Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Give an Ovation, the restaurant guest experience podcast, where I interview 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 I am excited to have Neil Paraswan, the owner of Naratai, former consultant, brilliant guy. I met him at the Texas Restaurant Association. Holla at all my friends over there at the TRA. What a cool org. But Neil and I had such a great conversation around technology and his philosophy of tech and in the restaurant space and I'm like Neil, you got to come on man. You obviously come at this from such a great point of view. Being a former consultant, you're really good at putting things into boxes and trying to understand the world through two by twos and things. So welcome to the podcast, neil.

Speaker 2: 1:07

Hey Zach, Thanks for that phenomenal intro. I'm super stoked to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:11

Yeah, so let's dive into your theory on restaurant tech and hospitality. And why do you think restaurants have such a hard time adopting and maintaining technology, and what do we do about it?

Speaker 2: 1:25

That's a tough question, right, because, like for restaurants themselves, they kind of fall into different buckets, right. You have your mom and pop restaurants, which are kind of small, they do pretty well, and then you have your big restaurants, large chains, your franchises, right, and so they all kind of have supremely different needs. But the one thing I kind of talked to you about it here, it was that they're all kind of fundamentally the same. Where they have the one same issue when it comes to tech, which is when it comes to adoption, they still have to deal with the same employees, right. So for the most part, when we're talking about technology right, you're looking at different tools that are out there, they are positioned to interact with a certain kind of restaurant employee, right, they're typically managers. This is kind of where I talk to you about my labor theory when it came to what happened after COVID, right. So when you take your tools right and they're positioned specifically for a certain kind of employee, when those employees are gone, these restaurants have the toughest time figuring out adoption, right. So I don't want to talk to you ethereal, but let's say like a restaurant management tool, you know. Let's say like a restaurant management tool, you know, I've done like 20 demos over the last like three or four months to try to find a really good tool for us. I've done them over and over again, I've asked them all kinds of questions, right, but the fundamental problem with them all is that my employees can't use it. So we have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to teach them how to use these tools, how to think about the concepts that we have to have in the restaurant to use these tools effectively. So it's hard, right, because we're talking about things like inventory. Inventory sounds easy.

Speaker 2: 2:48

You go into your walk-in, you count out what's here, right? You have your protein, so you have like five pieces of beef. That's easy to count. They're right there for you. Yeah Well, for me that's five portions of beef that I'm looking at, right? I know how many ounces those portions are. I know how big they are. I know exactly what I'm looking at. For my employees, though, because they're in one box. That's one, and so I can train them about case sizes. I can talk to them about a lot of these things, but it's a mindset that you kind of have to teach your employees when it comes to working inside of a restaurant. And so when restaurants want or so, so when technology comes in and says, hey, I want you to use this tech, I want you to get some value out of it.

Speaker 2: 3:26

The thing is, when they position it in a certain kind of way, those employees that they want to have use it, they don't really exist. Why is that? Yeah, so over the course of time, the restaurant industry itself, after it went through COVID, you did what I call the double hump. So, at the bell curve, right, so you get your 80-20 rule, 10% on either side, right In the middle of the bell curve, you take your average age, right On the very bottom, and then your level of confidence at the very left side axis, right, if you look right in the middle, generally speaking, right, your most competent employees are probably, like I don't know, between 28, 45. So COVID happens.

Speaker 2: 4:02

When COVID happened, most of these employees got laid off and because they're competent and they have to support their families, they have to do something. They all left the industry to join something else, right, so they might've gone to Toast, they might've gone to a call center, they might've worked for Amazon right, and they stayed long enough to get their first raise. After you get your first raise, there's no reason to come back anymore because you're making the same amount that you were before, you have a better quality of life, you have better hours, you have a different career path that you've been set upon. You have no reason to come back. So after that happens, the industry kind of hollows out in terms of its most experienced and probably the most pliable people when it comes to doing work, and so you effectively lose your middle management, and so if you take that loss of personnel and you compare that against the tools that are kind of built for these guys to use, then you're looking at a place where these tools are now mispositioned entirely for what these guys are supposed to do.

Speaker 2: 4:56

I've talked to so many tools recently about how we can make better decisions using tech. Right, we can do better analysis and we can have a better control over our cost of goods, assuming that we have the time and we have the ability to take a look, that we have the staff to make sure that we can populate this information correctly. And the problem for me is we just really don't right, like every restaurant, if you look on reviews online for a lot of the tech tools which is like hey, I had a hard time implementing this tool. I couldn't keep up with, say, for restaurant management. I couldn't keep up with reclassifying all my products. I let it go for one week too long, two weeks too long. There's just so many now. And then I'm stuck operating. I can't come back to it.

Speaker 1: 5:32

And then, if you ask, these guys like hey, well, why don't you delegate it out and say, well, my staff doesn't know either. And you also want to make sure that you're not bogging down your staff with technology. Technology should not be a burden that they're carrying. It should be something that's carrying the burdens for them. To let them focus on the things that are most important, which is how does the guest feel, whether or not they're dining in or dining off-prem. We need to make sure that guest feels like they're cared about. Off-prem, the most important thing is accuracy. On-prem, it's hospitality, right, and those are things that if technology is distracting from that, then nothing else really matters, right?

Speaker 2: 6:15

You're absolutely right, zach. Simplicity is the answer for most restaurant problems. Your staff should be 100% dedicated to guest management. So if they're in the kitchen, they need to produce good looking food. You know they need to package it correctly. If you're in the front of house right, they need to spend more time just talking to customers overall, because customers they're not easy to find now, right. So when they come in, you want to make sure they're having a good time. The environment is right.

Speaker 2: 6:40

So if you're bogging them down with like inventory and they're trying to figure out the tool, if you're bogging them down with like a list of side job sheets right, where you have to kind of go through, hit your checklist and every single one of them, you're getting them caught in like the structural part of the job and you're kind of forgetting about the key part of the job, which is your customers.

Speaker 2: 6:57

And so for me as an owner, right, I'd rather spend more time teaching my employees about how to interact with the customers, how to get more value out of them, how to sell, how to build a relationship with them, and even internally, I'd rather have them spend more time like discovering how to like talk to each other In my restaurant, at any given point, I have five languages being spoken. Oh my gosh, yeah. So how do you get them to coordinate? And so, because there's so many different things happening inside of this restaurant, if I have them spending time doing the inventory all the time, right. If I have them spending time doing tech work, they don't focus on the big part of the job, which is talking to their buddy next to them and building that relationship.

Speaker 1: 7:32

I think that is so right and, at the end of the day, really, what we're talking about is how do we improve the guest experience? Right, because the employee experience is critical and, as we've talked about on this podcast before, the employee experience can never exceed the guest experience in terms of like long-term. But what do you think is the most important aspect of guest experience nowadays? Oh man.

Speaker 2: 7:56

Zach, you know it's always going to be the relationship right the ability for our staff to recognize customers when they walk in, remember their orders, put some care into producing food and make as little mistakes as possible. Right now it's really hard to build a relationship with the customer because they're not always coming in. So, say, you got third party. You need to be able to talk to them somehow and if you can't talk to them directly, you have to make food and have that food. Be the one that talks to them.

Speaker 1: 8:21

And I love that as one of our customers, michael McHenry. He's got a great restaurant, a bunch of great restaurants, but one of them is called Sunday's Best and he actually posted on Instagram today about him doing a delivery yesterday and he wrote on a napkin I hope you have an awesome day, sunday's best team. Right? He didn't, by the way, say, oh hey, I'm the CEO and I'm like hand delivering this to you, but like, he made it out from the team, not just from him, and I think that that goes a long way to show the team what is most important. And how do you build that brand? Right, to build that connection? Because when it's off-prem, you can't go up and see the whites of their eyes and see that they're not eating all of their beef gang muscle man. And so what do you do? Like, how do you have that way to make that connection? And I think there's some opportunities there for technology to help augment and make your staff's lives easier, but it's those little things that go so far in the hospitality industry.

Speaker 2: 9:20

For sure. Yeah, I mean. So this is between us and whoever's listening to your podcast. I'm working on a new concept right now. Right, I'm gonna prototype a fast, casual Thai concept and I'm gonna do it off a third party. I'm talking to DoorDash. Right now, I'm talking to Uber. How do I run a virtual restaurant out of the business? I've talked to Toast. I've got my POS ready to go and what I'm trying to prove here is that I can repackage Thai food and it'll be really good. It'll be easier to eat whatever else.

Speaker 2: 9:46

But the thing is I need feedback from the third-party customers and I don't want to wait for a review to come in via Uber Eats and in DoorDash. So what do I do? I give them a QR code. Maybe it has two questions, right, maybe I use Ovation for it.

Speaker 2: 9:58

The key is a part of this right is I can have them give me feedback as we go through and as we're prototyping the food and prototyping what we're doing to try to figure out what that kind of customer needs. We spent a lot of time at TRA talking about going to meet our customers where they are right, and so I'm going to do it and I think like this is a really kind of good way to do it, because I feel like you guys have built a pretty phenomenal tool so I can use your tool right In order to kind of help me get that feedback back, and it can augment the job that I'm doing right now, and it won't be in the way that's a great way to put it is not having technology be in the way right, and there's some types of technology that I mean I think about it with my wife, like Instagram, is probably a thing that gets in the way, right, we could be sitting there in the same room and we're both on Instagram, and so technology gets in the way.

Speaker 1: 10:45

But on the flip side of it, when I travel so much and so FaceTime is great as a way to connect us, and that's how technology is. It's either going to get in the way or connect us, and I love that concept of leveraging technology that enhances the experience and that doesn't get in the way. And so I love this concept, obviously, of using ovation. I love that, but it's the concept of really connecting with the guest. Any other tactics that you would recommend, any other things that you've seen that improve the guest experience For?

Speaker 2: 11:14

sure, yeah, so you know, I think at TR we talked about the fact that my staff tends to be high school kids, young 20s. Right, they're inexperienced, they're not really good at the job just yet, and there's a lot of things you can do with the staff to try to get them better at the job, but one of the main things you kind of have to do is invest in them a little bit to make sure that they can interact with the customer in a more meaningful way. For example, right, like I called the restaurant the other day, someone answered the phone and here's how they answered it Zach, hello. And I'm like, dude, this is Neil and you've been with us for six months and I trained you better than this. Oh, yeah, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, like, yeah, well, and it's a teachable moment, right, and the thing is right. It's like, because this is our staff and this is kind of who we have, we have to spend constant time just showing them what to do, teaching them over and over and over again, right, and trying to instill the value for at least for me which is continuous improvement, right, so, yeah, dude, you got the call wrong. Let's try that again. I might call back a week later, show them how to do it, just try it again, just go over and over and over again until they get it right. So, to improve the customer experience, I have to make sure that we spend enough time with our staff to continuously develop them their skillset from a certain level.

Speaker 2: 12:26

And one of the strategies that I use I guess a tactic that I use more often than not, which is I've actually pulled away from a lot of tech inside of my restaurant when it comes to training I don't know if I talked to you about this or not, yeah, so what I do more often than not is I give them a sheet of paper right, it's a training manual of sorts and I take my staff their kind of experienced, but still younger and I force them to train the new person and I watch them.

Speaker 2: 12:49

I'll give them pointers here and there about how to train them better. I've trained my staff that helped me manage to do the same exact thing, and the intention isn't to just train them on how to be better with guests, right, but it's also to force my staff that's training to think about it and then to force them to train and then have it bring back on paper, and then this is where tech comes in, which is then I have them send me a picture of it right, so we have a record of them doing it right, and so they know that we're checking. But it's a way for us to make sure that we're getting the training done and we're watching them kind of do it, while still making sure we can track it in a meaningful way.

Speaker 1: 13:21

I love that, because you will never learn more than if you're teaching. Teaching forces you to learn it, and so, by getting the trainees to become the trainers, you're creating an army of people who know what to do and how to do it, and I think that's powerful.

Speaker 2: 13:36

Yeah, I'm training a lot of people on how to coach, and by teaching them how to coach, I'm teaching them how to understand their friends, how to talk to them, how to get them to do what they need to do right To build that relationship internally. And then when it's time to talk to the customer, they're ready to talk to them. They know each other pretty well. They have teamwork kind of running for them. Everyone in that restaurant is on the same page about what they want to do and how to deal with the customer. And so, from a guest management experience right, it's a good way to build a basis for culture inside the store in terms of how you want to interact and make it consistent.

Speaker 1: 14:07

I love that, because that word consistent is really key here. If your training is going to be so different person to person, then the experience of the guest is going to be different time to time, which means people aren't going to come back because they don't know what they're going to get for their money. Right, exactly.

Speaker 2: 14:24

And the beauty of it all is right. So I've put them in a box, like you're talking about earlier. Right, I've built out a training plan for them. I know exactly what they're going to talk about. Right, I know it's built in a certain kind of way. They're going to do it on a schedule and they're going to keep working through until this person passes, according to the opinion of my management team.

Speaker 2: 14:42

And so in that process right, if I mentioned he. And so in that process right, if I mentioned he walks up and a guy's not doing the right thing, he can go to the trainer, talk to them, right, and then they can go back and forth until they can get it right. And this is my way of making sure that people understand the process of conversation and how to connect with each other, because for the most part, like you'll see, training videos people watch training videos like do all this kind of stuff to make sure that they're like people aren't talking and they're just understanding what's happening, or they're watching what's happening in front of them. And so we're pushing them to make relationships inside the store so they can then have relationships with the customers afterwards.

Speaker 1: 15:15

Love that Super powerful. This has been such an awesome podcast and, to wrap things up, I'd love to know who is someone that you feel like deserves an ovation in the restaurant industry. Who's someone that we should be following?

Speaker 2: 15:26

Oh man, I'm going to shout out three people right now, or three groups of people really. It's actually one group of people but three restaurants right. So I'm in a group with other Asian restaurant owners in Houston and I get a lot of inspiration out of them. When it gets really dark they can always kind of pick me up, and so the three restaurants that have done a really good job for me is like what Blood Brothers Barbecue, Saigon Hustle, which I think you've probably heard of, I think at this point.

Speaker 1: 15:47

Oh, I love Saigon Hustle yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sandy and Kathy are amazing, right. And then I have a friend, another Thai friend, that has like a higher position Thai restaurant, which is Gindi, and like we just been an incredible thing just to talk to them because it's made me a lot better.

Speaker 1: 16:08

And what great brands and certainly hustlers there, and so great shout out. Now where can people go to follow you or your brand?

Speaker 2: 16:18

You can find me on LinkedIn and you can just hit us up on the website. Really, I'm not as active on social media as I probably should be. I think you noticed that I'm a little bit more pulled back right as far as my presence, but anytime someone emails me, if they send me a message to the website or LinkedIn, I typically answer and I try to be as thoughtful as I can, because they've taken the time to talk to me, so I'm going to take the time to have a conversation as well. What's the website? Naradiningcom Awesome.

Speaker 1: 16:43

Well, neil, for helping us focus on simplicity and getting technology out of the way. Today's Ovation goes to you. Thank you so much for joining us on Give an Ovation.

Speaker 2: 16:53

Thanks, zach, it's really phenomenal to be here.

Speaker 1: 16:59

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.