← Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore
Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore
1158: Etkin Tekin, Craig Sklar, & Rob LaTronica, Co-Owners of Haven Hot Chicken
01:47:30
was previously featured on the show for episode 1151 when Jason Sobocinski, President and Co-Owner of Haven Hot Chicken, was a guest! All three of our guests today are co-owners of Haven hot chicken today. Haven Hot chicken is a hot chicken concept...
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- [00:00]
A
Yeah, and it's something that's less prevalent now, but I would say for the first, probably two or three years of the business, there was a phrase we often used to say we're a small company that thinks like a big one. We really enjoyed being ahead of the curve and having systems, processes, documentation in place at a level far above the size of the company we were at because of our intentions to scale. I mean even thinking about Our first location was named 001 when there was only one unit. There's intent behind that.
- [00:39]
B
Welcome to restaurant unstoppable. For 10 years and over 1,000 episodes, I've been traveling the country chasing word of mouth leads and having in person only long form discussions with the industry's finest owners and operators. Our mission is to inspire, empower and transform the restaurant industry by bridging the gap between this generation's leaders and the next. Listen to today's guest and so many others and get one step closer to becoming unstoppable. This episode is brought to you by Means with me's. You can standardize your culinary IP in state in sync, giving the culinary team the ability to both create recipes and distribute them from the same platform. You can train your team quickly and maintain dish consistently by turning your recipes into interactive training material. And you can get laser accurate food costs because me's allows you to calculate the yield of ingredients with prep loss included. Create a free account by visiting getmes.com unstoppable that's G-E-T M E E Z.com forward/unstoppable and as a listener of Restaurant Unstoppable, you can get 25 recipes uploaded to your me's account for free. Sign up today and learn more at G E t m e ez.com forward/unstoppable. The new year is here. It's 2025 and restaurant systems Pro is extending their deal through February of 2025. Here's the deal. When you join Restaurant Assistance Pro through February of 2025, they will handle your 2024 books at no charge. Why are they doing this? Because they know how stressful and time consuming it is to get caught up on bookkeeping. Restaurant Systems Pro wants to show you the power of their all in one rest accounting system so you can experience the difference for yourself. Here's what Restaurant Systems Pro will take care of for you. Organization of all invoices and expenses AI scanning of products so you know the usage, reconciliation of your accounts, tracking inventory and labor costs and providing detailed P and L reports and the best part, you never have to deal with QuickBooks again. Ready to see how it works? Head to restaurant unstoppable.com RSP and be sure to mention this special offer. Let's make 2025 the year your restaurant thrives. P.S. this offer is only available through February of 2025. Don't miss your chance to start 2025 with stress free up to date books with excitement. Allow me to introduce to you today's guest co owners of Haven Hot Chicken, Eken Tekken, Craig Sklar and Rob Latronica. My gentlemen, are you feeling unstoppable today?
- [03:35]
A
Very unstoppable.
- [03:36]
C
Every day.
- [03:37]
B
You're also welcome to make fun of me or tell me you're not feeling unstoppable, but I'm psyched to be here. I spoke with Jason, your fourth partner. There's actually five of you now.
- [03:45]
A
Five in total.
- [03:46]
B
Yeah, yeah, I roll getting into partnerships. I love partnerships. I think it's the future of the industry. He was episode 1,100. Sorry. Yeah, 1,151. He told me, you know, I had to talk to you guys. I wanted to to talk to all of you. So we're making it happen. I highly recommend going and listening to that episode because it kind of leads into this one. So we're going to kind of pick off where we left off or pick up where we left off. But I would like to kind of dive deep into each of your stories today too to kind of figure out what was happening before Haven Hot Chicken, before we kind of dive into where you guys are today. Let's get that motivational inspirational ball rolling with a success quote or mantra. Who wants to take it?
- [04:27]
A
Yeah, I'm happy to jump on this one. So back from the very early days before we started any brick and mortar, we had a mantra that we want to be a good employer. This stems from lots of past experience working with other companies who had missions and values. And at some point in time, as companies grow, they may say things and not necessarily do them in the way that they say. And so when we make decisions about how to, how to bring team members onto the team, how to train them, what resources to provide them, what benefits to provide them, we always start with, are we being a good employer? What decision would a good employer make?
- [05:10]
C
Greg?
- [05:11]
B
Rob, you want to tag on to that or do you just want to support it?
- [05:15]
C
I mean, definitely want to support it. That is definitely been, you know, one of our initiatives and just ways of thinking from the beginning was making sure, you know, as good Employers, we're providing, you know, everything a team member needs, from their work experience to the benefits they get to take home with them. But, you know, I will say, you know, one of the things that has resounded with us since the beginning is quality.
- [05:35]
A
Yeah.
- [05:35]
C
You know, quality is something that is so key to everything we do every day, you know, from the experience the guest has to the food they eat, enjoy. You know, quality is critical to us.
- [05:44]
B
I love it. Rob, what do you got?
- [05:46]
D
Yeah, I think we talk about it a lot, how we manifest it, like, both at the store level and as leaders, and we call it the servant leader mentality. So it's like, always, you know, questioning first. Have I done everything that I need to. To support this person, given the education, the resources, the access?
- [06:03]
A
Yeah.
- [06:04]
B
Listening to you guys talk first, starting with you. For the record, from my left to my right, we have Ekin, and you're the CEO.
- [06:10]
A
That's right.
- [06:10]
B
And then to the right, we have Craig. You are the cio. Chief Information Officer.
- [06:15]
C
Yep.
- [06:16]
B
And your title is chief. Is it culinary or operation? Wait, you told me earlier. I forgot already.
- [06:23]
D
My title is right there. It's the Chief Growth Officer.
- [06:26]
B
Growth Officer. That's right. So Ekin, Craig, and Rob, those are their voices. And when I was listening to you talk, I couldn't help but think that, you know, I had Joe Pine on the show. He's the author the Service Economy and. Or, sorry, the Experience Economy. And his. His prediction is that we're going into the transformation economy. And I wrote to him because I found out his. His book was about to drop, and I was like, I would love to get you back on the show. He's like, what does the restaurant industry have to do with the transformation economy? I was like, are you kidding me? Like, we literally are transforming the future of employers, you know, like, and we touch. We take people at their youngest, and they can choose to stay with us, but they're the. For the most part, the first impression for so many people when they come into the workforce. And I love. I just want to, like, recognize you guys for being willing to raise the bar on your abilities to be employers. That's awesome stuff.
- [07:13]
A
Yeah, we talk all the time, you know, whether it's with investors or. Or in interviews. We talk a lot about, you know, people ask us, what's your greatest strength as an organization? We say people, and then people will ask us, what's our. What's your biggest challenge as a company? It's also people. And so investing in your teams, investing in the quality of the environment that they operate in, the training that they receive, the benefits that they get, that leads to lower, quick quit rates. It leads to longer employee retention. Through all of the growth and things that we can talk about for us as an organization, I think one of the things that I get most proud about is we have about 20 people in the organization that have gone from hourly team member into salaried management roles. The GM of this location that we're sitting in Right now, this is 003 in Norwalk, Connecticut, by the way, is Maddie Chelgren. She's been with us for over three years. She started as an hourly team member, worked her way up to trainer shift lead assistant general manager. She's the general manager of the store.
- [08:20]
B
I love that. Great opportunity for people. That's what it's all about. So speaking of creating opportunity for people, I think your name again, was the first name that came up in my interview with Jason. So you actually worked with Jason back in the day. You were a Yale graduate. You found yourself work. Was it in Haven? New Haven?
- [08:37]
A
Yeah.
- [08:38]
B
Yeah. So let's kind of start there. Like, what were you doing? Like, how. Like, when did you know, like, you wanted to do this for the rest of your life?
- [08:44]
A
Yeah. So, yeah, when I was an undergrad at Yale, between my junior and senior year, I actually started my first restaurant. Me and a friend, we walked into an existing restaurant with a business plan and convinced the owner.
- [08:55]
B
How old were you?
- [08:57]
A
I was 21. And me and my buddy, we made a business plan and we convinced an owner of an existing operating restaurant to close his business down and partner with us to launch our concept. So opened that right before my senior year, started, operated at my. My senior year and a bit after, we opened a second location and a food truck. And then I eventually exited that project when I was around 23. And I loved the space. I love restaurants. And so I wanted to learn from somebody. I wanted to hone my craft and get better at what I did. I was still green. Right. I was 23 years old. And so Jason had a listing for a floor manager. And I sat down, interviewed with him. I told him I was going to make his restaurant better. I was going to make it more profitable, grow his revenues and that by doing that and showing him that one day, I'd like to partner with him on a business one day. And so I worked with him for about eight months. Then we kind of. We kept in touch. We were friends, kind of just, you know, that kept in touch over the years. And then in 2019. I gave him a call, and the rest is history.
- [10:06]
B
Well, did you do all those things for him? Were you able to move the needle when he came on board?
- [10:10]
A
I was actually, yeah. So I figured out how to retool his reservation system to increase the number of covers that we were able to take every night. It was an incredibly popular restaurant. It's now closed. But Casey's Fromagerie and Bistro was absolutely phenomenal. It was a staple in New Haven. Got a very good. From the New York Times. And so we didn't have a demand problem. We had an availability issue. Right. And so. And so we were able to increase the number of covers on a nightly basis. And then from there, I was also able to work on his margin profiles across his food and beverage menus in order to increase profitability. I overhauled his beer program because I had a bit of a beer background. And, yes, I think I left a good impression.
- [10:56]
B
So one more question. This person that you approached to kind of leave his current partnership and join you as a partner.
- [11:03]
C
Yeah.
- [11:03]
B
What did you say to convince them?
- [11:06]
A
So he was running kind of a, you know, he was running a steamed burger restaurant, which has some following here in Connecticut.
- [11:15]
B
Original thing.
- [11:16]
A
Yeah. There's a popular one, I think it's in Wallingford or Meriden, called Ted's. Okay. Ted's Famous Steamed Burgers. And so he had tried to replicate that model in New Haven, and it seemed like it was going all right. But we had kind of.
- [11:29]
B
This is.
- [11:29]
A
Back in 2011, we were kind of watching Sweet Green grow down in D.C. we were watching Chopped grow in New York City. And we're like, this whole custom salads and wraps thing has legs. And so we developed our own concept. It's called the Little Salad Shop. Okay. And so, yeah, we fleshed out a business plan, created some branding, and we pitched him, and he bought it.
- [11:51]
B
That's cool. And when that happened with that.
- [11:54]
A
So they're still around today. They still have two operating locations in New Haven. They rebranded to New Haven Salad Shop. Okay. But, yeah, there's one. There's. There's two locations in downtown New Haven.
- [12:04]
B
I mean, I'm so tempted to go deeper into your story, but I also want to pay homage to the two other backstories. Typically, when I do the one on one, I'm able to really go deep and, like, flesh it out. But tell us a little bit more about what you're doing, Craig, before you guys.
- [12:20]
C
Yeah. So, I mean, before we got into Haven, I probably have the least Restaurant experience out of the three of us. I had for a long time worked in beer sales and craft beer in New York City, sort of handling, you know, specialty accounts across the city for a small craft beer distributor. And, you know, my first foray into restaurants on the ownership side was a small beer bar in New Haven on a kind of a small, you know, side street called the Beer Collective. And we specialized in high end craft beer and great, you know, sort of American pub type food. And, you know, we had about a three year run there. And that was definitely where I saw my passion for the hospitality industry just, you know, blossom. Yeah, you know, at that point I hadn't really had a lot of experience in serving people and just seeing the reaction when they drank something really delicious or ate some of the food that came out of the kitchen. Hint, hint. My executive chef is sitting on my left. But yeah, it was, you know, it was a really wonderful transformation for myself and really affirming that this is what I want to be doing and really made me feel confident about my leaving the beer industry to do something, you know, very different.
- [13:28]
B
And when did you leave the beer industry? What year was that?
- [13:30]
C
So that was 2016.
- [13:31]
B
Okay.
- [13:32]
C
Yeah, 2017. Yeah, I moved back to Connecticut. You know, I was originally from here, grew up in Guilford, just a Stone's fellow from New Haven.
- [13:40]
B
Got it.
- [13:41]
C
And, you know, we had a, a great culture, a really great vibe at the bar. It's actually, you know, where I met Ekin and subsequently Jason hit me with.
- [13:51]
B
The name of that bar one more time. Yeah, that's where both you and Robert were working.
- [13:54]
C
Yeah, we worked there together. Is the Beer Collective.
- [13:56]
B
Beer Collective, yeah.
- [13:58]
C
Yeah.
- [13:59]
B
So you said for you, what it was that like, it was the recognition from people, the, the, a job well done, I think, I think seeing smiling faces in this industry, there's something that is like burned into our DNA to be seen and to be appreciated. And I think, I mean, continue along that, that train of thought.
- [14:17]
C
Yeah, absolutely. It was, you know, it was watching those reactions bringing joy, you know, to people, really, and watching them just have great experiences, great moments with loved ones or family or friends in your restaurant, enjoying the food and the, you know, the curated beer list that we put together. And it was something that, you know, definitely kind of came along with us to Haven during the pop ups before we ever had a physical location, you know, we, we hosted pop ups.
- [14:40]
B
What was your, your title at this, this place? Was it head brewer or were you.
- [14:44]
C
I was the owner. We didn't actually, you're the owner. Yeah, well, we didn't actually brew any beer on site.
- [14:49]
A
We got it.
- [14:49]
C
We were big on local before. Local was like standard at every beer bar. So we, you know, when myself and my business partner first came back to Connecticut, we spent about a month going to almost every brewery in the state, trying all their beers, talking to the people, seeing what was driving them and what they were passionate about before we really started to hand select the brewers we wanted to work with.
- [15:10]
B
Got it. And go ahead, Rob. So you two are working together? Craig and Rob?
- [15:14]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [15:15]
B
So how did you get into this situation, find yourself where you are today?
- [15:19]
D
So I've. I've worked in the restaurant industry my entire life. So when I was, I don't know, maybe 14 or 15, my dad got me a bike and he was like, you can go, like, do a job now. And I biked down to this, like, local catering place and I walk in and I told the chef that I was like, oh, I got really good knife skills. And I was like 4ft tall. And he made me dice an onion, cook a medium burger, and then cook a medium egg. And he was like, come back on Saturday.
- [15:49]
B
Nice.
- [15:50]
D
That was kind of where it all started. So it was like perennially my second, kind of like my second job, you know.
- [15:54]
B
And how far back are we going now?
- [15:57]
D
20, 22 years at this point? Yeah, it would be. And then I. So I started my own catering company in college and I was making more money in the three months during the summer than I did working a job during all of the rest of the year part time, you know, and so that kind of was. It was really taken off and my family was starting. Like, my uncle was starting a restaurant and he asked me, he's like, you're really killing it with the catering. Do you want to come, you know, run the restaurant? And we, we started Wheelers. It was a eatery, like a full service restaurant in Woodbridge, Connecticut. And that was in 2013.
- [16:34]
B
Okay, so how did the two of you, Craig and Rob, come together? Like, how did this, how did you guys connect?
- [16:42]
C
Yeah, so this is actually a pretty funny story. You know, when my business partner at the time and myself started the process bar, you know, we were very green to the industry and, you know, we relied on our Cisco rep for a lot of connections. You know, they were great, super accommodating, introduced us to, you know, other vendors and other people. You know, we ran into a bit of a sticky situation where the executive chef we did have, you know, left a week or two before we were set to have our grand open. And, you know, talking about it with our Cisco rep, he's like, oh, I got the guys for you.
- [17:12]
B
Nice.
- [17:13]
C
I was like, I got the guy.
- [17:13]
B
So you're. This is 12 years ago, right?
- [17:15]
C
2013.
- [17:16]
B
12 years ago.
- [17:18]
C
So it's actually about two.
- [17:19]
D
Yeah. So we, I ran that restaurant for, for four and a half years or so.
- [17:25]
B
Okay.
- [17:25]
D
And I was actually looking for a new job, and I just taken another job at a place in Connecticut. And our mutual Cisco rep called me and was like, you got to talk to these guys. I was like, I literally just took this job. I can't quit it.
- [17:37]
B
And he was like, was it about this opportunity that was worth pulling you off of something you just started?
- [17:41]
D
Honestly, actually, it was meeting Craig in the interview. Me and Craig, like, really hit it off in the interview. He asked me to come back and, like, do a cook for him. I cooked a bunch of dishes for him. I think we really had a good working vibe and a good rapport. And, you know, especially as a chef, having your front of house manager, your owner, really understand what you're doing in the kitchen is pivotal to a good working relationship.
- [18:05]
B
What was it you said? Good vibe, good rapport. But speaking specifically, what drew you to Craig? I know, it's awkward. He's sitting right next to.
- [18:13]
D
Yeah, I, I, I mean, I don't know. He just, he, he was a straight communicator. I'm very straightforward. And Craig's kind of the same way. Like, he doesn't beat around the bush. And so, yeah, I mean, it just like, we kind of hit it off immediately. He asked me to come back, I think, like three days later and do their soft opening. And me and my sous chef at the time, we did, and that was, the rest was history.
- [18:35]
B
So do you remember what he was.
- [18:37]
C
Communicating to you at that time?
- [18:41]
D
Honestly, no. I was actually kind of nervous. It was, it was in the job interview.
- [18:44]
B
How old were you? I'm curious.
- [18:46]
D
So probably 28.
- [18:48]
B
28. What was different about this that made you, that made it so nervous? I mean, you already were running a restaurant for four years.
- [18:55]
D
I don't know. I mean, it was just one of those things. Like, it was more just getting to know a new person, more, more the actual social interaction than anything else.
- [19:03]
B
Were you worried about leaving a job? Just as, you know, starting a small industry? Right.
- [19:08]
D
Not. I don't want, I would never speak ill of anyone, but at the time, the owners of that restaurant were not the most scrupulous people. So actually, I didn't have any qualms.
- [19:16]
B
Got it. I'm pretty sure we didn't say the name of the restaurant. This episode is brought to you by me's. Running the Back of House brings a whole suite of challenges, like distributing intellectual property from your chef's brain to your Back of House team across all of your locations. Once that information gets distributed, you still have to train your backup house to ensure the recipes are being executed accurately and consistently. Once everybody is trained, you still have to nail down profit calculations, which can be a nightmare when your team doesn't fully understand theoretical food costs, factoring in yields and unit conversions. Then once all this is done, you still have to push the information across all of your locations in real time, factoring in the prices that are constantly changing. Are you kidding me? That's where me's comes in with me. You can standardize your culinary intellectual property and stay in sync as a team. You can train your team quickly and maintain dish consistency by turning your recipes into interactive training material. And you can get laser accurate food costs because ME allows you to calculate the yields of your ingredients with prep loss included. Create a free account by visiting getme.comunstoppable that's G E T M E E Z.com Unstoppable and as a listener of Restaurant Unstoppable, you can 25 recipes uploaded to your M account for free. Sign up today and learn more at gme.com forward/unstoppable. And Ekan, at this, at this time, do you know who these two characters are?
- [20:49]
A
Yeah. So we had very briefly met.
- [20:51]
B
This is 2016.
- [20:52]
A
Yeah, 2016. We had, we had actually briefly met. At least I'd met Craig and his business partner at, at several beer related events in the state. I was actually hosting an event at another restaurant and the two of them showed up to it. And so I believe one of the first soft open events that the bar actually had was an event that I organized. It was like at my friend's birthday party and I think it was a couple of weeks before the Beer Collective even opened. So from the very beginning of Beer Collective, I had gotten to know Craig and then it was about 150 yards from where I lived at the time. So it was quite convenient for me to make that my local hang. And I would often come in and hang out with Craig and Rob and the crew.
- [21:40]
B
Got it. And forgive me, I'm following three storylines right now. But by 2016, where were you again?
- [21:45]
A
So 2016, I had just started at AB InBev and a division called ZX Ventures. And so that was kind of their corporate venture capital. Disruptive growth, new ventures, new product development.
- [21:56]
B
What did you go to school for?
- [21:58]
A
Anthropology.
- [21:59]
B
Okay. I love anthropology.
- [22:01]
A
Yeah.
- [22:02]
B
Oh, man.
- [22:02]
A
Yeah, the, the clo. The clothes there are great.
- [22:05]
B
Just.
- [22:05]
C
Right.
- [22:07]
B
And you and Jason have that in common?
- [22:09]
A
Yeah. Right.
- [22:09]
B
Wasn't that big?
- [22:11]
A
Yeah. So, yeah, he studied gastronomy within, like in a, like in an anthropo anthropological lens.
- [22:16]
B
I think the, the, the answer to our future is in our past. I really like reverse engineering the human factors.
- [22:23]
A
Sure.
- [22:24]
B
Why we are how we are the way we are. We are like Moore's Law. Right. The world is technologies improving, expanding exponentially.
- [22:32]
A
Yeah.
- [22:33]
B
I think information is technology. And we're learning so much about the human. The, the anatomy, the brain, the psychology, the biology. And the more we unveil, like, the more we reveal in that world, the more we're just going to start to figure out and just be like, oh, why don't we just reverse engineer business to make people happy?
- [22:49]
A
Yeah. And I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of fundamentals that you can draw back to that, that I think we've stuck to from the beginning in our business where we're, we're well past information upload, overload, rather, and you know, the, the difficulty of keeping somebody's attention for any amount of time, whether it's, you know, in person or digitally, it's insane these days. And so for us, we can draw back to simple fundamentals that are evergreen really, within the industry. Provide a great product, a fantastic guest experience in a clean environment. If you can do that successfully and consistently over time, people will come back.
- [23:36]
B
I love that. So you're working for Bevintel? Not Bevintel.
- [23:40]
A
A baby and Ezra Bush.
- [23:43]
B
Yeah.
- [23:44]
A
Budweiser.
- [23:45]
B
Easier pick any of us in a venture capitalist company.
- [23:49]
A
Yeah. So it was a. We did corporate venture capital within that group. So, you know, think acquiring smaller beer brands, mostly international.
- [23:58]
B
What were you grooming yourself for? Like, why. Like, it seems like you were working in the restaurant industry. You loved it.
- [24:03]
A
Yeah.
- [24:05]
B
With your anthropology background.
- [24:07]
A
I love that.
- [24:08]
B
And then from there you went in corporate.
- [24:11]
A
Yeah.
- [24:12]
B
But then you found yourself trying to go back to the food and beverage. I mean, you're always in food and beverage, right? Yeah.
- [24:18]
A
Well, isn't this like the normal super linear path that everyone takes to study anthropology and then work in restaurants and then, you know, go into the corporate world? I think it's pretty fairly normal. I'm kidding.
- [24:29]
B
Yeah.
- [24:30]
A
So Right before I started at AB InBev, I also, I co founded another startup which you might be familiar with, called Byte.
- [24:37]
B
Okay.
- [24:38]
A
They're a kiosk solution. Another group of great folks in the industry, a Yale School of Management grad, I was introduced to and I ended up co founding Byte. And I did that for about a year before joining AB InBev. I realized that I had the entrepreneurial spirit and I had the passion, I had the ambition, I had the drive, creative, you know, I'll stop with superlatives of myself, but I lacked the professional acumen to scale properly and to run a business the right way. And so what AB InBev, one of the primary reasons I went there was I needed to cut my tail. I needed to have a safer environment, one where I was given more freedom to work on big, impactful projects, but insulated in working for somebody else. And so one of the things that was great about that company was my last major project there was to take a white label case study for an internal business. Basically, I got to be a founder of a business inside of a business. And yeah, I was given the space and the support to grow that business from $0 in revenue to $40 million in revenue, a team of just me, to 18 people in about three years. And that's a painful process. Right. You have to, you have to run the whole business. You have to understand all of the mechanics of how information is shared, what becomes important, what metrics to track what, what, what, how you organize yourself and your work. And so the team often teases me as the, like, I'm the corporate guy on the team.
- [26:19]
B
Yeah, well, that's, that's exactly how Jason described it.
- [26:22]
A
Yeah. And, and, and that's, I, I embrace that. I, I, I'm proud to be the corporate guy.
- [26:26]
B
I, I always encourage people who are, who have gone and worked for independence to take a year or two or even, you know, five years, leading like a, a franchise or something as a general manager or area manager and going to get that corporate experience and in bringing that to that experience, to whatever vision you have for yourself, there's power there.
- [26:47]
A
Yeah. And I think again, it's something that I was pretty transparent about with Rob and Craig and Jason. As we were kind of in fledgling, kind of, you know, testing stages to our first brick and mortar. And as we were growing, I kind of, I had a, you know, a suite of tools and systems and processes that I had available to me. And for me it was about understanding when the timing was right to incorporate certain Systems and processes within the business. Because you don't want to over encumber a small. A small business. Right. You want to keep things streamlined and efficient. But then you watch that break over time. Right. As you scale, as the work begins, becomes more complex. There are more people involved, there are more locations.
- [27:31]
B
Yeah. The more layers between you and the person that created the system, the more further removed you get from it. It's harder to keep your thumb on it.
- [27:37]
A
Exactly.
- [27:39]
B
Yeah. And I think the other important thing too, when you're first getting started, I think people like, they, they do all this research. Oh, like I need culture, I need systems. And like everything needs a checklist. Everything needs pro. That thing is going to change in the first two years. Whatever you think it is, you're like, oh, it's going to go exactly like this is where the salt is going to go. No, like let things settle and then once things are like groovy and like in their place, like, and you can't figure out a better way to do it, then slowly. I mean, you just don't be so rigid out of the gates. I guess what I'm trying to say.
- [28:11]
A
Yeah. And I think mantras that we hold internally as well, like, we are definitely like Kaizen, like continuously improvement mindset. We're also big fans of pdca. Plan do check, adjust. Right. Like you we. You have to have a system that loops back and verifies decisions so that you can iterate and continue to make things better.
- [28:36]
B
Who coined the pda?
- [28:37]
A
Pdta?
- [28:38]
B
Pdt? Ptda?
- [28:41]
A
Pdca?
- [28:42]
B
Papa Delta Charlie Alpha.
- [28:44]
A
That's correct. I'm actually not sure who specifically coined pdca. I think it's part of it has a lot to do with like Lean manufacturing kind of Toyota methodology. So I'll mention them again later, but some of our early partners in the business was Brian and Steve from Service Physics. And they took us basically through a crash course of Lean manufacturing in order to help us design our first location.
- [29:12]
B
I love that Eric. Do they force you to read Eric Reese or is it. I think it's something Ryan. Eric Reese, maybe the Lean Startup.
- [29:19]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [29:19]
B
Was that one of the. Was that on the do list?
- [29:21]
A
Yeah.
- [29:22]
B
Lots of valuable stuff there.
- [29:23]
A
Yeah.
- [29:23]
B
Is Eric Reese I.
- [29:25]
A
That sounds right.
- [29:26]
B
I think so.
- [29:27]
A
Yeah.
- [29:27]
B
Okay. So haven't forgot about you, Craig and Rob. So who. Who approached who?
- [29:36]
A
I got to let them take. Take that. Yeah, it wasn't me.
- [29:38]
C
That's gonna be us. So this was again, you know, 20, you know, 18 probably at this point. Me and Rob had, you Know, been working together for a few years. I think at that point we were both looking at sort of food driven concepts. We'd work in bars for a while. The bar hours, you know, late nights were kind of grinding on us, so we were looking to sort of shift. So, you know, that's where we really fell in love with Nashville. Hot Chicken. You know, Rob I can let him talk to in a bit. Took a trip, brought it back to us. You know, created this experience with Hot Chicken that was mind blowing. So we knew we wanted to do something with this. Edkin had been, you know, like, he had spoke to, you know, a regular in the bar. He came in, he would hang out with us, he would, you know, hang out after hours. He was very friendly with us, the whole staff. You know, it was a great relationship. And, you know, from there, when we started to think about what we were trying to do, what we wanted to accomplish with this more food driven concept, the idea of multiples was there then. We wanted multiple locations. We wanted to grow a business. So we looked at someone who had experience growing a business in the corporate environment, taking a startup.
- [30:50]
A
Both.
- [30:50]
C
He had done it in the restaurant space with the salad shop and now working with ZX Ventures over at ab. You know, it was, you know, we look back at the, the offer letter that we sent to Ekin now and it's, it's very funny. You know, we were very green, very young at the time when you look back at it, and just the language and the way we, you know, spoke about the business and his contribution was, it was funny. But, you know, ultimately game changing for, for everything we did from there on.
- [31:16]
B
Now, when Ekan was sitting at the bar, was there language around? Like, you know, were you bringing him into the fold? Were you sharing the vision? Was, were you, were you, were you like. Because you're all entrepreneurs, right?
- [31:26]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [31:27]
B
So like, was there like that geek out, entrepreneurial thing happening?
- [31:32]
C
Yeah, you know, we definitely spoke a lot about the business. I would say, you know, we geeked out a lot on flavor profiles and testing and the rigor that we put into, you know, coming up with the recipes and just, you know, I mean, I can let Spot Rob speak a little bit more to some of the rigor and stuff we put into the food.
- [31:48]
D
Yeah, I. So if I remember correctly, Ekin was. While we didn't necessarily bring him in initially on like, hey, we were. This is the business plan that we're, we're trying to put together. I think he was there for even the earliest tests. Like, when I got back from my initial Nashville trip, I had had it because, you know, it's like hot chicken is to Nashville the way pizza is to New Haven. Right. Like, you're there, you got to try it. You got to go to, you know, insert restaurant.
- [32:13]
B
Right.
- [32:14]
D
You know, go to Princess. Go to.
- [32:16]
B
Yeah, I mean, I, I've been to Princes. They weren't open when I went. But I have had Hattie B's on the show.
- [32:21]
D
Yeah, I, I, My favorite, honestly, is a pepper fire, if you can actually go there. This one's really good. And 400 degrees, she's great. But, yeah, so, like, I brought it back and I started making test batches of it, and the first ones were, if I'm being honest, really not great. You know, they had thickened sauces that were liquid based. It just wasn't done. Right. Right. And thank Edkin for his candor. I think the first one I ever had, he, he called it, he was like, is there like, togarashi in this or something? And he was right. And so we, you know, but having that honest that, that, you know, clear mirror to, like, you know, drive that innovation is super important. And it led us through hundreds of iterations of different product testing to what we have today.
- [33:11]
B
And I love hearing stories like this, these stories of just like, you know, whether it be, you know, business owner. Were you brought in as a partner at the. No. So the business owner, employee or employee. Employee working for somebody else. And these, like, you know, late night conversations about the dream, the vision. Oh, like, if we were owning. This is how you do it. Or, oh, like, this is a, like, let's create something else new together. And like, those, as you're having these conversations, were you guys writing these things down? Like, the vision, were you working on the business plan?
- [33:41]
D
I mean, like, I remember initially chatting with Craig about that stuff. And, like, Craig said we were green, you know, and I remember sitting there having that conversation being like, you know, who we got to, you know, we got to call.
- [33:55]
C
Right.
- [33:55]
D
And it was that.
- [33:57]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, but I think just this, when a vision is a shared vision and it's being birthed together, you know, two people's brainchild. Right. When it's not just one person who's like, here's where we're going. And, like, they never really communicate where we're going. But when you say, when your brains come together to pick a, like a collective destination, there's so much like, like, staying power in that.
- [34:21]
A
Yeah. One of the first exercises. So we, you Know when I agree to come on board again with the premise of not just opening a restaurant, but building a brand and a company and a multi unit concept, we started diving into brand development and we started doing sacrificial prototyping around kind of different brand identities and like visual brand basics and things like that. But we essentially started trying to create Personas and profiles of, you know, it's not just about Nashville hot chicken, but what's your approach, what's your thesis behind how the brand is going to behave, how is it going to talk? And. And so what we didn't realize at the time was as we created all these kind of sacrificial prototypes of kind of like what the brand behavior was and what the brand story would look like, we kind of, in each of the prototypes, we kind of manifest, manifested different versions. Like, there was one concept that was about being meticulous and rigorous and like NASA level precision on the recipes and the consistency. There was another one that was really like kind of more like Southern comfort style and really like making, calling about calling into like a comfortable place to be. There was one that was much more brash and bold. Right. There was like the confidence that, you know, you'll see on our walls. We make the best hot chicken you've ever had. Yeah.
- [35:45]
B
Why wasn't Ekin, Rob and Craig hot chicken?
- [35:50]
A
So that does roll off the tongue. But yeah, we decided to go in a direction where, you know, ultimately we actually did a poll of both folks we knew and then we also sourced a bunch of folks that we didn't know and we started kind of weighting some different brands that we had developed. And so we got a lot of external feedback. And Haven, ultimately we're from New Haven, so it's cool to give homage to our hometown. But then we also started developing the brand further and our mission and our values. And one of our values is inclusive and Haven is also a safe place for people to gather. Right. And we want to be that place for people, both for our teams and for our guests, so that they have a. A comfortable, safe, fun place to be.
- [36:46]
B
Yeah, I love that. And I couldn't help but think while listening to you too, is that like, you got to be really careful about creating a brand around a person or like individuals like, you wanted to have it. Like to your point, when you were visioning this, you said you want to skip scale it. You want it to be something that had legs and can grow. So you want to be careful not to have it be centered around individual or something. But why, I'm curious, why didn't you guys decide to go with the like more like rigid and like, like there was one that was like pinpoint accuracy or something that you're saying.
- [37:17]
A
Yeah, I think it, I, I think we call. It was like the sacrificial name for. It was like chicken craft and. Yeah. It had like beakers and like molecules and you know, kind of capsizing like with like the, you know, the, the molecular structure and stuff. It just didn't feel like it fully encompassed like what, what and who we.
- [37:38]
B
Were never heard of a brand like that though, so it's just interesting.
- [37:41]
A
But.
- [37:41]
B
Did you want to say something, Craig?
- [37:42]
C
No. Yeah, I mean sort of akin's point. It. Yeah, it didn't fit everything we were doing. Right. It's a little kind of one dimensional, a little flat and it's almost, you know, kind of got rolled into what we're doing with Haven as it bigger and that NASA level precision is important to us still today. But it, it wasn't like the singular focus.
- [38:00]
B
It could be a core value. It doesn't have to be the mission.
- [38:03]
C
Exactly.
- [38:03]
A
Yep.
- [38:04]
B
Yeah, I love that. Did you want to add on?
- [38:06]
D
Well, I mean as a group of multiple people, you know, especially once Jason came on board, you know, there are multiple personalities in that room. It's not just one person's core values, it's everybody's core values. And so how do you, how do you find something that is a big enough umbrella, right. That everybody's under it? You know, go ahead.
- [38:24]
A
And I think to that point we were also warned very early on that starting a company with four co founders and then eventually Tom coming on was not a good idea. Getting, you know, four, four entrepreneurs to work together, cohesive.
- [38:39]
B
Well, that was the where I wanted to go next because like I believe full heartedly in part partnerships. I think that the industry is getting more competitive than ever and more complex than ever. It's no more. You can open a restaurant and people will just flood through the doors. Like there is more restaurants per capita than ever before and only the cream rise to the top. And if you, unless you are a freak of nature with which the majority of us are not, like you need to divide and conquer, like, and I see that clearly happening, happening, you know, so, so it sounds like, you know, Rob and Craig, you see that you need the executive. You're missing that executive. How to like, from that, like, I don't know how to scale something. Right. You know, you want to scale. So you're like, who do we know who would be good at this. You approach Ekin and what did that conversation look like?
- [39:32]
C
Yeah, I mean, the conversation was, you know, probably more casual than any conversations we have these days.
- [39:39]
B
Well, I think you kind of started to tell us that before, so you kind of got like, why you approached him and you felt like it was, you were very naive and young and you thought you had it together. But from your perspective, and I'm curious, you said yes, so something must have went right.
- [39:51]
A
Yeah, I did. I, I. One of the conditions was that I wasn't going to quit my job right away, you know, so that I was, I was going to continue working in the corporate world and work on this on the side. And then, yeah, confirming with both Rob and Craig that this was also. I wasn't interested in opening one location of a restaurant. And so validating with these guys that again, building an actual brand with multiple units was the goal. And I found that compelling. Again, at this point, I had spent probably three and a half, four years in the corporate world and I had learned a of ton ton, and I was getting that itch again. I was looking to start something new. And I fully agree with you. Partnerships are fantastic. I think it's really important to land. You know, I think Craig and Rob started talking about it, but we created a mission and values as a way to govern ourselves as well. Right. Like, there is no such thing as Ekin's way. It's the Haven way. There's no such thing as, you know, Craig or Rob's way. It's what is the Haven way of doing things. And so it actually disambiguated most of the decision making that we had to make within the organization because we all aligned on. These are the core values by which we do our work.
- [41:07]
B
Right. And it's kind of like creating like, like when you start a business, you create an llc, an entity, right? And then you give that entity character and values and, you know, like, how would this entity do it? You know, and when you can come together and build that thing together and say, do we all agree on this sign off here? Then later on down the road, like, hey, you can change things. If there's a better way to do something, by all means, like, evolve. But at least you start somewhere and like, changes don't happen unless everybody agrees. So you, you choose to kind of start with pop ups. Did you have the break? Like, I know you went to a brand specialist. Did that happen before the first pop up?
- [41:48]
A
So, so actually in the earliest days, we actually, I Had a friend that was a graphic designer, and he made our sacrificial prototypes and our eventual logo for free. And so didn't have to have a.
- [42:04]
B
Friend who's a lawyer by any chance.
- [42:07]
A
That came later, but. But by doing that, we were able to do that in a very streamlined way. We landed on branding that we really loved. Before we announced our brand to the public, we had our full logo set and visual brand identities.
- [42:21]
B
I think that's something. I mean, it's one of those things I think people just don't put a lot of time and effort into. But it sounds like that was really important to you.
- [42:28]
A
Yeah, and it's something that's less prevalent now. But I would say for the first, probably two or three years of the business, there was a phrase we often used to say, we're a small company that thinks like a big one. We really enjoyed being ahead of the curve and having systems, processes, documentation in place at a level far above the size of the company we were at because of our intentions to scale. I mean, even thinking about our first location was named 001 when there was only one unit. I love that there's intent behind that.
- [43:02]
B
Yeah, I love that. 2016 is when you guys were having this conversation.
- [43:07]
A
When was 2019?
- [43:09]
B
2019. I thought, oh, wait, so you're still in dreaming. But it was. That was the first conversation.
- [43:13]
A
Yeah.
- [43:14]
B
Didn't Jason come on in 2018.
- [43:16]
A
2019.
- [43:17]
B
Oh, why did I. I don't have it.
- [43:19]
A
We might have. We might have my brain. We might have the year off.
- [43:21]
B
Okay, got it.
- [43:22]
A
So Jason's also dyslexic, so me too.
- [43:25]
B
He's a good company. Yeah. So, okay, 2019. How much time elapses from. From when the three of you are like, okay, we're missing a leg.
- [43:37]
A
It's probably three or four months.
- [43:39]
C
Yeah, a couple months. I'm like, it wasn't that much time. We sort of, you know, we looked around the room and we knew there was something missing.
- [43:45]
B
Were you doing pop ups at this time, or is this still before pop ups?
- [43:48]
C
No, I think this was still just sort of the deep diving in the brand, getting that identity sort of locked in, like Aitken says, developing some of those sacrificial prototypes and getting to Haven. Ultimately, I think that was sort of happening. Parallel path to a lot of testing on the food recipes and things we were doing at the bar. Sort of using that as our test kitchen. Early days. And then, yeah, Jason came on just a few months after when Ekin came on, and a Lot of things change for us.
- [44:18]
B
So it was both you and Ekin that approached Jason right the first time.
- [44:24]
C
Initially, it was Ekin that approached Jason. He had the existing relationship with him. And, you know, when we knew we wanted to bring someone with that, you know, that little extra end of the.
- [44:31]
B
Team, he said, it wasn't until you knew, he knew that you had robbed that you agreed.
- [44:36]
C
Yeah.
- [44:38]
D
So we brought him to the. We brought him to the bar and I made him the full menu.
- [44:42]
C
Yes.
- [44:44]
D
And we presented him like, priced, like menu pricing, the actual menu with pricing on it, you know, what the costing was for all the items, the actual dinner. And then he sat there, ate everything, looked everything over, and was like. I meant, yeah, yeah.
- [45:00]
B
How much has the product changed since that day?
- [45:03]
D
I mean, from the actual core offering? Like, the chicken is literally. But at that point, we had determined the process. There were a couple of, like, things that we've improved. Like, from an equipment standpoint, you're also kosher now.
- [45:15]
B
And that happened during a pop up experience or halal.
- [45:18]
D
Yeah. So that did, that did evolve from the, the pop ups. Our first pop up was actually at one of Jason's other restaurants. After that dinner, he. We tested the first pop up there.
- [45:29]
B
So why Jason? What was missing with the three of you that you needed? Jason?
- [45:33]
D
I mean, similar to Etkin. I mean, I've worked in the Connecticut restaurant industry my whole life, and I'd known about Jason for six, eight, ten years before I met him. You know, and when I moved to New Haven 2012, 2011, I was like, I want to go work for that guy.
- [45:49]
A
Yeah.
- [45:50]
D
And I actually never ended up crossing paths with him until.
- [45:53]
B
What was the reputation that made you want to go work for him?
- [45:56]
D
Jason's not necessarily the easiest person to work with all the time, but he has extremely high speed standards, and he tells you exactly what he thinks, and then he'll help you get there and solve it, too.
- [46:09]
B
What's the difficult part about working with him?
- [46:11]
D
He is very, like, he's a. What's the term? A diva. A little bit, but in a good, in. In the best way possible.
- [46:19]
B
I, I like, I don't know Jason. I was able to sit with him for an hour, and I feel like if he was at the table, he'd be laughing right now.
- [46:25]
D
So I feel like, oh, yeah. No, and I mean it in the most complimentary way. Absolutely possible. You know, Jason is always pushing you to do better, to be better, to try harder, to think it over again. Is this good enough? You know, high standards Yeah, I love that.
- [46:39]
A
And not just high standards, but relentless and obsessive about it. Right. And it's, it's rare to see somebody so. So dialed into like brand and brand reputation and brand building. And so again, I worked for him in 2013 or maybe 2014, whatever it was. At that point he had a couple of businesses and I watched him kind of double that while, you know, in the 18 months, two years after working for him. And I just watched him over and over again in similar or adjacent spaces, just create compelling brands.
- [47:18]
B
Yeah. And how many, how many restaurants did he own when you approached him?
- [47:24]
A
So I think when I, When I approached him in. When I first worked for him or when I approached him to start this.
- [47:30]
B
When you approached him to start this.
- [47:32]
A
Yeah. So I think at that time he, he was the owner of Omo Ordinary Blackhawk Brewery, the crispy melty cheese truck, mystic cheese company, Continuum to sell stilling. Yeah. And that's why he. I listened to his podcast also, but he, like, when we initially asked him to join the team, he said no. Yeah, he had enough on his plate. And so, you know, we kind of convinced him first as like an advisor. We got our foot in the door and, you know, given, you know, give an inch, we took a mile and now we have, now we have Jason full time. So.
- [48:10]
B
I mean, when did the conversation approach, partnership agreements come into the fold?
- [48:15]
A
Pretty early on. As we were doing the pop ups around the city, we were still kind of validating whether or not we were going to jump in and kind of go full force into this. And so relatively early on, we started discussing operating agreement and we were, again, I think we acknowledged the fact that there were four of us and that we needed to have some hard conversations about, you know, what would happen if X, Y and Z. And so we were able to hammer that over the course of a couple of months to something that I think is really robust and still is in place today.
- [48:49]
B
All the awkward conversations that you don't want to have, have those conversations and have a lawyer there.
- [48:55]
A
It's so relieving to just put it out there to speak. To speak the things and, you know, take the elephant out of the room and just, hey, what happens if, you know, what happens if I'm not fulfilling my end of the bargain?
- [49:07]
B
Yeah.
- [49:07]
A
What's the process by which you fire me? Fire me or address. Right, address the problem? What are the repercussions of that? What happens next? All of those things.
- [49:17]
B
Yeah. What are you responsible for exactly? Did you guys go through that? E Myth exercise, where you write out a hierarchy and every job that has to be done and you put someone's name next to it.
- [49:26]
A
I don't think so, but I mean.
- [49:29]
B
You get to see, like, you got to think like that. Like, what are all the responsibilities and who's. Whose department is this in? So if that area of the company is going down, then we know who to hold accountable. You're gonna say some rock.
- [49:42]
D
Well, I feel like we definitely did get there a lot more organically as we grew. You know, like with the first location, it was a lot more. Decision by committee.
- [49:50]
A
Yeah.
- [49:51]
D
But then, you know, as you get a higher amount of workload, you got more locations, you have different work streams going. You have to split.
- [49:59]
B
It's hard to keep a conversation with three people under an hour and 40 minutes. I want to move the conversation forward, but I'm really enjoying the conversation. But I think I want to pay homage to pop ups because if I'm opening a restaurant tomorrow, I'm starting as a pop up. So what advice do you have for pop ups or like, starting as a pop up?
- [50:19]
A
I mean, I think operational. Understand that it's going to be a log. Operationally. You essentially need to set up and break down a restaurant in one night.
- [50:26]
B
One of the pros, though, I mean, people actually, before you answer that question, keep along with the slogs. The cons.
- [50:31]
A
Yeah, it's, it's in terms of, like, effort to return. Like, you have to understand that the point is not at all to make money. It's frankly, it's a marketing expense to get your brand out there, get your product out there, and to get feedback on what you're doing. We actually, we learned a ton about the structure of our menu and about the receptiveness of certain parts of our menu based on those pop ups. And we were able to make real, actual decisions about what would manifest in the brick and mortar as a result of them.
- [50:58]
B
Yeah, for sure. Were you collecting, Were you being intentional about, like, building a list at this point? Like, building a following? Like, how are you capturing that data?
- [51:07]
A
Yes, we launched an Instagram and a Facebook before our first pop up. And so by the fourth pop up, I think we had 1500 followers in New Haven. So we had built quite a following and just really word of mouth. And again, through, you know, Rob, Craig and Jason, we're all. They're all born in Connecticut. Right.
- [51:29]
B
You all have successful brands behind you, so you can, you can leverage those platforms. Exactly, yeah. Did you. Do you still own your restaurants today?
- [51:37]
C
No.
- [51:38]
B
No. Did you get out of those before this venture?
- [51:42]
C
Yeah. So, you know, I unfortunately had to close mine. You know, right around when the pandemic began in March 2020. It just, we weren't sort of set up to pivot and, and capitalize on, you know, how the industry was about to undergo a pretty massive transition. Right. And evolution. And we just, you know, we weren't ready for it at that point. We were sort of, you know, one foot in the door with Haven and we could see the potential. Like the potential was there. You know, just seeing some of the reception we got from the pop ups was tremendously exciting. You know, a ton of work went into every single pop up for sure, but it was also so rewarding.
- [52:16]
B
So you had your brand established, you had your social media presence established. In terms of the pop up, how were you, were you like, what was the technology that you were leveraging at this point?
- [52:28]
C
So at this point, and this was one of the challenges to the pop ups was, you know, we didn't have a handheld POS that we could bring with us for each pop up. So every time we were doing a pop up, we had to rebuild our menu in the systems that the restaurants we were working with had. So for technology.
- [52:43]
B
Small menu.
- [52:44]
C
Yeah, exactly. And we were very intentional about doing tests with our menu too. So we, you know, had options on the menu that, you know, ultimately never made it out of the pop ups. But for our own internal tech, yeah, we relied pretty heavily on social media. We didn't have like, we had, you know, laptops that we would manage the organization of the events and things like that. But in terms of data collection, I would get reports from the restaurants and we would sort of aggregate those reports to see what was selling well, what wasn't selling well and sort of, you know, just sort of highlight, you know, what were the items that we knew were going to carry with us and what were things that, you know, one of the early on discoveries was, you know, bone in chicken just didn't sell well for us. We all loved it. It's a, you know, I love a bone.
- [53:26]
B
Is it a thigh?
- [53:27]
D
We did bone in wings and we did, we did one pop up where we did all the parts and it was very not popular. But then we did fun and wings.
- [53:34]
B
Still was so underrated. It's the best part. Sorry, keep going.
- [53:38]
C
No, yeah, so, yeah, so we tested the three piece wing and we could see very early on that like it just, it wasn't what it was hitting, you know, and it was, was a Little bit tough because we sold out of food at every pop up we had up until. No, we sold out, I think at every single one. So really was looking at sort of the paces and what was selling out first and understanding, you know, what were people gravitating towards you getting proof of.
- [54:03]
B
Concept and you're refining your processes, you're refining your recipes and you're seeing what sticks, what markets stick, what food sticks. I think it's a phenomenal way to get started today, despite the slog.
- [54:14]
A
It is, yes. I think it's also worth mentioning again, I'm going to do another service physics plug here. They traveled and attended with the pop ups. With the pop ups. They were early on with us and they would, they actually recorded most of our pop ups back of house and then we would then analyze, break down and create action items out of the pop up documentation. It was, it was phenomenal.
- [54:42]
B
Yeah, I'm, I've been in touch with service physics from the first conversation I had, Jason, and I'm working on. I was hoping to swing through up like through New York, my way back to New Hampshire, but we weren't able to make it happen. But I'm, I'm hunting down Brian.
- [54:55]
A
Yeah, we're big fans.
- [54:57]
C
Yeah. We did some, some great work with them early on. Right. You know, we talked about sort of developing our core values and our brand identity and there were four different, very distinct personalities in the room across the four founders. And we had a lot of hard conversations, a lot of long sessions and workshops. You know, we conveniently had some. The bar to work out of, which is great, but we, you know, we whiteboarded a lot of things to really get to like, what are the core values that we want the brand to hold true and represent. And service physics was, you know, phenomenal in those early days and creating exercises to make us think in the right ways and get on the same page. And you know, we, we probably wouldn't be where we are today without some of that really good early work that we put in, in those workshops.
- [55:36]
B
Yeah, I'm going to make a note to ask him what those exercises were. Yeah, you guys, I want to share them out. So, I mean, one thing that's standing out to me is you guys put, you invested a lot into a popup, you know, the brand. I know it sounds like you had a friend to help you with that. Service physics couldn't have been a cheap resource, I'm imagining.
- [55:55]
A
So we were actually, it was kind of serendipitous, so I was in the, I was in like the commissary kitchen of our ZX Ventures office and Steve was part of the brand experience team at ZX Ventures and we were friendly over the years working together. And I reached out, we were both grabbing coffee and I was like, hey, can I let you in on something? I'm thinking about starting a little something something on the side. And he's like, can I tell you a little something? I'm also starting something on the side. Okay. So the next week I met with Brian and Steve at a local coffee shop in, in the city where the ZX Ventures office was. And they were also just getting their company off the ground.
- [56:38]
B
So you're a proof of concept for them.
- [56:40]
A
And so we were actually. So you as well.
- [56:42]
B
They were a pop up in your business.
- [56:44]
A
Exactly. And so they, we were the, we were the guinea pigs for a lot of their systems.
- [56:49]
B
I love that.
- [56:50]
A
And so they were able to learn a ton from working with us. And so it was really just like a, a beautiful win win for both of us.
- [56:57]
B
I love that. And I think that's like such, I mean it's creating like one of those seven habits of highly effective people. Create win win situations. Find people who need you and who you need and go further together. It's one of our core values. We, we collaborate at restaurant Unstoppable. It's one of the biggest things. The people that go furthest in this industry stay in their lane. They focus on the 20 of things that they're uniquely qualified and skilled at and they surround themselves with other people around pop ups. I mean I just. Because I think that this is such a low like bar to get over for people to get started. You owned your own businesses that you could pop up in. That was huge. But what advice do you have? And then we'll move away from pop ups. But what advice do you have to approach a restaurant not to do a pop up in their space?
- [57:42]
D
I would say find a way to make sure that it's worth it for them. Like when we were approaching the restaurants, we would do the majority of the ordering, order handling. They basically had to run food and take drinks. Drink orders.
- [57:55]
A
Right.
- [57:55]
D
We managed everything else, but they didn't have staff costs in the back of house. They got, you know, almost, you know, dollar for dollar liquor sales versus what we were doing for the pop ups. So there was something in it for them.
- [58:06]
B
Win win situation.
- [58:07]
D
Yeah. And you know, we're bringing hundreds of new people that haven't been to their place down to, you know, how did.
- [58:14]
B
You get the word out about the first pop up? Were you piggybacking on your existing brands?
- [58:19]
A
That was a lot of it. We, we didn't really do any, like, paid dollars for marketing in the early days. We, we just, we leveraged our existing networks. Again, I was starting to say this earlier, but, you know, I. I've lived in Connecticut for 15 years and that's the shortest amount of time for any of us. Right. Like, yeah, they. Everybody else was born and raised here. And so we have deep networks in, in New Haven county and specifically in New Haven. So we were able to leverage, kind of spreading word of mouth through our. Our literally friends and friends of friends.
- [58:53]
B
I love that. So, okay. People listening at home are like, eric, you know, we're over an hour into this conversation or just about an hour into this conversation. We haven't even gotten to them opening the first brick and mortar. But that was only four years ago. Yeah, that was only four years ago. So we have about 45 minutes to cover the next four years. So when did you open your first brick and mortar?
- [59:17]
D
October 17, 2020.
- [59:19]
A
I've been talking too much. I'm going to let them talk.
- [59:21]
C
Yeah, yeah, no, I can. I'll fill this a little bit. Yeah. So we opened our first brick and mortar October 17, 2020.
- [59:28]
B
It was only a year of doing pop ups.
- [59:31]
C
Yeah. Yep. Yeah, we did the pop ups for about a year. We did, I think five in total. The last one was, you know, really cool because it was during the pandemic and then we had already at that point signed the lease for the new location and sort of started working on it. And funnily enough, the first guest we had at the last pop up asked us for a job and we were like, hey, we're building up the first location now. It'll be open in a few months. When you see the ads go up, you know, apply, you know, he worked for us for a while. Great, great team member. But yes, we opened in October 17, 2020 to just gangbusters. You know, it was super humbling the response we got, but it was probably six weeks of just a line around the corner open to close every day. You know, people super excited about the brand, love the food, and for us, it was just like, it was shocking.
- [60:20]
B
Were you worried that it was a honeymoon period?
- [60:23]
C
You know, that thought never really crossed my mind. You know, I think we were all so confident in, like, the quality of the food we were putting out and the service and just the excitement for what we were doing, you know, the idea of the honeymoon just didn't really cross our minds. But, you know, we, you know, I remember one of the things, things that definitely sticks out in my mind is we're probably a little bit understaffed in those early days. You know, myself, Rob, two of our other partners spent a lot of hours in that restaurant in the early days making sure that, you know, people had great food. You know, Rob fried every single piece of chicken we served for those first six weeks. And I think that also speaks volume, knowing you're getting it from Rob. His chicken was phenomenal. And yeah, we had just a great reception in the community. And a is really, you know, like I said, humbling to see that.
- [61:09]
B
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- [62:28]
C
Yeah.
- [62:28]
B
You opened your first restaurant October 2020. When was your second restaurant? Without getting into any detail, when did we open?
- [62:36]
A
That.
- [62:36]
C
That second one opened in June 21st.
- [62:38]
B
Okay. Less than a year later.
- [62:40]
A
June 22nd.
- [62:41]
C
June 22nd. Sorry.
- [62:42]
B
So two years later. A year and a half. And then third location.
- [62:47]
C
Third location we are sitting in today opened in November 22nd.
- [62:52]
B
Okay. And then the fourth location, that was.
- [62:57]
D
May, I think of 23. April. April 23rd.
- [63:00]
C
April 23.
- [63:01]
B
And fifth location.
- [63:05]
A
November 23rd.
- [63:06]
C
November 23rd. Yep.
- [63:09]
B
Sixth location.
- [63:11]
C
Yesterday. Last year, about a year ago.
- [63:14]
B
Seventh location.
- [63:17]
A
April 24th.
- [63:18]
C
April 24th. Ekan's got all the dates. Okay.
- [63:21]
B
And then there were 8 and 9.
- [63:23]
C
8 and 9, yep.
- [63:24]
D
Which opened May 24 and then August 24.
- [63:29]
B
Got it. So it seems like obviously, I love that you took almost two years for that first location to really dial it in. Right. How much where did service physics get you to in terms of location 1 and how did that service help you continue to evolve in that first year now?
- [63:49]
D
I mean, most of our fundamental processes are still based off of what we did, like in those first couple of months, you know, between the pop up. Well, basically between the pop up and once you have like, you know, because like Craig said, like, you're building a new menu, but you're also building a new kitchen. Right. The kitchen layout, where you pick up where the fryer is, where the assembly is, like, all those are different every time. So when we finally had the moment where you could just design it the way you wanted it, we did.
- [64:17]
B
And you guys realize how, like how close this is hitting to home with my mobile studio right now.
- [64:24]
D
Oh. Oh, yeah. I mean, I would have to move an entire walk in a food every there and back, every pop up.
- [64:29]
B
I totally understand where you're coming from.
- [64:32]
D
So.
- [64:32]
B
So, yeah, like, there was the inconsistency of setting up, breaking down and no muscle memory. And you guys don't have to worry about lighting, but I do. But yeah, I mean, so but what were the, like, I guess, like what did, like, what was the biggest impact that service physics had? Because I'm kind of uncertain exactly what it is they do. They helped you with your core values. They helped you with like, what is, like, what are they know, is the tail, like restaurant consultancy.
- [65:00]
C
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the exercises we did was sort of, I think it was called a magnet exercise is what they described it as. And it was how we really organized the work that needed to happen. Right. So you think about, we start with a raw piece of chicken. How do we get that raw piece of chicken to a beautiful fried sandwich? There's a lot of work that goes into it. And that was like, you know, we literally spend time listing every single thing that needed to happen before that thing, that piece of chicken could leave our restaurant. And then we started to organize it by like stations effectively and sort of created the stations, the routines and the system on how that food would go from a cold piece of raw chicken to, you know, the beautiful sandwich we serve every day. And being able to organize that work was, I think, instrumental because, you know, I think back to the early days in the pop ups when there wasn't that organization, it was a little bit more scattered in the, in the, in the kitchen. A little, you know, chicken with its head cut off, running around, trying to make it all happen. And they gave us sort of that, that clarity and that, that structure to create the systems to deliver it with a much less running around.
- [66:00]
A
Got it.
- [66:00]
C
You know, we did those spaghetti diagrams in early days to see just how much movement there was and how we could simplify that.
- [66:06]
A
Got it.
- [66:07]
B
And when you guys opened the first brick and mortar, what did that, how did that continue?
- [66:11]
D
So like, I mean even like literally today we're rolling out a new revamped training plan for 2025 as we're, you know, driving the next phase of growth. And one of the core concepts that I teach now is this thing called like human time versus machine time and cycle time, written batch size. And so teaching them how do you determine the largest amount you can make without generating waste, without like exceeding our quality standards. And this is stuff that we're now training at like the hourly team member level. But to watch them go from hey, just do it this way because I'm telling you to do it this way to this is the core concept underlying it. They grow, they feel empowered, they understand why we're doing things. Right.
- [66:56]
B
Powerful. What about like the capital to get started?
- [67:02]
A
Yeah. So at the very, very beginning, each of us put in some funds to get us off the ground. And then from there we, we raised some kind of friends and family, you know, called pre seed money to, to open our first brick and mortar. We opened that for a couple hundred grand. It was pretty cost effective.
- [67:19]
B
We did low overhead too. Yeah, relatively.
- [67:23]
A
Yeah. And we, we were going into a turnkey space that already had hoods and a walk in and a lot of, a lot of the things we needed. So that was, that's, that's how we got funded in order to get to one. And then we've had a number of funding moments since then.
- [67:36]
B
Got it. Was that first location, that two year or the year and a half period from going from one to two. I meant to ask this question earlier and I'm really trying to be better about talking about numbers. I had some advice recently to ask the question, not around gross revenue, but what is your total percent profit on, on, on your margins focusing on that percent profit, not total revenue. Because revenue is so relative to areas.
- [68:03]
C
Sure.
- [68:04]
B
If you're in New York and you're doing 2 million, that might not be enough to pay rent, you know, so like, and like Connecticut is also a very, you know, Extreme expensive place to exist. We're not too far over the border. Right. So what, you know, what were your targets in terms of percent profit? Did you exceed those?
- [68:21]
A
So in the early days, we were trying to operate as profitably as we could with without as much close examination of labor and cogs and prime costs and overall opex. It was kind of, you know, we've always talked about it as a team as we had different phases in the business where once we opened our, once we opened 001 in New Haven, it was, let's just make sure we can open every day and deliver a really high quality product. We'll figure out the rest later. And then over time, I would say by the time we got to our third or fourth location, we started really keying in on budgeting, forecasting, developing much more robust targets. But you know, to answer your question, but bringing it up to speed to today, our, our restaurants obviously have a range, you know, across the nine locations. But from a blended profitability perspective, at the store level, we're in the high teens.
- [69:17]
B
That's awesome.
- [69:17]
A
And our best units are in the mid-20s.
- [69:19]
B
So I'm assuming doing one thing really well probably helps. I mean, you have more than one thing, but primarily one thing, relatively low labor costs, terms of the amount of people in here relative to the amount of volume you can do, because you do mostly take out.
- [69:37]
A
I would actually say that because we're so uncompromising on our quality. You know, again, I'll leave it to Rob to talk about the meticulousness that we take. But you know, it's a three day process to produce our chicken. So we actually do a lot of things, you know, in house that require a lot of time and care and we invest in those labor hours because we believe it makes a difference and we have great team members that they're able to, you know, do that.
- [70:04]
B
Is time one of those ingredients where like is, is it necessarily more work or is it a matter of just doing it right and being kind of.
- [70:11]
D
It's strategic. It's, it's very much both of them. Okay, so there is like, you know, non negotiable times during our process. Right. You have to marinate things for a certain amount of time. You know, it just marinate, won't penetrate in and do what it's got to do in two hours. It needs 12, 14, 18 hours. On the other hand, we have some unique processes that we do in the store that require just actual labor on the employees part to achieve the results that we actually get. Every day.
- [70:39]
B
Wow. And I mean, so is it mostly with the cost of goods that gets you flirting with that, that close to 20% the profit market, or is this the fact that you're doing the volume?
- [70:51]
A
It's, it's, it's a blend across the different stores. I mean, from a prime cost perspective, you know, we, we hover above and below the 60 mark, which is kind of generally looked at as like a good. But, but when we're, when we're really humming, we can be in the mid-50s.
- [71:09]
B
From a price perspective. And I'm assuming just because, you know, your, your footprint. I was in one of your locations prior to this. It was, there was four seats.
- [71:17]
A
Sure.
- [71:17]
B
It was like a Domino's pickup situation, you know. So I'm guessing your rent relatively low too. Does that help?
- [71:24]
A
Yeah, our rents, our rents aren't too bad in context of the overall revenue we do. We like having tighter footprints. But we've also, as we've expanded more of our locations, have more dining. We have, you know, found that, you know, as we move further away from the pandemic and as we grow as a brand, that folks do like to experience Haven Hot Chicken at Haven Hot Chicken to have a bit more of an immersive experience in the brand.
- [71:51]
B
Yeah. So another thing that I think was really interesting, you didn't really start, you said forecasting or budgeting until you got to like three or four locations, which most people would be like, that's frigging absurd. But then when you think about, took you two and a half, half years to get there, so you didn't really have the data to really, you know, the track record of being able to look past.
- [72:11]
C
Sure.
- [72:12]
A
And I think I'm being self deprecating. We did those things. I don't, I don't know how well we did them, you know, so through augmenting the team by adding, adding some additional folks onto the team, I think we got a lot better at some of those things. So. Yeah, I mean we did versions of forecasts and we had budgets and we had spending plans and we had, we were actually probably the furthest along on the labor side in terms of developing labor and deployment models. So we did all of those things from day one and we had plans, deep plans around them from the very beginning, I guess. Yeah. I'm being self deprecating and I think we got much more robust and professionally good at it a couple years in.
- [72:53]
B
What were your biggest challenges from one to three people locations?
- [72:58]
A
Sorry?
- [72:58]
B
Oh, I thought you were asking people or Locations. But I realize now you're saying people was the answer, so specifically what.
- [73:07]
A
Yeah, so I think I said this before we started recording, and I'll say it again, folks ask us all the time, what's your biggest strength as an organization? We say it's people, and they say, what's your biggest challenge? It's also people. For us, you know, kind of going into what Rob was saying about servant leader mentality, have, have we given our team members the right training tools, resources and environment to succeed? And if no, then it's our, our fault. It took us a couple of years to feel like we were being servant leaders, that we were giving them the, the proper training, the proper environment, the proper resources. Obviously everything is safe and everything is compliant, and we did our best. But I think it took us a couple of years to really get to a point where we could make things really robust and have that team member onboarding experience be really strong. And so from that, a lot of people saw the vision and were excited about where Haven Hot Chicken was going and being a part of an organization that was generating a lot of attention and hype and, you know, doing collaborations with Dame Drops and, you know, all of these other exciting things. But, you know, again, as we grow, it was, it's essential to cultivate an environment where people can grow, you know.
- [74:29]
B
So what did that picture after two years look like where you got to the point where you felt like, okay, we were kind of where we wanted to be. What paint that picture? What did that landscape of the resources and tools and like, if we can recreate what you created in that two years, what are we aiming for?
- [74:46]
A
Yeah, I mean, I, I would be remiss not to mention that one of, one of the most critical things we've done as a company was bring on an experience, operations and people executive. So our chief operating officer is Gretchen Bartkis. She came from 25 years at Starbucks and had a stint at Amazon and a couple of other companies. And her experience, she's done everything, every role in Starbucks managed thousands of employees, was on the rollout of food nationally for Starbucks, worked in several HR roles. So she really brought a formalization, serious, like, order of magnitude level up for us in terms of how we ran the business operationally.
- [75:36]
B
What changes did she make when she got on board?
- [75:39]
A
I don't know where to start.
- [75:40]
C
She rewrote every training guide we had.
- [75:43]
B
Okay.
- [75:44]
C
Beginning to end. I mean, she created a lot of documentation and systems that, you know, we were lacking on, like, what, you know, hiring processes, but, like, really like, you know, we had processes and systems and how we would do things, but not everything was documented. She created a lot of that documentation, created structure for our documentation.
- [76:03]
B
What systems were missing specifically that you think really like helped.
- [76:08]
C
I mean, I think, you know, really defining the training process for a new team member, what that looked like, how they would, you know, how we would cross train team members from, you know, the sort of the front of house positions that we call a guest experience and consolidator to the kitchen positions that we call, you know, assembly and fryer. She created the documentation that really defined what are the key things you needed to learn, you know, what were the reasons why. And that I think gave a lot of clarity to new team members coming on. Right. And she came on, you know, just before we opened our fourth location in North Haven and we had rewritten all this material and we tested it there, you know, with that team. You know, we had a really strong GM there and Jonathan, who's still with us doing a tremendous job and he tested all those training materials for us for the first time. And the engagement we saw from the team, the ability to learn the material and use it and hold things to standard was almost immediate.
- [77:03]
B
So it's almost like compartmentalizing the space and then identifying you're being hired for this role and in this role the space. These are your key responsibilities. Here's your opening responsibilities. Here's when we're in like full steam ahead, like this is your focus, here's your breakdown responsibility. So kind of like just saying like in these different, like how would you, what language you use to describe those different spaces? You already kind of told us.
- [77:28]
C
Yeah, so I mean we use, we refer to them as pods. Right. We have sort of pod one, pod two and pod three within the restaurant. You know, pod one being that front of house, you know, the guest experience on the consolidator. Pod 2 being our execution kitchen. So the assemblies and the fryers are making food to order. And then we have pod three, which is our prep and production.
- [77:46]
B
So when you're getting, when you're making the schedule, people, will they move around different pods? Will they work different pods, different days?
- [77:52]
C
Yeah, so that was something that, you know, early on we definitely put in place was cross training. Right. We wanted people trained in multiple positions, multiple pods, so that we had, you know, one flexibility when it came to scheduling, but two, also it came to service. Right. If you knew every position in the restaurant and you're serving, you're going to quickly realize when someone's in the weeds and needs a little assistance and you're going to step in and help.
- [78:12]
B
Right.
- [78:13]
C
And that just call an audible, put.
- [78:15]
B
Them to their strong pod.
- [78:16]
C
Created some culture and some camaraderie for the team to support each other when, you know, things got a little dicey because, you know, anytime you're running a restaurant, it gets really busy. It's going to, you know, there's going to be some support that's needed for sure.
- [78:27]
B
Where did other resources that she referenced or applied or is this from just her experience? Like, if I was talking to her right now, where would she say, like these are the places I went to go learn that aside from her work experience, publications, anything like that, you know.
- [78:42]
C
I'm not too sure about any specific publications or anything she read. I know she draw a lot from her experience, you know, from Starbucks, you know, from the experience she had in Amazon. She worked for another small, a small chain in Connecticut. The name is evading me right now. But she, you know, she did a lot of the same things there and creating systems and training and creating structure for the teams to make sure that they're getting all the education they need.
- [79:07]
B
Any other challenges? One of the three.
- [79:09]
D
Yeah, I would say that at least from one to two, which was honestly probably the hardest of the leaps, you know, than any of the next ones, was the realization that, you know, just because someone is really good at doing the thing doesn't mean they're good at overseeing or teaching the thing. Right. And we got ourselves into a little bit of training. Telephone is what I call it. You know, it's like I teach you the hundred percent, you teach that person the 95. Well, let's hope. Right.
- [79:38]
B
Then it's the 90 every. Yeah.
- [79:40]
D
And then in two, three generations it's not good enough. Right. Like, you know, then that's just how that. And so the dream, bringing that formalization so that you were making sure a. You were covering off on everything, but then having a little bit of like a reporting and a visibility structure. So it's like, so is this person objectively able to do this position? Yes or no. Right. And, and having that assessment and it doesn't have to be like a, you know, like a combative thing. You know, that's your moment to be the supportive servant leader and help support on that training.
- [80:11]
B
Right.
- [80:11]
D
But you know, don't put someone in a position that they're not equipped to. Right. You're setting the guest up and the team member up and the team broadly up for a bad experience there. Right.
- [80:20]
B
How do you approach the situation where, where you have set somebody up to not be successful when that happens? How do you approach that situation?
- [80:28]
D
Well, I mean, I think you, you always want to go into a corrective moment asking what's going on. You know, you want to be curious about what their, their issue is, because, you know, it might be something that like, oh, this scoop is always broken, you know, and you're like, oh, we should get you a new scoop. That's on us. My bad. Right?
- [80:45]
B
Yeah.
- [80:46]
D
And then, you know, or it might be, you know, they had a terrible day, maybe something's going on in their personal life that, you know, and you want to have, you know, some compassion to meet them where they're at. And then if you've done all of that stuff, you try and just keep it to the task at hand. Coach them to the actual standard, Explain to them that, you know, this is how you, you do it. If you have any questions, let them ask the question. And then you got to hold them accountable at some point, you know, so.
- [81:11]
B
What I'm hearing is first seek to under. First seek to, to understand, then seek to be understood. And also don't correct the person, correct the process.
- [81:19]
D
Well, always, you know, you, you want to depersonalize everything as much as possible. You know, like, I don't want to be criticizing you for being bad. You know, this is just how we do the thing. Right. And then, you know, I had a, I had, this is going back years now. I had a chef who said, criticism is investment. You know, if he, you know, if I didn't want you to do better, I would just document you, keep my mouth shut, and let you get out the door. Right. But if I want you to succeed, I'm going to give you the feedback so that you can have the opportunity to improve.
- [81:48]
B
Yeah, I love that. So I'm segmenting my community into three or probably four, four segments. The first one's gonna be zero to one, meaning you're in pop up mode or food truck mode, and your goals get to a brick and mortar, I like to call it one to three, because typically you can get away with three locations before.
- [82:08]
A
Yeah.
- [82:08]
B
But if you try to get to that fourth, that's when like, whatever you were doing before is no longer even one to two to your point. Like, that's where most people. But you can get to three if you're a freak of nature. But then once you start looking from 4 to 10, there's like a hole. That's when you start thinking, thinking about the C suite.
- [82:23]
A
Right.
- [82:23]
B
You start thinking about, like, we have to bring somebody in to cement these processes to. To dial it in to great. To create the pods, to create the HR systems to. So what from going from three to 10 for you? Because you said it was around that two for you guys. But from four to 10, what have been the biggest challenges for you?
- [82:43]
A
Yeah, I mean, again, we. We have to keep in mind that five of our units open in a span of about 14 months. So the company more than doubled in size in terms of total team members. Getting that many people trained on our systems and processes. And to get enough experience to handle being in a new location, it's always going to come back to people. And then how do we have enough. You know, we talk about training the trainer or teach the, you know, teach the teacher. Right. Like, how do we get enough other people to be able to teach the standard and maintaining our quality as we grow. Right. Like one of our. We've always been ambitious about growing, but we've also all agreed unanimously that if at any point our quality suffers, that we're going to stop, fix our quality before we take any other steps forward. And then I think the other key challenge that we had as we were in rapid expansion mode is balancing all of the components of the business simultaneously as you grow. Where we were excited about growth and as we were doing that, were we as mindful about how we were spending money or what the business performance looked like or tracking things that we should be tracking and so making sure that we are attentive to all parts of the business as a couple of major things are occurring along.
- [84:13]
B
So your fourth location was two and a half years ago?
- [84:17]
A
Well, it opened in April of 23.
- [84:20]
B
April 20.
- [84:21]
A
So it's less than two years.
- [84:22]
B
Less than two years from that point to nine locations.
- [84:26]
A
Yeah.
- [84:27]
B
Was there. How many hiccups have there been that are worth Circle surfacing?
- [84:32]
A
525,600 minutes.
- [84:35]
B
You guys gotta leave in 15 minutes.
- [84:38]
A
Countless. But, you know, it's something that Jason talked about on his episode fail, fast fail, forward, momentum, decision making, moving forward, learning, creating opportunities out of the mistakes you made is absolutely essential because if we were bogged down and upset and sorry for ourselves every time we made a mistake, we wouldn't have gotten past one.
- [85:02]
B
Yeah. I big Darren Hardy fan. I've recently reconnected with his work because, you know, you start this process of learning, learning, learning, and you just start drinking from the fire hose of books and like, you learn the next thing. But over time you start to Hear the same things over and over again. So you go back to the greatest hits of like, which ones? If I'm opening a restaurant tomorrow, who am I? Whose work am I sharing? And Darren Hardy, for me, the compound effect is absolutely on that list. And he recently just wrote an email that I got that was like, my biggest fear is failure or failing. I think. Well, he made the point that like, there's. There's failure, which is like complete and other, like utter, like, I failed, but then there's failing, which is different from failure. Failing is you swung and you missed. You know, failure is choosing to give up a game of baseball, you know, or choosing to resign from your role. So, like, it's one thing to try something and miss, but it's another thing to fail altogether. So don't be afraid of failing. Be afraid of failure.
- [85:58]
A
Absolutely. We make mistakes every single day. I, you know, if we took a poll, there's half a dozen that happened today, right? Yeah, I, I think it's about awareness, being self aware, and then also being honest about kind of an. And owning things when they occur. You know, I'm always happy to take blame, as are the rest of the team. When things aren't going well, it's okay.
- [86:24]
C
Great.
- [86:24]
A
That's on me. Where are we going from here? What's the opportunity? What happens next?
- [86:29]
B
Well, Rob, Chief growth Officer. When did you earn that title?
- [86:34]
D
When I started really taking over the construction of the majority of the stores in. What was that? Or mid, mid, early 2023.
- [86:43]
B
So are you focused on site selection too?
- [86:46]
D
No, actually I manage mostly the literal construction and launch process. Getting them from breaking ground all the way to the door open.
- [86:56]
B
So you're a project manager?
- [86:58]
D
A lot of it. But also designing the locations, managing, helping and supporting with training, making sure that the people are in place, you know.
- [87:05]
B
Got it. Do you miss the kitchen?
- [87:07]
D
The simplicity of it is, you know, is missed. But, you know, I think it's. It honestly is significantly as much as jamming out a really great service, like, gets the dopamine going. Watching someone you've taught teach someone else and grow, you know, Like, I can think of a number of employees that we've developed and I watch them take ownership of other people, and that's a way more rewarding feeling than just slinging out 300 plates, you know, Awesome.
- [87:33]
B
I mean, how did you guys, like, settle into your current roles? Like CEO, Right. Ean, Craig, you are the cio, and then we have the growth, Chief growth Officer. I know that we have. Jason is the president yeah. You have a coo.
- [87:51]
A
Yeah.
- [87:52]
B
And you also brought on a cfo.
- [87:54]
A
We do not. Well, we have a VP of finance.
- [87:57]
B
The strategy. Got it. Got it. So, I mean, I guess over time, like, how do you go from chef to chief growth officer? Like, and like, how do. You were in breweries before, Right. And owning a restaurant, like, how did you earn, like land the title of chief Information officer? Like, I'm curious about how over time, as the business grows, how you have to figure out where you fall.
- [88:22]
A
Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to. I won't tell their stories for them, but I think the business and the needs of the business evolve over time. And so some of the roles were kind of unidentified and ambiguous for quite some time. We had formal conversations about form. We had a lot of conversation about formalizing our titles way after the first location opened. We did do a lot of kind of consensus decision making and stuff early on, but. But you know, I think we all have kind of natural proclivities towards certain parts of the business. And so, you know, I definitely went through the process with both Craig and with Rob of kind of, hey, what, like, where is your specialty? Where is your super. We talk about superpowers a lot in the business also. What's your superpower at haven?
- [89:10]
B
That's the 20% of things you should be focused on.
- [89:12]
A
Exactly. And so as we went through that process, things you've done evolve and you know, I think. And like, but like, both Craig and Rob have shifted their primary focus within the company multiple times.
- [89:26]
B
Right.
- [89:27]
A
And I think that that's, that first of all shows how dynamic they are, but also how resilient they are to, you know, again, meeting the needs of the business. As a co founder, like, it's just, it's so impressive. Yeah, I love it.
- [89:38]
B
I mean again, like you go further together, know your lane, stay in it. One thing I do, I do want to talk about, thing that I want to make sure we plan a time for is the tech stack. So that's your role, Craig.
- [89:49]
A
Right.
- [89:49]
B
So what is your tech stack today?
- [89:51]
C
Yeah, so tech stack today, you know, our POS is, is Toast. Toast does a lot for us, right? We have their growth package. So it's our. A lot of our guest facing, you know, stuff. Yeah.
- [90:01]
B
What is their. What is the growth package?
- [90:03]
C
So that's gift cards, loyalty, email marketing and their CRM.
- [90:07]
B
Okay.
- [90:08]
C
So it's like all the guest facing stuff that we are able to take advantage of. And Toast has been a great provider for us. We use their payroll system they have a 401k integration, which is a great benefit that we can roll out for the team. And then they're also just a great integrator of other platforms and things from there. For our labor and scheduling, we use a company by the name of rightwork.
- [90:33]
B
Say that one more time.
- [90:34]
C
Right.
- [90:34]
B
Work.
- [90:34]
A
Okay.
- [90:35]
C
Yeah, They're a smaller company. They've got a great product with some really great analytics and algorithms behind it that help drive forecasting, labor management in a way that has, you know, definitely improved our GM's abilities to, you know, really schedule to our labor targets that we set.
- [90:51]
A
Got it.
- [90:52]
B
Keep going.
- [90:53]
C
Yeah, yeah. From there, you know, thinking about the back end, we use, you know, QuickBooks, things that we are recently onboarded that have been tremendous for us as Biky, you know, as a CDP has been tremendous. We're working with Loop AI, who does a lot of reputation management on third parties. It gives us some, some operational insights to downtime, which is, is really good. And it also helps with the reconciliation process.
- [91:17]
B
Say the name of that company one more time.
- [91:19]
C
Loop AI.
- [91:20]
B
Okay.
- [91:21]
C
And.
- [91:24]
B
Biky, I know you're using Ovation.
- [91:26]
C
Yep. We use Ovation for surveys and guest sentiment and they're, you know, they're a tremendous partner. I actually requested some, some customer reporting from them and they're, you know, obliging and helping put together some stuff for us. They're a tremendous partner. You know, as well as Biki, you know, we also work, we have an LMS in World Manager which has, you know, been a good, great platform for us to, you know, get all of our content into the hands of everyone in the team. All the team members, you know, across the company are un. Using that to learn a lot of our systems, our processes and all the training material we put together.
- [91:56]
B
Okay, I'm curious. So with Toast Growth Package, you said that you're. That's mostly. You said it was email marketing.
- [92:03]
C
So it's. Yeah. Gift cards, their loyalty program, email marketing. Well, now it's email and sms and then it's. It's got a CRM built in. So it gives us a lot of good information about our guests, the ability to, to market to them, send them offers, campaigns, things like that.
- [92:19]
B
So between that and Biki, how much overlap is there?
- [92:24]
C
You know, Biki is, you know, more of a pure cdp. So it really gives us.
- [92:28]
B
Say that one more time.
- [92:29]
C
It's more of a kind of a pure cdp, a customer data platform. So it gives us a lot of great insights on, you know, how our guests are interacting with the menu, you know, what are the items that are bringing them back the most? What are the items they're pairing together the most? What is. Is our attention, you know, how. What is this, their frequency and how we really. You know, it's funny because before we onboarded Biki, we had a lot of assumptions around our guest base. And I think since onboarding Biki, we've validated a lot of our assumptions, but also learned so much more. You know, who's coming in, who's got the higher ticket averages, what age demographics are, you know, coming in the most frequently. And being able to understand those helps us from the marketing side, you know, make sure when we're putting together targeted campaigns, we're targeting the right segments of our guest base.
- [93:14]
B
So are you creating the campaigns within Biki, or are you using the data to create the campaigns within Toast?
- [93:19]
C
Yes. Biki gives us all the data and all the analytics, and then we can go and create our campaigns through Toast.
- [93:24]
B
Got it. Labor Management. Say the name of that company one more time.
- [93:30]
C
Yeah. There's a Right work.
- [93:33]
B
Is it W you rit or like.
- [93:35]
C
R I H T R I G H T Work.
- [93:38]
B
Right work. You said they have certain data that you can get. Like, what's that? Or like the. What was. I can't remember the words you use exactly. But you said there was something unique about what they offer.
- [93:46]
C
Yeah, they just got a great sort of AI model that helps, you know, really pull together a lot of the factors that are going to influence your revenue and able to create forecasts for us. Right. So they create sort of our first round of forecasting. We then have our GMs kind of look at that forecasting layer on what they know to be true about their business, whether it's, you know, events going on around them or promos that they're running or things like that. And they can, of course, adjust those forecasts, but Right work is able to give us sort of that. That baseline projection.
- [94:17]
B
Got it. And I should have probably went. Did I cut you short? I should have went straight to Ovation, because I feel like Ovation, like your marketing tech sack, Toast, Biki, innovation. In terms of marketing, are you leveraging anything else? So how is Ovation complementing Biki and Toast's growth package?
- [94:36]
C
Yeah, absolutely. Ovation is a great platform. We are able to learn firsthand from the guests what their experiences were like. Right. They basically, you know, they get a text, they fill out a survey, rate our their experience, and then from there we get to have direct conversations with them.
- [94:53]
A
Right.
- [94:53]
C
And what's, you know, funny we talk about it all the time is we'll have conversations with people on Ovation and they're like, oh, I thought I was talking to a chatbot. And you're like, no, no, this is the manager of the location. You know, I read about your experience. I'm really sorry to hear we missed an item here. Or the quality wasn't up to our standard there. And we can send them an offer to help recover that guest and bring them back in, show them that they are really important to us and we want them to come back in. We want to make their one star experience a five star experience.
- [95:19]
B
Where's the QR code?
- [95:22]
D
It's on, like every bag.
- [95:23]
C
It's on every bag and everything.
- [95:25]
D
Every box, yeah, got it.
- [95:26]
B
So the process is they come in, they can scan a QR code. How are you incentivizing them to scan a QR code?
- [95:33]
C
Yeah. So there's two different ways that this happens. Right. So anyone that is a loyalty member with guest through Toast or we have their, you know, email or phone number, Ovation will send them an SMS text. You know, I think it's 30 minutes after their ticket closes, they'll get an SMS text. It's like, hey, how was your experience with Haven? We'd love to hear your feedback. Or yes, they can go ahead and scan the QR codes. And we have, you know, little QR codes on the bags and boxes that indicate, hey, we're looking for feedback. Please tell us how your experience was. And that's, you know, how we get it. And we probably see, you know, somewhere between, you know, 7 and 9% of our guests responding through there. So we're to able to collect a ton of data across all of our locations to understand, you know, what are the things that we're doing really well that they love and where is the opportunity for us to improve.
- [96:17]
B
So what is the biggest feedback you've gotten that has like, from Ovation that has like really, like shifted how you do business and move the needle?
- [96:26]
C
Yeah. You know, I think one of the things that we have learned through Ovation is that, you know, we, we, we have some misses in order accuracy, you know, know, whether it's, you know, missing a sauce or a drink. And that has given us a lot of opportunity to examine our systems, our process, understand, you know, why these misses are happening, where is the breakdown in communication amongst the team to make sure that everything that's in that bag is getting delivered to the guests.
- [96:49]
B
Got it. And are you Capturing data from this too. Like, like beyond like the actual like conversation, like email and stuff like that.
- [97:00]
C
Yeah, yeah. So when they, when, you know, what's great is, you know, when you start, it's called a win back conversation. When they text you and you start.
- [97:06]
B
But actually that was my follow up conversation. Yeah, yeah.
- [97:08]
C
So, you know, you go through the win back and the win back basically shows the guest's history with our brand. Right. It shows us what, when they've ordered what they've ordered, you know, have they had communications with a different manager or maybe the same manager at a different time. You can see it just comes through as like one long sort of text message. So it gives you a lot of understand, understanding about the guest, a lot of understanding about their frequencies. And we, you know, generally use. There's a lot of great dashboards and analytics provided by Ovation that we, you know, we reference constantly. And what's really great is, you know, probably within the last five, six months or so there's a kind of an AI summation of the experience that your guests are having at each location. So it really is great at nailing, hey, these are the things that your guests are saying you guys do for phenomenal. This is really good. Quality of food is great, speed of service is great. But then it also gives you like a, hey, you know, you're missing a couple things here and there. And that's driving some of the, the poor responses from your guests.
- [98:02]
B
And relative to Biki, what is the biggest impact that that data has given you? Is it just the segmentation?
- [98:08]
C
Yeah, the segmentation from Biki is tremendous. Right. Because it gives us that ability to really tailor fit marketing campaigns to specific segments as opposed to to just sending out a blanket campaign and seeing who responds to it.
- [98:19]
A
Right.
- [98:19]
C
We can really find a way to find a campaign or an offer or a new LTO or something that we're rolling out where the guest is going to be really engaged with that. And we can learn that through Biki by looking at who's buying the ltos in the past. Are they continuing to buy them? What other items are they buying with them? So we can sort of find out good ways to pair some of our menu items together at the same time.
- [98:43]
A
Got it.
- [98:44]
B
Has the needle. Can you give me an example of how you've literally seen them the needle move on like top end revenue because of that ability to be so precise in your messaging?
- [98:54]
C
Yeah, you know, I mean, I would say kind of most recently, you know, we've been looking at a lot of our guest base that uses online ordering in order to, you know, whether it's through the website or. Now we are about to imminently launch an app. So we're able to sort of target some of the marketing around the app to people we know that are heavy online ordering users or third party users and working to transition those to more first party platforms. Right now being the app or delivery. So we're offering free delivery on the app to start for a little while. We're offering some other campaigns where I think that day one, there's going to be a promo code sent out for a free slider. So we're doing a lot of things to target specifically to that online guest base.
- [99:40]
A
Got it.
- [99:41]
B
All right, fellas, I told you how to get get you out of here by 3 o'. Clock. I want to respect that time. Anything we haven't discussed up to this point that you want to get out before we say goodbye?
- [99:53]
C
I mean, I'd love to talk a little bit, you know, kind of continue to dig on the. Into the tech stack. You know, there is something that we are actually about to undergo a pretty big evolution of is our current existing tech stack. Right. You know, one of the things that I think is really important to us is getting to a unified set of data.
- [100:10]
B
An enterprise solution.
- [100:11]
C
Yeah, something like an enterprise solution. You know, one ecosystem where all of our data is so that when you're looking at cogs, labor, whatever, it all flows into Your P&Ls into your business intelligence module. So we're, you know, looking right now at R3C.
- [100:25]
B
Okay.
- [100:25]
C
You know, tremendous brand. We've been in communications with them for a while, you know, super excited. We're about to go through sort of a process with them. They're going to come out and really hands on, show us their product, what it can really do for us. You know, I'm personally super excited. I've been looking at their product for a while, you know, very excited about a lot of the modules. And now it's going to be really exciting to share with the whole team.
- [100:45]
B
Nice.
- [100:45]
C
Get them excited about how this can really transform our business. Right. This is going to create a tremendous foundation for us so that as we examine any future tech partners, we have a great foundation to build on.
- [100:56]
B
What is the significance of an enterprise solution? Why is it worth having everything pulling from one source?
- [101:02]
C
I mean, you need a source of truth, right? If you have four different reporting modules and they're giving you four different numbers, who are you trusting? Right? So you want that source of Truth that you can really rely on for your business.
- [101:12]
B
Got it. Thank you for getting into the detail. That was awesome. Awesome. I just had a lot of fun talking to you guys. I think, you know, what you're doing is the future. I hope more people are able to, to build on their relationship skills and their communication skills and their trust in others to go further together. And I mean, I just wanted to. Before we say goodbye, I want to give you guys an opportunity to answer just a couple more questions real quick. What is one thing about you, your business, a process, a part of your culture that you think makes you truly unstoppable?
- [101:46]
C
I would like to say our data driven approach. You know, we are obsessed with data and analyzing and understanding what the data is telling us to help us, you know, make critical decisions.
- [101:56]
B
You got something?
- [101:58]
A
Yeah. I think it's our values. We're rigorous, relentless, humble, positive, joyful, teamwork, inclusive. These are these, these values help us guide the path towards growth. And it's, it's something that every team member, every, every team member all the way up to our leadership team can embrace. And so as we grow, everybody's, everybody has clarity on, on how we're going to accomplish that.
- [102:28]
B
Love that. Rob, what do you got?
- [102:30]
D
Yeah, I mean, I think about what we been doing with our revamp on our training for the beginning of this year, and we talk a lot about that. We call them the three Cs. Clarity, competency, control. And as we've grown the business, you to your point, you know, if you're superhuman, maybe you can get to three, but if you don't empower people with the competency and the control, you will not be able to get to scale. Right. They have to be able to do it themselves.
- [102:57]
B
And this is the last question before I have you guys share some contact information and call somebody out. The mission statement is to change the world through inspiring, empowering, and transforming the restaurant industry. And I think the way we're going to do that is by transforming one owner at a time. So how have the three of you personally transformed. How are you better men today than you were when you got started in this industry?
- [103:16]
C
Yeah, I'm going to go with. Start with myself. You know, one of the things that I wasn't the best at was sort of unreasonable hospitality.
- [103:24]
A
Right.
- [103:24]
C
When a guest experience wasn't great. You know, when I was first managing Location one in New Haven, I wasn't always the most receptive. Maybe I was. You know, thinking back to my bar days and people trying to get free drinks, I Don't know what it was, but there was a transformative conversation I had with Ekan standing outside of our first location, just talking about the guests, you know, what they mean to us, how important they are, and. And how, you know, little things like giving away a free sandwich, giving away a free meal, you know, they don't matter. It's about the life cycle for them, and it's about their interaction with the brand. And when they have a bad experience and we still want them to keep coming, they're not gonna. You. You have to show them that unreasonable hospitality and give them the reason to come back so that we can change their mind about their first experience or a second experience whenever.
- [104:09]
B
Rob, what do you got?
- [104:10]
D
Yeah, I mean, I'm actually gonna give it credit for. For my moment as well, you know, not to, you know, jazz them up too much, but, you know, I think about our values, and I. And I come back to humble a lot. You know, I'm, as any as either of these guys will tell you, I'm usually pretty sure of what I believe. Right. And sometimes that you have to have that moment where someone sits you down and gives you the hard truth, and you got to be able to sometimes think about what they actually say and internalize it and change your behavior. When you're working in a collaborative setting with five other founders, you have to be able to listen to what they have to say and actually manifest that feedback. And that's how you build culture. Jason says practice, breach, permit. And part of that, it extends not just down, but also up and to the left and right.
- [104:58]
B
What do you got?
- [105:02]
A
Yeah, I think one of the ways that I've transformed is being better able to. To articulate how and why I make decisions. I am often. I used to often be criticized for, like, being an A to Z thinker, where I will rapidly think through a bunch of variables, and then I will say something, and it's like, well, how on earth did you get there? And so being able to communicate both with my. With my business partners, with. With direct reports, or with. With. With. With. With team members at the store level, making sure that I can provide clarity within the visions and the strategies that I convey so that they make sense and that they're coherent.
- [105:48]
B
I love that. And you already have somebody lined up for me, somebody you want to call out to be a future guest on the show.
- [105:55]
A
Go ahead. Yeah, it's got to be Brian Reese and Steve Crowley from Service Physics. They were transformational for us. They continue to be really strong partners to Haven Hot chicken. Absolutely. Recommend anybody looking to level up their operations to give them a shout.
- [106:12]
B
Brian, Steven, look out. I'm coming after you. I don't want to cut you guys short from any recommendations, or are you going to back that one?
- [106:18]
C
I mean, I would absolutely back that one. Brian and Steve have been tremendous. I would also call it Abhinav over at Biki. He's somebody that I've been fortunate enough to have some time with just to talk about technology, about hospitality, and how they sort of are intertwined in this restaurant space. And he's given me a lot of thinking as of late to really help give me some clarity around this transformation.
- [106:40]
B
I'll be back on. I love it. I mean, you've had him once already, and I'd love to get him back on because I believe in the work he's doing.
- [106:45]
C
Yeah, it's great work.
- [106:46]
A
Yeah.
- [106:47]
B
Actually, I'll be that put me down this path for the reason record. So shout out to Abby for making this happen.
- [106:53]
D
Yeah, I think my shout out would be Matt Jennings. He's a chef out of. Out of Providence. He now lives in Vermont, but he's, like, five times James Beard nominee. Amazing chef, amazing flavors. But I've been following him for years. He's a. A chef inspiration of mine. He really shows you how to balance your family, your life, your business. You know the show as well.
- [107:13]
B
Awesome guy. But he is due to come back, so.
- [107:15]
D
So, Matt, he's a man.
- [107:16]
B
I'd love to get you back. All right, fellas, you got to get going, so I'm gonna let you go. This is where I say thank you so much for making time to share your story, your knowledge, your perspectives, your values. You make the work I do possible, and there is no questioning. You are unstoppable. Cheers.