Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Give An Ovation, the restaurant guest experience podcast. I'm your host, zach Oates, and each week I chat with industry experts to uncover their strategies and tactics to help you create a five-star guest experience. This podcast is powered by Ovation, the feedback and operations platform built for multi-unit restaurants. Learn what is actually happening at your restaurants and how to improve without just a long survey. Learn more at OvationUpcom. And today I am so excited because it's really interesting. Being a part of Ovation and being able to see the back end of what brands are surfacing to the top and there is one brand that I have seen consistently not just care about the guest experience but see how much their guests love them has been inspiring. I've got John Lawn. He's the CMO of Earth Bar and John, welcome to the podcast man.

Speaker 2: 0:56

Thanks a lot.

Speaker 1: 0:56

Thanks for having me Excited to be on You've been doing some amazing things, and so maybe not everyone might be familiar with Earth Bar, though Do you want to give a little update on what is Earth Bar?

Speaker 2: 1:07

Yeah, happy to. Earth. Bar is a really exciting brand. I'm proud to be a part of it, been here just under four years and as a company. The brand itself has been around since 1971. So one of the wellness OGs, as we like to say. Back from the early days of people would eat red meat and smoke cigarettes and go to the doctor when they got sick things started to move in the direction.

Speaker 1: 1:28

Those were the days, John.

Speaker 2: 1:29

Those were the days, the bad, you know, the madmen days and really, as things shifted to people being aware of how food can be medicine. Oranges have vitamin C and if you eat enough oranges maybe you don't get sick, so you don't have to go to the doctor. And then I moved into well, what if I don't want to eat 12 oranges a day? What if you eat your vitamin C from a pill? So Bernie Budman, who's one of our founders, still very active in the brand today If you go by our West Hollywood or Brentwood stores you may bump into him he was one of the first people to put vitamins in a retail environment. We could go buy vitamin C pills and take them as part of your morning routine.

Speaker 2: 2:03

Proactive wellness and how to really get ahead of the curve. And as that evolved, that really became the underpinning of the brand of giving your body what it needs when it needs it. And as the smoothie craze caught on, we were at the forefront of that in the 90s and smoothies are a great way to get those whole fruits and vegetables which are packed with great nutrients, but also a way to work those supplements into a smoothie makes it even easier to take something. You know we were both chatting. We both have kids. Anytime you can make something a little tastier, a little bit easier, more enjoyable. It's easier to do regularly and make a part of your daily habit, daily routine. So smoothies really became the tip of the arrow for the brand and it's our supplement delivery system and we really focus on amazing functional wellness. But supplement delivery system and we really focus on amazing functional wellness.

Speaker 2: 2:46

But if you walk into an Earth Bar location today, we've got over 60 locations across the country, predominantly in California and New York, but we're really focused on functional wellness solutions, what your body needs when your body needs it, especially post workout. We're proud to have a national partnership with Equinox. We're in over 50 Equinox locations across California over 30 in Manhattan and we really love showing up for that Equinox member as California over 30 in Manhattan and we really love showing up for that Equinox member. As well as street stores across the country. And for anyone that doesn't live near an Earth Bar, we sell some of our leading supplements, including our Earth Fusion plant protein, which has been in literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of smoothies a year. We sell that at earthbarcom.

Speaker 2: 3:19

So we really want to make sure people get wellness solutions when they need it. But one of our big gaps and learnings with that many locations is how do we, without scaling a very large internal team, how do we keep a pulse on that guest experience? To keep that consistent, we've doubled our footprint. We had around 30 stores a year ago. Now we're over 60. So in scaling at that level, we really want to make sure we have the tools to keep a pulse on the customer and guest experience every step of the way too.

Speaker 1: 3:43

And I think it's so powerful that, as you've been able to expand even in non-traditional locations, it's really tough to do that. It's tough to do that successfully and it takes a focus on that guest experience. So what would you say, John, if you're looking at the guest experience, what is the most important aspect of guest experience nowadays?

Speaker 2: 4:00

So I think one thing that we really focus on is one of our core values energy. And I think people leaving the gym if they've just finished a walk, a workout, they're just out for a break and they need something. Food is energy, food is energy, food is medicine. And generally people coming into an Earth Bar, they want to feel better. Either they feel great and they want to feel amazing, or maybe they're under the weather. They want some immunity support. But people are coming into Earth Bar because they want to feel better than they feel before they walked in, and so our team members' ability to exude that energy we call them master mood shifters, right, our ability for you to walk out of Earth Bar in a better mood than you walked in, for that visit to be the best part of your day, the thing you look forward to is really important, and that's the hardest thing to quantify.

Speaker 2: 4:39

We can quantify speed of service. There's a way to figure out how fast you got through the line. We can quantify how well we've helped people add on to their check and our average ticket. There's a lot of things we can quantify if they use the app or not. One of the hardest things for a brand to quantify is what was that experience like? And surveys and things like that can be a lagging indicator. But we really love the tool of Ovation because we get that real-time feedback and, in a lot of cases, our ability to handle that guest experience.

Speaker 2: 5:06

In the moment we've really been able to democratize the way that we respond to guest feedback through the ovation tool and so we've even seen situations where a guest has a negative experience. They send in instant feedback about that experience on ovation. But they're in the space still, they're having their avocado toast, they're still talking with friends and we've been able to fix that experience or rectify it. And someone's like oh, you know, and more often than not what you find out is for whatever the issue was, it's sort of the bark is worse than the bite.

Speaker 2: 5:34

And sometimes, especially with social media, someone gives feedback and then you help them. It's like oh, like anything we can do to be the best part of that person's day, to make sure people feel the energy we have. And that really helps us find out within our organization who's really crushing it, who's really helping elevate the guest experience. It gives you metrics about your team that you wouldn't find ordinarily just from what you can get from your report, from your POS system, for example. Really just from what you can get from your report from your POS system, for example, you really find those diamond in the rough team members who are creating amazing moments that exude our culture, that tell you what we're about, and it's a way to sort of to cut a second layer deep and really find out what drives the business.

Speaker 1: 6:16

And I love that. Here we are. You're a CMO and you're talking about guest feedback. Normally, when people talk about feedback, they're like, oh, that's an operations thing, no-transcript.

Speaker 2: 6:30

Well, I think in discovery today, the way people discover brands, the people make shopping decisions based on friends recommendations, social media recommendations. We have a beautiful Instagram feed. I love the work we do on social media. I love our email. That's all foundational stuff that when you go to find out about Earth Bar, you find out what we're about and who we are. More often than not, it's a friend saying you've got to check this place out. And then when they go to our website they go to our Instagram. It's deepening the connection to.

Speaker 2: 6:57

I love Earth Bar because they do X, y and Z, but our best marketers are happy guests.

Speaker 2: 7:02

If we focus on happy guests and we focus on that relationship and especially in the environment we're in, we're a very unique concept because we're inside of Equinox but we're not part of Equinox.

Speaker 2: 7:14

But that Equinox member even though many of our locations are open to the public that Equinox member makes up a large percentage of that business, which is a double edged sword, because if they love you, that's great and they're going to be loyal, but if you have a negative experience with somebody that walks by you every day, it's easy for them to make that decision of oh, I just don't do earth bar after my workout anymore. That's not a guest. You get back necessarily because the gym has so many members and so it's really important to take especially good care of the experience of that guest, because if they're loyal, you have a really loyal repeat guest and if you create a negative experience that you're not able to really help work through with them, a negative experience will happen all the time and we welcome it because we learn from it. But if you don't do anything about it, that repeat guest intent starts to drift over time and that's where you lose connection.

Speaker 1: 8:00

I love that you said a negative experience could be a positive thing, right, because you learn from it, and I think that that's something where, as humans, we tend to shy away from that feedback. We tend to shy away from someone who had a negative experience. I don't necessarily want to dive into why is that? Or, like, why does this person not like me? And, as humans, we have the ability to kind of like, pick our friends, and we don't need very many friends to be happy. But as a restaurant, we don't have that luxury all the time.

Speaker 1: 8:30

And, yes, there's always going to be cases where we should be able to fire guests who maybe aren't a good fit for the brand, and that's OK.

Speaker 1: 8:37

But for the most part, you need a lot of people to come in and buy a $5 smoothie in order to make a successful business, right, and so I love that you're focusing in on what does that guest think, and then how do you improve that best think and then how do you improve that?

Speaker 1: 8:57

And one of the things I see you guys using well is the Goals AI, where you're able to take that feedback, look for those trends and actually then recommend the goals to the GMs to help them improve, and your GMs are doing a great job at making sure that they're improving, category by category, every single goal period, and I think that's impressive to see, and especially coming at this from a marketing perspective. One of the things that we always talk about is that if you want great marketing, you need to have exceptional operations, because you can't do all this work to bring someone in or bring someone back, and then there's a negative experience because there wasn't good training, because there wasn't good preparation, because, whatever the case is, restroom isn't clean right. The operations really are so critical to be married to marketing.

Speaker 2: 9:48

We're fortunate. We have an amazing relationship with our operations leaders and we're in constant communication, constant contact and and all those tools. You know we love AI, we lean on AI and everything we can advances in technology to make sure that we're serving each store and each guest correctly, and we do. We've got a really wide variety of store types, sizes, layouts and setup, and so we're not a one size fits all concepts, and so a goal that makes sense for one location just simply doesn't track for a new location, and one example of that is we have an app, and our Earth Bar app is a great way to order ahead and save time, and whenever we open a new location, it's very easy to get everybody on the app. It's everyone's first day at the gym and it's a little bit of like this is where this is how you do the lockers and this is where you get the towels and you order on the app, and so it's almost like first day of school Everybody just gets in line. And then there are other locations where we've taken over from a previous operator that didn't rely on the app so much and was more of a walk up or a wait in line or different flow, and so that's a really slow boat to turn, because now you're changing behavior of thousand plus people a day that this is how they get their smoothie after the gym, which is very different than a place that might be three blocks that way in Manhattan, and so to tell those two stores you need this to be your app. Adoption percentage isn't realistic, and so it's really important for those two stores to have goals that are meaningful for them so that they know what success looks like, and also for us to really understand the ins and outs of every store across the system, and all the changing dynamics takes a lot of manpower, takes a lot of people, a lot of analysis and a lot of data flow, and more often than not, ai will do that more nimbly to just the same degree, if not better, of analysis, and it will learn and see what's happening, and so we've really found it's a great way to help the stores find room for improvement, and then also, whether the goal makes sense or not, we can help train the system a little bit. So it's really just the same way marketing and operations work together.

Speaker 2: 11:45

We, as a business, are working with AI to not just take whatever AI says, as I guess that's what we're doing now, but as a trusted advisor with a ton of feedback, it's basically like if you could press pause and go spend a month asking a ton of people across the industry how they do something. You would still synthesize all that data and decide what you buy and what you don't, and what really aligns and what doesn't, and AI just speeds up that process. It's a way to get a lot of collective feedback in a short time, but it's still just like any tool. It's what you do with it. But for us it's an incredible game changer because our entire customer service operation runs through one individual, and she's a very talented individual and she's got a lot on her plate.

Speaker 2: 12:25

But without those tools, there wouldn't be a way to give thoughtful feedback to every single store in the system, and so, rather than have one person for every five stores just sort of watching the data all the time, it's really important for us not only for us to have that bird's eye view, but for those operators to have access to those tools, having the Ovation app to sit down with the general managers and see here's what's happening with your store over time. So we're most efficient where we teach our operations leaders how to use the tool to guide what's needed at each store and we focus on is the tool serving the stores? Is the tool set up correctly? Do the reports look correct? Are we measuring the right things, training on the right things? And that's where our training team comes in play, our operations team. So it's really helped us just orient around.

Speaker 2: 13:10

It's a single source of truth for what's the guest experience? And there's always different angles and feedback and any concept in some of these locations without a ton of feedback. If you get five pieces of feedback that are really actionable in a month and two of them are about your price, you have to make sure to not overreact and say, well, our prices are too high, we have to slash prices. And the same thing, if three people say you've got incredible service, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's the best store that's ever existed. But over time, the totality of all this data, they're all data points that you take into account and it gives us that single source of truth of everyone can orient around this one metric or this one tool and, just from my standpoint, just being able to see the alerts on my phone and Clay Sanger, who's our CEO, he wants every alert on his phone all the time. It gives you this great pulse, and so, for him especially, he's got this amazing ability to his gut.

Speaker 2: 14:01

Feel of just I feel like I've been seeing a lot of questions about this in this location more often than not is right, and so that's another example of you can get buy-in from across the organization without everyone having to dive into the data. So, depending on how people learn or react or how people want to be engaged with, gives you a lot of different ways for people to engage. Some people that love the data want to dive into the spreadsheets. Some people want to see a daily recap, and so they just get the daily recap. Some people want to see the weekly recap. So it also gives us a lot of ways to get leadership buy-in and connection to what's going on without us having to send out some massive daily. Here's what's happening in the world of customer service, and it's more of a self-serve solution for our internal leadership to have a pulse on the stores.

Speaker 1: 14:43

I think it's so important to keep that connection right, because, for Ovation, we actually use Ovation right. So at the bottom of every email that you're talking about, we have smiley faces where people can give feedback on what they love or what they don't love about Ovation, and similarly, I get everything to my inbox and right to my phone, actually, and like if there's an issue that I see, yeah, we jump in and we help navigate through any of those issues, and I like that. How you describe that, though, of like that company alignment, where we're all seeing the same things, and so it's not like someone's shocked that wait, what happened over there, but we're all on the same thread, we're all working towards the same goal, which is creating a great guest experience, and building value.

Speaker 2: 15:28

It takes any politics out of it. Also, where it takes out this notion of like you're telling on a store, if it's like, hey, like I saw this thing on customer service and now I'm going to tell leadership that one store is having an issue with one thing, it's really more, hey, we've all been seeing this trend, or hey, we can all see, or we can all agree, or the numbers say this, and so it takes any personal feelings out of it, and so the data is the data. We all see the numbers, we all see it in real time, personal feelings out of it, and so the data is the data. We all see the numbers, we all see it in real time and, like I said, we're a brand that we welcome feedback. We're not a huge corporate infrastructure. We've got a lot of stores spread out nationally and that footprint's growing, and so the only way we're going to be able to keep a pulse on the quality of the experience and how guests are feeling is using technology and using tools, and so all feedback helps us get better at. Any piece of feedback that leads us to a solution saves us someone having to fly out to that market, to that store, to troubleshoot what's going on, to see declining sales four months later and find out that there's just been some gap.

Speaker 2: 16:24

That's creating a negative guest experience. It's turning members off over time. It's like that's. We don't have time to wait for the problem to show up, and so it's a great early warning system for anything that might become a larger problem down the road. It's helped us a ton on product quality too. We've certainly made decisions from a product standpoint where we thought that we could change this ingredient for this ingredient, and we've tested it and we try it and we take a lot of pride, and when you do something at scale across the market, you find out that the guests experienced something different than you did. We've been able to reverse course on decisions before, say, just based on feedback, so it's really helpful for us. It's like having thousands of secret shoppers across the country. That's invaluable feedback and things we wouldn't see ourselves. We find out all the time.

Speaker 1: 17:04

Well, that's awesome, john, and I was going to ask you about tactics, but I feel like we've been talking tactics this whole time and, especially, I think the one thing that I really want to pull out for our listeners is the fact that AI is a trusted advisor. You shouldn't look at it as like, hey, this is going to do my whole job now, but you look at it like if you hire a restaurant consultant that comes in and they say, hey, john, here's 10 things that you should do, and you're like okay, based on our brands and our goals and what we're doing, these three are the most important, and so it's about really focusing in on using AI as a way to enhance yourself and not as a way to replace yourself.

Speaker 2: 17:43

One thing that I've shared with my team in a cross organization is it's tricky because AI looks like a technology and it is. It's based in technology, but if you treat it like a technology, you won't get much out of it. So if you treat AI like Google or if you treat AI like email, you won't get much out of it. As we try to roll out AI across, even our teams, like you, get questions, which are totally valid questions of can we get training on AI or how can we get some training on how to use AI, and we'll use it more.

Speaker 2: 18:13

What I share is almost like just pretend I said, hey, the thing that you do for your role, I've got somebody for you to talk with, that's done it before, that's really good at it. Just take it all with a grain of salt, but I'm gonna give you their info. And they love to do like a 30 minute call with you and that person wouldn and say, well, can you train me on how to have that phone call? Can you train me on how to talk to the contact you're connecting with? You say, oh yeah, I guess I'll see what they have to say.

Speaker 2: 18:40

So it's awkward because it's a computer program and it's a keyboard, but you almost have to talk to it. And you have to be more honest than you would be even on that phone call with that expert and say, hey, I've got a question. There's something that I should know how to do in my job and I just don't. And where should I start Right? Hey, my bosses have asked me to do something and I don't know where to start. Or I'm having a challenge with something that doesn't quite make sense. What are five ways I should attack this problem right? Or we've even done it just from doing internal surveys with our team, right? If we wanted to do X, y and Z with a future product launch, what do we want to ask our team members? Right?

Speaker 2: 19:13

So it's really treated as an advisor and a sounding board of bounds. And have a conversation with it and you'd be surprised how it learns over time, and that's been a big shift for us as well. As, just don't be shy to show your thorns. It's a great place to ask those silly questions you might be embarrassed to raise your hand about on a call. It just speeds up the iteration cycle so much. And then the caution of all that is to make sure that you don't copy paste and lose yourself in the process, right, and make sure you still apply your own filter, your own layer, your own expertise and and you don't get lost in. That's better than what I would have come up with, because that's where you sort of can go sideways with it. But you know, manage correctly and treat it like someone you're just having a conversation with and you're going to come back from that conversation and share your best ideas. One of my coaches.

Speaker 1: 19:59

he's like hey, I had an hour conversation with ChatGPT yesterday or had a two hour strategy session with ChatGPT on Saturday, and so like he talks about it just like that of not using it as like a plug in, plug out, but JetGPT does strategy so well and so that's something to leverage. I love that. John, now you know a lot of people in this industry. I know we're out of time here, but like I'd love to get any advice on like who is someone that we should be following, who's someone that deserves an ovation?

Speaker 2: 20:27

So there's a brand that is in the restaurant space. It's called Carla Cafe, which I just love, and it's a couple that, during the pandemic, started making sandwiches out of their house and then started making them available for friends and then, before you know it, it was one of these Instagram, if you know, you know kind of things where you could DM them and you could Venmo them and pick up a sandwich. It was there's a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard that was obviously closed during COVID, but out the side window you could pick up your sandwich after you Venmoed for it, and they were just amazing amazing sandwiches and great quality and there wasn't much to do at the time, and so I would drop my daughter off at preschool and go wait for my sandwich and my wife thought I was crazy she's just going to go sit in your car and wait for your $17 sandwich. I was like there's not a whole lot else to do and watching them grow and they've opened their first brick and mortar location and it's just a fun brand.

Speaker 2: 21:18

But I think what I love about it is they're really committed to the food, to the quality and to not cutting corners and they stand for something in their food and the sandwiches are amazing and I'm a huge sandwich and salad fan. I love a good tuna chop, which is my favorite there, and we'd love to do something with them one day. We'll see if there's ever an Earth Bar, carlyle cafe collab in the works, but I could see like a protein smoothie sandwich.

Speaker 1: 21:43

you know something there? Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2: 21:44

They do great. They do great cafe drinks. It's been a fun brand to follow. I love stories like that, those stories where there's a similar one down the street from me here in Redondo Beach in Hermosa called Proudly Serving. Similar story with burgers and someone that started making burgers in his driveway during the pandemic and is now up in two locations and just very innovative, very committed to the food and very committed to the vibe, just creating a great guest experience and great vibe. When you see brands like that, you know what they stand for. There's a real fingerprint on it and I love to see that. So it's been fun to watch those two brands grow, which are local brands which I'm sure you'll be hearing more about in the future, but I'm big fans of both. Super cool, john.

Speaker 1: 22:21

Well, john, thanks so much for joining us today and for, Coast to Coast, helping us live healthy and happy. Today's ovation goes to you. Appreciate you so much coming on here with us. Thanks a lot, appreciate it. Have a good day. 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.