Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Joe Fontana has a Chicago based brand called Fry the Coop. If you don't know them on social media, go stop this right now.
Go follow them on social media. What this guy does in social media makes me rethink the way that I approach social media. I invited him on the show because I think there's so much we have in common, as you'll see, and I think we disagree on some really key things, which is healthy because my word is not gospel. And I think it's valuable to get a bunch of different perspectives. I have a perspective that's formed over my years of experience and he has the same based on his years of experience. I think there's things you can learn from me and I think there's definitely things you can learn from Joe. Don't go anywhere.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking.
[00:01:03] Speaker C: Foreign.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated to helping you build a more profitable restaurant. Each week I leverage my 25 years in the industry to help you build a more profitable and sustainable business. Mondays we do operations episodes, Thursdays are all about marketing. The whole goal is to help you level up, teach you maybe something you didn't know before. Maybe help you see something in a new way than how you normally look at it. Every single week we are here trying to level up. I wrote a book all about marketing. It's called the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. Ironic program called the P3 mastermind where I work with owners and operators all over the country to help them increase the profitability of their restaurants. I give talks, I've got membership sites.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: There'S a lot that I do.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: This podcast is the center of this ecosystem. Here's what I want you to do for me today. If you get any sort of value out of this show, please press pause right now. Go to Apple Podcasts, leave us a five star rating and review. Just let others know the kind of value that you get from this show. Why you tune in, why you like it, why you think they would like it. That more than anything would help us grow this business and continue to build this community. Go do that again. Apple Podcast, five star rating or review right now. Pause and go do that now. You tired of juggling schedules, tracking hours, worrying about HR compliance, and dealing with last minute no shows? It's Time to say goodbye to the headaches and hello to Time Forge, the labor management solution designed for the fast paced world of restaurants with product offerings ranging from recruitment to retention for your team members. With Time Forge, you can, number one, simplify employee scheduling with automated AI schedules based on sales, weather and other events. Two, track attendance and labor costs in real time, keeping up with complex labor laws like fair work week and meal penalties. Three, you can recruit staff who live near your stores from our more than 11 million hourly job seekers. Number four, pay employees their wages and tips on a daily basis after every shift. And finally, number five, you can communicate proactively with your staff using messaging and surveys. And that's not all. Timeforge integrates seamlessly with most POS systems, giving you full visibility into labor and sales performance and suggesting when you should staff up and when it's time to staff down. Whether you manage one location or dozens, Time Forged saves you time, money and stress so you can focus on what really matters. Delivering an exceptional service, exceptional dining experience, and growing your business. Thousands of restaurants already trust Time Forge. Why not yours? Visit time forge.com restaurantstrategy today and see how they can help you run your team like clockwork.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Again, time forge.com restaurantstrategy so my guest on today's show is Joe Fontana. He is the founder and the owner of Fry the Coop it's chicken concept out in the Chicago area and the surrounding suburbs. I am so excited about this conversation because there's a lot we're going to get to. There's a lot I think we're going to disagree on which, which, which makes me particularly excited. But we got to get started. We got to welcome Joe. Good to have you here.
[00:04:35] Speaker C: Hey, thank you so much for having me on. It's great.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: Okay, so I want to get to your background, but I care less about the background and more where you're at now.
Fry the coop launched in 2017, one location over the last seven years. You've grown that to nine locations. I want to spend the first part of the conversation talking about that, the launch and the growth of that brand and what you've learned along the way. But do take me back to the beginning. Why chicken? Why hot chicken? Tell me what this brand is. Tell the audience what this brand is and why that of all things.
[00:05:11] Speaker C: Well, funny enough, my first concept was called Meatball Republic. And you being from New York, you'll remember the meatball shops. Very similar concept. I was living in California, didn't know about the meatball shop and came up with this concept. But when I went to go check out a location, after two years of trying to find locations, I found this over the counter place. And it was a restaurant that had just opened up and closed real fast. And it was over the counter service. My meatball Republic concept was a full service, full bar restaurant. It was not over the counter, quick service. So at the time, I was addicted to these fried chicken sandwiches. And I kind of saw this movement in California coming around. Fried chicken sandwiches. I love fried chicken. Growing up, my grandma made this like Italian style cutlets, but I would make them into a sandwich. And so when I saw this lease in real estate, it was a sweetheart deal. I couldn't pass it up. And when we saw the real estate, I was like, God, this isn't right for a meatball republic, but this could be a great chicken sandwich shop. So I went back, wrote the business plan. I got about seven pages into the business plan and my partner, who's a real estate guy, I call him up, I go, this is a hit. We got a hit on their hands. Didn't have a name, just had the seven pages of research. And I was like, I don't care what corner you put this on, this is a hit. And Bourne was fried the coop from that day.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: So how long until you open your second location?
[00:06:46] Speaker C: So one of the things too that I really liked about this concept because I was actually moving from California, where I never. I grew up in Chicago, but I was moving back to Chicago to open this concept. I couldn't figure out how to get funding in California. And so I was changing my entire life. Like, when my wife and I moved to California, we had no plans on coming back to cold Chicago with Winters. I mean, we were in San Diego, you know, like, forget about it. And so we sold our first house, we just had our second kid, and I uprooted my whole life. But one of the things that I knew in this concept is that it was scalable. Like the Meatball Republic concept was a one off. It was a magic. It could be a magical restaurant with one location. I don't believe it was a scalable thing, at least not in a really special way. But with this chicken sandwich concept, it was so simple, I knew it was scalable. So we came to Chicago with the goal of opening 15 stores. That was my original goal. I'm going to open up 15 locations. So it was literally about nine months after we had opened the first restaurant that I had signed the lease for the second one, and it was literally one almost like, one year to the day that we had opened the second location. But that was, like, kind of the original plan. So I had went into it. I got a hold of a great book called Finish Big.
And that book talked about starting with the end in mind almost, but planning your exit from the beginning. So I was lucky enough to read that book, and I had planned my exit before we even opened our doors.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: Okay. So that was part of the plan. 15. I love it. I always say we sort of get to that first goal, take a deep breath, and then figure out where you go from here. So this idea. So then how did that influence the decisions you made with menu and design and staffing and all of that? Because I understand that you were building it to scale, building it to be replicable. Can we talk about some of the sort of the nuts and bolts decisions you made when you were still at the ground floor designing that first one that were sort of very deliberate?
[00:09:06] Speaker C: Yeah. So. And don't let me, like, see, like, I'm on a high horse over here with this grand plan and everything figured out. I was winging it, for sure. But. And you'll appreciate this, I studied a lot of restaurant tours in New York City, and I listened to a lot of podcasts of restaurant guys, and I kept hearing them talk about hiring a publicist. And I was like, what? Like, why would you hire a publicist? Like, I thought that was for, like, celebrities and movie stars, you know, But I found out, you know, through talking to a lot of people that hiring a publicist is a game changer. And if you're in New York City, you're in Manhattan. You have to stand out. Yeah, you're not going to make it if you don't stand out. No one in Chicago hires publicists. I mean, some, you know, but it's not. It's not a very popular thing for one restaurant tour with a little fast casual chicken shop to, you know, hire a publicist. So three months in, we did hire a publicist. So that was like a big kind of, like, leap of faith, you know?
[00:10:03] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:10:04] Speaker C: And I kind of knew, like, hey, like, we're going to shout from the rooftops. So I was kind of thinking, like, we could kind of cheat our way to being a staple in the neighborhood.
I learned that was not true. But it did help because, you know, we got on TV pretty quickly, and before you know it, you know, I had four employees. I think when we first started out, after our first TV segment, I had to hire, like, 10 people. Then our next TV segment came out like a couple months after that. I had to hire like 25 people lying around the building. So it did give us that, like, oomph, you know.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:37] Speaker C: Kind of put. Put us on the map a little bit. And then I also, you know, was hiring managers that I kind of like, real quickly, I was like, who can run this tour? I was kind of thinking, like, who can replace me? You know?
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:49] Speaker C: I knew I could be, you know, I could bounce between two restaurants pretty easily, but I needed to kind of like have some people in place that could allow me to go to the next place and kind of work on it. So I paid a little more and did quick raises and, you know, I tried to like, make it, you know, kind of like whatever. I could afford to slap some golden handcuffs on our managers. So they stuck around, cared, and helped run the place when there was but a lot of learning lessons when you go from one to two, because you can't be in two places at once.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:23] Speaker C: And yeah, I quickly figured out that, like, even after about maybe eight months after the second restaurant opened up, that I actually need to figure out how to not work in either of the places. Because that was really one day I'm pouring sauces. That's when it slapped me in the face. Portioning sauces for two hours. Literally these two ounce cups. I'm just sitting there and I couldn't believe. I'm like, God, this took me two hours to portion all the sauces for today. And I was like, what am I doing? And I was thinking in my head, there's a million things that I could be doing to move the business forward. Instead, I'm sitting here portioning sauces when I could pay a high school kid 10 bucks an hour at the time to portion those sauces. So that was like a light went off in my head and I was like, all right, I need to figure out how to get me off the schedule. And that was like the big step of like, hey, like, I can't work any shift in the business.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: I love it. It's funny, this is something we talk about with my clients all the time, the members of my mastermind, where we say, okay, you pay somebody, what, 10, 15, 20 bucks an hour to do that to two hour jobs, let's say aggressively. You pay 20 bucks an hour. It's 40 bucks you're investing in. That frees you up for two hours. And is there something you can do that will generate. Right. So I say if you, if you use those two hours to make 50 calls, for catering clients or private dining or whatever it is. You book one or two events over those 50 calls, I promise you, you're gonna make more than 40 bucks. That's gonna be a $2,000 event, $3,000 event, whatever that number is. Like there's a high value task that you can be doing. So we systematize, we delegate the things that can be delegated, and then we take on the things that only we can do, the high leverage, high value tasks. So, all right, you learned that there's a better. There's probably somebody else you could teach to pour sauces. What else?
[00:13:12] Speaker C: Well, it also took me two more restaurants to realize that I can't do anything in the restaurant because I would walk into a store. So now we're at four locations. I'd walk in a store and of course you start seeing everything wrong. That table's dirty, there's napkin curled, you know, crunched up on the floor. Oh, a customer needs help with this. I mean, so I would walk into a store and next thing you know, just naturally. Yeah, I'm working, I'm wiping tables, I'm talking with customers, I'm bringing up this customer. So then I literally had to tie my hands behind my back.
[00:13:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:43] Speaker C: When I walk in and not touch anything. If a light was off or not dimmed enough, it took me so much like self control to not just undim that switch. I would grab the manager. Hey, come with me. Do you see this? This should be dimmed. You know, I know. Hands behind the back, don't touch anything.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: So talk to me about that then. Because that's a really important. I want to, I want to live in that for a minute.
One of the things that I think good owners, good owner operators have is they've got a, they got a sense for the place. Right. That like, your instincts are good, your gut's good. Right. I always joke around that I used to consult for years. Now I don't consult. I. Because I can come in and be a really great high paid manager. But that doesn't do anybody any good because for the three weeks I'm there, for the six weeks I'm there, fine, everything's great. I think the same is true with you. Right. You can come in, you, you instinctively know, like, oh, somebody's got to jump back on the line. Somebody's got to get behind the register. Oh, I bet you nobody's been to the bathroom. Very low, the lights aren't dimmed.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: You naturally.
[00:14:39] Speaker B: So how do you give your managers eyes for that? How do you.
Their education, their evolution, how do you develop them to get them to where you are naturally? I don't know if I'm articulating that. Right?
[00:14:54] Speaker C: Yeah, no, no, you are. And we actually call it extreme ownership, which is not a term we came up with, but we try to tell them, like, hey, this is extreme ownership. This is your store. Like, the success that you bring, like, will directly infect you. We make more money here. I can give you more money.
And we're still working on this. So don't get me wrong. Like, I would love it if the stores could still see things. Like, I see things. But one of the things that we have done is I take them out into the parking lot, and I'm like, get out of your car, Walk up to the door, open the door, Walk in, order at the counter, get your food, go sit down. So we walk through the whole customer experience. Yeah, I'm like, what does the customer see? You know? And, like, when you get out of your car, is the parking lot dirty? First thing you know, is there the garbage around it? Like, clean up the front of your store. When you get to the door, is there fingerprints all over the glass? You know, when you walk in, what does the floor look like? Is it slippery? Is the carpet neat? You know, in the right place? Or is it off to an angle? You know, when you go in some things, when you walk around and you're cleaning the dining room, you don't realize, like, if you're sitting in a booth, you can see underneath something, but you don't see that if you're just standing up right around. So go sit in the booth. What do you see when you're looking in the booth? Oh, I can see under that pot machine that there is, you know, a bunch of dirt under there, you know, and you start to see, you know, what?
[00:16:19] Speaker B: You know, it's funny. So I used to work with a guy who was a maniac, but a very brilliant restaurateur. And he would do this. And what he would do is the way he, like, systematized this for his people. So he would do that, and then.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: He would walk people through that.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: And he says, I need you to do this at least once a day. And you send me an email with five things that you learned, like, five things you saw. And he would, like, this way, it's not just, oh, I did it, I saw something, I fixed it. But, like, tell me what you did. And what happens is that there's, like, accountability.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: There's a cycle.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: Like, we look for things we talk about things we talk about the problems we saw, the solutions we brought to the table. And he would say, he's like, I want you to do this, but you're going to want me to know that you're doing this. And you know, I always use the car wash analogy, right? Like, Nobody sneaks a $10 bill into the tip jar.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: When you tip the guys at the.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Car wash, you're like, hey guys, here's $10. Thanks so much.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: Give me the good love on the tires.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Like, you want to make sure they see it. He's like, make sure, you know, perception is reality. So make sure that I, as the owner see you guys actively doing it. That it was a way of, of building the habit and making it, making it rigid on a daily basis. He systematized it.
[00:17:33] Speaker C: Yeah, I love it. And that's what we're working on now is trying to systematize going from one to five restaurants. It seems silly to say that that was easier. Now going from 5 to 10 has been like a crazy challenge.
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[00:19:20] Speaker B: Okay, so then talk to me.
[00:19:22] Speaker C: Still.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: I want to be in the sub 5 thing because I want to understand. So part of it was giving them eyes for it, helping them understand, literally walking them through the entire customer experience and all that.
Talk to me about on the other side, on, like, the financial side of things. What did you learn about the revenue you need to drive, what you need to do to drive it? How you teach your people to manage the expenses? Are you budgeting?
[00:19:50] Speaker C: Who.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Who's generating the budgets? Who's responsible for that? Who answers for the P and L. Talk to me a little bit about that. Again, back to, like, the 1 to 5 area, because then we'll. We'll jump and do the same kind of conversation on the larger. The larger growth.
[00:20:01] Speaker C: Yeah. And we always paid attention to what we called a prime cost, and that was not really what a prime cost is. We were kind of faking it. I thought I was on top of financing, and that was one of the biggest mistakes I've made in the 1 to 5.
So we would monitor labor, we monitor food cost, but that was really about it. Those two things, which are kind of the two biggest expenses. Right. But there was so much more that was going on that we really weren't paying attention to. And, you know, those first four years, five years, like, our cash was like this. It was like this straight up. You know, the growth just kept going. First year we basically did 1.8 million.
Second year we did 3.7. Third year did 6.8. Fourth year did 10.8 million. So, like, almost like doubling revenue every year. So I was just like, what do we need? Let's go. You know. So we had all this cash flow, and I did something called profit first accounting, which was basically like, you might remember your grandma doing the old envelope system. Of course, when you get paid, you know, you put, oh, I got rent coming up. I'll put cash in, you know, that. That bin. And then I got electric bill coming up at the end of the month. So you put cash in that envelope. Well, I did the same thing with bank accounts. So for every store, I would open up, like, 10 bank accounts.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:21:26] Speaker C: And then every time we get cash, I would just be moving cash into different bank accounts.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: I want to pause here for a second because already you've mentioned Jockoelek's book. That's on my bookshelf. Now you've mentioned profit first. Michael's book is on my bookshelf. I mean, there's we are in. We're in alignment. And this is what I teach to the members of my program, basically like the holding account model. So for anybody who doesn't know the profit first sort of philosophy, do you want to give them the quick 30,000 foot view of the profit first philosophy?
[00:21:55] Speaker C: It's basically that you take the.
An allocated amount of profitability and you take that off the table first. So you kind of pay yourself first in a way and you create, you know, the profit envelope. We had a profit bank account, and so I knew, like, hey, we want to make, you know, I'm just using round numbers, ten grand a month. So I know every week I got to put $2,500 into that profit account. And then at the end of the month, voila, there's 10 grand in there. So I get to take that home. And then, you know, you. Then you allocate the other percentages. So I know my rent is also 10 grand. So I got to make, put the money in the rent account. And I know that my labor is going to be, you know, whatever, 20 grand. So I make sure I'm putting that. And so at the end of the month, when it's time to pay up on all these things, I have all that money already put aside. So it just takes a little discipline of going into your bank accounts. And I called it cash flow management.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: It is 100%.
[00:22:49] Speaker C: Let's fast forward to today though, and we have like 75 bank accounts. That is not okay when it comes to GAAP accounting. They do not like that. It's caused a crazy amount of work for our finance team. And so I think that helped me in the beginning. If I had one restaurant and I didn't need a whole finance team to be rocking out what we're at now as far as growth, that would be totally fine. Even up to like three, four restaurants. After five restaurants, you really cannot do that. You know, I just, I think it's not. You need a more intense system of like a CFO really managing cash flow differently.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: So that gets to the point is that it's funny because the operators and the owners that I work with are all what we're talking about here, where they need some systems, right? They're doing so much right, and if I can just help them put a couple of these systems in place, because eventually they'll get to the point where, yep, you need a cfo, you need a, you know, bookkeeping team on board. You need like, there are things.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: But once that's infrastructure and there comes.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: A time when you'll have sort of, you'll be able to pay for that sort of infrastructure. But there's a, there's a very crucial part in the life cycle of a business where you can't. And I think it's foolish to imagine that you could afford a CFO for a couple hundred thousand dollars. Like at the, you know, at the, at the onset. It's not realistic.
[00:24:17] Speaker C: Oh, you're 100% right. And I love the, the envelope system with your bank accounts, because what's nice about it is you keep your operating count as low as possible. Pretty much every time you get some income, you move it around. And then what I loved was anytime something came up, anytime something happened, we had cash for it. It was like, oh, that broke. Well, guess what? I got cash in the bank. I have a drip account. Yeah, I had a drip account. And so that was always like the rainy day savings. And, you know, you put as much money as you can into it when you can. You know, maybe a thousand bucks this week, maybe it's. We had a great week. I put 3,000 in there. But then before you know it, time goes by and you got 50 grand in there. Great. Something happens. A piece of equipment breaks, the hood goes down, and you find out you need a brand new hood. It's not the end of the world. Because you're like, well, I got cash for that.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: You've planned for it. It's the same thing we do with personal finance, and it's applying that same thing to our business. And it doesn't actually take a lot. Two months in, three months in, then this whole system is wired. I love that you brought this up. I love that we're talking about it. I want to jump now to that. You said it was, it was one thing to go from 1 to 5, and then 6, 7, 8, 9. Brought a whole other set of challenges.
[00:25:25] Speaker C: Before you get there. Can I interrupt you? I'm so sure, because this was so such a big mistake for me, too. Sure. Do you want to bring it up from 1 to 5? I did not collect any source documents.
When I say source documents, I mean invoices, receipts, all that stuff. That was a really. I was telling you, I listened to thousands of podcasts, restaurant owners. No one ever talked about making sure that you have account for every invoice, every receipt, and then also nowadays have a system or a software to get all those in there and organize all your invoices. I just naively thought, ah, if there's ever a problem, our vendors Love us, they'll take care of us, they'll refund stuff, blah, blah, blah. That was the biggest mistake I ever made. Chapter four. After five restaurants, we really had to hone in on like, okay, we need to gather all the invoices, get them into one system. And that we finally, after, you know, two years of doing that, were there. Yeah.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: And there's so much great software out there. I mean, when I was coming up through the industry, that didn't exist. That was like a. That was a vanilla folder that went into a box with, like rubber bands around. You know, January invoices. It's like, now there's actually a way to, to document these and, and keep them all in the. Within the software.
[00:26:44] Speaker C: So I had. Sorry to cut you off, but that was. And if anyone collecting invoices and all your receipts, you. That is like a must, must, must. I didn't do it. Don't make the mistake that I made.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:26:56] Speaker C: Be very happy you did.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: I appreciate, I appreciate that. So now let's move to the more recent growth going from 6, 7, 8, 9. What was so different about it and what are some of the big lessons that you've learned over the last couple of years? Doing that?
[00:27:10] Speaker C: Well, going back to systems, it's really important that you get the SOPs in place also, too. Just training, training, training. You cannot let your thumb off the pulse for one second on training everybody, because you might train a team at a store and everything's going great for a period of time, but then maybe six months a year goes by and some of the high school kids go off to college or some of the college kids get onto their real lives, and before you know it, you have a new staff in place. And the people that you trained really well six months a year ago, the new people might not know that, you know. And so I think we had opened a store and we thought, oh, it's great, you know, crushed it. I mean, I think we did 200 grand in the first month or something. I mean, it was like, awesome. Like, this is a hit. Yeah, we're crushing it. And then all of a sudden, you know, I let my thumb off the pulse, went and worked on other stuff, and I just watched this door go down and down and down and down before, you know, we were. The sales were awful, like, half of that.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: And what was the. And what was the cause of that?
[00:28:15] Speaker C: It was just not training the team. I let my foot off the gas of the training and I thought, oh, they got it. And before I knew it, you Know, everyone in the neighborhood kind of saw what the lack of training that we were doing. And a year goes by and I realized like, wow, like I just kind of like rested on our laurels. Like, oh, they got it. You know, they did so good the first month, you know, and it was just an awful mistake. And literally it took. That store's been open for four years now. It is now finally doing good sales numbers. But it took almost three years to get like, we lost the neighborhood and the community there. They just, they were like, oh, these guys aren't. They don't execute what they say they do.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: So then talk to me about how.
[00:28:57] Speaker B: You systematize that, about ongoing training and development and all of that. And now, having learned the lesson the hard way, what is it you have in place to make sure that doesn't happen again?
[00:29:09] Speaker C: So we try to do something called all staff meetings, where every quarter we bring the whole staff together, try to get on the same page. In between those, we do line trainings and we do front of the house trainings. So we'll do like a Saturday morning where we just get, you know, the whole front of the house team, go over hospitality, what that looks like. Kind of just keep reminding them of what a great experience looks like. Same thing with the line. We always say there's the devils in the details. And you know, what we do is so simple. We have 13 menu items, you know, picture In N Out Burger. We're the Nashville hot chicken sandwiches of In N Out Burger. You know, very small menu, but the devil, the details are in the devil. So we try to teach that over and over again. We have a meeting with all the store leads. We call them store leaders, the GMs, basically, but we call them store leaders. So every month we have a store leader meeting. Everybody comes to the office and we all meet and go over, you know, everything different trainings with them. So we're actually going to do something differently now though. We're going to start training the managers and having them do the trainings instead of like our support team doing them.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: Love it.
[00:30:15] Speaker C: So that's the next like evolution of it is because we find out like it's working, but it's kind of not working. You know, that's like it's not working as best as we think it could be without having a full time trainer on staff. That's a goal we have coming up. But for now we're gonna, in 2025, we're gonna keep meeting with all the three, four shift leaders, system leaders, store leaders, and training them. But I really think it's just constant gentle pressure.
[00:30:44] Speaker B: Yeah, listen, that's satting the table also on my shelf. It's, it's, it's a big deal. Talk to me now, going from operator, owner, operator, now owner over this multi unit machine. Talk to me about, I don't care so much how you feel your day to day, but what fills your head? Where does your focus go as the leader of this whole thing?
What are the things that you're doing that no one else can do now that you've delegated and outsourced so much, so much of what you used to do?
[00:31:22] Speaker C: So the new construction, I kind of am in charge of that. You know, I built out all the restaurants now intimately, like, you know, almost like kind of being the GC of the gc. So that's something that only I do. Unfortunately, because of that too, I do all the facility management. So the H Vacs toilet packs up. You know, that comes to me, which is a little unfortunate.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: You need a director of ops?
[00:31:50] Speaker C: No, we do have a director of operations, but he handles like that. We've had to split up. You know, we have nine people on our support team for nine restaurants. However, we need like 18 people and all of us are wearing multiple hats. So we're splitting up tasks and construction and facility management is on my plate. Marketing stuff. Yeah, I do all the marketing. So that's one piece that I think about a lot. Because you know, you only have a small amount of money to work with in marketing. You know, you don't have an unlimited budget. So when you do have a tight budget on that, every dollar counts. And so you really have to be strategic on where you throw your dollars at. Because some stuff, it's like I might throw up a billboard and that billboard might cost me 12 grand for the month. But like did that, Was that the best use of that 12,000?
[00:32:44] Speaker A: So great.
[00:32:45] Speaker B: Okay, so talk to me about that because this is, this is the last thing I really wanted to cover. Talk to me about marketing and how you approach marketing, how you allocate your dollars. What do you think is the best use of your time and dollars? What do you think has been the worst use of your time and dollars? Bring me up to speed there.
[00:33:04] Speaker C: Yeah, so what I've learned about marketing is it's 20 things all leading up to marketing. It's not just one thing. And also it is a non stop process too. You can't just be like, oh, we did this marketing campaign and now we're done. It's like you constantly have to keep going and doing marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing. It's a never ending thing that you constantly just have to keep pushing on. So we still have our publicist who gets us on tv. We do the TV spots, we go on WGN quite a bit, NBC, abc, we get on radio shows, podcasts, stuff like that that we kind of push the envelope on.
We started doing radio advertisements with ESPN here in Chicago. So we kind of thought that helped us in September. School, you know, the school year sales are kind of soft a little bit. Being on the radio I think has really helped us. We bought maybe 400 commercials over like August, September, October, November, football season. So that was pretty strategic. So that seems to work out. The social media aspect. We're trying to keep getting better. I love the idea of having entertaining videos. You know, everyone's got their phone in their pocket, so making people laugh. Like our whole thing is like delivering happiness and bringing happiness to the community. So if we can do that through our social media where somebody's scrolling and they come across our video and if it makes them chuckle or smile, it's like we delivered happiness to the community.
[00:34:43] Speaker B: Okay, so I want to pause right there because your social media feed is awesome. I'm going to include that link in the. It's awesome. And I have a very specific view about the value and use of organic social media.
And now I understand why. I like yours so much because it is an extension of your. One of your core values which is bringing happiness. Because it does. Your feed really is an extension of that. I often use you guys as an example along with Wendy's and of all things Scrub Daddy because I think they use. So Scrub Daddy and Wendy's utilize their social media feeds in very counterintuitive ways.
And if you don't know if anybody's listening, if you don't follow either of these, I mean, go find scrub Daddy on TikTok and tell me that's not the funniest thing you've seen all day. Oh, awesome.
[00:35:37] Speaker C: I don't follow that.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: So good. And I felt the same way about yours. But for Scrub Daddy it is an extension of their core values. And I know that having taken the deep dive into what the executives believe and how that's made its way to marketing, etc. Etc. The decisions are sort of, are sort of influenced by a very deep seated why. And I've liked yours and now I understand. I mean, yours is probably my favorite as far as like independent restaurants. I told you at the beginning, when we came on before we hit record that I was so excited to do this that I don't do a lot of interviews anymore. And when you guys reached out, I was like, absolutely, I want to have that conversation largely because of this. So I love that it's so tethered to this. This why you were really deliberate about that.
[00:36:23] Speaker C: Oh, that's 100%. Yeah. And I really think, like, if somebody likes a brand because they brought them joy, I mean, to me that's like the ultimate goal, right?
[00:36:35] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:36:35] Speaker C: Between brand, you know, the trust factor and then, you know, the happiness. And so we've really. Somebody asked me a long time ago, they go, if you can do any job, what would it be? And I just thought those Bud Light commercials back in the day were so freaking funny. They still are. And so I thought, God, if I could be a writer in one of those rooms that wrote those Bud Light commercials, like that's what I would do for a living.
Kind of living it out a little bit at Fry the Coop. But I think like that, you know, that extension is really just a special thing that you can do now. And then technically, I mean, we pay a social media person who helps us, but I mean, besides that, it's free. Right. Like, I don't pay to put these things up on Instagram or TikTok. Right.
[00:37:19] Speaker B: So can I pull up that thread a little bit further? So you obviously have a really strong organic social media presence. I'm hoping all the listeners will go click the link and watch because it is really good, it's fun, it's energized all of those things. And I actually think it shows the, the product really well. So it's not just a novelty of it, which it's not so easy to do. Talk to me about the other side. Do you also balance that with a paid social spend every month?
[00:37:45] Speaker C: No, we've never done that. And I actually think we need to start doing that because.
And it's not lack of like wanting to. It's more just like time and effort and putting in. Like, I do all the marketing and I get to spend maybe a couple hours a week on marketing. That's another goal we want, is to bring on a full time marketing person that would be focused on stuff like that. But I've seen, I'm in our location right now in Lincoln park, which is a prominent neighborhood in Chicago, and this store is not doing that well. And it's newer too. It's only been open for a year. We need to do some social spend. You know, because you could geographically tag.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: That's the whole point of it. That's the whole point of it.
[00:38:28] Speaker C: We can target get the whole 1 mile radius around here. I mean where I'm sitting right now, there's probably a million people within a 1 mile radius living, you know, which is crazy to be in such a densely populated area.
[00:38:41] Speaker B: One of the big things that the big cases I always make for having a social spend and it doesn't have to be a lot in the beginning, $10 a day per store just to.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: You know, make sure things are working.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: And then when it works like we.
[00:38:55] Speaker A: Just ring the bell over and over.
[00:38:56] Speaker B: Then we increase the spend at 20 bucks a day, 50 bucks a day. Because if we know there's a clear ROI and you should get to the point where you can measure all of it.
But social media works because of its targeting. It's an ad platform. So every time I see one of your posts, right. So if an organic post only goes out to roughly 3 to 5% of your followers and maybe more for you guys because some of those videos go viral and all that, but still it's 5 to 10% of your, of your audience. And when I see it, I'm one of the, I'm one of the few who get to see it and I.
[00:39:30] Speaker A: Can'T come in, I can't be a.
[00:39:31] Speaker B: Customer this week or this weekend or this month because I'm not going to be in Chicago. So the case to be made for.
[00:39:39] Speaker A: Utilizing the paid tools is just getting.
[00:39:41] Speaker B: Your content in front of the people who can actually make the decision you want them to make, which will help.
[00:39:46] Speaker A: Your top line revenue.
[00:39:47] Speaker B: Does that make sense?
[00:39:48] Speaker C: Oh yeah, no, 100%. And you're, you're right. I've actually told our social media person, I'm like, please, like let's do some social spends. And I think she's like, oh yeah, I'm in. And then like it just gets, slips through the cracks because we're all busy and she doesn't do it. So thank you for being my reminder that we need to.
[00:40:05] Speaker B: It's. And especially when you tell me it's a new store and it's about sort of raising awareness and customer acquisition, that's where that stuff does really well. Do you guys, are you guys spending money on Google search ads as well? That's another question.
[00:40:18] Speaker C: I've tried it on one store so far and I can't really say I've seen the bang for the buck also. I'm doing it myself, so I'm kind of winging it, and maybe that's the wrong approach. I think I put maybe 500 bucks a month towards it, and I started it in August. It's still going, but I don't really see, like, oh, wow, like this sales has really gone up since that moment or whatever.
[00:40:46] Speaker A: We should talk offline.
[00:40:47] Speaker B: But for everybody listening, for me, I always recommend it's the first dollars we should always spend. First dollars we should always spend on digital marketing should be Google search ads, because they actually work. They drive traffic. As long as the website is optimized and will convert visitors to sales. It absolutely works when you get the cost per click below $0.50. So, meaning you could send somebody to your website for $0.41 as long as the website is optimized and it will get 30, 40, 50% of the visitors to actually place an order. Like, again, ring that bell every single time. Absolutely. I'd be willing to spend 41 cents to drive traffic to my website.
[00:41:23] Speaker C: Yeah. Another thing in that realm. We interviewed a lot of SEO companies back in August, and I really couldn't find one that I was like, oh, like, this is it. And we ended up not pulling the trigger. I learned a lot about some of the triggers to pull. So I did it myself again. And I'm starting to realize, like, that I maybe should have pulled the trigger on some of that SEO stuff, because it's crazy. Like, you look up some of the towns we're in, and you'll just type in fried chicken. You know, town we're in. And we come up maybe like 10th or even page two. And there's restaurants. Yeah, there's restaurants that, like, just opened up. They might have, you know, 100 reviews on their Google listing. We have 2,000 reviews. And how are they coming up before us? Like, it's shocking, you know, so I'm starting to realize, like, I might have. Should have pulled the trigger on SEO.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: And this is where SEM, Right, Search engine monetization, meaning the paid side of Google, can actually help support SEO, because.
[00:42:26] Speaker A: You'Re just driving that much more traffic.
[00:42:27] Speaker B: To the website, which then the other side of Google just sees, oh, man, there's all these people going to this website, which then, you know, helps. Helps on the SEO side. They're like, oh, man, this place is getting a lot of traffic. I guess a lot of people like it. Like, there's not a person looking at that. It's a computer. It's an algorithm that's determining what's popular and what's not, what's going to be Relevant to the people searching. So SEO and SEM are two sides of the same coin, and they absolutely help each other.
[00:42:55] Speaker C: Yeah, 100%. No, it's. I've seen even the little changes I've done. I've seen the improvement.
[00:43:01] Speaker B: Love it.
[00:43:02] Speaker C: But we need to be number one.
[00:43:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Okay.
[00:43:05] Speaker C: If you're not finished your last.
[00:43:07] Speaker B: I want to be really respectful of your time.
Last words of wisdom again. You got a whole bunch of owners and operators, independent owners and operators listening to this. That's almost exclusively the audience. This has been a very challenging year. I think this has been one of the hardest years I've ever seen in the industry. I think most people are down or flat. I think with labor still being tricky, I think with the cost of goods being. Being up.
We talked before we hit record. I got a whole bunch of restaurants.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: Closing all around me.
[00:43:38] Speaker B: It's a very weird thing to see.
What advice. What advice do you like to share? What advice would you share with this audience?
[00:43:46] Speaker C: And I'm in the same boat. It's like you have days where I'm on cloud nine and I'm so happy, proud. And then there's days that I'm wondering, like, what the hell am I doing? How did I get myself into this? But I think at the end of the day, we get to be in the happiness business, and that is freaking awesome. We don't work in some industry that has all this negativity. It's like we get to be in the place that serves happiness to people. So I love that also, too. I think.
Listen to your customers. I think a lot of people do not listen to their customers. And one person. We get reviewed all the time. All of us. What industries do you get reviewed every single day on your work. But I think if you start to see the writing on the wall, your customers, the guests are telling you something. So listen to them.
When you start to hear enough comments about something, take action. Don't just rest on your laurels. Do something about it. The customers will tell you what to do and how to make your business better. And everyone wants to support you.
[00:44:53] Speaker B: Yep. Everyone wants a really great food.
We get hungry three times a day, and I can't eat at the same place.
[00:45:00] Speaker C: That's 100% right. So keep pushing, keep fighting. The future's bright. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Finish big and just go confidently in the direction of your dreams.
[00:45:13] Speaker B: Joe, I love it.
We're going to put the links that we talked about to some of the books you mentioned to your social media. Where else can we send people to learn more about how to get your chicken?
[00:45:25] Speaker C: Oh, just everywhere. Add Fry the Coop. Come to Chicago. Stop in for the best chicken sandwich you ever had. We fry everything in beef tallow and it just makes the chicken and French fries taste that much better.
[00:45:38] Speaker B: I love it. Joe, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.
[00:45:41] Speaker C: Hey, cheers.
[00:45:45] Speaker A: Once again, I gotta thank Joe for taking time out of his day to sit and chat with me. Explain how he approaches his business, how he's approached his business, and how he continues to think about the growth of his business. Again, I urge you to connect with Joe. If you don't know his brand, go follow him on social media. Go grab a chicken sandwich at his place, Fry the Coop in Chicago. If you're near any of the locations. Again, as always, if you've if you are struggling with profitability, then I want to have a conversation with you. The P3 mastermind exists to help independent restaurant owners increase the profitability of their restaurants. What you do with that profit, I literally don't care. It is yours. It's my job to help show you how to get more of it. You start that conversation by going to restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule grab some time on the calendar. You'll chat with me or someone from my team. We'll get to learn more about you and your restaurant. You'll get to learn more about the program, ask us all kinds of questions so we can see if you're a good fit again. Restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule appreciate you guys being here every week.
[00:46:41] Speaker B: I will see you next time.
