Talent tips from top Zaxby's locations

Daniel Blaser (00:04):

Hello and welcome to On the Clock presented by Workstream. If you care about hiring and retaining hourly employees, you're in the right place. I'm Daniel Blazer, and today I'm clocking in with Ben Little. Ben is the owner of 14 Zaxby's locations in the southeast us, including some of the top performing stores in the country. We discussed the importance of maintaining consistency while scaling, why you should always invest back into your business, how to identify potential leaders within your organization and much more. Enjoy. How have you maintained a consistency as far as both hiring, but then also the customer service that you offer as you've opened more locations? Because I've heard from other customers that can be a challenge obviously.

Ben Little (00:51):

Yeah, it definitely is. I have a unique advantage, I guess, in my operational structure is that in every restaurant I have an operating partner, so they get paid a salary plus a percent of the net profits, and it just really goes a long ways and aligning the incentive and making the operating partner that's in the store day to day, week to week, actually serving the guest, making sure that their incentives are aligned in the same way that us the licensees are. And then the other thing is just having just really high standards and holding people accountable when they need to be held accountable. That's one of my favorite Tony Robbins things is if you're getting a result that you don't like, then raise your standards. And it sounds so painfully simple and obvious, but when you sit there and think about it for a second, if you're getting a result that you don't like, it's because your standards are low enough to allow for that result to happen. So if you have high enough standards, then you're going to start getting the results that you want.

Daniel Blaser (02:07):

So maybe kind of a related, and maybe it's a similar answer, ants, or say someone's watching this and they own one store or two stores and they're like, one day I want to have a dozen, two dozen, whatever it is. What recommendations, advice would you give them?

Ben Little (02:23):

Oh man. We could do a week long podcast on that, but I'd say just invest back into the business. I mean, that's really the secret sauce. I mean, we've got the number one, number three and a bunch of other top 20 and top 50 locations in the entire Zaxby's system out of 920 locations. And I mean the whole secret is just invest back into the business. I mean, yes, live your life, take a little money out to put food on the table for the wife and kids and do some fun things along the way, but as much as you can invest back into the business and especially invest back into the people and developing the leaders and future leaders. And the other things just align the incentives. I mean, I'll say it until I'm dead, is I greatly don't believe in the traditional GM DM area manager model just because it doesn't align the incentives.

(03:33):

I mean, you're going to give them most likely some arbitrary goals that may or may not drive long-term business growth and success. Whereas when you tie everything to both the bottom line and the top line sales growth, and those are really the only two things that matter. Well, how do you get to that? You take care of the guests, you serve really hot food, you serve people quickly and in a timely manner. You have really good guest service. You keep the restaurant clean. I mean, that's the only way you reach those two objectives is you do all those things and you do them consistently every day for a really long time, especially in the restaurant business, there is no such thing as overnight success. It's doing a bunch of little things really well for really long periods of time. And I know a lot of people don't want to hear that, but that is the secret.

Daniel Blaser (04:33):

That's really interesting how you talk about creating a structure that aligns those incentives. It makes a ton of sense, but that's something that I haven't really heard before. So that's interesting. You did mention how you are able to find people that can then make it up to a managerial level. How do you approach that? How do you identify people that are ready for those opportunities and then how do you work to promote them internally to give them more responsibilities?

Ben Little (05:06):

Yeah, I mean that's always a struggle in our industry specifically just because of the aforementioned turnover that we usually experience year over year. But going back to what I just said, I mean if you want to keep growing and grow your top line and your bottom line, there's no way to do that without investing back into your people and putting the time and money and effort into showing them how you do all those things. Yeah, I mean there's a number of roads and routes to get there, but there's usually a pretty common set of things that we look for and see in people when we think they're ready to take the next step or if they're ready to be an operating partner. And I mean far and away number one is you have to think and act like an owner before you're actually the owner. If you're not doing that, that's a really hard mindset shift that has to take place if they're not doing it before they become the owner or the operating partner or the GM or whatever.

(06:31):

I would say, and this is probably slightly unpopular, but they need to be a capitalist. At the end of the day, this is, we're not in a nonprofit and it's not a charity. And a lot of times that means making really hard decisions with both people and just the business in general. But there's a distinction though. There's the short-term capitalist and then there's a long-term capitalist. And the kind of people we want are the long-term capitalist, and I call it being long-term greedy because the people that are short-term greedy, they're going to be more likely to cut corners and maybe not provide as good a guest service and probably run the labor a little too tight so they can make a little more money this month or this quarter, and they're going to serve old shitty food that they probably should have thrown away so they don't have high food cost and they're not going to keep the building clean because that requires more labor and more repair and maintenance spend.

(07:39):

Those are the things we don't want short-term greedy, long-term, greedy does all of the opposite of that with the end goal being just building transactions and transactions and transactions. Because in the restaurant business and in my business, that's ultimately how we judge if we're growing or not. It is not even if the sales are growing, are our transactions growing? Is our guest count growing because everything else is a BS metric of growth. If you don't have more people coming into the restaurant every day and every week and every month, then you're not growing. And I would say go back the same thing. They have to have really high standards and they have to again, be able to hold themselves accountable and hold others accountable and do it in a way to where you don't come off as an a-hole. And I mean people that are interested in growing and doing better and becoming something more, they want to be held accountable, believe it or not, they don't want to just be able to do whatever they want and not be held accountable if they do something that they should not be doing and setting good aggressive goals and putting a plan behind it.

(09:00):

You're not just saying, I want to sell 10 million in chicken this year. Okay, well that's great. Well, how are you going to do it? Having plans behind the goals and people that are ready to take that next step, they have a plan for how they want to do it. And then the last thing I would say would probably just be obsessive about operations. And again, just going back to in the restaurant business, if you're not serving really good hot food, that's kind of one A, then people aren't going to come back. That sounds like common sense, but I can assure you it is not common practice. And just going fast, good customer service, keeping the restaurant clean, seeing labor as an investment in the guest and not just a line item to manage. Just all those little things. And again, just doing it consistently for a very long time.

Daniel Blaser (10:05):

A lot of great knowledge. And in what you just said, one question that we get a lot from workstream customers, non-customers is do you have any ideas for sourcing and hiring that are maybe out of the box, right? There's the standard stuff everyone tries. What have you seen that out of the box efforts for sourcing hiring that has been surprisingly successful?

Ben Little (10:29):

There's a couple things. One, I would say kind of the ancillary benefits that you can offer people outside of just the standard pay PTO health insurance, whatever, things like offering scholarships to either juniors and seniors in high school or kids that are already in college talking. For my industry specifically, we have been playing around with offering a daycare program for working moms. We have a lot of single working moms that work in our restaurants. So once you get one of them in there and get 'em on the daycare program and they're going to be extremely loyal to you. And then the other thing is posting job ads and posters and yard signs that are in Spanish. I would say of my 850 employees, I probably have 150 to 200 that are native Spanish speakers. And a lot of times they're just intimidated from the language barrier and the vast majority of 'em speak some English, but that can be really intimidating for them to come in and ask for a job or ask for an interview if English is not their first language.

(12:05):

But if you have yard signs up and job postings that are in Spanish, they're much more, they're obviously going to apply at a much higher rate. They have the confidence that someone will be able to communicate with them. And we try to have at least one hiring manager in every restaurant that is fluent in Spanish. And I mean you'd be amazed. I know it's kind of a stereotype, but the folks from Central and South America, they're some of the hardest working, just best people, just super loyal will go above and beyond. And if you just give them an opportunity, they will generally reward you greatly. And a lot of times we will pay for them to get English speaking classes so they can become more confident and hopefully grow into roles where they can be customer facing as well. And kind of a sidebar of that, I didn't know this until we started doing the scholarship programs, but if their parents are first generation and the child is born here in the United States, obviously they're a US citizen, but they have to pay out of state tuition. So you can imagine how unaffordable college education is to those families. So again, that's kind of another benefit and attraction to those folks is you can get school and college paid for if you come and work for our group.

Daniel Blaser (13:43):

That's really cool. Those are some awesome benefits. You mentioned the daycare program, the scholarship program. I had love to hear anything else as far as what have you done to increase retention or invest in those employees to keep them around longer term?

Ben Little (14:03):

I think it mostly just goes back to just treating 'em really well. I mean, we're still not immune to managers having lapses and judgment and not treating them. They would like to be treated, but I think by and large, it's that old cliche of people don't quit jobs, they quit managers. And it's definitely true. If you don't have the right people in leadership positions in your restaurants, then you are going to hemorrhage turnover. And I guess I would say that's kind of a secondary benefit of workstream is turnover is not a line item in a p and l statement, but I can assure you it's in there and it is a big line item. But when you get down into the nitty gritty of the cost to recruit, the cost to hire, the cost to onboard, the cost to get 'em trained uniforms, the list goes on and on.

(15:11):

We did the math last year, I want to say for an hourly team member, it cost us like $2,000 for every person that turns over and then that only goes up with pay rate. So that's kind of where workstream can help out is you can know all those benefits upfront and just kind of goes to help communicate with the team members better what to expect. And the job postings are really easy to change and adjust if you need to. And it's a big cost and anything you can do to minimize it is a nice secondary benefit.

Daniel Blaser (15:58):

I think I have one more question left for you, which is you mentioned that it's possibly been the hardest job market maybe in history the last 18 months or whatever it's been. Do you think we're going to see a shift in that towards a little bit easier hiring for hourly workers? If you have to put on your predict the future hat, what do you kind of anticipate over the next year or something?

Ben Little (16:28):

It's definitely getting easier, but we're starting from the frame of reference of we're coming off the worst of all times. So anything that's not the worst of all times easier. We have seen applications continue to increase, and I mean, knock on wood, we're finally to the point of where we're actually turning people away and limiting our availability on the scheduler and work stream just because we don't really need anyone right now. And I think it's going to continue to trend that way at least for the next three or four months as you see unemployment trickle up and especially on the backside of Christmas when a lot of those part-time jobs go away, UPS or Amazon or those kinds of jobs. I see, especially January to March should be easier. I don't think it's ever going to go back to the way it was in 2019 or earlier, but it's getting better. But again, I don't think it's ever going to go back to the way it was. And if you don't have good competitive edges like using workstream or doing any of the other things we've already talked about, you're just going to be at a big disadvantage. And ultimately, our business, it's a people business, and if you don't have good people running your restaurants, then it's an uphill battle.

Daniel Blaser (18:07):

Those are some great points and hopefully as maybe you continue to get more applicants coming in, like you said, you're having to actually set some limits now. Maybe you have the opportunity to increase the quality of candidates or a little bit more, and now you have your pick of the candidate pool.

Ben Little (18:30):

Yeah, we're no longer in, can you fog a mirror? Okay. You're hired stages. We've moved on to other requirements now.

Daniel Blaser (18:42):

Thank you for listening to On the Clock. For show notes and more info, visit workstream us slash podcast. I've included that link as well as some links to connect with Ben and see what he's up to in the show notes. Until next time, we're clocking out.