Use Your Restaurant Customers’ Feedback for Good with Ovation’s CEO

Hey there restaurant pros. It’s David Scott Peters, and welcome to the restaurant prosperity formula podcast. For over two decades, I’ve been guiding restaurant owners to success with the proven principles of something I call the restaurant prosperity formula. I originally created the formula based on the daily practices of the most successful restaurant tours I coached, and it’s now the foundation of what I teach restaurant owners like you so you can achieve success. What do I mean by success? Success is a restaurant owner who dictates the terms of their life and their bank account, instead of their restaurants dictating those things for them, success is a restaurant owner who has freedom from the restaurant and the financial freedom they never thought possible. How you define success is up to you, but I do know the way to achieving it is using the restaurant prosperity formula. This season, I’m diving even deeper into the core elements of the formula, leadership, systems, training, accountability and taking action. Along with my insights, you’ll hear from special guests, industry experts and inspiring success stories from fellow restaurant owners who’ve turned their businesses around and found their definition of success. In this episode number 116, our guest is Zach Oates. Zach Oates is the go to guest experience expert in my book. Zach is a husband, father of four, author, three time founder and hot tub lover. He grew up in restaurants, rang the NASDAQ Bell and has been over 50 countries. He is the founder and CEO of ovation. Ovation is a guest experience platform for restaurants to collect and take action on feedback they improve online reviews, streamline guest recovery and easily monitor and improve restaurant operations. Listen in as Zach talks about the importance of having data directly from your customers and how it can transform your restaurant and ultimately increase your sales.

Let’s get started.

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Zach, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show today. Dude,

absolutely anytime I get to hang out with you. Record it or not, it’s it makes my day, man.

Well, it seems we only see each other in Vegas. Most recently, with that said, talk a little bit about we had a happenstance meeting. You started. Oh gosh. Now, how many years ago? How many years ago.

This was 20 November of 16. We started, and then I started hitting the conference circuit in 19. So

talk about this. I’m in New York. We were talking about this. Before we started doing this, I had given a presentation on the show floor. Everybody is gone. I’m packing up my stuff, and here’s this young buck shows up and you say, Yo, talk about what you were doing at that time and how we kind of met in that respect. Yeah,

I was just, I remember being just captivated. I was like, Dude, this guy knows so much stuff, and how does he get this whole entire room full of restaurants that just want to come and learn from him. And I didn’t even realize that that was like, that you could do stuff like that. So it was super impressive to see that. And so I sat there for the presentation, and I was like, This guy knows his stuff. And at the time, we were honestly, we were doing so many different things for so many different people. We had very little focus, very little direction, and we just kind of like I was working with a bunch of different industries, and I was doing a bunch of different stuff, but my passion is all around the guest experience in restaurants, but we just had other people that were coming to us and asking, like they were willing to pay us to build stuff for them. And so what basically happened was we were kind of becoming a dev shop, and when I saw your presentation, I was like, Oh my gosh, we need to focus. Because the reason that you’re doing so well at what you’re doing is because you’re solving a specific problem for a specific person. And that was something that at the time, at ovation, we just had so many things that were adding on. And as a bootstrapped company, like I self funded, right? And so I was like, hey, someone’s willing to pay me to do something great. Let’s do it. Because we don’t, you know, I’m not getting a paycheck, and I need to pay these people. And but so I came up to you, and I was like, Okay, what is going on? What are you doing? How do you do this? And anyway, you were really kind, and you gave me a lot of really good advice. And, and I think that was something that where. And then I remember, fast forward, and you actually kind enough. I started a podcast in 2020, and you came onto the podcast. You actually, you’ve been on the podcast a couple times now, and it’s just something that from then to today, going through that journey of staying with Ovation but focusing it on the things that matter most. And so we’re solving one problem for one person, and by doing that, it’s enabled us to go so much farther, so much faster. I was actually looking at my revenue numbers back from then until today, and for basically it was, it was actually really sad to look at this. But for 16 months, our revenue increased by $1,200 yeah, right, because we just didn’t. We weren’t really solving a problem. People were coming in and out and in and out, and now people stay with us forever because they’re just they’re getting the value, and we are obsessed with figuring out, what more things can we do to help these restaurants improve their operations with guest feedback, and so that’s been transformational for us as a

company.

Well, I can tell you that I understand the self bootstrap my old company, we built software, and oh my gosh, I really my hat is off to you. I don’t ever want to do software again in my life. I swear to goodness, you know, if I have another programmer tell me, they can deliver and they don’t, and I’ve sold it. It’s like I want to with that said it is one of those things that you can simplify somebody’s life and use technology to leverage the data. And you’ve done that to a point where I’ve got member after member in my group coaching programs that bring up ovation, and it starts with literally my two member mentors. They just rave like they talk about every now I go into my revenge session and I see dot.dot.net, Dasia Wakefield and Avery Ward like they are, just like, preach, how integral your software has become to their guest experience retention, making sure people are happy. You know, not letting a guest go home unhappy. It’s just just the power of it. They couldn’t think about running their business without it.

So let’s talk about the guest experience first, and we’ll get into to what you do in a little bit. But you know, what is it when you look at at the guest experience? What are the things independent restaurant operators, I know all operators, but independents are my love and joy. What should an independent be looking at to ensure the guest is having a great, great experience?

The question to really ask is, what is happening when you’re not there, right? Because, as an independent restaurant operator, here’s, here’s the, you know, we’ve got about, about half of our, half of our restaurants are independents. Half our logos that we work with are independents. And it is a real challenge, because what’s happening is they’re in the restaurant, and they feel like I know exactly what’s going on when I’m in the restaurant. I’m going up, I’m doing the table touches like you, you are the real owner, and I know that you and I, if we go into a restaurant within 30 seconds, if the owner is there, we can tell who the owner is, right? It is just so obvious how much they care. And as as CEOs, we know what it’s like to care. Because, you know, if I get an email that someone said, Hey, I think this onboarding is taking a little bit too long. It’s like, I don’t care if you’re one location or 1000 locations, like, I’m going to be responding to that because, like, my team knows that, that that I care about that, right? But the problem is, what’s happening when you’re not there? Now for me, it’s a lot easier, because everything I do is digital, right? So I can see the emails coming in, I can see, you know, the the ratings coming in. But you know, at ovation, we actually use ovation as well, and so it’s amazing to see. And we every single email that we send out has a rating on the bottom, so that we can collect feedback, and we can chat in real time with our with our customers. But when I look at what does it really mean? It’s like those independents. How do you take a vacation? How do you take a holiday off? How do you? What do you do when you’re not there? And that’s really what Ovation comes. Where we shine is helping independents feel that everything’s under control. If there’s a problem, there’s a way to hear about it, and they can, they could personally fix it, but they could fix it while they’re on the beach, right? Like I had a customer, you know, message me one time and literally say I was on the beach, I got to notice that something was wrong, and they were like and the comfort that it gave me to be able to personally reach out to that customer, to that guest, and say, I’m sorry, Here’s a coupon to come back and to know what they wanted to retrain their team on when they came back from vacation, he was like, that comfort is something that I can’t get with any other piece of technology. And so that’s the real thing that that I want to, you know, make point about is like when, when you’ve got an 80% manager turnover, 120% employee turnover, and you have new person after new person coming through that door. And the data shows that 30% of the time that guest will come back, 30% we do all of this work, and yet, for whatever reason, 30% only 30% come back. And the question is, why? And what happens is we don’t really know was the food not that great was, you know, because, because we know that if, if an owner comes up and I’m sitting there and I’m eating the burger, I actually, it was funny. I was out with the Ovation team, okay, yeah, we were sitting there at dinner, and I’m like, Man, I wish there was a way that I can tell these people that this food isn’t very good. I was like, here’s like, a real life example of where I feel like Ovation is needed. And the manager comes up and, you know, we could tell it was the manager, and he came up and really excited. He does, like, the perfect table, touch. Hey, how is everything great? Anything I can get for you? No, we’re good. Thank you. Walks away, and I was like, you guys, look at that. There’s, there’s six of us here because we’re at a trade show. There’s like, there’s six of us here. And none of us were willing to say that the food wasn’t good. But we all talked about how we didn’t like the food. Now, none of us are going to go back to that restaurant. None of us left a negative review because, like, you know, we don’t like to leave negative reviews. Yeah, but it’s like, that’s the problem is that that owner of that restaurant didn’t know that the food for six out of six people was not good. But if there was a a unobtrusive way to give that feedback in a way that isn’t making the waiter feel bad, isn’t insulting the chef, it’s just out of a desire to help that restaurant. What we find is that so many people are willing to give feedback if you make it easy, and that’s the key. That’s the thing that so many people miss out on, is they, they don’t give feedback because they’re either making it difficult, because they’re going up to that person face to face, and you know, they don’t want to cause problems, right? But, but if you give quick feedback, and you make it easy, and you make it on the phone, people will tell you the truth because they care, because they want you to get better.

And I think that’s the most powerful part about is you’re giving somebody the data to understand and be proactive. So I always preach being proactive, proactive systems from budgeting to purchase, budgeting to labor budgeting. It’s proactive. What am I going to do? I need that past data when I could do budgets, things like that, to create what the template would look like. But in a budget, I create a plan for success to reduce my food costs, a plan for success reduce labor costs, control my operating expenses, whatever it is, but I’ve got this information that allows me to decide what is my plan to make change. When you spend all this money as an operator on marketing, and I drive all these people in, and you suck, you are losing money faster, because in the old days when I was an operator, man, we didn’t have the internet. We had bulletin boards like, you know, dial up modems, for crying out loud. And all of a sudden, you know, it was, the story was, if somebody had a bad experience, they might tell nine or 10. If they had a good experience, they’d tell one or two. Well, now we got the internet, you know, you’ve got all these platforms for people to just, you know, put bad information out about you. And very few take the time to truly say this was an incredible experience. Now, if we get to a Yelp, if we get to a Trip Advisor, we get to a Google review, anything that it is too effing late, like it is hard, the damage is done. And I think that one of the most amazing things about what your company does, it gives me the ability to get in front of that. So talk about, if I have a bad experience, or I have a good experience, whatever it may be, I’m a customer at the table. As an owner, I truly want to know, I truly want to know what that guest experience has been like, because I spent all this time, money, effort to create the atmosphere, the background music, the flat where that I chose, the, you know, the glass where the uniforms I spent time, selecting people, training them, designing my menus, from the food to the actual printed copy. I want this to be an incredible memory, because we’re in hospitality, we have an opportunity to create memories, which is unbelievable. But then I sit there and look at my sales and go, What the shit is happening? Why are my sales going down? What? What is going on? I talk to my managers, and my manager goes, Oh, it was a great day. I don’t know what you’re talking about. As my managers go around and you say, talk about table touches. They either do it the chain restaurant way, is everything good, everything good, everything good, everything good, one after another, or they go, is everything okay? And customers like you said, if you have a bad experience, yeah, it’s okay. And they walk away like, oh, everything was good, you know, okay. Means it sucks. If you ask somebody, is it, you know, I didn’t say it was your steak cooked to the right temperature. Isn’t that? Anch, a lot of fantastic dotted out whatever. I’m not touching tables properly and gathering the right data, and even if I do, it’s in my ear, and out another ear, it never gets to the owner. You never get that data. So now we spend all this time and money to create this incredible experience, but now I have no idea if it’s working, except for looking at my sales. And there’s so many things that we can do wrong in hospitality, from restaurant 101, from hot food, hot, cold food, cold, clean, safe, work environment for your guests and employees. Wow. Customer service. Incredible product. And now to go, we put all this together, and we can flop and have no idea which piece of that is flopping. Talk about how you get that data, and the power of proactively using that data.

So at a high level, basically, Ovation starts to the guest as a two question survey, and they get that through either QR codes on the bag. If we have an integration with your online ordering system, which we you know, almost every online ordering system we have an integration with, now we’ll send automated text message or email saying, you know, hey, DSP, How was everything? Could you answer a couple questions for us? If you know, stickers on the table, you know, we have basically 100 different ways based on the flow of your restaurant and the channel that they order through, to rate their experience. Now, here’s the interesting thing, if we have a sticker to get people to convert them from third party to first party. We have another sticker, if they just like order to go. We have another sticker that sits on the table. We have another with the text message that goes out with a link. Now to the guest, all they have to do is scan that QR code or click that link, but automatically, we know where they ordered from, because we give unique QR codes other survey tools. The first thing they do is you scan a QR code and it’s like, how do you order? When did you order? Where did you order? By we do the hard work for them, and by telling them where they ordered and how they ordered based on the QR code or the text message. Now they click on the survey and it’s two questions, and the reason why is because we’re trying to mimic a table touch. Now let’s, let’s imagine independent restaurant. The owner goes around does a table touch, and in a world where everyone is honest and that that owner is really smart and can remember and pick up on the patterns, that works perfect, and there is no need for ovation. Unfortunately, owners want to take vacations. Owners want to open up multiple locations. People aren’t honest, and so in the world that we live in the table, touch is nice for hospitality, but it’s not nice for building up operational excellence and that data that comes with it. So now what we do is we listen to what goes on, and here’s why we listen is because, think about this. I was talking to the CEO of Dave’s hot chicken, and he was telling me they recently switched over from a traditional, long form survey company to ovation. And he said, I went to a Dave’s hot chicken and I had excellent service. I had excellent food. It was excellent timing. The ambience was awesome. Everything about it was great, except for the survey at the end, for me to tell them, they did a good job, I had to answer 50 questions. He’s like, That’s just stupid. When we announced at the Dave’s hot chicken conference that they were switching to ovation and and, and, you know, some of the people there hadn’t heard of ovation, and when I explained it and I said, Ovation starts for your guests, it’s two questions. Literally, the whole room just erupted in applause, right? Because those two questions are so powerful. And what we ask is, How was everything with a simple emoji scale, we don’t use the zero to 10 because the NPS scale while, while nice for comparisons, it’s not nice for the guest, because 11 options, zero to 10 on a mobile device is really hard to get accurate. So we do emojis, and we’re asking about the emotional experience. And if you ordered, you know, five burgers, and you went, you got home, and there’s four burgers in your bag, I don’t want to, you know, you don’t want to answer all these questions about the ambience and the price and the value. You just want to say, you forgot one of my burgers, right? And then what our system does is we’ve developed AI over the last three years, and we will look at all of the feedback that comes in. If someone says, Hey, the food, the service, was amazing, but you forgot one of my burgers. What our system will do is it’ll recognize that there’s a missing item, and so it will flag that as a missing item, and then that store will get a score based on missing items. And so that way they’re not having to ask, did I miss an item? They just say, How was everything? And then if there’s a missing item, they will tell you. And then what we do is, it’s nice to, you know, collect that feedback. We have super powerful tools that are able to analyze that and break that down, but in real time, here’s the here’s the the catch, the happy customers. We don’t just say thanks, we invite them to do things like leave a review, buy a gift card, place a catering order, and if they didn’t have a great experience, it pings the owner right away to their phone, and using our AI, they literally push one button and boom, the perfect response is created, designed to get them to come back in. So now you’re fixing the problem in the moment. We’re collecting the data on what is the trends of what’s going well and what isn’t, broken down into 34 restaurant specific categories. And then we have a whole system called goals. We’re using AI every location will get a specific goal to say, this is the thing that you should focus on for the next four weeks to improve your restaurant. And then you can track to see how well they’re doing in that specific metric. And it gives the GM one thing to focus on, to improve, one thing at a time, to rally the team behind order accuracy for this month. And then you can track how that improves, bonus the team on that, and then go on to the next thing that needs to be fixed. And that’s the power of going from two questions to a better restaurant. But all along the way, you’re collecting data, you can send out text messages to bring them back in, and you can even do traditional long form surveys. So if you want to say you want to figure out what people thought of your LTO, great, you could do that in a follow up question. You cannot do that in the survey flow because we lock it down to those two questions to make sure that that guest has the trust that it’s going to be two questions.

We actually are getting 68% more people. We did a test to say, you know, how did we do versus how did we do two questions, 68% more people. Took the survey that where it said two questions.

I want to, I want to focus on the data and the change you talked about real time. But there is, there is a point in time where, as operators, we see these little challenges, little challenges, little challenges, and we don’t think a lot that we’ve got to take action on it, but they add up. They add up. And I’m going to use Avery Ward as an example. Again, one of my member mentors, star star pupil, if you will, like, he is a rock star Little Italy, and I just just beyond his years, and an incredible operator. He, one point time, went through all the Ovation things, and found out, oh, in this area, our to go area will look cluttered. Oh, in this area, the customer said this. In this area, the customer said this, and he compiled the data of these routine and repeat offenders in his business that customers would tell him about, and then he fixed them all. And then he literally communicated with the person who left that review. We have fixed this. We would love for you to come back and give us your feedback on dot.we, listened and we changed. It was unbelievable. The power of having that data. You know, again, Avery’s an incredible operator, and he’s always striving for excellence. You can achieve excellence if you’ve got the right data, and you do something, you take action with it. And I think that’s some incredible hidden power innovation, the way he’s using it, that maybe so a lot of your operators don’t even know that they could, they could do that. It’s incredible. Do you have other people doing things like that? Yeah,

well, that, that’s one of the things that we’re trying to make it easier for them to so a lot of things that we’ve been building, that we built this last year were around making it easier to find the trends, and then the entire goals module, because we saw a lot of people doing just that is they were taking the trends that we were giving them, and then they were manually setting goals. So we met with a lot of people to understand, how do you want these goals to you know, how would you want to track these and so now we’re doing that, but it’s just included in the software. So this is one of those things that we do not you know, we’ve built out this entire goals feature, and our investors were like, great. How much you gonna charge for it? And we said zero. This is going to be included in every for everyone. They were like, but this is like, this is a huge thing that you can charge a lot of money for. But the point is, the more that people use the system and find the value in improving in the long run and not just constantly fixing the problem, the better it’s going to be. You know, I can think about like, if you have a rug that you’re constantly telling people, oh, you know, like, watch your step, watch your step, watch your step. Just fix the rug, right? Don’t, don’t keep telling people to watch your step, or sorry you tripped. Like, fix the problem. And I think about that in real, in real life, with ovation, where we had Sean Welch tells the story of he, you know, he’s been in business for years. He’s been selling the online for years, selling brisket online or barbecue online for years. Anyway, he started ovation, and within, within like the first month, he got people that were only the people that were ordering online, that were saying, I wish I could choose to get lean or moist brisket. And he was like, if someone shows up to my shop, like the very first thing when they say, I can get some brisket, they’ll say, do you want lean or moist? Right? Yeah. And he didn’t know he was selling brisket for like, four or five years online. He didn’t know that he never put the modifier for Lean or moist option on there. And here’s the thing, those types of things aren’t going to get you one star reviews on Google. They’re not going to get an angry phone call from a ken or Karen yelling at you about, you know, you did. You sent me the wrong one. It’s, it’s just one of those things that it’s like, Oh man, it’s kind of a bummer. But those are the little things that take you from being a good company to being a great company. And those little details are amazing. And then he was able to reach back out to those people that complained and say, Hey, heard you. Not only did I apologize, not only did I give you $5 off your next order, but now I went back and I said, you could now order lean or moist online like that full circle ability to discover, to fix in the moment, to solve the root of and then to go back and return and report to that guest. That is the hand to hand combat that you need in restaurants nowadays, because in 2025 it has never been more expensive to get a new guest in the door. You cannot afford with the current retention rates, to just keep bringing people in, having 70% of your of the bottom of your bucket empty and having people just fall through, you have to do a better job at getting people to come back in, and that makes all of your marketing dollars worth five to 25 times more by focusing on retention as just opposed to acquisition. Now I get it. Acquisition is sexy. It’s fun to get new people in the door if there’s a lot of good like you know, but at the end of the day, you got to get them coming back if you want to have a successful business.

Well, retention is probably one of the most powerful things. We talk about marketing. Marketing for your business, my business, any independent restaurant operator out there, or any business period, there’s only three ways to get more business, get a new customer, most expensive form of marketing out there, get somebody to come back more often and get them to spend more when they’re there, and all of a sudden, that’s the power of, say, loyalty, but you’re inserting yourself almost becoming even more cost effective and easier for an operator to go, Hey, you want that person to come back and spend more with you? Then you ensure they have a great experience every single time. I have a choice every single every day. Do I want to go to this restaurant or this restaurant that are damn near similar? Well, if I know that this place is always going to deliver, always going to deliver, and if they goof up and I say something, they reply, I’m important to them. I get to make that decision. And so, you know, if we look at it this way, all marketers love to say, you know, if I gave you $1 if you give me $1 to give you three back, how many dollars would you find? Well, every dollar I can frickin find, right? Well, the reality is, we’re talking about if you had a customer comes in, all your customers come in once a month. And because you listen to them, because you delivered on that experience, they decide to come twice a month. You just doubled your sales. There is nothing more important while we are going to lose customers based on people who pass away and move out of the area, find new interests and friends, we’re going to the competition down the street. The reality is, 86% of our customers don’t come back because of our our employees. They encounter an attitude of indifference by one or more employees, or we fall down, and all of a sudden, what Ovation allows me to do is find that 86% the customer that said I had a bad experience, find the solution, fix it, be able to repair that, that that relationship, and I will tell you that when it comes to sales, if you can Turn a bad experience into a good one, like the most awful experience in the world has now become visceral, deep in my gut. It is a memory seared in my brain, and then you go, make it good, it’s seared in my brain. Oh, my Lord, they screwed up so bad, and they cared so much that they took the time to fix this. I’m a customer for life. Can you talk a little bit about some of the experiences you have when it comes to retention?

You know? I think that, well, first of all, I think that that that customer for life is something that we hear all the time. In fact, I still want to pull up this quote. This is something, this was a very interesting experience. Someone said, Hey, I had a good experience. I got the four cheese, but I’m paying $3 for extra cheese. Is great, but I can never tell that the extra cheese was added. Well, within five minutes they you know, the owner of this person, the owner of this restaurant, responded to the guest and says, Hey, we use this is our three cheese. Is how we do with four cheese. We’ll remind the kitchen to make sure they’re willing to give the exact amount every single time. Thanks for the feedback. It helps us be better. Now, keep in mind, he didn’t give this person a coupon. Didn’t give him anything, and the guest responded. This is the first time I have ever received a response from a business based on my feedback, I am your forever customer. Now, like those are the types of experiences that you know, anecdotally, are really powerful, but there’s data, there’s data to back this up. In fact, what we found is that the average guest has a 30% retention rate, meaning that they’ll come back in they’ll come back 30% of the time, sorry, 30% of guests will come back within 12 months if they’re happy. And they give you their data with ovation, that number doubles to 60% if they’re unhappy, that number plummets to 13% but here’s here’s a powerful stat, if they are unhappy, and the only difference is someone responds to them with innovation. And by the way, this, this has to do with using our AI, because our AI is actually 10% better at recovering unhappy guests than than humans. But remember, 30% average, 60% happy, 13% unhappy. But if you respond to them with our AI, it jumps up to 68% retention rate. Not only that, but they spend $5 more than the average guest. They come in four times more frequently, and they’re 12 times more likely to leave you a five star review than the average guest, meaning that when you take all of this into consideration, a recovered guest is worth 24 times the average guest.

It’s mind boggling.

It truly is. And when we talk about, let me go backwards, and as we tech stack like 20 years ago, we didn’t have to worry about a tech stack. We’ve got all these pieces of software we need, when you talk to start to analyze the return on what you provide. It is more powerful than any other marketing piece you could put out there. It’s more powerful than anything that you can you can put in your tech stack because that retention can blow up your sales. It can truly not just you spend all this money bringing in the brand new customer. You got a 30% chance they’re going to come back like you spend all this money over and over and over again for these 30 percenters. That means at three out of 10 customers you’re going to possibly retain that may come back one more time next year. All of a sudden, you take that person it’s 68% they come times four times more than the average person. They spend $5 more. Man, you are fixing your sales problem, your volume problem. It’s huge.

And that’s the thing that so many people don’t realize. We actually did a case study. We took a city and a very large brand, because, because, obviously, you’re looking at these brands, and it’s like, you know, the smaller brands, and you’re thinking, you know, you’re an independent restaurant, yeah, it’s like, you get it that a reputation is really important, right? But just to prove the point, we actually worked with a very, very large brand, like one of the largest brands, I guarantee you that everyone has eaten there in the last few months, right? It’s a large brand. So we took one of the cities that they’re in, and they picked 5050, locations using sorry, locations that would use ovation, locations that wouldn’t they put them into two buckets, and they had equal satisfaction before, equal online reviews, equal revenue. And they ran it for four months, same city, same area managers, same franchisee, and what they found after four months was that the stores using Ovation were doing 18% more revenue than the store is not using ovation, it’s It’s crazy to think about, but here’s the thing, you can’t double your five star reviews, intercept your negative reviews, get more feedback, recover guests, improve your operations. Know what to train on and not make more money. You can’t do it. It is impossible. And so if you want to improve that revenue gap, if you want to make your restaurant better, if you want to make something more sticky, if you want people to come back in more it starts with listening and not in a way that makes it, not in a way that is easy for you, but listen in a way that’s easy for your guest. Make it, make it so easy for them to give you feedback, that they do give it to you and then take action on it. Now I tell people all the time, Ovation is where great restaurants come to get better. This is not where I am not going to take a crappy restaurant and like, transform your life. No, no, you need to care about the guest experience, right? You need to be someone that’s already willing to do the hand to hand combat of winning back that guest individually. Now we have AI that can help you, but at the end of the day, if you are looking for technology to replace hospitality, you’re in the wrong industry. This is a human industry. I think a lot about one of our one of our customers in Rexburg, Idaho, you

would be shocked at how good

the pizza is in Rexburg, Idaho, at righteous slice, Bill and Cheryl Crawford, they have this amazing restaurant. He’s a professor of business. Then was like, Hey, I’m going to start a I’m going to start a restaurant and see how it goes. And he became hyper fixated. Got all the best coaches and anyway, but in Rexburg, Idaho, people don’t always understand or appreciate the the brick oven pizza. It’s not the typical chain pizza, right? There’s gonna be a little bit of charring on it. That’s that’s how the style of pizza is. But he was the first one in Rexburg to do that. Well, he started using ovation. And here’s one of the secrets about Ovation too, is oftentimes we don’t want to give someone a comp meal or something like that, because we feel like, Ah, they’re taking advantage of us. Well, here’s what happened. He used ovation. Someone came in there complained about the food, saying, hey, the pizza was burnt. So he said he he wrote the message him back on ovation. Explained how, you know, the neapolitan style pizza is how there’s a little bit of charring, but it might have been too burnt to your taste. So here’s a free pizza. He uses that free pizza coupon, and he takes another survey, and he’s like, oh, wait a second, I think I’m on to something. Complains and says, Hey, my pizza was burnt again. So again, the owner hops on, explains to it and gives him a free drink. He comes in a third time, complains again about the pizza being burnt, and the owner said, Hey, looks like our style of pizza just doesn’t fit. Doesn’t fit your style of pizza. That’s totally okay. Wish you the best, but thanks for your feedback. But, and he goes, he responds back and says, Well, come in, if you give me another free pizza? And he said, No, we’ve already given you a free pizza and a free drink, and obviously we’re not, we’re not hitting the mark. And the guy said, fair enough. He comes back in, pays full price, leaves a review on Ovation that’s positive, and then goes on and leaves a five star review online. And see that’s the thing is, it’s not just about that individual experience, but it’s about who because we track everything based on the guest mobile number. We can we added to the conversation thread, so if they came in and complained three times, we can fix that. We can figure that out. We can be generous the first time. We could be skeptical. The second time, we can invite them somewhere else. The third time, you know, like but right now without ovation and by just doing table touches or just hoping that we’re getting with online reviews, we’re always going to have in the back of our mind is this person just trying to rip us off, right? And it that that stops us from being hospitable, because we want, we want to be fully in it, to believe that they’re there and being honest. But unless we have the data, we don’t really know

it’s so powerful.

You know, I sit there and think about,

you, talk about the owner that is looking for the magic pill, that you’re not a magic pill. There is no such thing as a marketing magic pill. There’s no such thing as a customer service magic pill, an operations Maggie pill. I can tell you personally, when I you see me present, I go, I suck, I create work and I do but it changes your life. It puts you in a position to work on budgets, marketing, lead the team, develop your managers, hold them accountable, work strategically on the business, move it forward. Now, if you’re in that role, ovation, if you’re in role of a restaurant owner, and Ovation now gives you the power to spend your time on the important things, the guest experience at the top level, not having to worry about every day was the table clean. We have checklists for that. We have managers for that. We just talked about at the very beginning of this, how we have managers to ensure the process is working. The challenge is, in one ear out the other, the data isn’t compiled. It’s lost within seconds of the time the manager asks the data. Now you’ve got data as an owner, you can look at it, plot out, do I have a trend? How can I save a guest? And with your AI, I can kind of auto pilot at least the first response, or I look at it and go, Hey, generate something. Oh, that’s much better, because I would have been emotional and said, Go, f off, right? And said, it’s this really nice, nice message. This is huge. But I think again, I want people to understand that that Ovation is a tool. Ovation is cutting edge. Ovation can change your life, but you have to be ready for it. You have to say, I have to use the system. I have to. I don’t, I don’t just have, oh, I have ovation. It’s not working for me. You have to, you have to go through the data, and you actually, actually have to take action. That is a critical piece, whether it’s my systems, whether it’s ovation, anything you do, can have all the great ideas in the world, but if you don’t take action, who gives a shit? Nothing’s going to happen. So you have to be ready. So talk a little bit about who’s that ideal person that you’re looking for that is ready for an ovation.

If you have comment cards, right? That to me and you actually read the comment cards, it’s not just like a dusty box.

If you have comment cards, that means that you care about the guest experience, and if you’re willing to read them and to figure that out, that’s amazing, right? Or, I could think of another restaurant that we worked with where in the morning, the first, the first hour of that manager shift, for the first half hour, they would call, randomly call customers from the day before and just say, Hey, this is so and so with such and such. I just wanted to see how was everything yesterday? Right? If you’re doing things like that. If you are actually training your managers on doing the table touches, if you’re having them report to you on problems, if you are someone who’s looking at your data to figure out, why is my revenue doing what it’s doing. Because, by the way, guest experience is like three to four month leading indicator on your revenue, right? So if you’re if you’re if your guest experience is going down, guarantee you three or four months down the road, your revenue is going to go down. If you’re someone that cares about that, then Ovation is it for you. If you’re someone who you know is like, I don’t want any more people in my doors. I am to the gills. I can’t take it anymore. The only thing I want to do is just let it run. And you know, my restaurant does everything on autopilot. Great. You know, your manager would love ovation, but you might not. And so I think that’s where, when I, when I look at that the brands that are already trying to do things to think about and to improve the guest experience, those are the brands that we work with really well, because when they get ovation, here’s what I heard. You know what I’ve been hearing throughout the whole time I’ve started since starting Ovation is when I go and I talk to restaurant owners, they say this. They say, had I started a single company, a single tech company, it would be ovation, because knowing what I know, the power of of that guest experience is foremost. I mean, like it’s people say all the time to me, they’re like, I need my point of sale and I need ovation. Everything else is optional, but to your point, it does require some work, right? You You have to actually change things like I went to we worked with a large, 30 location pizza joint, and one of his locations was causing him problems. He didn’t know why, but just the revenue was consistently down compared to the others. They were bottom of the pack when it came to online reviews. But you know, when you’re looking at 345, online reviews a week, there’s not really enough data there to, like, get the trends of what’s going on. And then every time he went there, guess what happened? Magically, everything was fine, right? Could you imagine the owner of a restaurant shows up and all of a sudden everything goes smoothly. All the checklists are done, everything. Wow, go figure. So he implemented ovation, and within one week, we told him food preparation in terms of the consistency of how they make the food in every other location, it is at you getting about four complaints a week. When it comes to food prep at this location, you’re getting 28 complaints a week. Wow. So he went there, and what he realized was, when he wasn’t there, they were being sloppy with making the pizza. So it was messy, toppings, unevenly cooked, burnt, undercooked, like they just weren’t being consistent. So he sat down with the whole team, retrained them, and in one week, complaints dropped to four a week, and then he was and then he saw a bump up that, you know, two weeks later, called the store, and he knew exactly what to tell them, but Ovation telling him there’s a food prep problem doesn’t solve the problem, right? Right? He could apologize all he wants, but at the end of the day, he needed to fix the problem and understand so we’re giving him the tools to fix that problem. We’re doing the hard work to analyze all that data, but it doesn’t. Ovation isn’t going to fix your problems. But here’s

the point.

The biggest point is, if you’re an action taker, Ovation finally told you what you were ethereal, going, what is wrong? And you you look at things, and you look at things, and you look at things and you change this and change that, and you see if your sales change. And you’re like, you’re finding it. You’re trying to find a needle in a haystack instead. Ovation says, here’s the needle. What do you want to do with Yes, here’s the damn needle. What do you want to do with it? You want to sew it back together, or do you want to throw it, ignore it? You now have the needle. What do you want to do? And that is huge, absolutely huge.

Do me a favor. Zach, tell people a little bit about your company and how they would contact you.

Yeah. So we work with 1000s of restaurants all around North America, helping them to measure and improve their guest experience. And if you want to learn more, you can go to Ovation up.com and and there’s links there that you can click on and get a demo with our team. We’re happy to chat with you at any point. You know, we were very low pressure. It’s like, hey, try it out. See how you like it. This is something that is really important to that we believe that, you know, we require a little bit of a commitment up front, but we’re not here locking anyone into these five year contracts. The big thing is we know that every single time that someone has implemented Ovation correctly and actually used it, it has worked, we know that this tool works. It’s just a matter of, you know, are we going to use the tool the right way? And that’s the reason we have such high retention, is because we’re obsessed with making sure that everyone is using the tool correctly, and that they understand how to use that data. So we have teams that are going to help you with the onboarding, with customer success, but yeah, I just say go to ovationup.com sign up for a demo, learn more about it. Got nothing to lose. Got a lot to gain.

Yeah, I tell you, be afraid of the fact that it’s going to become how you breathe. It. Literally every one of my members that uses a software is just a raving fan because of what you can do with the data that they actually have it, and it’s just impressive. I really appreciate you taking time to do this with me today. If there was one thing that we didn’t talk about, or a favorite book or quote or anything like you that want to share with people before we go. What would that be? Zach?

I think so. I’ve got these four books behind me that I feel like are so powerful endurance, which is about Shackleton’s voyage up north, like just the perseverance that’s required in any business, in any undertaking that is so powerful. The next book is Victor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and that puts a whole why in perspective. And then what I call the Old and New Testament unreasonable hospitality and setting the table. These two are like the Bible of hospitality. And so in terms of, like, getting through things, remembering why you’re doing it, and then how to do it in hospitality, those four books are just so critical. I love reading, and I think those are books I recommend to everyone,

fantastic. I will have to look at the I’ve got the hospitality ones. I got to figure out the other two. I will be re listening to this. We’ll add it to our book list in before our members as well. Zach, I appreciate you. I hope we’ll do this again soon, and I hope to see you well sooner than later.

There we go. Appreciate it, man. Thank you.

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Hey, that was an awesome episode. I want to thank you for taking the time to take action on building a better, more prosperous restaurant.

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