Angelo Esposito [00:00:00]:

I don't do this for me. I do it for everybody else that works for me because they get an opportunity to shine and grow. And my job is to make them better each and every day so they can go on and do their next thing, you know, because. And whatever that is. And I'm not ever ashamed or upset when someone says they're leaving me for a bigger opportunity. And I take that as a pride component because I taught them how to go and build. And then hopefully they can take the culture we put in place and install it somewhere else and do the same thing for the next group.

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Gregg Majewski [00:00:42]:

Welcome to another episode of WISKing It All. We're joined today by Gregg Majewski, founder and CEO of Craveworthy Brands. Gregg, thanks for joining us. Of course.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:53]:

Great to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. Like all of the conversations that we have on all the podcasts.

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Gregg Majewski [00:00:58]:

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I know, I know. We'll get into to your stuff too, because I know you got your own podcast. I know you do a lot of public speaking and you're no stranger to the hospitality space, to say the least. So obviously. I know. But for our listeners, can you tell them what is Craveworthy Brands?

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:16]:

So Craveworthy Brands is a. I mean, I guess it's not new, but in the term of everything, it's still new. Started in January 2023 to create a incubator of sorts to emerging and legacy brands so they compet so they can compete on a national scale and have shared services and everything else and have a chance to grow at a much more expedient rate without having PE sort of dictate their growth if they're not ready and everything else. You grow as a team as you need to be. As an operator's point of view, being a restaurant operator, I felt that PE and private and family offices and stuff like that in the past have always put undue pressure on restaurants to grow when they're not necessarily ready to grow. Here you come in and yes, we see still operate in the same mentality, but you grow when the restaurant's ready to grow and you focus on the proper things and you focus on your franchisees winning first and not your bottom line of your company. So we take it in the shorts maybe a little bit longer than we should as our franchisees start to get up and running to where they need to be. But our philosophy is if they're winning, we in the long term will end up winning.

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Gregg Majewski [00:02:26]:

Right. That makes a ton of sense. And you know, for the people listening in prior to this, you know, I know you were the CEO at Jimmy John's, you know, correct. Correct me if this is wrong, but I, but I saw something like from 30ish stores to 300 stores, you expanded from 30 to 300. So to our listeners, you know, some, some good advice will definitely come from this podcast, but I love to know a bit about what got you into that. So I always like to go for the story and then we'll fast forward and talk about Craveworthy brands. But I love to understand how people got into the hospitality space. So if we rewind, even prior to Jimmy John's, like what got you into the space?

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:01]:

So I mean if you go all the way back. I put myself through college working odd jobs, bartender, bar back salesman, everything else because I screwed up. I was a kid with a silver spoon that, you know, looking back at it, I could have had anything I ever wanted. And my parents were going to pay for school because my dad worked his butt off and I made a mistake and I didn't get 10 classes and I nearly flunked out of school. So my parents cut me off. Most people get cut off, you still have some support. And my parents cut me off. I had to survive on my own after that fact.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:33]:

And oh wow, we put myself through school, through all the odds jobs did not at all ever wanted to be in the restaurant industry. Went to school for forensic tax accounting. And as I was on my way to go to Arthur Anderson as one of two hires in this department, a guy by the name of Jimmy called me out of the blue. And the rest is sort of history. Jimmy and I met, he gave me an internship and then I negotiated a deal to sort of set the rest in stone and exceeded every expectation as I moved up from intern to controller to CFO to CFO and COO to all three of them.

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Gregg Majewski [00:04:12]:

When I added the CEO title, wow, that's impressive. And so can you share? I mean, I know it's going to be hard to say to such a short amount of time on here and you can only condense so much experience, but can you just allude to some things that, that were important when it came to scaling from, you know, 30 to 300 some?

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:31]:

Yeah, I mean the biggest thing that, and it still doesn't change no matter what the size is. It was the belief in what you were doing. It was following the playbook and not deviating from the playbook when things got hard. And in the restaurant industry, things get hard all the time. And you Start to question, can I do this or can I do that? Or how bad do I have to discount to build sales? Or oh my God, it was a bad month and I'm going to lose everything. We stuck to a plan and believed in what we were doing. We fine tuned it continually, but the plan was a plan and we operated under the mantra. We knew what our core beliefs were and we didn't deviate from those.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:04]:

We knew we were a great sandwich, that we could deliver it freely, fast, and that we could make our franchisees money by being something different and offering that delivery component. It was also building a culture of people all working towards the same common goal and the same belief. And that was the most important thing that we did, was that culture piece that everybody worked their butts off to get us to that next point and that, you know, typically it was a 40 hour work week, but for us it wasn't 40 hours. It was 60, 70, 80, sometimes 100. But it didn't feel like we were working. We were all doing it to the same march and the same beat because we believed where we were going. And that's what accelerated the growth more than anything is that we believe we were just killing.

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Gregg Majewski [00:05:48]:

Right. I love that. And I think those are really two good takeaways. Like, you know, having leadership that, that inspires and has a clear vision and, you know, instilling that culture that makes a ton of sense and then sticking to the plan, which, which might not be easy. So if we, if we dive in a bit to like, sticking to the plan, what are some areas that you think were, like, super important? Right. I know in restaurants, a big piece of this is, you know, people always talk about, especially my space, the food costs, the beverage cost, you know, the cost of goods in general, labor. But I'd love to hear from your point of view some core things that were important to your plan.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:21]:

It was easy. It was being freaky fast. We took that as our marching tune. We knew we wanted deliveries out the door in five minutes and we tried to get them to the customer in 10 minutes or less.

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Gregg Majewski [00:06:30]:

Wow.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:30]:

And that was what we built our entire brand on. So when you sat there and got your sandwich, we wanted to beat you to it and make it in 15 seconds or less. And you were standing at the register with your food already. That's. That was what we built everything on. And then obviously, fun advertising, great food and all that, but it was speed. We became a convenience item and it was the convenience of being able to get that product delivered. It was Being able to get it fast when you came in, but it was able to get this great sandwich better than the competitors that were out there at the time.

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:00]:

And get that in such a speed that made your life convenient. So you can now have it three, four or five times a week because you knew it would be there in 10 to 15 minutes, you know, and that's what gave us the boost and what we had. And that was all Jimmy. I mean, Jimmy was focused on delivery from day one, way before anyone else was even remotely into that product. Jimmy was delivering a sub sandwich back in the early 80s. I mean, think about it. No one else delivered at that point besides pizza, right?

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Gregg Majewski [00:07:27]:

True. And maybe your occasional Chinese restaurant, but yeah, pretty much just pizza. That's. That's crazy. And so for people listing that maybe have, you know, a handful of either QSRs or fast casual restaurants, and they're as they, you know, maybe on a smaller scale, they're at five, six, seven locations and they're looking to scale up. What advice would you, would you give them?

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:47]:

So, I mean, the hardest part is getting from 1 to 2 and then 2 to 5. You know, that's the hardest thing that you're ever going to.

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Gregg Majewski [00:07:53]:

Okay, so you know what, let's go there then, because that's the hardest part. Let's talk a bit about that. One to two and two to five.

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:58]:

And that, that is if you're a franchisor or a franchisee or anything of that nature, that's where it gets hard. And that hard part is because you have to make sure your systems and procedures actually scale and that you can operate the restaurants without actually being in the restaurants all the time.

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Gregg Majewski [00:08:14]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:14]:

And can you duplicate what made you successful in Stor one in store two without you now being split between time between one and two?

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Gregg Majewski [00:08:23]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:24]:

Very hard. And you can't do it if you don't have systems. So it's developing the playbook and the systems that you're going to use day in and day out to make sure store one operates exactly like store two when you're not there. So we use the analogy all the time. Would you get on a flight without the pilots going through the checklist? And the answer is always, absolutely not. I would never take that flight. Why would you open up a restaurant if your restaurants don't operate underneath that same checklist every day? Why would a customer come in and spend that money with you if it's not duplicated exactly the same? Because your checklists are perfect. So while you're building from one to two and you're thinking about that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:00]:

Make sure your checklist and your systems are easily duplicated and then easy to follow so you have that default back on. Then you manage systems and then it's easy. You ask the question, hey, this didn't go right today. What went wrong? Was it a system fail or was it an employee fail? If it's an employee fail, you retrain, you educate and not if it's a system failure, you rewrite the system, tweak it so you don't have that problem going forward. And that's what we've, I built my entire career on is that mantra that then gets you from two to five. And five is hard because now you have four people running restaurants or five people running restaurants. And now you need procedures for an area manager and RD on how to still be profitable as you start adding those layers of cost.

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Gregg Majewski [00:09:44]:

Interesting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:45]:

And the issue that continues to remain is those added layers of cost. You know, and so you can have a very, very successful one restaurant, you can have two, you can have three. But when you start putting the overhead or the infrastructure in five is sort of where you know if you can make it or not with interesting above store people.

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Gregg Majewski [00:10:04]:

Interesting. That's super cool. Yeah. Because I could see how it's different challenges. One to two is probably like you said, a big milestone because you're, you're, you're delegating and creating playbooks for the, you know, first time. So you're like this is a big step. But two to five, you're right. It's like now you're thinking about each area manager.

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Gregg Majewski [00:10:20]:

Yeah, it's super interesting. And so let me ask this, what got you from, you know, so obviously doing, doing some, some crazy stuff at Jimmy John's 33 to 300 locations. And you know, I'm sure that that's the high level story, but there's the day to day. I know how stressful the restaurant space can be and the ups and downs. But fast forward what kind of got you, you know, to Craveworthy. Like I'm curious about that transition and story.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:45]:

So I mean I always knew that if we were going to do this. After I left Jimmy John's I went and consulted for almost everybody in the restaurant space. I was a huge franchisee through different groups where I owned restaurants from a ton of different brands. As investors I've opened up and designed over 200 restaurants. I knew this was always going to be sort of where I was going to go. But I made a promise to Myself when my family went through some hard times with a little girl and, you know, about just having children was not the easiest thing for us to ever do, that I wanted to be home for my kids growing up, and so I enjoyed that time. And I was fortunate enough to enjoy that time because of everything else I had. And then when my kids were old enough and then high school and all that, I just started laying the groundwork in 2017 to start acquiring these brands and started investing in some brands.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:40]:

And then in 2022, pulled the trigger to go full on board. But it was always. I always knew I was going to do this. It was just a matter of I lucky enough to be young enough in this industry that now most people are getting their first bite of the apple at my age. And this is time number three. You know, this is chapter three already for me.

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Gregg Majewski [00:12:00]:

Right. That's awesome.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:01]:

I knew when I could do it. And around the life that I wanted to have and the dad that I wanted to be for my kids.

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Gregg Majewski [00:12:07]:

That's really cool. That's really special. Thanks for sharing that. And for people that don't know, like, can you kind of maybe go through some of the brands? Because I know that look. Even just looking at the website, there was some brands I didn't even know of. So some really cool, unique concepts I'd love for you to, like, highlight, you know, some of the. Some of the concepts.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:22]:

So, I mean, the brands continue to evolve. So this past week, we added Fresh Brothers Pizza. We have Genghis Grill, BD's Mongolian flat top Grill, Budlong, Southern Chicken, Hot Chicken Takeover, Taim Tsum Tsum, Siguri Indian Barbecue. Those are the main brick and mortar brands. And then we. We have a virtual platform which we call Craver of the kitchen that has 16 unique virtual brands that make up it, that then operate in our individual restaurants. And so we have a ton of brands, but three of those brands operate in the one brick and mortar. Like, so those 16 all use the equipment and all the food and all that to create different menu items that we then add incremental revenue to through that worthy kitchen model.

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Gregg Majewski [00:13:10]:

That's smart. Yeah. I was looking at the website, I saw, like, one of them, the virtual brands was. I like the name. That's what stuck with me was Nomad Dog.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:17]:

Yep.

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Gregg Majewski [00:13:18]:

Like, hot dogs around the world. That's pretty cool. And so I'm curious when you guys think about, let's say, the virtual brand. Excuse me. And sharing, you know, one kitchen and obviously, like, recipe ingredients and all that, and you know, using that, that as leverage. Do you guys actually, when you say virtual, does that mean those brands can only be ordered through like delivery, a third party or in the physical store? Can people also order those three brands?

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:42]:

So we're, we're slowly rolling out the fact that you can order them in the restaurant. We're not afraid and we're proud because they're our brand to advertise that we have these. So the new webpage and the new site, when you go to Genghis Grill or one of those, you'll see Creper the kitchen brands available in your restaurant. So we're going to start tying that in. So. Oh, I want that. Oh, that sounds really good too. Let me throw in a lucky cat poke bowl or whatever the brand is that's operating in that one.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:09]:

We're not running from that. We're also allowing our consumers to buy those items in the restaurant, which just again, helps us build incremental revenue or they know it's there. Maybe one person doesn't really want to go in and get hot chicken, but, but they love, they'll be fine with a hot dog and fries for dinner. I don't now cancel out the Vita vote a little bit, but we're proud of the brands that we are. So we're front facing. It's craver of the kitchen, where most people with virtual brands don't want that to be known. We're all in on it.

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Gregg Majewski [00:14:38]:

That's cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:39]:

And you know, might as well take every dollar you can get, especially today.

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Gregg Majewski [00:14:43]:

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And you know, myself being in the, in the inventory space and all about, like I said, you know, recipes, ingredients and all that stuff and invoices from supp suppliers and costing. So I nerd out on that stuff. So obviously when I hear, you know, virtual brands and leveraging, you know, one kitchen for, for many different brands, I love that. I'd love for you to maybe touch on that. Like how can you, can you maybe go through some of the advantages? Let's say that from a just operational or business standpoint.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:12]:

So I mean, let's look at the basics. And no restaurant is fully at capacity. It's impossible. You build these kitchens to do 4, 5, 6 times the dollar amount that we do today. So we know that every restaurant in America has capacity and they may be some that don't in certain hours, without a doubt. But in those off hours there's capacity.

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Gregg Majewski [00:15:31]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:32]:

We designed menu taking account what the kitchen needs for those equipment, for those brick and mortar, the Main brands, we designed recipes and product around what they all have in place. So the menu items and skus, and we try to bring in no more than five additional SKUs to create these menu items. And that sounds like, oh my God, you can't do much with it. But you got to think of all the ingredients every restaurant has. You know, you can do so many things. And then we create unique brands to operate with that in the forefront. What that does for us is, in our case, we know that we can increase sales by half a million dollars for our virtual brands. So half a million dollars in incremental revenue after you pay your delivery fees and everything else.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:16]:

If that's the way it is, yeah. But you're covering your gna for that restaurant, which now makes you extremely profitable.

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Gregg Majewski [00:16:26]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:27]:

So that's the game plan and the matrix behind why we're doing it. I wanted to find a way to have my friend, my franchisees and my corporate stores make more money without having to do much more. You know, we have the labor already, we have the skus, we have the, we pay for the rent and everything else, but I need to lower those, those cost. So we created this to help do that.

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Gregg Majewski [00:16:49]:

That's super neat. And obviously I see it, you're clearly passionate about what you do. I'm curious what's been the most fulfilling part of this new venture so far, at least, right? It's a long journey.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:02]:

The most fulfilling part has always been building the team and watching the team grow. I mean, back in the Jimmy John's days to now, that has always been what I've been most excited about. I don't do this for me. I do it for everybody else that works for me because they get an opportunity to shine and grow. And my job is to make them better each and every day so they can go on and do their next thing, you know, because. And whatever that is. And I'm not ever ashamed or upset when someone says they're leaving me for a bigger opportunity. And I take that as a pride component because I taught them how to go and build.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:38]:

And then hopefully they can take the culture we put in place and install it somewhere else and do the same thing for the next group. And so most restaurant people are always so mad. I can't believe I spent all this money. I did all this, I trained them. They were with me for five years. How dare they leave me? And I look at it as we did this together. We went, this is a huge opportunity. I'm so proud of you.

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Gregg Majewski [00:18:01]:

And go, what A great perspective, you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:03]:

Know, and that's my job. And so as long as that's what we're doing and we continue to have people grow, then we win because the company continues to get better. But that means the people underneath them continue to get better. So I can just kind constantly promote from within. If that's the culture you build, you never have to worry about someone leaving because you already always have a bench, you know, now obviously some big positions and stuff like that. You got to go and hire from the outside.

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Gregg Majewski [00:18:28]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:29]:

But most of the time you want to build from within or from within your network, so your culture stays in. Yes.

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Gregg Majewski [00:18:36]:

Yes. I love that. There's. There's a quote that came to mind when you were saying that. It was like, you know, someone. I'm gonna paraphrase, but someone says, what happens if I spend all this money training this person and they get good and then they leave. Leave. And then the person responds and says, well, what happens if you don't train them and they stay? You know.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:55]:

I mean, and we spend a lot of money on training and we spend a lot of money on fostering them to get to that next level. So we do that in a way that is crucial and we're proud of that. And I want people to leave now. I, obviously, I don't ever want anyone to leave. I'd love for them to stay because we're all just making so much money and all that. But everyone has their own personal goals. And, you know, if you want to be a VP or a senior VP or if you want to be a senior CEO of a company, as long as I'm here, that job's not open. So if you have an opportunity to go and be a CEO of a company and start doing your path, I'm going to support you, champion you, and help you get that right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:31]:

And that's what makes a great operator or a great leader so much different than everybody else. A great leader wants you to go somewhere and be successful. A bad leader is going to be bitter that you left and hold it against you for the rest of life and never want to talk to you yet. And I know people in the industry and some of the biggest jobs ever that are just bitter because someone left. You know, that's not why you should be bitter. You should be thrilled. You got that guy the job because you taught him. That looks great for you.

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Gregg Majewski [00:19:59]:

Yeah, I love that perspective. And, you know, labor is, Is obviously a hot topic in the, in the hospitality space. And more specifically, you know, turnover, staff turnover. Is, is there in every industry. But we know in the restaurant industry it's high. So it sounds like you really care about your team and you take a lot of pride. So anything you can share when it comes to retaining talent, I mean, here's.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:22]:

What I'll tell my team because they complain about it all the time. If you just pay people what you should pay them, they're always going to look for the next job. If you overpay, they're going to work for you harder and eliminate somebody else. And it's mind boggling to people, oh my God, I'm going to pay someone more. But if you look at the history of my history or Jimmy John's or everything else, we way overpaid for the positions that we had. So we never bothered to look for something else, you know, because we were happy and we just thought it was normal. You take care of people day in and day out, they're not going to leave you, right? If you're trying to worry about the bottom line so much that you can't give someone, hey, $2 more an hour and I'm throwing that out there because you know, that's of course they're going to continue to look. But if you're taking care of them and paying them more than what they're worth, they're never going to look.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:19]:

But they' also going to eliminate other people from the organization. Now if they're not willing to do that part, take on more and eliminate others so you can make cuts elsewhere, then they're not the right person to give that bigger wage.

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Gregg Majewski [00:21:32]:

That's fair. And from what I've seen, I imagine it's similar in the restaurant space. But you know, we're in the tech space, we work with restaurants. But what I've noticed, and I'm curious to get your perspective, is sometimes a 30%, let's say markup, right? Like let's say you're paying someone X amount a year and you overpay by 30% is that the value is disproportionately higher. It's not like you're getting 30% more value. You're getting like 100% more value. So there's like a, at least in my world, there's a, you know, a disproportionate relation between paying someone a bit or, you know, enough above what their expectations were and their output. And so what I realize is like, it just makes economic sense.

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Gregg Majewski [00:22:10]:

It's like, hey, by paying a bit over market, this guy's twice as good as the other guy in line, you know, so it doesn't make sense to say that. But I'm curious, in your space, how do you think about, about that. Is there like a threshold?

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:23]:

I mean, I know what I think. People need to be comfortable or be uncomfortable in life. So my key people, I take extremely good care of. I, you know, and if I can't pay them enough, I'll pay for a vacation or you know, something different out of my pocket personally to get them somewhere. And I've always done that. I've bought cars, I've put deposits down on people's homes. I've, you know, stuff like that. And I just know that the people that are taking care of me because I can't do this without them, you know, and I can't do this without an incredible team.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:58]:

I know that. So it doesn't matter how much money I'm making today, if I need to take, you know, 50,000 or whatever for my savings to help someone get to the next point, then that's my job to do because they're going to reward me 10 times over. Now I own the company, I'm the biggest shareholder. I look at things a little differently, but in life it doesn't matter. So executives and leaders tend to always want to pay raise and the bad ones will take the pay raise before they make sure everyone else has it right. I've always had the different philosophy. I'm the last one to take a raise or the last one to get anything extra. My team gets it first.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:30]:

Once my team starts making all their money and starts performing because they're being taken care of, I'm going to get it in the end. And that's really where my head has to be as I build the company. Not worried about, oh, what am I getting today? Yes, leaders have to look out for the people below first. And they again turned down. And it bothers me when I see some of these bonuses and everything else that are out there that, oh, I made, you know, a million dollars in bonus this year, but my staff doesn't have any cash and they're struggling in your turnover so soon I've taken the million $10.

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Gregg Majewski [00:24:07]:

No, I love that it is, I, I, I'm, I'm very similar. It's, it's different, right? I'm in the tech space. My team's what, 35 people is not as big, but same mentality. Especially in the early days when you're a one person team, two person team building a company and you try to get good talent, it's the first thing is like, hey, as long as we can find good talent, I'll just take whatever I need to just survive. And you keep growing and growing and looking long term. Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:30]:

And in this space more than any like again, every job, every company wants to see their leader doing their jobs. Wants them to be part of it. Wants you to ask the best leaders in these organizations actually go in and can do the job of everybody in the organization and then go in happily and help and just show up and do it. Some days, yeah, you know, I can go into a restaurant and open up and open and run any of my restaurants, any of my brands I can go and function in. There's a lot of damn brands. But yet I'm able to do it. And when I walk in, my staff knows that I'm going to go and clean tables or clean the bathroom or run the grill or whatever because that's where it's my happy spot. I'm happy when doing it because I get to see them, I get to interact with them, I get to hear the things that are going wrong in the restaurant or things that they think can be improved because all of a sudden they open up to me.

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Gregg Majewski [00:25:20]:

Yes.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:21]:

And I start getting information that I may not get just sitting in a meeting listening to the reports.

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Gregg Majewski [00:25:26]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:26]:

I now know what's really going on in the restaurant. And so I do it all the time, but I do it because I want them to be able to share with me and tell me honest feedback.

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Gregg Majewski [00:25:35]:

Yeah, that's amazing. It's one of the reasons it's funny, sometimes I take on maybe like handful of like demos, online demos with restaurants a month. And sometimes restaurants are like, why is the CEO doing a demo? And I'm just like, it's for me it's a way to stay close to the customers. It's not a big deal. I take maybe one a week, it's half an hour. And it just gives me a chance to be on the ground floor, hear what pains restaurants are feeling, how that's evolving, you know, different pains from inventory to ordering to just recipe costs or whatever it is. But it keeps me in tune. So I find that super important.

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Gregg Majewski [00:26:08]:

And to your point, I think good leaders have a good balance of obviously vision, high level thinking, strategy, et cetera, you know, just, just leading by example, but also being able to kind of get their hands dirty and do that as well. Switching gears. I wanted to just ask you, like, there's tons of stuff happening in the space and I know. AI AI buzzword but really like there's a million and one things going. I'm just curious, curious from your perspective with the industry evolving so fast, what are some trends that you're seeing that excites you the most right now? Now?

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:38]:

So the trends that excite me the most is obviously anything that improves customer. Customer experience. So those are the things that excite me. How do you get throughput up? How do you improve the customer experience without taking hospitality out of the restaurant? So I'm a big believer in tech behind the line.

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Gregg Majewski [00:26:57]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:57]:

And not so much I don't want it to remove the hospitality component. So there if you have kiossas, I think kiossas need to have somebody focals out there still to sort of manning it and teaching people how to do it and asking the questions, speed up that process. But I'm all in on tech everywhere else. You know, if you can have AI to help you, you know, teach people and help inventory and help manage the process of what your projections should be and get that down to science, then why wouldn't you go and explore those avenues?

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Gregg Majewski [00:27:26]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:27]:

My biggest fear in the industry is that we've been an industry that has never had tech. You know, we were tech adverse for so long, there's so much incredible tech coming at us right now that we give. We get pigeon holed on the shiny thing.

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Gregg Majewski [00:27:42]:

Yes.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:43]:

And we don't fully invest in the technology we already have before we get onto the next tech. And now we're settled with subscription fees and everything else that are going to bury the restaurant.

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Gregg Majewski [00:27:53]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:53]:

So my biggest like advice in all of this is pick your one tech item, get it perfect, don't look or talk about another piece of tech until that one tech is working on everything the way it's supposed to be working and you're using everything it has to offer. So I'm guilty of this. We have ovation. Ovation is something I'm a big, big fan of. I did not know when they did a bad job of telling me this. They offered text to those people that put innovation surveys. Don't know when it came out. But Zach and I, everyone in the industry knows how close we are and I've teased him now for the last four months that I who sit on his advisory board and investor did not know that his product did this.

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Gregg Majewski [00:28:39]:

Wow, that's so funny.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:41]:

You have to know what you're paying for fully so you can take advantage of what's out there.

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Gregg Majewski [00:28:46]:

Yeah. Well said. Well said. One mistake I see restaurants make sometimes is they they get Dish. And it's not their fault, but they get to your point, they get bombarded with all these different tech and sometimes they forget, wait, what? What am I actually looking for? So I always tell people, if you're like, in the market right now, you're opening a new restaurant, your main focus is like, like finding your point of sale. Okay? Focus on that. If your main focus is now, hey, I know I don't know if I'm making money because I can't really track my food costs. Focus on that.

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Gregg Majewski [00:29:11]:

But what I noticed sometimes, and it happens, they'll speak to clients and they'll talk to me and they're like, oh, we're looking at software X software. But then they'll mention other softwares that do a million and one things. And I'm like, but remember, you came here because you told me your biggest problem right now is your food costs are out of control. So why are you talking to me about this? And this? So my biggest advice is always for restauranters shopping around, make the list before you book these demos of what you actually care about. And then look at that checklist. Because if not, you get distracted easily and you start judging on features you didn't even really care about. But now you're like, oh, yes, there's other software could do XYZ when you didn't really care. So I will say make a checklist first.

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Gregg Majewski [00:29:46]:

What matters? What do I need for my restaurant? And then when you meet with these software companies, you can kind of do your due diligence. But no, that's great. Well, listen, I know as we kind of get to wrap it up. One thing I wanted to ask you was just every business obviously faces operational challenges. I'm sure you did at Jimmy John's. Curious to like, what operational challenges are you potentially facing today? Right. Just to give a behind, if you can, a behind the curtain look.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:16]:

I mean, it's no different than what everybody. It's a pricing issue right now. So we're facing the headwinds of the consumer doesn't have the disposable income that they once did, and they're choosing what they should and should not eat. You see the things that they're now willing to part with. Chipotle and all that other world that are still seeing positive sales, but the rest of the industry transactions are down and it's because we've taken too much price. And what's funny is the restaurants that have not taken price are still feeling a price issue. And people are saying they're too Expensive because everything else around them is too expensive. As an industry, we effed up and I say that as nice as we can be, we effed up.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:53]:

We did not adjust pricing back down when we should have. We took way too much because we thought it was going to continue. So, oh, I was going to take enough to last a year and then it didn't happen and now customers couldn't feel it. Now we're in this pricing conundrum that's not going away until they feel better about the state of the economy. And when that happens, there will be a lever that goes off again. It's never going to be the lever that gets back. And unfortunately you're not going to get the 20%. They're not going to see wages go up 20% on the 24% that food costs went up.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:25]:

Inflation on those items. They're not even a 24% increase in pay. So the issue then becomes, is when do they get sick of being at home and they're willing to spend that money and that becomes a focal point. That's the biggest headwind. That's the issue. That's something we're going to have to struggle with. And the industry has got to get better at not setting your pricing for different times of the day. You know, surge pricing, that's not what I'm talking about.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:52]:

But we need to have pricing where if our costs go up, we go ahead and jack our price up. And when costs come back down, just like the grocery store, milk charges $5 for milk one week and then it's 249 the next week. When our costs go down, we have to adjust our pricing back.

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Gregg Majewski [00:32:06]:

Right. Makes sense. Thanks for sharing that. Super insightful. And look, like I said, as we're wrapping up, I'd like. I got two more for you. One is I want to know just what's on the horizon for Craveworthy brands. What's next?

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:17]:

I mean, we say Craveworthy and I mean when I built this company or built any company, it's our job to dream big and as big as you possibly can and where you're going to go. We set the lofty goal that we want to be a thousand restaurants in five years.

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Gregg Majewski [00:32:30]:

Wow.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:30]:

And we want to have a billion dollars in system wide sales and all these things. Now I know we can't ever hit those goals. That may be impossible, but you have to work towards getting them. But if you set goals that you think are possible, then they're easy to hit and they're not really goals Right. So I mean, that's on the next. It's going to be rolling out our franchise and getting our franchise system up and running, getting the franchisees that we've sold to achieve the American dream. And once that start happens, everything else sort of falls together and then of course there'll be other deals and some new things that come down the line and maybe even a couple in a few weeks. So we'll see.

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Gregg Majewski [00:33:06]:

Exciting, exciting. And that leads me to my last question. For people who want to follow you follow Craveworthy Brands, I always like to give a chance for you to plug your stuff away. So for people who want to follow your journey, just go ahead, where can they find you and the brand?

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:17]:

So easiest way is go to craveworthybrands.com, hit media. You can go ahead and follow our podcast, which is room four seconds. You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, you name it, I have it. Gregg Majewski, Just type it in, it will come up. But again, we give advice, we continue. And it's not about building our brands. Everything we do on those media pages, that's what talk about them and stuff like that. But our podcast and all that other stuff is really giving back to the industry.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:42]:

That's been so great to me and you know, and so we do everything that we possibly can to make our industry win.

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Gregg Majewski [00:33:49]:

I love that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:49]:

So that's what those podcasts are for.

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Gregg Majewski [00:33:52]:

Amazing. And we're going to include those links too in the air. So if people are watching this either on YouTube or on Spotify, whatever, we'll include the links to the web website to your podcast. So people keep learning. It's why I do this show. I try to get experts like yourselves on here who have lived it, who have seen it, who are, who are still living it and can share their wisdom and knowledge. So with that said, Gregg, I really appreciate having you on the WISKing it all podcast. Thanks for being here.

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Gregg Majewski [00:34:15]:

And once again, Gregg Majewski, founder and CEO of Craveworthy Brands.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:21]:

Thank you. It was a great time.

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Gregg Majewski [00:34:23]:

If you want to learn more about Wisk, head to Wisk.AI and book a demo.

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