Welcome And What Ovation Does

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Given in Ovation, the Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Zach Goates, 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 AI feedback and operations platform built for multi-unit restaurants. Learn what's actually happening in your restaurants and exactly how to improve while driving revenue. Learn more at ovationup.com.

Meet Chris Ives And His Path

SPEAKER_01 0:27

And today we have a good friend of mine and someone that I really look up to in this industry, Chris Ives, CEO and president of Bubba Coo's Burritos. And Chris, you've got a really interesting background because not only have you been in the FB space for a long time, but you've got the finance and operations background. So when you took over the helm as CEO, having that finance background, having an operations background, I mean, really interesting, giving you a great perspective on what's going on. Before we jump in, first of all, thank you for joining us on the podcast, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Yeah, man, absolutely. Love, love to be here. Appreciate all the stuff that you do for us as a brand and love to give back. So happy to chat.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Yeah. So talk to me about this journey between finance, operations, back to finance, and now CEO. Like, how has that finance background helped you as a CEO? Because obviously, operations, I get it, right? This is an operations business. But talk to me about the finance.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah, it's been an interesting road. I mean, just the level set it. I did grow up in a kitchen. So I've been in a family-run catering business since the age of like eight. I've been washing dishes. So that was always my motive not to get into restaurants just because I never saw my parents growing up. But that sort of gave me the ambition to go to school. And I just happened to land in accounting and I started my career at big four. But at the end of the day, it's obviously the infrastructure of what the businesses run on. I'm very keen and very close to the puts and takes of the profitability of what makes uh operators make money, as more importantly, their ROI on their investment in our brand. So I think I always come with the overall mindset of how is this generating actual dollars, not so much margin, to our franchisees. So any discussions that we're, you know, we're war board, you know, war war session over, we're constantly just going through it. Does this make money to our franchisees? Taking away the ops and the marketing piece of it, it always just comes down to dollar and cents.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Yeah, I mean, because what we always say in ovation is like there's your PL tells you where you're at, and your guest experience tells you where you're going. And everything that you do in business, every investment that you make is either to help improve the PL or to help improve the guest experience. And there are some things that do both, and there are some things that hurt both, but at the end of the day, it's like you've got to look at both, and and you've got such a keen eye on that guest experience side of things too. How do you look at the guest experience? How does that play a part in understanding the value and the money that's coming in?

Finance Thinking That Protects Franchisees

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Yeah, I mean, for me, it starts at a high level of what's the overall experience that's, you know, is the guest overall happy within the four walls? If they're happy, I'm going in there to see, okay, what is that crew doing differently than the same type of store that's got the same type of real estate, same type of everything, but what is actually driving the business forward? And that sometimes doesn't happen from a metric standpoint. You can look at all the KPIs in the world, but you got to go into the shops and really figure out what's the difference in culture that's driving it from a guest or you know, a guest perspective. We kick and scream over metrics, you know, you know, from being behind the computer, but to really, really understand what's going on is we're going out in the field just to figure out why this franchisee having so much success? 9.99 times out of 10, it always comes down to the culture and the DNA of that franchise operator versus the other operator. You just it's hard to teach people. And some operators get it, some people get it, others don't. And that's always the hardest part to coach and to challenge people on.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

What do you say? What does that actually look like? Like if you were to give the anatomy of a really good culture, what what does that look like that you've seen?

SPEAKER_00 3:53

It's case by case because every culture is different in the store, but I would say uh at the end of the day, it's the people within the shop are generally happy to work, whether it's to the franchisee uh as an owner operator or as a manager. If you could get your people to buy in on your overall goals and you're transparent and you do that servant leadership, it's not about, hey, you know, uh, we need to save 10 cents on PICO because you're putting too much Pico on, but it's more like, hey, I intentionally uh served more food today just to, you know, to make the guests happy they were having a rough day, and I gave them an extra scoop of protein of chicken, you know, on the house. So having that culture of just understanding and being able to adapt to each person uh because everybody's different, especially, you know, the kids, you know, the gen alphas of the world that are primarily making our bowls and burritos uh in today's world, just knowing how to really connect with those folks at their level is just critical. And if you don't, you just get lost and you just have a lot of turnover, and that goes into the overall flywheel of burning money on labor.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

Yeah, I mean, totally. And I love that idea of an extra scoop of protein because I'm actually surprised that hearing a former CFO and Big Four accountant talk about an extra scoop of protein, because we all know how those protein uh costs are going up, but I think it goes back to like this book right behind my head, which is Unreasonable Hospitality and that whole 95-5 of what can you do in that extra 5% because you're so careful with that first 95% to create a great guest experience, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Absolutely. Especially if it's a first-time guest. Like if you're engaging and it's the first time that they've come into you know into our four walls and just doing the small things that they're you know they're picking up on, it goes a long way. And you know, get that guest back in from a frequency standpoint is everything. So that's sort of the uh contribution cost on that on that one guest. But that, you know, again, you could go to five stores

Culture As The Real Growth Engine

SPEAKER_00 5:40

and you can, you know, sometimes you could just see five different personalities and you just know right away within the first 10 seconds of walking into the operation, you know the experience that you're gonna have.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Yeah, very true, right? When you get in and people are like, hey, welcome to Moe's, as opposed to like, welcome to Moe's. Like you could you feel it, right? You feel the vibe. So, what do you think is the most important aspect of guest experience nowadays?

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Oh, this is I don't want to say it's cheesy, but for us, it's still at the end of the day, it's just the basic, genuine hospitality of speaking to the guests and just not going through the transactional steps of our menu. We are a build-your own concept. You can have a great employer that could do that, awesome. But they're just doing the bare basics of asking them, you know, rice, beans, protein, boa, queso. There's really no engagement. They're doing it friendly, they're smiling, but they're just not having that genuine conversation of, you know, hey, did you watch Knicks game last night? You see the win, that was awesome. Or hey, you got a Yankees hat on, big Yankees fan, you know, love judge. So just coaching on having genuine conversations when they're paying a premium goes a long way. You might not always hit it, not, you know, 10 out of 10 on the food quality, but just being a genuine person and getting down to that personal level and personal touch is everything. And that's very, very hard to execute on. It's it's easy, but it's it's extremely hard. And you need the right person and you got to know your team of where you're gonna put them. Because if Susie's great at the POS, but she's got a horrible, you know, last touch, that's your last expression, uh, you know, touch that your guest is gonna have before they leave. So you got to know where you got to put your aces in places.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

That's a really good point because one of the things that we hear a lot about is this concept of you've got your last mile that everyone talks about, but really what about the last three feet when you're handing something across the counter, when you're handing something through that drive-thru window, right? It's like that last three feet is way more important than anything else, because we were talking about the price of tomatoes before we hit record, and we're talking about thinking about training, thinking about all the things that you need to do. And if that last three feet interaction is not positive, then every other thousand things that went into that supply chain to get that food to them is kind of is for naught, right? Because it's about how the guest feels about it. And so when you think about that, what are some tactics that you've been using to improve

Genuine Hospitality Over Transactional Service

SPEAKER_01 7:55

the guest experience?

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Again, we're getting back to the basics. I mean, that that's been you know probably a cliche term over the the past few years here, but really it's let's forget about all the technology, let's forget about all the AI, let's just focus on what we could control. We can't control gas, we can't control the war, we can't control the macro, you know, which wars. Yeah, exactly. Uh end of the day, though, what we can control is delivering on you know a genuine hospitality experience. So just constantly beating it down our throats of literally just making sure that people are coaching, having those prep rallies before every shift to make sure that we're engaging with our guests and thanking them for their business and just having that small talk. So, I mean, really, it's taking away the noise and just focusing on what we can control has been our focus for the past 90 days. We just introduced um a value offer, which is something we've never done at $10. That's a very bold value for us. But it's really with the initiative to get people back into the restaurants to order in-house, forget about the digital side. Let's go after getting people back in and showing them what we're all about. You're starting to see that more and more, you know, not to go off topic here, but like even like going into Home Depot these days, you have the people coming up to you, ask how they can help you. Probably a year or two years ago, people on Home Depot were running away from you. They didn't want to talk to you. So you're starting to see the brands just really focus on engagement. And that's something that we just continue to coach on. Stop worrying about the third parties, stop worrying about the digital side. Every single guest that's in front of you, let's focus on them, let's win them back, and let's deliver on a great experience. So everything that we're talking about is all about delivering on our three uh critical standards when it comes to hospitality. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

And that back to basics is something that you see, like there's a couple of bellwethers in the industry, right? You look at Starbucks, you look at McDonald's, you look at the amount of money that they put into their strategy. And if you kind of align with their customers, you'd be wise to really study that. And Starbucks really going back to the basics, hospitality, McDonald's really focusing on new innovative items to like get people in and get them curious again, and not saying that you may think as a restaurateur, oh, like that's not my customer. But at the end of the day, like I've seen a lot of different kinds of people in McDonald's. Now that I got four kids, I go to McDonald's all the time because the play place, and there's lots of people that go in there. I mean, I see some really nice cars in McDonald's, and so anyway, I just would challenge anyone who says, no, I don't want to follow them because they're not my people, you know, occasions, man, right? That's right.

Back To Basics Training And Value Offers

SPEAKER_01 10:30

So as you think about, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask how ovation's been helpful for you.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

Yeah, of course. I mean, I'd been a big I think when we acquired, uh when Thompson Street acquired us, ovation was one of my main initiatives to roll out. I just was never, you know, meeting the customer where they are, emails were a thing of the past. They work. You could probably be a little more creative on what you want to get from them with with some of the surveys, but people want fast response and just the overall text messaging opportunity to troubleshoot a poor experience live, the amount of recoveries that you see, like wow, I wasn't talking to a robot. I would appreciate it. They're not even looking for money, they're just looking for acknowledgement. So end of the day, ovation gives us, I think somebody else might even said it before on one of your podcasts or somewhere else, but it really is like that heartbeat of the business to like really just get a quick sense of, hey, how's this market doing or how's this store doing every Monday going in to see what you know what the results were last week? Because reviews are always just nobody's gonna really always go out of their way to give you a great review. Google's always a lot of negative reviews if they have a bad experience, but to really go after and benchmark a store on great reviews as well as poor reviews, this was really the tool that I thought was the best fit for you know for our brand. So again, you know, we we live and breathe it every day. We're now tracking it from a frequency standpoint with another partner, Picky. And that's really what's important to us to say, okay, is it a pure marketing thing or is it a pure ops thing? The one thing that is a little challenging is people, my team or or whether it's an operator or a manager, we're always just focused on the negative ovation reviews. And it's like, okay, you got to sometimes pull yourself out. If you have one, okay, it could be isolated. Let's look at it, let's not overreact because one person left a scathing, you know, comment through a text message. But that's just us as humans, that's how we react. So I just think it's not being in the stores every single day. It allows us, you know, we're 150 shops across the you know, the eastern, you know, eastern seaboard uh primarily. It allows us to see how our guests either love us or you know, we have opportunities. And that's what I love so much about the tool because it's quick and it allows the guests to give a you know a quick uh thumbs up or thumbs down. And you're starting to see some

Real Time Feedback With Ovation

SPEAKER_00 12:35

of the uh the door to ashes of the world, they're starting to even transition to how they you know leave in reviews with the you know that type of um feedback tool as well. So yeah, overall it's been one of my most favorite rollouts partnerships that we've had, but just gives you intangible value of how stores are performing afar.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

Yeah, well, I I appreciate that. And I think that as I think about the winning side of things, because you know, you look at the dashboard, and that's why we we ended up putting all of the uh data and information on the mobile dashboard so that way people can see all the wins that they're getting outside of just the daily and weekly emails. I we put that in the app, and now we're building out different views of the data so that way you can see the positive things more easily, because that is something that's tricky, right? It's like you get the instant alerts because that guest who has a problem, that's an opportunity to recover that guest. And so we don't want to inundate GMs with every single review because you all get quite a few pieces of feedback that are and and the vast majority of them being very positive. But it's like you still got to figure out how to make sure the GM knows that they're doing a good job. So anyway, we got some cool things in the pipeline. And by the way, I'll I'll uh I know we got a hard stop here, but once we hit pause on this podcast, I'm I'm gonna talk to you about a couple of things that are

Where To Find Bubba Coo’s

SPEAKER_01 13:50

in the pipeline. So, but Chris, how do people find and follow you and Bubba Coos?

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Oh, let's focus on Bubba Coos. You don't want to follow me. Um Bubba Coos, yeah, you can find us at Bubba Coos.com. You know, we're all over LinkedIn, TikTok, Meta. But yeah, you know, hopefully if you haven't heard of Bubba Coos, you you get to try us or look us up. In my opinion, obviously I'm I'm a little selfish here, but I think it's one of the best burritos, you know, in the space. We're totally different. We focus on that fusion element, create something different on all of our walls. And that, you know, that's what our mission is is you know to deliver on a create something different experience, you know, with genuine hospitality and credible food. So yeah, that's Bubakoos. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Well, Chris, for helping crush the burrito market, because I sure love Bubba Coos. Today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Givenovation. 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're all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by Ovation, a two-question estimated, 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.gov.