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Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore
1232: Brian Reece and Steve Crowley, Co-Founders of Service Physics
02:01:21
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- [00:00]
Steve Crowley
And so we like to, you know, nobody wakes up every day and thinks about how they can go to work and struggle, how they can go to work and move around and run out of things. I believe that people wake up every day and just want to show up and shine. We talk a lot about something we call the story of work. And so like any story, it has a beginning, has a middle, and it has an end. And the three phases of those stories can be reflected with questions. So start at the beginning of the story. Why do people wake up every day and choose to spend their time, their most precious commodity? Because, you know, no matter how much wealth you ever acquire, you can't buy more of your time back. It's gone, is gone. But you give that time to an organization to do something. So everybody has a why. That story concludes with what the customer gets, what the customer wants, right? And so we have a pretty good beginning and we have a pretty good end. And when people ask us like, hey, what do you do? We're really good at describing the why we do it and the what the customer gets. The entire middle of that story is the question of how work gets done. How do we bridge why we got up in the morning to what the customer gets? And we gloss over that and don't pay it the attention it deserves. And so the practice of service physics is really understanding that how do things go down? We put a lot of emphasis on getting people out of their offices and boardrooms and back rooms and onto the front line to watch people doing their work and then to get the people who are doing the work out of their work, to watch other people do that work. Because that's where you really start to see these sort of like inefficiencies that we've just accepted as a part of what happens. Because motion looks like work, but it's not.
- [01:40]
Eric Cacciatore
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 made possible by US Foods. And one of the pillars of the US Foods we help you make it promise is more tools which provides resources designed to make running your food service operation easier and more efficient. From the all in one food service app Moxie, which goes beyond order placement to help manage every part of your operation 24. 7 to the digital solutions like check business tools and vitals. US Foods delivers smart time saving tools built to simplify operations and support your success. To learn more visit www.usfoods.com. expect more restaurant Owners what if I told you there is a way to lower your prime cost by a thousand dollars and get paid $1,000 on top of that? If it sounds too good to be true, it's not. Restaurant Systems Pro is offering that deal right now to 10 of my lucky listeners. Listen closely. Join the Restaurant Systems Pro 30 Day Prime Cost Challenge and if you successfully improve your prime cost by 1000 do dollars or more compared to the same 30 days the year prior, they will pay you $1000. Find the link in the show notes titled restaurant systems pro 30 day prime cost challenge. Click that link and get signed up. Today only 10 people are going to get approved into this program. Get on it. This episode is made possible by Sir Boni your all in one bookkeeping and financial solution. We're talking about reliable tax preparation, business incorporation, seamless payroll and compliance reports, strategic CFO services that drive business growth, detailed custom reporting for complete financial clarity, dedicated support for restaurants and multi location businesses. Did I mention bookkeeping late Sir Boney Handle the numbers so you can focus on the vision. Call Sir Bony today at 281-888-2413 to schedule your free 30 minute consultation and discover how Siboney can streamline your operations and boost your bottom line. Limited Time Offer an exclusive to restaurant Stoppable listeners. Mention and get 20% off your first month of services. This episode is made possible by Mees. Mies is a digital recipe platform that helps you stay creative, build profitable menus and nail food execution at scale. We know to scale you need consistency because consistency builds trust with your guests and your staff. We all want to know what the job done right looks like and when you have systems, your systems are a picture of perfection of what that job done right is is and that puts us to peace. We are so happy when we know.
- [04:58]
We'Re doing a good job.
- [04:59]
Me's will be the one source of truth for your entire team. It's time to take control of your profitability. Learn more at www.getmes.com unstoppable that's www.G-E-T m e e z.com unstoppable with excitement.
- [05:17]
Allow me to introduce to you today's guest co founders of Service Physics Brian Reese and Steve Crowley. My men are unstoppable today.
- [05:26]
Brian Reese
Hell yeah.
- [05:27]
Steve Crowley
Always, dude.
- [05:28]
Eric Cacciatore
I'm stoked to be here. My guys. So you are here because. Episode 1151, Jason Sabasinsk. Sabos. I knew I was gonna screw up the name Jason. I'm sorry. I don't know why I struggle. So Basinski, Did I say it correctly? That's the one, right? Haven Hot Chicken Again, episode 1151. He had amazing things to say about you guys. And I'm here just to follow up. You know, I really just want to go deeper to. To learn more. He. He said that, you know, that you guys really helped them advance and where they were with trying to franchise their operation scale and find efficiencies. So I can't wait to dive into exactly what it is you guys do. But before we dive into who you are and how you got to where you are today and the wealth of knowledge you collectively have, let's get that motivational inspirational ball rolling with a success quote or mantra. What do you got for us?
- [06:14]
Brian Reese
Well, I, you know, would be remiss if we didn't talk about the mission of service physics. And our mantra there is to make service work better for people. And so we find if we keep folks on the team and keep ourselves focused on making service work better for people, that always leads us in the right direction. It's that human centered approach to problem solving.
- [06:33]
Eric Cacciatore
Make service work better for people. And do you have anything to add to that, Steve?
- [06:37]
Steve Crowley
I'd just like to call out the sort of double meaning there. We're making service work better for people, so the customer service should just be great for them, but also the work itself that the people who serve customers day in and day out do every day could just be more simple and repeatable. And instead, most of what happens in our industry is people going to work and grinding it out, spending the peak periods in the weeds, engaging in a lot of friction and struggle. So when you remove waste from the work, we can achieve that mission for customers, for employees, and then it just trickles down to the bottom line.
- [07:14]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah.
- [07:14]
Go deeper into what? Making it work, like making service work better for people. I mean, like, what does that look like? How does service improve for people?
- [07:25]
Steve Crowley
I'll answer the same question that Brian just answered with my sort of mantra, which I think touches upon that, which is motion is not equal to work.
- [07:34]
Eric Cacciatore
Right. What is the definition of work? And I'm asking you this because I know your background and I'm sure you can answer it.
- [07:39]
Steve Crowley
Yeah, sort of underpinning of lean, which is the suite of tools and techniques and really mindset that service physics is. Is based upon, defines work as activity that creates value for customers and waste as anything that does not. So if you were to visualize that like on a pie chart, there's some small sliver of activity that creates value for the customer.
- [08:05]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah.
- [08:06]
Steve Crowley
And then there's everything else.
- [08:07]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah.
- [08:07]
Steve Crowley
And so the opportunity is. Is gigantic.
- [08:09]
Eric Cacciatore
So like, I think the formula for work is like force times distance over time or something like that. Is that what it is?
- [08:16]
Steve Crowley
Something like that, yeah. Actually the. You're not the first person to measured.
- [08:20]
Eric Cacciatore
In joules or something.
- [08:22]
Steve Crowley
I think, you know, the first person to bring that up. And one of the. Maybe we can tell the story in a little bit about how service physics became named service physics, but we do love to think about things in terms of how things interact with the physical environment, be it equipment, people, inventory, moving through and using a formulaic approach to just. Instead of route our problem solving through our opinions, build it from a place of facts and data and a uniform problem solving methodology that can be used by anybody in a restaurant company from the front line up to the boardroom.
- [09:03]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah. I think it's really interesting too that just this idea of getting systems or service to work for people, I think. I mean, I try not to go too deep into a rabbit hole straight out of the gates. Right. But like we are. At the end of the day, we are people. I think the world is becoming more and more dependent on systems and processes that keep things in order as you go forward. And that's a necessity. But at the same time, like people in nature are chaotic, you know, so it's a. It's a very yin and yang thing where people are think. We like to put things in order, but at the same time we thrive in chaos. And sometimes like, like. But we also thrive in order.
- [09:38]
Right?
- [09:39]
It's a. It's a yes.
- [09:39]
And kind of thing.
- [09:42]
So like how do you get service or systems to not necessarily go against the. The grain of human nature, but to go with the grain of human nature? Is that the kind of stuff you guys get into?
- [09:51]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. And. And let's. Let's go right down this philosophical rabbit hole. Might as well. This is where we spend most of.
- [09:57]
Eric Cacciatore
Our days and wait before you go down. That whole work equals force times distance. I was right. And times cos. 0, whatever. I was kind of surprised I pulled that from my aviation days. I wanted to pat myself in the back. Philosophy. Philosophy. Go for it.
- [10:13]
Steve Crowley
So we like, to. You know, nobody wakes up every day and thinks about how they can go to work and struggle, how they can go to work and move around and run out of things. I believe that people wake up every day and just want to show up and shine. We talk a lot about something we call the story of work. And so, like any story, it has a beginning, has a middle, and it has an end. And the three phases of those stories can be reflected with questions. So start at the beginning of the story. Why do people wake up every day and choose to spend their time, their most precious commodity? Because, you know, no matter how much wealth you ever acquire, you can't buy more of your time back. It's gone, is gone. But you give that time to an organization to do something. So everybody has a why. That story concludes with what the customer gets, what the customer wants. Right. And so we have a pretty good beginning, and we have a pretty good end. And when people ask us, like, hey, what do you do? We're really good at describing the why we do it and what the customer gets. The entire middle of that story is the question of how work gets done. How do we bridge why we got up in the morning to what the customer gets? And we gloss over that and don't pay it the attention it deserves. And so the practice of service physics is really understanding that how do things go down? We put a lot of emphasis on getting people out of their offices and boardrooms and back rooms and onto the front line to watch people doing their work and then to get the people who are doing the work out of their work, to. To watch other people do that work. Because that's where you really start to see these sort of, like, inefficiencies that we've just accepted as a part of what happens. Because motion looks like work.
- [11:47]
Eric Cacciatore
Right? Right.
- [11:48]
Steve Crowley
But it's not exactly.
- [11:49]
Eric Cacciatore
And with the world we live in today, with all the data touch points, you can really get super granular about, like, if you put the systems in place to collect that data, like, it just tells you so much about where the opportunity is.
- [11:59]
Steve Crowley
Absolutely. And we're excited about the future that exists, with cameras and artificial intelligence giving us some of these leading indicators. But today, most of the data we can get from restaurant systems are lagging.
- [12:09]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, we're going to. Yeah, we're going to get into that. We're going to. Like, when we get to the part of the conversation of, like, where are we today? In terms of, like, after we share your backstory, like, I want to pull back where you like, what gets you guys excited with this, this. This technology? I'm really interested in getting into that before we move on. Did you want to add anything to that, Brian?
- [12:26]
Brian Reese
Man, no, I think, you know, just back to that mantra, making service work better for people. If we keep the people at the center of the. Of the activity, of the problem solving, you know, it can really connect. Just like Steve was saying, why people show up to work every day with the value the customer's getting. And we know from our experience that when people are working in direct service of value to other people, that's like the most fulfilling thing that they can be doing with their time.
- [12:49]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, it's really. At the end of the day, I think that's what it means to be human. I think if you look at the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like, beyond, like, shelter and security, feeling secure. We need to be seen in the way. The way we are seen is by being of value to other people, serving other people. And it's. I think it's such a part of our DNA, our tribal DNA, to add value to our tribe, to be appreciated and seen, because if we weren't valued and seen, they'd get rid of the dead weight and you'd be on your.
- [13:16]
Own in the wild.
- [13:17]
And we don't do good on our own, you know, so it's just so.
- [13:19]
Important to be seen, to see and.
- [13:21]
Be seen and to try to serve and add value.
- [13:23]
Brian Reese
That's right.
- [13:24]
Steve Crowley
And we.
- [13:24]
Brian Reese
We even would take it a step further and say, like, that's almost the whole entire point of a business is to create value for company people, right? Yeah.
- [13:30]
Eric Cacciatore
Like, literally, it's in the word. It's like your company is the company you keep, you know?
- [13:35]
Brian Reese
Yeah. And so if we take that mission to, like, its biggest possible vision, it's really just making work better for people and, you know, in service of other people. And so, you know, I've had so many jobs in my career that were just terrible, terrible bosses, terrible working conditions. Nobody was thinking about the work that I was being asked to do from a, you know, how can we make this easier? How can we make it more joyful so that it's more directly connected to the value we want to create for the customer? And so that's the sort of perspective we bring with service. Physics is like, really looking at what is that messy middle of the work story and how can we make it easier, more joyful so that we free folks up from figuring out how to replenish their inventory, how to spread the mayonnaise on the sandwich and focus more on how can I create value for the customer through human interaction, through higher quality product, whatever. That is awesome.
- [14:27]
Steve Crowley
And we're not reinventing a knowledge base here. So manufacturing has been perfecting better ways of making stuff for more than a century.
- [14:38]
Eric Cacciatore
That's what we do.
- [14:39]
Steve Crowley
That's what we do.
- [14:40]
Eric Cacciatore
Make things better.
- [14:41]
Steve Crowley
Yeah, but that, the, the, the leaps in technology around making work better in manufacturing has spread to many industry verticals. But not the restaurant industry.
- [14:52]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, I can't wait to get into this stuff. Before we get into this, like we really pull it back. I want to help the listeners kind of better understand, you know, I think it's coming out, reading between the lines, the work you do today. But just like, like, like snapshot, like what is service physics today? Like who are we talking to?
- [15:09]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. I think many people would describe us as a consultancy, but as you know, former Fortune 500 company employees, we've grown to despise the C word. There's another C word we like, which is coaching, which is a part of what we do, but it doesn't encompass all of what we do. I would describe our, our practice as a combination of lean thinking and manufacturing methodology, systems engineering and then like human centered design, really understanding value from the perspective of the customer and then also the people who are engaging in that value creating work.
- [15:43]
Eric Cacciatore
Say that one more time. Lean systems.
- [15:44]
Steve Crowley
Yeah, lean systems systems engineering and human centered design. Okay. You put all those things together and we've assembled a team of the world's best problem solvers. Got it.
- [15:54]
Eric Cacciatore
How many clients are you working with today?
- [15:57]
Brian Reese
At any given time? It's probably three to four.
- [16:00]
Steve Crowley
Yeah, I think we've, we've been as busy as six or seven. But we really start to max out our capacity at that point. You know, we're in the process of growing. But you know, the world's best problem solvers don't grow on trees.
- [16:11]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah. And some of the names you've worked with, obviously, Haven, Hot Chicken. I think I saw Krispy Kreme is one of your clients. Starbucks is one of your clients. Or those are pass. Get your past employers.
- [16:21]
Steve Crowley
Yeah, Starbucks is a past employer. Just kind of go down the list of restaurant folks who've been working with Panda Express for a number of years. We continue to engage with Vail resorts during the season, so that makes sense to do with them. Pete's Coffee and Tea. We supported Mod Pizza a couple of years ago.
- [16:39]
Eric Cacciatore
Past guests in the show.
- [16:40]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. So, you know, we, you know, since the Inception of our company a little over five years ago. We started working with small regional companies very quickly started getting pulled on from these larger companies. It's been a challenge to our growth. So for the, the entrepreneurs listening on your, in your audience, I think that's one of the, the things to consider is like size of client relative to the maturity of your organization. That's been a constant, you know, opposing tension for us as we've grown. Yeah.
- [17:12]
Eric Cacciatore
So traditionally you worked with larger organizations but you're trying to get more into that, what like 4 to 10, 10 to 20 unit operator range.
- [17:21]
Steve Crowley
I think we recognize that the, the larger. So we're interested in industry transformation. That's you know, the purpose of our mission. We're not going to be satisfied until we accomplish that. But also, you know, Brian and I are not at the beginning of our career. So we're running out of time.
- [17:36]
Eric Cacciatore
Right.
- [17:37]
Steve Crowley
And you know, I worked with a coach years ago who said that most problems boil down to a cycle time demand rate problem. You know, how much time do you have and how long is it going to. Right. So we know that, you know, working with these large companies is great because they have, you know, tens of thousands, if not, you know, 100,000 employees that are early in their career and they'll go on to other companies and bring this, this thinking with them. However, it's a giant industry and more than 90% of these small, medium sized businesses. And it's actually where we started and had a lot of fun is with companies like Haven Hot Chicken. We started pre Restaurant one. They were still doing kitchen pop ups and asked for some support. And so we supported them and their, their early.
- [18:13]
Eric Cacciatore
It was Ekan that you guys had in the relationship. Right. Because he was also at AB Dev. Right?
- [18:17]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. Yeah. So Anheuser Busch, Anheuser Bush. Yeah, Bevin.
- [18:22]
Eric Cacciatore
Is that what it is? Anheuser Bush, Bevin or whatever?
- [18:24]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. AB and Budweiser, the, the parent behind Budweiser. So I'll just maybe do a quick little storytelling around who we are and how we got here.
- [18:35]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. So like that's kind of what I want to go to next. We'll get into that.
- [18:39]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. So it's probably a story you've heard before. Have you heard the one about a barista and a nuclear engineer walking to a bar?
- [18:46]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah.
- [18:46]
Steve Crowley
Okay.
- [18:47]
Eric Cacciatore
So only once. It was only because I did a little research before getting here.
- [18:51]
Steve Crowley
So Brian and I met at Starbucks Coffee Company more than 10 years ago. I actually started working there as a barista in the 90s as a stop along the way, while I was finishing my hospitality program at Boston University, which is where I was born and raised, I worked through the field hierarchy for about a decade before moving into the corporate headquarters into an operations strategy position, which is where I met Brian, who had joined from the Department of Defense as a nuclear engineer, which he, you know, jokes around it's all just hot water, whether it's nuclear submarines or. Or making coffee. But, you know, during that time, the great financial crisis, Starbucks was in a lot of trouble. The stock price had bottomed out, closing stores. There was recognition that more than half of the drinks that went across the counter were not achieving our own quality standards. And so with a bleak economic outlook, we looked across industry to say, like, who else has solved problems like this before? And through some really clever networking, there was a strategy executive who had been exposed to lean manufacturing as a concept in a consulting role and said, you know, I think there's something to that for us to learn. And so we partnered with ex Toyota coaches to teach us about the work of brewing coffee and making coffee and serving customers that we had been doing sort of subconsciously for 30 years. And they brought that all to consciousness. They submerged us in that, like how work happens. And we went to work on a long journey of redesigning all the store processes, including management processes, and all said and done that that took about 10 years for the Starbucks transformation to.
- [20:32]
Eric Cacciatore
And this is like 2010.
- [20:33]
Steve Crowley
It was like 2007 is when. Is when the signals really began. 2008 is when it got really, really heavy.
- [20:40]
Eric Cacciatore
And that how many hundreds of stores.
- [20:41]
Did Starbucks, if not thousands of stores does Starbucks have by 2007?
- [20:45]
Steve Crowley
In 2007 we were probably 8, 000 or so is.
- [20:49]
Eric Cacciatore
Which just goes to show that the growth never stops.
- [20:51]
Steve Crowley
That's right.
- [20:52]
Eric Cacciatore
You know, when I'm talking about growth, I'm not talking about number of units. I'm talking about efficiency, like the, the internal, like the growth of like doing things better, more efficient.
- [21:01]
Steve Crowley
Well, you think about the Starbucks journey. When I joined in the 90s, the mantra was 2000 stores by 2000. So it's probably inconceivable for most of the listeners to imagine a world that only has 2,000 Starbucks, where they're not across the street from each other. But after that point, there was a format called Core B, which was designed to be able to slap into any rectangle space you could find on the planet. And so at that time, you'll remember Frappuccino had just been introduced and the margin on ice, turns out is really, really good. So Starbucks had a lot of cash. And so what are you going to do with all this cash? Well, let's take real estate and start slapping these core Bs in. And so we went on this tremendous like arc of growth from 2000 to like 2007 and all was well and good. And then the bottom dropped out of the economy and folks didn't have the disposable income to spend at Starbucks. And so Starbucks had quality problems, labor productivity problems, profitability problems. The center of the P and L was a mess. And it wasn't something that could be solved locally across, you know, now 8,000 stores. It needed to be solved programmatically from, from HQ. And so we went to work on designing a service delivery system built on simple and repeatable work. And it's hard to imagine a world that, where Starbucks doesn't function like it does today. But I often say, like you went into Starbucks in 2005 during a peak period, you could have a clown go across the back line on a unicycle juggling fire and knives and you wouldn't have noticed because there was so much motion and chaos back there and it was just accepted. And so fast forward post transformation, you've got a stable standard service delivery system and no matter how busy they get, they're not moving around a lot. They're not like stressed out and yelling at each other.
- [22:40]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, yeah. Anything to add to that, Brian?
- [22:43]
Brian Reese
No, I think that's the foundation of the service physics practice. And you know, the rest of the story is, you know, how service physics came to be as a company. But really that's the story of, of the work and the inspiration for how we approach everything today.
- [23:00]
Eric Cacciatore
This episode is made possible by US Foods and one of the pillars of the US Foods we help you make it promise is more tools which provides resources designed to make running your food service operation easier and more efficient. From the all in one food service at Moxie, which goes beyond order placement to help you manage every part of your operation 24, 7 to the digital solutions like check business tools and vitals, US Foods delivers smart time saving tools built to simplify your operation and support your success. With Moxie alone, you can browse products with AI powered search, manage lists, track deliveries with the AI powered Where's My Truck? By US Foods reorder with just a few clicks and you can do that from your phone, tablet or desktop. Here's a bonus, you can even browse Moxie without signing in. And we can't forget Check Business Tools, which is essentially a suite of vetted third party solutions that help operators solve critical business challenges such as drive traffic to their location, simplify staffing processes, and modernize operations for greater efficiency. To learn more, visit www.usfoods.com. expect more restaurant Owners what if I told you there was a way to lower your prime cost by $1,000 month over month and get paid $1,000? That sounds like a deal too good to be true. But that's exactly the deal that Restaurant Systems Pro is offering 10 of my lucky listeners. So why are they doing this? Because they consistently help their clients get between 15 and 25% profit in their business. And when they approach new clients and say, I can do the same thing for you, they get met with a lot of resistance. And because it sounds too good to be true, most restaurants think if you do between 5 and 10%, you're doing good. So to hit 15 or 25%, like what do we have to sacrifice? What, what scam are you throwing at me, sir? No, thank you. But the truth is they really do help people hit these numbers. And the way they do it is by having all the most important systems that are tied to profitability fully integrated into an enterprise solution. I'm talking like counting, inventory, scheduling, checklists, training systems, general ledger, balance sheets, costing cards. When you have all those systems dialed in, ironclad, tied, connected, fully integrated in an enterprise solution, you get data. And when you have data, you can make little tweaks here and there. And those little tweaks you can see the fruits of your labor, the effects of your efforts. And that's how you hit 15 and 25% profit. And on top of all this, they also have support, which is unheard of in today's age. So you get all these things compounded that help you hit that 15 to 25%. And if I have your attention, keep listening. Join the restaurant systems pro 30 day prime cost challenge. And if you successfully improve your prime cost by one $1,000 or more compared to the same 30 day period last year, they will pay you a thousand dollars. If you're listening on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, find the show notes and we will have a link titled restaurant systems pro 30 day prime cost challenge. Click that link and get signed up today. Only 10 spots, guys.
- [26:07]
Do not wait.
- [26:08]
Get your spot, lower your prime cost by a thousand dollars and get paid that $1,000. They're actually calling this a reverse guarantee. Get on it.
- [26:16]
So, I mean I. So you guys met at Starbucks I mean, looking at your, your backgrounds, Brian. So basically O3, you're in the world of engineering. You're an intern for Chroma Chrome, Chromaly Chrome Alloy Cromwell. You spent a little bit of time with IBM as a supply chain engineer, co op. They went to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard where you're the program manager and nuclear engineer. That's around the time you crossed paths with, with Steve.
- [26:42]
Brian Reese
Yeah, that's right. So have an industrial engineering degree. So what do you do with an industrial engineering degree in this day and age, you know, when most manufacturing is. Is overseas? So you can either go work at a car manufacturing plant or apparently go work for the Department of Defense nuclear sub.
- [26:58]
Eric Cacciatore
Really good at those.
- [26:59]
Brian Reese
Yeah.
- [27:00]
Eric Cacciatore
And then so you go from this world and then 2012, you go to work for Starbucks. I don't think I've ever had a nuclear engineer go to Starbucks for work. Yeah, that's kind of a crazy leap, man.
- [27:12]
Brian Reese
So I was working for the DOD and I couldn't really get behind the mission. You know, I would walk around the office every day and folks, the older guys just were like, crossing the days off their calendar, waiting for retirement when they could actually start enjoying life. Right?
- [27:26]
Eric Cacciatore
That's my fear.
- [27:27]
Brian Reese
Yeah. And so that's what I was saying earlier. Like, I've just had these jobs where I just felt like what I was doing with my time was not contributing value to the world. And so I really wanted to do something else, but I had no idea what that something else was and took me a year and a half of really hard work. Really just trying to say, like, where can I take my career from here? And, you know, you'll appreciate this, right? Like, all the classes I took, all the, like, certifications I got, it was actually the people that I met that helped bridge the gap for me. And so I met Lynn Hepler. I call her my patron saint of Starbucks because she really took it upon herself. We were in a class together to, like, help me get to my next, my next stage of my career. So I had no intent to go to Starbucks, but really lucked into a job there on Gary Lehman's team, who's a great mentor of ours now doing EOS implementation.
- [28:21]
Eric Cacciatore
Oh. So we still work quite a bit. Eos.
- [28:24]
Brian Reese
I'm stoked. That'll be a fun one. So anyway, it just, you know, I'm just mentioning these folks because these were the people who really helped me in my career journey to, to make that big shift. And I wouldn't have been able to do it on My own by any stretch. So these, these folks really put themselves out there. I have no idea why to this.
- [28:40]
Eric Cacciatore
Day, like when we like the normal path for like restaurant tour, I think when people close with their eyes, like, how do people become a restaurant? Or like become a chef? And then like you like go to culinary school, go work for a successful chef, become the chef, open a restaurant, find a general manager. Like, that's like the, the path you think of, of.
- [28:58]
Steve Crowley
Right.
- [28:58]
Eric Cacciatore
But you know, going to culinary school, I think the number one thing when that conversation comes up when I'm interviewing people, it's not about what you learn there, it's about the connections you make there. That the doors that opens to go get the job with that chef that will help you build a resume. So you can go to a bank and say, I work for Thomas Keller.
- [29:16]
Brian Reese
That's right.
- [29:17]
Eric Cacciatore
Six months.
- [29:17]
Brian Reese
It's amazing.
- [29:18]
Eric Cacciatore
Give me a million dollars.
- [29:19]
Brian Reese
Yeah, there's always kind of crazy this, you know, everybody says you got to have a goal. What's your, what's your five year vision? Like, where do you want to be in your career? And I actually, frankly never really had that. And so I was just sort of navigating where my passion took me and like choosing the doors as they opened. And you know, I've had doors open that I chose not to go through. So, you know, to some extent there was some like, intention there. But getting into Starbucks is where I really just discovered this, this whole passion for creating value for customers. You know, I've worked in E Commerce, I've worked in the Department of Defense. And it's just really difficult because you can't see how the work that you're doing, you can't directly see the value.
- [29:57]
Eric Cacciatore
You don't get seen. You're not being seen, you're not seeing like. Sorry, go ahead.
- [30:01]
Brian Reese
No, sorry. You can't see the smiles.
- [30:03]
Eric Cacciatore
Exactly. And I think we forget what, what drives us that back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs being seen and feel in seeing and being seen. And when you remove the, the result of your work, like the, like the. That's why the restaurant industry is so satisfying is like you in that moment are getting approval or disapproval, you know, like that, like it's, it's so crucial to our like, mental health.
- [30:26]
Steve Crowley
Yeah.
- [30:27]
Brian Reese
And then the opposite is true.
- [30:28]
Steve Crowley
Right.
- [30:28]
Brian Reese
When you see the struggle, you know, when you, when you walk into an operation, you just see people yelling at each other and sweating and, and just struggling. And then you see the, how that plays out in the guest experience and so, you know, we just see a world where service experiences can be so much better for people if we focus on making that, that work easier.
- [30:45]
Eric Cacciatore
I love that. The other thing that makes me think from your story too, I think with AI on the rise, there's going to be a lot of people from different industries losing their, their jobs. And I think what's hopeful is as the restaurant industry is also getting more and more complex, so there's a need for technical workers in the restaurant industry. So I think as. But at the same time there's, it's still so human. So I think that it's going to be. There's this renaissance or like this like, like the. Something is about to go off in the restaurant industry where people are going to be losing their jobs and all of a sudden there's going to be an influx of people looking for opportunity within the restaurant industry. And I hope that it helps create balance where there's no more like 20,000 unit operators, but there's more, you know, 200 to 100 regional unit operators or even like more 50 unit operators. Hell, you can make really good money with the 20 unit operation. Like, how do we, how do we spread the knowledge and create opportunity? And like, I think there's gonna be so many people rushing to the industry to be able to level that playing field.
- [31:46]
Brian Reese
And it's a great industry that I think, you know, a lot of those technologists don't give it credit, you know, just back to like being able to see the result of your work so immediately, you know, impacting people. So I think you're right. Like a lot of folks are going to see what's possible in the industry and bring their unique skills and perspectives to a very traditional and in some ways not very sophisticated industry. And so that's the opportunity.
- [32:10]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, it's interesting too. Like food has literally been at the corner, like the, the pivotal, like food is always at this like pivot point for like the, the progress of humanity. And we forget that to this day. It's still like it has always been that way. It will always be that way. I was watching a documentary on George Washington last night and like he was a farmer and they were farming tobacco and like there were big taxes on that with Great Britain. And to kind of give it to the man, he started farming wheat and flour, you know, and like that sparked a revolution, you know, or not like the independence of this, this country. You know, like it's, there's always food behind the scenes, like influencing what's going.
- [32:50]
Steve Crowley
On in taxes yeah.
- [32:53]
Eric Cacciatore
Anyway, I digress. So Brian, you pivot to Starbucks, you get involved in this world. You're the digital product manager for Starbucks. You're there until what, 2016. 16. Then you go to ZX Ventures. Yep. Global Director Data Strategy and Mobile and then AB where you're the Global Director of Retail. That's your, your path.
- [33:18]
Brian Reese
Yeah.
- [33:18]
Eric Cacciatore
For 2019 where you break off with Steve to start Service physics and Steve a little your background. 2006 where you're at Starbucks. We kind of talked about that. What was the work that you. The titles I see is just District Manager, Implementation Project Manager, Senior Continuous Improvement Manager. This is all like Kaizen. This is all the stuff you were talking about before about constant evolution, that constant growth. Then you leave Starbucks, you go to Anheuser Busch. What's going on here? Take us to that point.
- [33:49]
Steve Crowley
So and sorry for the HRE job titles there that I could describe. What I was actually doing was running the, the lean Innovation lab that Starbucks had, which was best way to describe it might be. Looks kind of like a Starbucks store does not have real customers like coming in off the street is buried in the middle of the headquarters building and all of the cabinetry was on casters and all the plumbing and electric came in from above on hoses. So we could configure any store type in the world that we wanted to. You know, the Japan team reached out and said we have this drive thru problem. We can configure their drive thru setup and start doing problem solving. We had teams of baristas come in from the Seattle area on rotating basis a couple months at a time and that spend Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with us from 10 to 3 and we would run experiments either like very specific point Kaizen problem solving at a station or we might like force volume through the system to help help a program owner working on a product that's a year and a half away understand how it's going to need to be built to be delivered within the system of Starbucks. So went on from that into working on the management system for store managers, district managers, regional directors of Starbucks to tick and tie that all together through to the service delivery system so that it's all marching in the same direction. And then towards the end of my time at Starbucks, we package that into a complete operational excellence program which enabled the organization to do better innovation and get things to market more quickly and to communicate with each store in a way that was more humane. So five times a year instead of five times a day is a good way to think about that. Brian and I worked together on a bunch of really cool projects during that time. He was on the engineering team, I was organizing the experimentation and problem solving in the lab. So good partnership around redesign of the, of the Starbucks drive thru and sort of the, the late 2000s. Brian was the program owner for Mobile Order and Pay. So he had this kind of like Apollo 11 moment where he's like, I gotta stick this square thing into this round thing with just the things we have here. And so we did a lot of that work in the lab and figured out how to get to an MVP as quickly as possible, which was just a really a matter of months at a time when mobile ordering was not a thing that people knew about or thought was possible. And Howard Schultz, the CEO at the time, walked into a room and said, I want to be able to pick up my phone on the subway in Manhattan, order my coffee, come up, up from underground and have my coffee waiting on the handoff plane. And that problem fell to Brian to solve. So that was super exciting. And then Brian went on to the Digital Ventures team and did some product work and then went over to AB InBev's innovation arm, ZX Ventures. And then that group decided that they wanted to start building craft beer businesses around the world through brand experience. And so they wanted to open brew pubs, bars and restaurants. And they asked him if he knew anybody at Starbucks that could lead operations. And so I was like, oh, it'd be cool to work with you again. It took a few months between the time I got on the ground and the time I was able to get Brian convinced enough to come from his E commerce team over to the retail team. But then we were able to work together again, is where we started to develop the practice of service physics, which was really inspired by a terrible book that I.
- [37:03]
Eric Cacciatore
The title of your company?
- [37:05]
Steve Crowley
No, no, the, the, the insight that led to the company. And I don't want to throw any authors under the bus, but the insight was that anything you do hits a point of diminishing returns. So you can find the minimum effective dose of sleep, exercise, nutrition, all of these things, if you can identify them, you can get a lot of value in a short amount of time. And having worked in the lean world for a while, I recognize that many organizations and we benchmark not just across the restaurant industry, but also government, healthcare, education, there's a success rate of full lean transformation of 5%. And so like 95% of the time, these transformations fail. And I read this book and I was like, man, There's. There's something in this which is lean as a methodology is so exciting and so big that everybody wants to do everything, and they try to do everything, and then the transformations are too heavy to get off the ground. But what I've noticed in my practice is there's like a handful of things that if you give them to an operator, they just lift off and that becomes the beginning of their practice. And then they can bring in these other pieces of the practice as they. As they learn. But not everybody needs to know everything. You need to learn what you need to learn at the moment when you have the problem that that technique might apply to.
- [38:26]
Eric Cacciatore
So what you're talking about right now is what comes up a lot on the show. It's, I think, you know, different speaking to different people. Had Ed Daugherty on the show. He's a restaurant coach out of Philadelphia. He talks about one degree. What's the one thing? Who's the other woman? Her name's. Escape me. Anyway, she talks about the one thing.
- [38:48]
Steve Crowley
Right.
- [38:48]
Eric Cacciatore
Why can I think of her name? She's been on the show like three times, too. It's killing me. It'll come to me eventually. But the whole idea is like, just what is the one thing that you could do better than anybody else and put all of your energy into doing that one thing? 80 of the yield comes from 20 of the work. So, like, what is that like? Like, how do you proto principle this? You know, like what, like, what is your lane? Stay in it, be better than anybody else, and double down.
- [39:09]
Steve Crowley
Down.
- [39:10]
Brian Reese
Yeah.
- [39:10]
Steve Crowley
I worked with a coach in Southern California who had a. A coaching practice built out around one question, which is what's stuck? Right. So we're going to watch an order come in. We're going to watch an order go through all the steps in the process, and we want to identify any moment where that thing stopped being worked on.
- [39:26]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah.
- [39:26]
Steve Crowley
Why?
- [39:27]
Eric Cacciatore
Right.
- [39:28]
Steve Crowley
And you can. If you can figure out why it's stuck and why it stopped being work on and solve that problem and then solve it again and again and again. Eventually what you end up with a restaurant that's just humming with continuous flow. And it's. It's simple but hard.
- [39:41]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah. It kind of reminds me of what I like to say is scale doesn't come from putting your energy out. It comes from putting your energy in. And that's into what you're already doing 1% better every day. Don't compare yourself to the other fried chicken joint. Compare yourself to you today, tomorrow.
- [39:57]
Steve Crowley
That's right.
- [39:57]
Eric Cacciatore
You know, oh, man, her name is at the tip of my tongue and I want to give her a credit. So if it comes to my main. If it comes in, I might stop later on. You said something about the law of diminishing returns. Returns. You said the law of diminishing returns, which is basically this idea that no matter what you do, the, like, the returns on your work are going to diminish over time. Right.
- [40:19]
Steve Crowley
Well, everything hits a, Everything hits a tipping point. Right. So I think the way they teach us on economics class is like eating skittles. The first skittle's amazing, the second one's amazing, the third one's amazing. But you hit a point where like, suddenly it's like the middle that, like.
- [40:32]
Eric Cacciatore
This is the expectation.
- [40:34]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. The next skittle isn't as good as the incremental skittle that you ate before it. And so you can find that moment where you've derived the best ROI on something and then stop.
- [40:44]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah. So that was the connection you were saying. So the law of diminishing return ties to this idea of being very efficient with focusing on the fewest amount of things. So get more into that because I feel like there's still in my mind a little bit of a disconnect of how those two things are tied.
- [40:59]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. So I'll give an example of a really simple thing that we do with folks in the beginning, with partners in the beginning, that yields a lot of results. So remember, you, you can go on a, they call it like a lean journey. You can explore this methodology, exploit this methodology for your entire career, and never get to all of it. But let's go back to the, the quote at the beginning where motion is not equal to work. There is a technique popularized in industrial engineering and lean work called a spaghetti diagram. The, the barriers to, to using this tool are really low because all you need is a piece of paper and a pencil. If you want to get really fancy, you can get one of those, like multi colored Bic pens from the early 90s. And you essentially draw the layout of the space you're working in. So there's an oven here, there's a cooktop here, there's a fryer here.
- [41:50]
Eric Cacciatore
Like an overhead view.
- [41:51]
Steve Crowley
Like an overhead view. And then you put your, a pen or pencil to the paper where the operator's starting. And for like three to five minutes, you just trace their motion through the operation. Invariably, and I've done this hundreds of times, the operator from the organization that you're doing it with within the first 30 seconds will say like, why is she going over there? And you've got to stop them and say, like, let's not worry about why she's going over there, because she's going over there to get something. The right question is, what's over there that shouldn't be? But we'll get to that. But we still have, like, three more minutes to be watching this, and we're gonna find, like, 20 things that are just mislocated. Um, and so now you've got this plate of spaghetti on your diagram, we can start to say, like, how do we make this, like, lower carbohydrate? Let's get rid of some of these loops. And you know, you may be taking away two seconds here, five seconds here, but you take an end to end order where you did 15 seconds of motion. You serve it, you know, a thousand entrees with this much motion a day. 15 seconds. And that's also. You're like, oh, that's a significant amount of labor that I'm investing in this motion, which the customer doesn't care about and the human doesn't really want to do. And that's just one. That's just like the minimum effective dose of lean might be the spaghetti diagram. Because you can go be dangerous and create a lot of value for customers and make work really simple just with that one technique.
- [43:04]
Eric Cacciatore
So all we need to do this is a security camera. And you know, as people are walking around, you're just kind of. You do like one person at a time with one color. Then you find the next person, do a net, and you just get this bowl of colors and spaghetti.
- [43:15]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. Like a heat map.
- [43:16]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah. So I guess where I'm still the disconnect for me is this idea, like, I understand that you are. You're eliminating inefficient things. And over time, doing less work actually compounds into doing more work or doing less. Moving around.
- [43:34]
Steve Crowley
Less waste. More work.
- [43:35]
Eric Cacciatore
More efficient work is better work, right? Yeah, but how does that influence the law of diminishing return returns? I guess this idea of your ROI over time.
- [43:43]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. It doesn't influence the law. I'd say we. We put the law to work.
- [43:48]
Eric Cacciatore
Okay.
- [43:49]
Steve Crowley
Instead of saying I, I could deep dive you and operational engineering practices to eliminate waste, which is just one of seven types of waste. Sorry, motion. And so we could. We go deep on motion for a month, a year, your entire career, or I could just teach you a spaghetti diagram. And now you can go do that.
- [44:08]
Eric Cacciatore
Right.
- [44:08]
Steve Crowley
It and your. Your head.
- [44:10]
Eric Cacciatore
Got it, Got it. So many things going through My mind right now, it's hard to pick a direction, what we can talk about next. So I think let's just get to the point where you guys are deciding. You're both at Anheuser Busch. You're, you're working with these C words and you're thinking to yourself, what's next for us? Like, how do we, like what were you feeling in 2000, 2018? Is that when you guys started bubbling up this idea of working and starting Your own business?
- [44:37]
Brian Reese
2018, 2019. We were on the road, right? So we were based in New York City, but actually all of our business units we were supporting. Steve was talking about the bars, restaurants, brew pubs around the world were outside the US right? So a lot of South America, Europe, Asia. And so we'd get on a plane and we'd have a week to make an impact on an operation.
- [45:01]
Steve Crowley
Right.
- [45:01]
Brian Reese
And that's, that's where Steve's talking about this like, minimum effective dose. How do we, how do we go into an operation and win the hearts and minds of the operators and teach them some of these basic techniques that really set them on fire for continuous improvement. And so that's really where the service physics practice was honed. Right. Because we were traveling around the world, we had a week to make an impact. So Steve built this training. It's like a 90 minute, you know, in the back room of a restaurant workshop. It was called service physics. And then we would take what we learned in that workshop and go out into the operation and start improving the work right away. And so we could do that in a couple days time and already have some problem solving energy and momentum that was not there before. So that was the genesis of man. We're going in and being really impactful in these like very short windows of time. I wonder if there's an opportunity to make the industry better. Why is this just Anheuser Busch and Bev and the Starbucks, you know, largest beer company in the galaxy, largest coffee company in the galaxy. Why is it only them that have access to this kind of approach to the work when the whole industry really is struggling?
- [46:12]
Eric Cacciatore
Low hanging fruit. Yeah.
- [46:13]
Brian Reese
And so we didn't know we had a hypothesis. We went back to New York and actually early, early 2019, we started just doing work for free with restaurants in New York City just to see, like, how does this translate outside of a large enterprise. And we actually found it translated really well. And actually one of our first test clients, the general manager for that concept is now on our team, which is just a testament to the ability to really bring people along, build capability and generate energy and enthusiasm and passion for, for what's possible in the industry. So we did a few of those kind of just like trial engagements where we weren't charging anybody anything. We were doing it in the morning. That's right, we were, you know, in the morning before work we would go set up cameras. At lunchtime, we'd go, you know, recharge the cameras and, and then at the end of the day, we'd pick them up and over a beer that night.
- [47:07]
Steve Crowley
Be collecting the data from the video.
- [47:08]
Eric Cacciatore
When you can include drinking beers with work, it's always a good, that's it, good sign. So really what you guys did is you service physics yourself. Else you said, what is the one thing that we can do where there's blue ocean, where no one else is doing this and it can have a massive impact and make people's lives better.
- [47:26]
Steve Crowley
I can just hit on the like, reason to believe. I want to describe what the experience is like for these folks that were going through this service physics training. Have you ever had a day where you, you woke up thinking the world was one way and then something happened to you during the day and you're like, the world is just this other way.
- [47:43]
Eric Cacciatore
I think there's multiple realities going on at once.
- [47:45]
Steve Crowley
Yeah.
- [47:45]
Eric Cacciatore
I mean, I know there is. That is quantum physics.
- [47:48]
Steve Crowley
That's it. Right. But you're not aware. Yeah. And so you've got restaurant operators who have been in the industry from, you know, anywhere from months to decades, and they walk into the service physics training session thinking the world is one way and then they, you know, they've got these blinders on. Yeah. And then they walk out and the blinders are off and you can see it in their eyes. They're like bright eyed, excited, turned on, tuned in and they're ready to just like be unstoppable. Yeah.
- [48:15]
Eric Cacciatore
I mean, I think that's one of the things that I love about the work I do in. One of the biggest struggles I had to get over as the host of this podcast, probably like five or six years in, was like, by that time I was like, why am I more confused today than I was when I started this thing? This whole point was to get answers and to find the path, the answer, the secret and the reality is that there is no one path. There is no, no one secret. It's all relative. And there's a million different paths you can take in this industry. And the cool thing about the work I do and things I'm proud of is I get to share a lot of different perspectives and prove that there are more than one reality and more than one truth happening at once right now. And there's so many variables. It's a very complex system. All you can do is get all the perspectives and figure out which path that makes sense for you in your market, in your unique, like, your skill set, your passion, your. Where's my destination? Where am I starting from? You know, like, all those variables play a role.
- [49:09]
Steve Crowley
You know, there's an almost infinite number of paths and ways to solve problems, but there are only seven types of waste.
- [49:16]
Eric Cacciatore
Only seven types.
- [49:17]
Steve Crowley
There's only seven. It simplifies the world so much.
- [49:19]
Eric Cacciatore
What are the seven types of waste?
- [49:21]
Steve Crowley
So there's an acronym for. For people who want to commit this to memory. You know, we don't have to. We don't have to remember anything anymore with our smartphones.
- [49:28]
Eric Cacciatore
But start with the acronym term.
- [49:29]
Steve Crowley
Tim Wood.
- [49:30]
Eric Cacciatore
Okay.
- [49:30]
Steve Crowley
Like somebody's name. Tim Wood. So transportation is the T just means stuff moving around. I is inventory. So too much or too little product or parts in any one place in the operation. The M is motion. And motion is not equal to work. So unnecessary movement of people or machines. You might notice that motion and transportation are similar because they're both about things moving, but motion is about people and machines and. And transportation is about the stuff, usually inventory.
- [49:59]
Eric Cacciatore
Supply chain.
- [49:59]
Brian Reese
Supply chain.
- [50:00]
Steve Crowley
Yep. W. It's interesting to think about supply chain as there's the whole supply chain to get stuff into a restaurant. And now you're in the four walls. There's actually a really fascinating supply chain that happens from when stuff comes into. When stuff goes out.
- [50:10]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah.
- [50:11]
Steve Crowley
I mean, I could.
- [50:12]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah. Stephanie Robson did a really cool workshop on like how to organize and set up your business. So flow. Mood flows. Food flows in a single direction in the. From the back door, out the front door.
- [50:21]
Steve Crowley
That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Including the trash.
- [50:23]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah.
- [50:23]
Steve Crowley
It's always something we forget about. T. Transportation. I Inventory, motion, W Waiting. That's the whole. What's stuck? Like, people get stuck, orders get stuck, customers get stuck. Why are things stuck? Why aren't they moving? Right. And there's reasons and. But there's usually a way to get things to not be stuck. Limit work in process, synchronize with machines. There's like a whole.
- [50:47]
Eric Cacciatore
I'm tempted to like, just use this as a teaser and the get you back on the show to do a whole Tim Wood workshop. Yeah, I think that'd be a lot.
- [50:53]
Brian Reese
That's.
- [50:53]
Steve Crowley
That's that's essentially what the service physics workshop like service Physics 101 and teaser.
- [50:59]
Eric Cacciatore
Look out for everybody. We're going to get into it.
- [51:01]
Steve Crowley
So what's the first over processing?
- [51:04]
Eric Cacciatore
Okay.
- [51:06]
Steve Crowley
So that's just basically doing something that's redundant. And in the restaurant industry because we've, we've conditioned people to think that if you have time to lean, you have time to clean. When people experience the waste of waiting, they usually start over processing. So I'll clean a clean counter. Yeah, I'm.
- [51:21]
Eric Cacciatore
It's going to look busy because I don't want to get yelled at.
- [51:23]
Steve Crowley
Look busy. Yeah.
- [51:24]
Eric Cacciatore
Where there's a broom, I'm going to sweep. Nothing.
- [51:26]
Steve Crowley
Another good example is if somebody hits reply reply all on an email to 100 people when one person needed it, you got one person that was getting work done for them in 99 and 99. People who just distracted got. Yeah, they got over processed.
- [51:38]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah.
- [51:39]
Steve Crowley
So the other, the next O. We usually save this one for last but it doesn't work with the acronym to end with an okay. This is the primary waste or some companies call it the mother of all wastes, which is overproduction. It's producing anything, anything in excess of what the customer demands. And it looks like batches. And so you think about the restaurant industry and how often we're batching and preparing. That's all over production and it's okay. Remember that in, you know the sort of pie chart of waste versus work, they're very little sliver that's actually work and most of it's waste. But the opportunity like my glass is half full. So more, more upside when you get rid of overproduction.
- [52:12]
Eric Cacciatore
Got it.
- [52:12]
Steve Crowley
Move away from big batches. D defects. Some companies call this rework. But in the restaurant industry we, we're lucky if we get the chance to rework a defect. It's a defect and it goes out the door. It ends up on Yelp, Google.
- [52:24]
Eric Cacciatore
So yeah, what are the. What's the customer feedback? What are the things people keep saying highlight. Okay, what is. What is. Where's the speed bump? Like what's causing like what's the triggering event that's causing this to happen over and over again?
- [52:35]
Steve Crowley
That's right. And you know, we have encountered over the last couple decades plenty of people. I think just some people's, you know, cultural or DNA background makes them process resistant. And so what we often say is like let's just first agree that everything that's ever happened happened as the result of the thing that happened before. Let's just call that process. The real question is not whether or not we want process. The real question is whether or not we want control. Is this thing so important that we want to control it and put a standard process in place? Or is it okay if there's some variation? And many things are.
- [53:07]
Eric Cacciatore
I would love to go deeper on this with you guys. I think it'll be fun to get you back from the top. Just hit me with the words from.
- [53:15]
Steve Crowley
Transportation, inventory, motion waiting, over processing, over production and defects.
- [53:21]
Eric Cacciatore
Sick. Thanks for getting into that, man. So, okay, so you guys decide that you want to do this one thing. You found your one thing. You're a core focus, an opportunity to make an impact. You launch service physics. You're just helping people for free to see if you have proof of concept, really kind of get into the work that you're doing today. I mean, I don't know where we're going to end up from here, but I mean, I'm just going to go through the list of what your website says, the services you offer. So operations strategy, service design consulting, management system design, digital strategy consulting, program management consulting. And there's a sub bullet under here, which is basically service physics seed launch grow framework. Is that what we need to go over? That, that, that could be another workshop, just throwing it out there. Custom experience consulting and loyalty program design. So that's a lot of stuff, you guys. That doesn't sound like one thing. Right? But how is that all one thing?
- [54:17]
Steve Crowley
It's all problem solving. Okay. And these are the type of problems that we tend to encounter most often and have capability to support with. I just give like an example and then maybe Brian has a better one. But we've been working with Pete's coffee and Tea for almost a couple years now. And the original sort of task that they assigned us was where we're going to replace the fleet of manual La Marzocco espresso machines with an automated machine. And we don't know how to assess how many machines we'll need per location based on their volume, their, their volume bands. And so we said without a, without a standard process for how to work in the machine, we can't tell you that. So we'll first just, we'll work to understand what the different components of that machine are. So it's a, it's a milk steamer grinder and a brewer and those things need to work together. And then we'll build a work routine to help organize and orchestrate how the human works with that machine so we can keep that milk steamer busy, keep that grinder busy and keep that brewer busy so that the machine is highly utilized so we don't have to highly utilize people, which is more expensive. And so we did that work and then we did the analysis and we're able to tell them that you can service the highest volume location in your entire portfolio with one half of one machine. Wow. Which is great news because now you've got all this free capex to do whatever you want with more. More things. And you've got a work method that's going to be easy to train, easy for leaders to see when, you know, things are throwing people off. Routine and a whole bunch of like, future benefits related to products that are being built. Innovation that needs to happen that now has a place to land in a standard process. So we've got a. We've got to design a product in a way that works with the routine that the barista is going to be working with every day. So it's a, I think, a good example of a lot of the first places we start in an organization which is like, like Point Kaizen or like single process improvement. And then you start to realize, like, you unclog one bottleneck and it just highlights the compound.
- [56:26]
Eric Cacciatore
Compound effect. There's two books I started listening to on, like, repeat at the beginning of this year because I, I did like a long look in the mirror and being like, I'm not practicing what I'm preaching, you know, and that's really just focusing on the most important things that will move your life forward. Like what, what is, what is your one thing that you can focus on to move your life forward? How do you, how do you narrow your focus? And those two books were the Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. I don't know if you're familiar with that book. And Brian Tracy's Eat that Frog. So like just kind of forcing you to like, reflect and do like this like internal inventory and like where if I just focus on these three things, these three rocks, if we're talking EOs to move, if I just do these three things that will have the biggest impact in my life and just every day focus on it, improve the process. And just like over time, like that ripples out and it compounds through everything.
- [57:17]
Brian Reese
What I love about what you just said there is. That's actually a key part of our practice, right? Like, let's focus on something and get it done before we move on to the next thing. So let's not try to do 20 different things to, you know, grow our business. Let's focus on the most important thing today. Get that thing to a place where it's delivering what it needs to for the business and then move on to the next. And that's a lot of what we help restaurants do as well. Let's really just focus on one order or one item at a time, get that thing done and move on to the next so we can avoid a lot of that process.
- [57:49]
Eric Cacciatore
Follow one course until success.
- [57:51]
Brian Reese
That's it.
- [57:51]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah.
- [57:52]
Brian Reese
And so all, anything that's not driving toward that result is in some, in some cases waste.
- [57:58]
Steve Crowley
Right.
- [57:58]
Brian Reese
Like that overproduction of like we're trying to do all these things we're over producing but we're not actually delivering on a. On a result.
- [58:05]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, you're making me think, you know, it's again the acronym follow one course till success Focus. When people are trying to systematize their business, they're so overwhelmed because there's so many things happening. Where do I start?
- [58:17]
Brian Reese
That's right.
- [58:18]
Eric Cacciatore
Right. Well, what's the one thing that if you did this, if you.
- [58:21]
Steve Crowley
If.
- [58:21]
Eric Cacciatore
Where's 80% of your yield coming from? Where it's probably 20 of the work you're doing. So this actually comes up a lot. So Fred Langley, the CEO of Restaurant Systems Pro has been doing a bi weekly P L power hour where when you are in RU network you can show up and he'll just, we'll do a screen share and he's like, let me see your P L. And he starts looking for like here are the gaps, here are the holes. Like he reads P Ls like people read, I don't know, like what's something you read every day that's super easy to read?
- [58:49]
Brian Reese
Newspaper.
- [58:50]
Steve Crowley
Yeah.
- [58:50]
Eric Cacciatore
Like it's just, he just gets it right. So in the one things that he almost has everybody do to have the biggest impact on their prime costs with cost of goods is get a descending report of the products that you use the most from your, your purveyor. Like where is most of your money going if you want to save. Oh, you're a burger shop, like you're spending most of your money on beef.
- [59:11]
Brian Reese
Right.
- [59:13]
Eric Cacciatore
Work on fine tuning that system and that's going to have the biggest impact on your bottom line. And then what's the second line on French fries? Are you portioning? What's the third? And if you just focus on like usually like 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of the items on your menu.
- [59:26]
Steve Crowley
Right.
- [59:26]
Eric Cacciatore
So if you can just focus on those things, then you're going to have the biggest impact on your bottom line and then you're going to have more resources to focus on the next thing.
- [59:33]
Steve Crowley
I love that. Yeah.
- [59:34]
Brian Reese
I think, you know, just to play that out, right, like we're focused on beef costs. I'm going to send an email to my supplier and now I'm going to wait for them to respond and I'm, I'm going to go work on something else because I got time to work on something else.
- [59:46]
Eric Cacciatore
Right.
- [59:46]
Brian Reese
But if I was laser focused on that beef cost problem, I might go into the restaurant and try to follow that beef through my operation to see where we're wasting beef or maybe we're over portioning beef or whatever it is. So like that's where that single focus comes in. Like, let's not just take an action and then move on to some other focus. Let's take an action. But then where else can we look with this, this problem? Because usually the insights come after deep study. You know, there's some surface level things. It's like, let me go squeeze my, my purveyor, right? I'm going to go squeeze them on price. But then there's probably a lot of controllable process opportunity as well. And that's where it gets harder is to like look inside for those opportunities versus try to try to shift the world around you.
- [60:26]
Steve Crowley
I think it's a pretty common mistake and I think you guys have been dancing around this. But the work can only begin after the problem is really clear. Right. And costs are not problems. Costs aren't. Aren't. They're not. Cause they're causes. Right. They're caused by something else that's happening. And so you've got to go to where the work is happening to understand what's driving that cost. Unless it's the vendor, just like mischarging or something like that. But our point of view is it's better to form a long term partnership with a vendor and treat them well anyway instead of squeezing them. There's plenty of low hanging fruit in house for us to help with.
- [61:06]
Eric Cacciatore
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- [63:22]
Yeah. So what are the key variables in order to do the work you do Right? Like what are the things that if you come to a company and they want to work with you, like what are the. But I mean we know we're focusing on like we kind of got into like what service physics is and if you're one thing and finding where the opportunity is. But like what things do you need in order to do your job for people? Like where? Like I don't know if I'm asked.
- [63:46]
Brian Reese
Yeah, I kind of want to start and say two things because I don't think we fully addressed your question earlier about like all the stuff on our website. How does that all fit into one, like one thing?
- [63:55]
Steve Crowley
Yeah.
- [63:56]
Brian Reese
And in this conversation we've been talking a lot about work and we say work is, you know, what creates value for the customer. We haven't spent much time yet talking about what it really means to the customer, what is value from the customer's perspective. And so if we start to look at what the Customer is paying for what they're actually valuing in the experience, whether it's the product, whether it's the esthetics of the, of the restaurant or the service experience with the staff. You put that together and every business has what we call like their unique value DNA. It's like the unique value they're trying to create for the customer.
- [64:31]
Eric Cacciatore
Unique selling proposition. Same.
- [64:32]
Brian Reese
Exactly.
- [64:33]
Steve Crowley
Yep.
- [64:34]
Brian Reese
And that is actually similarly to the Maslow's hierarchy we've been talking about. There's some basic value you have to create for the customer. Quality is number one. You have to have a quality product, but then you move up into more sort of like emotional engagement kinds of value that you.
- [64:49]
Eric Cacciatore
Psychographics.
- [64:50]
Brian Reese
Yes, exactly. And so this is where loyalty programs as an example would come in. Because you need to get. Deliver that rewards me value to your customer at some point in your journey. And so that if you, if you take all of those services on our website, they usually ladder to a value that needs to get created for the, for the customer. And then how do we think about from a business model standpoint? This is the, the DVF framework that's also there. Seed launch grow. DVF is when we're desirability, viability and feasibility. And that's baked, baked into that seed launch grow framework that you mentioned when you were reading the website there. So desirability, do I have something the customer wants? Is it desirable from a customer standpoint? Is somebody going to be willing to pay me for this thing? Viability is, can I charge enough to make money doing it? And feasibility is where we spend a lot of our time. How can we actually design the operation the most efficiently and effectively deliver that value that the customer wants? And how do we balance the three legs of that stool? And so all those services on the website really ladder back to that. How are we creating value for the customer? But how are we doing in a way that drives value for the business and is something that we can repeatedly consistently deliver with our operation?
- [66:02]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah. So really what you guys are about is just improving and streamlining and finding efficiencies to do things better, more efficiently. Like that is what you do, you optimize.
- [66:13]
Brian Reese
Right. The headline, the way I like to describe it is like, let's figure out what the customer wants. What is the value that we're trying to create for the customer? And let's align our operation to do that and only that.
- [66:23]
Eric Cacciatore
So I guess what I'm curious about today, what I would like to learn is like, what are you seeing? Like what Are the patterns you're seeing, like, like in 2025, like what direction are you steering your clients? Does that make sense?
- [66:36]
Brian Reese
It is, it's a great question and there's so many ways to go with that. But I think through some of those customer insights, markets efforts that we've done, like to really uncover what is value from the customer's perspective. What we're seeing most recently, folks are making fewer restaurant trips, they're purchasing food from restaurants less. What they seem to be doing is trading up. So not to throw anybody under the bus, but you know, when folks previously might have gone to McDonald's three times a week, now they're going to go to a Panda Express once a week because it's a better perceived value for their money.
- [67:17]
Eric Cacciatore
Okay, so you said what is what, what was that, that term you use? What is increasing value for the customer? What did I say? I'm trying to follow the.
- [67:27]
Brian Reese
What's creating value for the customer?
- [67:29]
Eric Cacciatore
Okay, what's creating value for the customer? And then you said that is tied.
- [67:33]
Brian Reese
To, so our, our overarching methodology really is getting clear on value.
- [67:39]
Steve Crowley
Yeah.
- [67:40]
Brian Reese
From the customer's perspective, what is this experience that we're trying to create? Quality product, speed of service, some rewards, me, some, you know, human connection. Let's get clear on what that is and then let's align the operation to do that and only that and do it really well consistently. And so that's, that's where we, that's sort of our definition of efficiency.
- [68:00]
Eric Cacciatore
Right, like unique selling proposition.
- [68:01]
Steve Crowley
Right?
- [68:02]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah. So one of the things, so you just mentioned that Panda Express, right. That people are going there, people are going out. When the overarching value propositions or what is being perceived as values is being able to get food to people from different points, whether that's at home or pickup or delivery.
- [68:19]
Steve Crowley
Like.
- [68:20]
Brian Reese
Yeah, I'm trying to speak a little bit to like what we see as an industry trend. Right. So from our, from our customer insights, this is the trend we're seeing from consumers. They're, they're trading up. Right. And so I think the point that I'm trying to make is like, let's get clear on what it is that's driving folks to come to you. If we're clear on that, then we can organize your operation to most efficiently deliver that. And right now what we see is a bit of a trading up trend. And so as a business, how can you position yourself to be the trade up? What are people trading up from when they choose to come to you? And again, this is just like 20, 25 moment in time insight. But if we can get clear on what that is, then we can deliver on it.
- [69:04]
Eric Cacciatore
Okay, so what is driving people to, to come to you? The trading up trend. And trading up is meaning basically like leveling up more value. And that value that people team seem to be putting a lot of emphasis on is convenience. Or like I want to be able to have this delivered to me, I want to be able to pick it up, I want to be able to eat in, I want to be able to like infinite. Like you're diversifying your, your point of contact with the customer.
- [69:30]
Brian Reese
Well, and again, I think it comes back to focus, right? So to your point, why are people quote unquote trading up to you? What is it that they're coming to you for? And now how can you recognize that and go big on it, right? If you recognize that this is where the consumer trend is moving, how can you position yourself to, you know, sort of weather whatever storm is coming by focusing on that value that people are coming to you for already?
- [69:53]
Steve Crowley
And also differentiate. I don't think it's a one size fits all for the industry. I think you've got to know what your value DNA is as a brand and then really lean into that and do it better than anybody else.
- [70:04]
Brian Reese
So for example, Pete's Coffee, right, Folks might trade up from, I don't know, a McDonald's McCafe to a Pete's Coffee. And so a customer who might go to the McDonald's drive thru. I keep using McDonald's as an example. I have no problem with McDonald's, but they might go to McDonald's three times a week because they can sort of afford that and it fits into their value need in the moment when those prices go higher and all of a sudden those three trips are costing me, you know, twice as much. I might take that same twice as much money and make fewer trips to a Pete's Coffee because I get a higher quality product. Might not be as convenient and it might not be as routine, but it's going to be more value for me as a reward for my hard earned money as an example.
- [70:50]
Eric Cacciatore
Got it. So what is, you know, driving people to come to you? What are they trading up for? They're trading up for a perceived value, better quality. And they're trading, they're trading up for convenience. Where can, how can you get this to me? What are the different modes that this food can be accessed, right?
- [71:06]
Brian Reese
And again, it's like I'm going to spend the same amount of money. And so if I'm going to spend the same amount of money, how do I maximize the value of that money?
- [71:13]
Eric Cacciatore
Got it.
- [71:14]
Steve Crowley
Can I just add to that too? It's, it's fun and exciting to talk about the 2025 trends, but there are really important things that have been like always on trends that I think we have unique insight into. Like as an example, after 30 years of working in this industry, I've never met a unit level operator that thinks they're getting enough labor to run their business. And I've never met an owner that doesn't think that they're overspending or over allocating labor. And, and so you've got these two seeming truths right up against each other. And the fact of the matter is that they're both right and they're both wrong because it's the way that the work is being done, the way that labor is being allocated. One of the studies that we do as a part of our standard diagnostic package is called labor utilization, where in 5 second increments we'll go across every teammate and mark them as actively serving a guest. Guest. So either with the guest talking to them, taking an order or preparing their food, or moving something from one place to another for them. So active, idle, meaning they don't have anything to do right now. They're ready to serve a guest. Idol's not, it's not a time to lean, time to clean. It's like I've got capacity to do more work walking between two points, not pacing like I'm bored. I'm actually idle. And I don't know if they do something to pace back and forth. But I'm walking from this station to that station.
- [72:31]
Eric Cacciatore
I just emptied the, you know, cheat the steak for the cheesesteak. I need to go get another one from the walk.
- [72:38]
Steve Crowley
That's right. Yeah, that's right. And then the last one is tasking, which is work for future customers that aren't here right now. So that could be preparing a big batch of whatever for later or cleaning. And so when you look across that the four dimensions of utilization, a, an operation that is running optimally will be at about 75 to 80% active utilization during peak periods. That's ideal because then you've got 25 to 25 or so percent capacity to deal with the unexpected and additional demand. And so you want people to be working in a routine and at a consistent pace, not herky jerky and not stressed out, not in the weeds. Right. But that like 80% mark is pretty.
- [73:19]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, there's that bell curve of human performance.
- [73:21]
Steve Crowley
That's right.
- [73:22]
Eric Cacciatore
And like people perform better at a certain level of stress. It's better to be slightly stressed best than it is to be like fat, dumb and happy.
- [73:30]
Steve Crowley
Because then you're complacent and starting and stopping is terrible.
- [73:32]
Eric Cacciatore
Right.
- [73:33]
Steve Crowley
It's like the worst.
- [73:33]
Eric Cacciatore
But then once, once you get to that point of like too much stress, the productivity, like, like drops.
- [73:39]
Steve Crowley
And quality.
- [73:40]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, and quality.
- [73:40]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. And safety.
- [73:41]
Eric Cacciatore
So it's, it's finding that sweet spot of like engaged, moving like you can handle it, but not exceeding it. But like how do you. That's back to Pareto's principle. Right?
- [73:50]
Steve Crowley
That's it. And that 75 number is a great target. And I'll plug the Circle service physics app on any of the places where you can download apps. It has a tool on there, it's free to use. You can put in the, the names of the servers that you're observing or descriptions of them and then you just categorize their activity. Every five seconds is active, idle and walk. And it'll spit out a bar chart. And we. So I'll get to the punchline here. After collecting restaurant data and over, you know, tens of thousands of restaurants, We've only found one restaurant company that has active utilization at peak over 50%. That's the industry level gap. Right. So we're talking sub 50% to a goal of 75. If you can close that and you think about the, you know, let's, let's say it's a 50 to 75 gap. That's 25. What's 25 of 20 an hour is $5. You know, somebody working 2,000 hours a year is $10,000 a year times however many workers. And suddenly you start to see like, yeah, there's a massive opportunity. So it's a good example of like an always on thing that we have unique and fresh perspective on.
- [74:50]
Eric Cacciatore
So do you have thoughts on creating budgets with labor based on labor hours? So like when you're coaching people and you're trying to like control your prime costs, your labor costs, are you saying like here, like here's your budget. If you're trying to hit say I don't know, like 25 labor, right. In order to you reverse engineer, like this is how many hours you have at your current hourly rates to hit that, that mark, like is that an approach you take?
- [75:16]
Steve Crowley
Or when we help in the labor space, we start with how long the work takes, how many labor hours. Usually at that, at this point we're talking to the minutes, how many minutes of labor need to be allocated to fulfill this product mix at this demand rate, this number of transactions per however many minutes, 15, 30, whatever. And then, then look back, it's a little bit of a triangulation. Then you look back to see if your prime costs are in line and if they're not, then you got to go back to the work and say how do we make this?
- [75:47]
Eric Cacciatore
So you're doing like a pro forma of labor basically. Like this is what, how much. This is our, like this is how much time it's going to take to get the job done.
- [75:52]
Steve Crowley
Yeah.
- [75:53]
Eric Cacciatore
And then you start to say, well is there a way we can do it in less time?
- [75:56]
Steve Crowley
Yeah.
- [75:56]
Eric Cacciatore
Is there a way you can approve efficiencies?
- [75:58]
Steve Crowley
Most labor systems like software that you can get on the market, there's really two families. One is what we call like the fancy calculator which you say, this is what I want my labor budget to be. This is how much is going to be in sales. Tell me how many bodies I get. And then if it's, if it's good software, it'll distribute the bodies across the demand for the day. That's sort of a top down approach that is usually like it comes with less expense and a pretty good like user interface. It's pretty easy to use but it's not very precise. It's a little bit of a guesswork blunt. Blunt object like yeah, more precise but also more expensive and a little bit more complicated to use is activity based labor schedule. So that that starts with like how long does each thing take to do? How often do we need to do it? And then you build the workload from the ground up and then you allocate the bodies off to meet the demand of the work, not to meet the financial budget that you're your labor labor finance team put together for you.
- [77:00]
Eric Cacciatore
Okay. And you, I'm assuming you prefer the latter approach.
- [77:05]
Steve Crowley
I think it depends on your problem to solve. Right. If you're not a large or like, you know, medium to large enterprise, it's going to be hard to afford.
- [77:11]
Eric Cacciatore
When you say how would you define a medium to large enterprise? What's like on the low side of medium?
- [77:16]
Steve Crowley
I think you start to struggle after like 12 or 13 units to do things in a blunt instrument way. A lot of things change at that point because you can no longer get to every restaurant with enough frequency to help them with the problem solving and be impactful. You've got to rely a little bit more on the Systems and data to manage that business. And so usually around that point is when we were building country level businesses at ZX Ventures that start at 1 and then they wouldn't say anything about needing help for dashboarding or financial reporting for like a year until they got to about there like somewhere between 10 and 15 units. And then they would start screaming because they didn't have the visibility they needed to manage their business. And so then the question becomes how do you start to lay the groundwork around like eight locations to be ready for what's going to need to occur between 10 and 15 and by the.
- [78:11]
Eric Cacciatore
Time you build the house before you move in it?
- [78:13]
Brian Reese
That's right, yeah.
- [78:13]
Steve Crowley
Now that being said, Starbucks ran its entire international business on a Excel spreadsheet for a labor model for a long time successful.
- [78:20]
Eric Cacciatore
One of the things you're going to need lots of money. Which is one of the reasons why like that's like I like to focus. There's like in my mind there's like four stages. There's the like one to three unit operator is like one way to run a business. And then to get to 4 to 10 you have to kind of there's a pivot in how you do operations and then 10 to 20, there's like another pivot in how or like an evolution of how you have to operate. And it's usually means you have to go out and raise money at different point at these different points. So like, like go build the house before you move into it because like you need to like you need certain people with really big salaries to get to that next level and like the tech, the tech stack to, to execute it. What are some of those technologies? So you said the plunt, the blunt approach, which is, what was the technical term for that?
- [79:05]
Steve Crowley
The fancy calculator.
- [79:06]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, the fancy calculator.
- [79:07]
Steve Crowley
Calculator.
- [79:08]
Eric Cacciatore
What are some examples of fancy calculators?
- [79:10]
Steve Crowley
I think like Hot schedules is a fancy calculator.
- [79:13]
Eric Cacciatore
Seven shifts.
- [79:14]
Steve Crowley
Yeah, seven shifts.
- [79:15]
Eric Cacciatore
Okay. And what is an example of the more the other approach what you're calling.
- [79:20]
Steve Crowley
Yeah, like Kronos.
- [79:21]
Eric Cacciatore
Kronos. Okay, got it. What else falls in is that like Oracle. Got it.
- [79:27]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. And these are really like enterprise solutions. There's starting to be some like hybridization of these approaches where they're trying to like marry and meet in the middle. But I've not seen a.
- [79:38]
Eric Cacciatore
What do you mean? Like give me an example of somebody who's trying to marry in the middle.
- [79:40]
Steve Crowley
I can't think of an example of a particular company, but people are Trying to get more sophisticated about matching workload to demand based on average ticket. But it implies that you have good prime cost accounting, which if you're, you know, fewer than 10 units, I would not imagine you put a lot of work. It's not really the right time to solve that problem into the hand time associated with every menu item and broken it out like that. Because then you've got to like take a batch that has 100 ingredients or 100 units of an ingredient that goes on five sandwiches and just like backing the math into every item is a lot of work.
- [80:20]
Eric Cacciatore
It is a lot of work. It's interesting. I mean, so are you guys familiar with platforms like Restaurant Systems Pro and Restaurant365?
- [80:26]
Steve Crowley
Yes.
- [80:26]
Eric Cacciatore
So I mean, where do you fall on like, where would those technologies fall on your. Your like, spectrum of like solutions? Like, are like, are those, those are not enterprise solutions in your mind?
- [80:42]
Brian Reese
Probably not.
- [80:43]
Eric Cacciatore
Probably not. What's keeping them from being an enterprise solution?
- [80:46]
Brian Reese
My experience is when you reach.
- [80:52]
Steve Crowley
A.
- [80:52]
Brian Reese
True scale, you're building more of those tools custom. So you're Moving from a restaurant365 to something like a power bi or a tableau because you have your own view of your own data that you, that you feel is important to run your.
- [81:08]
Eric Cacciatore
No two restaurants are exactly the same 100. Right.
- [81:10]
Steve Crowley
Y.
- [81:11]
Eric Cacciatore
So I mean this is kind of the, the stuff that I really like to get into. At what point does it make sense to leverage what technology?
- [81:16]
Steve Crowley
Right.
- [81:18]
Eric Cacciatore
And that. So this is right around that 10 to 20 mark of like scale of like evolution again. 1 to 3, 4 to 10, 10 to 20. That's. That's when you get us. If you want to go from 10 to 20 and 20 to 50, you got to start thinking about like what's the future look like. Start with the end in mind and how do we reverse engineer that. You go out, raise a bunch of money, hire the hoods, the who's, and have the capital to also get to do the customization to. What were those two companies you mentioned?
- [81:45]
Brian Reese
Power Bi or Tableau.
- [81:47]
Eric Cacciatore
Right. Where you can really create something custom for your unique. You have to customize it to your uniqueness to continue to compound and find more efficiencies.
- [81:57]
Brian Reese
Right.
- [81:57]
Steve Crowley
Can I say something controversial?
- [81:59]
Eric Cacciatore
Please. I love that.
- [82:01]
Steve Crowley
Technology will not solve our problems.
- [82:04]
Eric Cacciatore
Yes.
- [82:05]
Steve Crowley
And so what I would be thinking through is how can technology remove friction from and or automate or make simpler. The good process that I've proven works to solve the problems that I have. So say that one more time.
- [82:22]
Eric Cacciatore
Sorry.
- [82:22]
Steve Crowley
So you guys Are very intelligent.
- [82:24]
Eric Cacciatore
It's hard to keep up sometimes.
- [82:26]
Steve Crowley
Process first, technology second. And so one of the, the parts of the service physics practice is a very clear definition of operational excellence. So operational excellence is really like a four step process that, that starts by defining what perfect looks like. Like, so let's. We could talk about labor scheduling since we were just talking about that. What does excellence look like for labor scheduling within our organization? I might offer it's we have the right people in the right place at the right time doing the right work. I can walk into an operation and know if I see that, am I seeing excellence in scheduling right now? Do I have the right people in the right place at the right time doing the right work?
- [83:12]
Eric Cacciatore
Yes or no is that step one?
- [83:13]
Steve Crowley
That's step one. Step two is. And you can't skip any of these steps by the way. The step one start with like the goal. Step two is by what method can I reliably deliver excellence? That definition, what are the process steps that I would need to take in order to do that? Again, another thing you can't skip over and takes a long time, but that is the one that gets skipped over most often. Question three is what tools, if any, emphasize if any, would help us make this job easier or help us detect a gap to standards so we know we're off the method, something's gone wrong and we're not going to get to excellence and it's like automatically detected with a tool. So I'll just, I'll go through the first three questions again. What does excellence look like? By what method would we achieve excellence reliably, repeatedly? What tools, if any, will help us make the job easier or detect the gap to standard and then make this.
- [84:07]
Eric Cacciatore
Job easier and detect the gap?
- [84:08]
Steve Crowley
Standard to gap to standard. So we have the standard process steps and I need a tool to tell me that like I'm off the, I'm off the game.
- [84:17]
Eric Cacciatore
What tool, if any, would help us make this job easier and gap the.
- [84:20]
Steve Crowley
Standard and detect a gap, the standard. Okay. And then the last thing is how will we train people to use the tools to work in the method to deliver excellence? And so again, define excellence, define the method, define the tools, if any, and then define the training. And so now we have people trained to use the tools to work in the method to deliver excellence. And as a leader, I can now walk into the the operation and say I've defined excellence for X, Y or Z. I'm not seeing it. Is it a gap in the method? Is there a gap in the tool or is there a gap in the training? What often happens, we see this time and time again is people detect a problem. It's usually a gap to a definition of excellence that's not well articulated, but they know they don't like it because it's messed up. It's not a great experience for the customer or the worker or there's some problem in the P and L. And then we say, okay, what tool or what training should we do? And they skip over the method part. And then what we end up with is learning management systems full of training that don't apply to delivering excellence, or a toolbox that's full of tools that we have to sort through every time we can ever find what we need. No articulation of the method. So we keep skipping over that thing and we keep getting frustrated because we're not delivering excellence.
- [85:35]
Brian Reese
It's a super important order.
- [85:36]
Steve Crowley
Excellence, then method, then tool, if any, then training. And that is a complete system of operational excellence.
- [85:42]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, I had a Rudy Mick on the show a bunch of times, repeat guests on the show and one of the things that he said to me that made a profound impact and I constantly echo it, is your job as a restaurant owner is to paint the picture of perfection for your staff. What does the job done right look like and how do you reverse engineer it and how do you empower your people to, to do it?
- [86:01]
Steve Crowley
Love that. Kindred spirits. Clear as kind. Right?
- [86:04]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, yeah. So we got down this path because we're talking about. You said process isn't. What was the quote you said? Or.
- [86:14]
Brian Reese
Oh, do you remember process for process sake?
- [86:19]
Eric Cacciatore
No, I can't. We were talking about technology like enterprise solutions and then we're talking about like, like the, the restaurant systems Pros and the Restaurant365.
- [86:28]
Steve Crowley
That's right. So I remember now. So technology is not going to solve your problems. Method will solve your problem. Technology is a tool.
- [86:35]
Eric Cacciatore
So the. That all starts with what is. What is the. What are we trying to achieve? Like what does the job done right look like? What would you say? The right people, right place, right time, doing the right work. Right. What is define that and then reverse engineer it. And can we find technologies to be a solution? But is it going in the direction that we're going?
- [86:53]
Steve Crowley
That's right. I listened to a panel at the National Restaurant association show this year where an operator was talking about the application of artificial intelligence as a coach. And they highlighted some research that people who learn from directly in a one on one way with a tutorial outperform people who learn in a classroom by one to two standard deviations. And we're about to enter a world where everyone's gonna have their own, everyone's gonna have their personal coach. Now that's not method, that's like training. And so I think what, like what I'm really excited about with technology is the opportunity to reinforce and support good method, but it's not going to be the method. And I think it's the same with any other digital technologies that are out there. If we keep looking to that, to that, well for solutions, we end up with more sass fees and more fragmented solutions that don't talk to each other, more frustration.
- [87:50]
Eric Cacciatore
It's the cart ahead of the horror situation. What's weird? Like, so like let me kind of talk about one of my partners, Restaurant Systems Pro. Right? So the store behind Restaurant Systems, probably, you know, David Scott Peters and Fred Langley developed like this training where they basically had an operations manual where they're like here are from what we've learned the best of standard operations from like labor management, scheduling, costing, inventory, purchasing. You know, like what are all the things you have to do that have the biggest impact on your prime costs? And here are the systems in an operations manual. Like execute these standard opera, like the foundational thing, things like inventory is inventory almost everywhere you go, right. Like there's a good way to do that. Like what are the, like the, the most standard things across the board that is considered best practice that can be universally spread out so you can go open a restaurant and you know, say like this is like you can create your own systems and processes but the likelihood as a single or two unit operator that you're going to be able to do it as efficiently with the technology of like a Restaurant Systems Pro is probably not going to happen. Right. So could you go out and like, so they started with this, like this, this operations manual and that, that evolved into a service as a software, right? That is improve the systems and techno like, I don't know, put those, those technologies into a service as a software. So now you can take this suite of tools and you can start as like, you know, now you have an inventory process, you have a costing process process, you have a, a budgeting process, you have a fill in the blank, you have a general ledger tied to all the these things. Would you say that that is putting technology ahead of method?
- [89:28]
Steve Crowley
No, it sounds to me like they documented the method in the ops manual first and then started to remove some of that friction through software, which I think Is absolutely the right approach. The. The where I'd love to dig in, maybe in another episode and maybe we can be on at the same time as your partners.
- [89:43]
Eric Cacciatore
I'll do have that conversation.
- [89:45]
Steve Crowley
But if we define excellence in labor management, it's the right people in the right place at the right time doing the right work. Work. We could define excellence in inventory management as having the right product in the right place at the right time and quantity. And so what I would say is like, once we have that definition of excellence, does do the methods that were put in place and the software that supports it deliver that? Or will we go through the, that mini supply chain that we described inside the four walls of the restaurant and think through like, why is this the way it is? Is this the right amount of inventory in the right place at the right time, in the right quantity, or, or not? And what can we do to keep. And you know, it's one of the things about software and other sort of like hard technologies are they create monuments that we have to work around. They're not flexible. So now we've set something up in this way. But hey, we found a better way to do things. Does the software support it? If the software doesn't support it, we might not be able to make that improvement as opposed to if we built this on method with software supported, we can change the method and the software will just continue to support it or it won't, or we can change the software, but we don't need to do it today.
- [90:47]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, so it's weird because like, this is the hard question I think that restaurant owners have to answer for themselves. Like, when do I implement technology? And I think that part of the argument out there is that we're getting, we're, we're moving into an era, a time where you, you need technology to have a fighting chance.
- [91:04]
Steve Crowley
Right.
- [91:05]
Eric Cacciatore
But that comes at a cost. So what is the opportunity cost? And like, at what point do you start? I sometimes I lean in the direction of if you're opening a restaurant and you're going out to raise a million dollars to, you know, get everything you need to be open, what is another 300amonth, $600 a month for 24 months to have your tech stack operational. Like the most basic things like budgeting, costing, inventory, you know, like all those things that are going to have the biggest impact on your, your prime costs, and you build your restaurant on one of those platforms that would just give you the foundational things, right? Labor, management, like, like all that kind of stuff. Like instead of going out and trying to build all those systems from using like, you know, spreadsheets, like having a fully integrated tech stack that is tied to your general ledger. You know, like, do you start from day one with that or do you wait until you have the cash flow recovery?
- [92:05]
Steve Crowley
Like, am I. Yeah, I totally get your question. It's a really complex question. I think the answer, you might not like it, but it's. We've got to solve one problem at a time and we have to define problems correctly. And so this is probably a whole nother podcast episode, But a mistake we see over and over again, not just in the restaurant industry, but in industry is people defining problems as the absence of the solution that they want to do.
- [92:32]
Eric Cacciatore
People defining problems as the apps, the absence of the solution.
- [92:37]
Steve Crowley
So, for example, what's your problem? I don't have labor management software. Okay, okay. That's not the problem actually. That's the absence of the, the solution that you want. What is actually the problem is we go back to, well, if excellence is the right people in the right place at the right time, doing the right work work, and I don't have that, and there's a gap and I can get really clear about what that gap is, then I can start to do some problem solving around that. Before I answer the question of what. How can, how can I automate this or remove friction which might be. Usually is in, in the stage software. However, by defining that problem, you will know what type of software you need and select that right solution.
- [93:16]
Eric Cacciatore
Is that something you guys help people with? Identifying the right software.
- [93:20]
Steve Crowley
Software identifying the right problem?
- [93:23]
Eric Cacciatore
Well, once you identify the problem, like, I mean, this is another truth, right? There are no two restaurants that are exactly the same, and there are no two solutions that are exactly the same. This is one of the big reasons why I'm trying to get away from sponsors, because there's conflict of interest. You know, like if, if, if, if my whole livelihood is dependent on these companies that are one solution and I start promoting their, their competition for a better. That might be a better solution for your uniqueness. That doesn't. They don't like that. Right. So I think it's really important that we have a source of information that is independent, that can look at the different scenarios where different things make sense. Right? So like, can you kind of get into some of the examples of like, how, like, if I'm a restaurateur and I'm trying to, like, here's my, here's my. The picture of what the job done right Looks like right, right place, right product, right market, all that. There's a gap because I. And you've identified the right solution for that gap. Like what, like what is, like what are the most often like the most common gaps you guys see? I guess we'll start there. We'll start with that question, like, where you make the biggest impact? Like time and time again, like, let's just start here because we know this is going to be the biggest place we can impact your operations.
- [94:37]
Steve Crowley
Are you talking from a technology standpoint or just generally?
- [94:40]
Eric Cacciatore
I mean from like, like a technology standpoint. Like give me an example of where there are two solutions that are ideal for two different scenarios, or the same scenario, but different mod. Like business. Does that make sense?
- [94:55]
Brian Reese
Our reality is today the clients we're working with already have most of their tech stack in place. And so we're helping advise on changes to that tech stack so it's less about, hey, we need a labor scheduling tool. And it's more like, we have this labor scheduling tool, is it the right one? And so then we get in and we start talking to the leadership and the operators and we're like, it turns out you don't have that definition of labor excellence yet. You haven't really gotten clear on your work methods yet. And so we can talk about software, but to Steve's point, there's sort of an order of operations and Steve said it before, usually it's in that work method space. And so let's try to try to get clear on the work method and then we can design the labor model and pick the right scheduling software based on that for where you're at in your journey. But the most often problem that we're helping with is really getting clear on the work method. What is the method by which we will deliver excellence?
- [95:56]
Steve Crowley
If I can just go deeper on that, because an automated espresso machine in the story I mentioned before is a technology. Right? And I'll just kind of go back to this case study to talk about how extreme this math can be. So remember, you've got this big box that is, looks like a machine, but it's actually three machines. It's the milk steamer, it's the grinder, and the breweries. How you sequence those three pieces of equipment within that box will result in one beverage being made every 45 seconds in the best case scenario, or one beverage every two minutes in the worst case scenario. So that means that within a half hour, if you get the 45 second method as a part of your training, then you can make 40 beverages in 30 minutes. 1800 divided by 45 is 40, I think. And then if you can make. If you learn the two minute way Brian taught you here, then you can only make 15 beverages in 30 minutes. So that's the gap 40 to 15. Which means I either need one, two or three baristas based on that work method. But that work method isn't software. It's a work routine which is kind of like human software. But good luck getting a labor scheduling software to match your reality if you don't know if you need one, two or three baristas on that espresso machine to make to meet the same demand.
- [97:17]
Eric Cacciatore
Got it, Got it. So you really got to start with the end in mind and reverse engineer.
- [97:21]
Brian Reese
That's right at the core.
- [97:22]
Steve Crowley
Start with the end in mind and then build the method, the tool.
- [97:25]
Eric Cacciatore
Are you familiar with Dr. Benjamin Hardy?
- [97:29]
Steve Crowley
No.
- [97:30]
Eric Cacciatore
The book 10x is easier than 2x. The gap and the gain. He also has who, not how.
- [97:37]
Brian Reese
I'm gonna have to get a book list from you.
- [97:38]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, I mean, and I'm stoked. I'm getting on the show in July. And his latest book is the Science of Scaling, where it really gets into like, like the, like the, like the, like the, the stuff I love, which is like, how does the human like, mind work? And like, whatever. Like what is it? The actual science and like. Yeah, I can't wait to get into it. So his book is dropping, but I think we're gonna get into it. I'm about to go audio listen to all of his books. You keep on talking about the gap and I'm, I haven't read that book yet. So I'm like really interested in what you're saying is really what he's talking about in that book. The gap in the game.
- [98:10]
Steve Crowley
We'll read it to you and we'll have a book. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [98:11]
Eric Cacciatore
We could. Hey, we could have a conversation in the network. That'd be fun. What haven't we discussed, guys? We, we've kind of already had about an hour and a half recording time. Goes by fast.
- [98:22]
Brian Reese
That was awesome.
- [98:22]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah. Doesn't go by real fast. Thank you.
- [98:24]
Steve Crowley
One thing I want to call out is that we've, we've tried for a long time to crack the code on supporting smaller businesses. It's a passion point for us and we have a product that will help and we're just not quite clear on how to bring it to market. And so our hypothesis is this August time frame workshop and we'll post on our LinkedIn page, Service Physics LinkedIn page, as well as our website that, you know, people can sign up for this workshop. But it's like anything else that we do, it's just an experiment. We're trying to find the best way to get this information which again, the work is not, it's not easy, it's hard work. But the concepts are simple and with this minimum effective dose, if you, if you can attend, you know, three hour workshop and get some hands on practice in doing this, you can be absolutely lethal back in your operation and create tons of capacity. This is August of 2025.
- [99:22]
Eric Cacciatore
Okay. Yeah, I mean, well, let's try to definitely, you know, we'll have a link so people can learn more about that in the show notes. I'm not done with you yet. I still got another 15 minutes. I'm gonna go to the very end before we start to wrap things up. I am curious in terms of like, you know, typically the format of the show is like, how did you get here? Where are you today? What's the work you're doing today? But I love when I get to talk to people like yourself who are really plugged into like the future and like, like I kind of have a feeling if I ask you guys, like, where are we going? Like what things are on the horizon in terms of like the future of restaurants and just like all industry, like what are the things that like you have your eye on? Like what excites you the most? Like what are those things?
- [100:02]
Brian Reese
I'm curious, man, I got to go back to the mission. You know, the, the opportunity is so big in, in restaurants, in service, including healthcare. I mean just look at all of the nonsense going on in healthcare today into, you know, all work that people are doing. And so we're just nose to the grindstone trying to transform service work. And there's so much opportunity in the, the current state. I'm really excited about what happens when the industry has sort of like taken that next step. We're a little bit more sophisticated. We understand the work method to a granular level. We're able to schedule our people to meet demand and deliver consistent quality. What's next? What's possible in the industry once we have that foundational sort of consistency across the industry of approaching the operation. So if we achieve our mission, what's next? What comes after that? What's possible for humankind when the work is easier? We're being really thoughtful about it and we're delivering consistently great customer experiences and then that's supported by AI and all the other technology that's coming along. So the future is bright, but that future, you know, it's going to take work to get there.
- [101:18]
Eric Cacciatore
I think it is really bright. It's exciting time. And like, you mentioned the word consciousness a few times too. This idea of, like, you know, we have an influence. We can, we can dictate our future. That is like, I think that's like the one thing that all life has in common. Like, all living things share this ability to influence probability. Like, that's the whole, like, you know, what is the power of attraction? And the, this idea of, like, if you have a vision and like, where are we going and what can we collectively do to move towards that future together? I think what's cool is if the industry starts saying, like, here's our collective vision, here's our better future as an industry, and how do we get out of our silos? How do we decentralize information and democratize knowledge? Right. Like, I think it's, it's. We've held ourselves back because we, we are out of fear of sharing information, out of, out of the competitive nature of the industry, of trying to be better than the next person at our own demise. You know, and I think what's exciting about the future is that with resources, like what you guys are doing, what this podcast is doing and countless other resources are doing is we're, we're, we're finally sharing information. We're, we're getting perspective. And like my hope, I mean, so your. What is your mission statement?
- [102:32]
Steve Crowley
To make service work better for people.
- [102:34]
Eric Cacciatore
And you, you mentioned the word transaction transform a couple times. Right? So, like, aggressor, unstoppables mission is to inspire, empower, and transform the industry. So I guess the question I'm curious about is, like, what is a better future? What is a better industry? Paint that picture. Let me real quick. What, what is the right place, right time? Doing what type of work? Like, like, like, let's. Like, what is that for the collective industry? Right.
- [102:57]
Steve Crowley
I want to attempt. Temper the. Temper your optimism and hope. Hope. You've probably heard a million times, hope's not a strategy. Right. And you gave us a history lesson earlier about how George Washington didn't want to pay taxes. Another history lesson, which is what happens when technology outstrips operations?
- [103:16]
Eric Cacciatore
What do you mean by that? When technology outstrips operations.
- [103:18]
Steve Crowley
So I use the history lesson as a, As a bridge here. Everybody in this country knows that the U.S. civil War was one of the bloodiest wars in our history. One of the reasons why that war was so bloody was because there were three major technological advances that happened right before it. One related to weaponry, one related to the sighting on warships and another related to basically supply chain and railroads. Arguably another one related to the telegraph. So communication was disrupted as well. So you've got these four technological leaps and then we went to war and we lined up in lines right across from each other as we always did and use these very lethal weapons to destroy ourselves.
- [104:09]
Eric Cacciatore
Wasn't it like the board gun, the rifle essentially like more accurate than ever.
- [104:13]
Steve Crowley
That's it.
- [104:13]
Eric Cacciatore
So you just point like yeah, like you're not like, yeah, like it was old war, new technology, blood crazy.
- [104:20]
Steve Crowley
And, and so think about. Actually before I say this, I read A post on LinkedIn from a CEO of a technology company espousing that the restaurant industry is ready to lead the technological revolution that's coming.
- [104:37]
Eric Cacciatore
100 I think that I believe this.
- [104:39]
The restaurant industry is going to change the world. Like I sound like crazy people like oh, like sorry, go ahead.
- [104:44]
Steve Crowley
It totally, it totally could. But let's, let's look back at recent history and Covid. So 2020, the restaurant industry had to go from largely non digital and third party was there but it wasn't what it is today and we needed to transform as an industry in like five weeks or we were out of business. We've not recovered from that and it's been five years.
- [105:10]
Eric Cacciatore
Right.
- [105:10]
Steve Crowley
So if recent history is any indication of what's coming, what's going to happen with a, with AI I don't believe it's going to replace method in the short term. It's going to be helpful as a, as a coach and in augmenting some of our, our thinking.
- [105:23]
Eric Cacciatore
It's going to be like a tasker like, like you give it a task and like it'll just automate. It'll just do that over and over and over.
- [105:29]
Steve Crowley
That's it. And then it will get better over time. So there's there's a, you know, there's the today future, the tomorrow future, the, the year from now future. But what is coming is going to be, you know, I'm not sure how old the, the, the audiences but we probably are sitting here today thinking like the invention of the Internet was the biggest technological leap in our lifetime. No way like artificial intelligence will be the thing that when we're, you know, at the end of our careers that was the technological leap. And I don't have any indication to think that today the restaurant industry is ready for that. But if we can heed the warning from COVID from the Civil War, and think about how do we upgrade operations at the. The same rate that we're upgrading technology so that we don't end up with the bloodbath that happened in the Civil War or during COVID to restaurants that we've not.
- [106:15]
Eric Cacciatore
How is, how is the technology in this case, the technology is the board rifle, right. That delivers a very accurate shot. You're not going to miss. What, like, how is. How, like, what technology do you see on the horizon? AI. And how is that going to be a shot to our forehead? Like, why is that a bad thing? Like, why, like, are you saying if the technology gets too powerful and, like, it controls us? Like, what. What do you mean?
- [106:36]
Steve Crowley
Yeah, and it will create problems, can guarantee, like. And I think, you know, one part of our practice and our mindset is that problems are good because they create opportunity and you can't ignore them. They're bad if you sweep them under the rug and they are plentiful. Like hundreds or thousands of problems happening in every business every day, all the time. The new technologies will create new problems at a faster rate. Communication will speed up, expectations of customers will speed up, and costs will increase.
- [107:07]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, I mean, it's weird. So have you guys heard of the book Power and Progress? It's written by, like, a Harvard professor, like, of, like, economy. His name's got a mirror. I can't remember. I'm horrible with names. I can remember titles. I'm horrible with names. Anyway, the whole argument in that book Power and Progress is that historically, whoever controls the technology controls everything, controls the money, controls everything. And we're moving in this direction right now. It's a really fascinating book.
- [107:42]
Brian Reese
It's.
- [107:42]
Eric Cacciatore
It's like an anthropological approach to technology over time. And like, what the. The repercussions of society, like, how that influenced society and power. So whoever controls the technology controls the power. We're moving into this future where, like, the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and whoever controls the technology is really the shot caller. And you, you saw this over the past 10 years with, like, the, the evolution of, like, Google and Meta and how much power that they have with being able to influence masses. Like, like brainwash societies, you know, and like, they control, like, if, if a hundred people are on the Internet, 99 of them are either on Facebook or Meta or some Google platform platform. Like, the majority of our existence is controlled by those two entities.
- [108:26]
That's not a good thing.
- [108:28]
That is not good. And whoever controls the AI, which is probably going to be three companies, is.
- [108:36]
Not going to be good.
- [108:38]
You know, so we're kind of so short sighted we don't see the big picture.
- [108:43]
History repeats itself.
- [108:45]
You know, like we're like, we have to be very conscious about who as consumers we're giving our money and our time to data. Exactly. This is one of the reasons why I kind of push back against some of the bigger players in the restaurant space right now. Like the technologies, like we as consumers can't all use Toast as a pos. Like that's not good for the industry. Like, I'm not saying that Toast is a bad company, but they are clear for like front Runner. Like by far the number one most recommended POS on the show. Like, there's some other great companies out there. Spoton's doing some really good stuff. Catalyst is doing some really cool stuff. Like how do we just intentionally fragment the industry when we can create, when we create a competitive market, we win. You know, like, what's going through your mind as I'm saying this a lot?
- [109:28]
Steve Crowley
I'm going to say something else controversial, which is technology's definition is the application of scientific knowledge applied for practice, practical purposes.
- [109:38]
Eric Cacciatore
Damn it.
- [109:40]
Steve Crowley
Say that again. Technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.
- [109:46]
Eric Cacciatore
Okay.
- [109:47]
Steve Crowley
There's nothing in there that says it's digital hardware, software, nothing. It's the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. Service physics, as a proper noun, is a company. But what we find with almost every client is that the teams start talking about service physics the way that people talk about Lean or systems thinking or any of these other methodologies. Service physics as a, as a concept is a technology and it's free. The knowledge is out there. The practice is a practice. So you get better over time and it will prepare us for what's coming and maybe keep it at like arm's length as long as we can until we eventually, if ever must succumb to one of the three companies that will control artificial intelligence. But remember the restaurant industry, restaurants are not e commerce businesses. They're brick and mortar. And if all the technology went away, we could still operate it like a lemonade stand if we had to.
- [110:49]
Eric Cacciatore
Right? Well, I think that's one of the big things too. Back on this idea of being short sighted. Like, we're so like, we're in like a complex crisis right now where things are just getting so overly compact, complex, and you need these complexities, complexity, complexities, arguably to, to be able to compete because it's no longer serving the person that walks through your front door. It's serving everyone everywhere. And you need the technologies to be able to reach these people. Right. You don't have an option. Your hands are tied. But it's interesting because I think we're.
- [111:22]
Like, in this bubble, and the bubble.
- [111:24]
Is the Internet, and we are all literally in the bubble, and we can't see beyond the bubble. And I think we forget that at the end of the day, that bubble could. There could be a solar flare tomorrow and that bubble could disappear. And we're still human beings. We are.
- [111:40]
Steve Crowley
We.
- [111:40]
Eric Cacciatore
We've created a scenario where we're dependent on this bubble that could pop at any point. So, like, how do we, like, become conscious of that and choose not to be in the bubble, but choose to say, oh, wait, we're human beings and like, let's reverse the human variables that we know to be true to create a better future?
- [111:59]
Steve Crowley
Right.
- [111:59]
Brian Reese
This is actually what I really appreciate about the service industry and restaurant operators. Restaurant operators can get shit done regardless of the barriers in front of them. Right. So the Internet goes down. They got their backup to being able to ring transactions. There's the resilience of. This industry is unstoppable. Right. Just to really hammer that home. And so that's like, part of what I think service physics recognizes in the world. Like, people always got to eat. And the operators in this business are like, you know, die hard unstoppable in their passion for delivering great customer experiences and their ability to get shit done. And so, yeah, the solar flare comes, our Internet bubble bursts. I bet restaurants are probably one of the few businesses that still go.
- [112:46]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, yeah. And, like, there's always going to be that need to bring people together to feed them. And I mean, the restaurant was the original Internet.
- [112:55]
Steve Crowley
Yeah.
- [112:56]
Eric Cacciatore
That's where you got everything. Your news, your.
- [112:58]
Your.
- [112:58]
Your communication, your political, your politics, your entertainment, your. You know, it's like it was the. So the original social platform, your dining room floor.
- [113:06]
Steve Crowley
Yep. You know, question for you, Eric. This bubble that we live in, our reality, is it physics or fiction?
- [113:15]
Eric Cacciatore
I think it's fiction.
- [113:18]
Steve Crowley
So the best way to navigate through the fiction is with physics.
- [113:22]
Eric Cacciatore
Right.
- [113:23]
Steve Crowley
And it's not like that. You know, the thing about science is it doesn't presuppose anything. It starts with the scientific method of, like, observation. Let's get clear on, like, what's happening and develop some hypotheses about how things might be better. And if we can free ourselves from the, The. The narrative of technology as a, you know, that solution, fixation trap. That we get into. And then defining the problem is the absence of it. Because if you define your problem as technology, you've already committed to spending the money. And another, like, service physics mantra is like, we put our minds before our wallets. Would rather go there first. We can always go to the wallet if we need to. Right. But there's plenty of value we can extract from just thinking through it and taking a defined and consistent problem solving approach.
- [114:11]
Brian Reese
I love it.
- [114:12]
Eric Cacciatore
This has been a lot of fun. I told you guys I'd be wrapping up at 12:30. We got a minute left. I've really enjoyed this time today. Honestly, I can't do what I do without people like you being willing to open up and to share your knowledge and to share your perspective before we say goodbye. Who do you respect and admire in the industry? Who are some folks that in your work with, doing work with restaurants? Or some people that just like, whoa, like, you're on a different plane, you're on the next level. Like, who. Who do I need to make an example of? Who is that for you? That's how I found you guys. Just through conversation.
- [114:53]
Brian Reese
I know you've already interviewed Meredith Sandlin.
- [114:56]
Eric Cacciatore
Yes.
- [114:56]
Brian Reese
And she talked about, about Empower Delivery. When we talk about all this technology in the industry, Empower Delivery and the, and the team behind Clustertruck are doing it right. So what we see a lot of times is folks coming from Silicon Valley, like you said, the big three companies, right. Meta, Google, Facebook, Amazon, whatever, and they're bringing their technology lens to a very human problem. And what I mean by that is they are used to being able to design computer code that does exactly what they want it to do. And when that mindset meets the reality of restaurant operations, it totally misses. Because humans are humans and humans are going to behave the way they're going to behave. And so what I'm saying is, like, the clustertruck folks took the right human centered approach. They had a goal, they wanted to create something amazing for consumers. And then they literally put their engineering office above the restaurant operation. And whenever the restaurant operators had a problem, they would like, bang on the ceiling and the engineers would come down and be like, what's the problem with the work? And how can I design the technology to support the work so they're really doing it right. And what we oftentimes see, again with the Silicon Valley mindset is like, let me, I've got this technology. How do I get the operation to support my technology? Right? And so the approach of what's the work that delivers the value for the guests. And then how does the technology as a tool support that work?
- [116:27]
Eric Cacciatore
Who, who are cluster like who. What is clustertrun?
- [116:30]
Brian Reese
It's a good question.
- [116:32]
Steve Crowley
I would describe them as the most successful ghost kitchen that has been created. And so the founders, again, they set out to build a technology company by first starting a restaurant, then building the technology to support it. But the idea was can we, can we lead with delivery? And so what that led to was them defining their customer as the delivery driver. And so they've optimized all value to flow to the driver, knowing that they are the person that is going to serve the end customer. So all their, their delivery staff is in house like on, on the payroll. They're not third party there. It's, it's a fascinating story just on the cluster truck restaurant side. And then the software that spun out of that with Empower Delivery is really fascinating too, and brings, it's what is.
- [117:19]
Eric Cacciatore
Empowered Delivery is that different company.
- [117:21]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. So it's a cluster truck built the software and then built a company around that software to sell to other restaurant.
- [117:30]
Eric Cacciatore
Companies, specifically virtual kitchens or ghost kitchens.
- [117:34]
Steve Crowley
Yeah. And mostly I would describe their value proposition as timing. And so especially in a ghost kitchen setup where you've got such a complex menu, all these different cuisines, all these different machine cycle times, when things get fired really matters to make sure that it's coming, it's all landing in the same spot hot, just as the delivery driver is.
- [117:50]
Eric Cacciatore
So who, who's the person behind this organization that I need to talk to? What's the name?
- [117:55]
Brian Reese
We're going to have to look it up for you. There's two founders, one of them, they're based in Indianapolis. So one of them had a tech exit. So it is a tech, tech guy who decided to, to get after the, this, you know, ghost kitchen, virtual brand opportunity. We'll have to look up the name for you. But Meredith for sure was, you know, the one who introduced us to them.
- [118:17]
Steve Crowley
She could make all the right contacts for you.
- [118:19]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, she's past guest on the show. This has been so much fun, guys. You mentioned that you have a workshop coming up in August. What's the title of that workshop?
- [118:28]
Steve Crowley
It's a title and title and progress work. The working title, Service Physics 101 or something like that. But it, it'll essentially be an introduction to service physics, thinking, methods, tools and training and how to improve work with excellence.
- [118:46]
Eric Cacciatore
Well, I would love to help you guys get more eyes and ears on that. Maybe we can get you Back in the near future to do a workshop.
- [118:52]
Steve Crowley
Yeah.
- [118:53]
Eric Cacciatore
That kind of like give like a high level version, like the 45 minute version of that.
- [118:57]
Steve Crowley
Yeah.
- [118:57]
Eric Cacciatore
To get more people to go over to you folks. And you already mentioned that you're willing to support the podcast and pay me a commission. So we'll work out those details. Thank you very much. You guys use my links, then we will make sure you connect with these guys and get registered for their webinar. Pay attention to the calls to action. At the end of today's episode, we'll do a special recording to let you know exactly what to do to get signed up for that, that webinar. And thank you guys so much again for taking the time to get open, to get vulnerable, to share your perspective, to share your knowledge. The future of Restaurant Unstoppable is finding people like you and sharing my platform so we can spread the knowledge and live our purpose. To transform the industry.
- [119:35]
Steve Crowley
Man.
- [119:35]
Eric Cacciatore
Men, I should say.
- [119:37]
Brian Reese
That's it.
- [119:37]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah.
- [119:38]
Brian Reese
Thanks for coming in person. I think it was a huge, huge, just new experience for us, you know, being on a podcast, doing it in person. And like you said, it felt like we were just having a conversation. It was great.
- [119:50]
Eric Cacciatore
Conversations are meant to be in person.
- [119:51]
Steve Crowley
Person.
- [119:52]
Eric Cacciatore
You know, I think again that we start with the, the end in mind. Like it's about people. I think people. There's so much more communication that's happening in this room right now other than our audible voices, like, and you can't get that unless you're in person. And I think we sacrifice convenience sometimes.
- [120:08]
Steve Crowley
Yeah.
- [120:09]
Eric Cacciatore
For sacrifice quality. For convenience.
- [120:12]
Steve Crowley
Yep.
- [120:13]
Brian Reese
Absolutely. So, yes. Anyway, thanks again for coming.
- [120:15]
Eric Cacciatore
My pleasure.
- [120:16]
Steve Crowley
Should do a selfie.
- [120:17]
Eric Cacciatore
Yeah, yeah. Oh, on air selfie. I love it. Awesome, guys. Thank you so much. There is no question you are unstoppable. Cheers.
- [120:25]
There is another episode wrapped up here at Restaurant Unstoppable. And if you want more, Brian and Steve, they are joining us live for a Q and A on December 9th at 2pm Eastern. Head over to restaurantstoppable.com Service Physics. One word and we will get you the link to join us on December 9th at 2pm and they're going to throw in the Service Physics. Physics app, which is a app that will help you basically identify those problematic areas and routines and help you discover operational improvements. And the Q and A is really around helping you discover these. These bottlenecks. And they're going to make suggestions to help you improve your operational efficiencies. Again, that is December 9th at 2pm Eastern.
- [121:05]
We'll see you there.
- [121:06]
Head over to restaurantstoppable.com Service Physics and if you want access to this and all future Restaurant Unstoppable Network community events.
- [121:15]
Head over to Restaurant Unstoppable.com live and.
- [121:19]
Be a part of our community.