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've got a guy here who is just so impressive. He's been doing amazing things. Learn more at OvationUpcom. I mean, this stuff looks so good. He's an advisor to a bunch of different places, including Toast and DoorDash. He's also the co-founder and president of Frank from Philly and Andrea Pizza.

Speaker 1: 0:52

I mean, you're all over the place. Welcome, shaz Kan. How are you, shaz? I'm doing well. How about yourself? Oh man, pleasure to be here Doing great now, because I got the chance to just look at all these amazing photos from your restaurant. So it looks awesome. Glad to hear it. I mean, you got to fly over now, I know Well, next time, because you guys are a Delta hub, aren't you up there in Minnesota? We sure are there, we go, so I have layovers there occasionally. So next time I just I may have to miss the next leg of my flight and go get some.

Speaker 1: 1:26

You've always been at home at Tono. There we go. So tell me about Tono. What was the birth of Tono?

Speaker 2: 1:32

Yeah, so it's kind of funny because I don't come from the food industry. My background is in engineering. I went to school for electrical engineering. My best friend of 20-something years, Antonio Gambino there's a joke in there somewhere.

Speaker 3: 1:45

He's Sicilian.

Speaker 2: 1:48

And we eventually started having talks about kind of how to work together and what that would look like. He was working at his family's slice shop called Andrea Pizza for many years, like out of high school, and he wanted to kind of step outside of that and then do his own thing. So he was born in Philly but obviously raised in Minnesota. So we kind of talked about this and so came our first concept Frank and Andrea's. It's short for Frank from Philly and Andrea Pizza. Frank's his brother's name, andrea's his dad. Like I said, his dad's from Sicily, mom's from Philly. He was born in Philly, so this is a dual pizza and cheese steak concept. Recipes go back almost a century. So, yeah, it's very authentic artisan. So the pizza at Frank and Andrea is New York style. We're located on the University of Minnesota campus in an area called Dinkytown, and that was our first joint venture together and my entry into this space in 2016.

Speaker 2: 2:46

Fast forward, 2019,. We were going to open a second one and it quickly transformed into what is now Tono Pizzeria Plus Cheesesteaks. This is brick oven pizza, so I guess for the untrained eye it's Neapolitan-esque. I wouldn't call it Neapolitan by any stretch, but it's artisan, hand-tossed brick oven pizza paired with authentic cheesesteaks. So we have nine locations. I've actually got a grand opening tomorrow for our ninth location hey model tough.

Speaker 2: 3:13

Thank you. And then location 10, 11, and 12 around the corner. So busy time of year.

Speaker 1: 3:20

That's incredible, and it's amazing to see how much people love your brand. The pictures don't only look amazing, but the reviews are great. People love the food, they love the vibe, and so you've done a great job building something special. And people are looking at this and it's like you've created such a great guest experience. And so what do you think is one of the most important aspects of guest experience nowadays?

Speaker 2: 3:45

Great question. To be honest, I'm huge on technology, right, like I'm a massive tech enthusiast, as if my CD didn't make that evident. But it has nothing to do with technology at the forefront To me, it's integrity and truthfulness. Right, it's an aspect of authenticity, I would say so.

Speaker 2: 4:09

My mission that I chose to accept was taking that history and that family legacy and that story that came from Antonio's family, translating that into a physical space, a menu presentation, but also combining this with being able to tell that story in a fashion that didn't feel like people are being sold something we don't want to be like, oh, we're the best, you know, we're authentic, come check us out. It's more like, hey, here's a story, here we are, come on in. And usually that refining process of getting that guest feedback it might go without saying, but just using that feedback to constantly refine the product and that guest experience. And when things aren't working well, like I said, the truthfulness piece right, you're slammed, things are really busy, things are late, not as expected, maybe there's a bunch of training shifts and and you know things didn't go as planned Just letting people know and offering them that information in a fashion that makes them understand that you care that you're still giving them that hometown feel and, to be honest, that's the key factor for us. It's just the level of service.

Speaker 1: 5:16

Yeah, and one of the things that we find is do you know why? Most people they want to go to their local businesses. They want to support local. But if they feel like it's a chain, why do people go to chains? Because it's consistent, because they know what they're going to get. But when you can fight back and you can start to grow your brand into the double digits and still maintain that community feel, yeah, it's like powerful.

Speaker 1: 5:42

And to your point, a lot of people who complain they're not complaining to like ruin your business, they're complaining because they want to feel heard. And if you fulfill that need to help them feel heard, then you've won them. And it's not just something where they're like okay, maybe I'll come back and try it out, but that recovered guest is worth 24 times the value of an average guest. So it's just so powerful, exactly what you're saying. Hey, if the shifts were off or someone didn't show up, be open. Yo, I'm so sorry, Someone didn't show up for their shift. It was a little crazy. Tonight. Here's a free cheesesteak on me that goes so far to humanize each location and to realize like this is my local Tonos you know, yeah, absolutely, we never want to lose that human touch, that element.

Speaker 2: 6:29

We never want to feel like a chain. We're always as we've been growing, at the pace we've been growing. That's been one of my challenges is to make sure and to kind of get ahead of the idea that we might be a chain, local or not, because that has connotations with it and I don't want those connotations to overcome any kind of human element in that sense of locality that we are very adamant about having. Now, people obviously get it when they show up, as evidenced by the reviews and that repeatability in our customers and that raving and our customers and that raving fan base. But we certainly want to make sure that we're driving that narrative not out of manipulation or marketing but out of authenticity.

Speaker 1: 7:10

Yeah, I mean you don't get to 5,000 reviews and 4.7 stars without doing something right. I just think that is a testament to what you're doing, because, at the end of the day, people vote with their wallets but they hint with their reviews. So I think that it's important to remember that, and you've just nailed that recipe, and so let's talk about that recipe. What are some tactics that you've used to improve the guest experience?

Speaker 2: 7:40

Yeah, this is, I would say, where the technology piece comes in and, I guess, our training and management and leadership style. So we leverage a number of platforms to acquire data. Like you said, it's important for the customers to feel heard. Well, we want them to know that we're listening. It's not just about waiting for somebody to raise their voice, proverbially, until we hear them. We want to make sure that they know that we're open and we want to listen, and so, offering the capacity to listen in the form of customer feedback that, no matter the platform, we respond to every single review across our entire location base.

Speaker 2: 8:27

So, all of those 5,000 or maybe more reviews, there's a response to each and every one of them in a timely fashion and in a fashion that demonstrates the empathy that we truly hold, as well as letting others who may see those responses know we care. We're not AI driven right. It's not like, oh, just get the text out there. I understand that's a solution for brands. I just personally don't entirely believe in that. I fully leverage AI where it's best suited for us, but at this point in the evolution of our accessibility to those tools, I don't know that that's the place I want to deploy it at its maximum.

Speaker 1: 9:04

Who do you use to respond to your reviews?

Speaker 2: 9:07

We use a platform called Marquee at the moment. Yeah, yeah, so Marquee Innovation, like together. It's like I don't know the dream team.

Speaker 1: 9:16

It's Stockton Malone, jordan Pippen, right, I don't know who's who, but they're great. We love our friends over at Marquee. In fact, they're the only company that we currently resell, and we're pretty open about that. When we talk about our review management services, it's powered by Marquee because they have such a great tool and I can go out there and reinvent the wheel or I can get some really cheap solution and slap it in there, but we wanted it to be something that works and so, yeah, we also use Marquee and they're amazing great team, great support. So, yeah, anytime I hear someone that like talks about it, I'm like I'm assuming that they're using Marquee, but anyway, awesome. I think that's so great and I think that what you've talked about and the things that you're doing are amazing. And I'd love to just ask you, when it comes to Ovation how has Ovation been helpful for your brands?

Speaker 2: 10:04

Yeah, great question. I think before Ovation things were just disjointed. I knew I mean, first and foremost, the impetus has to be there on the part of leadership of a restaurant brand for them to want to listen. I know we're talking about listening a lot, right, and like actively listening. But even when you want to, it's like, okay, how do I do this? Right, and some point of sale manufacturers offer tools to be able to get that guest feedback. We'll call it. There are other third-party tools available to acquire that.

Speaker 2: 10:33

But then getting data from multiple sources and having it live in multiple places across different databases, call it. That's a task in and of itself to be able to aggregate that and put it all together and make sense of it and interpret it into some kind of actionable item so that you can actually derive what your customers are saying at large or issues that need to be addressed, challenges that are being posed, and so Ovation provides that. It consolidates everything into one place, gives us an analytics dashboard, allows us to see, in the form of both a word cloud and graphs and numbers and text, just what our customers are saying and where the opportunities of improvement are, what locations they're at, what times of day they're at. That consolidation is massive. I'm all about efficiency and Ovation has made that process efficient.

Speaker 1: 11:21

That was not a sales pitch.

Speaker 1: 11:24

No, I love hearing that, because we always talk at Ovation is we're great. Restaurants get better and to your point of like, the leadership has to be on board. You have to actually want to hear. If I'm talking to someone and I'm saying I talk to my wife every Sunday and I ask her, hey, what's something I could do to improve, and if she tells me something and I don't do it and then every single week she's telling me the same thing, it's like she's going to eventually I just don't want to listen.

Speaker 1: 11:50

But that's how you build these relationships, because we all know that we're not perfect but we're so afraid to hear why. But the beautiful thing is is if you ask it frequently right, and normally in marriages with a lot of my friends it's like the only time they ask that is in marriage counseling it's like a big thing. But if you, I ask it every week and then it's little things, and then it helps just kind of like course correct with ovation, right, it helps you kind of see the real picture of what's going on, as opposed to getting a really detailed list from a couple of people or just kind of closing your eyes and hoping you're doing the right thing, which sometimes feels easier, right Chaz.

Speaker 2: 12:28

I can understand why that may be the case, but, honestly, no longer does it feel easier Like the first question in my mind, whether it's a restaurant or just in my personal life too. It's right. It's that very question of what is it that I'm not considering? What might I not know? Where are my blind spots and how can I ask others to help me identify those in a fashion that lets them know that I truly want to offer that for them and I want to be better.

Speaker 2: 12:51

Right, I want this brand to be representative of that kind of psyche of we're looking to be better, we want to improve, we want to be the best, and to do that we can't just make our own assessments and assumptions on what that looks like and means, because that would be fluid too. That might change over time. I'd rather take it from the customers and say where can we improve, what do you like, what don't you like, and in the process let them know like that's a great idea, for example, but we're just not there yet. And that transparency being able to have those conversations it creates trust. I mean, I trust somebody that's telling me what time it is with them, right, versus somebody who's telling me everything's all good and great, and my experience is telling me otherwise. So we're managing expectations by being that transparent. I love that Managing those expectations. If we close that gap between reality and that expectation, that's where we want to live, right there.

Speaker 1: 13:48

I think that's spot on and I think it makes a ton of sense. And as I look at what things are operationally, because you're a man of efficiency, are there any things that Ovation's allowed you to change in the last year about operations that you didn't know about beforehand?

Speaker 2: 14:04

Oh, absolutely. I think as we've scaled, I myself personally have you lose a little bit of visibility into some aspects of your organization. It's not like when you had one unit or when you were visiting the store frequently and of course you're always going to look at things from the perspective that your brain is kind of predisposed to. So, like I'm bringing, like that engineer look to things and whatnot, right? So for me personally too, it's kind of given me some of that visibility back so I can notice things like oh, that's interesting, at 4 pm at this particular location there is an increase or uptick in comments about temperature of the food. Right, what's going on there? Is there a shift switch that's happening at that moment? Is there information that's not being translated from the earlier shift to the later shift? How do we document that and identify where that opportunity is? So it's given us more opportunities to find solutions that we didn't think of or we didn't know were needed. For that I'm grateful. I mean, anytime I get more information, the better it is.

Speaker 1: 15:06

That's great and again, I appreciate you being the type of restaurateur who really cares about the guest experience enough not just to invest in collecting it, but also taking action on it and making your brand better because of it. I was looking before our podcast and you had some stores or some months where you're at 4.9 of your average online ratings. I mean, that's bananas. It's super cool to see, really impressive and again, a testament to what you're doing. So one thing that I want to ask you. Last question is I got a second to last technically, but who's someone in the restaurant industry that we should be following? You know a lot of people on these advisory boards and stuff. Who's someone that you think deserves an ovation?

Speaker 2: 15:52

Honestly, it's not a singular person, it's the restaurateur next door. I encourage every restaurateur everyone who remotely touches hospitality, cares about it as a customer or as a business owner to have conversations with their local restaurant owners. Have conversations with their local restaurant owners Because I mean, first of all, they deserve a round of applause Just doing what they do. Everything's changing constantly from a regulatory and customer and environmental standpoint. But also it humanizes those conversations. It allows people to empathize with challenges that they didn't know existed, as well as understand what moves and motivates those business owners to do what they do. So, from that perspective, I think that that's who we should be talking to.

Speaker 1: 16:41

Love that man. Well, shaz, where can people go to find and follow you and your brands?

Speaker 2: 16:47

Yeah, we're on TikTok, so it's underscore Tono MN. So that's Tono T-O-N-O and MN is in Minnesota. We're on Instagram with the same handle underscore Tono MN, and you can find us on LinkedIn Tono Pizzeria plus Cheesesteaks. Come check us out sometime If you're ever in Minnesota. We want to see you.

Speaker 1: 17:04

Love it Well, Shaz, for using your engineering background to engineer an amazing restaurant brand. Today's Ovation goes to you. Thank you so much for joining us on Give an Ovation. Thank you, Pleasure.

Speaker 3: 17:16

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.