Owner: Jeremy Julian
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
franchisees, people, pos, brand, beer, tech, run, pandemic, online ordering, restaurant, tap, brass, loyalty, guest, third party, talked, brady, technology, franchise, scott
SPEAKERS
Scott (64%), Jeremy (36%), Intro (1%)
I
Intro
0:02
This is the restaurant technology guys podcast, helping you run your restaurant better.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
0:13
Welcome back to the restaurant technology guys podcast. We thank you guys for joining us. As I say every single time I know you guys have lots of choices, and it feels like every day, there’s 20 new podcasts that pop up there for trying to get your attention and trying to get your your ears to listen, but we appreciate all of those longtime listeners. Today is a pretty cool, pretty cool topic that we’re talking talking about. And talking to we are talking to the CEO of before Brady’s and the brass tap. Scott St. Louis, I think is how I say his name. And we’re going to talk a lot we’re going to, you know, span the gamut about what they do as a brand, who they are. They’ve had kind of a tech journey over the last five years, and Scott’s going to kind of clue us in on all of that. But Scott, why don’t you say hello to who or to our audience, tell them a little bit about yourself. And then we can talk about the two brands you get the privilege of working with?
SS
Scott SirLouis
1:05
Well, Greetings, everyone. Glad to be here. Happy to be here. Jeremy. Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to our conversation. As Jeremy mentioned, my name is Scott Lewis, I’m the Chief Operating Officer at FSC. franchise. We own two brands, before Brady’s a family sports pub and the brass tap, which is a craft beer bar social gathering place around the country, about 180 units overall. And what I think we’re gonna talk about today is just our technology journey over the last few years, from from a pretty rudimentary beginning to where I think now we’ve got a pretty good restaurant technology stack, able to service all of our stakeholders from guests to create jerseys to our ownership group. That’d be a thank you for having me.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
1:55
I love it. I love it. I know that you’re not in 100% of the cities out in the country. So for those that are not familiar with before Brady’s and or the brass tap beer bar, what, talk to me a little bit more about what those brands mean, because I think it’ll, it’ll create some context as we start talking about tech and kind of what you guys have done and how you guys want to engage with the guests and staff and franchises and all that kind of stuff.
SS
Scott SirLouis
2:19
Sure. Sounds good. Well, people bring his brand is a 38 year old brand. It’s it’s really a legacy brand. It’s primarily franchise, mostly single unit owner operators. Based in Florida, in the southeast, although we do have some penetration into the Midwest. The unique thing about before Brady’s is really the that our stores are embedded in their communities. And that’s really the point of differentiation between us and and the large casual dining brands. We are typically not outside on an outside of the major shopping mall. Instead, we’ll be in the local Plaza down the street from your house where your grocery store so we get a lot of really, really high frequency. Repeat guests, particularly during the week, Sunday through Thursday, but probably Metro a little weaker on Friday and Saturdays where people are going out for special event dining. You know, we’re not necessarily the place that you’re going to bring mom for, you know, for her birthday or for your wedding anniversary. But we are the place that you’re going to show up every week after Tuesday night soccer practice, to catch a game, have a cold beer with a cute with your family and your friends and you’re likely to see three or four your neighbors in there every time you’re in as well. So that’s really who that brand is. And kind of the heart of of that brand. We’ve got about 136 of those units. Our best kept brand is a little more widely spread across the country. We’ve got 45 Brass tabs open right now and quite a few of the pipeline coming up almost 100 that we’re looking to get built over the next few years. The brass tab is a social gathering place started off as a craft beer bar 60 taps in every every one of our bars that rotate out frequently. But we’ve expanded a lot beyond craft beer into a really great and creative liquor program. We’ve got great food, really upscale bar food and things you can come in and have a good meal while you’re in one of our places having a great drink cocktail or beer and socializing with your friends. Maybe for a game or a World Cup game or so forth. That’s really the heart of who that brand is as well.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
4:50
I love it. I love it and I know you and I talked to a little bit pre show and many of the people that are on you know that are listening, I talk to on a semi regular basis and I did catch a World Cup game At the brass tap about 10 minutes from my house with some buddies. It was certainly the gathering place. And I think what, what Scott shared as far as high quality food, high quality drinks, and it was fun. I’m not, I don’t drink any longer but But it was funny because I think of the other three people that were there with me, everybody had at least two rounds of drinks. And every single one of them got a different drink each time. So it was kind of cool, because they were able to experience a whole bunch of different beers, some Belgian brews and, and whatnot. So for those beer aficionados, I know that I know at least my friends that that are here, here in Texas, they love that that store to be able to be able to be able to go enjoy, not only a game, but but a cold drink, as you said, so. So you talked a lot about a lot about the two different brands. And you talked about the the legacy before British brand. That kind of came up and you said it’s kind of community related. And then you talk about brass tap and how quickly brass tap has grown. Why do you think that that is taken off and kind of tell me a little bit about kind of why you guys think you have so much in the pipeline? Because I know in just in general, you know, casual dining has taken a bit of a dip over the last couple years with with COVID. And just you know, there’s so much competition in different areas. Talk to me a little bit about why you guys think that that brand is really the growth strategy brand, and why people are taking so much to it.
SS
Scott SirLouis
6:21
I think from a from a guest perspective, the strength of the brass tap is that it’s there’s not a lot of places like it around where you can go we compete. Not necessarily with other chain restaurants, but probably more with the local independent bar that’s, that’s down the street or around the corner from your house. We just have upscaled that experience a little bit. Not not too much. Not not, we’re not. You know, as I said earlier, before we started, we’re not gonna shoot pretty Michelin stars. But you know, we’re definitely a step up from the guy down the street that’s putting peanuts on the bar and hotdogs out of out of a war room. Right. So I think we provide a good alternative for people to come in in their neighborhoods and meet their friends and have a great experience from a franchisee really, the reason that we’re seeing so much interest in the brass tap as a as a franchisor is that we’ve hit that sweet spot in the model between how much it costs to get one open, how much it costs to operate it, and how much profit you can make. So ultimately, what’s your return on your investment? how complicated it is to run and so forth. So, you know, we’ve success in the restaurant industry, and particularly in franchising is about, kind of triangulating between operational complexity, upfront investments, and then ongoing operating expenses and, and bottom line profit that and we think we’ve got a really attractive model. In the brass tap, you know, our it certainly helps that our sales mix runs about 60% alcohol and 40% food and margins on on alcohol are a lot better than they are today. But it’s in the industry knows that. So we run some some really compelling unit level margins out of our brass tap. And we’ve been very careful not to get out over our skis in terms of size and investment. So the best app is about 3200 to 3600 square feet. So it’s not a gigantic freestanding box that you got to fill and do $4 million in sales every year in order to make any money. But yet, we do do pretty compelling sales volumes. Averaging up for the system right now is north of 1,000,005 in our top quartile is, is running well north of 2.2. So we get pretty good sales per square foot out of the concept. And we get really good unit level margins helped in a large part because of our sales.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
9:09
Because your sales mix. Well, I know you and I talked a little bit about it, Tom pre show and I’ve only been into a couple of brass tops, you know, just across the country. And when I think of you know truthfully when I think of of a brewery, I think of a large facility. And I think it’s I think it’s interesting because you guys have you guys have served that market but not in a huge footprint. So it does keep your unit economics on line because I do agree with you. You know, at some point, you get to a point where you’ve got to do a certain amount, a certain amount of volume or you can’t stay open whereas you know, that store, the store at least around the corner from my house is is is big enough that you can have a large party of 10 or 12 or 15 people and not feel like you’re taking up the whole restaurant, but it’s also not you know you’re not dwarfed by by having you know by by having 15 people and you know the place is tight. So the energy, I would say the other thing I really like about about having been into two different stores is just the energy that you can create in that small space, especially when there’s lots of TVs around and lots of activity, it creates a vibe that that is enjoyable, especially when you’re going out to have a drink with some friends.
SS
Scott SirLouis
10:18
I’m really glad to hear you say that, because that’s exactly what we’re striving for.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
10:21
Yeah, no, I love it. I love it. And again, I know that that’s a lesser, I don’t say lesser known brand, but there’s less of them out there. And so as you guys are looking to grow that brand, I just want to I guess I want to get my opinion on it a little bit. Because I do think that that’s that for me, as somebody that’s been into 1000s of restaurants over over my time. I do enjoy that part of it. So you’ve been there a little over five years, I take it from your LinkedIn page. We talked again, pre show about kind of where you guys were at when you got there both operationally and where you guys were at that at on a guest experience and on the tech stack. And and where you guys have gone gone? Why don’t you take me back as far as your memory will allow you back that five years to tell me, you know, what was it like when you got to the brand from a guest experience and how technology played a part in it. And then we can talk, because really through that five years, you’ve gone through the pandemic, and a whole lot of changes with with adoption and whatnot.
SS
Scott SirLouis
11:15
Sure. So I mean, one of the reasons I was brought in is is my CEO realized that in order to position FSC, as a franchisor, for the growth that we saw coming, we were going to have to make some significant investments in technology to be able to just keep up with with the industry. When I got here, there was a mix of the biggest issues, there was a mix of POS systems across not only the brands, but across units, the brand, the company as a franchisor had not mandated POS prior to this, we were in the middle of a of a POS rollout, when I walked in that rollout had actually stalled due to just a lot of executional issues, primarily on the other side of FSC. But a few stumbles on the part of our POS provider as well. But you know, that’s one of the first things I did was to walk in the door and just kind of reevaluate what’s going on with this deployment. Do we have the right POS partner chosen? It once I answered that question, yeah, this does look like the right the right partner, then it was a matter of, of getting with the right people at that at that organization and partnering up to identify where, where they’re where were the stumbling blocks that had stalled the process, how do we get past them? And how do we move as quickly as we can in a franchise system to finish out that that deployment of POS and you’ve been a technology a long time, I’m sure you’re aware that POS switch out in any restaurant system might be the most difficult change you make. Between the
JJ
Jeremy Julian
12:59
two people get promoted for going to the CEO and saying we got to change out POS like it’s, it’s painful, it’s painful, it takes a lot of work, a lot of you know, and we deal with brands that are against the size and bigger, and it’s it’s a pain in the ass. It’s a lot of work. It’s open heart surgery in the middle of an operating restaurant. And there’s so many so many stakeholders that you got to figure out between corporate and the franchises and the operators. I mean, you know, the third party, different packages that are integrated, whether that be loyalty, or gift or third party delivery, all of it. It’s painful.
SS
Scott SirLouis
13:28
Yeah, it was for a little while. But we have a good partner, and we’re happy where we ended up, we got it back on track and got that completed. Pre COVID. Thank God, we were able to finish that up. And then and then we started layering on the other things that that needed to be done and COVID was a was obviously a terrible, but we came out of it a lot stronger than we would because it forced us to accelerate our timelines to really get a lot of the guest facing technology in place. For third party delivery, integration, robust online ordering platforms, curbside pickup, all of the things that I think a lot of brands did, during COVID, to try and increase the number of channels that they were able to sell to consumers. So I’m very happy about where we ended up coming out of that. But yeah, it was a it was a difficult process, particularly during COVID to scramble to get all these things in place.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
14:37
Well, I’d love to hear from an operator because, again, we’re in the pls business, we do these kinds of change outs for brands like you every day. And you said at the onset, when you were talking about the description of what what was going on that that some portion of the failure of the first implementation came from the FSC site. I think that’s what I heard you say, tell me a little bit more about that. Because I think all too often just dropped off. And we’re to blame as the as the technology manufacturers and the technology providers, because we have to get to a place where we can say it’s gonna be painful, but it’s not that painful, because people won’t sign up if it’s too painful. But there’s also a part to be played on the restaurant side on the change management side, on the operator side on the technologist side. Okay. I want to I want to keep going down that thread that said, FSC had a part to play in this failure. And it’s hard because again, as somebody that has to sell this in sell the change that we’re trying to experience, there’s challenges, there’s challenges that come about, and people in their mind, think it’s gonna be, you know, if I told you, you got to, you got to lose 20 pounds by the end of the month, it’d be, it’d be hard. But like, you kind of know what that looks like, when you’re changing MPLS, it’s, people can’t really give you all of the steps and all of the things that you need to go by, tell me a little bit more about why you think that FSC didn’t, I guess, it probably wasn’t the tech, it probably was something to do with the implementation, the partnership, the expectations, it probably wasn’t the actual technology that that was the problem. It was the change management. Talk to me a little bit more about that. Because I think all too often people try and change, they’ve got this vision of the future, that’s gonna be so much better. But they don’t understand the work that needs to go in to get in there. I’d love I’d love to have you riff on that for just a few minutes, Scott, if you wouldn’t mind?
SS
Scott SirLouis
16:33
Sure. I will say the probably the number one factor that that made it difficult for for that process in the early stage was we didn’t get buy in from either the company operators or the franchise operators. They I think everybody moved too quickly that, that predates me, you know, I walked in the process that was already underway and stalled. But, you know, my understanding from from kind of trying to do root cause analysis, where the issues were, is moved too quickly at the beginning, without clear communications, and expectations on what was going to happen and how the process was going to be and so forth. The second thing was not a lot of disciplines around the process. I’ll give you an example. You know, there was many, you know, we’re a, we’re a diverse franchise system, particularly on the people Brady side stores do a lot of things that are unique to their store. So there was grandma’s
JJ
Jeremy Julian
17:41
been coming in for 30 years, and she wants her bacon grilled cheese, and it might not be on the menu and you’re gonna get grandma her bacon grilled cheese, because that’s what you do. Right?
SS
Scott SirLouis
17:49
Well, that and it’s part of our concept to be in our communities and kind of every store is a little bit different than what the feel part of the community. Well, we didn’t have good process for accommodating those those types of menu items. So converting over from, from old POS to the new, all of a sudden, half the menus missing or the prices are wrong, or those sorts of things. I mean, all the way down to things like the provider we chose is cloud based. We, they I think we’re not as experienced that enterprise at that time. Maybe some others. And I think they learned some lessons too, but it was things around, you know, we gave some general guidelines to the franchisee about networking, how to how to set up the networking, how to get the wireless access point. And then we relied on the franchisee to go out find their own contractor and do that on their own networking. We didn’t have they didn’t insist on a failover. So, you know, internet goes down. And I got franchisees that didn’t understand that when the internet goes down, the POS goes down. Yes, exactly. And they’re not yellow franchisees are not tech people, and they haven’t they were it was, it was a long education process to help them to get to that point. And it was a little painful in the sense that you know, there were disciplines that said we had to put in place and say listen, you’re going to use this networking provider, you’re going to have this cellular failover option and which is a little more expensive on the front end for franchisees but in the long run ends up being the right solution and then probably the third thing was the department it totally was just under resource just simply did not have the bodies and the bodies we did have didn’t have the experience or sophistication to to manage a POS deployment across 150 locations.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
19:52
I love it. I love it and like I part of me I mean we are recording so that’s great for me because I’m going to be like I’m gonna cut out this five minute clip when I I’m going to talk to people about these things, because what you’re saying is 100%, right? And they see more failures of technology because of underresourced, poor expectation setting poor communication. And I mean, you hit all of those and you know, your to listen, the last 20 episodes, I would say that almost all of them hit on one of those three points, if not all of those three points.
SS
Scott SirLouis
20:19
Well, I’m glad to know that we got the trifecta, we screw up basically everything else.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
20:22
Yeah. Okay. But the sad part is, is and I would, I would contend it’s less about the tech because you know, what, if you chose any of them, they’re running and hundreds, if not 1000s of other restaurants. So they’re there. They wouldn’t be in business if they weren’t able to figure out how to get technology to work. But oftentimes, it’s what do I expect? How do I manage through those things and change management’s heart, you know, as I said earlier, nobody got nobody got promoted for picking, picking the right point of sale, or going to their CEO and saying, We got to change point of sale, it’s it’s hard, it takes a lot of work. And with the right one, as you talked about, it allows you to fulfill the business needs that your guests are looking for, which is the thread that I want to go on here in a couple minutes. But it looks like you’re about to say something.
SS
Scott SirLouis
21:04
No. The other thing about POs that makes it even more difficult than really any other technology change out is there’s both a you talked about change management. And there’s that so there’s a learning curve for all your operators, your frontline people that have to come in. But then there’s the hardware component, that layers on top of that, we change the back office system, which we are in the middle of doing, we’re towards the tail end of doing. I mean, that’s a hard enough process to teach everybody how to use the new system. But the hardware thing adds a completely additional layer of complexity to it. You know, because it’s not like you’re walking in and changing out hardware, pristine, new restaurants that have just gotten built. Some of these are 35 years old. And you’re having to go in and convince the franchisee that yes, you really do have to rewire everything. Yeah, no way use the existing wiring.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
22:01
Yeah, or that printer that’s been 14 years old. Can’t they reuse it? I bought it, you know, 14 years ago. It’s like, and I look at people and go, Okay, take the cell phone out of your pocket. How old is it? Well, I bought it six months ago. Oh, let me go get your laptop. How was it? We got it last Christmas? Why do you think that you’re going to take a system that you’re running your business on every day, and let it run on 10 year old tech, it’s like, Come on, man. It doesn’t work that way. You wouldn’t run any other business that way. But for whatever reason, people think POS, they should be able to run it for 10 or 15 or 20 years without any issue. Right? Right. So So you talked about the fact that you guys swapped POS pre pandemic, which allows you the opportunity to fulfill some of the market demands that came out of out of the pandemic. Talk to me about the decision making process, because you still had the same problem change management, you still have the problem with training, you still have the problem of getting new franchisees on board? Where did you guys go first? And why did you go there versus, you know, was it online ordering? Was it loyalty? Was it you know, you guys had some path that you guys took, talked and talked me through the decision making process? Why did you go where you went? And and how did you guys choose that first versus something else?
SS
Scott SirLouis
23:13
Sure. So as the pandemic was starting off, we sat down as an executive team and started to ask ourselves, how are we going to get through this? You know, and that’s a question that has multiple facets to it. We set ourselves some goals that we were not going to lose any franchisees and we were not going to lay anybody off. Because either constitution, well, we listened, we thought this is the long term play, because this is going to end. You know, it’s not the zombie apocalypse.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
23:45
It is you won’t be around to worry about it anyway. Right?
SS
Scott SirLouis
23:48
Right. So it’s, we’re going to come out of this thing. And the brands that are going to succeed in the long run are going to be the ones that set themselves up for coming out of it. Now you still have to manage cash, and you got to be able to stay in business, and all those sorts of things. But But that’s where we started looking. The first thing we did was really say, alright, the way we get our products to guests, is fundamentally changing. This is, you know, this sounds obvious now, but in March of 2020, it necessarily wasn’t that we were going to have to figure out every channel we could possibly find, to be able to sell to guests without having them come in our restaurants. Because that just in most jurisdictions, that was we were shut down. Yep. So the first step was was listen, let’s look at the bulk of it, which is online ordering. So we took a big initiative around making sure that we were as good as we possibly could be. And
JJ
Jeremy Julian
24:51
and prior to that, were you guys doing any online ordering, or was it just
SS
Scott SirLouis
24:55
it was we took we took our existing dining menu and just kind of put it up there. And you could you can order it online if you wanted. But it wasn’t the user interface wasn’t very good. There weren’t any pictures. So we were running about six or 7% Total off premise pre pandemic. You know, of course peak in the pandemic, we were up over 90%. Yeah. But really coming out, we’ve we’ve stuck at around 20 to 23%.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
25:27
Wow, that’s huge. That’s got to be well above industry average, when I when I look at the 10 ks from some of the publicly traded companies.
SS
Scott SirLouis
25:34
Well, I’m glad to hear that we put a lot of effort into it. But But we looked at both the the ordering experience, and that’s where the tech comes into place. And then we also looked at, listen, you can’t just have best in class ordering. And then on the back end, deliver a crap product. Yeah. So you know, we went out and worked with our packaging suppliers to figure out what is the best packaging we can get for our food, we looked and did a lot of a lot of studies. I mean, in our people, Brady’s brand, you know, it’s, we sell a lot of chicken wings, we sell a lot of burgers, we sell a lot of French fries, and chicken tenders, and so forth. It’s a type of menu and who we are. And, you know, we calculated that there was a almost 73% of every one of our items that went out the door, had a fried component that was either a food or a side item, french fries or onion rings, and so forth. So we really put a lot of focus on what’s our packaging for fried foods. Made a big upgrade to that. So I you know, I want to say I think our success in this has had a lot to do with tech. But there’s more that goes into it. You can’t just focus on the tech as a as a rush.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
26:45
Oh, absolutely.
SS
Scott SirLouis
26:47
But we worked with our with our POS provider, they put a lot in and I will say they were a great partner through COVID. And that they were constantly adding functionality and capability into their system of at no additional expense to their client, their customers. Again, to open up sales channels to allow Yes, whether it be improved online ordering, whether it be direct integration with third party delivery drivers, whether it be curbside. All of those sorts of things. And so that’s we looked at every one of those channels and kept working on it. I mean, at one point in the pandemic, we had all of our restaurants go out and buy the go to Walmart, you buy the 10 by 10 tents. So we’re primarily at shopping plazas, and the inline or Encap shopping plaza, so we don’t have drivers. So wouldn’t expect counsel that you have driver. So what we did was we set up tents on the sidewalk in front of every one of our locations. And our POS provider uses handheld devices. So we were able to put a couple of employees masked in glove and everything out and big signage out there and had people basically ran it as a kind of a pop up drive through that utilizing the handhelds to transmit orders back to the kitchen.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
28:15
I love that. I love that. That’s I mean, the one thing I love about operators and why I love having you guys on these things is because you guys figure it out, like tech or no tech, you know, plumbing goes out, you figure out how to operate a restaurant, you know, fryer goes out salamander goes out, you still figure out how to operate the restaurant, you know, pandemic hits, you can’t sit people in the dining room. So we create a drive thru out of a 10 by 10 tend to, you know, from from Walmart or Sam’s Club or you know, target or whatever. You know, it’s so amazing to me,
SS
Scott SirLouis
28:43
one of the most creative ones. We have one of our franchisees do this, you know, people breeze, we do a lot of community events, we do a lot of trivia and so forth. So when his dining room was shut down, he actually went out rented a very large tent, a 30 foot something, got permission from his landlord set it up in the parking lot. And he’s at a fairly small town in Florida. And he he ran tailgate trivia night. So Oh, wow, drive up that truck truck up and everybody would sit on their tailgate. And he was running food out from the restaurant food and beer so forth out to the restaurant and ran to eat trivia nights. That’s awesome. It was a great really, really,
JJ
Jeremy Julian
29:27
that’s a really unique way to go about it. I’m gonna keep going down that path of, of, I guess for wall economics. And how did you guys how did you guys decide? So did you guys open up the third party delivery. So you talked about online ordering, getting tech in place, getting the packaging in place, getting the business process in place to make sure that that your staff can serve serve those customers in that way, which quite frankly, people underestimate you know, I’m sure even some of those things there were probably operational changes you needed to make to make sure that product got to the right places and the right time so that you had the right product out. Did you guys do surprise Ready delivery and just open it up to all third party delivery apps. Day one. Did you guys pick? You know, I’m just going to partner with DoorDash? And make sure that that’s right. Or tell me a little bit more about how you went from online ordering and curbside pickup or were in dining room pickup to third party and what experience did you have on that?
SS
Scott SirLouis
30:18
There we go. You’re back.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
30:20
Okay. Sorry, I don’t know how much of that you missed. I was just saying third party, like, where did you guys go with third party? Did you guys just start with your own online ordering? And then do third party after the factor? Or the third party start day one talk to me a little bit about, you know, did you open it up to all of the third party delivery drivers are just just one, you know, focus on just DoorDash or GrubHub, or UberEATS, or whatever. Talk to me a little bit about that decision making and where that went?
SS
Scott SirLouis
30:45
Sure. So, so we had been working with third party pre pandemic stores. But the adoption across the franchise system was was fairly slow. I mean, the the business case for going to third party with particularly with the with the commission rates that they were charging back then it was difficult to get a franchisee to kind of understand the just how to how to make the decision
JJ
Jeremy Julian
31:16
and how to make money. Well, I
SS
Scott SirLouis
31:18
mean, I mean, plenty of have conversations with franchisees even pre pandemic to say, Listen, the consumer decision process is not I want to order before Brady’s should I go there, or should I get it delivered? Instead, the decision process is I don’t feel like going out when I’m hungry. I get to deliver to me.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
31:40
Absolutely. It’s so funny that you say that because I love that because that is so often I’ve had a little bit too much to drink. I’m not driving anywhere, I need food, or whatever. You know, it’s it’s raining out, I’m not driving out, I need food. And then they go on the app to figure it out. Not I really want people Brady’s I should just call on the app and go order it because that doesn’t happen very often.
SS
Scott SirLouis
32:00
No. And that was you know that it was key getting franchisees to understand that that they weren’t going to need, they weren’t losing sales or paying this giant commission on sales that would have come in that it was all incremental, particularly pre pandemic. So we got a little bit of adoption. We did not limit the providers because our store base is pretty diverse geographically. And a lot of our stores are in small towns across Florida and the Southeast. People mean the brass tap is a major, major metro areas, Dallas and Sacramento and Washington DC and so forth. But people Brady’s is in you know what Tula Florida and Albertville, Alabama, right? And so pre pandemic, certainly, and even during the earlier parts of the pandemic. UberEATS and DoorDash worked in those those markets. Yeah. So if there was delivery available, it was a local player or a regional player. So we ended up working with everybody, which operationally causes a lot of problems, because you’ve got, you’ve got six tablets behind the bar, and everything’s dating orders are coming in crazy and that sort of thing. So one of the things that once the pandemic started, and the volume really started to pick up on third party delivery, and the franchisees were jumping on because they had no other choice, one of the first things we had to do was find a partner that could take all of those orders, even from the small players, and figure out how to get them into POS effectively and efficiently and so forth. So we did that, you know, we found we found a pretty good partner to be able to do that. And this is, you know, prior to the times when now a lot of the POS providers are doing direct integration, especially your players, but, you know, in 2020, that was not the case. Yes, absolutely. Third party players that were the only they were the only game in town.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
34:03
Well, and even though those aggregators and or any of the third parties were you know, from a consumer perspective, everybody was using them, but the restaurants had to your point were reluctant because they saw it as you’re just eating out in the margins that are already super thin. So how am I gonna make any money by by doing this and the only way you can make money is it is incremental number one and number two, it’s you got to streamline the process, you got to make sure that the process doesn’t need a human being to be standing at a tablet, listening for it today and then re entering it into the point of sale. It’s going to flow straight through. So So where are you guys going tech wise, you talked about the fact that you guys are putting in a new back office. What else have you guys thrown loyalty? You know how to you know, talk to me a little bit about all of the other things that you guys are considering doing? Because I think it’s an interesting you guys have done a lot in the last five years since you’ve gotten there. I love the success story and I’m sure I could find a franchisee that’s not happy with what you did and I’m sure I could find some that just love everything you guys have done. and everywhere in between. But talk to me a little bit about where you guys are at now and where you guys think you’re gonna go over the next couple of years tech wise and really quite frankly, as a brand.
SS
Scott SirLouis
35:07
Yeah. So I guess probably start off with saying, You know what loyalty is very important to us. And I think we’ve we’ve, we’ve set ourselves up with a really strong loyalty program. On the beaver Brady side, we have a pretty, pretty traditional loyalty program where you reward for spend, and so forth. And there’s, there’s fun stuff, there’s surprise and delight, and all the things that go into loyalty and so forth. But it’s fairly, it’s fairly standard. On the brass tacks side, though, we think we’ve created something pretty unique. So our POS provider has a built in loyalty platform that that has some pretty rudimentary functionality, but it’s, it’s solid for signing people up and keeping track of rewards based on spend, and so forth. So we took that and did some custom work, to have some capabilities built on top of that platform. And the really cool thing about it is, is it will track every beer you’ve ever drank in Nebraska. Wow. And we we rotate a lot of beers through the rest happening. Typically, in any given brass tap, you’re changing out 20 or so taps every week. So it’s a constant churn of different brands and different beers, and so forth. And we get a lot of our most loyal guests, that that’s what they come in for, because they want to try something new. So the the app keeps track of everything you’ve drank. And in a lot of our stores, they run contests there are leaderboards on who’s you know who’s drank the most beers? There’s actually a there’s a loyalty member in Wisconsin. That’s over 8000 beers at this point.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
36:54
Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I just hope that you guys don’t get subpoenaed and divorce court from some wife that saying, my husband’s come on a brass tap too much to drink and bear and you guys get your loyalty database subpoena saying Scott’s had 8000 beers at this store somewhere, I could just see that story yield. If that ever comes up, you better you better text me or email me and let me know that that happened.
SS
Scott SirLouis
37:18
You know, a lot of our so we built that. And we’ve had a lot of success with it. But I will tell you that. Now the challenge for our IT department is there’s a lot of work behind the scenes that goes into making that work. We have, we have franchisees that that put in requests to add new beers. And it’s not like, you know, Anheuser Busch is coming out with a new beer. This is the brewery down the street, maybe is only brewing three kegs of this limited release something and part of the appeal of our brand is is we partner with those local breweries to become one of the places where people can come and get this sort of thing. And it creates buzz when you’ve got a limited supply and so forth. So it’s really critical that we’re able to get a product from, hey, the brewer from down the street, walked in and said, I’ve got a keg of beer, I’d love you to try. Right? And how do we get it from that to it’s in the POS, it can be rung up, it’s in the loyalty app. It’s in the menu print program that we use to print their menus every day. It’s in the back office system so that it can be inventoried. All those disparate systems where that beers got to end up. Today, we’re about halfway through automating that full process. We used to run a three day turnaround, on from the time a request came in to getting a beer available everywhere. And we’re now down to less than 24 hours. Wow. But we want to get it to where it’s fully automated. And we take as much of the human interaction in our office out. I mean, I’ve got a guy that’s, that’s our beer guy. And his, one of his main jobs that he does is he looks at all these requests and figures out. Okay, so for this beer, how am I going to describe it on the menu? What glass? Should we pour it in? What should the pore size be? Should it be a 16 ounce pining for a 10 ounce snifter, or so forth? And he’s got to do all that stuff. Because he’s a beer expert. Yeah. So what we’ve got to figure out how to do this year, and I’ve got a great VP of it that’s that’s working towards this is how do we figure out how to get that information somewhere else? Because it’s all out there somewhere on the web? And how do we get it and put it into into our platforms quicker and without human innovation? So
JJ
Jeremy Julian
39:49
after the show, I’ll send you a previous guest that does have one of those peer databases that has an API that you can go pull from. They were on the show kind of probably 18 months ago or so. But they have Full published peer database out on the web that, that you can go get some of that content to maybe hooking you guys up in your beer guy up with them might be helpful. That’d be very great. So awesome, awesome.
SS
Scott SirLouis
40:10
The other area that we’re working on is, you know, we’ve put a lot of infrastructure, particularly guest facing infrastructure in place. And now what we’re doing is really coming back around and looking at our internal stakeholders, both franchisees and ownership and executive level and our franchisor. And what do we need to be doing from a tech standpoint to support them to get information and reporting in a more timely manner, in a format that, that we’re handing people information and that they can make decisions on instead of just data. So that’s a big focus for our for my it, professionals that this point.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
40:56
I love that. I love that because I mean, we talked about it often in our in our sales pitches at the end of the day. You put in IT systems to make things easier to make things more efficient to make better business decisions, not necessarily just for tech sake, tech, for tech sake, doesn’t do anything but tech to make a guest experience better or staff members experience better it, you know, operations whomever to be able to get the data to be able to make better business decisions is is the purpose behind it?
SS
Scott SirLouis
41:24
Absolutely, we’re on the same page. Love it.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
41:27
Love it. Is there anything we missed? Scott, we’ve been rapping for, you know, good 4045 minutes, just kind of about all of what you guys are doing. I love all of the different insights that you’ve given us. Is there anything that we’re missing that, you know, other than for those that are interested in opening up a breast app? They can go check you guys out on the web? But but otherwise? Is there anything that we missed in our conversation that that they think makes sense?
SS
Scott SirLouis
41:50
Yeah, I think there is one more piece here, we’ve talked a lot about guest facing tech. And I’ve talked just recently about internal, like support tech. But we also are excited, I’m very excited about where we’re going with our tech around training and developing our teams. And our people. I have a new vice president of training and development. And he’s come in with some some great ideas and tools that we’re working towards, on how to leverage our existing LMS into being able to deliver training more effectively through through technology, particularly mobile technology, you know, around micro courses that are like little 30 or 62nd courses can pop up on somebody’s phone on how to do things. So that’s a that’s a big focus for us in this year, and will be ongoing, particularly in the next year as well. But I am a big believer that, you know, tech, there’s there’s three legs to the triangle in the restaurant business. There’s, there’s the guest, there’s the investor or the financial part of it. And then there’s there’s your internal team as well. And, and I think a good tech stack supports all three legs of success.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
43:07
Absolutely. Yeah, no, I I swear I’m gonna make you part of our marketing team. Because every time I hear you say something, I’m like, I’ve been trying to say this for years, I’ve been doing this for a really long time. And all too often, you know, clearly this isn’t your first rodeo, you know, being where you’re at. And you’ve probably seen, you know, some of those failures, just the same. And I think it’s, I think it’s key to make sure that operators and investors understand that it’s one it’s not overnight, it does take time, it does take energy, but if you do it right, it can really augment and accelerate the growth of the company. Absolutely. So, so talk to me a little bit about the Franchise Group. You know, you talked about the fact that you guys are looking to grow the brass tap franchise system, you guys have got almost 100 of them in the pipeline. What does that look like if I’m if I’m sitting out here, and I’m looking to open up a brewery, I’m looking to open up a, you know, a brass tap because I just heard all of these amazing things that Scott just talked about for the last 45 minutes. What does that look like? Where do they get engaged? You know, what’s what, what should what should they expect the process to sound like and feel like?
SS
Scott SirLouis
44:14
Sure. Well, the easiest place to get started is to go to our website, which is brass tap beer bar.com. There is a link there on on franchising, if you’re interested in becoming a franchisee of the brass tap, you know, we’ve got a lot of franchisees that get into the brass tacks because they want to own a bar. They want they want to be the guy behind the bar on Friday night greeting their friends and so forth. And that’s a lot of fun. But the unit economics on that brand are also particularly strong. So we also have a really large group of multitude of franchisees people that you know, have own that we have one of our guys in Dallas is up. He’s on his fourth unit. He signed up for another five years So it can be a really good investment as well for the right owner operator. So it’s a great I think it’s a great concept and a great brand that offers a lot to different kinds of franchisees depending on what what the franchisee wants out of their life.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
45:21
I love it. I love it. Well, I’ll put a link in the in the show notes to both breast app website as well as the franchise franchise group because they do have, they do have a link on the website. Scott, I can’t thank you enough for for the time you spent with our audience with myself. It’s been fun to rap about just to rap about all the ways that you’ve had to work with your executive team and your leadership team to implement the changes you guys have over the last five years and watch the success of the brand and as a consumer of the brand that’s always also fun to go engage with it.
SS
Scott SirLouis
45:56
Great. Well, thank you so much for having me. I’ve enjoyed it as well.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
45:59
So and to our audience guys, we know that you guys have lots of choices out there if you haven’t already done so go subscribe to the newsletter every once a month you guys get an email with everything that that we posted the blog posts the the podcasts in such to Scott, we thank him and to our listeners make it a great day.
I
Intro
46:18
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