Don't miss Brandon Rhoten, CMO, Dave's Hot Chicken, on this episode of The CMO Suite podcast - Presented by MiO Intelligence and Hosted by Sean Halter. This episode is also sponsored in part by digitalfix.ai and YouConnex.

Speaker A: You're listening to season 13 of the CMOSuite podcast. Every journey has a story. This is where you find it. Catch each episode this season on your favorite podcasting platform, YouTube and always at the Samosuite.com plus be sure to follow along on your favorite social platforms for highlights of each episode. This season of the CMO Suite is presented in part by MEO Intelligence. MIO provides AI driven signal systems around business development, retention and competitor insights for agencies, brands, media companies and platform providers. Visit them today@meo intelligence.com and DigitalFix AI. If you're looking to transform your team with tools built just for you but don't know where to start, fix it today by visiting DigitalFix AI and finally, Uconnects. Uconnects helps brands to determine if their current campaigns are reaching the right and real customers. When you don't know which is which and want to keep it real in the biddable media space, just Visit them@uconnext.com I'm your host John Halter. Now let's start the show. You are listening to season 13 of the CMO Suite. I'm your host Shaun Halter. We're excited to have as our guest today Brandon Roton, the new Chief Marketing Officer over at Dave's Hot Chicken. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Second podcast for you. We got a chance to talk to you earlier this year in the Digital Fix. Uh, was that fun for you? How was that experience for you?

Speaker B: Oh, it was a blast. It was a blast.

Speaker A: The thing I love about this podcast is it's Origin podcast. So we get to talk about people basically where they started, how they got to where they are. We've done 12 seasons of this previously. We just kicked off season 13 and it was really interesting. I work with this guy named, named uh, Sri Raja Gopalan who's been in the space for a long time and every year when we kick it off, he does a recap of the last season. He goes back, he listens to all the episodes, tells me a good thing that he learned from it, gives me a good reminder to it and we do this podcast once a year. What was most interesting to me was as he was walking through I was like, I've forgotten all of that. There was a lot of early conversation around AI, even that, uh, last season. Certainly it's table stakes now, but it's really interesting just to see the difference that a year can make in our lives, which is also then just a reminder of the path that we're all on right now and how different it is for all of us. Let's talk about where your path started. Talk to me a little bit about where you grew up.

Speaker B: Yeah. So grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Back in Cincinnati, Ohio. I landed there again after I ran around the country a lot as working in various companies. Yeah. But I'm in Cincinnati. Have worked in New York. Have worked in Louisville, Kentucky. Columbus, Ohio, North Carolina. My office is in LA right now. So I'm all over the place.

Speaker A: I don't know if we talked about that when we were on the other podcast because I'm from Cincinnati. I'm in Cincinnati all the time. I grew up in North College Hill and then my mom got remarried and moved to Anderson Township. My sister owns a bunch of properties in Mount Adams. I was just there. My. My stepfather just had his 90th birthday there. Where are you in Cincinnati?

Speaker B: Mason. Mason.

Speaker A: Oh, man. That's what. That's a. That's a small ass world, isn't it?

Speaker B: It is, man. That's why you can never be a jerk. It always comes back to bite you. Somebody's in your hometown, you don't even know it.

Speaker A: Cincinnati doesn't let you do that too much. So why'd you pick Cincinnati?

Speaker B: So I grew up here. My wife grew up here. We were in Chicago before, uh, in Cincinnati area. So she grew up on the west side. I grew up in Loveland. Um, but as we were getting out of getting finishing Covid, like at the end of COVID we were in Chicago and decided we want to be somewhere a little more simple. You know, free parking, cheap milk, cheap gas, all that stuff. And Cincinnati kind of qualified. Plus my family's here and her family's here year, so we felt important.

Speaker A: Do you have kids?

Speaker B: We have three kids. 2017 and so you say 20? Yes.

Speaker A: God, dear Lord, I've got 22 year olds, so that's. I can't imagine that. And how has that been for them? Even just the slightly younger ones that move from Chicago to Cincinnati? How's that transition been for them?

Speaker B: Yeah, they love it. They love things about every city. The seven year old's only really known Chicago and, and Cincinnati. He was really little. We moved from Chicago, but. But they kind of learned something along the way. They learned how to make friends really quickly. They learned how to fit in a new environment in their schools and with friend groups. So I think the moving was very good for them. Uh, and ultimately now they're here, they feel a little more settled. We've Been here, I think four years now. The seven year old never wants to leave because grandma's here and he loves grandma kind of thing. But yeah, they love Cincinnati.

Speaker A: Again, part of the conversation about this, there's, as we do, there's plenty of podcasts where we just dig in super deep and we talk about this is what's happening in all these spaces. But I feel like again, sometimes the origin stories, the impact that our lives have on our families. Right. It doesn't get really talked about enough in my opinion. And in many cases because so many brands and so many people are based either here I am in New Jersey with Manhattan across, or they're out in Los Angeles, to your point, or Chicago. This industry still lives sometimes in these little bubbles and you miss the learnings that you can have. If you're based out of Cincinnati with Procter and Gamble or Kroger, that's there. There's still big companies that are out there and if you don't run around with those people, sometimes you, I feel like you get this almost social media haze of just not realizing that 10, 10 minutes is 10 minutes in one part of the country, which is a different kind of ten minutes somewhere else.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it adjusts daily decisions, things like pricing. My office right now is in la. I was in New York for several years before that, and World Trade Center. Your perspective gets very skewed on how do people consume things, do things deliver, or do you pick them up? It's a big country and there's a lot of. There's a lot of variables at play that I think, ah, a CMO especially has to consider. And I think moving around a bit helps. And being in a spot that's a little more, I don't know, run of the mill, normal is helpful as well.

Speaker A: I'll say one last part about Cincinnati, then we'll talk a little bit more about your folks growing up and your first kind of position in there. But we had breakfast with a bunch of friends when we were there. It may have been maybe 10 people and the bill came and maybe it was 150, $35 for eight people. And my fiance was like, who, uh, are you splitting this with? I was like, I'm not. That's the craziness of Cincinnati. But good city. You said you grew up there. So what did your folks do? What did your mom and dad do growing up?

Speaker B: Yeah, my dad ran restaurants when I was a kid. He ran for different franchisees, several concepts. Burgers, bagels, Burger King. For a while he ran some University, restaurant, scenarios like Sodexo kind of thing. So when I got to hang out with my dad, it was. He worked six days a week, and I hung out with him Saturday doing inventory and cleaning ice cream machines and helping him set up for the day when a, uh, shift lead called out or whatever. My mom was a school teacher. In fact, I had her for fifth grade because it was a small Catholic school.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And became the principal of the school. She was at the Same school for 47 years. 45 years. Not a long time. They're both retired now.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But, yeah. So a teacher, principal and a guy who ran restaurants, which is, I guess, where it got into my blood.

Speaker A: Was it hard having her as your teacher, fifth grade? Was she easy or hard on you?

Speaker B: Uh, I would say she treated me like every other student. I. My first couple of days, I think I called her mom, and then she put me the sign said, you should probably call me Mrs. Burton, because that's a little weird for everybody else. I have three siblings, and all three had her at some point in school because she was at that school forever. So it was actually good. It was a good experience.

Speaker A: Again, I think it's one of those things where you don't realize it at the time, the impact that your parents probably have on you growing up when you. Especially when you're a kid and you want to be different. But as you get further and further along in your career, I do feel like that's often those principles that you end up valuing is those foundational things that they set for you. My daughter just landed an internship here in the city. She's more like me, I think. She's a little bit more street savvy. My son's got a great job up in Vermont as a baker, and he's a bit more my ex wife, who's an amazing human. And it's just funny to see as they become these adults with careers and. And what parts that are you. What parts are Environment, et cetera, et cetera. So let's talk about your career. In your early career, what's the first job that you feel like you had in this industry? Did you go to college at all, or did you jump straight out of school and straight into the business?

Speaker B: Yeah, I went to college and worked actually full time through college because my family didn't have a whole lot of money. And my wife's my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, so we've been dating since high school.

Speaker A: She.

Speaker B: She, uh, didn't have a lot of money. So I had to pay for kind of both of our ways to school. I worked in the restaurant world a little bit and then just basically helping out my dad with the franchise organizations he had. Very early in high school and into college, I ended up actually getting a job in an arena.

Speaker A: What arena?

Speaker B: An arena, yeah. And I was actually a biology major through most of my college. And uh, so I got a job basically at the arena thinking this is just an hourly thing. It turned it out, turned out they need just working in the arena. It turned out they need some help in marketing. I was good with computers. I was the early days of helping them digitize video and getting it to use sources so we could first day of monster truck rally, get the video to the news station before the 11 o' clock news. So it would be on the news or Disney on Ice or Toby Keith or whoever it was at the time in the arena. That led to media coverage that then led to selling out the second night or the third night. So quickly I found myself very interested in marketing and they hired me on full time in college. So I worked in an arena full time in marketing in college.

Speaker A: What was the. What college did you go to and what was the name of the arena?

Speaker B: Yeah, little school, Northern Kentucky University right across the river here. It's a good little school. And, and the unit, the arena has changed names like 20 times, but I think it's called Heritage bank arena now. It's the indoor arena on the river in Cincinnati.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, great. Yeah, it has changed a few times, but man, we used to go to concerts there. Wrestling with all, tons of professional wrestling there and a bunch of other stuff.

Speaker B: So the WWE folks, I had a lot of sweaty wrestlers in my car. Take him to radio stations in the morning.

Speaker A: So strangely enough, my old career in rad sales back in the day in Florida, I crossed many paths with many wrestlers along the way. They were client of ours and they're carney people, but you got to love it along the way. That's a nice introduction into the space. You know, from what you said, it sounded like not a little bit of an aha moment of oh, there's, there's something interesting there. And so then from there, what was your next stop?

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, I then officially switched from biology to marketing because I found I was pretty good at it. Had a lot of the same kind of principles anyway, of cause and effect and doing analysis to understand outcomes and all that stu stuff. That led me to an agency. So I worked at an agency here in town. It was a B2B marketing agency. And really, because I had done a lot of digital stuff and this is the early 2000s, so before YouTube was a thing and social was just starting to come into the world, they asked me to help them build out basically a digital function at the agency, which we did. And that led to streaming video and webinars and digital magazines at the time because people were starting to get away from print. That's where I got my first taste of big campaigns. And learning how to build campaigns and understanding media led to that was. It was a very lauded agency. It was called HSR Business to Business. Eventually bought by Gyro, eventually bought by Merkel. So they're part of a big company now. But we won creative awards, got a lot of attention. Not from my work, from. I was just a support person and kept moving up the ranks and eventually, eventually ran accounts for. For a bunch of accounts at this agency in Cincinnati.

Speaker A: You took a playbook out of your dad's playbook and ended up at Wendy's next. But in this, I don't call it early aughts of digital marketing, but in some ways it was early aughts 11, 12 years ago. And so talk about that experience, talk about that entry level point for you. Talk about what parts of that were either drinking fire from a hose that you might remember or what you feel like you learned along the way there. Because you were there for a bit of time.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I was at the agency for I think four years, five years, something like that. And then Wendy's found me. So they recruited me to come and build their digital function. I'd never been at a big company, I'd never been on the brand side. It's always. It always had been connected to outside of the arena, but really never been on the brand side. So I had to learn a lot about how brand teams work, how products are developed, how calendars are built, how basically you invest hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a year to get to an outcome. And I came in at a kind of a very interesting time because the new CEO had come in. He's the one who wanted this digital function to be built. So I was one of his first people that he brought in to the organization back in 2011. And I was the only one in the company with digital in their title. So I was the only guy who was there that had any sort of say on digital stuff. But at the same time, I had no budget, I had no people. So I had to make the argument at this Company for decades had been running television advertising heavily and sponsorships and things of that nature. Make the case that digital marketing actually was a potential path to see traffic growth. And it was also an interesting time because the brand was at year 9 or 10 at that point of traffic decline. So there was a bit of desperation, but also desire to get back to the days Wendy's had marketing people paid attention to and media that actually moved the business. I was given the task of doing that homework and running a bunch of tests and learned pretty quickly that and was able to express the franchisees also my first entrance into dealing with franchisees and fell in love with the franchise business and people who have real skin in the game. It's m what my dad did on working for the franchisees and that led to tests that worked, that, that showed promise, that showed traffic potential in the first few months. That led to me being able to hire a team, led to me quickly taking over more functions. As we learned it worked and as the brand got attention for our mostly social, but really all of our digital marketing, we became all about digital marketing over a couple of years and the traffic turned and we kicked off over a decade of traffic growth, uh, through a lot of people's hard work. But I'd argue the, the marketing shifts that we made while I was part of that team was a huge, huge, uh, component to that fix.

Speaker A: Do you remember anybody from your time there? Anybody that was either a good m. Mentor to you or somebody that was a right hand person that you could really like, lean on?

Speaker B: Yeah, totally. Emil, the CEO, the guy who brought me in, Emil Brolich. Uh, I learned more from Emil than I've learned from any human being in my life. He's amazing. Hsr Emil Brolich. Okay, so he was, he ran Taco Bell for a while and then ran Wendy's for seven, eight years, something like that. Most of run at, uh, Wendy's. Learned a lot from Rick Siegel actually at HSR Business to Business and Mike Hensley, the guys there. I learned the basics of marketing. I had an amazing team at Wendy's. There's a dozen people now that are CMOs or CEOs that were on that team because of the work we did, frankly, the team is all that matters. I argue all the time. The leader in the marketing department or the leader in the function of the marketing department, your job is to set the path. You just got to hire really good people and keep them on the path. And everything works after you figure that out. So I've learned a lot from A lot of people very proud of those.

Speaker A: It's interesting having interviewed almost 400 CMOs or VPs of marketing or CEOs that have been in marketing, some I think are just great tacticians. They're just so. They have this kind of brilliant nature to them that they can suss something out in a way that I can't. Some are good at, ah, just being good diggers and they can kind of dig into something or financials. But it's always interesting to see these great team pickers. I feel like it was never strength of mine. I feel like in my life I've picked a few good team people that end up just going on and doing really amazing things. And there is a moment in my career that I still remember often with a guy that I was actually just on a call with yesterday, where we were sitting at a table, early days again of digital, and a guy was like, how does this track? And I said, pierce, how you do it? Let's we drop these pixels in and blah, blah, blah. M. We run the trade desk. And I remember this, and I just brought it to him yesterday. This is an employee of mine who put his hand on my shoulder and he said, you know what, Sean? We did used to do it that way, but we actually just changed how we do that in the last kind of 60 days he did in such a kind way to not make me look like a complete idiot. But it was this moment where kind of the student became the teacher and I was like, oh, that's a good pick. That's a good pick right there.

Speaker B: It is. And I love it. I love the fact that I've got people that have worked for me or with me that are now in amazing positions doing awesome work. That's the most proud thing about the things I get to do as a marketer is see people grow and see teams come together and people sometimes will follow me or follow others to other organizations, and it's awesome. Frankly, I haven't applied for a job in three decades. Two decades. And the reason is because of those connections, because you get great people in your world that then you just want more good people around you that know what they're doing to get to the outcomes that the business needs. I think that's a critical component of being a good leader.

Speaker A: Good point. From there, you had a couple stops along the way. You spent a little bit time over at Papa John's and a little bit of time over at Potbelly. But let's talk about your next stop. From there, let's Talk about Ground Truth for just a little bit, and then we'll dig in to the time over here at Dave's with the back half of it. So talk about ground Truth, because that kind of took you out of. I don't want to say your comfort zone a little bit, but took you out of one space and kind of into another.

Speaker B: Yeah. So when I wrapped up Potbelly and I was there for, I think, three, four years, I actually decided to hang it up and was just going to retire. And Wendy's had done really well. Papa John's done really well. Pap Belly had done really well. Uh, all these companies. The stock went pretty wild with the fixes we put in place. So that led me to a position where I could just say, okay, we're done. I turned 40 and I was like, okay, I can stop. Uh, I got bored after three months. I just couldn't do it. I wasn't ready. So I joined a bunch of boards, and one of them was connected to this company called Ground Truth, which is a media company. One of my big sort of passion points is I'm a big believer in roi. I've got nine mugs behind me that letters roi. People joke, my dog's name Roy, but it's roi. I just. I think it's not our money, it's our investors money. Or in the case of a business like Dave's or Wendy's, it's a. It's our franchisees money that you're investing. So understanding the impact of that investment to get to a return is really important. Great creative is awesome. Winning awards is awesome. Sales growth is the goal. But at the end of the day, roi, I think, is the thing we have a lot of control over if we know what we're doing. And groundtooth was a company that I'd used previously to understand foot traffic patterns so I could optimize media plans and test things very quickly. So when they asked me to come on and help them rework their offering, I, uh, jumped at it. So I worked with them for about three years and reworking their offering that led to a sale that just happened. So, yeah, it was a blast to see it from the other side, but also learn some of the nuances of media that I had exposure to behind the scenes.

Speaker A: There's a timing element sometimes as well. I found the ground truth. I don't know how this happens sometimes, but they were in just the right place at just the right time because they found the pain point. We ran campaigns when I was running a Digital media company for a long time again, uh, trading predominantly on the trade desk. And there's plenty of good and bad that goes along with that. But we had same thing. We have franchisees. We needed to be as precise as we could to provide them that roi. To your point, it's not my money, but I should treat it like it is as much as I would. And we would ask who's really. Who's got a really good product that's going to help us with that. And their name would pop up pretty consistently. And I'm assuming that in some ways that also was that interest point for you of being on that kind of backside of a little bit. Was there an element of that also allowed you to see under the hood a little bit. That part that isn't. I don't say the reality of it, but the part of it that's. Let's make sure that we're talking about this part because there's also some parts we're still engineering behind the scenes.

Speaker B: Totally. Uh, and I think you know the tendency for a lot of media companies to be very technical in the way they approach the market. And marketers, by def. By nature tend not to be technical. We tend to be much more creative, leaning much more about relationships, much more about growing business and seeing the effect of our marketing. But we don't. Media folks can be the exception of that. But by and large, I don't care what my CPM is. And that sounds crazy, I know, but I don't, I don't care what my video completion rate is. All those things are indicators to get to the ultimate. Do people show up to the business, yes or no. And what I really liked about Ground Truth was they cut out all the crap in the middle. It was there. So the tech was there. If you wanted to dig in but just got to Are people showing up and because of your media, yes or no. There are other variables. Obviously Message Media Creative is the pile there. But if you just isolate the element of media, it's very clarifying to say do people show up? It's the first thing I did when I came to Dave's was we did a bunch of media tests along with a lot of correlation analysis to understand what drives traffic, to understand what mediums and what messages and what creative deliver traffic to stores that I can then not only count on, but can repeat that and scale that very quickly. So some companies are really good at that. Ground Truth, I would argue, is not the best company to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of media with for efficiency sake. That's not their purpose. Their purpose is to really use them as a tool to understand what works and what doesn't and scale those elements of what works.

Speaker A: We'd run it for a 60 or 90 day test because it was worth that. It's the old door counter days. Right. Of being able to go, okay, what can we punch a hole in with this information to be able to figure it out from there. You talked about Dave's. Let's jump into that for the back part of this episode. How did the opportunity come along?

Speaker B: Yeah, so Ground Truth works with Dave to do a lot of measurement of traffic from the early days of starting media. So I was introduced to Dave's very early in my Ground Truth relationship. In fact, I was part of the reason they came onto Ground Truth because they saw somebody with a restaurant background was willing to engage in the business, which then led to a lot of learning, uh, about what works and what doesn't for Dave's. Uh, obviously Ground Truth works with a lot of restaurant brands, but Dave's was a really interesting case because it was so young and interesting and socially driven. All the things that sort of in the DNA of Wendy's that I loved.

Speaker A: That sucked you back in, right? It did.

Speaker B: It totally did. And then middle of last year, the CMO of Dave's was getting ready to retire and he reached out and said, I'd love you to talk to these guys because they're, they're very interested in having somebody that looks like you. I know you're not in the full time thing again or want to necessarily get back into restaurants, but can you talk to them? And I met the team and told I, I met the broader team, the executive team. I really didn't have interactions with them as on the vendor side and fell in love. The team's amazing. I loved the brand. I actually praised them several times as ground through CMO on stages talking about this is awesome partner we have in Dave's. So when he decided to retire they, they asked me to come in and take over for the marketing function. So I've been on with Dave since about November and, and helping them figure out the next levers of growth as this brand is, is quickly expanding.

Speaker A: We've picked apart and we've gotten you for two podcasts in that short amount of time. So first of all, I greatly appreciate that we've picked apart the elements of vendor facing, agency facing, brand facing. I remember early days of the trade desk when we, we owned a digital company that we'd Sit in a room with Spectrum and they'd be like, we're going to show you something that's going to blow your mind. And we tell our client before we're going in, they're not going to show us in. That blows our mind because we already know it. Do you still feel like that's out there? And I don't mean to call Spectrum out specifically, but do you still feel like you're sitting in a room sometimes and they're going to wait till we show you what we've got, Brandon. And you're going, wow, 2012 is right back in front of me again.

Speaker B: I tell you, man, the problems that exist in marketing and brand building have never changed. They really haven't changed. Just the toolbox shifts every once in a while and frankly just gets bigger, which is great for a marketer. But yeah, it's pretty rare you see something that is totally game changing. Usually it fixes a detail or augments a detail. I'll give you a specific example. 0 to 1, the company that acquired Ground Truth recently has a lot of AI driven audience profiles. So to actually pursue targets, that's a cool feature, right? It's not brand new, it's been around in other forms and other ways, but they can get to a lot better audience targeting through AI. But it's not really something fundamentally different. It's just a better kind of widget in the toolbox that lets you tweak something. So I would say yeah, it's very rare someone shows something. In fact, I can't remember the last time it's happened. That totally blows me away. But usually it becomes the expression of that thing that gets really interesting. It's the execution of it within a full plan where you bring message media creative together and some widget that results in an out return in the business. You generally don't get that. You get a piece of it from a partner, but you very rarely get the whole puzzle.

Speaker A: You talked a little bit about AI. You talked about some of your early days a little bit as well. We've got a few minutes left. AI is a really interesting component. I'm 50. Because you're, you're in your 40s now, I would assume, just based on the fact that you said you just turned 40 at the moment. AI, when you scratch away at the surface, or at least have enough knowledge to be able to scratch away at the surface, which you have because of your time at Ground Truth and because of where you've been, there is an element I feel like of that Is pretty close to that cusp of oh my gosh, there is a, there is more to the there that's there. Not just from a staffing standpoint, but from just a deeper authentic analysis that can be done. When we were running an agency, I was talking to somebody about this. We would charge you as a client or first watch, my buddy Chris that runs that, we charge him a retainer for our time. Right. We charge them a percentage of the media spend and we'd charge them a strategy fee for building out the strategies. Uh, granted we charge a bunch of that upfront. We do the work a little bit here and then a little bit over time. But with the analysis that are available through smartly built agentic features that can be done better than the best media strategist I ever hired in 10, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. And so how do you envision that, whether it's through your relationships with your agencies, your current time? How do you navigate this space of how much can we build ourselves, how much do we need an outside group just so we have this outside perspective? And how does anybody get paid around here? Because kind of hard for us as an agency to charge you a, uh, $6,000 a month retainer for work that really, once the prompt is built and once we all agree that the structure is right strategically gives us at least the base groundwork to work from. How does the math still make sense?

Speaker B: Yeah, I can't really speak to how people get paid, so I can't go there yet. I think that's a big nut to crack. I will say though, it has changed a lot. I think though, when I say like wow, moments like to the end consumer that drives their behavior in, it's really changing the background of how we do work. Just as a specific example, it took about a year to figure out how to make Wendy's grow. That's just what it took. It took partners like multiple agencies, big agencies with big retainers. It took hundreds of tests. It took McKinsey in the background doing analysis. It was a multi tens of millions of dollars in investment, uh, ultimately to get to what is going to create consistent growth for the next 10 plus years. We were able to do that at Dave's in three months, two months. The timelines have truncated pretty dramatically. And in part that's due to the technology that are available, like AI, that let us do things like analysis on historical correlations much more quickly. It lets what used to take a team of people, maybe one person who understands how to look at the data and push it into the systems, but also make sure it's right when it comes back to give you something in a matter of days instead of months. It's pretty dramatic. So I think where the changes are happening, it's really underneath the surface where speed to market can improve, where. Where confidence in decisions can improve, where optimizations can improve in a dramatic time shift that does put pressure on the team and put pressures on partners because you just don't need as much. I've got. I had hundreds of people at Wendy's on the team by time I was fully baked there. I've got five people here and I'm getting ready to hire one more and that's about it. I think I'm good for at least a year, maybe two. And we're running billions of dollars in business through our system and I've got a tight team and not a lot of partners and not a lot of folks on retainer. I think that's going to be the new reality, especially for brands that aren't stuck in the history of this is the way we've always done things.

Speaker A: All right? It's all built in, it's all baked in there. Last question is just this. It's an advice question, advice that you give to yourself. Looking back at this path that you've taken, at this journey that you've taken, what do you wish you could go back to that 20 year old Brian wrote in Cincinnati, Ohio, kid, what do you wish you could tell them? What advice would you give them?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think the biggest piece of advice, and this may be a little counterintuitive for a cmo, is just do your homework before you speak. I came into Wendy's and the agency a little bit like a bull in a china shop and I remember some HR meetings that were uncomfortable because I was throwing elbows trying to get stuff done and I've definitely matured since then. Where now I do my homework, I can really make any moves for three months, two months at Dave's or at Ground Truth. Frankly, to understand what are the problems we need to solve, let's cut, measure twice, cut once and do our homework when we actually are going into a situation so we can fix the real problems and create sustained long term growth rather than chase a week of success. So I guess let's do your homework.

Speaker A: Brian Roten, Chief Marketing Officer of Dave's Hot Chicken, thank you so much for telling us about your journey. Thank you brother. Thanks for listening to this episode of the CMO Suite podcast presented by MIO Intelligence. Every journey has a story. This is where you find it. And remember to subscribe so you don't miss an episode this season. And be sure to like and follow along on your favorite social platforms for highlights of each episode.