SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome! You are listening to the CRM Success Show, where you will hear from CRM executives who have overseen some of the most interesting and complex CRM implementations. Your hosts, David Mossri and Kira Whitey, will be bringing you real stories, real insight. Follow along on social media for updates on new episode releases, exclusive content, and much more. Enjoy the show and thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_03 0:29

Welcome to the CRM Success Show. Today we're talking with Jeff Wilshire, former City Director of Marketing at Muya Burgers. Welcome, Jeff.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Great.

SPEAKER_02 0:39

Thank you. Good to be with you guys. Great to have you as well, Jeff. So we always start real simple on our podcast. We warm you into it. Just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. Who is Jeff Wilshire and how you went from IBM consulting to the restaurant industry?

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Yeah, no, great question. So I spent the bulk of my career in the tech industry. I spent almost 20 years at IBM. I came in in the database marketing analytics group and kind of helped build a lot of the analytical and modeling functions at IBM. I like to say I coined the phrase of insights to action while I was there. So I think what we found early on is they would invest quite a bit in analytics and modeling, but then getting the sales or marketing teams to actually implement the insights was always kind of rigorous. So that was always a big focus. And then at IBM, I moved more into a traditional marketing role. And then after IBM, I worked for a few startups. I ran my own fitness business for three years and then spent close to three years at Muya in the quick serve restaurant industry. So it's been an interesting journey.

SPEAKER_02 1:44

From fitness, obviously, too much fitness decided you wanted a burger, so joined Muya. Not exactly health food, but but we had really really good ingredients there. So maybe that's a potential from protein to burgers. Well, good story. We're gonna dive into some of that story. We're gonna focus today on a lot of the restaurant industry, how they use CRMs, loyalty, customer data, CDPs, the challenges for franchise operations, and then bringing all that together with digital marketing third-party delivery. So lots to get through. So just tell us a little bit about Muyah. Some of our listeners maybe the clue is in the name, Muya burgers, but you know, what do they sell? How big are they? What attracted you to the quick service restaurant industry? Maybe even starting there.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah, that was a great question. So Muya, probably a medium-sized franchise business in a quick serve restaurant industry. The QSR industry is typically it's kind of a step up from traditional fast food, is characterized by usually higher quality ingredients, more customized ordering, a little bit better of an overall customer experience. Uh, Muya is headquartered in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We're in about 26 states. It was very interesting. I kind of ended up at Muya, it was kind of by design by them. The CMO at the time that brought me in, she was intentionally looking for an industry outsider, somebody that was not close to the restaurant industry. And they were interested in my time at IBM, kind of doing things a little bit different, taking a different look at analysis and insights and some rigor. I put in some scorecards and measures. So I think a lot of times in the restaurant business, it's you know, you're dealing with environments that are kind of constrained on resource and budgets. So it can get a little bit willy-nilly, but to me, I came in, I wanted to put some really good rigor in and make sure we were making business decisions based on what the data and then the business insights were showing us.

SPEAKER_02 3:47

I think it's really important to highlight Milliard Burger isn't a McDonald's five guy Shape Shack in terms of size, right? Billion-dollar enterprises with massive technology budgets. This is an environment where we're looking at still very, very much a revenue-making business, but some hundred mil perhaps, 80, 90 stores. You've got all kinds of issues with marketing teams being lean, customer data all over the place between loyalty app, online ordering, some of it sat in Uber Eats DoorDash, and you're dealing with franchises with varying levels of maturity too. So I think not necessarily a blueprint for scalability already there and existing just to kind of take over and run, correct? Correct. Yeah. So you won maybe a natural hire for someone like Muya with the industry experience, like you said, and you kind of gave why they actually didn't want that, right? Taking experience from a different industry background. Was there one thing in particular that interested you about Muya and this space? Was it just the curiosity of never having really done it before, or was there more to it than that?

SPEAKER_01 4:56

I mean, one big draw was really doing something outside of the technology industry. And I love the fact that, you know, you're at IBM selling solutions that could have a two-year sales cycle. At Muya, you're selling a solution that has, you know, minutes, right? You're appealing to somebody's basic pain point of hunger. And it's all about, you know, giving somebody a good experience and then they come back. That was very interesting to me. And really enjoyed a lot of the things that you could do from a marketing standpoint in the restaurant industry that you can't really do so much in the B2B industry. It's just totally different dynamics. So I enjoyed that quite a bit.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

What would you say one of the biggest dynamic differences were that you uncovered during your time there? Other than the buying cycle being a lot quicker.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Well, one thing that surprised me is how technical it is. I mean, these medium-sized QSR businesses, I mean, by design, you have a pretty lean corporate team, right? And it's all about helping, you want to support the franchisees, but you also want to, you know, help make them as profitable as possible. So everything is maniacally measured, you know, by the dollar, by the resource. It was interesting to me how complicated these businesses can be, especially on the technology stack or specifically the marketing technology stack. And you come into an environment, and there's a lot of different platforms. A lot of times IT support is at a premium. It may even be outsourced. So you may be a marketing leader, but you're looked at actually taking on some IT functions. And to drive the best customer experience, you really have to have the technology integrated. That's to me the biggest key. Integrating everything together. And when you can do that, you have the best chance of driving the best customer ordering experience, restaurant experience, and that's what's going to bring them back into your business.

SPEAKER_02 6:51

I think you hit it now on the head there. There's a few different factors that go into that broader digital marketing, performance managing of that marketing. You've got the customer loyalty programs, you've got your elite gen tools, your ads, your online marketplace, and then you've got the analytics and insight piece around that too. So there is a lot going on than what other industries may not necessarily have. And they might also have their own versions as well. But I guess before we get too much into nitty-gritty, you've worked in different industries before, but like you said, you did spend 20 years at IBM dealing with the same kind of problems, same types of customers, maybe designing similar modernized versions and solutions. What or how did you approach stepping into that industry, which was a complete unknown that, you know, be fair to say you're not necessarily you weren't at the time an expert within. As an executive who is a key senior, viable hire, how do you like how do you approach that? How do you go about becoming an SME in that space as quickly as possible?

SPEAKER_01 7:53

Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think one thing you learn when you've been working for a while, as long as I have, you realize there's a lot of fundamentals in marketing, analytics, branding that can kind of transfer across industries. So you come in, you need to, you know, have confidence in the core fundamentals, but you need to come in and really focus on learning the business, understand the customer, understand the product. I mean, for me coming into Muya, understanding the whole operation side of things, supply chain, training, processes, that was key. That was all new to me. Never had that before. I kind of come from the technology sector. Focus on the business. But sometimes I think being in the outsider can be a strength because you're gonna look at things a little bit different. Because everybody else has been so focused on restaurants and they're coming from a certain place. You're coming from a different place. You may recommend some things that everybody's like, Well, that's just too different. But sometimes you're gonna hit something and it's gonna turn on some light bulbs, and you know, you'll get some successes bringing that in.

SPEAKER_02 8:57

And with IBM, obviously, you events and product launches was two of the core areas. I know you were there 20 years, and we could have a podcast in it in itself about those 20 years. But just to set the scene for listeners, your primary focus at IBM over those 20 years was it what what else beyond events and that kind of thing?

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Well, I was in my last eight years, I was in the cloud computing area, so I was really part of the dawn of cloud computing at IBM and how you know it just blew up across the IT industry. But you know, IBM was in the digital space, events, co-marketing with business partners, PR, brand awareness, pretty much the gamut. And Muya's the dynamics are a little different, and you're really focused on the opportunities of store launches, generating local excitement, a lot of marketing structured around key moments of the year, holidays, customer birthdays, anniversaries. It's much more personalized, but you're really trying to generate it's when you work for a medium-sized franchise business, you're kind of in a gray area. You're you've kind of grown big enough where you're still trying to be a family type business where you can respond to all 80 franchisees and help them individually in their market, but you know you're getting big enough that at some point you need to start standardizing processes and you need to start thinking bigger because you can't talk to 30, 40 franchisees every day, right? At some point it becomes unmanageable. So that was you know, that's what you're gonna see in that type of space.

SPEAKER_02 10:28

I'm gonna throw you a curveball now, Jeff. This might be your most difficult question to answer for today's recording. So Muyah isn't just burgers, it's also fries and shakes. What was your go-to shake?

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Personally, my go-to shake. I like vanilla. Okay. I go into Muyah, I get the same thing. I get the double cheeseburger, vanilla shake, and the chips.

SPEAKER_02 10:52

You can tell you can tell a lot about a guy and his order, you know, uh, milkshake order. My favorite one that I had was the peanut butter cup shake, which probably won't surprise a lot of people. I'm a big peanut butter fan. So, listeners, this isn't necessarily a commercial, but the shakes are fantastic. Go check them out. Over to you, Max.

SPEAKER_03 11:10

Yeah, there's not too many kosher milkshake places. I've never obviously been to a Muya, but there are some. I've never been a big fan of milkshakes, they're so heavy. It's like half a day's meal. They're filling.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Well, you know what, and the best milkshakes, um, little secret here the best milkshakes can have the most fat, right? The higher the fat content, the more creamy and the delicious.

SPEAKER_02 11:31

Yeah, a membership uh Jeff's gym franchises, you know, to burn off the calories.

SPEAKER_03 11:37

Um, anyway, I I would probably end up going with straight chocolate. Um if that was me. So that's back to tech. Most of us in the CRM space, I would probably say it's the vast majority of us, particularly in the consulting side, tend to be on the B2B side. Franchising is interesting because it sounds like normally you think of a franchise that they're customers of the franchisee, I guess the person buying the franchise as opposed to the end consumer. So I guess they would consider them B2C or B2B. How do you think of it?

SPEAKER_01 12:11

On the franchise business development side, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:14

Um well C and CRM, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:18

I mean, typically typically B2B. I mean, franchisees are all different shapes and sizes, right? Some are you know have a huge portfolio of 20, 30 other types of restaurants, and some is a guy who retired in his 50s and just wants to put everything into one restaurant, right? I mean, it runs a gamut, but we would approach as more of a B2B development function.

SPEAKER_03 12:42

So, how do you look at that from like a CRM system perspective? Are you tracking more so the franchisees or prospects that the prospective buyers of franchisees or locations, as opposed to the end customer stuff, like you were talking about, um, I guess loyalties and birthdays and that kind of stuff?

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Yeah, I mean, so just roughly my focus would be 80% and user customer, or the B2C, and then 20% on the B2B space. That's a big discussion in QSR. Getting more sophisticated on running that B2B process, getting kind of a true traditional CRM in place where you can put all your leads in there, you can work the process, you have a few salespeople trying to progress the leads down the path. When things get really, really good, you invite them into the office for what they call discovery day. So this is somebody that's very, very close to signing the Dodd line to buy a restaurant, they get a full review of all the different functions and everything within the business, ask all their questions. And it's kind of a dating, both sides are dating here, see if they like each other, and boom, if that goes well, then you know you've got a new owner. And that's very exciting in the franchise industry.

SPEAKER_03 14:01

So, how do you, in terms of systems, like how do you structure the systems or the teams around the systems?

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Typically on the B2B side, they're using a traditional CRM, such as like a spot tool, something kind of work that data. The customer side is completely separate. Typically, might use your loyalty database as kind of a proxy CRM. That's really where you've got the most information on customers in the loyalty database. But it's a challenge because loyalty customers are typically roughly 20% of your transactions. Now they'll make up more percent of the sales, but you still have about 80% of your purchases that you have very little data on, and that's a challenge in the industry.

SPEAKER_03 14:46

This is not a tech question, but I always have this question how do you guys handle loyalty programs, right? Because I I go to one franchisee 12 times, and then what I get my free burger by a different one. Like, how does that reconciliation work?

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Restaurants typically have a pretty sweet offer to download their loyalty app. And then you'll get the app on one of the app stores. Typically, there's a sign-up offer. You sign up for the app and make your first purchase. Maybe you get another free burger, or maybe you get something free your first time. So they get them in, and we can identify you then, right? You're in the database, you're identified by email, phone, name, and then we have the ability to market to you. There will be loyalty campaigns, which can run a whole different gamut of different types of things. Some are going to be kind of standardized across the whole system, all restaurants. And then there's also kind of triggered type campaigns so that you can program it to these loyalty apps. So when a customer hits certain thresholds, you can give them something, a reward. You can reward them on their birthday, their anniversary date. It's a pretty big function of the focus.

SPEAKER_03 15:58

What I was actually asking, who takes the burden of the free thing? Is that just something that goes rolls up to the corporate because it's not fair to give it to the place that they did the redeeming, or is that just I guess it averages out, but you get some, you lose some, but yeah, got it.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

I mean, that can vary by the business. Some places are going to have the individual franchise or pick up the costs of the promotion, and some may have the corporate entity pick that up. But you know, those are all you know, the promotional costs to do things or to give it's all about growth, driving business, increasing frequency and average order value, and there's a maniacal focus on just growing the business. If you look at a loyalty customer and they're purchasing, let's say 3.8 times a year in your business, moving them from 3.8 to 4.8 times a year doesn't sound like a lot, but if you can do things that do that, it's huge. It's huge for a medium-sized business.

SPEAKER_03 17:01

That's the same with subscription says services, right? Getting your average lifetime customer or adding services. So the loyalty programs, is the purpose of the loyalty program to do that increase, increase customer lifetime value, let's say, or is it just so that you can track the customer? Because I always thought that it was more the latter, right? You guys just like we need to know who our customers are, we need to need to know how to target them. So we're kind of just you know giving them a freebie so that they'll hand over this information, um, or that combination of both.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

It's kind of a combination of both. On QSR, if 20% of your sales are from your loyalty base, you're doing great. If 25%, you're like crushing it. A lot of restaurants are gonna be maybe 15 to percent. There's always a lot of focus on growing that base, but that's also one of your primary acquisition channels for people to experience your brand, right? We you know, to me, there's two kind of online acquisition channels. One is through your loyalty app, right? You're giving them an offer to download your app and make their first purchase, and hopefully they have a great experience, come back. And the other would be through third party, like a DoorDash or an Uber, bringing people in through that way. You want to introduce them to your brand and hopefully they have a great experience and they'll order again. And if you're bringing them in through a DoorDash and Uber, hopefully they order again on a first party channel where it's a much more profitable order. They're either gonna go into your restaurant or order through your website, things like that.

SPEAKER_03 18:36

Wow, I didn't even think about DoorDash or all of those services as a way of identifying the customer. Do they allow you to use the loyalty program in conjunction with the DoorDash? Or how do you deal with that?

SPEAKER_01 18:49

No, I mean, it's typically DoorDash, Panuber. I mean, that's they have their own platforms, their own ways you can invest in marketing, you know, you can do paid ads, you can do promotions there. But they own the data, right? So you can identify some of the ordering trends on those platforms through a customer data platform, like a Biki, something that conglomerates it, but you can never identify the individual person because they own that. They're an important partner because, for example, some people may love Muya, but they will only order Muya through DoorDash, even though they know it's you know they can save 20% if they order Muya at the Muya website, but they just love those platforms. There's always the push, like, okay, well, if I get people ordering through DoorDash and Uber, how can I convert them to order through a first-party Muya owned channel next time? I mean, that's a big focus as well.

SPEAKER_03 19:43

Yes, 20% cheaper, and then cheaper through the Muya app.

SPEAKER_02 19:47

Roughly, yeah. Yeah. But it's it's not always cheaper. I'll caveat that, because I'm that person, right? I'll always use Uber versus ordering directly. I think because Uber offer you know a lot of promos like buy one, get one, or free delivery, etc. I think also as well, it's easier to deal with Uber if there's an issue versus a restaurant owner directly. You call a number and up the answers, but it's kind of a big name that you know there's gonna, okay, send me a picture, refund your order, no, it no no kind of additional questions asked kind of thing. Or you if you have an issue with a driver, you've got someone somewhere to blame, right? It's difficult because as a franchisee owner, you want people to go direct because again, Uber take 30-40 percent of sometimes of the order, right? Um, but I think because the volume is there, they can be more aggressive with pricing to their customers. So that's my two cents on it. The times I've had a muya, it's been through an Uber, right?

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Yeah, yeah. I mean, some people just love those platforms. I mean, now they don't care if they're paying more, they're just they're like groupies, they love those platforms. But you know, we always tell individual owners too, part of it's what you want to do. If you're a new restaurant, you need to build awareness, you want to get established in your marketplace, those are great platforms to help you do it. If you are established and you're maniacally focused on margin, you may want to scale back your investment there because your lowest margin sales are gonna come from those channels. Yeah, because you know, like you said, you're taking out marketing fees, other fees. Now we you know people typically do mark up their prices too on there, but it's yeah, it's gonna probably be your least profitable channel.

SPEAKER_03 21:34

So do they give you nothing? DoorDash, Uber, like not even an ID to know that it's the same person ordering from Uber regularly, even if you don't know who they are?

SPEAKER_01 21:46

They know they can like they they've in the last year been pretty good at implementing AI type smart promotions now. So you know, if I'm on Uber and I'm ordering You know, Muya on Uber all the time. They know me, they know my behavior. So and sent me maybe less than somebody that maybe hasn't ordered from Muya for six months. So now there's a lot of AI there that really tries to tailor it through that individual person there. I can't identify. I mean, I you know, we can identify how many sales we're getting and orders we're getting from Uber and the trends and roughly the types of customers, but the individual, no, can't do that. But you're hoping that they have a great experience on Uber, and at that point they move over to a Muya owned channel. You know, this was this was a surprise to me when I came to Muya. Roughly every month, 25 to 40 percent of all DoorDash orders were first-time Muya customers. First time. How do you know that? They can tell you in conglomerate. Like you can look at on the dashboards, you can see which are first-time customers, which you know, is there second order first time via Uber? Correct. Yeah via Uber. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, with the same purchase, purchase mode. If they're using different credit cards every time, it you know, it gets a little dicey or no, they have an account, they know.

SPEAKER_03 23:19

Yeah, true. Yeah, um yeah, it's it's it's uh it's really interesting, it's really interesting how the technology comes up, and because of the business behind it, you lose capabilities as opposed to gaining capabilities, right? Like the loyalty program worked very well, it pre-existed all of these kind of apps, and now the technology advances, you get less visibility. It's happening, believe it or not, in the streaming space. So, right, originally you had TV, it was very hard to know who's watching what. So you have to go to like Nielsen ratings, and then you had Netflix so you can tell you exactly who's watching, how long, when they stopped. It got really, really detailed, and then it's kind of shifting over to like podcasting, and now they got nothing again. No, yeah, because it's downloaded, there's 40 different platforms, it broadcasted, like nobody knows anything what's going on in this space. It's like, yeah, um, it's funny how things turn around.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Oh, just one thought there. I gotta tell you though, there is some judgment day, I think, coming up at some point. I mean, you know, restaurants know that it's a love-hate relationship, right? The delivery platforms like an Uber, DoorDash, you know, you love and hate them because you know, margins are low, don't own the data. So there's a lot, there is focus on what can restaurants do to try to supersede those platforms. You know, is it some kind of elaborate delivery co-ops or you know, other types of marketplaces that don't have the same fees, structures, things like that? But it's a big discussion within every QSR brand, I would think.

SPEAKER_03 24:53

Yeah, I'm sure they're trying everything. They're putting coupons in the delivery bags, order direct next time. Yeah, yeah, they're trying everything. All right, so pivoting back to tech. Okay, great. So you have all this information. You have the Uber Eats orders, you have the deal door dash orders, loyalty programs, walk-ins. I guess you're doing a combination of of more direct advertising, which is through the through the loyalty app or direct email, as well as brand awareness, just typical general advertising, brand awareness. So, how do you bring that all together, you know, and run your KPIs, you know, down to even the customer level or to the aggregate, the franchise level or to the state level or your regional managers? I walk us through that.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Yeah, no, it's it's a it's a great question, and and just a little more visibility, like on the technology stack, somebody would be dealing with one, you know, you you've got your POS system, payment processor piece, your loyalty program. You have something like Olo, which is an online order engine, which kind of conglomerates your third-party stuff, your website, your loyalty program as well. You've got all your digital marketing channels, you've got email marketing, SMS, text marketing, review platforms. I mean, there's a lot to tie together, and you've got to make sure it's integrated for the best customer experience. KPIs, you can get, you know, on the digital marketing side, you can get pretty detailed. I mean, you can at least you you know, you can see performance on paid search ads or different types of digital ads by using different tags on your website and looking at who visited, who navigated different pages, who converted, who abandoned their cart. You can do marketing the people who abandoned their carts. You can identify groups of people. We also were doing something pretty interesting where we could identify people that got digital ads that visited physical Muya locations, and we could see it within a certain time frame. So, boom, if somebody gets an ad, you know, this morning and they're visiting Muya this afternoon and they've never been there before, there's a pretty good chance maybe that ad helped you know get them into the restaurant. So that you know, you're starting to see some of those measurements. Some of the other things though, when you're doing some of the broader awareness, like marketing, and you want to measure the impact, you're kind of looking at what's in market, what are the things I'm doing in social or digital, and then seeing if you're moving the needle like in overall sales or online orders for a different time frame. So a lot of times it's kind of like proxy like that. You're looking at when you have the activity in market, and you're seeing, okay, am I generally seeing a corresponding lift across my online channels? Um, you know, you can get down into the detail by individual stores, markets, regions, customer data platforms, really great to give you some of those insights. That's kind of a conglomerator. They'll bring in your POS data, your online ordering data, your loyalty data, all that data comes in. So you can go in there and make some really cool analysis that can help you not only drive marketing decisions, but really good smart financial decisions, smart operational decisions. You can get into seeing menu combinations. If somebody orders the double cheeseburger, was it the second most thing they're most likely to order? Or what was the last thing somebody ordered before they never ordered again? Um, you can get some really interesting things like that. And then you have the ability to get really granular segments and you can market to them, right? You can uh yeah, you can you can you can email market, you can text market, you can do lookalikes in a digital marketing campaign. I mean, there's a lot of things that type of platform can let you do, and that was one of the things I was very happy at Muya, helping bring that in and get that launched during my tenure there.

SPEAKER_03 29:06

Yeah, so CDP stands for customer data platform. Correct. Um, Salesforce has a customer data platform that you know if they call that anymore. What's Agent Force Marketing Cloud CDP, something like that, or just Agent Force Data Cloud 360 now, I think. So, yeah, I believe you guys aren't using something called Vicky, I believe. Why don't you tell our listeners what exactly a CDP is? A common question comes up is like, how is it different than an MDM? Master data management system. If you know what an MDM is. If not, I guess ignore that question. But yeah, so what's a CDP? How's it different from an MDM? Um, what is it used for?

SPEAKER_01 29:43

I gotta apologize. I'm not real familiar with MDN.

SPEAKER_03 29:47

So what MDMs do is they'll take data from various platforms, usually let's say person data, and they'll try to match them up and create what they'll call a golden record for that person without having specific keys that tie the data together. So it's gonna try to match on natural keys. Oh, these people have the same phone number, maybe they have the same name or the name and address, and they come up with all of these kind of match keys, and then they'll then they'll create a reference between the keys in the various systems, and then they can tie the data together across all of those systems. That's what it is, and it's often used for weird things like product catalogs, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:25

When I'm dealing with screws even across 40 different vendors, like when I look at something like Bicky, the CDP, I mean they play across multiple industries, but I think they're really big in the restaurant industry, and they know a lot of these companies are staff is at a premium, budgets are at a premium, but you're hungry for insights because when you don't have that, a lot of these places are kind of reliant on their POS system. You're kind of getting some kind of analytical overlay over the POS system trying to come up with really good customer ordering menu insights through that, but it's tough because you don't have the level, you don't have all the data kind of flowing in and being linked that you do with a CDP. So, you know, CDP again is bringing in your POS data, loyalty data, all of your online ordering data. There's probably some other feeds that came in as well, but it's giving you a really good match rate and it really helps you dig deep into those insights that can help you make some really good business decisions because you don't again, it's it's it's fairly cost effective. You know, they usually bill at a per location level. It can be a little painful getting all the data feeds in there. I don't know if you you know if you ever gone to a payment processor and asked them the, you know, you want a feed of your daily data, that's that's a nightmare scenario, but you get through it and then you get all the data in there. But it gives you a good view of you know, customer life cycle, you know, what are the little things you can tweak that can increase revenue? You get a good view of you know a top performer versus a low performer, but why is that? You know, when you get a store that's just crushing it versus stores that's struggling, what are some of the differentiators there? It helps the operations team go to these stores and helps them kind of focus on you know some areas of improvement.

SPEAKER_03 32:25

So, yeah, so do you have any specific examples of when the CDP found something interesting or wrong, or you guys found something using the CDP and then like actually changed changed something that made it a positive? For example, maybe you changed the checkout process on the app, or I don't know, you trained the customer service rep to instead of would you like a shake?

SPEAKER_01 32:49

One area is we felt like we had some really good opportunity on our beverage attach rate to orders. You know, comparing against industry standards that gave us some input for marketing on you know, kind of the kind of different ads we shot, some of the images we included in there to bump up that beverage attach rate. There's you know, there's studies as when people order, if they're attaching more different items in that order, they're more likely to continue to do business with you. Um, so you know, things like that. It gave us good insights on when you're in a burger business and you might have, you know, 15 core different burgers and they all have different ingredients, and then you got your customized burgers. It helps you understand what's the most profitable burger as well, which is very, very valuable. So when you're doing promotions, you want to include those items that are delivering the most profit for your owners as well. It helps you with menu health eliminate items that maybe aren't profitable or are you know are just taking up space on the menu and people aren't ordering. You know, simpler menu usually equates to positive results.

SPEAKER_02 34:00

So with platforms like Biki, you could argue, like you said, it's built specifically for restaurants, heavy customer analytics, restaurant-pecific KPIs, et cetera. You now have access to data that perhaps other uh CDPs out there might not be able to provide to that level. I guess I have a question, which is these franchise businesses have more data than ever before, but still struggle to personalize experiences. I'll give you an example. I'm just curious if there's any reason you could provide. I will get one particular restaurant that will always send me a targeted ad for a burger with bacon. I don't eat bacon, I never have eaten bacon, and I never will eat bacon, right? So if it really knew my order past history, they would see I always get the double cheeseburger, right? So I guess I'm sure there are hundreds of stories out there. Maybe someone has religious reasons they don't eat certain things, maybe it's you know, kosher, halal food, whatever. Um obviously there's room to go when it comes to personalization. Where do you think maybe you can't even put it down to one thing, but where do you think that gap still is for restaurant industry franchises? And also as well, like you know, in certain geographics, you have a bigger population of a certain type of individual versus other geographics, right? So you might push halal food or kosher food in certain areas more so than another, right? So, where do you think that gap still is for data?

SPEAKER_01 35:36

I think there's great opportunity there. I mean, like you you hit the nail on the head, like you know, even the DFW area, there there's parts that might have a much more incidence of people that are more into a vet vegan burger, right? That um it gave us opportunity to try some promotions there. Your example's great. You don't order bacon. So restaurants can get to that level. I think you know, a lot of people are scrambling to get the right tools in place, getting the right people in place to be able to mine the data, and then transfer those insights into marketing. Again, it's insights to actions, right? I think now the data is available. It's just there's a lot of improvement that can go there. One thing that's really tough in this industry is technology changes all the time, right? But it's hard to pivot. I mean, when you're in a smaller business and you've got five or six key platforms you're working on, you just can't rip them and comes out, right? So it's a lot of times integration is key, and that's something people struggle with too. Like, okay, well, when do I bring in a new platform or something that's going to help me? Like CDP, you know, brought it in the last year. It's not easy to bring something like that in into a mid-sized franchise business. But once you bring it in, it opens so many doors. I mean, it's a corporate tool, but then you can open it up to your individual franchisees. You can give them just their stores data. So now you have the ability to give people that have marketing savvy, give them the ammunition, do more within their own local area, right? I think there are just so many opportunities to empower the individual restaurants versus it's always typically been everything handled at the corporate level.

SPEAKER_02 37:27

I think there's a massive geo-targeting opportunity for restaurants. And again, Uber has its faults, but I will say one thing they do really well is as soon as you land at an airport, the push notification pops up. Do you need a taxi? Right. I was just in New York last week, and I still get messages from two big name coffee places that are only operating on the East Coast. They don't have them in Texas, so it's pointless, right? So if you keep sending me the emails, I'm probably going to unsubscribe because it's going to be another six to eight weeks before I'm back in New York. So I think that ability to push notification, that's something that a lot of people allow us to track your location, etc. Some opt in. I always opt in. I think restaurants can get smarter around that. I think that's where a gap is to stay top of mind in a competitive landscape. So I'm interested to see what the next 12 months will look like for that piece as well.

SPEAKER_01 38:14

Yeah, I mean, that's really a great thought because, like, you know, we all have our short list of go-to's for restaurants, right? Three, four, five. When we're hungry, we go to. How hard is it? I always tell people, how hard is it to get into somebody's go-to group? They may have your restaurant, they may have one, two, or three great experiences with your restaurant, but it still may not get you into their go-to list, their inner circle. So to me, you know, one thing is what does it take to get into somebody's inner circle? Once you're there, you're there. I think that's kind of the motivation and kind of the the drive that we're trying to do.

SPEAKER_03 38:54

What do you mean by inner circle?

SPEAKER_01 38:56

Like, you know, when I'm hungry or if I'm on DoorDash, there's probably like three, four restaurants I'm gonna consider. Different restaurants somewhere else can have a great experience, but eating their once with a great experience probably isn't gonna move them into my inner circle.

SPEAKER_02 39:13

It's interesting, just us three alone have different buying habits when it comes to fast food, right? I wouldn't try a new fast food option unless it's a ridiculously good offer. Yeah, I'm money driven with my food purchases. Whereas, you know, for you, Jeff, it's loyalty, right? If you've had a good experience a couple of times and they're on your inner circle list, you will keep going back. So it is interesting, buyer behavior patterns, etc. We talked a little bit about franchise businesses presenting unique challenges. How do you, I guess, create consistency whilst also giving franchisee owners the flexibility to run their own business? That might be a podcast session in itself, but initial two-minute answer on that, please, Jeff.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I mean, a lot of times when you're still in a kind of smaller to medium-sized company, you still have the flexibility to allow to work with on an individual franchisees basis, right? Some of these people are very sophisticated. They may even have their own marketing person on staff. So they're using you as kind of a consultant. They can drive a lot of their own effort. Some people have no marketing background. So they're looking at like a corporate office to do everything for them. So it's kind of a customized basis. But as you get bigger, as you move to that 100 plus stores, which starts to become kind of the larger company, unfortunately you lose some of that individual, customized support with individual franchisees, right? Because by scale, you have to start scaling things, you have to build processes that kind of work for everybody. But you know, when you're small and medium, you can still kind of work individually with people based on how comfortable they are and what their objectives are. And also where they are in their restaurant cycle, if they're new in the marketplace, you're gonna be helping them with a lot of awareness. You know, how do you how do people even hear about you? How do you push through the clutter on DoorDash or Uber? How do you push through the clutter with digital marketing? If somebody's more established in market, then your techniques can be a little bit different.

SPEAKER_02 41:20

What would you say uh are the key two or three metrics that matter most when you're comparing stores? Is it purely just revenue, profitability, or are there a do franchise businesses care about things like turnover or is it net promoter score? What are the kind of the top two or three metrics that franchise businesses would compare?

SPEAKER_01 41:39

You know, at the store level, it's probably what we say same store sales. So it's sales growth year over year. So you're always monitoring that. And you know, you look at stores two different ways. You look at stores that have been open like 18 months or less. Those are newer stores, and typically their growth is going to be much more higher as they go. But for more established stores, you're looking at the same stores growth year over year, month over month, week over week, taking into account certain holidays or weather issues or things like that. You look at loyalty performance by store, how many people are signed up to have a loyalty app in that area, what percent of loyalty is with their store? You want to make sure a store isn't too reliant on like a DoorDash Uber channels, third party, because that's going to really affect margins and profit. There's a healthy balance of these things, measuring traffic and responsiveness to certain local campaigns than they do on a digital basis, things like that.

SPEAKER_02 42:44

And what misconceptions would you say individuals have about franchise operations? And maybe that you had prior to joining Muya.

SPEAKER_01 42:54

I would say that this was an eye-opener. The food industry is tough, right? Margins are much thinner now. Food cost is up, labor is up, everything's up. The surprise was how much focus is spent on a daily basis in support of the individual owners and franchisees to help them be profitable? What can you do on the food ingredients you're purchasing? Are there other arrangements you can use that help increase margin? Are there supply chain things you can do to help increase margin? Can you get better with different processing or training? How can you eliminate SKU items in your in you know in your inventory? Or how can you reuse SKU items? Um, all the little things to make store owners more profitable. And then, you know, we it's a focus in marketing as well. But I think sometimes people think, oh, margins are healthy, prices are high, I'm sure everybody's making a ton of money. But it's you know, it's not the case. Everybody's doing the best they can, and this is a focus on profitability and margin.

SPEAKER_02 43:57

Really interesting, as I know Mazas said. The whole franchise restaurant industry is just it's a different beast. All right. So just pivoting to digital marketing, we talked a bit about third-party delivery and where that fits with that. But how do you think restaurants should think when it comes to paid promotions on platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash? Do you just kind of accept it as a business operation cost? It is what it is. It's the cost of doing business, or is it is there more to it than that?

SPEAKER_01 44:25

It depends on the objective of the individual stores. Like if they're a new store, weighing the build, awareness, and presence there. A lot of times maybe the recommendation might be paid ads on DoorDash or Uber, but then you always pay attention to the ROI. They have pretty robust dashboards on these platforms. So you want to make sure you know your ROI on your ad or your promotion is, you know, six to eight percent or six to eight X times of what you're spending. You really need to be paying attention because it can skew widely across the stores there. We would do a lot of testing on different promotions, different ads. Now they've got, as I mentioned, they have AI integrated into what they can do. But it's a lot of testing, trial and error, but really maniacally focused on the numbers.

SPEAKER_02 45:14

Actually, you mentioned AI. I'm curious, how have you seen so far AI being leveraged in the restaurant industry? Any use cases that have gone through in the early kind of adoption phase?

SPEAKER_01 45:27

Yeah, I mean, you know, we're seeing it incorporated into again third-party, you know, a lot of AI insights on these different platforms. You know, we have a platform I use for SMS text messaging. They have their AI agent there that can help you, you know, with ads or copy, you know, time of day, audience, a lot of recommendations. So I think all of these vendors now, whether you're offering a loyalty platform or text message platform or email, whatever, you need to have an AI component built into that product because I think you'll get left behind. It seems to be everywhere right now. You know, and even on the creative side, you know, not that long ago, everybody had a creative director or two that they loved that would do everything, but it's an expensive piece of business now, a lot that you can do with some AI or at least simple ads. You can get created in an AI engine, eliminating creative costs.

SPEAKER_03 46:27

Yeah, it's coming, it's coming everywhere. What about traditional BI? That I'm assuming that's something you guys leverage heavily.

SPEAKER_01 46:42

Tableau is a dashboard on a loyalty program, still use those quite a bit. Yeah, disseminate that information down to your franchisees, or how do you mean I would you can look at it holistically and then at specific store level and can get that to them. For example, loyalty if some store is struggling on app signups for the program, and you can identify that and you can work with them on how they can increase more people to sign for loyalty in their store.

SPEAKER_03 47:14

So, how does that work? Like you assign a rep to each franchisee to have how do you work with the franchisees?

SPEAKER_01 47:20

It's on an individual basis. I mean, again, but and it gets hard when you start getting over 65-70 stores because only so many hours in a day. A lot of them are self-sufficient and you don't really hear from them, and you deploy marketing support and they pick it up and they run with it. But you have individual franchisees that like their hands held quite a bit, and you try to provide that service for them.

SPEAKER_03 47:43

Well, it's not so much about hand holding, it's more about disseminating knowledge and learnings. But I'm sure they can learn a ton from each other as well.

SPEAKER_01 47:53

I mean, I think in the franchise world, there's different communication channels that help that, right? So there's a series of meetings that you know you corporate teams will hold with their franchisees to disseminate information and insights. There's the advisory councils usually made up of franchisees' teams where they share amongst themselves. There are information sharing channels, which is really key. There's only so many hours and resources in a day. So, what can you do to help disseminate things quicker and wider and all of that?

SPEAKER_02 48:27

I think that brings us to a close, Jeff. I know you had a plan to retire, semi-retire, but that didn't quite work out, did it? So, you can't, what does the future hold for you? What are you what are you currently working on at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 48:41

Well, I'm currently working with another franchisee company, roughly about the same size as Muya, doing some consulting with them locally, working with a few digital marketing companies to help them with business development, maybe helping them get a little more traction in the marketplace. Uh, we'll be doing a little bit of writing in the space, and then hopefully checking out some craft beer breweries and doing some mountain climbing.

SPEAKER_02 49:07

So love it. Hopefully, not at the same time, might be dangerous. Well, look, Jeff, thank you so much. I think this is a great episode. Listeners, hope you enjoy it. Give Jeff a follow if you've got any questions. Thanks again, Jeff. We appreciate it. I really enjoyed it. Thank you both. This was great. Thank you.