Hey, it’s Roger back at you with another Restaurant Rockstars episode. Today, I’m speaking with Adam Klaers, the Executive Vice President of a legacy brand called Roy Rogers.

 we’re going to talk about relevance. marketing strategy leadership and staff retention, which is so important today. We’re also going to talk about about menus limited time offers and lost leaders anything that will move the needle because he is also an expert at increasing transactions per store and that is important to all of us.

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Welcome back, everyone, to the Restaurant Rock Stars podcast. So glad you’re with us today. And Adam, welcome to the show. Psyched to have you here. Great to be here with you, Roger. Fantastic. You’re a high energy guy and you’ve got so much operating expertise. I can’t wait to dive in, everybody has a backstory in hospitality.

When did it all begin for you? Tell us your journey.

Yeah, great question. I’ve been in hospitality for about 12 years or so. I got introduced to to hospitality and the restaurant industry through a good friend of mine that was a franchise business consultant for Yum! Brands. I originally started in Louisville, Kentucky, the home of Yum!

Brands. And he introduced me to Taco Bell and I came on board with Taco Bell and And learned really hospitality. It was David Novak at the time had written a couple of books and was leading yum brands, good to great things like that. So that’s really when I got started into into the hospitality and into the restaurant business.

Made a couple moves over the years to different brands, spent about four and a half years with. Chipotle here on the East Coast. It’s really where I dove into operational excellence. Scott Boatwright was leading the charge as operations for Chipotle and really put an emphasis on operational excellence.

I think it’s where I learned a lot. And then I made the move over here to Roy Rogers, where I am now. I’ve been here for about two years and really putting into play all of the things that I’ve learned from hospitality and operations and leading a full team here. At Roy Rogers leading a marketing team and an operations team and procurement and IT is something new to me.

And then also working with our training team and training department. So I’ve got a whole lot of different things that have, we’re a small company, but so wear a lot of different hats here.

I would call that a very well rounded skill set that’s been forged through hard won experience. That’s fantastic.

Yeah, the hard way for

sure.

Yeah, right? But this is definitely an industry of passion and pride, and that’s coming through loud and clear from you. It’s obviously that you’re really passionate about what you do and about the brand. Let’s talk about the legacy that is Roy Rogers Restaurants, because I grew up with it as a kid, and I remember it, and it’s still around, and it’s what, 50 plus years old now?

Yeah, 55 plus years. So

yeah, brief history on it. It started in the sixties, late sixties, it started. And then our founder, Pete Plamondon Sr. became a franchisee for Roy Rogers back 1980 is when he became a franchisee up here in Frederick, Maryland is where our corporate offices are at just outside DC.

Marriott owned the company at the time. And then in the nineties, early nineties, Marriott sold off the Roy Rogers brand to Hardee’s. You may remember that story. They sold 600. Yeah, they sold over 600 stores were sold off to Hardee’s in the 90s. And a lot of those stories between 90, in a 10 year period, a lot of them were converted to Boston markets or sold off to McDonald’s.

Hardee’s really didn’t have a whole lot of success with it. And during that same time period, Pete Sr., his two sons, Pete Jr. and Jim, who own and run the company now, came to work for their dad and started running the company. And as Hardee’s continued to sell off properties and the store unit count diminished over that 10 year period in 2002 Pete and Jim went to Hardee’s and Bought the namesake back from Hardee’s.

So in 2002, then we became the franchisor and also the largest franchise group owning the largest unit count of all of them. So we currently operate as the franchisor today with 40 units in our system, 23 of those being corporate stores that, that we operate as well. We’ve got dual roles here as corporate stores and franchisor.

So it sounds like it’s been through a number of iterations and rebirths and rebranding and refreshings and all that sort of thing. And is it where you want it to be now, or is it still going through any evolution?

No, we’re still looking to grow. It’s challenging now, restaurant industry is challenging, finding franchisees getting younger people to buy into really a legacy brand.

But we’re looking to grow in the next year to probably 2025. We’ve got two new corporate locations. And we just had a great day with a couple of franchise opportunity people who came to Frederick out of New Jersey. New Jersey’s been a strong market they came and visited us and are looking at maybe opening up some locations back in New Jersey again.

Constantly looking to grow. I think unit wise we need to be a little bit larger, just to be honest with you, for economics of scale, buying power and things like that. We need to be a little bit larger, so we’re looking to grow for sure.

Since you’ve been with the company, what have you seen in consumer dining trends and how have they changed and where are things at?

What are guests looking for today in in their quick serve choices?

Yeah, really good question. So Roy Rogers is a little unique in, in that we are quick serve. We do have drive through at all of our locations. But if you remember back from when you were younger, we have a fixin’s bar in our dining room.

So all of our burgers and sandwiches come plain and customers can then go through the fixin’s bar to get You know, if you want nine tomatoes on your bacon cheeseburger, you can have nine tomatoes and you get to dress it the way you want. So for us, that’s a little unique because our drive through experience is only about 50 percent of our business because customers want to come inside.

And what we’ve seen really happen post pandemic is more of our customers are coming into our into our stores and enjoying a meal in our stores. They’re not on the go as much. Prices are going up. It’s more, it costs more to eat out these days. We’re finding that when they are wanting to go out and when they are wanting to treat themselves to a dining experience, coming into the restaurant, sitting down with their family, bringing their kids in, not just rushing through the drive thru to get a meal.

It’s expensive to go through the drive thru and get a meal. If they’re going to do that, they might as well come in and have that experience in store. So we’re seeing a little bit of a growth with our in store customers, more so than our drive thru customers, as we look at the data.

Are the check averages higher for the sit in versus the drive thru?

Because obviously people come in, they take up space for a certain amount of time, the drive thru is like throughput, constantly moving people through, but I’m sure the spending is going up as well because like you said, families are sitting there versus maybe one or two people in the car going through the drive thru, all that sort of thing.

Yeah, a couple of things with that. One, it’s more family, so it’s a larger ticket price on average when they come in store because they’re bringing more people in as opposed to just going through the drive thru. But we feel like that we want to offer a great experience in the drive thru. Our frontline cashiers and the hospitality that we offer on the in store experience gives us an opportunity to suggestive sell, or to offer that new creamsicle shake, or do you want a brownie for dessert?

So it gives us more interaction with the customer on the in store experience, which helps us drive average check

too. That’s fantastic. The suggestive selling piece is missing so much, not only in drive thrus, but in restaurants in general. And I constantly talk about, the order taker versus someone who’s a salesperson, and that is so vitally important.

Let’s go back to the fixin’s bar because that is a unique sort of a competitive advantage. I would call that a hook, which is fantastic, but let’s relate that to. If controversy is the right word, the fast food industry has been slammed lately for really big price increases and there’s been consumer backlash about that when, it’s supposed to be affordable and then all of a sudden you show up and your check is 20 or 30 bucks for a burger, fries and a soda.

You get the idea, right? So you got a fixin’s bar and I guess my question is Have you analyzed the cost factor of, someone could put 10 tomatoes on their burger versus you’re putting out a fixed product where you know how much it’s costing. Every unit is costed out to the penny.

We, yeah, we take a look at, we attribute that to a cost of doing business and it’s a way to get customers in. It’s a competitive advantage. So it’s non varianced food cost item for us is how we look at it. So we obviously track it. We look at it weekly. We’re counting inventories weekly and we’re looking at things like that but no, it’s It’s a cost of doing business that we’re happy to provide for our customers.

Like I said, you can have it Jim’s way, which is lettuce, tomato, pickle, and mayo. You can have it Pete’s way with nine pickles and mustard. You can really dress it any way you want. We think that’s why customers enjoy eating and dining in our restaurants.

Now the menu has stayed relatively consistent. You still focus on burgers and chicken, fried chicken and chicken tenders and chicken sandwiches.

And you also have obviously roast beef sandwiches rounded out with fries and onion rings and shakes and all the typical things. How often do you roll out new menu items and how often are you doing, LTOs, limited time offers, that sort of thing?

Yeah, our menu has stayed pretty consistent over the years.

We. Cook USDA top round choice every morning and slice it fresh to order. That’s always been a staple of ours as well as, like you mentioned, fried chicken and burgers. We introduce LTOs probably three times a year, maybe four times a year. We’re right in the middle of a chicken and waffles with Mike’s Hot Honey.

We partnered with Mike’s Hot Honey out of out of New Jersey. Hugely popular with a younger demographic right now. So we are running that right now and seeing some really good success with that. The next product that we’re testing right now is a pretzel beer cheese burger with fat tire beer cheese, which is a great product, a great partnership that we’ve got that the test numbers on that are really well.

We introduce three to four times a year, but we find it’s an opportunity to just show our customers a little something different. It’s tough to say, does it drive transactions? Do we get a flood of new customers when we introduce something like that? It’s challenging to really evaluate all the numbers.

You can, you can look at the numbers a lot of different ways to see but we feel like it gives our customers a little something different. We also are going after maybe a little bit of a different demographic. Mike’s Hot Honey on chicken and waffles is not something that our typical demographic of a customer would know about or eat, right?

They’re coming in and getting their roast beef, but it does resonate with a little bit of a younger generation, which is the goal for that LTO.

Okay, but it definitely perf it sounds like it perfectly complements the dish itself, and once you taste it, it’s like it’s something special there, and it’s gonna bring you back, I think, so I think awareness builds over time, and people talk in social media, and all those things kick in.

Do you do tried and true LTOs that always work? You just roll them out to create this pent up demand and then people know it’s going to come out again at a certain time? Or does it vary when those things come out and people have to keep following you to figure out when they’re going to come out?

That’s all marketing as well.

Yeah, steak and cheese comes out the same time every year. It’s hugely popular. Our average daily on steak and cheese is probably 40 to 42 per store. So it’s hugely popular for us. It always comes out in the fall. We know that’s going to come out. Jim and Pete grew up in a Catholic family.

So fish comes out at Lent every year. And that will stay on the menu all the time during during Lent. So we tie in two to. Two to three during the summer and during the fall. And then I always have the staple steak and cheese and fish at around Easter time.

Do you do any special promotions or tie ins with movies or any of that kind of stuff?

Or is that something in the future? Because the, obviously the larger chains, obviously they have, It’s got the big war chest, and they spend tons of money doing that sort of thing. But it is unique and different, and when a new movie comes out, it catches the public’s attention, and if you can tie a product to that, it’s gonna drive people in.

But maybe you zig when they zag, and you do something different. What really works for you for marketing?

Yeah, so the partnerships that we have with some of our vendors is really where we leverage some of those promotions. Huh. Coca Cola’s a good partner of ours. We recently leveraged the Olympics.

So we’re running some promotions. We’ve got some Maryland athletes who have also partnered with us through Coca Cola. Bobby Fink, who just won gold in the 1500 meter. Is a Coke athlete who’s also partnered with Roy Rogers, some things like that. We’ve also partnered with Coke through Stagecoach, who’s going to be a big promotion that we do later this fall for the big festival that they have Pretty basic, buy an extra large coke, scan for your points, and be entered to win a round trip and tickets to stagecoach.

Those sort of things. Movie wise, it’s difficult. We’re just not at the scale that we can compete on that level. We value our partnerships and leverage our promotions through them.

Let’s put your independent restaurant hat on for a moment, because we’ve got a varied audience. We’ve got independents, we’ve got restaurant groups, we’ve got franchisees and franchisors, and a wide cross section.

But those companies, a franchise per se, will roll something out because it’s already been tried and true and, focus groups and all that kind of stuff, and here you go, here’s the new, just offer it. But the independent person that wants to keep a menu fresh, it’s like, what’s the process? How do you come up with a new menu item, and then

so that you know it’s going to be a winner before you go through all the time and effort and expense of rolling something out. Can you relate how it happens in the franchise world to the independent?

Yeah, great question. So we some of our vendors that we partner with, Smithfield is a really good vendor of ours.

I’m familiar with Smithfield. ham. Yep. They have Expert chefs that are always willing to put different menu items and things together for us to try and sample. Our distribution center has opportunities for us. They’re bringing us new ideas for whether it’s burgers or chicken or sandwiches or how to mix and match some different things.

And a lot of it is, We take a look at the competitive landscape and see what else is going on out there. That’s one advantage of being the size that we are. We’re, there are some disadvantages to being our size, but some of the advantages are we can take a look and see what’s happening out there in the market and we can react pretty quickly.

We can get something into one of our test stores in a matter of, days. Two or three weeks of designing it, figuring it out, having the distribution center get it in, put it in a store, running a three week or a four week long test to see how customers react to it. And sometimes we ride the coattails of the bigger guys out there, but it serves to our advantage.

Awesome. Let’s

go back to what’s made the biggest difference in your career. Did you have any early mentors, someone who took you on? You mentioned some people and you mentioned Taco Bell and Yum Brands and all that sort of thing, but getting into the business itself, sometimes we have really special people in our lives that inspire us, they motivate us, and they teach us something special that really makes a big impact in our career.

Anything like that stand out?

Yeah, I had a back when I started at Yum! Brands, I was running one store for a short period of time before I became multi unit and a district manager came to me and he said, and I use this all the time, he came to me and said, there’s three things you look for in people.

He said, you got to be willing to look for somebody who’s always wanting to work hard. The line is long, the POS goes down the fryer breaks. You’ve always got to be willing to work hard no matter the situation. Two, you’ve got to be willing to learn. Nobody’s going to teach you. Nobody’s, you’re going to have good mentors and bad mentors, but you always got to be willing to learn.

You got to take it upon yourself to learn a new station, to learn, a new , whatever it is in the business, learn, always be learning in the business. And three, you have to talk to people with love. You have to treat people with respect. You have to talk to them with empathy and treat people the right way.

And if you’re willing to work hard, no matter the situation, if you’re willing to constantly be learning, no matter what’s happening around you. And if you treat people right, really in our industry, the sky’s the limit. There’s so many people I know that. Don’t have college degrees or don’t have MBAs that have worked themselves up in this industry because they work hard.

They’re constantly learning and they’re just respectable other people. So I think that would be something that I’ve learned early that I try to pass on to people, any chance I get.

That sounds like the definition of leadership right there. That’s leading by example. That’s inspiring, motivating, recognizing talent in others.

That’s a powerful skill set and approach to running the business. It’s clearly that you have that. Now, when you have franchisees, you have Possible places for inconsistencies and everything has to be the same as it is at corporate, the same it is store to store. How do you transfer that philosophy on leadership to your in store managers or leaders?

And do you pass that down? Is that part of a credo? Is that a company culture? It’s like, where does it fit and how do we maintain that leadership consistency? Because that’s very powerful.

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Yeah, we hope that it’s a culture here. We try to make it a big part of our culture here, leading people first. And that’s cliche, obviously, to be a people first company is a credo that a lot of people have.

But we really try to take notice of people early in their career. at the crew member, at the shift lead, at the assistant manager, and really invest in them, get to know them, get to know why they’re in the business, what their goals and what their aspirations are, and then connect with them early in their career.

One of the things that we try to do, we’re not always great at it, but what we try to do is every time we get a new hire we give the new hire a eight piece family meal coupon. We want them to come in with their family. The first week that they’re working, a lot of them are young kids that we hire.

We want them, no, they know of us, that we were well in the community. So we would hope that their family members would know of us, but we want them to invite their family in that first week they’re working with us and say, Hey, mom and dad, or, Hey, sister or brother or whoever, aunt or uncle,

this is

where I’m working now, and this is the place that I’m working and offer a eight piece family meal.

to them and their family the first week that they’re working so they can come in. That’s where I think we can really start by building that culture.

I, I so agree with that. That is such a foundational element that, that means a lot. It makes an impression not only on the new employer, the new hire, but also the family at large.

And it’s they could become raving fans and that just keeps somebody thinking there’s opportunity here. But you also described something that I would call the whatever it takes attitude. The approach that you bring to a job, whether you’re. Whether you’re experienced or you’re going to be trained, it’s take on, additional responsibility.

Ask what you can do to grow and teach me a new station. And being versatile makes you very valuable in a job. And that’s how people get promoted and move up. But really it’s that attitude and the approach versus just someone that shows up for the paycheck. So I’m really glad you emphasize that.

What about the labor challenges that everyone seems to still be complaining about? Is that affecting your company? Sure, we,

we’re no different than anybody else. We’ve got challenges with hiring and staffing. We’re in a much better place now than we were two years ago. We think that doing the little things like I mentioned of offering, a family meal their first week helped to go with retention.

Obviously, training is a huge part of, retaining people. We’ve implemented some new training programs and things like that to really get them engaged. We’ve also gone to more quarterly reviews for our hourly employees rather than that time and tested annual review at the end of the year and you get your 20 sec, your 20 cent raise.

We want our managers to be sitting down with all of their people once a quarter. What are you doing well? What do you need to work on? And what are your goals for the company? And if we’re sitting down with them on a more regular basis, it really helps us with our retention.

Yeah. And once it becomes a system like that, it’s so much easier than waiting at the end of the year and then it creeps up on you and then it’s probably not as effective and it’s probably not as detailed, but that’s a system, right?

And it speaks to accountability because, okay, you’re a store leader, a store manager, and you’ve got a very solid knowledge of what every station should be doing and what the performance expectations are. And if those expectations are set, there needs to be some parameter that the employees follow, job descriptions perhaps.

And I’m hoping that’s, part of the mix, but. If someone’s constantly keeping note of the things that people do great and the things that they fall short on, that becomes the basis for your review quarterly, and you have a really good idea of who’s really performing and who isn’t, but I want to move away from being the boss and telling somebody, you’re not doing this right, go out there and do it the right way.

There has to be a, I always used to say, what can you do to get your performance back on track to what you. Said you could do or what our expectations are that we’re in the job description. Does anything like that happen in your organization or how is it at Roy Rogers?

Yeah it’s challenging at times when managers are, they’re short staffed they’re, have a call out. How do you maintain those standards on a consistent basis? When things get hectic in a store, we try to keep it as simple as we can and let’s focus on the basics. And the basics really are great food and great hospitality.

So if we can focus on those things, no matter what happens in a store or how challenging things get, it’s great. Let’s just deliver great food and great hospitality. And if it all boils down to that for us,

I would not disagree. So every new team member, you mentioned onboarding sort of an indoctrination process.

What does that look like in a typical store when besides giving out the eight piece, the, the family meal kind of thing, what’s the next step? Is there any kind of a mentor that they shadowed to learn the ropes? Did they work with the team leaders? Tell us about that.

Yeah, that’s exactly, we’re pretty typical in that way.

Yeah. We. We have a general manager that would sit down with a brand new hire for about an hour, go through expectations, whether that’s uniform expectations, showing up on time expectations, how to clock in and how to clock out. And then we like to pair them up with a shift leader, a training manager.

And they’re going to work side by side, shoulder to shoulder. It’s a combination of hands on training computer training, right? We’ve implemented an Opus system that’s a fabulous micro learning on the. On the phone, so all the employees get to learn ahead of time on their phone, and then they go back and they work hands on.

But really making that connection, one of the things that I encourage all of our managers to, to do as well as all of the shift leads to do is, day two and day three, have those shift leads reach out to that brand new hire with just a simple text message. Hey, it’s been great working with you for the past two or three days.

I think you’re doing a great job. Looking forward to seeing you on Thursday. That interaction and that empathy and that leading with compassion makes people go, yeah, this is a good place to work. I like going there. Nobody wants to show up and get an old dirty t shirt. Have a manager dig around for some sheet of paper that they need to do a checklist.

It really takes a lot of planning to have a good orientation and a good first few days of training. And when we can pull that off well, we know that our retention rate goes much higher and obviously that leads to better better operations.

Absolutely true. How about recognition and rewards?

When people do something extraordinary, is that part of the, the company culture?

Yeah, so all of our store managers have got a limited budget that they get to use monthly. They just do a cash payout and whether that’s treating their entire team to, Two dozen Krispy Kremes on a Friday or Saturday morning because it’s been a rough week or whether that’s going out and buying a 25 gas card for that employee that went above and beyond.

That’s a big part of what we encourage them to do. We also use a system called Honor Roll, which tracks our back of house data and all of our team members are able to earn points. based upon store results and then over the course of a period they’ll accumulate points and then they can cash those in for gift cards of their choosing.

So we tie those back of house metrics of speed of service or we just finished up extra large drink sales so if you achieved a certain amount of extra large drink sales that day everybody that worked got 20 points added to their account and once they accumulate a thousand points they can cash it in for a 10 Starbucks card.

So it’s a way to tie in recognition with also improving some of the KPIs on the back end that I like to see improved.

Now that you’re talking KPIs, let’s first start with you’ve got a particular expertise in increasing transactions store to store, and that obviously impacts profitability, so let’s talk about the numbers, when it happens at corporate, and then how it gets passed down store to store, and what your role is in that, and what those KPIs really are.

Sure. Biggest KPIs for us obviously are our food costs and labor costs.

As they are in every restaurant. Yep.

We we’re using restaurant 365 as our kind of back of house operating system. We’re utilizing them for nightly inventory counts. Nine key items are high priced items. They’re counting every night.

General managers are validating that every morning. They’re taking a look and saying, Wait a minute, if my actual and my theoretical are really what we measure, if I, the POS said that I was sold 82 bacon cheeseburgers yesterday. What is my theoretical and did I count, 103 pieces of burgers missing?

What happened there? Was it a miscount? Was it waste? Was it was it theft? What was it? So really looking at that nightly with our actual versus theoretical in our food cost. It’s a big one for us.

Now, minimum wage varies from state to state, and it’s higher in And county to county. Okay, there you go.

So that affects bottom line profitability of stores, and does that mean that prices are different in different counties, different stores, different states, that kind of thing, versus a consistent menu? Because, again, If I’m a, if I’m a Roy Rogers fan and I dine at a restaurant in this state, I expect it to be the same if I dine in that state, if I just happen to be traveling and suddenly it’s like the burger, wait a minute, I paid X for the burger here and now I’m paying Y for the burger there.

Is it consistent or does that have to be factored in?

It is factored in. We at Roy Rogers, we’ve got two pricing tiers. Our franchisees are on a second pricing tier. We’re on a tier one. And it’s because of the labor challenges that we face. New Jersey, Montgomery County, just outside of DC, their minimum wage right now, I believe is 17.

35.

Unbelievable. Yeah. That’s what

their minimum wage is. So they’ve got a little bit of a different pricing tier to compensate for that. Maryland itself is at 15. So it’s a little bit less. We don’t want to take advantage of our customers. We don’t want to gouge our customers, but we do want to make sure that we set our prices at a point where.

where we can still remain profitable based upon that. But we haven’t taken price since October last year. Knock on wood, we’re not going to take any price this year. We fell into the trap of taking prices and it hurt our transactions. Customers got turned off by it. And it’s tough to unring that bell.

You can’t, yeah, that’s really hard. Yeah, that, that’s something that just sticks in the consumer’s mind. They remember it and you lose that loyalty that’s so important to, the average lifetime value of a customer is suddenly lost, right? If they’re a fan and you send them somewhere else. So that is such a delicate balance.

And the balance now too is how do you get those customers back? So you’re seeing more and more promos being offered out there in the space or more value menus being offered out there in the space. And so now customers are. I believe customers are saying, wait a minute, why can I get this now for cheaper when you, when I couldn’t a year or two ago?

You really mean I could have gotten it for this and you just didn’t allow me to have it for that price? So we’re really trying to balance out driving and increasing our transactions with the promos that we’re offering to get them in to not offset that balance to much

Let’s talk about the volatility of the markets, and over time how often you mention certain grades of quality that you don’t deviate from.

Do you have long term relationships with your purveyors, or do you negotiate and shop things around? Based on the volume of, sales you can bring to the table or purchases, I should say, do you ever switch purveyors based on price or how strong can you negotiate? Cause you mentioned, you want to get the store counts up.

So you got more greater leverage with suppliers and that sort of thing. But yeah, how often do you change products out because that one just becomes prohibitively expensive to continue to offer the value to the guest at that price. You know what I’m saying?

Yeah, we, on our food, we don’t very often.

So with our roast beef, that’s our number one highest commodity price. We actually have four different beef suppliers and we shop that out. On a monthly basis, but it’s all the same USDA, top choice. So not much quality difference there. Our burgers, our fries, our chicken, we tend to lock into that on a longer contract basis.

So we don’t change that out very often. Where we do take a look at some of that is in some of our paper products, in some of our non variants things, right? Can we get a different fork, plastic fork? Can we take a look at maybe a different napkin? Do you know Should we evaluate our tray liners? Some of that sort of thought, some of those sort of things where customers don’t really seem to have as much care for, that if we change those out is an opportunity for us to maybe improve our margin a little bit.

But no we consider our products to be a cut above. The play on the roast beef there. And we always want that

reputation.

Yeah. We want to have that reputation and uphold that reputation. That means that we’re a little more expensive than other people in the market that our burgers and our experience is a little bit better.

And we have to make up for that in a great hospitality experience when they dine in. Customers, I believe customers don’t mind paying a little bit more. They mind paying a little bit more when the hospitality is bad or when the food isn’t bad. If you can deliver a great product with great hospitality, you tend to find customers are okay with that.

But when you deliver a subpar experience with high prices, that’s where you lose customers.

I’m sure you can speak well to kids in the family and the importance of them making dining decisions. And they want to go to the fun place and all that. And obviously, Quickserve is famous for having, playgrounds and play places in the stores and, coloring sheets and everything under the sun to draw that younger traffic in.

What do you do kids to standout

Yeah, so we’ve got a loyalty program through our app, you can earn points and redeem, build them up and redeem a free sandwich or a free dessert or things like that. It tends to be for our adults and the people that have carrying iPhones or Android phones.

We also have a Buckaroo Kids Club that’s specifically for kids, where they can become a member of the kids club, they can earn their own and keep track of their own points and rewards and things like that and so it’s a way for us to connect with kids at a younger age that maybe aren’t tied into a phone or into a loyalty app, but they’re not paying for their own meal, but they have their own loyalty program, and that’s our Buckaroo Kids Club.

Okay, now you’ve done these things for quite some time, I’m sure, and the tried and true continues to work. One of the biggest challenges with any restaurant is staying relevant, despite, shifting consumer preferences, and I want to try something new and effortless. After 55 years, maintaining that balance between tradition the things that have always worked versus staying relevant and trying something new that could be an experiment that may work.

How do you find that balance? And what do you, how do you feel about that? Yeah, so we’re, I like to consider

ourselves an emerging legacy brand, right?

Yes.

Okay. Yep. And tying those really together. It comes with a little bit of menu innovation, like we talked about with LTOs, offering new and different things to our customers.

It also talks, it also comes with being available through online ordering or through the app or through DoorDash or Grubhub, making our Food and our experience accessible on multiple different levels is how we can maintain or build on those legacy kind of customers. And that’s what we try to do.

Technology, I’ve said this before, technology in a restaurant is like salt in a restaurant. You need just enough to make it good, but too much can really make it bad. Oh,

that’s a great analogy. I’m going to remember that. Oh that’s fantastic. Excellent. Now you’ve got a retail merchandise program online.

Do you also sell it in the stores or just available through private party distribution or however it works?

It’s just available online and I am, I’ll be honest, I am surprised that it does as well, but we’ve got royalists out there, we call them who love our merch. They love our old merch that has that vintage look and feel to it.

And It does surprisingly well our merch store does well with people ordering. We use it for giveaways and different things like that as well when we’re doing contests, but our merch store does pretty well with kind of that vintage look of the old Roy Rogers logos and things like that.

Have you stayed true to a Western theme, like inside, outside, and the legacy was originally like the Wild West and all that sort of thing?

Yeah, absolutely. We feel we’re trying to evolve a little bit from the hokey cowboy to more of a traditional Yellowstone cowboy is how we’re.

Oh yeah,

that’s so powerful. Our ad firm

came up with that, right? They, that’s how our ad firm is positioning us and branding us these days.

Yeah, not to mention an industry that I’m not a fan of, but it’s like the Marlboro Man was really powerful marketing, but now Yellowstone is on fire and has been for quite a while, and that image of that cowboy is something that so many people just get hooked on and aspire to.

Now, I’m sure the new generation, it’s like Roy Rogers was big in the 70s, meaning the figure of Roy Rogers, right? But a lot of people now have no idea who Roy Rogers is. Is that even important from a branding standpoint? Of, staying relevant, like who’s Roy Rogers,

I think it is.

I think there are like I mentioned the vintage t shirts and the vintage logos, they’re all coming full circle again. Yeah. I think that the classics are coming back. So we do resonate with a younger, a little bit of a younger generation where maybe their parents or their grandparents knew who Roy Rogers, they’re taking interest in that.

Which is neat to see in our stores and with our customers.

Fantastic. It’s been awesome talking to you. Any advice to People that are moving up in this business today, we talked about leadership, we talked about the whatever it takes attitude, that sort of thing, but if you’re new to this business, you mentioned, you said it you don’t need a college education, you don’t need an MBA, you can rise to the absolute top of this business if you have a passion for the business, if you are eager to learn, you’re asking for responsibility, all those kinds of things, that was really foundational.

for our younger people that are listening to this, that are working in restaurants. How about for operators? They’ve made it through the pandemic, the toughest challenge ever. I can’t imagine anything, comparing to that. But it’s think of how it’s devastated this industry and restaurants are still bouncing back from those challenging times.

And it’s taken a lot of Pride and passion out of it. And a lot of people are just hanging by a thread because margins are low and the competition is intense and minimum wage keeps rising and I could go on all day. And I know you could as well. What do you, what would you say to those people that are still running restaurants, but it’s like, what’s the future look like?

Yeah, my advice and kind of what I focus on is still just giving back to the, giving back to the customers. Focus on the customers. Great experience and great hospitality, great food. A lot of our customers come to us and for any of those out there, they’re coming to you for a good meal.

And they’re coming to you to maybe escape work or bring in their family. So just focus on delivering great food and great hospitality, and you’ll continue to strive, I believe.

Excellent advice and conversation. You’re an operator’s operator and you really come at this business with such a broad skillset and tons of energy.

So I’m really glad you’ve been on the podcast today. I appreciate you having me, Roger. It’s been fun. Thank you, Adam. That was the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. Can’t wait to see you in the next episode. Thanks to our audience for tuning in. Thanks to our sponsors this week. Stay tuned, stay well. Can’t wait to see you in the next one.

People go to restaurants for lots of reasons, for fun, celebration, for family, for lifestyle. What the customer doesn’t know is the thousands of details it takes to run a great restaurant. This is a high risk, high fail business. It’s hard to find great staff, costs are rising and profits are disappearing.

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Thanks for listening to the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. For lots of great resources, head over to restaurantrockstars. com. See you next time.