4 ways to recession-proof your quick service restaurant

Daniel Blaser (00:00):

Hello everyone. My name is Daniel. I'm with Workstream, and it's my pleasure to be here today with Gary Occhiogrosso. Now we're going to talk all about how you can sort of recession proof your restaurant if you want to put it that way. But before we jump into that, I want to give Gary the opportunity to introduce himself. Gary, could you, I know you have a great background in the franchise restaurant world, and then also provide a little bit of info about what you're currently doing with Franchise Growth Solutions.

Gary Occhiogrosso (00:30):

Sure, and I will try and keep this under two minutes. It's my challenge. I'm the founder and managing partner of a franchise development and franchise sales organization called Franchise Growth Solutions. And what we do is we develop franchises with individuals who have a good business, a profitable business, and they want to expand using franchising as the development tool. And additionally, if they're looking for support or assistance or actually an outsourced sales department to help recruit franchisees into their system, we take on that role. We provide infrastructure for startups so that they can supply their franchisees with the proper tools and support necessary to grow. And on the backend we do exit strategy through private equity, cash outs and also cash infusion. That's sort of in a nutshell what Franchise Growth Solutions does. From a background point of view, I've been in the franchising business since Dinosaurs Rule the world.

(01:34):

As I say, I got in, after doing seven, eight years in the New York radio business, I decided to open up a Dunking Donut shop. So my first foray into franchising was as a franchisee of Dunking Donuts, and I was fortunate enough to be put on their advisory council and on their advertising committee, and I quickly learned that I didn't want to be on the franchisee side of the table. I wanted to be on the franchisor side of the table. So when I sold my shop, I became a consultant, whatever that meant at the tender age of, I guess I was 31 at that point, and just sort of as life and the world and the universe happened, it just sort of unfolded. And I got very involved in franchising and remain an advocate of the concept of franchising and speak on the topic very often at conventions. And I think I mentioned to you earlier on, I teach the topic as an adjunct at NYU. So I'm very involved in it because my purpose or what I believe is that everyone should have the opportunity to control their own destiny and create legacy. And the best way to do that is to own and operate a business. And for many people that means owning a franchise.

Daniel Blaser (02:51):

I love that you touched on so many different pieces of your background and reasons why I feel like you're uniquely qualified to talk about maybe some of these macroeconomic trends and then how they translate to restaurants and franchise restaurants. Based on our previous conversations, we were kind of talking about how the restaurant industry has just been in this uniquely challenging place for the last few years especially, right? And we all know that that's kind of obvious, but I feel like it might be helpful if you could kind of summarize, let's hit on some of these challenges that have kind of come up year after year over the last little while,

Gary Occhiogrosso (03:37):

And thank you for acknowledging that the restaurant industry has been challenged because there are folks out there, and I'm amazed sometimes as we're coming out of the pandemic, I'm in a restaurant and I know that restaurants are shorthanded, for example, and I see guests sort of thumping their hands and maybe being a little bit more impatient than they should be and not being sensitive to the situation. But I guess we should go back to sort of the beginning section of your question and talking about challenging times and the recession. And first of all, I'm not quite sure that it's officially a recession yet. We'll know that in a few weeks when second quarter numbers come out, it's kind of interesting because I'm of the belief that we're already in the recession or a recession of sorts. However, I think, and I'm not an economist, but I think two straight quarters of negative growth would indicate an official recession.

(04:33):

The interesting thing is, is that some of the outliers, so to speak, that would define a recession don't exist. So what I mean by that is we still have a very, very low unemployment, so we still have more jobs than people. I mean, we talk about companies everywhere you go, you see help wanted signs. So we still have this massive need for employment. Also, I read the other day that the United States is at either its highest or near highest amount of savings that people have saved more money in the last two years maybe because they're not flying around during covid and spending money on vacations or whatever. So having a lot of cash is certainly counterintuitive to it. And also the idea that, I guess from a consumer confidence point of view, although it may have waned and it may be irritating when we're paying $5 a gallon for gasoline here in the New York market, and then some look, at the end of the day, consumers are still spending records amount of money.

(05:40):

We're taking so many trips on airplanes that there's not enough pilots and there's cancel. So those three things are kind of like a headwind against what people would categorize as a recession, be that as it may, if we're headed in that direction, which as I said, I believe we are restaurants, which are just now coming out of the whole covid thing, which was hammering certainly for restaurants in urban markets. Truth be told, in suburban markets where I live restaurants, especially quick service or fast casual restaurants, maybe not so much fine dining that's really about the experience of going there. But a lot of suburban restaurants actually had some of the best years that they had because all of a sudden old people like me said, oh, okay, yeah, I guess I'm going to have to download the app and order food that way, or let me figure out what this, and I'm a bad example in the restaurant business, but friends all of a sudden like, Hey, have you ever heard of this thing called DoorDash?

(06:47):

Yeah. So a lot of suburban restaurants, restaurants benefited from the third party ordering platforms, for example, that actually helped. But in urban markets like inner city in New York, I have some clients that got clobbered, for lack of a better word. So when you combine the fact that we're just coming out of that, there's this ultra tough hiring environment. Again, recession aside, in New York, minimum wage is $15 an hour to pay a young person to stand behind a cash register, so to speak and take orders for hamburgers. But just because that's the minimum wage doesn't mean that everyone in the restaurant's getting $15 an hour because the people who were getting 15 an hour are now getting 20. And given the fact that the hiring environment is so tough, the minimum wage might be 15, but reality is that the average minimum is probably 18 or 19.

(07:50):

So you've got this downward pressure on labor and labor cost as well as we talk about everywhere you go, you hear inflation, inflation, inflation, and I mentioned gasoline, but some of sort of the behind the scenes, the things that people, again, I'm a bad example, but I think most people don't realize that the same way you're paying $9 a pound for bacon right now in the supermarket. For example, the restaurateur, his cost of goods is no longer 25 or 28 or 30%. It might be 35 or 40%, so there's no profit in there. Then he's giving up money to the third party ordering platforms to deliver the food. Everybody has gotten used to that now, and that's never going away as far as I'm concerned, it may diminish. So we've got this really challenging environment with, okay, as long as business keeps increasing and we can eke out a little bit more in price increase, it might be okay, but now we have this thing called recession and you're not going to raise prices in a recession and chase more customers away. So restaurateurs need to figure out how do I survive and thrive in a downward economy? That's really the essence of it,

Daniel Blaser (09:11):

That, yeah. Wow, great setup of where we currently find ourselves. I guess in our previous conversation we were kind of chatting about this, and it seems like you kind of mentioned four main ways that a restaurant can, I want to say protect against an ENC encroaching recession, whether we're already in one or there is one right around the corner. There's kind of four directions. I was wondering if maybe we can jump into those, but before we jump into the specifics, do you want to just high level give an idea of what those are?

Gary Occhiogrosso (09:47):

Yeah, yeah. I think when we spoke initially, I had mentioned that if we're going to see decreased customer counts, because now people are fearful, Hey, maybe I'm going to lose my job. Maybe not. Gas is so expensive. Well, maybe we're not going to go out to the restaurant twice a week. Maybe we're going to go twice a month. So traffic counts are going to go down customer counts. So restaurateurs need to look at what are the things they can control. So they can certainly control things like food cost. They can certainly control the customer experience. They can do different things with their advertising. They can get their team members on board with the idea, Hey, we're all sort of in this lifeboat now during this recession, and they can understand that they need to really look to sort of employ and deploy tactics that will help them get through again, the downturn, the recession.

(10:49):

So I can certainly detail those if you'd like. And I guess it looks like you'd like me to do that. So I would start with food costs, because in a restaurant there are really two categories of costs. One is what's called cost of goods, which is typically food, paper, products and beverages. What are you selling? And then the labor, so we'll put labor on the side for the moment, but if we look at cost of goods, how can a restaurateur start to manage cost of goods in a better way? Well, there are several ways. The first thing is what we call menu engineering. So if I'm running an independent restaurant, franchises have a different set of rules. We can talk about that later. But if I'm running a restaurant, I'm going to do what's called a pix or a product mix off my point of sale system, and I'm probably going to knock out the bottom.

(11:46):

Let's say I'm selling 50 items on my menu, just pick a number. I'm probably going to knock out bottom 20 or 30% of that. That's not selling. Why am I going to do that? I'm going to do that for several reasons. First of all, it's going to give me more buying power in the sense that if I have four proteins on my menu and now I go down to two, I can go to my distributor and say, Hey, I need a better price on chicken. No longer buying a thousand pounds a week. I'm buying 3000 pounds a week because I'm no longer selling three other proteins. So that goes up and I have more leverage in terms of, Hey, can I get a better price? The other piece is that if I'm selling higher items that have a lower food cost and higher profitability through what's called menu engineering, and that's the first step would be to get rid of those bottom, the bottom 20%, 30% of what's not selling.

(12:45):

So now everything on my menu is higher profit. It's the best of, so my guests are getting the best of what they love me for, they're coming in for that. Maybe I've irritated a couple of guests that only come once in a while for that one thing that's on the menu that they come for. Hopefully they'll love me anyway and they'll choose something else. Food costs with menu engineering is a very big piece. The other part to that is things like waste. If I've got 10 items that I'm selling and I'm moving it, I'm probably don't have any waste. By the way, my product is probably fresher, another conversation for another day, but I'm moving that product. I'm probably not at the end of the day looking at something in my hot table or cold table that didn't sell because it's a very small percentage of sales that I now have to throw out because that one customer that comes every three weeks didn't come in that day for that.

(13:44):

So less waste, better buying power, higher profit items that are up on that menu for people to choose from without sort of compromising the integrity of the menu or the concept. So food costs would be one way to look at what I call the middle of the p and l. By the way, that will also translate into less labor, though I mentioned food, paper, beverage, labor. So how could that translate into less labor? Well, if I have less menu items, perhaps I don't have to prep as many things. So instead of prepping 30 things in the morning, I'm only prepping 20 now. Yeah, I might be doing more of them, but it reduces setup time. It might reduce the prep person coming in for two hours before we open down to an hour and a half. It increases what I call flawless execution. So if I have a team member there, and again, remember labor is tough, so I might have a lot of new team members there teaching a team member, a young person, let's say in a quick service establishment, how to execute 50 items on the menu, they're probably going to make mistakes and it's going to take them longer to sort of ramp up and get up to speed.

(15:00):

But if I only have to teach them 10 or 20 and we're cross utilizing items, well that's more efficient labor. So the labor load goes down. So looking at your menu engineering, that menu has a lot of very good positive middle of the p and l effect. The other piece, and again, I had mentioned about franchisees and franchisees don't necessarily have the ability to decide what's on the menu so they can do other things in addition to maybe creating some specials that are higher profit items. But all restaurateurs can elevate what I call the customer experience. And the customer experience is often with our clients anyway, what we sort of preach and teach and counsel is there's a very big difference between the customer, sort of the overall experience that they're going through, and customer service people confuse customer service with customer experience. Customer service might be 5, 6, 7, 8 things that lead to that great result where the guest walks out of the restaurant and has a great feeling, you've left them with a great feeling and I'm going to come back.

(16:26):

Whereas customer service might only be one or two pieces within that entire experience. So things to me like teaching team members to make sure that they acknowledge guests when they walk in. One of the things that we were taught way back when in Duncan, in the morning hours, we'd have a line of people if someone came in and you kind of made eye contact and said, Hey, I'll be right with you, even though there were five people in line. So the guest knew like, okay, they know I'm here and it's a greeting, it's comfort, it's a connection. If we thought about it from a social media point of view, we'd say, wow, it's an engagement. And that's very, very, very important. So the overall customer experience teaching team members, and this is one, and I think we may have talked about this, I think we may have talked about it early on, but one of the things that is sort of a pet peeve of mine, and I realize when I'm in a restaurant and I ask the server, Hey, can you go get me some water?

(17:29):

And they go, no problem. Okay, I realize it's good intention, but what's the energy there? The energy is that maybe it was a problem, but for you it's not a problem. The response is, my pleasure, my pleasure, or right away or coming right up if you want to be corny. So it's those things that create an environment and an energy where the guest experience is elevated. All restaurateurs should be doing that recession or not, but in a recession is far more important because it's sort of the value add to the food. I would say restaurateurs and people in a recession, what's the first thing they do? Oh, well, let's bag the advertising. I'm cutting advertising. Don't do that. Okay, don't do that. If anything, you need to increase advertising. And some of the things that we talk about is how do you do that and still have value?

(18:33):

And it's not about discounting, and we can talk about that in more detail, but it's about letting your guests know that you're out there, that maybe you're running certain events or certain things that put you in the forefront of their mind that maybe they weren't thinking about using you. You're sort of in their habit sphere, as I call it, but you're going to get maybe one extra visit out of them. So those three are key. And I would say the fourth is that none of those things will work. None of those things that decrease food cost and elevated experience, and none of that will work if you don't get your team to buy in. Your team members have to buy into this. Otherwise they're think about they're standing behind the POS system and they're playing with their phone and somebody walks in and they're still playing on their phone.

(19:29):

Okay, that's because they haven't bought in, and that really doesn't have much of anything to do with recession. That has to do with the culture, the tone, the mission is the employee, is the team members, I like to use that term, are they showing up every day because they really want to serve the guests. They want to put the best food out there as possible. They really believe in what they're doing. They're having fun, and that you get that team, which often relates to, Hey, you have to make it a game. You have to make it fun for them. So as I've often said, nothing works a lot, but everything works a little. So you have to take that approach because if you're looking for that one magic bullet, that one thing that's going to help you survive in a recession, you're not going to find it. It's a lot of little things and it's executing it. It could be how clean is my bathroom? Are there fingerprints on the door? As I said, is my team members saying, Hey, how are you? Thank you. Come back, come back again soon. Those things really are the things that when executed properly and consistently will help you not only get through tough times, but will blow you into orbit in good

Daniel Blaser (20:50):

Times. Yeah, wow. So much good insights there. I love that you talked about the importance of getting team buy-in. Obviously shameless plug work stream, we help with hiring, and so hiring the right people that can be a big part of this, hiring people that you feel like are going to be bought in with some of these objectives you're mentioning there's maybe a tendency over the last couple of years to, I don't know, kind of disparage the service that you've been receiving at restaurants or airlines or anywhere in the service industry. I feel like there's maybe been a decreased experience, I'll say to put it nicely, but one upside of that that I think you just touched on is now that maybe we've, all our expectations have all been lowered. When you have a good service experience, you notice it even more. So we're kind of primed to notice these things that you're mentioning. Even the small little things can really make a big difference because we've all kind of had some negative experience probably over the last couple of years.

Gary Occhiogrosso (22:02):

Yep, absolutely.

Daniel Blaser (22:03):

I wanted to jump back real quick. You were talking about the idea of this customer experience and that it's all these different things. I feel like when we were chatting a little bit before, you were talking about this idea of guests feeling like they're trading down and trying to avoid that feeling. Could you kind of explain that a little bit? I think that that's a really interesting insight and I'd love to get your recommendations on how you can avoid your guests feeling that way.

Gary Occhiogrosso (22:29):

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, again, I just kind of glanced over it and I'm glad you want to detail that because I, okay, so let's say a family of four people are. Now, maybe they would go to a family type dining restaurant, pick a brand Fridays, blah, blah, blah. Well, that event, that event is probably a 60 or an $80 event. So now because of quote recession and fear of whatever, now they're going to a fast casual restaurant. So now they're kind of walking up to a counter, and the goal here is that you want that experience. While it would be different, you want that experience to certainly be as joyful, if you will, or as fun and as nice as the full service experience. So how are restaurateurs able to do that, by the way, including franchisees mean? So again, if we talk about elevating that experience, things like, I dunno, maybe after 6:00 PM when the person orders their burrito at the counter, rather then they go sit down and calling them back up, or number seven, your food is ready or whatever.

(23:55):

Maybe they get a little stand with the number and someone brings the food out to them. So you have what we call modified table service. So it elevates that dinner experience to, okay, it's not full service, but hey, I'm not feeling like I'm in a fast food joint or I'm in a fast casual place. That's something that I think is important. Having small items that you can tag on, sell that cookie, sell the upsell. When I was in the fresh Mexican business, and if you go into some of the big, fresh, what I call a memex chains, now they're selling you guacamole and chips. So typically in a full service Mexican restaurant, guacamole and chips, they'd or chips for sure they'd put on the table, but in a fast casual, you might have to purchase those. Well, those are great because now even though if your customer count is down, you can increase the value of the customer a little bit at a time, and you can increase the experience also because where they might order a dessert in a full serve restaurant, well now maybe they're getting that cookie or there's an ice cream serving, or there's some easy to serve dessert product, and rather than having the entree that they might have at a full serve restaurant, there's maybe chips and dip, or maybe there's something that's out there that doesn't cost a lot of money, that elevates the overall experience.

(25:22):

I think increased efficiency is sort of something that helps folks feel that they're in a better place. I mean, when I go to a drive-through hamburger joint, if they get my order right, they've met my expectation, okay, it's down here, but if I'm used to going to a full service restaurant, my expectation is here. I don't want to feel like I've trade it all the way down, and gee, if they just get this right, I'll be happy. You could bring it to somewhere in the middle, and you do that by increasing efficiency. And I mentioned earlier about the no problem thing. I think that's a big deal. That to me is that's the energy in the restaurant, and there's just so much of that that restaurateurs can do to make folks feel like they're not trading down.

Daniel Blaser (26:17):

Great. Yeah, so many great recommendations there, and I really love your perspective. One of the things that you kind of touched on briefly, and I'd like to dive into that a little bit more, is you just kind of mentioned that you shouldn't just pull this discount lever, which might be kind of your first reaction, right? Recession's coming, people are not going to have as much money. Let's just discount stuff. Can you go into why you think that that's actually a bad strategy and maybe what you'd recommend doing? I think you've kind of touched on some of it already, but what you'd recommend doing in lieu of just discounting, discounting, discounting?

Gary Occhiogrosso (26:54):

Sure. Look, discounting doesn't work on any long-term level. There's what I call price value perception. Many years ago, maybe not so many years ago, 10, 15 years ago, McDonald's had their dollar menu. We all remember the dollar menu, and you could actually buy a double cheeseburger for a dollar. Insane, as far as I was concerned. Now, a couple of things. First of all, when the double cheeseburger was no longer on the dollar menu, I certainly didn't buy it because in my mind, it was only worth a buck. You was selling it for a dollar for years. Now all of a sudden you want two 50 for it. I'm not doing that. So when you discount, it's not just the sale at that moment, it's the long lasting psychological effect that it has on the price value perception of what you're doing. So I've now cheapened my product, so competing on price just as a secondary piece to that is I go to a dollar, you go to 99 cents, I go to 89 cents, you go to 79 cents, all we're doing is killing each other, and the guest is just going to stand on the side and go, well, you know what?

(28:15):

There's going to be another coupon coming out, or there's going to be another Instagram thing where I can get something free. I'm not going to Daniel's restaurant today. I'll wait until next week. I know there's going to be something free. Once you start doing that, and I think I shared the expression with you earlier, and I probably won't now, but you just sort of die doing that. There's no end to that. So what do you do? Because easy to say what not to do,

Daniel Blaser (28:49):

But

Gary Occhiogrosso (28:50):

Identifying the problem is easy. The solution is usually more challenging. The question there is provide value. Now, you should always be providing value, but how do I provide more value? How do I, again, elevate the experience? As I mentioned earlier, how do I, instead of tying the price to the product, how can I maybe offer a discount but tie it to an event? So maybe on, I dunno, pick a night, Thursday nights I have family nights and kids pay half price. Now you might say, well, Gary, what do you mean? You just said don't discount, stop. It's not what I said. I said, if you just discount for the sake of discounting and you tie it to the value of the product, we have a problem because it should go on forever. But if you're coming in for an event that's only tonight, or it's the third Thursday of every month, the price is now tied to the event.

(29:47):

So when I no longer have the event, I have not tarnished the integrity or the price value of my producting. So you can still do it, but you have to have a psychological workaround. And by the way, in the quick service business, it really does come down to two things. So if we go back to sort of the full service restaurant, like the big fancy restaurant, what's the server doing, selling you a drink, selling you an appetizer, selling you the special, selling you dessert, selling you, I don't know, an after dinner drink, selling you coffee, whatever, building the ticket. But in a fast casual restaurant or in a fast food restaurant, how do I build a ticket? I'm not going to be able to sell you 40 pounds of fried chicken. It's not happening. Okay, so how do I do that? Well, you can't. So in the quick service business and in the fast casual business, it comes down to frequency of visit.

(30:41):

How often are you, I might not get a hundred bucks out of you every time you come in. Maybe I'm only getting 10 bucks out of you or $12 out of you, so I got to get you to come back eight or nine times. How do I do that? I have to create what I call the occasion to use. So you might use me for lunch because I'm convenient and I'm near your office, your home or whatever, but what can I do to create another occasion for you to come in? Is that a new product, a special an event night or an event day or I dunno, flip-flop hour, you text out. Data collection is something we haven't talked about, but if I've collected hundreds, if not thousands of names and phone numbers from people through a loyalty program, I might spit out on a summer afternoon on a Friday afternoon, like, hey, between three and six, come in with flip flops and come in for flip-flop night or something. Again, getting people creating a reason for people to come in. So that's a big, big piece of it in terms of how you can actually sort of create value without simply just saying, Hey, buy one, get one free.

Daniel Blaser (31:57):

Yeah, a lot of great recommendations there. One other thing that I think you mentioned a little earlier that I wanted to drill down because you did a great job at kind of providing, here are some actual actionable ideas, and I think that that's what everyone's looking for, right? It's like you said, you can explain what not to do, but then it's like, well, what do you do? So you mentioned earlier the importance with creating this customer experience, just the importance of getting team, and you mentioned something like making it a game among your team. Could you provide one or two examples of what that actually might look like? How do you make it a game? How do you get that buy-in among probably younger team members?

Gary Occhiogrosso (32:41):

Okay, there's a couple ways that come to my mind. The first one that comes to my mind is to create a competitive game, and you can do it on an individual team member basis, but whenever I've done it, I've done it sort of on a shift basis, and there are ways to sort of norm the results so that someone that might be working a mid shift where there's not a lot of customers versus a Friday night shift where if it's about upselling, let's say everyone working on a Friday or Saturday night's always going to win. You have hundreds of customers and on a Tuesday afternoon you have five. Makes sense. So if you said, let's say you were upselling that cookie, let's go back to the cookie example. Okay, so I would create a contest with all of my shift members that as a percentage of the guests you serve, not as a percentage of the overall shift.

(33:39):

As I said, Saturday is different from Monday afternoon. The person who sells the most or the highest percentage upsells, I dunno, they get a 15, not the $15 buys a lot of gas these days, but think about what a young person might want. If you have young people working in your restaurant, probably want money for gas, maybe they want an iTunes card so they can buy more music or whatever it is that is floating their boat. You make it a contest and you make it a contest where the team members see it. I remember in my donut shop, there was this, we did this once and every day I would write on the, we had this cork board. This was before digital and screens and stuff. We had this old school cork thing. I would write six or 18 big black El Marco on a piece of paper and put it up right by where they had to that time we had punch cards.

(34:40):

It wasn't done on the POS and well, what's that? Oh, that's how many extra dozen donuts they were sold last night on the shift. Really? Okay, we're going to beat that. We're going to do 25. All right, I'm going to hold you to that. So it becomes a game. And let's face it, working in a quick service or a fast food restaurant or a fast casual restaurant, it's not always the most brain engaging task. It's generally task oriented. It's not creative, it's just you're doing a task and that's the nature of it, especially in franchising. So to make something like that, a game is super easy to recognize people, not just the game piece, but to recognize people. I can remember I had this young man that worked for us, again, going back to my donut shop, and he was the person who at night would fill the donuts with jelly and pout.

(35:42):

It's called a finisher. And when he was done at six in the morning, seven in the morning when our shop was getting crowded, his name was Robert. I won't tell you his last name, but I remember him. It was yesterday and this was like 40 years ago. And he was someone who was struggling with his confidence and struggling just kind of finding himself. He was probably, I dunno, 18, 19 years old, whatever. I would bring him out in the front and we would look at the donut case with all the beautiful donut and people would clap for him in the morning and he couldn't wait to come in the next night. Keep in mind, this is a guy that worked from midnight to six or seven the next morning. Not the best shift, not the easiest person to find to do that. But he was encouraged because in that case it wasn't really a game, it was recognition and he just dug it. So when you do stuff like that, you engage your team members to remember I said they got to buy in. You engage them to buy in, and if you can get your guests and your customers to support that, it's a win. It's a total win.

Daniel Blaser (37:00):

I love that story. Yeah, I love that. You also touched on these different motivators for teams, right? There's actual monetary motivation with a gift card or recognition also can be even more powerful as well as a little healthy competition. So

(37:17):

You did exactly what I asked for. You provided some really concrete suggestions, so I appreciate that. I'm looking at the clock and I realize we could just, I could ask you questions all day, but I think we both have a few other things to do today. I want to give you the chance maybe as we kind of start wrapping up this conversation, I want to give you the chance to just leave one ultimate takeaway or summary with those that have been watching this. If they're only going to get one thing out of this conversation, what do you think it should be?

Gary Occhiogrosso (37:52):

That's an interesting question. I think by now it's hard for me to scale anything down to one. I would probably say that as a restaurateur and someone who's been in the restaurant business, again, whether you're a franchisor or franchisee or independent restaurateur, I think first you need to embrace the idea that while the restaurant business is certainly a very simple business, I mean, we're not building rocket ships in curing cancer, okay? We're serving burritos and burgers and quesadillas or whatever we're serving, okay? So we need to understand that it's a simple business, but at the same time, we need to embrace the idea that while it's simple, it's not easy. There's a million moving parts. It's hard work. You're dealing with customers, you're dealing with employees, you're dealing with downward pressure of the recession, which started this whole conversation. Supply chain issues, labor issues, we can go on and on.

(38:51):

So the takeaway would be that everything, these are just moments. These are just moments in the life cycle of your business. It's not forever. I remember when pandemic first started, everybody was saying, well accept a new norm. And on my podcast mastermind minutes, I was hammering people. There is no such thing as a new norm. It's a new norm. Every minute there's a new norm. And stop thinking that way because you're going to sort of paint yourself into this way of thinking that is not necessarily going to be applicable when things change. So staying open-minded and understanding that if you're having a rough patch, it's not forever. Do what you need to do at that moment. Stay in the moment, stay focused, get by and get all these things and just know that yes, it's not going to be easy, and that's okay. No one said it's going to be easy.

(39:45):

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it and it's going to unfold. So I don't want to get into my theories of law of attraction and all that other stuff, but a lot of that plays mindset plays a big, big part of it in terms of why one person in a franchise is successful and another person who might be in the same franchise got the same training, selling the same product under the same brand name is not successful. It's about mindset. So I would leave you with that. One thing would be keep your head straight, keep your mindset focused. Take that deep mindful breath when you have to, and know that at some point it's not going to be a recession anymore.

Daniel Blaser (40:33):

That's great. I feel motivated personally from that, so I appreciate that. Alright, before we jump off here, I want to give you the chance. You mentioned your podcast, you mentioned a few different entities. If someone wants to reach out, get in touch with you or see what else you've got going on, let them know how to do that.

Gary Occhiogrosso (40:51):

Okay. Well, you see down, I think in the bottom there. I've put my email address so you can email me or my, just connect with me on LinkedIn. That's the best way to do it. I have an online magazine called franchise moneymaker.com. You can read my articles in Forbes, which are focused on restaurants and the franchise to restaurant industry. I have no place to hide digitally. I'm out there, so it's very easy to connect with me. But certainly that email address right there is what you should be using.

Daniel Blaser (41:28):

Cool. Awesome. And yeah, we'll drop some links in the description and whatnot to make it easy for people as well. But thanks again so much for taking the time to be here today, Gary. I really appreciate it and I know that everyone watching this appreciates as it goes. Well,

Gary Occhiogrosso (41:42):

It's been absolutely my pleasure. And as I've told you early on when we first spoke, I truly believe this is my purpose. So for me to do this is enjoyable. I feel like I'm fulfilling my purpose. But thank you very much. I appreciate being here.