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 Richard Green, the VP of Ops at Gusto Fresh Bowls and Wraps and also, interesting to note, for like four and a half years he was a grand opening supervisor at Chick-fil-A, and so I'm really curious to hear some of these stories of operations and grand openings. But, richmond, thanks for joining us.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Yeah, thanks for having me on, Zach.

Speaker 1: 0:47

And for those of you who are listening and don't see a clip of this, he is in full-on Gusto gear name tag on just coming from a restaurant. I mean, this guy is in the weeds, he knows what it's all about, and so, for those who aren't familiar with Gusto, can you give them a little glimpse on what it is?

Speaker 2: 1:05

Yeah, we are an Atlanta-born fast casual company, serve kind of globally inspired healthy bowls and wraps. We were founded in 2014 by a guy named Nate Hibble, former NFL player quarterback and really kind of born out of his passion to bring healthy fast casual to the South, where at the time there just wasn't much of it. So, celebrating our 10-year birthday this October and just based in the Atlanta area right now, but coming to new states and new regions here in the near future.

Speaker 1: 1:38

That's awesome and you're doing some awesome stuff and I love your name. It's got the exclamation mark in the name, Gusto Yep, and I'm your name. It's got the exclamation mark in the name, Gusto Yep, and I'm sure that you know goes into the brand of bringing a lot of healthy energy into the, into the world and into your, into your guests. One of the things I'd love to chat with you about is opening a new store. So a lot of listeners are in that emerging space. They're building really cool stores. They're growing quickly.

Speaker 2: 2:11

What advice do you have about opening a new store? Yeah, we're actually going through it right now. We've got a new brick and mortar location opening at the end of this month, and I've been with the company since restaurant number one, so this will be our 13th location coming the end of this month. And then, prior to my time with Gusto, I spent the first part of my career with Chick-fil-A, where I helped open 30-plus Chick-fil-A locations around the country. Yeah, grand openings are fun. I was an athlete as well. I was a swimmer at the University of Georgia and there's something about grand openings that are kind of like preparing for a big sporting event.

Speaker 1: 2:42

You know you're putting all this work in, you got the cowbell Exactly exactly.

Speaker 2: 2:47

Yeah, you're putting all this work in, all this preparation and then you've got the kind of big day where you know you're hoping at least a bunch of people are showing up, lining up outside the door, and then you're kind of off to the races from there and you know I think you know if I was speaking to somebody going through a grand opening for the first time the advice I typically give is prepare, prepare, prepare.

Speaker 2: 3:05

But understand that really no plan survives I don't like referring to guests as the enemy, but no plan survives first contact with the enemy. So you've got to be prepared to adapt, prepared for that piece of equipment that you just got a couple days ago to break down and prepare for some problem to pop up that you didn't anticipate is go to break down and prepare for some problem to pop up that you didn't anticipate. And if that rattles you or that shakes you then, especially if it's busy, it can be hard to recover. So you just kind of have to go with the mindset that I've got to be adaptable, I've got to be flexible, and if you prepared the right way and you've surrounded yourself with the right folks, then it can be a lot of fun. It only gets stressful if you don't have those support systems and that infrastructure around you.

Speaker 1: 3:47

Yeah, I think that's so powerful because when you're thinking about all the steps that you need to do, the million checklist items to open up a new store, that's a million failure points right.

Speaker 1: 4:02

And in this chain of opening up a perfect restaurant, it's like every single link needs to be perfect and at the end of the day, it's just like launching a technology. I remember the first piece of tech I launched. We got featured by Mashable, we got published by Wired Magazine and what we realized was we built this chain of technology. But then when it just got put out there and the day after we launched, I mean like literally we were hotspotting our laptops, driving to the trade show to launch and my CTO was still putting out code and so we launched it on time. But when it got released and all those people came in, we found a failure point which was something we had never even anticipated could happen, and then we were able to fix that and get it up within a couple hours. But those are things of like we planned so much around the press and the marketing and getting it out there, but then this one little thing like we didn't know and crazy.

Speaker 2: 5:03

Yeah, I mean, I think it just comes down to surrounding yourself with the right people. I remember the busiest opening I was a part of with Chick-fil-A. We were opening a new market in New York and I was opening a drive-thru restaurant on Long Island and the first day we did, I think, 80 or $90,000 in sales. We had a drive-thru line that was two hours long and we prepared and prepared, and prepared. But I think the most important thing I did to get ready was go find the most talented and skilled leaders from other Chick-fil-A restaurants around the country to come kind of lead different areas of the restaurants so that if something went wrong it wasn't me necessarily having to jump in and fix it. I knew I had somebody in the right spot.

Speaker 2: 5:48

It sounds similar to your situation where you probably surrounded yourself with a great CTO and a great team of engineers and so when something went down, you've got a team that can be there and react to it and then, if you do it the right way, the guest never knows the difference one way or the other. The user never knows the difference. They don't see the. You know the duck on the surface with the feet paddling you know, desperately underneath.

Speaker 1: 6:10

Well, and that's where teamwork, I think, comes in so much, because you don't need people who can just, you know, thinking about this in terms of like a sports team. You don't need people that can just show up and do what they're told.

Speaker 2: 6:31

You need people that can think creatively on their feet when things go wrong. Right, and that's the kind of team that you need when you're opening up a new store or a new business. Critical thinking skills are, I think, one of the most underappreciated traits of a person when you're looking to hire somebody. It's hard to measure in an interview, but, yeah, that ability to be faced with a problem and then not be overwhelmed by it but be coming up with creative solutions to that problem on the fly especially, is so, so important.

Speaker 1: 6:55

Absolutely love that. So all of this boils down to the guest experience, whether it's the opening day or you're 10 years in, and so what do you think the most important aspect of guest experience is?

Speaker 2: 7:07

Yeah, I mean. For me, I think one of the kind of timeless hallmarks of great hospitality or a great guest experience is anticipation of needs. If you go to a really nice restaurant or you go to a really nice hotel, you never have to ask for anything. Your glass of water is always full, the check is there when you're clearly finished with your meal Anything you need. If you're in a nice hotel, they've already prepared the room to receive you in advance, and that's been a part of great hospitality.

Speaker 2: 7:42

Since there have been hospitality establishments and I think in 2024, and especially in the post-pandemic world, anticipation of needs has moved into. There are so many different avenues for customers or guests to interact with us now and we have to anticipate needs, not just when they're sitting at our table in our dining room, but when they're coming through our drive-thru or they're ordering with us through DoorDash, or they are ordering with us through our mobile app, or they want curbside pickup or they've got a problem. I know a lot of what y'all deal with is guest feedback, and so when they've got an issue, there is an anticipation of need in that scenario as well.

Speaker 1: 8:23

So for us, we're constantly thinking about it's like that's an anticipation of the fact that there's going to be, that there's humans running this right.

Speaker 2: 8:34

Yeah, but I mean it's anticipating, like, if somebody has a problem, what does that experience look like? To provide that feedback and get a resolution to the problem, like you can anticipate that experience as well, not just wait for somebody to ring you on the phone and tell you that you forgot something in their order, not just wait for somebody to ring you on the phone and tell you that you forgot something in their order. So for us, we're constantly thinking about how can we anticipate what guests are going to want and what they're going to need before they even realize it. We talk a lot about creating a frictionless experience so that, no matter how they want to receive the food or interact with our brand, how is that experience? Kind of frictionless from start to finish. So for us, that's probably most important.

Speaker 1: 9:17

I love that key word of frictionless. I think it's so powerful and in this industry it means everything right. Getting to that today is just all about making things easier for the guest, and the easier we make it, the more powerful the experience becomes. I love that. And when we're thinking about tactics here, because I think that's a great way to think about guest experience, what are some tactics that y'all have used to improve the guest experience?

Speaker 2: 9:48

Yeah, I mean, I think there's. There's two kind of ways to think about it. One is is kind of like we were just talking about is human beings is hiring the right people, cause it's hard to anticipate every type of scenario that a guest might have or any every type of issue a guest might have, and so hiring and training the right people is always where you've got to start, especially for those in-store experiences. But I think in 2024, it's a lot about how do you utilize technology to create that seamless, frictionless experience, no matter how the guest is ordering with you. So we spent a lot of time over the last couple of years upgrading our point of sale system, upgrading our online ordering system, upgrading our loyalty platform and who do you use for those things?

Speaker 2: 10:40

We use Revel Systems for our point of sale. We use Olo for online ordering and a lot of our digital marketing, and then we use Punch as our loyalty platform and something that was really important for us as we were thinking about what tech platforms to go with is. From the guest side, they need to have a unified, seamless digital experience, so when they're going to our website, it needs to be easy to figure out how to go place an order. If they have a gift card, how do we make sure that gift card works in our in-store POS and in our online POS? If they've got loyalty, how do we make sure they're able to use their points or redeem rewards, no matter where they're ordering from? And those were things for us when we were a smaller company. We had siloed technology platforms that didn't really talk to each other and that led to a disjointed guest experience as well. So that's been a big focus for us, and I think there's still a long way to go.

Speaker 2: 11:37

A lot of the bigger companies they've got whole departments focused on this sort of thing. I know a lot of the drive-thru giants are thinking of when you talk about a frictionless experience. They're working on camera systems that can recognize license plates, that can understand what you're going to order before you're going to order it. And that's where artificial intelligence how can it store your data so that you pull up to a drive-thru and it already knows what you're going to order and it's already got your payment info saved and you're just rolling up and grabbing your order from the window. So we still got a long way to go for us still being a pretty small company, but for me, I think it's. It's so important nowadays to have a tech stack that is integrated and seamless and worked well together, because that leads to a more seamless experience for the, for the customer.

Speaker 1: 12:26

A hundred percent and, and you know there's just a big article written in restaurant business about do you go with a point solution or an all-in-one solution, Right, and the whole concept is, you know, if you go with the people that are best in class, you can get the best in class results. But they've got to talk to people right. Like, for example, like I look at our integration with with Revel and Punch and Olo and 47, actually over 50 others in the industry, and it's like the whole point is we want to play our part and no one tool is the panacea of all restaurant problems and but you can leverage technology to allow your people to do, when you remove the friction from the guests and from your employees, what happens? A better experience happens overall, because then they could focus on the thing that really matters, which is getting the food right and delivering it with hospitality.

Speaker 2: 13:23

Yeah, I totally agree.

Speaker 2: 13:25

I think technology, especially in our business, it exists to support our human workers, our human employees, like it works, to exist to help them do their jobs better and help them provide a better experience for their guests. I don't, I don't think it's replacing human beings anytime soon, but you're so right Having those systems that talk to each other. And when it comes to guest feedback, know, if you've got kind of a siloed guest feedback platform and you just get reviews but you can't see what they ordered or when they came or what's, you know what the aggregated data of all your feedback is telling you about problems in your guest experience. Like you're, you're going to be behind the ball compared to your competitors, and I feed that technology used to be unreachable for companies our size. You know, 10, 20 years ago, only the giant companies that had whole tech departments and could build their own proprietary stuff, you know, had access to this. But it's so accessible now for even small companies that it's a must have. Otherwise you're just not able to compete in the same way.

Speaker 1: 14:31

Absolutely, Totally agree with that and I think such a powerful way. I often think about technology as like Tony Stark right, Tony Stark is not Iron man, but the Iron man suit also is not Iron man, right, Iron man is like the suit and Tony Stark put together. And I think about that often in terms of how do we Iron man, how do we Tony Stark our employees and help them become the superhero to deliver a great experience? And it's not that technology is not replacing the employees as much as it is enhancing their ability to focus on the things that matter most.

Speaker 2: 15:06

Yes, yes, exactly right. We're actually kind of going through something right now where we're experimenting with kiosks at one of our locations, and it's something we stayed away from for a long time because we didn't believe in kind of replacing that human interaction between a guest and a team member. But the way we've been thinking about it now is how can something like a kiosk potentially, like you said, enhance our employees' ability to do the things that are most important? If you've got a kiosk there where a guest can place their own order, how do you still have a human being there in the dining room? Get them out from behind the counter in the dining room, where they're actually able to welcome people in the dining room. Get them out from behind the counter in the dining room, where they're actually able to welcome people in the door, explain the menu or greet people, go check on people at their tables, versus being stuck behind an order-taking terminal head down typing things into an iPad.

Speaker 2: 16:00

How can that kiosk not replace that human being but just repurpose them into something that's more important than a guest experience? And I think you know, if you take that approach, then it just enhances everything. But if you're the type that you think of technology as replacing humans. You know people don't have personal relationships with a vending machine. So if you try to turn your restaurant into a vending machine, you're going to, you're just not going to get people coming back as frequently or or spending as much money with you. So Totally.

Speaker 1: 16:29

And I remember going to an airport one time and there was a. It was a restaurant that had just kiosks and cubbies, and so you order and then you just got a text message when you're when the cubby had your food in it and you go in there and type it in and pops it open. Now that all good and well, except for the fact that, like my chicken was so undercooked that it was literally raw. It was just raw, absolutely pink, disgusting, and there's no way for me to tell them, there's no way for me to talk to someone to make it right.

Speaker 1: 17:06

And what are the chances I ever eat at that restaurant again, as I'm flying through Zero? I mean like negative, zero right, and so you can't. We cannot take humans out of hospitality, and the more that we input humans into it, the more loyal things will become. So, anyway, love this conversation, richmond, but who is someone that deserves a ovation in the restaurant industry?

Speaker 2: 17:33

Well, we're an Atlanta-born brand and we're really, really proud to be from Atlanta, and Atlanta is known for a lot of big fast food chains. We've got Inspire Brands here GoTo Foods, formerly, focus, is here Chick-fil-A Wafflea waffle house, by the way, can we just bring them back to focus?

Speaker 1: 17:51

can somebody please just like change them back to focus?

Speaker 2: 17:53

I'm not a big fan of go-to foods but uh, but you know we're particularly proud of the other kind of local companies like us that are kind of the up-and-coming fast casual restaurant companies. So there's there's one that's been around for a lot longer than us called Willie's. It's a Tex-Mex burrito chain that I've been going to since I was in high school but they've got 26 locations, locally born. We're really close with that group. And then there's another group called Non-Stop, which is an Indian fast casual. A couple of brothers out of actually Los Angeles had a food truck in Los Angeles, moved to Atlanta and started this restaurant chain around the same time that Gusto started and they've got excellent food. Only a handful of locations, but I think more to come from them. So love to always get an opportunity to shout out our fellow Atlantans.

Speaker 1: 18:45

Awesome. Yeah, atlanta is awesome. I'll be down there, I think, at least once or twice more this year for conferences. So I'll give those two things a shout out when I'm down there. But, richard, where can people go to learn more about Gusto or you?

Speaker 2: 19:00

Yeah, so you can visit our website whatsyourgustocom. You can follow us on Facebook, instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn at whatsyourgustocom. You can follow us on Facebook, instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn at whatsyourgusto. So, yeah, we really appreciate you having us on here today.

Speaker 1: 19:14

Absolutely Richman, and do you post online. Are you like a LinkedIn poster or anything?

Speaker 2: 19:19

I occasionally do some reposting I need to work on. Rob here is helping me with my LinkedIn presence, but I am on LinkedIn, instagram, facebook, so I'd love to connect with other folks in the business.

Speaker 1: 19:33

Awesome. Well, Richmond, for helping us learn how to prepare and adapt. Today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on. Give an Ovation Awesome. Thanks so much, Zach, Appreciate it. Thanks for joining us today. If you like this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We Appreciate it.