Default to How with Zack Oates

Hey, welcome to the Restaurant Coach podcast. It is the cure for the common restaurant. Woohoo. Zach Oates in the house. What's up, Donald? Oh, my God, it's been so long. It's like I feel like we're getting the band back together.

I know. Every time I see you, no matter how long it's been, it's always been too long, Donald.

Oh, it's always been too long. I saw you last at the Western Food show.

Huh. And now, now I'm going to see in Phoenix here pretty soon.

You mean Phoenix? Yeah. If you don't know, I've probably mentioned it a hundred times a day recently. Yes, we. I'm holding my annual restaurant success summit here in Scottsdale, Arizona, October 24th. 25th. 26th. I've got seven other amazing speakers, and one of those is going to be Zach. He's going to drop some knowledge bombs about text message marketing, about setting up your digital platform, how you can actually start using technology to really drive engagement. And what that does, that turns into people coming back more often, which that does. It turns into more money in your bank account, which is always a good thing. That's always that. Right?

Amen.

We were talking just before the show started. Zach was talking about, you know, he's, of course, he's a tech company and he does a lot of fundraising and they basically just raised some money for the next round of, you know, innovations and new, new upgrades over at Ovation. And he acted like it was so casual, like, you know, he's like, it's like, what you do today, Donald? I went out and I, you know, I got a sandwich for lunch. What'd you do, Zach? I raised a couple million dollars, you know. Oh, my God.

Like, well, it's. Right. As a CEO of, of a tech company, especially one that's VC funded.

Yeah.

It's like part of my job is to raise money, right? So it's like, yes, I celebrate when a sales rep closes a deal that's also their job is to close deals.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so, you know, I look at raising money as like, hey, it's part. Part of my job.

That's it. Just like a restaurant owner, your job is to make profits. That's it. That's part of your job.

That's right. And the best. That. That is the best tasting food, isn't it? Ebitda. Tastes so good.

Awesome. Tastes so good. So anyway, restaurant Success summit is October 24th. 25th. 26th.

Come party with us.

Yeah, come down. Party with us. It's Gonna be a great time. You can grab tickets@restauritsuccessumm.com. it's just. Just so you know, we keep this group really small because I like to have interaction with the speakers. So, like, you know, if Zach's wandering around, you could grab them and pull them aside, say, hey, man, you know, I love your stuff. I want to ask you some questions that might pertain to my brand, my restaurant. Zach's more than happy. All the speakers I invite to speak are more than happy to sit down with you and give you some of their time, which is different than, like, most conferences. Most. You've been to some of those huge conferences. I mean, you get up on stage, it's a big stage, you do your thing, and then you're off. You know, you're out.

And then there's. There's a line of 20 people that want to talk to you. After three of them, security comes and pushes you out into the hallway, and everyone gets, like, a minute of time. And it's just. That's what I loved about your conference last year. So last year is the first time I went, and super happy to come back again because it's just. It is such an intimate conference. It's a great place to get to know other restaurateurs, hear what they're doing. And not in a very fluffy kind of way of, what are you doing? It's like, oh, we're optimizing our menu. No, it's like we cut the chicken cutlets from our menu because of the operating costs and because we weren't getting the. The theoretical cost was just too far out there from what our actual cost. Like, you get very practical theoretical cost. How did you measure your theoretical cost? Well, this is what we.

And.

And I just love that. And the other thing, Donald, that I. I talk a lot about with people is your. Your sessions. You do on, like, menu. You know how you can.

I always do some killer sessions on menu and food costing. And. And I. And we got Bo.

Remember, Bo is awesome.

Bo is like. He's off the hook. If you've never been to a session with Beau Bryant, it's worth coming, man. I. I am like a maniac taking notes. Bo is just all over the place, super high energy, but he's a super great presenter.

The cool thing that I saw in the last conference, and when I've seen you present, it's like, Donald, you're able to give ideas of, like, here's a way that you can literally change the design of your menu and increase revenue you're not doing anything else. You're not having to buy new products, do more training, spend more money on tech. It's like you literally change your menu and you grow your revenue and things like that. It's, it's hard to get that very specific when you go to these larger conferences. Not saying the larger conferences are bad, that's a great place to go get inspiration, but this is a great place to get specific tactics for your restaurant. And anyway, and Donald is very clear with us in terms of when we are putting our sessions together, it's like have things that they can go and do. And so it's not just fluffy strategy, it's specific tactics, which is cool.

Yeah. And then the one thing a lot of people don't know is like, you know, and we just talked about like going to these. Sometimes you go to these big conferences and they're great for a hype up and get you motivated, get you some new ideas. But then what happens is you go back to your restaurant two, three days later and you don't implement. The beautiful thing I love about the success summit is that it also includes a 90 day membership in my mastermind group. So I will be kicking your butt for 90 days after the summit. So it's like, yeah, you like come down, get signed, excited. But then I'm gonna tell you right now, I'm gonna hold you accountable that we're gonna get back to work and then the next 90 days I'm gonna make you do the work and I'm gonna help you get better results.

Was it Mike Tyson said everyone has a game plan until they get punched in the face?

Exactly right.

And that's what happens. You go, you get inspired, you get a game plan, then you go back to your restaurant and guess what happens? Your manager doesn't show up, your, you know, your boiler runs out, your chicken goes up to $4 a pound and like, you know, like, what are you gonna do with that stuff? So anyway, I love that, love the inspiration and love the follow through.

Very cool. Hey, so Ovation up there and I'll be total transparent here, there's very few products I recommend. Just as you know, there's very few companies I recommend, there's very few products I recommend. I will tell you now without a shadow doubt, with no hesitation, Ovation up is a must have of your restaurant. You got to have Ovation Up. It is the future of that touchless interaction and engaging with your guest, especially if you do any kind of delivery service because it's almost like the virtual table touch. And you have to, I mean, if you have a pizza place, you do burgers, anything that does any kind delivery, you need ovation up to stay on top of the engagement with your guests and find out how you're doing. It is an amazing platform. I'll let you kind of talk a little bit about ovation up and really, what do you guys kind of focus on? How was that?

Yeah, so I grew up in hospitality. I, my first job was in restaurants. My dad owned a restaurant once he retired from his first career. And I was able to see that and realize that the most important thing in a restaurant is the guest experience.

It is.

And then you get to actually measuring the guest experience. Let's go back in the day. Imagine, imagine the perfect table touch. Right before fast casual, you know, QSR was still kind of coming around. What was a table touch? You walk up and Donald, you're well familiar, very familiar with this from opening up. You know all of like Wolf's restaurants, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So you go in and the perfect table touch. You see someone there and you notice that they're eating their meal, but they haven't. They ate one fry and then didn't eat the rest. And you go up and you say, how was everything? And what's the, what are they going to say? They're going to say, oh, everything was good. How are those fries? I noticed you didn't grab them. Were they, were they to your liking? Can I get you a different side? Oh, well, they were just, you know, they were cold when I got them. Let me get you another order of fries. Come back with an order of fries. And by the way, you're also bringing a refill of their drink because you notice they're a little low on that. How does that guest feel? They feel validated, they feel heard. They feel like, I'm going to come back here. Right now. You fast forward to today. You've got so many of these casual dining, full service. You have a lot of fast casual. The QSRs. Is it even possible to do that table touch anymore with the type of people that we're hiring with the challenges of training, with the number of people that we have going through our door, with the limitations of off prem where you can't even see what they are or aren't eating? You don't have that?

No, no.

And you layer on top of that this aversion to confrontation of our society face to face confrontation where if it's good, what are they going to say? It was good. And if it was bad, what are they going to say? It was good.

It'S fine, it's fine.

And so what we do at Ovation is we've created a frictionless experience for the guest where they can, in two questions, let you know how they feel about their experience. Because keep in mind you are only as good as your last experience. You can have someone that's been, that's been coming to you every other month for seven years. And if they have a terrible experience, guess what they're going to do? They're going to go down the street, they're going to go one click away. And so what we have is, it's a two question survey, starts off with how was everything? If they loved it, they had a great experience. And 80% of your guests do, I hate to break it to you, but it is only 80% have a 5 out of 5 experience. They go online and share it. We invite them to leave positive online reviews. We invite them to schedule a catering order. We invite them to buy merchandise. We invite them to buy a gift card. We invite them to activate with your brand because they just said, yes, I had a great experience. Right now. If they didn't have a great experience anywhere between one to four, maybe it was like, everything was great, but the fries were a little cold. Or maybe it was like, you totally screwed up my order. That goes directly to you or to your managers. And through the Ovation app that you'll have on your phone in three clicks, you can respond to that guest. Now to the guest, it's just a text message. They're not downloading, logging in, creating an account. It's super, super simple. And again, our whole emphasis is make it frictionless for the guests to give you their honest feedback, make it easy for you and your staff to respond to them. And then we listen to all of the feedback from online reviews to all of the feedback through Ovation. And we use our business intelligence to aggregate, analyze and compartmentalize all of that into over 34 categories. So you can know exactly how you're doing without having to read every single piece of feedback. So that's the power. Especially if you have multi locations, you can't sit there and read every single review and every single piece of Ovation feedback. So we do that for you, categorize it and then you know what to fix, where. So that's the basic heart of the Ovation system. We have a couple of things that we do on the back end, including next day follow up questions and including text marketing. And we Even have services where we can respond for you as you. But that's, that's the heart of what Ovation does. And we do that because right now, if a guest wants to give you feedback, there's two ways they could do it. Through a long, you know, cumbersome online, you know, online survey, which very few people do. Or maybe you have a contact us form on the bottom of your website. A lot of people right now are rolling their eyes, listening because they're like, oh, yeah, I have that, I got that.

I got one of those all over the place.

Guests hate that. So, so those are the two ways they can, they can talk to you or you give them the option of leaving you a online review, which is just like airing all sorts of dirty laundry. And that's, that's, that's the worst man.

When he gets online. Oh my God. And then, then of course, people don't, are not trained how to respond properly. So then it turns into a show.

I wouldn't use those words exactly, but yes, but, yeah. And so that's, that's the thing, Donald is as, as I, you know, the reason I started Ovation is because there's got to be a better way. It, you have to have something easier for the guests than these long surveys, more effective for the restaurant than an online review. And that's why we created Ovation. It's text message based. It starts off with just two questions and it's actually driving improvement and operational efficiencies. So these are the things that it's the best of both worlds. And that's why we've been able to, you know, we've added. We were at. Two years ago, we had like 200 restaurants we were working with. Now we're working with over 2200. Because it's what people are realizing is it's not a better way to do the wrong thing, it's the right way to do it. And that's what we're really focused on is not how do we do things a little bit better than the other long form survey companies, it's how do we do things right for the restaurants. And growing up in restaurants and only working with restaurants, we've been able to build a really killer product to help restaurants.

Very, very cool. Yeah. I love the simplicity of it. I mean, and then just the, it's just so easy to use. You know, it's. And it just makes sense nowadays, again, compl. Everyone has some, everyone wants to over complicate stuff. I think the, the simplistic approach is so much better than anything else you can think of.

And because, guess what? It's easy to complicate things. You add to it what we did. We started with a whiteboard, and we said, knowing everything we know about restaurants, knowing the culture of reviews, knowing the consumer desire to not take these long surveys, what should feedback look like? And that's how Ovation was born.

Yeah, I always say, like, you know, I have a chef background. I always, like. Chefs love to chef it up.

Yeah.

You know, it's just something. Take something. Just shift it up, man. Let's just shift that up. Let's just make it crazy.

Yep. Amen.

Wow. That's a great dish, man. How many components? 15 components. Wow, that's nice. You know, I love the little tweezers you're using. That's great. Yeah. Can I get, like. I need, like, 12 more of those, though, right now. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So what would you say is, like, one of the habits that. That you would kind of. What habits have been talking lately on, like, my podcast and the restaurant Coach Nation on Facebook. What are. What are some habits you think, that make you successful?

So I think one of them is. So let me give two habits. One kind of theoretical one and a mindset, and one is a practice. So the mindset that I have is God and family first. So it goes God, family, and then there's a large gap. Right. And so if my number three priority, if we're running a marathon, number one and number two come in minutes apart in this marathon, number three will come in, like, 45 minutes later.

Wow.

So there's a very large chasm between my number two and number three priority in life. And I think that's really helped to guide my decisions.

Yeah, yeah.

On what do I want to do, who do I build value in this world, how to help my family, and at the end, you know, build value for others to show my family about, you know, the. The spirit of building and the spirit of creating and that we were put here on Earth to do something more than just clock in, clock out. But we're put here on Earth to make a difference. And I truly do believe that. And so I have that desire to show my kids to help do what I was put here on Earth to do. And so that mindset, I think, is. It's hard to break that down into a specific habit, but that's a mindset that I think is very important. And again, not saying that. That your. Your top two priorities need to be God and family, but just saying that having my Priorities straight and knowing what's most important to me. That's critical. Yeah, is. Is really critical. So that.

That.

That's a mindset. I think a practice that I do that is really important is journaling. I have journaled. I have journaled every single day for now. It's going on eight years. And prior to that, I journaled periodically since 2001, and I. And fairly regularly. It was like at least once a month I would journal. And now I journal, like I said, every single day. And it's so important to be able to have that moment to look back and reflect. And for those who are, like, struggling with journaling, here's what I do. I answer the same question every single day, which is, what are two ways that I saw the hand of God in my life today? And what that's enabled me to do is just fill my life with gratitude. Because at the end of every day, I'm like, wow. I just, like, there's been so many things that have happened good. And even the things that happened that weren't good let me try to see what was good that came out of that. And so those are things that, for me, I just feel really grateful to. And that, again, having that gratitude, I think the last thing I do at night is. Helps me to. Helps me to start the day well the next day, and it helps me to commit to do better. And it helps me to. They've actually done a lot of studies that have shown those who journal every day are more likely to be honest. Because I know that at the end of the day, I have to give an accounting to myself of myself. And if I'm dishonest with something during the day, then I'm like, oh, man. Like, I knew I should have done something better, you know, so anyway, so that's a mindset, and that's a. That's a practice that I feel like are. Is something that I've. I've attributed a lot of my focus to.

Yeah. I use an app that's called 5 Minute Journal, and I love it because it asks you the same questions every day. And again, once you say it gets you in a routine. And one of the questions like, what am I grateful for? Name three things I'm grateful for. One of the questions is like, you know, who needs me to be in my aim my A game today? Those are like, questions like, you know, can make. Just remember, I'm sure I'm like you. I'm serving other people. I'm not just, you know, I'm not existing Just for me. I'm existing because I want to help restaurants. My goal is like you. I have a very big, ambitious goal. I want to help a million independent restaurants around the world break free from their restaurant, running their life, you know, have everything they want. But yeah, it's. It's huge. I mean, journaling. I think it changed my life too, in the sense that it makes me again, it holds me more accountable to my.

Yes.

Which is huge.

Yep.

I noticed behind you, you have a poster on your wall with some core values.

Oh, you betcha. Yeah, we.

I'm huge about core values.

Oh, we focus on core. I. I feel like core values are just so critical and so often it's easy to just, you know, forget about them. You know, I think that as I look at our core values, one of the things that we do. So first of all, let me just read off our core values. Yeah. Be a partner, build value, celebrate, default to how and keep focus. And one of the ways that we celebrate every single month is everyone at Ovation has a bonus, and it's a monthly bonus that they have to give to someone else. O. And so what they do is every month we send out a survey and it says, who deserves your Ovation this month? And so they, they give a name of who deserves it, they give what values they exhibited, and they tell specifically what happened when they exhibited those values. And so that's something that we do to make sure that. To instill in everyone that they're always thinking about these values, because we truly do. I mean, those five values, that's. That's how we do business at Ovation.

Yeah.

That's how we hire. And. And that's what we really care about.

Yeah. It's not one for debate. It's not for negotiations. So what it's. I say my core values are non negotiable.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

I'm going for interpretation. It's not open for, you know, and.

And some of them are a little bit controversial to, like, our investors. Right. Keep focus. For example, and with keep focus, what that means is family beliefs, health, job, get it done in order. That's what, that's the, that's the whole premise of the Keep focus. So, for example, how. How does that actually play out? Well, in the evenings or on weekends, we slack. We schedule our slack messages in our emails to go out later, like the next day or to go out on the Monday. So we don't. We don't, you know, email over the weekends because I want people to keep focus on their Family, we sell, you know, we celebrate. When people like going to the gym, hitting their health goals. These are things where you can't, you can't do them simultaneously. Like this concept of balance I don't believe in. What I believe in is everyone has a cup for their priorities in life and each cup is a different size and you need to allocate enough to each cup to make sure that it's filled. And for me, for example, I don't have like a huge workout cup, right? Like, I don't, I don't need to go work out two hours a day. There are some people who, they have to, or they get all antsy, right? But for me, like, I need to spend time with my family every day, right? Other people don't need to. And so it's just a matter of what, what do you, what are your cups? What are your priorities? And how do you keep focus so that you can do them sequentially, not simultaneously. When you're at dinner with your family, put your phone down, be at dinner with your family, because guess what, you're annoying them by looking at your messages and you're not thinking clearly about your messages when you're responding to those. So you're doing both crappily. So just, just keep focus. So that, that's one of the ones that sometimes people, we forget some of.

Those times though, you know, just like it's so easy to get disconnected. It's so easy to miss those magic moments, you know, they won't get back.

Yeah, exactly. Because at the end of the day, you know Gary, Gary Vee, you know him?

Oh, yeah.

So he is a, he is just so much content he puts out there, but he's got some really good stuff. And one of the things that he talked about, I saw him speak live and one of the things he talked about is the five year plan. He goes, you know what? Everyone talks about the five year plan and they always talk about the next five years and what they want to do. And he's like, that's the wrong way to do a five year plan. And I was like, what? And he goes, to do a five year plan. Don't look at your next five years, look at your last five years.

Ooh.

Who do you want to have become? What do you want to have accomplished? Who do you want around you? What do you want your life to look like? And are you living today to fulfill your last 5 year goal as opposed to your next 5 year goal? Anyway, and I think that to me, part of that is keeping Focus and on what you want to do. And again, all of this stuff, it's. You know, you and I. You and I are in a similar boat here. And I know we've talked about this before, but, like, one of the things that's challenging about coaching and about teaching.

Yeah.

And about doing some of these, like, you know, seminars or, like, when I go to church and I do a sermon in church, it's like, you know, it seems it's challenging because no one's perfect at it. At any of it. Right. So if I go and do a talk on, like, hey, here's how to live a fulfilling life, it's like, also a reminder for me of. All right, Zach, what. What aren't you doing? Right. When I go do a sermon in church around charity, it's like, okay, well, when are you not being charitable?

Right?

When. When I talk about, you know, how to. The perfect way to engage with your guests, it's like, okay, well, are you engaging with every single restaurant that way At Ovation? And there's always room for improvement in this. So the challenging thing about being a coach is, like, you're never perfect at everything, but there's perfect principles that we can all strive to live by, and it's about learning what those principles are, striving to achieve them, and about being okay with being imperfect and making every day to be a little bit better at that thing. Right. And I think that those. Those are some things, like when I look at our Ovation values. Yes. Nobody is perfect at all of those things, but we're all trying to. That's in the front of everyone's mind. I think that that's what's really key, is that continuous improvement.

That's it. I'm a huge believer in that, you know, that philosophy of kaizen.

Amen. Toyota 5Y.

Tell you it is. So, you know, and the reason I brought up your core values, you know, because my new book just came out. Your Restaurant Culture sucks.

Great book.

It's. Excuse me.

I said a great book. I have it.

You have it already?

Yes. Wait. Yeah. Didn't you give me a copy in. In California?

I thought I gave you a copy.

Yeah, yeah. I have a. I have it right here in my office.

The blue one.

Yes.

Yeah. Every cover has a different color, so I just called the blue one. The blue one. It's the blue one. I got an orange one. I got a black one. Now I got a blue one. I'm done with the Suck series, by the way. That's it. I'm Moving on to a different topic. I just. I have three books now with the word sucks in it, so I got to move on to something else. The reason I asked is that, you know, this is all about culture, and I saw your core values. If you had to describe the culture at ovation, what would you say is the culture at ovation?

I think that's a great question. I think that we are a very open culture.

You know, why? It's hard to answer why. And I talk about this with my clients a lot. Culture is hard to answer because culture is not logical. Culture's a feeling. Culture's emotion. Yeah.

Yes.

So a lot of times when I ask people tell me about your culture, they give me the deer and headlights look like, and then they look for the right thing to say. I think we're more like this. I said, okay, you know, but here's what. Here's the best definition I have of culture. Everyone says branding culture, branding culture. It's the same thing, right? No, not necessarily. Brand, to me, is what your. Your customers, your guests say about you online to their friends, to their family. Culture is what your team says about you to their friends, to their family. You know?

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's a feeling. That's why it's hard to define it.

Right. Because as you said, what's your culture? It's like words pop into my head.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like, open, like, care about. Like, you know, I feel valued. Like my opinion matters. Like, I'm excited. So those are things that. Those are, like, the feelings that we get. And when people come here, I think they're surprised that one of our. One of our values is to default to how. And that's something that most places they either don't have or don't live by. And default to how is something that. That we came up with. And it's basically when someone shares an idea, our first reaction is, okay, how do we implement that idea? We want to default to how. Not default to. No, not default to. That's hard. Not default to. It doesn't work. But default to how? And when you dig to the root reason of why of someone's idea, even if they're a brand new intern or they are the original founder of the company, the idea might be a harebrained, terrible idea, but. But. But if you dig to the root reason, there's usually a logic behind that where given when you overlay a context that they might not have, there's a different solution to solve that core problem. So. But you got to dig to the root problem in order to come up with a solution that makes sense. The other part is, even if it's a bad idea, even if there's already ways that you're solving that problem, how does that person feel when you poo poo on their idea? They feel like my ideas don't matter. So guess what happens? The next idea they have. That's brilliant, Donald.

I don't say anything, they don't say it right. I don't want to get shot down. I don't want to get like, you know, I got squished last time. I'm not going to say anything this time.

And that's something that's so important to me personally is like we default to how here, baby, we. I want to hear ideas from every single person and, and let's talk about them. And I don't want people to be afraid of sharing ideas. I want, I want everyone to be able to, to openly share their ideas. And, and, and that's one of the things that they, helps them feel valued because we look at everyone here at Ovation as a partner.

Very cool. Very cool. So the upcoming summit you're going to be doing a couple sessions. Give people, don't drop all the gold nuggets, but give people a little teaser about what you're going to be talking about.

You know, if you want to figure out how do you measure your guest satisfaction? If you want to figure out how do I get more five star reviews and learn why that's important. If you want the playbook to responding to online reviews and private feedback. If you want to understand how do I not just fix problems with one person, but fix the root cause. And if you want to figure out what are some secrets to text marketing, to bring people back in the door and to drive revenue, man, that's what we're going to be talking about.

Awesome. That's perfect. That's gonna be perfect. Hey, so let me ask you a really kind of off the wall question. If you were a, you, you, you just bought a restaurant, right?

Yes.

Your first restaurant, what would be like your go to marketing plan? What would you start with? What would you, would you start with tech right away? What would you implement? How would you get this thing? You know, I mean, we got to get people in the door. What would you do if you were starting a brand new restaurant?

First of all, I go to the menu, right? And I know, and I know that like I'm starting a new restaurant, I look at the menu and I would probably have no more than five Main items. And I would do a few things, maybe some variations on those, but I would do a couple of things extremely well. And I would have a killer dessert, I'd have a killer main course, and, you know, like, and then one. And like, a killer side. And that would be, like, first of all, doing those things really, really well would be important. Then in terms of marketing, I would take a three pronged approach of mailers, boots on the ground, going to offices with samples for catering, and online, online ads to people in my local proximity to get them in the door. And then as soon as they came in, I would be relentless on asking what they think about it and asking in a digital way where I can collect their data and then set up drip campaigns to get them to come back and get them to feel special. So, but those would probably be my three. My three main marketing tactics to, to get people to get new revenue from.

From.

From $0 to $1.

How, how often do you think a restaurant should hit their email list?

At least weekly. I mean, with at least email.

Right?

With an email.

Email.

Then society has said that's okay. With texting, I would do. I would do texting every other week, and I would do emails every week.

Emails every week. Texting every other week.

Yep, that's what I do.

Awesome. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Very, very cool. What's new with Ovation? What do you got? Any kind of. Any secret projects you want to kind of, like, tell about? I guess it wouldn't be secret projects if you live in a secret project, if you, like, spill your guts on this thing.

Well, we've got. We just launched Insights, which is that platform, which is our technology that allows you to aggregate and analyze and break down into all those categories, all of your online reviews and Ovation feedback. So that one, that was a huge undertaking, really excited. That one finally launched. And there was a lot of work that went into that. Coming up, we're doing a complete revamp of our Ovation app to communicate with guests, making it even easier to do that, giving more context. And then we. We've got some cool things coming up with more ways to communicate with guests. So there's lots of channels that a guest can interact with a restaurant. And what we're doing is we're going channel by channel and saying, how do we improve this communication? How do we improve this engagement? And so there's some other channels that we've been working on that that I'm really excited about, and they should be coming out, you know, this quarter. But don't don't hold my feet to the fire on that one because my head of product would kill me. And then a lot of it is around integrations, right. We're building some really cool integrations with some really well known companies that, that's just going to make it super easy to connect in and just start getting better feedback from your guests, start getting more reviews, start driving more revenue. And so that's, that's something that, that I'm excited about as well is our, our partners that we're working with now.

I, now just so everyone knows too I mentioned like pizza places, burger places do a lot of delivery but Ovation works with any kind of restaurant. I mean you can set up right the model with any kind of restaurant, full service doesn't matter.

Totally. I mean with fine dining we have, I'll put it this way, we have a unique implementation for every, every type of restaurant and every delivery method. So if you're fine dining we have QR codes in the check presenters. Right. If you're a fast casual we have stickers that we put on the table. If you're full service we have table toppers that get put in there. Your quick service we have drive thru ability to collect feedback from customers doing drive thru as well as stickers in store. And then with everyone we have integrations with companies like toast square, OpenTable where and over 50 companies where we can integrate with them. So that way the data you're collecting from these other companies can feed into Ovation and then all of that feedback gets drawn into one place, you know and we have even different QR codes that you put for dine in orders versus third party orders. And you have, we have automatic conversions where you can get customers who ordered third party to order directly from you the next time and that's really powerful. Save yourself that 20, 30% margin, bring them back in order, help them order natively and that's one of the things that we, that we facilitate for our customers.

Yeah, you're huge about that. That's one of the things you, you have kind of a mission to help people get off that third party and be more native app, you know.

Yeah, I, I, I refer to it as getting unstuck. And one of the, one of the first things that I want people to do is to take the, I still see it sometimes, Donald. It drives me nuts when I see this. And if you're listening please like please, please, please take the third party stickers down.

Oh my God, I hate. Yeah. And it's like a wave of Stickers on the front door.

Oh, my gosh. Are you kidding me? Like, you are asking your customers to not give to like, hey, you know, order from someone else. Where I don't control the delivery, where they're taking 20% of the margin. Yeah, no, take those stickers down.

Take those stickers down, baby. Take those stickers down.

Get unstuck. Free yourself from those.

You gotta be free.

And honestly, third party, phenomenal marketing tool. It's a marketing tool.

That's what it is.

Use it as a marketing tool.

That's what it is. Exactly.

And then get that customer data and turn them into your customer, not a door dash customer that they're sharing with you temporarily.

Right? Yeah. That's the number one thing. Yeah. We're going to be talking a lot at the restaurant success summit October 25th, 26th here in Scottsdale. You can grab your ticket over at the restaurantsuccess summit.com Restaurant Success Summit.com. you can grab a few seats left. If you ever want to hit up Zach, you can always go find him@ovation up one word, ovationup.com and of course, it's going to be a great event. I got one final question for you, Zach. Sir, this is an off the wall one. If you could personalize your car license play, what would it say? Oh.

I would say that's. That's a really good one. I maybe Oatmeal, just because.

Oatmeal, for those who don't know that one.

Yeah. My last name is Oats.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so, you know, I feel like.

Innovation, kind of like it works with food. That could be a meal. Yeah.

Right. I kind of feel like oatmeal could be a good one. Yeah. Or. Or death to long surveys. But that's a little bit long. So I don't know.

Yeah. Oatmeal. Where do you live? You live in Utah?

Live in Utah. Yeah.

Yeah. So if I come up to Utah and I see a car driving around with oatmeal, I know it's you.

You know it's me, baby.

I know it's you now, man. See, now I know it too. It's like if you guys. Are you guys ever in Utah and you see a car with Utah license plates, it says oatmeal.

That's gonna be me.

That's Zach. That is Zach. That is awesome, man. Zach, I appreciate you being here. Always great talking to you, my friend. Always, always with me.

Always looking forward to the summit and to anyone that's gonna join us there. Looking forward to Meeting you.

Yeah, it's gonna be great. Again. Restaurant success summit. October 24th. 25th. 26th here in Scottsdale, Arizona. Intimate event. Tickets are. I'm almost sold out. Just so you know. Not saying that. Just to say that. I'm actually almost sold out. So it's gonna be. We only have 50. We only allow 50 people. And this year. I don't know, Zach. Did you see. This year? I'm holding it at a house. I got a mansion.

I'm excited for that.

It's gonna be pretty cool. I expect you to be doing some cannonballs.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Monday night we're doing. We're doing a pizza pool party Monday night at the mansion. And then Tuesday night we're doing tacos and tequila. Okay.

I love. I love me some tacos. Why not? Let's do it.

I love me tacos. Pork belly tacos, baby. What's your favorite taco?

Buffalo chicken.

Oh, that would be good too. Yeah, maybe we'll get those too.

Buffalo chicken with some. With some pickled onions and a flour tortilla.

I like corn tortillas. I'm a corn tortilla guy, but I'm older. I gotta watch my carbs. Doc says I gotta watch my carbs. That's what it is. All right, thanks so much again. If you need to hit it, get a hold of Zach. Just head over to ovationup.com. they got a demo on the website. They'll be more than happy to talk to you about whatever your needs are. And again, whatever your restaurant is, Zach has a team in place that can help you implement. Capturing data is. I'm telling you, data is the new frontier. If you're not capturing data of everybody walks in your restaurant, you are losing out on a huge, huge opportunity to market directly to these people.

Yep.

There's only four ways. Only four ways to drive sales. Only four ways to drive sales. I don't care who you are. There's only four ways you can either get new guests to come to your place. That's marketing. Number two, you can get guests that come to your place to come back more often. That's what Zach does. Okay. You can get guests to spend more money that come to your place. That's also what Zach does. And then four, you could raise prices, which I always say, raising prices, the last kind of resort. I really don't. Because it's not sustainable. Because you don't. You're eventually plat. You know, you plateau out. You can't really keep raising prices every time you need to raise sales. But those first three are gold. And Zach's company can help you with two of those for sure. And even number one, because they help get new place, new people to your place.

Yeah, yeah. The more. The more. The better your reviews, the more people find you.

That's it exactly. So no reason not to go. Check out Ovation up. We will see you at the summit, Zach. I'll see you here in Scottsdale, October 24th, my friend.

Looking forward to it, Donald.

It'd be great. Have a fantastic day. Thanks for jumping on the call today.

I really appreciate you.