Why Guest Reviews and Profitability Go Hand in Hand with Adam Sanders at Killer Burger

Welcome to another edition of Give in Ovation, the Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Zach Goates, and each week I chat with industry experts to uncover their strategies and tactics to help you create a five-star guest experience. This podcast is powered by ovation, the AI feedback and operations platform built for multi-unit restaurants. Learn what's actually happening in your restaurants and exactly how to improve while driving revenue.

Learn more at ovationup.com. And today we have someone who I am I am so excited to have this conversation because I was just talking to Adam about how he has a very unique background. A lot of times in the restaurant space, you come from an operations role.

And there's a few who come from the marketing role. There are very few CEOs that come from a finance and technology background. And that's exactly what Adam Sanders, the CEO of Killer Burger, is. And he's got such interesting insights.

Every time I talk to him, I'm impressed with how he views the industry and the guest and building a brand. So, Adam, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks, Zach. Really appreciate you having me on.

Looking forward to this. So, first of all, I want to get your take on this journey from finance and tech to then the CEO role. I mean, why do you think there's not too many people that have done that transition? And what real lessons are you taking from your finance and technology background into the CEO role?

Yeah. When you think about finance, I mean, especially from a big perspective, people tend to get pigeonholed in their area, right? And they look at, I'm just going to look at the numbers and do that and not learn what's around the numbers so much. Where I've always been more of a strategy type of focus.

Like numbers in the past matter, but they only matter for what we can tell the story in the future, right? And how we can change results. So I did MA consulting for 10 years, bought some brands, worked for huge companies as part of it, you know. And uh, we always look and say, well, what is the future going to be if we make these transactions?

If we do this, do this deal, what is it going to drive going forward? And um, I think that gave me a unique perspective as far as how we look at the business, because I only care about what happened in the future. How do we take what we know from the finance, the results, and try to drive better results in the future? And then when you look at uh especially like the industry today and like the issues we have as Killer Burger, I think the finance background has helped me a lot where I've had to deal with companies where like profitability really matters.

We don't have a huge amount of big VC fund behind us and this and that. So we have to be able to manage cash and grow responsibly, but also be able to try to put money back towards the guest. And what do you think about if you were to go and take over a brand today? And in this environment where margins are getting crunched, and you look at we haven't even been hit really with the gas prices increase yet.

We know those are coming. And so that's gonna be another hit to the margin. What advice would you give to restaurant operators who are maybe not as financially savvy as you are? I think the biggest thing is just listen to what your guests are saying and be able to invest back in that area, right?

We all know that margins are gonna get tighter and it's tough's gonna continue to get tougher, but being able to put the dollars back to the items that actually matter is what we have to all focus on, right? So when we look at our guests and I said, and I can put more money towards finance roles or other solutions which maybe help around the edges, but I need to put more money back towards either bringing guests in the door or giving them a better experience when they're there so they want to come back.

I mean, we all know it's much cheaper to get a guest that's been coming in than to get a new one. So just trying to keep driving that money. And it's so powerful to think about that. And when you look at where to invest, what are some things that you think are most important about the guest experience nowadays?

I feel like it's changed even for our brand, where if you go several years ago, the guest experience was just about how you came in and interacted with them. I mean, now, especially after COVID, people want they want to feel like they're welcome, right? They want to feel like they're invited into your place, and this is a part of it. And that's different for every person.

I mean, for some person, it might just be they go to your kiosk and they do it, and they're welcome that way because they don't really want to talk to you, but they want to feel like they're still accepted there. Nothing drive me crazier than when I go into one of our restaurants and I see our team not acknowledge the guests there. I'm like, they just want to say, just say they're welcome. Talk to them, like interact, ask them how they're doing.

Like, we're a fast casual business. The whole interaction isn't a difficult one. It's help make sure you they understand our menu. They get the order, then you check on them once or twice, make sure it's right.

It's not hard, but it still gets overlooked. So I think it's that simple where it's you try to meet that guest where they want to be met and just welcome them and let them know that you appreciate they chose your business. And that to me, if you look at that connection, that one-to-one, that hand-to-hand combat, I think that's where it gets really tricky because how do you keep your employees excited about that and believing that that's a good thing? That's the toughest part of the job, right?

Is having your team that wants to interact with the guests and do the right, get the right people there. I mean, it starts with one, putting the people who naturally want to be in that situation, putting them in the right spots. I mean, if the person that works is great on grill, that's fantastic, but that person may not be the person that should be in the front of the house talking to everybody. I mean, that person that interacts in the front of the house is great as well.

And then second, give that person like giving them some things just to say, right? It's so often we go up to the table and say, How is everything? Right? And I guess like yeah, good.

Walk away. And it's like, well, did that really accomplish anything, right? I like to go to our guests and ask, what burger did you get? Because it gets them interacting a little bit, right?

Because we do very indulgent over-the-top burgers. And if someone goes, Oh, I got the purist, I'm like, Yeah, it's great. Glad you like it. Next time, get let us take a good shot at one of our special burgers, you know, that you really want.

Let's do give you the peanut butter pickle bacon burger or the Jose Mendoza. What kind of flavors do you like? It gets them talking a bit more, and you pretty quickly can understand within like 10 seconds that that person wants to talk to you more and opens up, or if they just want to say, hey, it's good and we can walk away. Because again, either is fine, but I'll get in conversations where sometimes it's 15 minutes, right?

If you're talking to someone and they want to know all about all our burgers and how they come to this point and um, what other things are we trying? You know, I think those are the type of interactions that gets a guest to come back, not just how are you doing. But Adam, from a finance perspective, I mean, I'm looking at 15 minutes that you just said, right? Let's multiply out the GM salary, let's look at the hourly rate of that.

That's a really expensive conversation. How could you financially justify that? That's gonna be your exception, right? But if you're willing to be out there and spend the time when that person's there, because there's there's always times when you're not gonna have it, and there's times when there's plenty of people there and they have it.

I mean, for me, it's easy. I don't have a other role when I go into a restaurant other than just to check on the team and check on the guests, right? When our people above store level go in, they can do the same thing as well, right? You have more interaction.

From a GM, it's obviously significantly harder, but there's you know, shoulder times when it's not quite as busy. But even if it's you just go for two minutes and have that interaction and talk to them, bringing that guest back over and over is worth so much more than they're gonna tell their friends and it's gonna drive more revenue. I mean, it is hard to get guests. There's transactions are down across the industry.

When you look at it, I think bringing a guest in is hard. It's everyone knows from inflation over the last several years how much people's your pocketbooks have been hurt. We have to really value everyone, those guests that come in and make sure we give them the right experience. I love that because one of the things that I hear you saying, and something that I've seen in our data, is that the PL tells you where you're at, and the guest experience tells you where you're going.

And if you are failing in your guest experience today, in three to four months, your revenue is gonna see it. And a lot of times we sit there and we're like, why is our revenue down? Let's like call marketing, our loyalty program isn't working. This, this, this, this.

And at the end of the day, it's exactly what you're talking about. Our team isn't having that connection with the guest. They're treating it like, I am in, I am out, and I am like, do not care. But if you care, that's when they come back.

That's when they're okay spending their hard-earned money with you. Yeah, we think about them as these two separate items, like profitability on one side and this experience and review on the other. But like, I could look at just the review, the ratings by store, and I can tell you which stores are more profitable. I mean, you don't even have to show me the PL.

It's that clear in our data where you start looking across and saying these stores had have good reviews, they have good ticket times, their accuracy is good. I can tell they have better profitability. And it just is that simple. Do the little things right, and it'll lead to the better bottom line.

I love that. What a powerful statement. Now, as you think about some tactics to improve the guest experience, any that you can share? Yeah, so we're working on trying to meet the guests where they want to be met, right?

So traditionally, you always came in, you just ordered our counter, and we had not even a menu board up in front of you. We had like a handheld menu, which we have 10 indulgent burgers, four chicken sandwiches. Like you you have to read a lot to get to that point, right? So we're trying to structure the menu board so it gets much simpler to get to if I like something spicy, I can pretty quickly pick out that's a spicy one.

If I want the peanut butter, pickle bacon burger or something sweet, I can pick that up faster. I'd love to get the kiosks, honestly, because I think the flow for a guest is much, much better on a kiosk where I can see pictures, I can kind of I can help navigate the experience better on a kiosk than I can with a person up front, or even more so reading a menu board. Are there any kiosk companies that you've seen that you've been impressed with? We use Toast's kiosk solution right now.

We're very new in it. It seems we're working pretty good. I've seen a few other ones, and like I think Byte does a really good job. Mine is in chicken salad chick a while back, and like they were good.

Who else does it? Um, I can't think of the name of the brand, uh, Chop Shop. Their kiosks are fantastic. Oh, yeah.

It's probably more for orders, right? You know, I do a lot of work with Bite kiosks, and it's been really impressive to see what they can do. And and yeah, I think the the nice thing about that is to your point about meeting the guests where they're at, not every guest wants that experience, but then you could have it when you do. Now, what percentage are you uh dine in versus outside the four walls?

If you look at your pickup delivery in three PD? 45% of our food is eaten within our four walls, and 55% is outside of it. Of that, like 30% is like third party, and then I guess what's that? 25% is takeout, that kind of stuff.

Got it. Are you working to push more people to order first party or to order dine in, or is it kind of like you're fine, however? It's always my preference to come order eat inside the restaurant, right? That is the killer burger experience.

You're gonna get the warmest food, you're gonna get our atmosphere. We want to create this oasis which is separate from your daily life, and you don't get that if you go somewhere else. That being said, like I also am a realist and I realize people are busy, and I think Doordash and Uber's customers are more their customer than our customer at this point, lots of ways. So I want to be there to meet them and uh give them that experience the best we can.

We designed a lot of stuff around our packaging and like even our food choices with our fries stays crispy. Wait, how do you do that? What magic are you using, Adam? It's not a fresh cut fry, it's a it's a rice-coated, rice flour-coated fry.

It's not always it's it gets cold still, but it is still crispy half an hour later. I mean, it's wow, a good product, right? So it's stuff like that that we think about specifically for delivery or eating outside our walls that so that it still works good as well, right? And we're trying to do that as much as we can.

It's like, do I care? I mean, a little bit. Obviously, I'd love them to be inside, eat eat in the restaurant, but also just be realistic about what what people's options are. Yeah.

And any tips in terms of especially with such a big to go, I'm assuming a lot of people will swing by and pick up as well, right? We have a lot of customers who, a lot of restaurants who will do that, and there's always issues there. Anything that you find to improve the pickup experience? Just have the team slow down a little bit.

Make sure you get it right. I mean, it's people get frustrated that they have to wait a long time, but like have taken the extra 30 seconds to look through the bag and make sure the items are there, the sauces are that they asked for, that kind of stuff. That's the number one complaint we get, it's the number one complaint anyone gets, I think, is accuracy. And I mean, what's more frustrating than you?

You give a place a shot, you go and order something, and you don't even get what you order or paid for. I mean, that's the worst experience you can have, right? That just tell the team like just make sure we get it right, first of all. I mean, everyone will be patient if it's a minute or two longer for us to check everything.

I love that. And I totally agreed. I think some of the best brands that I'm working with, and I don't want to share who because there's some secrets here, but they actually are deprioritizing speed of service complaints. And they're saying, hey, I'm okay with some speed of service complaints, right?

We've got a standard, it's not three minutes, but it's not 15 minutes, right? And they work on setting that expectation because their focus is accuracy. To your point, if it's really good food and it's exactly how I wanted it, a minute late isn't gonna kill me. But if I get it early and it's wrong, that is gonna kill me.

Yeah, and so when I first started here, our speed of service ticket time, it was like 15 minutes. I mean, it was unacceptable, right? For a burger place. No one goes in and thinking they have 15 minutes to wait for food.

Yeah. I mean, I wait for 15 minutes at chilies, right? Yeah, exactly. That's and that's what you think.

So we got down to our average ticket times eight-ish minutes at this point, right? We got it down to about six and found out like that that's actually problematic as well, because people hadn't got their drinks, they hadn't sat down yet, they were just getting settled in and we're putting food on top of them and they're just not quite ready yet. Also, we make every single thing fresh to order. We don't drop fries until it's ordered.

I guess nothing's hot held in our restaurant, right? I don't want people to think that that's the case when it's just not. So because we can do something in about six minutes, that doesn't mean it's the right time. It's fine that right time for the guests.

It's somewhere between six and eight is there. But if you brought food out in three minutes, it doesn't do our guests any good in our situation. That's such an interesting insight because I remember when I started my first company, it was a gifting company where I developed an algorithm to translate social media data into gift recommendations. And we had it so fast that it would like you click it and boom, gift ideas would show up.

And people were like, they were skeptical. And so we actually put in a fake buffer of five seconds because we wanted them to think that like things are actually going on right now, and it created a much better experience by waiting. And I had never, ever in the internet seen people want to put in more buffer time as opposed to making something faster. But it created that better guest experience.

Yeah, I mean, for us, it's so much just about differentiation too, right? I mean, there's lots and lots, lots of burger places. You mentioned chilies, but on the other side is obviously all the QSR places. I need to make sure we are differentiated from those.

Yeah. Well, and I think that you your brand, your menu, how you're running things, how you treat the guest is just what a I mean, pun intended, what a killer way to run a business. And I just love seeing that. Now, Adam, how can people find and follow you in Killer Burger?

So Killerburger.com is the easiest way. We're also on LinkedIn Instagram, we have Killer Burger Handle, we have Killer Burger Texas for our Texas stores. Kind of do regional stuff there differently.

Uh you can find me on LinkedIn, Adam Sanders, pretty easy. Yeah, always happy to talk to people and you know, look up more there. I'm not super active on social media, but our team certainly is. And Adam, how can people uh if you know, I know you know a lot of people in this industry, you've been around for a while.

Who's someone that we should be following? Who's someone that you think deserves an ovation? Yeah, there's a handful of people here. I mean, it's one thing in the industry, there's no shortage of people who are really good people who want to help others.

There's like, I mean, I really appreciate like Mark Hatch and Carolyn Gathigan and what they do with the Nest groups. I mean, that's probably the single most helpful thing that I have in the industry is other CEOs to talk to about what's working. And that's all because Mark and Carolyn set that up. On top of that, I mean, like other people that talk to, I mean Jeff Chandler, the CEO at Hop Dotty, great guy.

I mean, like, he wasn't half, he was a competitor, right? But always had good conversations and gives me insights and like I really appreciate his leadership. So that's the one. The industry just has great people across it.

They do. And and Jeff is just such a good guy, and Mark and Carolyn, I mean, just can't speak highly enough of them. So those are some well-deserved shout-outs there. Well, Adam, for today, for reminding us that doing the little things right and the rest will follow.

Today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us in Giving Ovation. Thank you, Zach. Appreciate it.

Thanks for joining us today. If you like this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We're all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by Ovation, a two-question estimate-based actionable guest feedback platform built for multi-unit restaurants.

If you'd like to learn how we can help you measure and create a better guest experience, visit us at ovationup.com.