your food . But I'm just your shopper , I'm just your credit card . It's these three preteen boys that are making the decision whether or not we're eating at your restaurant tonight . Are we truly getting not just to the heart , but to the heart of the key decision maker ? That's often not the person with the credit card .
Speaker 1I love that because really take that step back and think about who your guest is . Who's paying , but who's driving the decisions ? With that in mind , are there any tactics that you've used lately to improve the guest experience ?
Speaker 2Yeah , we are trying different things . We're in the process right now of adding a Shaquille . We call it a manifesto , which is probably way too grandiose of a word , but we're literally putting the origin story of the chicken into the restaurants where people could hear directly from Shaquille's voice . This is why I started Big Chicken and it's an honor to Mama Lucille . On top of that , we recognize that we had to get closer to this preteen kit . Call it the eight to 16 year old . We're doing product innovation testing . There's a high school across from one of our restaurants in Las Vegas . We brought students from the high school as our focus group for the testing Because we figure , if we send these kids back to high school , they're like man , we ate a big chicken . Last night it was awesome . They're bringing their friends across .
Speaker 2We wanted closer to elementary schools . We did that thing last year , where we announced with Blue Origin the dream of putting a big chicken in outer space someday . We actually had it and it should be going up into space soon where kids could draw on a postcard what an imagined restaurant in outer space would be like . Someday they're going to fly up in outer space on a new shepherd rocket and come back and be stamped , returned from space . Now , all of a sudden , you have this drawing of yours that actually went into outer space and came back . We had to focus on kids meals in a slightly different way . We do giveaways in terms of Shaquille memorabilia and stuff like that in different ways . We're always just looking at how do we drive a little bit more fun into the restaurants , because fun is so central to the Shaquille brand promise .
Speaker 1Yeah , absolutely , and man , it was so much fun to meet him . I've met him a couple of times before , but it was cool to hang out with him there in Vegas at Beer Park and maybe a little selfishly . Josh , I just love to hear I was Ovation helped you at all .
Speaker 2Nah , those guys suck man . I've heard . Yeah , no , whoever that founder is , no Ovation . I mean , if you care enough about your business and what the guest is saying and you really want to get to the guest , right , you need to be listening , right , you need to be listening what's working , what's not working . We just changed our French fry . It will hard convert in three days , but half the restaurants have already soft converted and we changed it , quite honestly , because the number one complaint coming up on Ovation was just our fries were going cold too fast in third party delivery , right . So if our fries are now a deterrent to the guest experience , we need to change the fry right . So we really believe in Ovation because we believe in listening to our guest and you know , like anything , feedback is a gift and sometimes you return the gift for credit and other times you use the gift , right .
Speaker 2But if you don't have a pulse on the consumer , especially in this day and age where every consumer is their own brand debating , hey , do I want this to be a part of my brand or not ? And or am I willing for my brand to be about hating that brand , right ? So we really need to make that happen . And then the number of times that people will reach out in a location and say , look , I really want to do a brand collaboration here but you sort of let me down . Our ability to jump in and be like we're so sorry we let you down . Look , fast food business things happen . Please come back . Let's figure this out together . You know we want to make this right by you . The amount of guest response that I've seen is incredible .
Speaker 1And it's been awesome to see , because you could truly tell looking at the back end system and seeing how you guys do . You guys do a great job at responding to guests because it obviously shows that you care about them and your brand is . You know , you're 4 percent higher of your love group than the average restaurant , and so people love what Big Chicken is doing and I love seeing that because , again , you have a leg up in that you've got a shack but you've got a leg down , and that they have higher expectations , and so the fact that you're still four points above the average restaurant and with those expectations just shows that you're doing a great job , josh .
Speaker 2And so I appreciate what you're doing . Man 99 problems no one else has , but that should kill . Promise is on both sides of that ledger right , it's something no one else has and it could be a problem for us at times . But you know it's funny . I rarely write reviews and stuff , I'm just so busy and I wrote a review on a brand the other day and they had like one of those AI bots and it came back like deer and it was parentheses . Thank you for your message and I'm like Screw that .
Speaker 1Oh man .
Speaker 2Right . So , like on all of this stuff , yeah , digital transformation it's a real thing , but transformation , there's positive transformation and negative transformation , right ? So I mean we still really are encouraging all of our GMs hey , you got to be responding to this stuff , you know , even if it's just to be like , hey , sorry we let you down , come back in , ask for me . You know , let's see what we could do . It's that personalized touch . I will be very disappointed in a restaurant in our system if they ever get a dear friend . I love that .
Speaker 1So , josh , how do people find and follow you ? Obviously , you go to big chicken and follow there , but in terms of Josh Halpern , if I want to follow Josh Halpern , where do I go ?
Speaker 2So I live in well , first off , anytime you hear or see Sam , I'm normally within a traffic lane . But I mean , realistically , I do most of my communication right now on LinkedIn from a B2B perspective , you know , and it's because I really want to be engaged in the business community . I like hearing from other leaders , I like putting my perspective out there too , and it's been really great , I think , because there's a couple areas that I've become really passionate about as I've been a CEO for the last three years , and one of them is just trying to celebrate celebrate the industry , celebrate my team , celebrate what we're doing at Big Chicken , celebrate what other people are doing . But the one that kind of caught me off guard , that you never really think about until really you're like in our type of position , right , is this notion of like we don't get the benefit anymore of work-life balance ? We really don't right .
Speaker 2It's really work-life integration and it's , you know , it doesn't phase Shaquille or any member of my board if they call me and I'm at the hockey rink with my son or at dinner with my family , or if I say I need to call you back in 30 because my kid , my kid . This where a lot of people earlier in their careers are really , you know , like , well , no , like if we're calls . You know , in order for you to be at your peak at work , you got to be at your peak in life , right , and that was something Shaquille and Perry really taught me and something that I try to put in a good practice every day . So I talked quite a bit about that on LinkedIn as well , but LinkedIn is good and we'll be launching very soon here , I think a second Instagram account like BigChicken Josh . Oh , nice , because for the amount of random work adventures that we get to go on , I think that that would be interesting too . Love it .
Speaker 1Well , josh , for bringing big fun to this podcast and for being such a rock star and mentor of mine . Today's Ovation goes to you . Thank you for joining us on Give Innovation . Thank you , thanks for joining us today . If you liked 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 .