Christin Marvin: 0:08

Something extraordinary is coming. My memoir, the Hospitality Leader's Roadmap Move from Ordinary to Extraordinary launches on October 15th on Amazon. This book shares my journey from a 15-year-old line cook to seasoned leader in the hospitality industry, packed with insights on leadership, resilience and transformation. Whether you're an aspiring leader or a seasoned professional, you'll find practical wisdom and inspiration to elevate your career. Mark your calendars and remember 10% of sales from October 15th until the end of 2024 will benefit CHOW. Grab your copy on amazon. com on Tuesday, october 15th. If someone could give you the tool to effortlessly manage a single food ingredient and save $6,800 a month, why wouldn't you take advantage of it? Matt Wampler is an ex-operator turned tech founder. He spent close to a decade as a Jimmy John's franchisee, winning awards for the highest comp and highest sales increase in the chain. Matt is currently the CEO of CLEARCOGS, with a mission to empower restaurants with the information they need to run more smoothly and profitably. He's deeply passionate about the industry and is hyper-focused on bridging the gap between the potential of AI and the everyday realities of running a restaurant. Join us for this conversation that includes how CLEARCOGS gathers all of your data to build a daily execution playbook for your restaurant. How AI helps restaurants sharpen their understanding of what works and how to build on it. And how CLEARCOGS offers support with sales forecasts and labor costs to help restaurants achieve success more efficiently, allowing them to focus their time and energy on what matters most.

Christin Marvin: 2:08

Welcome to the no Hesitations podcast, the show where restaurant leaders learn tools, tactics and habits from the world's greatest operators. I'm your host, Christin Marvin, with Solutions by Christin. I've spent the last two decades in the restaurant industry and now partner with restaurant owners to develop their leaders and scale their businesses without wasting time and energy, so they can achieve work-life balance and make more money. You can now engage with me on the show and share topics you'd like to hear about, leadership, lessons you want to learn and any feedback that you have. Simply click the link at the top of the show notes and I'll give you a shout out on a future episode. Thanks so much for listening and I look forward to connecting Matt. Thanks for being here, man.

Matt Wampler: 3:01

I'm excited.

Christin Marvin: 3:02

So, matt, let's start with your early days in the restaurant business. I mean, you started managing when you were 20 years old.

Matt Wampler: 3:10

Yeah, I'm an ex-owner operator. I took over my first restaurant. Got into the industry at 21, taking over a failed Jimmy John's franchise from a guy who needed out of his lease. Learned from the school of hard knocks, slept on the back of the store floor more than a few times. You know what it's like not being sure whether you're going to make payroll, and now I'm trying to give back and make the world of restaurant operations a little bit easier for those who are filling the shoes I used to wear.

Christin Marvin: 3:39

At the age of 21,? Did you really fully understand the pressure and the um the impact of not being able to make payroll?

Matt Wampler: 3:52

Oh my gosh. No, and I don't think anybody that enters the restaurant industry ever fully appreciates just how hard it is.

Christin Marvin: 4:00

Yeah, yeah, how tell? Tell us a little bit about that journey. So you had to go in. You said you needed to take or completely flip this failing Jimmy John's. I mean, how did you do it? What tools and resources did you have?

Matt Wampler: 4:16

So this is where I give Jimmy John's all the credit. Right, this is the beauty of franchising. They had a playbook. My job was to follow the playbook and execute it day in and day out. I, as a 21-year-old, didn't know anything about the restaurant industry. I would have totally failed without that playbook, and so I give thanks to them. But at the end of the day, it's just hard work. It's creating great customer experiences for your customers, making sure the store is cleaned and the staff's there, and if you take care of the fundamentals, like slowly but surely over the next 18 months, we were able to triple sales.

Christin Marvin: 4:54

Yeah, so what was in that playbook?

Matt Wampler: 4:58

You know, it's the basics. It's the things you don't even really think about, like how often do I clean the ice maker? You know, do I need to scrub the mop guards around the floor when you're changing the grease trap? It's that, those fundamentals. If you do this every week, your store stays operational. So what do I prep in the morning? You know? How much bread do I need to bake? All of that was given to us in our systems and procedures and my job was just to simply follow.

Christin Marvin: 5:26

Nice. And you who? Who taught you how to do this Cause it sounds like you took over from a failing operator, right, who sounds like wanted out. Did he help through your transition or were you just kind of thrown into the deep end?

Matt Wampler: 5:39

I'll throw in the deep end. So like when I walked into this restaurant so I bought it. I didn't live in the city, so I showed up on day one, packed up my U-Haul, hooked it up to the pickup truck and drove out to the East Coast to take over. This store literally had no air conditioning. In the middle of summer it's DC, it's 110 degrees in the restaurant. The grease trap is overflowing. The moment you could open the door you'd just smell it and it was just a. I think they had like four employees at the time. Ice buckets were on top of the cold table compressors to keep them from overheating. So it was a total train wreck. They left it in shambles and I was the patsy there to have to pick up the pieces.

Christin Marvin: 6:21

Yeah, why on earth did you decide to take over that store?

Matt Wampler: 6:28

pieces. Yeah, why on earth did you decide to take over that store? You know what? It's a really good question. I was drawn to it. I like the challenge. I like being on my feet. I think my dad gave me the advice. You're 21. You don't have any assets. You have nothing to lose. If you're ever going to take a shot in life, this is the right time. Love it. Can I ask you what that initial investment was? Yeah, I won't give you the exact dollars, but it was not a gigantic sum of money. It was one of those the guy needed out of the lease and it was hemorrhaging money and if somebody wants to come in and stop the bleeding, it allowed for a 21-year-old kid to enter the industry.

Christin Marvin: 7:06

I love it. What was the biggest lesson you learned during that time?

Matt Wampler: 7:10

People. It all starts with people, it all ends with people.

Christin Marvin: 7:14

How do you?

Matt Wampler: 7:15

give somebody a sense of purpose. How do you get the right people on the ship and pointed in the right direction?

Christin Marvin: 7:22

Did you have a team of people that stayed with you, or did you have to build from scratch?

Matt Wampler: 7:26

Lost everybody. It was not a great situation. There were only five people working at the restaurant when I took over. I remember one of the most hard decisions I ever made was I was four weeks into this and my assistant manager, who was the one guy helping hold everything together, saw a moment of vulnerability and said double my pay or I'm going to walk. I remember just thinking I can't run this restaurant without him. I don't know what I'm doing and if I keep him on, am I going to be just held hostage by anybody who sees an opportunity? And it was the hardest decision. But ultimately I said if you want to walk, walk. And it left me working 10, 12 hour shifts. The store's open 24 hours a day, so I had 120 or 120 management hours a week, which, you do the math real quick means three of the days I'm working, you know, 24 hours a day and sleeping in the back of the store. And sure enough, you found great people and eight weeks later I was able to get out of that position.

Christin Marvin: 8:37

Wow, so it took you eight weeks to start to turn it around.

Matt Wampler: 8:40

Yeah, and that was just the beginning.

Christin Marvin: 8:42

Yeah, that's incredible. So where did this love for COGS come from? Were you interested in that during your time managing?

Matt Wampler: 8:50

Well, I mean, in restaurants, there's really only three numbers that matter to your success it's revenue, food cost and labor, and so, love it or hate it, you get to know managing food costs quite well. Yeah, where did this idea for Clear?

Christin Marvin: 9:04

COGS come from, you get to know managing food costs quite well. Yeah, where did this idea for?

Matt Wampler: 9:08

Clear Cogs come from. I mean, it was born out of the pain that I felt when I was running my operation, you know.

Christin Marvin: 9:13

Jimmy.

Matt Wampler: 9:13

John's did give us this great playbook. It did set us up for success. It got me to where I'm at. But you know, you ultimately realize there's a lot of gaps in the playbook, and it's not just for Jimmyimmy johns, it's for everybody.

Matt Wampler: 9:27

So one of the problems we'd have is I had five locations it's five assistant managers that two hours prior to close had to decide do I need to make another cycle of bread? And they would literally stick their head out the door and say is it raining outside? You know, is there a line at the bar? And then they would guess how much bread to bake. And it's emotional, right. If you run out of bread, you've got angry customers and you're not making the deliveries and I'm probably calling and asking why you're out of bread. So you're always over baking bread and you're throwing it away and it's killing your food costs. So where it came from is how do we use the data they already have to systematically answer that question? You, at this store, on this day, the magic number is 17 sticks of bread. If you've got it, cut the oven off and start cleaning If you don't bake another cycle of bread.

Christin Marvin: 10:18

So how did you take this passion and knowledge and experience and say, okay, I'm going to transition from operations, I'm going to start to venture into the tech world and then get curious about AI? Walk us through that journey.

Matt Wampler: 10:31

It was an iterative process. I sold the restaurants, I went off and did my MBA. Later on in life I really got into the programming and data analytics world and was just blown away with the technology. It's like I was running my multi-million dollar you know small Jimmy John's group off of Excel spreadsheets and guessing. All of this modern technology could have fundamentally made my life that much easier. I just couldn't believe that. You know, nobody was really doing anything with it, and so I called up my now co-founder, osa said hey, I think there's something here with restaurants. Let's go dig in and see if there's a business to be had here.

Christin Marvin: 11:11

What'd you find?

Matt Wampler: 11:13

Found after talking to 50 to 100 restaurants. If you ask why, enough times it all comes back to I don't know who's going to walk in the door each day. I'm literally walking in and just waiting for the phrase someone just to kick me in the stomach and to get it wrong and either be hemorrhaging money because we've got too much there or running around trying to clean up the pieces because we got it wrong and we're playing catch up. And so when you really get to that core of how many people are going to walk in the door, that's something that technology can answer with the data you already have.

Christin Marvin: 11:56

That's so interesting when I think, when I think about cogs, I'm thinking about just managing managing what's coming in the door and what's coming out the door right from a product perspective. And I love that you're taking it to a guest perspective of being able to plan and execute right, which is it's all kind of encompassed together. But I think it's I'm looking at it from a different perspective, which is really cool. I love that moment. So when you started to ask these questions and you were understanding what the pain points were from operators, how did the business kind of evolve and come to light from there?

Matt Wampler: 12:34

Well, like many businesses, it starts with a call to a family member. So I called my cousin he's got a couple of Jimmy Johns and I said, hey, what are you doing for reporting analytics, all of that? And he said, matt, I'm using the Excel spreadsheet you built. It's amazing. I said Patrick, that's from 10 years ago. Yeah, I know Awesome. They're like, okay, I think we can do better than that. And so we went to go work with him and to answer that fundamental question I had about bread, two hours prior to close, and we put together a minimum viable product. We put it in his hands. Sure enough, we cut his bread waste by 53% and reduced the number of times that they were running out of bread. We're like, wow, this really works. This could make a real change in the industry.

Christin Marvin: 13:20

I love that. So let's go back to this example of bread. Take us through kind of the cycle of life. How does this process work?

Matt Wampler: 13:31

Yeah, so we use AI to sit on top of all of your existing technology. So we're pulling in data from your back-of-house system, from your POS we're able to go quantify how many sticks of bread you're using every 15 minutes. And we look at the past 10 years of data which is already housed in your POS so we have full access to it and with that data we're able to figure out what is your short-term trend, what is your long-term trend? How does the day of the week affect bread? How does the time of the day you know? How does yearly seasonality factor it in? And now we've gotten even more advanced. Where it's you know how does the weather impact your bread and what's on your menu and limited time offerings. And when you take all of this data together and you utilize tools like AI, you're able to just turbocharge. You know these predictions and get the accurate number that that restaurant really needs.

Christin Marvin: 14:27

How long does it take to gather all of that data?

Matt Wampler: 14:30

Really doesn't take long. I mean, that's fundamentally what we've built over at CLEARCOGS, so that's all an automated process. At this point we onboard a new restaurant. It's literally the click of a button and the systems start working. It starts pulling in the data, it starts pulling in weathers, it starts analyzing your menu to figure out days that you were likely stocked out of product and backfilling that data so that we have good data sets Figuring out what you're catering is. All of this is automated. The only thing that's left is to sit down and have a therapy session and understand what are the 20 or 30 questions that really matter in your operation, that you need to see each day so that you make better decisions.

Christin Marvin: 15:10

And then how does AI come into play here? What does AI do with all that information?

Matt Wampler: 15:16

I like to think of AI as just a great general manager. If you were able to just sit your GM down for a day or a week and say, figure out bread and how the day of the week affects it at this store and how weather affects it in store one versus two. So AI basically goes in and figures out this store. These are the important variables and these are how they should be weighted. Another way of putting it is you know, everybody's familiar with chat GPT at this point. You know chat GPT is really just predicting the next word in a sentence. You know that's what AI is really good at predicting the next number in a sequence. Good at predicting the next number in a sequence and so being able to look at a big time series of usage data and predict what the next usage number will be. That's what AI is fundamentally doing.

Christin Marvin: 16:14

Hey there, podcast friends. I hope you're enjoying these impactful conversations and leadership insights I'm bringing you each week. Before we dive back into today's episode, I want to take a moment and reach out and ask a small favor. That would go a long way in supporting the show. If you've been loving the content I'm providing, please take a moment to leave a rating and review. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, Not only does it make my day, but it also plays a pivotal role in helping the show grow. Your reviews boost my visibility, attract new listeners and encourage exciting guests to join me on the mic. So if you want to be part of my show's growth journey, hit that review button and let me know what you think. Thanks a million for being awesome listeners.

Speaker 3: 17:08

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Christin Marvin: 18:05

So with prediction comes a certain level of trust, right, and some risks. So how with using AI? How are you coaching and guiding your clients on how much to trust that data? Do they lean all in? Do they start off cautious and build over time? What does that look like?

Matt Wampler: 18:24

You know I'm amazed at how many just go all in, we're going to follow it.

Christin Marvin: 18:29

Sure, it's easy, right.

Matt Wampler: 18:31

It also gives me like heart palpitations that it's just you give them a wrong number and that's a really bad day for somebody, Totally. But look, the vast majority of the waste in restaurants isn't this one-time event the president's in town speaking. It's the random Tuesday night where you're over-prepping $5 in all of these different categories and you have one additional driver that you didn't need. So I always tell people that 95% of the time, 98% of the time, this is going to be great, but it's always great to have a manager there to recognize that there's a random pop-up farmer's market that's opened up literally across the street and you might want to react to that street and you might want to react to that.

Christin Marvin: 19:20

When clients are coming to you, are they saying let's start with one ingredient at a time and then build from there? Or are they saying like, give us everything you've got and we're going to implement a bunch of changes to?

Matt Wampler: 19:35

our entire program. I mean, they tend to say the latter, Although I think the former is the right way to do it. Start with whatever those five decisions are that really matter. You're the barbecue place If you're smoking your brisket the day before for the next day. If you get it wrong, you're probably having waste and you're throwing that in the night. Your food costs are up. If you're doing too little, you're not only losing out on revenue, but you're probably providing a poor customer experience and losing out on revenue that you would get into the future. So start with those key questions like brisket and pulled pork and then, once you've got a feel for it, it becomes really apparent how you would use this for all of these different factors for all of these different factors.

Christin Marvin: 20:22

So you talked a little bit about being able to help your cousin with bread, with the example of bread. Talk a little bit about share a success story with a larger company that's been able to really take all this data and apply it across every line on their P&L. What does that look like?

Matt Wampler: 20:35

Yeah, I mean we're working with a group out of LA. It's a commissary style organization, so they're preparing everything in one centralized kitchen and then hub and spoke, they're distributing it out to the restaurants. I love the model. It makes total sense. And they were skeptical. It was a bunch of ex-cheesecake factory guys. They felt like we know how to run restaurants, we do a good job and when we put this in place, literally within the first month in the first location, they save $6,800, which is just life-changing money for most restaurant operators. Or Red White Cube barbecue place just outside of New York. It was. I always do eight racks of ribs on Tuesdays and I get your report in and it says six and I'm like I don't know about that and I do six and sure enough there's, there's only half a rack left at the end of the day. It's. You know, it's. It's success stories like that that give us fuel to build this. Yeah.

Christin Marvin: 21:38

I love that. How many locations did the LA concept have? Six, okay, love it. Once your customers get all this data and the AI, do you help them understand how to implement it in their business, or do you let them kind of take it and run with it? What does that relationship look like?

Matt Wampler: 22:00

The answer is yes, so we absolutely go in to help them implement it. We build it around the individual customer. And going back to all of the data, the key isn't the fact that we analyze 100 million data points every day to figure out how many briskets it's. How do you take 100 million data points and turn it into just one data point? This is the number of briskets for you, so that there's no dashboards. I don't need to be a data scientist to do this. I'm looking at the same prep sheet or labor scheduling sheet that I always looked at, except it's now populated with the numbers that I need.

Christin Marvin: 22:39

So when there's an error in the brisket number and you say okay, or rack of ribs, right, we'll go back to that example. They've been producing eight. The data now tells them six. They've tried that, they're running out. Then what happens?

Matt Wampler: 22:52

Well, fortunately it doesn't happen that often, but that's one of those beautiful things about AI, so it's self-correct, just like a great general manager. If we ran you out yesterday, the system identifies that and says, okay, we need to up our forecasts. But the smarter aspect of it is, for a manager, it's an emotional reaction. I did six racks of ribs yesterday and I ran out, so I'm going to do nine racks today. Well, that might have been a Sunday to a Monday, and Monday is a totally different demand pattern, and maybe you really just needed to up it for the next Sunday. That's the kind of thing that this whole big data AI really is good at.

Christin Marvin: 23:35

That's awesome. Now are you guys behind the scenes kind of watching what's happening with your accounts and giving recommendations or helping them going? Hey, watch out here something's weird.

Matt Wampler: 23:46

Yes, I mean, I get hundreds and hundreds of these accuracy reports every day, and we've got a team of data scientists to review it all. I mean now, at least you know, we do our weekly meeting where we're going over how sales patterns are and where the system might be under forecasting or over forecasting. But fundamentally, when you go from guessing or a moving average of sales or even sales forecasting to a true time series usage AI forecasting system, it's like going from the horse and buggy to the automobile. It's just light years ahead.

Christin Marvin: 24:25

How many hours a week do you think operators are spending on this?

Matt Wampler: 24:29

I think it depends on the operation. Um, I would say that it's, you know, 30 minutes a day. You're probably spending what three and a half hours a week going over Excel spreadsheets or, you know, figuring out the math of what do I need to produce, what do the pars every week? And you know, once, whenever they break, I just kind of update it and make it a little bit higher. Or you know it's a Tuesday, this is what I always do, and it's it's those restaurants that you know are the ones that see, you know, really meaningful impact in their profitability.

Christin Marvin: 25:14

Love it. You are so passionate about AI and helping restaurants enhance their businesses. What's the opportunity look like from your perspective when it comes to AI and restaurants?

Matt Wampler: 25:27

I think it's a game changer. I think the restaurant industry I mean, you know this it's about hospitality. People get into this industry because they want to serve people, they want to create magical experiences. They don't get into it to be data scientists and number crunchers. Ai is never going to change the hospitality side of things and creating those magical moments serving people, but it's really good at managing the metrics. So if we can somehow empower the restaurant operator out there to not have to focus on the things that they hate the analytics, number crunching and can then just spend their time focusing on the team and the customer, it's just a better industry. It's what motivates me every day.

Christin Marvin: 26:17

Yeah, it's such a great tool for them to just block and tackle and just move on to where they want to spend their time and their energy. I love that. What does the future look like for ClearCogs?

Matt Wampler: 26:31

Yeah, ultimately, what I described before how do we have the AI basically being able to be your fractional COO, cfo, that person that sits on top of all of your data synthesizes it down into the answer to the one question we all want to know what do I need to know today? What are the things that matter?

Matt Wampler: 26:50

And you know with these large language models and you know the low cost of cloud computing. All of a sudden that's becoming a reality that we march forward to every day. But I'm curious your perspective on this whole. Ai in restaurants. You talk with a ton of people in the industry. What do you see?

Christin Marvin: 27:13

Well, the majority of the people that I work with are in the independent space, and some of them are just in love with tech, and some of them are still really skeptical of tech. Right, when you put in a new tech system and you're an independent operator, it's just another thing that you have to manage, right? So it takes time to get in, to learn it, to become the expert in it and then figure out how to use it, and so I think I love that AI is speeding things up, of course, and I love this perspective that you're providing of it being an excellent GM or fractional CFO or COO. But there's some hesitancy, right? Like I asked earlier, how do you trust this? I use AI in my business every single day. From a solopreneur perspective, I couldn't do what I'm doing at the level and quality that I am without AI. I'm a huge proponent of it, and so I love what you're doing and, as you were describing the future of this and where you're going, I had a vision of being back in an operational seat, coming in in the morning, getting on the computer, going.

Christin Marvin: 28:14

It's Tuesday. Here's my staffing. Here's how much we're producing. Here's what we should actually be doing based on today. How do we make adjustments before the doors even open and everybody comes in, right? I mean, holy shit, to have that kind of power and knowledge and plan set for every single shift every day? That's ridiculous.

Matt Wampler: 28:39

Well, it's probably the thing that I'm most excited about right now. So we have traditionally worked with larger chains.

Matt Wampler: 28:46

Not everybody can have a full AI operations management system built around their restaurant, but we love the independent operators out there and one of the things that we're doing is we're trying to democratize access to these tools. So we just went live on the Toast Marketplace and we're offering a freemium plan where we're giving a suite of tools away for free to restaurant operators, and these are not things that you need to go work to implement. It's things like free sales forecasting what are my sales going to be for tomorrow? Or just a helpful hand sitting on top of your data to say it looks like you stocked out of those ribs yesterday and you lost X dollars of revenue as a result. Or even here are your trend reports and what products are working and selling as they should, what are outperforming and what are underperforming. And these are things that we can do with AI that don't require any inputs from the operations team and may not fundamentally change your life, but sure make it a whole lot easier.

Christin Marvin: 29:52

Nice. So you mentioned earlier you're pulling data from all the back of the house. Are you integrated with every POS system or is it just Toast specific right now?

Matt Wampler: 30:01

There's a 52% chance if you walk into a restaurant. We're integrated with their POS but it's a large, fragmented market. For the most part, we're integrated with all the major players.

Christin Marvin: 30:10

Okay, is there a labor component to this as well?

Matt Wampler: 30:13

right now, component to this as well. Right now, yeah, there is. I mean, we found out pretty quickly. If you have a crystal ball that can tell me the future, that's relevant for more than just, you know, getting clarity on your food costs. You can use it for labor as well. So, yes, we do, and we can base it off, not just sales and your overall, you know, labor target goal. But you know I always go back to Jimmy John's because I'm a sandwich slinger at heart. I want to raise my revenue or my labor based on how many sandwiches I'm selling. I don't care about drinks and chips. I want to know how many people I need to have on the line, and so we can do very targeted things on the labor front.

Christin Marvin: 30:53

How can this help expanding restauranteurs know their next location, their next successful restaurant concept? How can AI help them with that?

Matt Wampler: 31:16

this of being able to suck in all of this data and to be able to help you understand where you should open up your next restaurant.

Speaker 3: 31:19

I have no idea how to do that.

Matt Wampler: 31:21

I always felt like opening restaurants was like playing Russian roulette. You go in an open day and you find out whether you're going to get shot in the head or not, or whether you open the fit. We rely on your operational data, so we need you to have at least been in business for three months before we're much of a solution for you. But I think that on the expansion side, we watched as COVID took a lot of our skilled restaurant people out of the industry. We had this knowledge suck and now we're kind of in this rebuilding state and finding our next leaders. I think that the biggest thing that it offers is the ability to systemize some of these decisions. How do you take the best manager and the way they think about it, digitize it and automate it so that when you're moving manager from store one to store two or you're trying to open up 20 units next year, you've got a system in place so that you're not leaking money out with these small decisions every day.

Christin Marvin: 32:23

Matt, do you feel like this is going to eventually replace restaurant managers?

Matt Wampler: 32:29

No, I think it just not at all. So I think that restaurant managers are asked to do way too much today. I mean, they're asked to run the business, run the analytics side of the business, to train and inspire their team and then to go walk into the lobby and have a wonderful conversation with a customer and build those relationships. It's just too much. You know, if we could self-select managers that work great with people and not analytics, I think that you're just shifting what their focus is towards.

Christin Marvin: 33:06

Yeah, what do you think the impact is going to be on the accounting teams in restaurants and CFO positions going forward?

Matt Wampler: 33:14

Yeah, I mean, when you look at restaurant technology today, it is basically retrospective reporting. We have every report known to man to tell you why you're failing and where you failed, and we have no technology that can tell you in advance what to do so that you don't fail. And that is less of an accounting function, because the accountants are just the ones that put all the numbers together to show you all of your failures or successes. We're playing more on the operations side of it, so our job is to make the general manager's life easier and more days go well and according to plan, and the only effect on the accounting side of things is the numbers look a lot better.

Christin Marvin: 34:00

That's awesome. Before we leave, I'd love to understand from your seat how are you developing yourself as a leader and CEO.

Matt Wampler: 34:12

Boy. It's a great question and it's a never-ending journey. And it's a never ending journey. I honestly look back at my time at restaurants to help inform what I need to be as a leader, because in the industry it's such a quick feedback cycle right, you say the wrong thing to an employee, they just take their apron off, quit, walk out the door, right, so you learn really quickly how to motivate, inspire and manage people. I hate to say that I'm going soft on the technology side of things because you know, it's not as many people and as many relationships. But you know, I think that same ethos is something that I'm drawn back to and trying to. But I also do executive coaching, uh, and and try and do, but I also do executive coaching, you know, always trying to step into a better version of myself.

Christin Marvin: 35:01

That's awesome. I love it. Thank you so much for being here. Is there anything else we should talk about before we depart?

Matt Wampler: 35:08

Well, you tell me, is there anything else we do that we didn't cover?

Christin Marvin: 35:12

I don't think so. I think we, I think you did an awesome job of taking us through that perfect example of bread. I really wanted to get into the nitty gritty of one ingredient and kind of the path of success there and love seeing this on a larger operational scale as well. I'm excited about the future. Again, I'm a huge proponent of AI. I know there's a lot of uncertainty around it and it's moving really, really fast, but I agree with you that the possibilities, especially for independent operators, are just endless and I really just thank you for being here today and sharing your story. I love that. You started on this journey when you were 21 and were able to see that playbook in action and take something so simple and then elevate it into this awesome business, and you've got this amazing team of 10 and growing, so just excited to stay connected with you and watch your journey. It's really exciting.

Matt Wampler: 36:10

Before we go, I always have one question I like to ask, and that is the heartbeat of the industry right now. What is on the minds of restaurant operators out there?

Christin Marvin: 36:23

It's labor models in full service. How do they people and continue to take a salary and overcome? You know, I think the service charge continues to put a lot of pressure on operators to deliver incredible value and we know that rising cogs are putting a lot of pressure on that value and that experience to customers. Right, we're seeing less and less people dining out. So you know I say labor, but it's really it's. The pressure is coming from everywhere. Right now, even the restaurants that are really successful, that are full every night are still scratching their head, going how the hell am I going to pay, continue to pay people a livable wage, a fair wage, an equitable wage between the front and the heart for years to come. It's just really expensive right now and that's not going anywhere.

Matt Wampler: 37:27

Yeah, I would say it's not going anywhere. So where does this lead in the next couple of years?

Christin Marvin: 37:33

It's innovative thinking. It's really looking at the business model and, like you said, getting really smart with your data what's working, leaning into that, being able to let go what's not working and get over the ego and the pride of what you've built and making really smart, informed business decisions, because a lot of the independents that I've worked with in through my 20 years in my career it's been emotionally backed decisions. Right, it's been oh, there's a location you know a couple miles down the road that just popped up. Let's just go over there and open a restaurant and then we'll figure out what the concept is for the locations available. Right, they can't operate like that anymore. They've got to be well-informed and planned and farther ahead of it than they've ever been and more cautious. The risk is greater than it's ever been. So this data is just. It's so important and their leadership development is so important.

Matt Wampler: 38:32

It's funny that you go to the data, because that is the way that I see it as well. Unfortunately, it's the restaurant concepts that have mastered the cold analytics of the business that are winning. They don't necessarily have the best service, they don't necessarily have the best food, yet they're not the ones winning, and I sure hope that this new wave of technology can level that playing field.

Christin Marvin: 38:59

Yeah, me too, and I think it can. I think it can, I think it's again, I think it's a really cool opportunity. I think it's fun, it's innovative, it's different and the industry really needs that. So thank you so much for being here.

Matt Wampler: 39:15

Oh, thank you for having me.

Christin Marvin: 39:17

Absolutely All right. Everybody that's going to do it for us this week. Please be sure to share this podcast with any leaders you know in the restaurant industry, and visit my website, kristinmarvincom, for more leadership development resources. We'll see you next week. You, you, you, you, you you.