Hey there, welcome back to the show. Whether you have one restaurant, 10 restaurants or 100 restaurants, you can so learn from today’s guest. We’re going to talk with a company that has 1, 500 employees across seven, soon to be eight restaurants, a catering operation and a distillery

They’re connected with the farming community farmers are their investors. So it’s a sustainable business and it’s all about making the least amount of impact on the planet while doing good, giving back and creating great dining experiences. We’re going to talk about company culture. We’re going to talk about labor, their staffing, all these restaurants, three day parts a day.

And they’re really having longevity and low turnover. It’s amazing. We talk about technology that you need in your restaurant and really good recommendations on things that can improve your operation. My guest today, Dan Simon, the guest’s company is Founding Farmers. You’re not going to want to miss it.

So stay tuned. if you enjoy what you’re listening, please leave us a review.

It’ll help other operators and hospitality professionals and managers and even staff find us. Now on with the episode.

You’re tuned in to the Restaurant Rockstars Podcast. Powerful ideas to rock your restaurant. Here’s your host, Roger Beaudoin.

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Hey everyone, welcome back to the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. So glad you are here. Dan, welcome to the show today. I’m excited to have you. Thanks, Roger. Glad to be here. What an amazing business you have. We’re going to get into the nuts and bolts and operations, but you have such a diverse company, seven restaurants, soon to be eight, a distillery, it’s But farmer owned, sustainable, all about lead certification and making the minimal impact on the planet while serving great food and doing everything from scratch, unbelievable.

So before we get into how you do it, tell us about how you became a restaurateur and what your history is.

Sure. So I started working in bars and restaurants when I was in college, busboy, bar back, work in the door, got behind the bar as a bartender. And I just. fell in love I figured out really pretty early, by the time I was 20 I loved the energy.

I love the work. I liked facilitating the party, cleaning up after the party, being the one with money in my pocket after the party and still having my head on straight. And I liked the party, but I’d rather get to the after party and really have my head on straight. So the nightlife of the restaurant and bar business just hooked me.

Then I had the opportunity. I was Friday’s Bartender, which in the late 80s and was

a cool thing to do. I remember Fridays. Yeah, that place was all about flair, showmanship. Everybody had their own unique personalities. I totally remember Fridays.

Yeah, it was wild. So I got great training there, had the chance to go into management after I graduated college.

So then I spent, the first 10 years of my career after college Learning to be a restaurant manager and a kitchen manager and a general manager and a regional manager, and, up through vice president of operations, et cetera, for a couple of different companies, had great mentors, got to really learn, saw some startups, grew some things work for some prolific folks like, um, in Texas under the Brinker umbrella, Phil Romano, we did a bakery and market concept.

Yeah. And so I got lucky, really, with mentors, and, people talk about their journeys, but they forget to tell you how lucky they were, who really taught them all the stupid shit that they did I had ten years of that. And then in my early thirties, joined forces with with Michael Vukovic, who’d been my boss and a colleague and a friend.

And we decided to start our own company. And so that’s, from age 19 until now I’m 54. It’s it’s all I’ve ever done is working in this business.

Wow. That’s fantastic. Like baptism by fire, you’ve done it all. You’ve had a variety of positions. You moved up into management, became a true leader.

And now, so you’re in the DC area. And it’s very interesting, obviously, because the name of your company is Founding Farmers, which is a play on Founding Fathers, and obviously, tell us about that, and then give us a little history of your company.

My restaurateur partner, Mike Verkurovich, we got lucky.

You’ll probably hear the word luck a lot from me, because I think it’s important to acknowledge it. Sure is, yeah. And we met. The farmers from the North Dakota Farmers Union, and they are exactly what it sounds like. They’re an organization of American family farmers based in North Dakota. They work on issues that support family farmers, both in the Midwest and nationally.

And they were seeing the struggles that independent farmers were having versus the corporate ag monsters, both in competition. But equally as important in messaging and that the American consumer didn’t know the difference, they thought produce grows off the stainless steel shelf at Whole Foods and that’s that.

And so these farmers in North Dakota, savvy folks, entrepreneurial futurists, and they said we got to get it. Find a way to connect with the people. So they said what if we invested in restaurants? What if we did a restaurant that, that really advocated for our message and we could meet people at the table around the food.

So we got introduced to them and we did some work for them and we decided to join forces and form a partnership. So they’re our main investor. We took their vision of a farmer owned restaurant with Mike and i’s vision of the kind of restaurateurs that we are, and we wove that into some new DNA and that’s what gave birth to founding farmers.

So it started, did it start with one location? In DC, I think it was down the street from the White House and then it just grew from there. Tell us about the growth trajectory and maybe, was it an overnight success? What were some of the bumps in the road? How did you grow from one location now to soon to be eight plus the distillery?

Roger, if anybody actually knows how you find a overnight success, let me know. I don’t know where they are or where they come from. So usually it’s a grind. Yeah. But indeed in, in September, 2008. We opened the first Founding Farmers on Pennsylvania, four blocks west of the White House. And for those who remember, September 2008, the world was falling off the financial cliff.

Not an ideal time to just have convinced our farmer capital partners to deploy You know, four and a half million dollars and give us, free reign to create the brand and create the whole thing and do it all. And yet we opened and we were busy. We were hoping to do 6 million in the first year five or 6 million.

We did 8 million. And 16 years later, it’s grown every year. I think that one location will do almost 22 million this year. And it’s, that’s out of 9, 000 square feet. It’s a full service restaurant. I’d say upscale, casual, polished casual, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every day, brunch on the weekends, and it’s really welcoming, and it’s approachable, and so I think we hit the timing right where We were value based, we had a message, some of our messages were early, sustainability, farming, all natural, cook from scratch, that wasn’t really what people were talking about but we just did the grind and figured it out, and the guests rewarded

us for it.

Competitive advantage, it sounds like. Being early isn’t bad because you’re a pioneer. You catch, the attention of the public at large. I think a lot of people resonate with your message, right? There’s so much talk about, global warming and save the planet and all this kind of stuff and carbon footprints, and everyone cares to some extent about doing that, and if you can go out to dinner and have a great experience and help by having a more sustainable experience.

Why wouldn’t you want to do that? I think there’s still a hook there, even though you were early, I think now it’s come into its own. That’s right.

It was early and, pioneers are great, but they also get arrows in the back, right? So there’s, there’s problems with being early and, there’s a lot of stuff in my career that I guess I’ve been early about, I’ve been talking about mental health in the workplace for 30 years.

And there’s rooms I get laughed out of. There’s rooms where nobody would know what I was talking about. There’s rooms where people weren’t, comfortable talking about mental health in the workplace, but I never stopped talking about it. And I’m glad that today, the topic has some momentum.

So I think we were a little bit like that with we were like that with mixology. When we started in 2008, the only mixologists were in, New York and San Francisco with 10 seats at the bar doing really amazing stuff. And we figured out how to bring that to, a thousand. Early is hard, but if you’re, but if you believe in something and you’re making character based decisions or what you think are really information based decisions, then you stick to your guns, and with a little bit of luck, then early ends up being right.

But at this point, those things, our environmental position, we lead certify the restaurants, we green certify the restaurants, we compost everything, we’ve been doing this now for almost two decades I think it’s more commonplace. And that’s actually what we wanted. We want the restaurants to be a role model, to know who you buy from and what you buy, understand the supply chain.

So eventually, These things aren’t so much a point of difference for us. You still need great food, great service, opening checklists, closing checklists, got to clean the floor, got to clean the grout in the grout lines, in the bathrooms. So the work of the restaurants doesn’t change. And I think that the only advantage any of us have in this business is when inside the four walls, we get the team inspired and.

fire on all cylinders

Let’s talk about the team, and let’s talk about your people, because they’re the foundation of any restaurant or restaurant company. But you also mentioned wellness, and I’m getting the sense you have a real passion for that. In an industry that, unfortunately, has Many abuses, there’s alcohol abuse, drug abuse, all sorts of things happen within restaurants and people that work in restaurants, and it’s a stressful environment.

So that’s part of the problem. Do you lend that wellness influence in some way amongst your teams and help them find a balance with their life and healthy choices? And obviously it makes for a better, stronger team and a better guest experience. Where does that fit in with you? It fits right

into the center of my personal leadership philosophy, which is we hire the whole human, we employ the whole human, and the whole human shows up at work.

So we should embrace the whole human, help them embrace themselves, if what we want is their best performance. When I was a young operator manager coming up and I had bosses telling me, leave your problems at the door and, all that matters is this. I was fortunate that I was able to hear that and think that’s fine, but that’s stupid because no human can actually do that.

And I was pretty fortunate in my life, like good family, super solid foundation raised in a way that if you had a problem, you spoke up, you asked for help. You got. Supportive feedback, you got tough feedback, but you communicated. So I thought, it was like telling people, leave your left arm at the door.

We don’t want you to bring your left arm to work. And it just sounded that ridiculous to me. And I just vowed that I’d never be that kind of boss. And I saw that if you want to build the best team, when your people show up to work, you don’t tell them to forget their problems. You ask them what their problems are.

And. This isn’t actually new thinking. The elite performers, the elite teams, they recognize that if you want elite performance, you gotta care for the whole human. So we train this, we have classrooms on this, it’s woven into the daily fabric for our managers and our staff. We do a lot of storytelling, a lot of role modeling.

Starts at the top, you gotta be able to unmask yourself and have the courage to say, like in my case, yeah, I had my first panic attack when I was 28 years old. And so what what’s the difference torn ACL panic attack? Like it’s in your mind. It’s in your, it’s in your soft tissue.

It’s all the same. So we need this throughout our operations and we just normalize, Hey, let’s help you solve your problems so that we can get to the work of the work. That’s

how we

go

about

it.

Excellent. Wow. I was going to ask you about your company culture, but I think you summed it all up right there.

And it’s about caring. It’s about involvement. It’s about training. It’s about instilling, the best and getting the best performance and just having pride and passion for what you’re doing. And that’s amazing. That would be a natural segue to labor challenges. Are you having any in your company as it grows?

Now, you mentioned the first place was breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Are all of your operations three day parts or are they all a mix? And if so, are there challenges filling all those shifts?

All the restaurants are three day parts. All the restaurants are open 365 days a year.

Wow.

And the catering, we have a full service catering events company that also runs, effectively 24 seven.

Cause you know, we do some wild events and the distillery guys, they get a couple of days off, every now and then it’s a little bit more of a normal schedule, but the operations are always running. The bakers are in at 3am. Staffing, for me, staffing is on, it’s on the far side of the equal sign.

It’s a lagging indicator. It’s a, it’s an outcome and the ingredients that go into that are, no surprise, the culture. And then, do we hire, do we interview and hire through the filter of Our culture. Do we interview and hire through a filter of a realistic job preview? Do we really, do we bring people in and do we let them stage?

And do we pay them when they stage so that they get some exposure to what it feels like in there? And I’ve learned that we don’t have to hire people that, you don’t have to hire people who look like you. You do have to hire people who are willing to think like you. And that’s not to say that we don’t want diversity of thought.

We do, but I don’t want diversity of thought when it comes to Grit, resilience, passion for teamwork, some level of self esteem, ride, the joie de vivre. And so like right now we’re, I think we’re fully staffed at the salaried ranks. And we have about 1500 employees. Oh, that’s a lot. Oh my gosh.

And I was looking at the numbers the other day. The restaurants are between sort of 97 percent staffed and 101 percent staffed. Can’t argue with that. It, but it never ends. If I was to say oh having super low turnover and great results all the time with staffing, I don’t actually know anyone that has that, but you can for sure crush the industry averages.

When you take this kind of intentional approach and then provide the work environment that you told people you were going to in the interview, and they stay.

So you had a lot of mentors, you mentioned, in your career. Is that part of the culture as well? Do you have a mentoring, shadowing program with anyone new that starts to instill this and best practices from different people before you turn them loose on the floor or interacting with guests or even cooking in the kitchen?

We do. We try to assign mentors or a buddy system when we hire new chefs and managers. We do have several different types of mentoring programs, some that we do inside the company and then some where we work with local schools. We bring folks in. And what we find is the more people you get involved in the teaching, the higher the retention you have.

So yes, people want to be men, mentored, but they also want to mentor. So we create these you don’t have to be 20 years older than someone and have this vast body of knowledge to mentor someone. You frankly just need. a little bit more experience and you can share it. And so I would encourage people to see almost everyone in their restaurant as a potential mentor for someone else.

And it’s really it helps pride bloom. When people get the chance to teach someone else.

Oh, absolutely. And, I always thought it was important to give my people a voice in all my restaurants as well, because people want their opinion to matter. Everybody works for paycheck, but they want to make, they want to make sure that what they do has meaning and that it contributes to the greater good, I think.

So, what are your philosophies there? That’s all part of it, isn’t it?

It really is. And Roger think about it in, in your restaurants. When you just reflect on some of the folks that really were locked in and make it an impact, weren’t they participating in, in learning and teaching?

And of course, the doing, didn’t, weren’t you seeing it that way in your places? Oh yeah,

absolutely. Absolutely. Everyone hopefully was always learning because we were always training. Training was such a huge part. We trained daily across the restaurant, but it wasn’t just me. I was actively involved because I had a passion for it, but all of my people were training and teaching other people.

And we had daily pre shift meetings and we had recognition rewards programs and all that. How do you recognize your outstanding performance?

We definitely have a system of public praise. There are the shift meeting opportunities, there’s the contest winners. I think the stuff that in the industry, lots of us do.

But what I teach in one of the classes I teach to the chefs and managers I teach several, but I have one called Building Powerful and Effective Relationships. And we just go through and role play How we build these relationships and how we really affect the people that we manage and lead.

And one of the things that I talk about is private praise. Yes. And we role play, a shift meeting and you give someone specific feedback on their specific performance, something, I’m cautious with just add a boy and add a girl and rah. It doesn’t, it feels nice. It doesn’t

land.

It gets meaningless

after a while. That’s right. We look for specific performance. Wow. Kelly, what you did yesterday at table 22, when you did X, Y, and Z, phenomenal. And you celebrate it, publicly. And then we role play. And so I take one of the managers in the class and we sit down and I say, Hey, do you have a minute?

Let’s just sit down. It’s the end of the shift. Let’s grab a couple of minutes. Manager says, yeah. Stop services. Yeah. And just look the person in the eye and say, I just wanted to take a minute and tell you that I watched you at table 12 today. And the way you handled that difficult situation, the way you gracefully You know, pre bust that table while simultaneously caring for that little kid, all while I knew that the rest of your station, was causing some stress for you.

Awesome. It was amazing. And then I say to the person after the role play, and again, it’s role play, how did that make you feel? And they say Even just sitting here pretending, it feels good. And so if we remember, ask yourself, what was the last really kind, important thing someone said to you?

Probably with something said privately when they took a moment. It surprised you that they took a moment, and they looked you in the eye, and they delivered it. No other agenda. No strings attached. Just private phrase. So those are some of the things that we try to teach. Because if you just talk too much about culture and retention, that’s why I say staffing is on the other side.

It’s this thing plus this thing that gets you there.

Those are all the positives for sure, and I love what you just said about that. And sharing success stories, even if it’s any team member telling the group in a pre shift, Oh, this happened yesterday. And it was unbelievable, whatever it is.

Or even when we dine out, when we have free time, anything that is extraordinary, that was a positive. We always used to talk about this kind of stuff in pre shift. What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? But then on the negative side, I didn’t invent this and I didn’t do it in my restaurants.

But when I speak across the country, I run into lots of people and somebody, I forget who, has what they call the MMDD box. It’s a suggestion box kind of thing. It can be anonymous, or you can send an email, or you can even say who it is, but they literally connect. What’s an MMDD? Made my day difficult. What made my day difficult today when it related to service, when it related to team, the restaurant, whatever.

And the leaders there would read these things. And if there’s a common thread, they would address them. And we could fix things. But again, giving people a voice, I think, really matters.

Listen, don’t lose birthday business to your competition. People celebrate birthdays seven days a week, the check averages are high, and when they have fun in your place, they’ll come back again. Talk to my buddy Dyson. He’s an operator also just like you and me, but now he runs a done for you birthday club.

Go to jointhebirthdayclub. com slash birthday rock star. It’s a piece of cake.

Roger, I’m sure you can relate to this. Think back, right? Your restaurants, my restaurants, there are some shifts where the best employees are thinking to themselves, my boss is an idiot, like we don’t have enough coffee cups and it’s brunch, right?

The best employees are just trying to do it right. And we, the management, the leadership, we’re not giving them the tools. If we then don’t give them any voice, we’re basically telling them, you know what? You should care less. So I

love your

MMP. That’s encouraging.

Yeah, you’re amplifying the

voice.

Yes.

Absolutely. Yeah. I just think it’s important and it’s not like it’s a grievance thing. It’s just, this is what happened and it could have been avoided by doing this. And it’s if you don’t encourage that sort of thing, then you will never know little ideas that people have because they’re in the trenches that can improve your business.

And I thought that was, I thought that was great. So I just had to share. Yeah, I love it. Excellent. That’s awesome. Let’s talk about what it takes. Now, you got this catering company, but you also have all these other restaurants. What does it take to make everything as fresh as it can be? You already have the farming connection, so you’re getting really high quality food.

Things, your own ecosystem you might say, in terms of products coming in. Is it, are there economies of scale to that? Because you have multiple restaurants and you can buy in such large quantities versus, the average restaurant that orders from the big box stores, that gets high qual high volume pricing based on hundreds of thousands of restaurants that purchase from, the largest suppliers.

Like, how does that work? How do you find a balance so that you can offer. Profit, you can get profitable, but you can also provide value and quality to the guests. And that’s such a balance today.

This is a challenging topic and I’m happy to share, how we do it, but Roger, you’re right.

We’ve built up some scale to be able to do what we do. And I have mission driven investors. We’re a for profit. We need to make money when times are tough. That’s, it’s not okay. It’s a business. And at the same time American family farmers, they have a predisposition to think long term.

So it’s not about quarterly results. So when I say in our distillery, Hey, we want to invest more money to lay down some bourbon for three years. And here’s what that costs. We’re gonna tie that money up for three years ‘

cause you gotta age it and there’s a whole process involved to get the highest quality I’m getting where you’re going here.

Yep. So there’s a lead time to that. And it’s not, there’s a lead

time

and it’s not a couple of weeks from now. It’s a couple of years from now. And that’s a vision. So some

of, yeah,

so some of what we do

is connected to the scale we’ve built, the wherewithal we have and what’s important to us.

I’d rather be in business 20 years from now than maximize my profit this quarter. So we think long term and then. Our partners in North Dakota, they own an 18 wheeler. And so we do get to unbundle the supply chain and cut out the middleman. This lets us pay the farmers a fair price, much more fair price than they usually get stuck with.

And it wipes out the profit from that distribution or the value out in the middle because we cook everything from scratch. So when I’m buying flour from the North Dakota mill on a truck that our collective owns, and we just run that distribution at a little bit better than breakeven, my bread in our bakery, not only is great quality made fresh every day, but we could do it at a much lower cost.

What does this mean for the typical restaurants? This is a challenge and this is why most restaurants are buying from, Cisco or the huge broad line distributors and are feeling forced into buying their brand name, which is really a generic name product. And I think the supply chains are really difficult.

My, my two cents of advice is. If someone is able to take the time, make the time, invest in the time, there are wrinkles and folds, these little spaces in the supply chain where you can find different suppliers, whether they’re local or they’re far away. And if you can find suppliers and product, and there’s something about that product that the story really matters to your diner, that you maybe can pay a little bit more.

Or through the right negotiation, through committing to a farmer, look, I promise I’ll buy the honey from you. for the next two years. Can’t pay for it up front, but I promise you’ll get my business, I’ll write a long term contract with you. Now maybe that honey, better quality, consistent supply, and I’m gonna really tell the story of that ingredient, connect with my guest, connect the product, and not just use the cheapest, bottom of the barrel generic honey from Cisco, which actually, they’re still charging you a lot of money for.

But I’d just like to acknowledge it’s supply chain and food costs. It’s a challenge. It takes menu engineering. It takes nowadays, good technology. There is a lot of AI that’s coming out to help all of us manage our menus and our ingredients. Look for where we can simplify But it’s not easy.

Thank you.

There’s so much we can unpack with this and you’ve taken me in multiple directions here, but let’s go back to menu engineering. Cause it’s something I’ve specialized in recently. And many people would think that’s just about item placement on a menu. to call attention to something that you want to sell as opposed to making sure that you cost out every menu item so that you know exactly how much it costs and with volatility of markets and increasing costs you want to maintain your margins if not grow your margins and still charge a reasonable price without paying for it.

Losing the value, all that kind of stuff. That can be a job unto itself. You need someone with financial acumen that really dives in. Maybe that’s a chef or a kitchen manager. Maybe that’s a district leader. If the menus, are relatively similar, how do you guys do that? Because that’s pretty vitally important because so much money can be left on the table and potential profit.

If the profit difference in each category is dollars and lower profit items are taking sales away from higher profit items, not a lot of restaurants are And I talk to people about it all the time, and it’s just something they don’t have the bandwidth for, but it’s so vital just to maintain your margins.

I have two thoughts here.

One, ideally, we all have our strengths, and we all have our weaknesses. That’s just logical. Most of the, or let’s say, the most creative culinary talent I’ve worked with is not The highest quantitative math skill person that I’ve worked with. Writing a recipe is very different than the culinary logistics around cross utilization of ingredients, understanding what we’re purchasing, thinking about the yield and the waste and writing a fully integrated menu.

So that we can prep to max shelf life, have as much cross utilization of ingredients, and follow a product all the way through our menu flow with secondary and tertiary outlets for any ingredients, right? Rotisserie chicken to chicken into chicken and dumplings that you know this, you know the story. Oh,

absolutely.

Yeah, now you’re talking cost of goods, prime costs, and keeping an eye on the prize there, too. And I think trying

to understand what are the skill sets we need, and I love to pair people up together, and so I use this term culinary logistics I like putting the most talented chef with the most talented culinary logistics person, and together, We can help build, the menus and the flow throughs and the order guides, et cetera.

I think it’s understanding aces and places, what skills do folks have. And then it’s technology. We use MEZ M E Z, a play on Meeze. I’ve heard of

MEZ absolutely. Yeah, I’m familiar with it.

This is a piece of software that the founder is, and I’ve got no vested interest, I’m not an ambassador, I don’t get paid for anything.

It’s Josh, the founder, he was a chef. He also happens to be an example of someone who can, write code and think in terms of, so this guy’s got both of these skills and he brought them together and he created a piece of software that a lot of us in the industry use and it really helps us.

He could take a handwritten recipe, you could scan it in, he’s got the OCR, he’s got to do some analytics. We, each of us needs to know our limitations, put teams together to accomplish the assignment and find tech that can help us.

Give us an overview of what Mies is doing for your business.

I’m just curious, because it sounds like something that you would recommend to other restaurateurs. So for, I don’t know, I’m 54

33 years ago when I was a young manager, I learned how to do the dog star analysis on the menu. And I think that’s a thing that lots and lots of folks are familiar with.

So MEZ has You know, gone so far beyond the typical dog star analysis and using the intelligence on the backend, you can do it. You can add, you can ask the software to simulate a change in your menu. What happens if I take off these two appetizers? What’s the customer likely to trade to? What’s the impact on check average?

What’s the impact if I have 19 entrees or 17 entrees? And this is stuff that. At least my human brain, Roger, there’s no chance, and so like the one dimensional dog star analysis that we’ve been doing for decades compared to a machine learning analysis of a menu is, it’s night and day.

It’s very humbling and it shows me just how limited I am with my abilities and that’s why I’m an advocate of the tech. Nothing wrong with going out there and finding a tool.

Are there other tools, like what else is part of your tech stack beyond that

so I guess if I start from the guest side, open table is a huge part of what we do and open table really has several products in it.

Yes, it’s a table management software, which is vital at our volume. Yes, But it’s also a CRM product. And so we can really deepen our relationship with the diner, building out individual customized profiles, auto tagging, setting communication for, VIP diners, lapsed diners. So OpenTable is a really powerful tool.

And I have to say, probably for most of us, including me, Yes, whatever software we use in any parts of our life, most of us are not power users. And so taking the time to really dive into the software, people use Microsoft Word, but we probably use 20 percent of its features. It can do a lot more.

So OpenTable is really robust as a marketing arm, as a CRM tool, and as a table optimization tool. And as a benchmarking tool against other competitors in your competitive set in your trade area. But a lot of people don’t even know that’s all inside that software. And then what, we use Toast as POS.

I love it. I love the handhelds. I love the product. It’s really good. You do need to understand credit card merchant fees if you’re going to go with a POS with integrated. Otherwise, you can get really ripped off there. So that’s like a little tidbit. Thank you. And then, one of my favorite pieces of software, is Culture.

Based it’s called Stop It, and it’s a simple app that all of our employees download at orientation. And it’s a two way anonymous or revealed communication tool between any employee and me and any employee in our HR department. And they can be anonymous, they can be in English or in Spanish.

I see. We

respond and then they can reveal themselves if they want or not.

And so that’s an example where. It’s tech for our people, it’s tech for the culture, there’s tech for the product, there’s tech for the guest but our tech stack is pretty complex.

And it sounds like with 1, 500 employees, you definitely need a tool like that as well. I’m sure it definitely pays dividends.

It really does. It’s hard to keep up, and I think we all know this from whether your listeners have one audience currently or at some point had one and now have more. If you get far away from the operations I don’t It’s not a good way to run restaurants, right? Like it still matters. The guest, what does the guest care about?

The cert, like you can’t have a chipped plate. The bathroom can’t be clean. In my places, the toilet paper has got to roll over the top, not over the back, there’s those details. So anywhere that the software can. free us up to still do this high touch hospitality.

Thank you.

As Will Guderra calls it, unreasonable hospitality.

I’m reading that book now. It’s the human touch. Yeah. Oh, what do you think of it?

Oh, you know what? We’re actually listening to the audible book. My wife and I we go up to a ski resort every weekend and we literally listen. And I think we’re on chapter 14, but it is just immersive in details and details that matter and going above and beyond to please the guests.

And certain things blow you away thinking, wow, they really do that. And then there’s so many things that are such common threads with how I ran my restaurants and I’m like yes, that’s what it’s about, so it’s there’s so many eureka moments. It’s a wonderful book.

Yeah, Roger, that’s what I think so many of us in the business, we read Will’s book and it’s he’s talking to us and we’re nodding because we’re we could be saying it too.

He’s just written it, brilliantly and wonderfully. He’d be a great guest on your show. And I think for anyone that hasn’t that hasn’t listened to or read Unreasonable Hospitality, it is it is well worth your time. I share it with my whole team. I’m proud of it. I’m often given copies of it away.

It’s a great book. Will’s a great guy.

I’ve reached out to Will and he’s on a recording hiatus right now, cause he gets bombarded with media requests. So I’m on his radar, but we’ll see when it happens, but I definitely want to have him on a guest. So I’m really glad that that you mentioned that.

You mentioned let me ask you about your investor partners and the farmers and whatnot. Are they hands on, hands off? Do they meet regularly with you? And obviously you go over results, but do they leave you alone knowing that you guys are fully in charge of the joystick? Or do they give you input on, hey, I think we should be doing this, or it should,

how does that go? Our farmer partners are the ultimate. They really are the ultimate partner. They are heavily engaged and they know they aren’t restaurateurs. So they understand their expertise. We understand our expertise and we understand where we come together in that shared middle lane strategy, financing, certain big decisions.

They’re really great at helping us with some of the supply chain stuff. They’re super innovative on the long term strategy. Supplier relationships and looking long term growth of the company. They’re great. And I had a board call yesterday, and I’ve been working with these folks since 2005.

So these are, 20 years and it’s it’s personal, it’s professional and the stereotypes hold true, Roger, in this case, when you think of an American family farmer and you think, A handshake, someone’s word is their bond, and they say what they mean, and there’s no bullshit. These folks are the real deal.

Awesome, thanks for asking. I got a last question for you. So much has come up in this about how extensive your organization is and the Details and the number of staff and all the moving pieces. And so much of our audience are, obsessed with perfecting and improving their operations, but they also want to grow an operation.

What does it take logistics wise to keep all those balls in the air and to make all those moving pieces synergistically come together without this thing, screwing up that thing, and I’m trying to get here. And it’s it seems like it requires a whole team to run your up and it does, but put your independent.

Operator hat on. Go back in time, and you wanted to grow a business. What are the steps? What would you advise people that want to grow but keep the quality high and not move too fast, but not move too slow? I know there’s a lot to think about there, but how would you answer that? So rather than advice, I can

share what works for us.

Thank you.

Just as well. What we have done since the beginningis share the success with the people who are creating it. And I worked for a lot of folks over the years and those owners, man, they were greedy. Everybody else did the work and they kept all the gold. And my partner, Mike and I, we just believe if you’re mining gold with the whole team, shouldn’t you be sharing it with everybody?

So we create lucrative opportunities. And lucrative is in the eye of the receiver, right? And if all you’ve ever earned is 15 or 16 an hour, and someone offers you the opportunity through your performance to earn 18 or 19, and to get paid vacation time and paid sick days that’s sharing in the success with people.

If the most someone’s ever made is 90, 000 with some, bonus program that’s murky and doesn’t really get paid, And you teach them about profit share and you say, look, if we hit this goal, the first hundred thousand in profit needs to go to the farmers and the investors to pay back their, their investment with their expected return.

But above that, we can share. So the reason I say this is if you want to grow, for me, I needed a need to keep my best people and inspire them and make them feel that they weren’t just working to support my life’s work and my purpose. So I look to understand people’s purpose. And sometimes that’s financial.

Sometimes it’s just sharing in the success. Sometimes they want to be able to create a life for their family. And I look to connect and overlap an employee’s life’s purpose with the company’s purpose and look for some shared purpose, and then you can. grow together. And so that’s what we do. What does it take for us to scale?

We write it all down. It’s a lot of written systems. It’s a lot of documentation and there’s no point writing it down if you’re not going to audit it. So every system needs an audit system and every audit system needs an auditor and every auditor needs a report, measurement of success. So I combine those things when I think about going from one restaurant to two and that’s the things that we’ve put together.

And that we still keep doing that are, the eighth one will be open in six weeks with a little bit of luck.

Fantastic. I wish you the best of success with that. And you’re doing such wonderful things for the industry and the world at large with your approach, which is completely different from the typical restaurant.

And there’s so much that we can be inspired by everything you’ve told us. So thanks for being a great guest on the show, Dan.

Thanks for having me, and thanks for the work you do in creating this platform and sharing all this information. We all benefit from it.

I appreciate that. Thanks very much. That was the Restaurant Rockstars podcast.

Thank you so much to our audience for tuning in. Thanks for our sponsors this week. Can’t wait to see y’all in the next episode. Stay tuned, stay well, and we will see you then.

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.

It’s a treacherous road and smart operators need a professional guide. I’m Roger. I’ve started many highly successful, high profit restaurants I’m passionate about helping other owners and managers not just succeed, but knock it out of the park. I created a game changing system and it’s filled with everything I’ve learned in over 20 years running super profitable, super fun restaurants.

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