SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Give and Ovation, the Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Zach Oates, and each week I get to chat with industry experts to get 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's actually happening in your restaurants and how to improve without just a long survey. Learn more at ovationup.com. And I am so excited to have Amanda Kahalahoy with us today. She is the COO of Vicious Biscuit. I have heard her speak from stage. Amanda and I have connected at numerous trade shows. She has got such a great emphasis on the guest experience and has a brand to prove it. So Amanda, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00: 0:47

Thank you for having me, Zach.

SPEAKER_01: 0:49

So for those who aren't familiar, tell me a little bit about Vicious Biscuit. First of all, what a cool brand. Because it's not like, you know, there are some brands that are like try to be way super aggressive, and there are some brands that are like very bland. And I think Vicious Biscuit strikes that balance of like you hear it and it sounds edgy, but not like I'm trying to be edgy. So tell me about the brand for those who don't know about it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12

Yeah. So the van brand started in Charleston, South Carolina in 2018. So flagship location is in a little, you know, town right outside of Charleston, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, one of the suburbs of Charleston proper. And it took off. There was such fervor around this brand. It actually started as a catering concept. It's very indulgent biscuit creations. We obviously have a pretty diverse menu of other things, not just biscuits. We have our, you know, healthy options, shareables, craft cocktails. We do it all. It's a very diverse brunch. You know, we're open seven to two on the weekdays, seven to three on the weekends. And the brand has just accelerated its growth in the last seven years. So we started in Charleston, opened another location in Somerville, which is just outside, about 30 miles outside of Charleston. And then we spread out a little bit just to understand and get to know who our market was and who our customer was. So we have currently six corporate locations. We have three open franchise locations, and we have four more franchise locations in development as we speak, opening in Q1 of 2026. So we have scaled and grown. And you're right. So the brand, it's really a delicate balance between leaning into that vicious name, but also leaning into the culture of that Southern roots with that hospitality. So we're vicious in what we do in terms of the food. It's unique, it's you know flavorful, it's powerful. But in terms of the culture itself, we're very deeply rooted in hospitality.

SPEAKER_01: 2:38

Yeah. And I think that the thing, like you look online, like I'm looking at your pictures right now. I'm looking at this biscuit, eggs, bacon, and potatoes. And it's just like, oh man, I feel like I just want to go to like auntie grandma's house and like sit down and have that for breakfast. Like it just looks so happy. Yes. And I love that emphasis that you have on thinking about what does the guest feel about this? And that's something I've heard you talk about before. And so talk to me about your philosophy on what do you feel like is the most important aspect of guest experience nowadays?

SPEAKER_00: 3:10

Yeah. And that's such a good question, Zach, because I think today the consumer expects more than just good food, right? They want to be seen, to be known, to be met where they are in their dining experience, right? This landscape, they want you to deliver something that is frictionless, that's personalized. That's not an advantage anymore. That is a differentiator in this particular climate of the restaurant industry, I think. So, you know, we live in a time where you no longer need to outflavor and outprice your competitor. You have to out-serve them. You have to out care for them, you have to out hospitality or competition. And I think what we've done really well is that, you know, we lean into the vicious side of that, right? We've never lost sight of that. And I think when brands have leaned into automation and efficiency at the expense of the guest experience, we've doubled down on the hospitality. And not just in the dining room, right? We translate it across all channels to really interact with the guest. You know, born in the South, but we're built to serve our hospitality everywhere, which is hard to scale. We're all over. We're up in Ohio, we're over in Mississippi, Louisiana, down in Florida.

SPEAKER_01: 4:14

You're even in South Jersey. Yeah, Florida, South Jersey, right?

SPEAKER_00: 4:17

Uh, not uh so yeah, no, I'm I'm joking.

SPEAKER_01: 4:20

So yeah, I know I'm from Jersey. That's what we call okay. So you get it. I think that's the sixth borough, right? Yeah, I mean, I know everyone's got oh I got a cousin in Florida, but I love that you need to out hospitality your competition because I love that line of that your food and your service, that's like table stakes, but it's like how do they feel? How do they really feel, right? And that hospitality goes beyond service, as our good friend Will Gadera talks about. And it's about being seen, being felt, being heard, feeling that on the other side, love, right? And that uh hand-to-hand combat is what it takes to win in restaurants nowadays. It's no longer, hey, just put up your sign and start flipping pancakes. You gotta have that hand to hand. And if you're not ready to get hand to hand with your guests and make sure that whether they're dining in, dining out, that they know that you care about them and their experience and you're making it use the word frictionless for you to connect with them, this might not be the right industry for you anymore because that's what it takes, right?

SPEAKER_00: 5:24

It does. I was at a conference, I was at QSR in Atlanta, and the other speaker on my panel, he said probably the most brilliant line I had heard in a long time. He said, Before COVID, we were the hospitality business. After COVID, we became the food industry. And I think that single shift said it all. You know, you wonder why traffic is down as an industry. It's because people no longer feel some anything when they're dining out, right? It's formulaic, soulless, predictable, it's templated. That's something we really try hard to combat and bring back that hospitality and that full service feel, even though that we're fast casual.

SPEAKER_01: 6:00

So, with that, what are some tactics that you've used to improve the guest experience?

SPEAKER_00: 6:05

So if you don't know, we've really launched a lot this year in terms of our technology stack to really understand, you know, our customer base, number one. But we also, I would say the simplest and most overlooked tactic is what we double down on is listening to our guests, which is ironic, right? This is your podcast and this is your wheelhouse. But I think brands really truly forget it's not just about the praise and compliments, that feedback that you get, but it's patterns, it's preferences, it's the unmet expectations and feedback that are hiding in plain sight. And I think a commitment to listening has directly shaped our initiatives, right? So recently we we launched a catering platform, rewards program, branded mobile app. That was all born entirely of guest feedback through surveys and studies that we did to listen to our guests, and we heard them. They wanted flexibility, they wanted customization, they wanted to engage with us beyond the four walls. So we tried to build an experience around that, integrating loyalty, frequency, customization, getting them to engage with us on their own terms. But what I will say is I think that's where it becomes a choke point for a lot of brands, right? You can listen, you can implement, but then there's this whole piece of follow-through, right? So once you launch something, whatever it is, we stay in listening mode always because our guests have lots of opinions, whether it's around experience, user experience, menu visibility, menu ideation, delivery speeds, delivery fees. We don't ignore them. So we try to take feedback and really apply real-time adjustments, proving to our guests that their voices are heard and they're not lost in a void. And I think that's a really underrated way to deliver a great guest experience. And I think too, it creates a team experience where they're seeing their leadership react and respond to feedback in real time. And it empowers them also to deliver feedback and hospitality and that experience over the top. And it empowers them to do the same, if you will. So hospitality starts here. We try to deliver it by listening and applying the feedback and not letting it get lost in a natural void. And that has elevated the experience and really created recurring customers for us.

SPEAKER_01: 8:14

How do you differentiate between the really vocal minority? You know, there's one or two people who will come in and just make such a stink about this one thing, but it's just not a trend that you're seeing. How do you differentiate between the trends and the loud one person?

SPEAKER_00: 8:32

Yeah. We say no. We do. We can't be everything to everybody. And I think that's where we lean into the vicious. I will tell you, we get a lot of feedback right now around people are very concerned what's in their food products, and rightfully so. But we can't be everything to everybody. We might not carry a vegan product, we might not have this special soy oil that only this particular consumer can eat. So we're transparent, we take the feedback, we try to educate and explain to the best of our ability, but there is a point where we can only deliver so much to the guest experience. So we may not capture every customer. We do our best. Our most recent medu ideation has been around gluten-free. We have a wonderful gluten-free product, probably one of the best out there in terms of biscuits. I personally like it more than all of our other biscuits. Don't tell anybody. Well, I just told the world. Okay, it's fantastic. I won't tell anyone. But we've curated an entire menu around it because we saw this growing trend of guests and consumers that really wanted it. But we're not dairy free in many ways. So there's just some nuances to that. We're trying to listen to the trends and the feedback, but we do have to listen mostly to the masses because there's real expense to that, right? So you just have to know when to say no. Your brand is who your brand is, and you have to do that well. And I think there's some great brands out there that do that. I think that's the success of Chick-fil-A and the success of raising canes. They knew who they are, they do their product extremely well, and they don't change who they are for others. They are their brand.

SPEAKER_01: 9:59

We actually had just a couple weeks ago the what I refer to lovingly as the sixth guy of five guys. Yeah. He was the guy that came in and they they brought him into actually they had a couple locations, and he franchised them all the way up to where they are today, 500 or something. Yeah. Anyway, so I was chatting with him on this podcast a couple weeks ago, and the choice that five guys made to use peanut oil and to have peanuts in their store. I mean, there's five percent of the population that is like either deathly allergic to or immediately related to someone who is deathly allergic to peanuts, where they can't even walk into a five guys. But they did that because they knew who they were, they knew who they weren't, and like that was a choice. They're not the choice for everyone. Plus, not everybody wants to buy like a$25 hamburger and fries, but some people do, and they're crushing it and they're great. I love that mentality of really leaning into who you are. Like, how did you come about figuring out what is vicious biscuit and what isn't vicious biscuit? Like, what would you recommend to a brand who's trying to understand where do I say no?

SPEAKER_00: 11:06

It is trial and error. I don't think there's a direct roadmap. I think there's a couple things. You have to, you know, again, we listen to the feedback of the consumers, but it really does come down to the operation and the team. Because if they can't execute something because it's complex and or it creates a really disengaging or negative environment for them, that's going to translate down to the guest. So what we try to do is really put the operations, even when we menu ideate, right? So I mean everybody is on the track of LTOs, seasonality are always trying to push traffic. When we ideate, we're always thinking about the complexity of the business. When we added first party ordering, we reduced the modifications for the consumer because, again, it's a lot for the team to execute. We want their experience to be positive. And thus a lot of what we do and how we say no leans into the team experience.

SPEAKER_01: 11:59

Interesting. So, how do you talk to your team? Like, how do you understand what your team is feeling about things? Do you survey them? Do you just do store visits? What's your philosophy?

SPEAKER_00: 12:08

We do surveys. They're usually on a quarterly basis. We spend a lot of time in the restaurants and we also have weekly Zoom calls with them just to get their feedback. You know, in particular, I have been on each GM call, I think, since the start of August, or actually when we started pilot testing. So this goes back to July, our app, and just constantly getting their feedback around their friction points and just hearing what they're saying in the business. This created a negative interaction with the team. This is very difficult to train. This creates complexity when we're sending this out to go. It's asking a lot of questions. It's asking where can I help? Where can I lean in? Where are the friction points? Where are the guests giving you negative feedback? Because the MOD process for us has a high touch point in our brand as part of the operational service point. If you don't know our concept, you order Fast Casual at a counter, but everything else is full service. So we bring our food, your food out to you, we bust your tables, and there's a manager that touches each of those tables to get feedback from the guest. So we're constantly ingesting that information. We want highly efficient throughput. We want great food quality, both in dining and off-premises. Our food carries very well. So, you know, for us, a lot of again, what we say no around is really just what works and what doesn't. When we first started, we didn't put everything on the third-party menu because we didn't know how it would carry. We didn't know how it was traveling. We wanted to make sure the customer had the best experience because if that was their first time engaging with Ficious Biscuit, we wanted it to be as good as the dine-in experience. So a lot of it is just around operational excellence.

SPEAKER_01: 13:38

That word operational excellence is a pretty polarizing phrase because there's so many things that it entails and doesn't entail. Like, what do you define as operational excellence?

SPEAKER_00: 13:47

Guest feedback, number one, the guest experience. I'm sure you've seen the red napkin technique. The guest has you have almost Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01: 13:55

I actually just was with John Taffer yesterday. Uh the Craveworthy stuff. I mean, yeah, I mean, that the red napkin thing is just the getting them to come in that third time is just so critical.

SPEAKER_00: 14:06

So we have a proprietary method that we know in this restaurant at all times who's a first-time guest. It's part of our script, it's part of our operational component.

SPEAKER_01: 14:15

Do you put a sticker on their forehead? It's like, hey, just uh something to that effect.

SPEAKER_00: 14:20

But at any time, the manager can scan the dining room and any team member, and they know who's a first-time guest versus not. And there's a reason to that because we know we have one chance to wow that guest. And if we can capture them a second time and a third time, there's tremendous lifetime value to that guest. And so we're really monitoring frequency, especially as we now have more data points through all of our new technology integrations. And we've seen this tremendous lift as we benefit from new initiatives, benefit from rewarding the guests, right? Making them feel that they are a part of our culture and community. So there's just a lot of that's really what it's about. It's just capturing that guest and getting frequency out of them. It's so hard to acquire a new guest. You have such great opportunity to bring your existing guests back. And we love having our cult fouling. I'm not joking. Today, we just got something from a guest. They made a country song about us. Oh my gosh. I mean, that's the kind of guests that we have. They run, they make ads for us. I mean, we really do. We get personalized letters all of the time. I mean, that's how you know that you're doing something pretty special.

SPEAKER_01: 15:27

Yeah, I love that. Awesome. Well, Amanda, who is someone in the restaurant industry that we should be following? Who's someone who deserves an ovation?

SPEAKER_00: 15:35

Sure. I had to think really long and hard about this question, Zach, because there's so many amazing restaurateurs out there that are innovating and just inspiring. So I picked someone that is a little non-traditional. They're not an operator, but they make waves in this industry. Do you know Will Brawley, restaurant owners Uncorked?

SPEAKER_01: 15:54

Oh no, I don't.

SPEAKER_00: 15:56

So if you are not following the podcast, Restaurant Owners Uncorked, you need to. Will Brawley, look him up. He's on everything Spotify, Apple Podcasts. I think he just has this masterclass in storytelling and connection and real world insights. He has such a gift of getting people to open up and not about the headlines and the polished PR, but about the real challenges of the business, their lessons, their losses, their breakthroughs, what defines the business. He just has this unique ability to connect all the dots across a very human industry. And he amplifies the voice of everybody. It can be an independent operator, a multi-unit operator, legacy brand leaders, young emerging founders. He's archiving the heart of hospitality, I think. For me, for I didn't grow up in this industry, right? I don't come. So I come with these fresh eyes and I have had to learn through a lot of trial and error and experience. And I found that he is the connective tissue, and we need more people that make our industry visible and accessible.

SPEAKER_01: 16:55

Yeah. Seeing the logo, I know I've seen this. I know I've heard the podcast looking at what there is. And I mean, he's got 615 episodes. Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00: 17:06

Yeah, he's phenomenal. And there's some really unique folks on there. But again, it's not just fluff, it's real challenges and real stories of how people have scaled their business. And if you're a restaurateur, he's absolutely one to give a listen to.

SPEAKER_01: 17:19

Very cool. Love that. Yeah. Awesome. Well, how do people find and follow you in Vicious Biscuit? Sure.

SPEAKER_00: 17:25

Viciousbiscuit.com. We're on LinkedIn. We're on Instagram at Vicious Biscuits. We're on Facebook, Vicious Biscuit, TikTok, Vicious Biscuits CHS. And if you're in one of our markets and we have 10 of them currently, please download our new app. It's Vicious Biscuit. You can find it in the Google Play Store or the App Store. You can earn points, rewards, and uh secret menu coming up.

SPEAKER_01: 17:46

Awesome. Well, Amanda, for being the sweetest, vicious brand that I know of, and for being songworthy, today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us in appreciate it, Zach. Thanks for joining us today. If you like 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 ovationup.com.