Jeremy Julian
Jeremy Julian
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
cars, rob, faster, store, data, order, ben, food, drive thru, window, operator, team, talk, technology, restaurant, process, point, line, work, tablets
Ben (37%), Jeremy (37%), Rob (26%), Intro (1%)
I
Intro
0:02
This is the restaurant technology guys podcast, helping you run your restaurant better.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
0:13
Before we move forward with the show, I wanted to share about a product that I came across recently. We’re in the middle of the summertime. And so you’re going through dads and grads and I know the holidays are just as bad. But it’s a product that’s trying to become the OpenTable. for large parties. The name is restaurant. Nick and his team have created a online booking solution to allow restaurants to book large parties and do them online in such an easy way. It’s a brilliant solution. And having just gone through graduation for my son, I would have loved to have had a solution like this, check out Nick and his solution restaurant, when you get a few minutes after the show. Welcome back to the restaurant technology guys. Thank you everyone out there for joining us. As, as some of you guys have have noticed, we’ve also been doing video the last couple of episodes. So if you want to see the guests that are on the show, we’ve been posting them on on YouTube and on LinkedIn live as well. Today a is these are some of my favorite types of episodes. And you guys have heard me say that. Say that because we’ve got a technology partner and an operator on the call. And so I’m gonna let our technology partner introduce themselves Rob up, why don’t you let our audience out there know who, who you are and what you get to do for living. And then we can that we can introduce the guy that gets to gets to be out in the field dealing with customers every day.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
1:36
The technology that we’re going to talk about,
RM
Rob Meng
1:38
that’s great. Rob Ming, I’m the founder and CEO of faster lions. for over 13 years now we’ve been watching cars and people in line and identifying delays and helping our operators that we work with actually utilize the data to reduce delays and move the line faster.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
1:54
Yeah, so you’ve been standing there for 13 years in the parking lot like with a little clicker. Is that how it works?
RM
Rob Meng
2:00
Yeah, exactly. No, we tried to get rid of the stopwatch that’s the whole goal right, get the stopwatch out of the district manager in the site managers hands and actually do a video analytic that has some machine learning and some AI and built in so that we can actually keep track of those things identify those delays, we work with the operator to figure out kind of what they want their cadence to be how quickly cars should move and and then help them operate with the data as well.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
2:25
Wonderful wonderful. Obviously excusing you know standing there with with a stopwatch and or with a with a clicker is probably not what I was looking at looking at listening for stuff and you were you were able to get one of one of your clients on the on the on the on the phone with us here on the recording today. But why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience and then we can talk a little bit about how you guys met and what your experience has been with the festival ads guys.
BL
Ben Little
2:49
My name is Ben little on the exact ease franchisee I have 13 stores here in greater Raleigh, North Carolina, we’ll have two more by the end of the years 15 Total have the number one store in the Zack space franchise as far as sales and we have quite a few others in the top 50. So that’s kind of where Rob comes in as he’s trying to help us stay at number one and get the rest of my stories up into the top 10 I love it.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
3:22
I love it for those that are
JJ
Jeremy Julian
3:24
unfamiliar with Zach’s views, which even though I’m in the restaurant space, I recently moved to Texas over the last couple of years. So I’ve gotten more introduced his expertise and there happens to be one on the way to my mother in law’s house so I have to eat it that will have that in Keller, Texas often and she does as well because yeah, helping her with some of her her budget management I’m like why exactly three times a week, grandma, but different conversation for those that are unfamiliar with what this expertise brand is would you would you mind educating our audience because it is you know, primarily in South I think at this point still as you guys
BL
Ben Little
4:00
Yeah, mainly southeastern United States we’ve got I think 920 stores in the brand now we’re chicken QSR kind of our closest peers is Chick fil A and raising canes which they’re kind of the gold standard of you know any franchise model any quick service restaurant and especially our discussion today of going fast and cranking as many cars to the drop that as possible. They’re never to gold standards and whoever was chasing and including us. So that’s that’s kind of what we do. And we just try and sell a lot of chicken.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
4:42
And I would concur that those gold standards are certainly there was just, we’re just at the National Restaurant Association show and and it was how do I get my drives here to operate like Chick fil A? I’m like, first you write a check for a lot of money. We can start to figure it out. Oh One more red check for a lot of money, just make me like that will make
JJ
Jeremy Julian
5:04
a lot of work to get there. So
JJ
Jeremy Julian
5:05
you guys, have you guys been been been business partners for some time, who wants to take kind of how you guys met and how you guys got introduced to each other? Oh, it’s
BL
Ben Little
5:15
been good. So to kind of lay the foundation of the conversation, you know, like I said, Chick fil A is set a very high standard, and we’re all just kind of trying to chase them and kind of a brief history of drive thru times and throughputs. You know, really, the technology has had little to no advancement for for a very long time, I don’t even know how long but a very long time. And so we started noticing Chick fil A put in these doors that there’s usually like two companies that do it tore Macs or OS are boy. So we decided we’re going to try and copy with Chick fil A was doing so we do the doors in the couple locations. So it just to be clear for the audience. These are doors words, like gigantic sliding glass doors where you know, people are physically walking in and out, you can, in theory deliver food to multiple cars at the same time. So we threw a couple in and you know, sales were up a lot. So we’re like, oh, great, we’re geniuses, you know, it’s all because of the door. And in the process of that, we figured out it broke our loop timer. So the loop timer is that little thing that sits in the concrete in front of your drive thru window, which is the extremely archaic way that our industry has measured speed of service for forever. So that’s when we started to really try and figure out is this door working? Or is it not? And I didn’t have a good answer. So that’s when I started poking around and stumbled across Rob and his group. And they have been trying to help me answer those questions now. So I kind of have the answers now that some of the answers I wish I didn’t have.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
7:18
Yeah, because sometimes the technology only only, like gives highlights what what you know, your real business problem is it’s not as has less to do with the tech. And sometimes it has to do with the systems process. And people, you know, as it relates to that, I’m sure. That’s right.
RM
Rob Meng
7:34
So Jeremy, let me just baseline really quick. So we do it a little bit different than, for example, the magnetic loops.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
7:43
Before you jump into kind of what you guys do different Rob, I was going to ask you can you educate our audience because quite frankly, those that may not be in Drive Thru, or are in a brand that might, you know, might warrant drive thru at some point. And I know a few brands that have kind of looked to figure out drive thru, they might not even know what this magnetic loop timer means. So if you could educate everybody on what that is first, because I think it really will help set the foundation for how have people done it to Ben’s point forever, they’ve always done it the same way. And it’s the thing that goes underneath the concrete. But I’ll let you talk about because you’re a lot more educated than I am on it, then we can talk about how you guys have really turned it on its head and changed the way that people people think about it.
RM
Rob Meng
8:25
Yeah, you bet. That’s great. So for decades, now, there’s been magnetic loops where they have this thin piece of cable that’s in the in the concrete, you do actually have to cut the concrete to put it in there so that the cars don’t mess it up. And, and so that that magnetic loop is basically identifying a large piece of metal, which is a car that drives over the top of it, and is saying oh, there’s there’s a vehicle here. Now, normally, magnetic loops are either set up in a single spot like at the window, where they can identify one car at a time. And then other systems tried to identify it maybe at the order speaker box. And then they’re trying to keep track of how many cars are going through and match that up with the loop that’s at the window so that you can start to get an idea of when the order was placed. And when the food was actually delivered when the car got out of there. And so that’s that’s been the standard. So when you see like the speed study report, and you’re looking at like 257 seconds or three have, you know, 384 seconds, that’s usually the concept of that is from the order speaker box to when the food was actually given to you in the bag and you drive off. We do it a little different. We’re not looking for service speed, or total time of service. And we’ll talk about why here in a second. But we’re actually looking for what the flow should be, How often should cars move through? And how long should they be at the window? How long should they be at the order speaker box until they should actually move because when you break down that flow, it becomes easier to actually communicate with your team at the store and and have them understand, it’s really difficult for them to understand. Okay, it was 257 seconds. And and if we go over that now it’s 302 seconds. So that’s only, you know, that’s only five seconds different. Well, it’s five seconds different. It gets 3000 cars, right? It’s it’s a huge it’s a huge number. But it’s hard for we found that it’s really difficult for for the team inside the store who’s actually running in the kitchen and assistant managers and sometimes even managers to kind of understand what that metric means. But when we break it down, and we say, hey, a car sat for too long, longer than our time standard 15 times over the last 30 minutes, they can understand that they can go 15 times we didn’t serve the customer to our time standard. That’s it. That’s an issue, we got to do better. We got to we got to speed up. And so that’s what we do. And that’s we help give Ben’s team that knowledge at the locations.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
10:49
Well, I guess I’m going to turn to the operator real quick, Ben. And again, I as a consumer and I have not run a drive thru. All of my previous restaurant experience before I came on to the tech side was in is in casual dining. So other than I did work at a sandwich shop, but they didn’t have a drive thru, which really, I guess, you know, oh, whatever it is, but, but talk to me a little bit about what that means from an operator perspective. Because I’ve been in I’ve been in the drive thru, I’ve watched the clock, and I’ve watched the staff get all freaked out, you know, your drive thru, and they’re like, they’re rushing to get you your food. And we’re like, talk to me about what that looks like, from a management perspective. And why is that so critical, not just from the guest satisfaction, but really even ultimately, your profitability because you you’ve got to staff that levels. And talk to me a little bit about how you think about that, as it relates to speed of service, profitability, but then even really, the customer service aspect of it, as you’re starting to train, you know, young staff members and educate them about those pieces.
BL
Ben Little
11:46
Yeah, and, you know, we were poor probably gonna make this sound way simpler than it is because like, we’re just go faster, get more cars through. But it’s really a multi dimensional problem. And this is where Rob and his team really helped us to understand because, you know, first, if you want to get faster, you have to identify where your bottleneck is. And then you have to kind of keep bucketing the bottleneck from that point forward. So you know, like, just as an example, like, I have one store that has an $11, average check of another store that has an $18, average check. But you know, going back to the archaic way that we’ve always measured speed of service, I can’t measure those stores, apples to apples, just on the, you know, 30,000 foot view, you know, let alone drill into the details of where can each store individually get faster, because of just going off a window average time, that there’s all kinds of problems in the data there to where you know, that $11 average check store, you know, they pretty much only have one entree per car, so they should be able to naturally get faster than the $18 average check store that has two entrees per car. So this is when we started kind of having some light bulbs go off of like, if we really, really, really want to measure apples to apples, and be able to kind of take best practices from certain stores and apply them to other ones. We’ve got to drill this all the way down to the entree level. And, you know, Rob has helped us build super nerdy stats and dashboards to help us see this data. Which like, that’s kind of the bigger picture of how we’re trying to tackle the problem. And not just using like lazy averages. Because, you know, I kind of have a gold standard, which you know, not for Chick fil A or raising pains. But the standard and standard QSR is a minute window time. That’s kind of like the golden standard, because you do in a minute window time, that’s 60 cars per hour. And then you can do the math from there. But that’s a lazy way to do it. Because you know, you can be super slow when you needed to go fast during the peak times. But then if you’re going faster, and you know, the slow day parts from like two to five, well, that the average may come out looking great, but you didn’t do what you needed to do.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
14:25
Your number of transactions is significantly lower. Yeah, your sample size is lower. Just because I’m I’m truly truly intrigued. And I want to talk about how faster Lyons has really helped with this and how they how the process worked with you as an operator. And again, this is just my own. My own lack of of knowledge. Why and maybe it’s because of the old tech. Why why do so many drive throughs do the food’s not going to hit the time. So go park in the spot and I’ll come bring it to you. Because that happens. That happened. That happened to me the other night I was leaving. I was leaving the airport it was like 10 or 1030 and I Oh heard of burger at a brand that doesn’t even matter what the brand is. But I got to the window, and the lady came up. And she’s like, she looked at me and I knew that I was going to, because I got a special little burger. And I knew she was like, Oh crap, I’m gonna get myself in trouble. And so she asked me to go pull up, and then it feels somewhat inefficient to me. But clearly it’s not or most brands wouldn’t do it. But help me understand that just because I’m truly inquisitive. And then I want to talk more about faster lines, if you guys don’t mind.
BL
Ben Little
15:27
Well, we’re we’re all tied to the incentives that drive us. The funny thing is that really, speed of service was like a key business metric. I mean, really, even five years ago, I mean, it got measure, but like, we really didn’t incentivize it, we didn’t really know what the times meant. It and the list goes on and on. But, you know, now, everyone has to be the service top of mind if you have a drive thru restaurant of any kind, and you know, that if your management team is not incentivized to push that time, as hard and as fast as they can every single day, it’s just not going to happen. I mean, I don’t, I don’t care how well you staff, I don’t care how great your GM is, whatever. If they’re not incentivized to get fast, they’re just not gonna get past.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
16:21
What happens to that to that transaction, like my transaction for my burger the other night, does that get thrown out of the averages so that they don’t get penalized? So Ben doesn’t come in and go, Hey, you know, Steve, you know, GM? Why didn’t you get this order out? Does it is that what happens on that? Because it looks like I left with my food, but I really didn’t. That’s correct. Sorry. This is totally me just trying to understand because again, I’ve not worked in drive thru and I’m half the time I learned, I learned for myself, why do they do these things? Right. I also happen to have a family of six. And so when we go through the drive thru, they hate us. I mean, their check averages are high, but they hate us because we never hit the frickin numbers. I promise you that
BL
Ben Little
16:57
will defend them for one second. Okay, so So one of the variables in drive throughs is queuing. So when I say queuing, that’s the number of cars that fit in your drive thru line. So, you know, there are circumstances where pulling a car forward and the window is correct and does make sense. Now if you’re the only car and drive thru, then yeah, they’re just cheating the system,
JJ
Jeremy Julian
17:22
there was one car behind me in fairness and this circumstance, and it was 1030. At night, I think they probably just ordered a ice cream or something. So they probably wanted to get the ice cream out and get that guest out. And I ordered the burger that was a special order at 1030. At night, they didn’t have anything sitting waiting, but I’ll let you keep going. Because they probably don’t have it in their system that says, go make sure you’re going to have burgers waiting for people because 1030 At night, who’s ordering burgers, but I had just flown from for three hours back from Chicago, so
BL
Ben Little
17:50
but I mean, yes, in that situation, they’re kind of cheating the system, because again, that location is probably just going off the straight time average, and they don’t want you messing up their average at the very end of the night. So, you know, they’re, they’re kind of cheating it there. But you know, lengthening the queue in one direction or the other is kind of a, at this point, a pretty well known best practice of you know, you can either lengthen it out on the back end, kind of like, you know, famously Chick fil A does and what we try to do with with tablets and kind of mobile drafting order takings, you know, we’re extending the queue back as far as we can go. And then you can also do that on the front end, you know, you can pull one, two, hopefully not more than that cars forward, at the window side to extend the queue that way. Yep. So that’s, you know, that’s one of the many variables of measuring speed of service. That’s, that’s really hard. And, and, you know, again, Rob has done a nice job of trying to help us better understand what is the optimal queue length? And you know, how many cars should we pull forward? How many cars? Should we take the order behind the order point, and so on and so forth?
JJ
Jeremy Julian
19:06
Yeah, I want to I want to dig into that. Rob, you, you were about to say something about my own personal experience in the last couple weeks, I apologize. I’m just, I’m kind of geeking out because I like to learn and, and I know our audience, when I when I talk with them, they’re like, yeah, just keep asking questions, because it’s really good. Good for us to learn because maybe they they don’t know these things, or they don’t have the budget of his expertise to be able to do some of these things that they don’t understand. So Rob, what were you going to share about my my experience get my cheeseburger the other night?
RM
Rob Meng
19:33
Yeah, well, first of all, it’s all universal, right? Like we all deal with it all the time. Every every everybody deals with it. And that’s part of why it’s so fun to geek out on this topic because we all just live it all the time. And all of us have sat in that line and been totally frustrated or all of a sudden pulled up and been like yeah, pull forward. You’re like there’s nobody behind me whiteboard, just give me my food right. So, but the pull forward is important, right? It should be a relief valve should be a pressure relief valve. So When your normal customer comes through, you shouldn’t need it, you shouldn’t be on point, we should be able to hit that, you know, hit your time standard and be able to make a move. But you get, you know, Jeremy, your family or, you know, a minivan full of hungry basketball players that are coming back from high school, you know, practice, and you get a $50 order, pull that car forward, right? Like they Yeah, that’s a perfect opportunity to not mess up your flow, make sure the rest of the customers again, convenience. But so many times, we just don’t know how to communicate that with our team, they just don’t know. And they don’t know when to do it. And so then they’re, then they’re starting to game the system themselves, because they just know that they’re trying to chase an artificial number. But when you actually start to understand the flow delay, and you’re communicating expectation with your team, then you can actually start having conversations about when do you pull a car forward? When does it make sense? Why are we doing it is my lot setup for it, there’s some locations where you pull a car forward, it doesn’t matter, there’s no place for them to go, there’s no place for the next customer to go. And even worse, how is the person getting from the kitchen with the food to the car that’s waiting.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
21:09
That was the moment that I was like, they don’t even have a door like this person needed an hour walk. And I’m like, there’s nobody behind me, this is the silliest thing. But I’m gonna say besides the point, Rob, you and I talked when we were in preparation for this call that I guess I want to also throw at our audience and have you and Ben riff on it for a couple of minutes, which is the whole idea, expectations from consumers end up getting hit how they you know, so Ben, you talked about going out into the parking lot, there’s something different about, I see a whole line of cars in front of me and I haven’t ordered yet. Versus I’ve ordered now there’s eight or 10 or 15 cars in front of me, I’ve ordered, I expect that when I hit the window, if there’s 15 cars in front of me for my food to be hot and ready. If there’s only two cars in front of me, I my expectations may change. Talk to me about that juxtaposition of consumers expectations. And again, it feels like they were really, really kind for the couple of months during the beginning of COVID. And then everybody’s expectations went through the roof in the wrong way. But there’s some expectation that we have to live with that the minute I order, I expect my food in a certain amount of time. And if I miss that expectation, you get a customer service problem. So talk to me a little bit about that operationalizing, because that’s really where the data comes from. And then I want to dig into to how faster Airlines is really helping with that.
RM
Rob Meng
22:24
So before Ben talks about that, in the in the restaurant, let’s just go back a little bit and talk about the system. So it used to be that you’re still looking at magnetic loops, right. So used to be, you’d get a time when the when the person got to the order speaker box, and then you get a time when the whether you’re sitting at the window, well then we start doing this thing with tablets where we start the order speaker doesn’t matter anymore. So now that magnetic loops aren’t doing anything, right, the orders now being pushed 789 1215 cars back with a with a tablet. And now it’s a totally human process. Now there’s people and really in order to make it work, right, and we can get into this a little bit, but you got to be moving with the vehicle as much as possible. And so now it’s a people thing, and a movement thing and a process thing. And if you don’t have any way of watching and seeing it and having some measurements around it, it can go, it can go bad really fast, they can get really crazy. And you can go from doing something that you think is fixing the system to something that’s actually convoluting the system confusing your customers and slowing down the process. And yeah, Ben kids
JJ
Jeremy Julian
23:32
I was I was just gonna share it I’ve been but it’s it’s such a human thing to your point. And I had a very similar experience at the beginning of COVID. And any of our longtime listeners have have heard this story where I walked into a brand and didn’t happen to be drive thru. But it happened to be a counter service place where I could walk up to the counter in order. But the queue for the kitchen to prepare the food was extremely impacted because it was the beginning of COVID. And everything was coming in for third party. When I see a line of cars, I recognize that there’s going to be a weight and I make a choice. When I don’t see a line of cars. I don’t necessarily always consciously make that choice. Because I think well, these I’m the only one because we’re all very self centered. We think I’m the only one Why wouldn’t I be the one that’s here, and they’re gonna get my food for me as soon as I’m available. So Ben, you want to riff on that just for a couple of minutes because that that I’m sure you’re having to manage and your general managers and your your shift managers are having to manage those expectations. Because technology oftentimes can get the odors into the kitchen just as fast but you might not be able to take payment and or you might not be able to get the food out as quickly as they might want.
BL
Ben Little
24:39
Yeah, and kind of going back to how Rob and I met was you know, again, we we put all these fancy Tormach doors in originally just for my stores as sales were up, you know, 20% and we just think we’re geniuses and we’re moving the line so much faster. And then as we really started today dig into the data were like, well, maybe we’re not geniuses, maybe we actually got slower. And we just added diamond sales back in and we grew our digital sales. And so we’re being fooled by our own data. And, and so as we started to dig into that, yeah, that’s again, kind of where Robin than coming into play is, you know, I. Previously, if we change something in the drive thru, we can make educated guesses, but we really didn’t have any data analytics behind this definitively work. And did we definitively get faster, and that we definitively get more cars through during our peak hours? And and what we found, originally with the Tor Max doors was was that that was not the case. We actually got slower. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And we assumed the exact opposite.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
25:57
Was it? Because I mean, I guess just Was it because of confusion with the guests of getting the right food to the right cars? Like, where did it get slower? Like, where was the sticking point? And again, Rob, it sounds like Rob helped you solve that, but probably something that without the data, you would have had a hard time ascertaining until somebody, you know, so one of those obvious ones, when you see the data, you go, Oh, yeah, that was stupid. Why did I not see that myself probably would be my guess.
BL
Ben Little
26:21
It just added a layer of complexity that I don’t think we fully came to appreciate until we saw just how much slower we had gotten in the drive thru. Okay. And, and we were trying to use it as kind of a one step fix all without really appreciating the need to fully separate payment from the window, which was, this is what Chick fil A has done better than anyone else’s, you never ever pay at the window. Whatever. That
JJ
Jeremy Julian
26:50
is, the biggest sticking point everybody tells me on Drive Thru, is that payment. And if I can move that closer to the order point, it’s, I mean, at least a couple of customers that we have that compete with me, when I compete with you guys put her in that space, they say it all the time, it’s like, you know what, move it farther away from the window, because that’s the biggest sticking point is that, which is why even you know, some of the brands used to have the pay window, and then the pickup window, because again, same idea. So there’s drive it back before the tablets got there. So
BL
Ben Little
27:16
yeah, yeah, and for, you know, the tour Max, you know, we would, we would have the door and tablets, but we wouldn’t have a payment station yet. And so when you have multiple people on tablets outside, you know, extending the queue backwards, we, we still didn’t, there was a lot of confusion at the window, a lot of times, it would just add lag time. And you know, the orders would be out of sequence sometimes, and that would impact order accuracy. But, but the good part about it is, is you just increase the guest touch points is the biggest thing as far as the guest experience, because previously, you’re just talking to a faceless speaker. Yes. And then you see one person at the window verse, Now, you’ve got the initial touch point, when you’re ordering from a personal tablet, then we have the payment bucketed it out into its own kind of outside payment stations, that’s a second touch point and a second time to confirm the order, then they get to the window and it should just be then wide explorer, here you go. So it really just kind of like I said on the front end, it helps them bucket everything out and increases the touch points. And it should in theory, increase your order accuracy as well which which we know that that you know, you can go as fast as you want. But if you’re not getting the order right then then you’re going to hemorrhage guessed that that sounds obvious. But it’s it’s not obvious. It really isn’t.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
28:48
Well, I set it to I said it’s a couple of customers this past week, like I said I was at at the NRA show and and talking to some of our executives from some of the clients that we work with, they said 70% of their of their guest complaints come from motor accuracy problems. And as more and more stuff is going out the door in bags, you know, and some of these are even table service restaurants or restaurants that may not have a drive thru and you guys live the drive thru world, yourselves. But if 70% of your problems are related to order accuracy, that’s a big challenge, because you end up getting get retention. Rob, I know you’ve been even patient. Talk to me about what is faster lines do like let’s let’s talk about what it is that you guys have taken a different approach to solving the same problem because I think your guyses approach is very unique in that you don’t just implement technology, you truly try to understand the business process and what it is that they’re doing because it could be a problem has been alluded to where it’s a confusion issue. It’s a staffing issue. It’s a process issue. It’s a space issue. Technology’s just going to exacerbate that and help them have the tools because data for data’s sake is not valuable data to make better business decisions is really where you guys focus on Why don’t you give give our listeners an overall overview of what you guys did to take, take a different approach to solving these problems. And then how you guys engage with clients to help them them solve it for themselves.
RM
Rob Meng
30:11
Yeah, that’s great. I appreciate Jeremy. So first of all, we, we’ve been doing this a long time, we’ve been doing this for 13 years, we have a lot of new people that are coming into the space now with AI enabled technology, trying to keep track of cars and trying to do some of the things we’re doing with people inside as well. And what most people and this is true of lots of technology projects in the retail space, as well as in the restaurant space. A lot of folks bring in a solution and they say, Here’s your solution. Good luck. Yep. And, and they expect the operator, they expect the the IT team to go and implement it, and then know how to use it, and then know how to make the data work for your organization. And then also know how to train your team on how to actually use the data. I was in technology for a long time before I started doing this. And what I know is that no team has time note, we talked about speed of service, because we’re trying to save time for customers and also save time for our clients. It’s about saving time for our clients, we go we implement this, I mean, Ben’s team didn’t have to do anything, we literally show up, we run the cables, we mount the box, the cool thing is that we’ve set this up pretty simply. So we can be in and out of the location, usually about two hours, sometimes three. And when we leave, we’re actually collecting data, like we have real data at that point where we’re watching the cars, we give a status quo, we actually start to measure and we try to figure out what’s the flow, what’s actually happening. Now, before we tell anybody anything before we start telling the team about delays, what’s actually happening. And then we sit down with a team like Ben, and he’s got some great, you know, operating partners and folks that are really invested in making sure each one of his locations are successful. And we sit down with people like that. And we say, Okay, this is what we’re seeing this is what’s actually happening. Is this what you expect? And then we find out oh, no, we’re that we’re way below our time standard, we really want to be going faster. And then and then we start talking about what faster is and what expectation is, what is the kitchen capable of what’s possible here? What is your what is your operation setup to actually do. And then the really cool thing is, is that we have a partner like Ben, and we get to actually start to work on really neat projects, we start to talk about things like oh, let’s separate pay, and where do we put the payment? And oh, order entry? Is the speaker box faster is line busting with these tablets faster? Why is line busting slowing us down? And we get to really start to dissect all these different processes. And at the end of the day, it’s it’s you know, we talked about something specific, which is job function splitting, right? And so Ben’s got a really specific example that he’s he’s working on now, which is in the expo area. And Expo, I’m gonna let him talk about it because he knows it better than I do.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
33:08
Yeah. So Ben, Ben talked to me a little bit about kind of your experience as a client as it relates to Rob and his team’s process that they go through because I’m, I’m genuinely intrigued, and I watch technology projects succeed and kill it. And then I watch technology projects just ruin, you know, people, like at the beginning of COVID, everybody was all excited about getting orders into the kitchen and loading all these digital ways to get orders in. And then they crashed and burned. And there’s a couple of brands that I won’t go to anymore because of it. Because it was such an awful experience. And, again, I there, it’s changed management that you’re doing. And it’s not just implementing technology to give you these, it’s how do we change it. And then there’s one other example that I’ll tell you guys about, and this will really resonate with you guys. 20 years ago, I was working in the stadium industry. And I had worked at the stadium, and they were making every order that came in from their 10,000 seats to order. And they said none and and and and and and and and no, we’re going to and then this the stadium happened to do the Superbowl. And like that the first year it crashed. We had tickets, they were running an hour and 20 minute ticket times it was insane service. And again, this was 20 years ago, but I went in and to your point, Rob, I said no, we’re gonna have hot dogs and then we’re gonna have ketchup and mustard packages that are on the side. They were trying to make every ketchup mustard on the hotdog. That and I said no, the beginning of your shift you’re gonna have 40 cokes here and 40 you know sprites and and then you’re going to just run this food to them as fast as you can get it out the door and you have somebody else and they did the job splitting thing, but what would happen in the beginning when they first set this thing up and you guys are gonna laugh at this. They literally would be taking the order. They’d look at it and somebody put a hot dog in a bond and they wrap it and they put it on the tray and then they go grab the french fries and then they go grab the nachos and then they go grab the bag of peanuts and then they pour the coke and then go bring it someone I’m like new this is not going But it’s funny because you think that, oh, they ordered the food, I’m gonna make it, I’m gonna bring it, bring it to him, but you can’t do it at pace to be able to do that. And then then the longer the queue gets, the more stressed out, they get. And it ends up doing that so. So great illustration long time ago, but it is kind of a funny story that I say to people like, No, we change the process, we’re still delivering the same product. We’re delivering it faster, and we’re delivering it hotter, and we’re delivering it better, because we change the flow of the line, and jobs split and set people up to be successful. So Ben, talk to me a little bit about kind of what your guys’s engagement with the team at Vassar lines look like? And how did it? How did it impact you guys, because I’m guessing you guys were really successful before just more successful once you guys got the technology in the place where
BL
Ben Little
35:45
we’re always trying to get a little bit faster every day, and I’m laying in our, our Goldsboro stores parking lot watching the line as we speak as matter of fact. But But yeah, I mean, the I think the best thing about Rob and his team is that they have been willing to customize the look and feel of the data to pretty much exactly what we ultimately envisioned that and just getting it to where we can simply communicate a message to the GMs, and the AM’s and the ship leaders of here’s what’s causing your delays. Here’s how we fix the problem. Here’s the data that shows it. And you know, previously, again, we were just relying on old loop timer data, where we really just had to guess and make assumptions. And then when we change something, you know, we may have felt like we were faster, but then the time didn’t change, then we didn’t really know if it worked or not. And then you’re kind of just chasing your own tail to where you know, now we, we have definitive analytics to say, alright, we tinkered with this, it helped a little bit, but maybe if we take it one step further, we can, you know, get five to seven more seconds off of the, the window time or, you know, we can get 10 Less alerts from 12 to one or whatever it may be. And that’s kind of one of the other things that I really liked about faster lines is that it’s really kind of a reverse way to look at speed of service. And it makes it very, very customizable. Kind of, like I’ve already mentioned multiple times, there are so many variables in store set up and you know, the parking lot and queue length and average check and all of these things. And each one of those variables changes the equation to what is going to be the bottleneck for that individual store. And so instead of saying, you know, all sub 60 seconds, we’re doing great, when really that store is true, baseline should be like 45 seconds, or maybe a store is true, baseline should be like 110 means that they’re killed. Yeah. So that’s, that was kind of like the biggest, one of the biggest light bulbs went off is like, what why are we not measuring this store against itself? And why are we measuring it against other stores that may just have completely and utterly different setups, you know, I got my oldest store we built in 2004. And I have my most recent one was built in 2018. I mean, they’re completely different stories, they’re completely different layouts, the key difference in the kitchen, the kitchen setups, different, so on and so forth. So, so you’re just being able to measure a story against itself is kind of one of the biggest takeaways we’ve had from, from Rob and his team. And so you know, when they come in, they’ll kind of set everything up, turn everything on, and just basically not tell anyone for about two weeks and collect baseline data. So then we kind of have, you know, true blind testing for for the first two weeks, because we don’t tell the GM or the AM’s that we’re doing it, kind of see where that stores true baseline is, then we tell about the program. And then we can really start tinkering and messing around with things and changing things and seeing exactly what works and what doesn’t, and where we can not move the bottleneck but hopefully alleviate the bottleneck. But sometimes you do move the bottleneck somewhere else. And then, you know, you get to work on a new set of the problem.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
39:28
So I’m going to ask you a quick question. Ben, what do you what do you say to those operators out there that just say just operate better? Because what happens at the end of the day, and you’ve been an operator for a while and you’re chuckling on video? Because you know, well, no, no, you don’t understand. You just need better managers and you need better people because that’s what people say all day long. And I see you shaking your head on video for the audio listeners. Ben and Rob are both shaking their head but we’ve all heard it. We’ve all seen it. It’s like just operate better. You know that your ticket time shouldn’t be 60 seconds. Just go be bad. Hear. But with data and with digging into each of these things, to your point, 45 seconds for one store could be the same for 70 seconds for another store based on volume based on kitchen based on guest check average and across the board. So what would you say to that operator, that’s the longtime operator that sits around with a clipboard and just says this is just what you need to do, manage better get better people, and you’ll get your ticket times.
BL
Ben Little
40:23
It’s kind of like an anti hustle culture strategy of, you know, like, I want to be as lazy as possible, I want this program to tell me exactly where I need to make the changes and exactly what we need to do better. So I’m not playing whack a mole, and just guessing and just, you know, telling my team members go faster, go faster, go faster, because when when people, you know, make that broad statement of like, just hire better, or just train them better, or, you know, whatever crap, they’re just, they’re always just making the blind assumption that it’s an effort problem. I mean, I’m telling you, I’ve been in hundreds of shifts during a store where the effort is absolutely there, they’re going as fast as they possibly can. But there’s something holding them down from reaching their peak throughput in those times and chips. And if you don’t have, you know, a guiding light, or some kind of data analytics that you can point to and say, We made this change, this was the result, then you’re just guessing, and I mean, guessing is a really bad business practice.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
41:32
I love your your idea of playing whack a mole, it’s like, you don’t show up somewhere else, because you don’t have the data to be able to do that. Rob, we’re getting close to the end of our time. So why don’t you talk to our audience out there? How do they get in touch with your team? What should they expect the engagement to look like? If they get in touch with your team? Are you going to show up with your referees? Jersey, you know, with your stopwatch? And when you started doing that? Obviously, that’s not the case. But why don’t you Why don’t you tell our listeners out there that have heard what Ben had to say? And say I need what Ben has? How do I get it in my restaurant?
RM
Rob Meng
42:04
Yeah, faster, lines.com, faster, lyons.com is the best way to get to. So there’s a there’s a place right there to set up a meeting with me and my team to actually set up a proof of concept, we like to roll it out to a couple of sites, we don’t want to do one site or two sites, usually three, four, even 10 sites at a time. Because you’re gonna see things, you really need to talk to the multiple sites like Ben was talking about, and see the difference between your mid your mid operating site and your high operating site. And we’re going to then do it for you, we’re going to come in and we’re actually going to implement for you, we’re not going to ask your IT team. Any questions, were literally because we actually put our network in the box, we don’t touch your network. We don’t want to deal with pay card PCI DSS or any of that stuff, I know how difficult that is, we’re going to put our sensors in, we’re going to put them into place where we need them so that we can see where the actual services and where the bottleneck is. And then we’re going to start collecting the data. And we’re going to tell you what’s really happening. And the cool thing about our data is it’s a trailing indicator of everything else that’s going on in the store, we actually can see what’s happening. And when you make those adjustments, adjustments, like Ben has, we can say oh, yeah, that’s working or no, that’s not working. And then the best part about about our data is we can say, Oh, and by the way, go watch your video. You already everyone here, everybody who’s listening to here has has video in their stores. There’s just no place that doesn’t have video on their stores. And we ended up for managers, for district managers for for regional folks, we give them a reason to go back and actually watch their video and see what was happening in the store. That was the bottleneck. Yeah, let’s go examine the process. Let’s go see what was happening. Because like Ben said, it’s almost never occasionally it’s training. But it’s almost never training, it’s almost never effort. There’s usually teams that are trying to kill themselves to get to where they’re trying to go. And they just need some help to actually adjust a process, do a job function split. And we can really help these organizations find out when are hours that we should be actually investing in these locations. When should we put an extra person in and that one extra person is going to help us serve 1520 Extra customers in that hour. And that’s the fun stuff, right? It’s not about whipping the team. It’s about making sure the schedules right, it’s about making sure that the resources are there, and then doing some process improvements so that you can actually make those adjustments that take a golden hour turned into a really golden hour that and and you mentioned something before you were talking about 70% of their complaints were accuracy. customers complain about accuracy. Customers don’t complain about speed. They just don’t come back. They just don’t and so speed is the first part of convenience and customer service. And then yeah, you You’re right, you have to get the order, right. But those customers who get the order wrong, they’re going to complain, the ones who just had a slow experience, they’re just either not going to come back as often or they’re just not going to come back at all. And so we want to make sure that we’re moving the line and making sure that there’s that speed. That is customer service that keeps those people knowing you’re convenient builds brand trust and get some coming back over and over again to to get your you know, your your, your chicken fingers and and your fantastic sauces.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
45:28
Yeah, I would I would concur with that statement with a of a father of four. When the drive thru experiences bad man, like, especially when they’re younger. Now I got three teenagers some pray for me, but that’s a different conversation at a different time. They’re patient enough because we’re always sitting on their stupid phones, but outside of that, you know, and I’ve got one one elementary age age kid, but when they were younger, man, they had to be fast, so bad. I’m gonna throw a curveball at Yeah. What if somebody that’s never experienced XP is they see exact speeds? They’re like I need I need some food was the go to and then what is your go to because every restaurant operator has some wonky way that they operate and they make their own food with their own sauces. So I want I want you to give some some saxbys gold out to our to our listeners out there if you wouldn’t mind.
BL
Ben Little
46:14
Um, I’m trying to eat healthier currently, because as you can imagine, I eat a disproportionate amount of fried chicken. But my my current goat is getting the grilled owl salad. No toast no cheese with one packet of white vinegar bread and one cup of the buffalo garlic sauce and putting the buffalo garlic on top of the grilled chicken and it’s very good. Very good.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
46:39
Yeah, that sounds that sounds way healthier than I’m gonna eat this afternoon. I
BL
Ben Little
46:45
don’t want to eat healthy. I mean, I’ve always thought that our kickin chicken is just the best thing that we have on the menu. It’s it’s three chicken fingers between two pieces of big old Texas toes, our tongue torch, hot sauce, ranch and crinkle fries and,
JJ
Jeremy Julian
47:04
yes, watering just thinking about that
RM
Rob Meng
47:06
right now. Precious is good. It’s fantastic. Yeah.
BL
Ben Little
47:10
I love it. It’s mostly but it’s good.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
47:13
Yeah, exactly. That one’s hard to eat in the drive thru, because you end up getting sauce all over yourself, but, but it tastes delicious. So awesome. Well, thank you guys for jumping on to your listeners, guys. We know that you guys have got lots of choices on how you guys spend your time and energy. So we appreciate you guys spending time with us. Learn a little bit about what the team at festival is doing and how they’ve helped.
I
Intro
47:37
Thanks for listening to the restaurant technology guys podcast, visit restaurant technology guy’s dot com for tips, Industry Insights and more to help you run your restaurant better.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
47:54
Zach Spees if you haven’t already subscribed, go subscribe to the newsletter as well as wherever you want to consume your content. Rob And Ben, thank you guys so much for your wisdom and hanging out with us today and to our listeners. Make it a great day. Thanks, guys.
