Hospitality Hangout | Expert Strategies & Industry Trends from Hospitality Insiders

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Jacob Jaber, Co-Founder of Philz Coffee and Consumer Investor. In 1978 Phil Jaber purchased a convenience store and in his off hours, he blended and tested coffee, looking to make the perfect cup. Philz Coffee was born and has gone from starting from one store to seventy-five. Jaber says, “I love people, I've been in business since I was nine years old. I started in a convenience store in my dad's convenience store in the Mission District in San Francisco standing on top of milk crates ringing up people at the register. I hated school because I felt like I was forced to learn stuff I wasn't interested in from people who weren't interesting. So I kind of put all of my energy into working with my dad and I learned a ton about business and people there and I fell in love with it and I've been doing that mostly ever since.”Jaber talks about how he and his dad built Philz Coffee. He said that he knew how to treat people, how to make a personal cup of coffee, and how to work the business. They worked with people that knew how to create systems, processes, and organizational structures to help them open locations. In terms of investing and advising Jaber says that he’s helped hundreds of entrepreneurs strategize, find product market fit, and build a team. He says this brings him the most joy. Jaber currently has almost twenty companies in his portfolio and they are out there looking for businesses. Frischling asks Jaber what it takes to build a restaurant or venue today. Jaber says, “I think the most important thing is you got to love what you're doing, you got to love the product that you're selling, I see a lot of technology-first companies that sell food and it's very difficult to succeed because you have to love food if you're in the food business. Technology's an enabler it's not the starter.” To hear more insights from Jaber about opening a business today and what he looks for when investing, plus get the Tuesday trivia answers check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with James O'Reilly, Chief Executive Officer of Smokey Bones. O’Reilly has been in the restaurant industry for 25 years. Prior to joining Smokey Bones as CEO in 2019, he was President and CEO of Long John Silver’s. O’Reilly held leadership roles at other restaurant brands, including Sonic Drive-in, Pizza Hut, and KFC. “Our tagline is meat is what we do and what that means is you cannot find a casual dining restaurant that has more cuts of meat, prepared in more kinds of ways than you can at Smokey Bones. So if you're thinking about steakhouses, we have more, if you're thinking about general casual dining restaurants, we have more and we have better. So we love what we do here. We're passionate about being a protein candy store,” says O’Reilly. Smokey Bones has recently launched Bite Hall, an e-commerce site that is taking five brands, Smokey Bones, The Wing Experience, and Burger Experience, plus two virtual brands Bowl Market and Tender Box under one digital roof. O’Reilly says, “we started with a major commitment to off-premise in this company when I joined and built my management team because we really believe in the power of off-premise and casual dining.”O’Reilly talks about realizing consumers who are in the traditional third-party marketplace space that wanted to order different things from different restaurants, would be looking at multiple deliveries, multiple commissions, and multiple fees. He says BiteHall was born out of this idea where the consumer has all of the bites in one site, one check, one order, and one delivery. The guys talk to O’Reilly about being the first virtual brand that was offered on Uber Eats as well as Smokey Bones going all in on drive-thrus. O’Reilly shares that they have a fully equipped digital drive-thru with everything you would find in a limited service drive-thru from the menu boards, the loop detection, the audio, and the digital menu boards as well as the pull-up window. They built a dedicated expediting kitchen inside the restaurant with its own beverage equipment its own hot and cold equipment, a fry station, and dedicated packaging. To hear more details about BiteHall, limited-time offers, Adventures in Candyland cocktails, and Tuesday trivia answers check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Anton Nicholas, Managing Partner at ICR. ICR is an integrated communications firm. Nicholas says, “We do everything from public company investor and public relations to private company consumer public relations and brand public relations. We also do a ton in the transaction support world and crisis communications.” Nicholas is responsible for managing the firm’s consumer corporate and financial communications practice as well as the ICR Lifestyle Lab, ICR’s consumer and brand public relations practice.Frischling asks Nicholas to share how the dramatic shift away from capital has expanded the focus on marketing and how this is affecting your business and your clients. Nicholas says that 2022 was something they have never seen before, the capital markets were shut, and getting capital for marketing was evaporated. “So I think what happened was whether you're big or small you realize that you really got to focus on your core business and in particular for restaurants you know that's about trying to attract new and also get existing customers to repeat frequency and I think we've seen a ton of people shift back to those traditional ways to do that,” Nicholas says. He adds, “In today's world with digital in particular, PR tends to be higher ROI because it's less expensive upfront investment than advertising.”Nicholas shares his thoughts on traditional media verse digital media as well as the trends and how you know people consume data. He says, “I think if you look at the way people consume media today, it's just more broad-based. They still read The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times of the world. They do it digitally probably mostly, but they still read those publications, and those publications still have influence just as much as some commentary blog.” To hear how media can influence how we consume data as well as consume food, plus get the answers for Tuesday trivia check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Sterling Douglass, Co-Founder & CEO of Chowly.Douglass says “Chowly is a leading point-of-sale integration company. We're enabling restaurants to expand and maintain different off-premise capabilities. So you know today we're seamlessly integrating orders from all the biggest platforms. So, Grubhub Uber Eats, DoorDash, and when Google food ordering came out last year and we've got a couple of hundred other integrations on different platforms.” He adds, “We've got over 12,000 restaurants on our platform and they're increasing their revenue. They're improving their operational flow and they're saving on labor costs.” The guys tease with breaking news that will be shared on this podcast and Douglass shares it. He says, “So with great pleasure and excitement to announce we've closed the deal to bring Koala this is an online ordering company with an absolutely stellar best-in-class guest experience platform under the Chowly umbrella, we are combining forces. We are the same company and we're going to be bringing an amazing product to the space. I can't be more excited about what the future brings for these 2 companies and what we can do together.”Douglass noted that Koala’s mission statement is what really spoke to him. He says, “their mission statement is to democratize premium online ordering for restaurants and so when I thought about what we could do in combination with them and you know they've done a great job with companies like Shake Shack and Mod pizza and P.F. Chang’s. If we could bring that experience and the revenue generators and the features that they have and we could bring that to the mom and pop and to the independent operator I thought what better way could we help accelerate that aspirational mission that they have.”To hear more about the acquisition and the answers to the Tuesday trivia questions, check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Wade Alle, SVP and Chief Digital Officer for Brinker International for a special Super Bowl episode where they talk about kitchen automation and the importance of a back to the basics game plan on strategy. Brinker International a leader in casual dining restaurant companies whose brands include Chili’s Bar & Grill, Maggiano’s Little Italy as well as virtual brands. Allen says, “Let me start with if you don't know Brinker you probably don't know casual dining because over the course of the last forty-five plus years we've owned 30 different brands. But today our core brands are Chili’s, Maggiano's Little Italy and then we launched a virtual brand called, It's Just Wings about two years ago.”Allen’s role with the company is SVP and chief digital officer and his focus is on the on 1.2 billion dollars off-premise business. Over the last ten years Allen has had four different positions inside of the company, today he is running all of off-premise. In 2022 Kevin Hochman became the new President and CEO and his leadership is driving the team to be hyper focused on the things that reality matter. They talk about how Brinker is bringing the kitchen of the future to life today with kitchen automation. Allen shares that they have two new pieces of equipment including a grill that cooks proteins to perfection with a touch of a button. The second is an oven that Allen says cooks foods really fast and their steaks in 3 - 4 minutes, cooked perfectly. Brinker focuses on bringing their own innovation solutions as well as working with companies to integrate good technology. Allen gets to throw a question to Frischling and Schatzy during their talking back segment and he asks, how much technology is too much technology in the restaurant world? Is there a limit or is all technology great technology? Schatzy’s says, “I think the key is it's the integrations and the workflow and how does it work with everything you already have and your business so coming up with a solution for a problem is great, but every restaurant group is a little bit different. It's not the right fit for everybody or it's the right fit but it doesn't work into my flow.” Frischling adds, “I think there was an explosion of tech and to Schatzy's point and when he's talking about integrations I think the fact is the remainder of this year and even a lot of 24 are going to be about consolidation.”To hear more about what to expect in restaurant technology and the foodservice feud question, check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Bo Davis, co-founder and chief executive officer of MarginEdge.Davis before founding MarginEdge was the founder of Wasabi, a group of conveyor belt sushi restaurants currently operating in DC and Boston. Before Wasabi, he was in the US Peace Corps serving in Macedonia, earned an MS in Finance from London Business School, and founded an educational software company, Prometheus, which he sold to Blackboard in 2002. Davis had a restaurant in Northern Virginia and where he is based and primarily focuses on MarginEdge. In December 2022 MarginEdge secured $45 million in a Series C funding. Davis says, “as far as deploying new capital, we're not pivoting, we're digging in, where we are here to help restaurant restaurateurs operate and make their back lives a little bit easier, solve some problems for them so they can focus on their customers and their food.” Davis talks about the team and shares, “We're continuing to grow our product team now, we wrote most of the core product with five people and now we're growing to 45 people and dev, our sales team was a handful of people for a long time. We're now at about 50 people there, so we're just building out the team, we're going to market and we're pretty excited about it.” MarginEdge primarily focussed on selling to restaurants will now be selling to accountants and accounting firms that work with restaurants. Davis talks about selling to accounting firms and he says, “You know it's one of those things where we were doing it before, not really realizing we were doing it because it wasn't intentional but bookkeepers and accounting firms working with restaurants found the software super helpful because it basically takes out part of the headache of just capturing the invoices, getting them into accounting, tying in the point of sales, getting that into the accounting system so they can focus on the higher value things that they do, the cash flow management and the strategic stuff. And so we found that some of our biggest clients were actually firms.” To hear Davis’ answer for Tuesday Trivia and the new rollout for MarginEdge check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “ The Finance Guy” were live from the Restaurant Marketing Summit where they talked with Robert Guarino, partner at Chef Driven and Andrew Nash, chief executive officer of Targetable. Guarino is a New York City restaurateur that has been in the city managing and owning restaurants since 1996. Chef Driven is a multi-concept restaurant group with all of their locations in New York City. The company has thirty years of history and are currently running 14 restaurants, 13 are unique concepts with 2 new concepts in development. Nash, an executive with over thirty years experience in technology, is the chief executive officer at Targetable, a done-for-you digital marketing platform for the restaurant and hospitality industry. They talk about customer journey marketing and Nash shares it’s all about the venue and experience and you need to create awareness, acquisition or the pre-customer, repeat customer or ideal customer follows and a loyalist or whale. Guarino jumps into the customer journey marketing topic and says as operators you need to get the customers into your restaurant as well as keep customers coming back by establishing initiatives. The discussion goes to having the right technology in restaurants that will allow employees to better service the guest and create a better guest experience. Guarino talks about using the guest feedback to power marketing. He says that guest feedback should be the key to keeping all of your existing guests and getting them back in the door. To hear the questions asked during the Talking Back, Marketing Addition and more about the importance of guest feedback from Nash and Guarino plus get the insights on how to treat customers throughout their journey as a guest in your restaurant check out this episode Hospitality Hangout. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout podcast, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “ The Finance Guy” were on the road at the ICR Conference 2023 in Orlando, Florida with guests Jim Balis, Managing Director, Capital Spring, Scott Lawton, CEO & CoFounder, Bartaco and Fred LeFranc, CEO, Results Thru Strategy. Balis leads CapitalSpring’s Strategic Operations Group. He stops by to talk with the guys at ICR to discuss what’s new at CapitalSpring. Balis shares the news that they closed on a fund back in April. He says he is excited about it and that they are going to continue to invest in the restaurant space. Balis says, “we've invested out of that fund already in some very exciting ventures and opportunities. As I think you guys know, what makes us unique is that we invest both in debt and equity.” Bartaco CEO and co-founder, Scott Lawton chats with the guys about having 24 company owned restaurants now and opening another 6 this year. Lawton says, “We're really excited, we've been kind of building up since covid and all these these are covid deals we're finally getting to launch the new fleet and we are super excited about it.” They are opening in Chicago and Charleston for the first time. They talk about Lawton’s view on 2023 biggest tech trends and he says, “Better ideas, better efficiency and we're going to have to figure out ways to drop more to the bottom line without adding to the top line.” LeFranc, CEO at Results Thru Strategy talks about the company and says, “Results Thru Strategy started in 2007 some so my co-founding partners and I decided that the industry needed an advisory firm that was not just an unemployed exec trolling for a job and we got together with 4 of us and now have over 15 entrepreneurial experts with minimum 30 years experience in their area of expertise we help emerging restaurant brands with a pathway to growth, we help legacy brands that need to revitalize their brand because they've lost relevance with their customers and we do a tremendous amount of work with technology companies that are trying to sell to the space.” To hear more from all of the guests that stopped by to chat with Schatzberg and Frischling at ICR, get branded quickfire Orlando addition responses and the crystal ball answers check out this episode Hospitality Hangout. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Trevor Shimizu, co-founder and chief revenue officer of Brizo FoodMetrics. It is a data and analytics provider for the foodservice industry, analyzing 1.3 million eating and drinking establishments in Canada and the United States. Shimizu played professional ball for a few years before getting into technology. Frischling repeats one of his favorite podcast topics and says, “That operators did not get into the restaurant industry to become data analysts and funny enough Brizo didn't start off in the data industry to be restaurant data miners. So you know we're all kind of in this together now.” He adds that the first two pilots were actually foodservice businesses that led Shimizu to become Brizo FoodMetrics specializing in food metrics and the foodservice space.“We were taking some time, it took about a year to be quite honest with you. Doing a lot of research to understand where we might be able to bring our expertise, we just happened to come across two foodservice companies, technology companies within Québec City that asked us to do some projects with them on a pilot.” Shimizu shares about how Brizo started. He adds, “You know our expertise would be huge and so that's where the collection of the online data, organizing it and then presenting it through our all in one dashboard became extremely helpful and that's why we decided to put our focus right into the food service industry.” Shimizu talks about capturing visibility and reputation scoring. He explains, “the more sources that we find you online the higher your visibility score is going to be and we're also comparing you to your peers within that particular area. As an example, if you've only got a Facebook page at this time in the industry then you know you're going to get an extremely low score because most people are on five to six 6 sources whereas if you're on Facebook, you're on Instagram, you've got a profile on DoorDash and Uber Eats and your website and all these other places obviously your visibility scoring is going to be higher.” Reputation scoring is where they capture ratings and reviews from different sources and analyze a restaurant compared to their peers to see if your reputation is higher or lower than businesses in your area. To hear why technology companies are embarrassing Brizo, Tuesday Trivia, true or false answers and more about the NextBite partnership check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Tablz chief executive officer, Frazer Nagy. Tablz is an immersive 3D booking experience that is redefining the future of dining by enabling diners to select and to the table of their choice. Nagy talks about getting started in the restaurant industry, he says, “I think like a lot of successful founders and a lot of people in our space that make this jump, it's because we started in the industry. I was 13 when a family friend got me working as a banquet server at a golf course for weddings.” He adds, “I've just been in the industry my whole life, from busing to dishwashing, a little bit of even prep cooking. But I always had the gift of the gab. So the minute I turned 18 it made a lot more sense for me to be on the floor.”They talk about starting a tech company and Schatzberg says, “I just love when you have a restaurant operator turned techie because who better to know what restaurant operators need.” Frischling adds, “I love that they're the ones leading the technology revolution.” Nagy shares the news about relaunching the brand. He says, “for us brand and design is just at the center of what we do and that's not always the case for restaurant technology, I think often it's overlooked. But we have really created a culture here of a design-centric culture.” he adds, “This is many months in the making and this is something that's really really important because we are taking the Tablz brand and really turning it into this beautiful mature website platform in the digital ecosystem.”The discussion turns to the difference between the terms dynamic pricing and revenue management. Nagy shares, “Revenue management is the big thing. It's what all of those other terms you described fall underneath. So revenue management is really the combination of premium seating which is one element with dynamic pricing. When you add those things together you get revenue management and this is a big part of my life and our thesis and our belief about this industry is that we quite simply are the last industry in the world to do revenue management.” To hear the Tuesday Trivia answers plus get more insights into revenue management and enhancing the customer experience check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout. Episode Credits:Produced by: Branded Hospitality MediaHosted by: Michael Schatzberg, JImmy FrischlingProducer: Julie ZuckerCreative Director: Adam LevineShow Runner: Drewe RaimiPost Production: Three Cheers Creativewww.thehospitalityhangout.com