Ashish Tulsian:

Hi, welcome to Restrocast. Today, my guest is Eric Slaymaker. He’s the CEO and managing partner at Winger Bros, Winger Restaurant and Alehouse. Eric packs almost four decades of journey from being in advertising for restaurants to running franchisees of other brands to building his own brand and being a franchisor. The story that Eric carries is one of grit and perseverance and also the one where you don’t run away from the bad times but sail through them with head held high. At the same time, keep your ambition to grow alive forever. This was a great conversation and great learning from somebody who has been on both sides of the table as a franchisee and the franchisor. Do watch. So, Eric, welcome to Restoracast. 

Eric Slaymaker:

Well, thank you. 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

30 years Wingers. Did that sound right? Because your LinkedIn says that.FP

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah, that pause was, I was thinking that wasn’t a question. You were just going to leave it there at 30 years. But yeah, you’re right. Actually, 30 years this month, I opened, I can still remember, it was November 22nd, 1993. I opened the first Wingers location just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Oh, wow. November 22nd.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

November 22nd.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Wow

 

Eric Slaymaker: 

And so, yeah.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

30 years.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

So, 30 years in a couple of weeks.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

But before we dive into that, there was an advertising piece before this that was…

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah, well, my family and particularly my father was in the restaurant business also. He was a franchisee of a couple of different brands, particularly going back, he originally was a franchisee based out of Salt Lake City, but somehow he went down to Los Angeles in the late 70s and he convinced Sizzler Restaurants at the time, which was a pretty hot brand at the time. You’ve probably never heard of it, has she?

 

Ashish Tulsian:

I’ve heard of it. I don’t know the brand fully, but…

 

Eric Slaymaker:

They were pretty hot. They had a great run in the 80s and he convinced them to sell them the franchise rights to Alaska. And so, my father, still based out of Salt Lake City, developed, I think it was five Sizzler Restaurants through Alaska and then into Wyoming also at the time. And he also became one of the first TGI Friday’s franchisees in the late 80s, brought TGI Friday’s brand as a franchisee to Salt Lake City. And yeah, so I had just gotten out of college and I went to University of San Francisco, but I did come back to Salt Lake City and I actually started heading up all the marketing for them at that point. That was kind of through the late 80s and when I was just a young green pup and had no idea what I was doing. And then just…

 

Ashish Tulsian:

So you called it Eric Slaymaker Advertising?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

I did. And then I started my own small agency and actually had a couple of other clients at the time. But the entrepreneur bug kept gnawing at me and in the early 90s, I knew that I had to go out and develop my own restaurant brand. I just knew I had to. And so that’s really what… Quick story, but that’s what ended up leading to opening up my first, when I went and opened Winger.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

But how was your growing up when your father was doing these restaurants in Alaska or even TGIF in Salt Lake? What is your experience? What were you experiencing?

How were you experiencing his life as a restauranteur?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Oh, well, I actually… It did come in. I did not get into restaurants through operations like a lot.

I was actually… I came in through marketing. And so I think I had a different mentality where a lot of the operators were there seeing day-to-day operations. I was actually seeing the branding and the operations… Or excuse me, the branding and how to market it to the public and how… And positioning of a brand and imaging of a brand. And that’s really the direction that I came in. It just happened to be restaurants. I guess it could have been a number of industries, which is the same, but certainly I had… The best way I like to call it, I have an old chef who used to work for us. Once you’re in the restaurant industry, it’s kind of a sickness a little bit because it’s just hard to get out of. The restaurant business is a tough, tough business. And not everybody can make it in the restaurant business. And it’s hard work, and sometimes it can beat you up. But once you have it in your blood, it’s hard to get it out of your blood. And at the same time, I love it.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

What was fascinating for you? So just to be clear, your dad was running… These were his restaurants or was he developing for…

 

Eric Slaymaker:

No, they were his restaurants.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

And you were not participating in the operations or any part of the restaurant?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

I was heading up the marketing. I was doing marketing for him.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

But then when he was taking franchisees from others, like from the established…

 

Eric Slaymaker:

When he was a franchisee, yeah.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

So as a franchisee, you did not have a say in marketing or positioning anyway, right? I mean…

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Oh no, not like a franchisor. No, of course not. Now we would… Primarily what we would be able to do is we could still create promotions. We would do a lot of media buying. I actually was… One of the primary things I was doing a lot of media buying in the team, whether that’s TV, radio. This was long before there was anything as digital marketing. And so the old traditional media buys, that was how I got involved in that.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

So why your own restaurant?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Because I saw at the time when Winger’s first opened, it was a small… The restaurant that I opened was a small 2,800 square foot diner. Now I jump… If I look at 1993 and the restaurant that I opened and I jump to today, the restaurant that we’re developing and franchising as a food are original sauces, but the restaurant experience is… And the facility is completely different. But the one thing that… And this is still true today, is that particularly having seen a huge flagship operation at the time in the 80s, like a TGI Fridays, I really felt that I saw the need to do something that would capture that same fun dining experience and to be able to put it in a smaller box, if you will. TGI Fridays back in those days was…

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Much larger format.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah, 6,500 square feet, 7,000 square feet. I did a 2,800, 3,000 square foot restaurant in a small suburban, which still to this day, even though today we’re really Winger’s Alehouse, which the bar and beer part of the business is a huge part of our business compared to when it first started. So the evolution has been pretty dramatic. However, our bread and butter at Winger’s is still smaller towns. And we have restaurants, Alehouses in places that you’ve never heard of, Elko, Nevada, Winnemucca, Nevada, Mountain Home, Idaho, Richfield, Utah. And you… I know, you just smile and laugh. I never heard of these places.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Yeah. I wanted to say in my head, I was like, try me. And then i was like.. Ohh shit. 

 

Eric Slaymaker:

And then I It’s still a bread and butter. We have locations certainly in metropolitan areas, but it is a unique marketing position and strategic position that we have that we can be successful in markets that a lot of our national competitors can’t. And… Why is that? Like what’s…

 

Ashish Tulsian:

How do you look at your own… How do you articulate your own positioning?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah, we, you know, specifically we have a average unit volumes that we like to be able to… We have some stores that are doing three million plus, but we like to be able to be profitable in that two million to two and a half million range. And even below there, maybe one eight, so that we can go into some markets that say like a Texas Roadhouse or an Olive Garden, where if they…

If they’re looking at a new location, they’re only going to look at locations that are going to be able to do four, five million dollars annually in sales. So we can actually target a lot of markets that a lot of our competitors like that are not going to be able to make sense of. And we’ve…

You know, we work on that every day as we work on being able to, you know, have that prototype that’s a little smaller. Our typical prototype’s about 4,400 square feet now. So we’re still… A lot of our competitors, whether it be like a Buffalo Wild Wings or, you know, some other restaurants like that, are going to be closer to five, six thousand square feet. So we’re still looking to be a little bit smaller on our footprint and where we can still identify markets and locations and be successful where some of our competitors can’t.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Interesting. Like, you know, I want to dig deeper into the model and, you know, how the evolution for the last 30 years have been. But before that, you know, continuing.

So you started your own. You started on your own post, you know, your marketing agency. Then you started Wingers 30 years back. And then what?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

So we did. We grew slowly. We were primarily just growing in and around Utah at the time.

And we were growing with what we would call our original footprint or our first generation store. And they were actually small little diner stores. And going back to that first location that we opened, it was in Bountiful Utah. That was a modular building that was constructed out in Florida. They shipped it in four pieces across the country, put it together on a foundation, and it was one of those old stainless steel diners. That was the original building. And we built more of those. It was successful right out of the chute.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

You still have that one?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Well, we closed that diner because when the 20-year lease came up, that original building, we were holding it together by duct tape. And it was literally almost falling apart. And it just needed to be. 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Ohh okay

 

Eric Slaymaker:

It needed to be to scrape. But we are up there. We’re about a block away in a new Wingers Ale house, 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

wow

 

Eric Slaymaker:

which is about 4,000 square foot. But it’s a little larger, full bar, much more. It’s our newest prototype now. But we are there. 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Got it. 

 

Eric Slaymaker:

So absolutely. But we were growing slowly. I also happened at the same time. I was also involved with another partner, that entrepreneurial spirit. I was partnering a couple of different radio stations at the time, too. And so I’ve had experience in the radio business. Also one down in Austin, Texas, and up in Salt Lake City, Utah.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Like the local radio stations?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah. These were both independent. They were actually adult alternative music stations back in the late 90s, that a partner and I did. We opened our first one in Austin in the early 90s. Kind of about the same, similar time that I developed the first Wingers. And then we bought another station and converted the format in Salt Lake City. It was still 1075 the end. And literally within the first six months, we were the number one station in the 18 to 34 demo in the market. And so we did pretty well with that, too, at the time. And then I was developing Wingers. One of the things that did happen is that in 1995, my father died and my brother was working for my father at the time. And so in 1995, what we did is, and he was still heavily involved in running the TGI Fridays and Tony Roma’s side of the business as franchisees. And so we decided at that time, we actually combined our companies. And my brother, Scott, and I have been a kind of equal partners since 1995. And that’s been a number of years now, too. So a couple more years and that’ll have been 30 years, too.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

That business, you still run some of the brands as franchisees?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

No, we are completely out of the, we are not a franchisee anymore. And you know, part of it we’ve had, we’ve really had, one of the interesting things we’ve had our ups and downs is our original diner stores did really well. Two things happened is our original Wingers diner stores did well, but they were, when we went outside of Utah, and this was in the late 90s, we were not getting the same sales that we were getting in our Utah stores. And in fact, our sales volumes were only about 75, 80% of what we were getting in our Utah stores. And we had some stores in Arizona at the time and up in Idaho. And part of that reason is we were in the full service business. And if Utah is, you’ve probably never been to Utah, Ashish? 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

No

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Utah’s, particularly in the 90s, it is quite a bit different now. But back then, a lot of our markets, we were doing really well in full service, but we did not have, we did not have a full bar. We did not have a full liquor menu at the time. We did offer beer, but as we went, one of the things that we learned and we do in focus groups is that as we went outside of the state of Utah, that if you’re in full service, one of the expectations is, is people want to go out to dinner and have a drink at the same time too. 

Ashish Tulsian:

Hmm

 

Eric Slaymaker:

And we weren’t offering that. And we didn’t really have the facility to, to, to, to do that. And the other thing is that, interestingly enough, is, is we were franchising and then we actually really ran into a problem in the early 2000s because we got caught up on our, on our, not on the winger’s side of our business, but on our franchise side of our business, because we were the largest Tony Roma’s franchising in the country back in the late 90s, early 2000s of Tony Roma’s, which is a brand that basically collapsed. And we were at the forefront of collapse and we were highly leveraged at that point. And so one of the things is when, when you learn, when you’ve been around and doing this as long as I have is, is one of the things that had really hurt our winger side of the business is in the early 2000s, my brother and I were essentially about $22 million in debt 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

wow

 

Eric Slaymaker:

when after the Tony Roma’s business really collapsed on us and we were too highly leveraged. So we had a couple of options in front of us at the time. And in fact, I still remember 2004, because those are the times you come in and you wonder how you’re going to make payroll when, when, when you have a whole, when you have a huge chunk of your business that goes away almost overnight. And we did, we could have gone chapter 11. We basically, we basically called up all of our, all of our creditors and all of our landlords and we did workouts. And so one of the interesting things is for the next 15 years, we slowly paid off all that and, and worked off all that debt.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Wow

 

Eric Slaymaker:

And so I, you know, I look back at it now and I mean, there’s a part of me that says, Oh damn, we should have, we would have gone chapter 11. We just should have, we just should have reorganized quickly. And yet I would also say from an integrity standpoint, I’m, I’m proud of what we did. And because for 15 years, our creditors and our workout arrangements with all of our creditors, in fact, I still remember GE Capital at the time, they would not allow us to open new stores or grow. And so essentially what we were doing is, so pretty much all of our profits were going back to, to, to pay off that debt.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

I mean, I’m just wondering, so, you know, like when a brand goes down and, and you guys were, you know, franchisees, so you still have the store. You still have a functioning store. There are customers who are still coming in, right? If the parent goes down, what does it mean for the franchisee?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Well, yeah, the downside, the interesting thing is it wasn’t, the parent didn’t necessarily go down. What, what happened with Tony Roma’s is that brand just started losing market share. So our stores at the same time too, just started, the, the sales just weren’t there.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Because of the news? Like what?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

You know, I, at that time, I would probably say that a couple of things were happening. Back when in Tony Roma’s heyday and Tony Roma’s was known for their, they really made baby back ribs popular. Before Chili’s ever started doing baby back ribs, it was Tony Roma’s in the day. And back then baby back ribs were an affordable item. Through the nineties, ribs as an overall product became more and more expensive. And I think they became more, they just became too expensive. They’ve actually priced, you know, to go get a rack of ribs like you used to in the eighties. And it just became too expensive.

Now, the other thing I think was happening back then is you were having steakhouse brands that were really coming into their heyday. Outback Steakhouse and, and even Texas Roadhouse and a lot of places like that. And they were eating market share up. And so it was making, it really made the economic model for Tony Roma’s at the time tough. And so we had stores that were highly profitable. Suddenly they were just losing market share in, in the late nineties, early two thousands.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Got it.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

And so we were kind of caught up in that. It’s just, and so the brand itself and, and so we eventually, we started, we had to sell off stores. We had to close stores. You know, we closed a number of stores and we, we basically, by 2004, we were, we were out of the brand. And, but a lot of those, we just literally had to close up, but, and we were, and we were left with, we were left with a ton of debt at the time. And so we had one saving grace.

We did have some TGI Friday stores and our winger stores were still doing very well. And so thank goodness those were doing well because, because of that, we use those stores to, to not collapse as an overall brand and, and we had to go pay off a bunch of debt. And that’s what we did. We paid off a bunch of debt. It literally took 15 years.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Wow. No, but that’s, that’s but Chapter 11 might, would have meant, you know, the, the company to also, you know, kind of shut down the rest of the stores as well.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah, I mean, it, yeah, it could have brought in some complications. We, we certainly could have, an option was to figure out a way to recapitalize, bring the, bring the company back out on the other side of a Chapter 11. So that could have, that was an option that we thought about for about five seconds or maybe 10 seconds and looked at it. But I think at the end of the day, we just said, you know what, we’re gonna, we’re just gonna gut this one out and we’re gonna pay this off. And, and it probably still took longer than we thought it would. And yet again, at the same time, it, and, and during this time, we decided we really were not able to invest a lot into our Winger’s brand because really all of our, you know, any profits that we had, you know, we had covenants that it was, it was being paid down.

It was just going to pay down debt. And so we stopped franchising for a number of years and until we could reemerge out of this. And so part of that, when you ask that question, what happened, we had a really, we had a solid start with Winger’s and then we stagnated for a lot of years. And I, and the company and the brand really got caught up in, in some problems that we had outside of, of the Winger’s brand. And so yeah, we had challenges. I’ve, I can tell you the ups and the downs of, of being in this business and I’ve, because I think I’ve seen it from all sides at this point.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

How many, how many stores like you have at Winger’s today?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

We have 22 stores. 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

And how many franchisees or?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

And we have eight of our stores are company stores. The rest are franchise stores. And we are, we’re primarily, we’re at this point, we are still, we’re still a small regional brand and we’re in four different states. We’re in, in Utah and Nevada and Idaho and Oregon. And we are moving, really focused on moving towards the Midwest U.S. right now. And it’s, again, it’s, it’s kind of our bread and butter as we’re looking. In fact, our first store in Oklahoma City opens in about a, just outside Oklahoma City in about a month.

And we’ve got a number of new franchisees in Texas. But we did have the, the one thing that was quite interesting that we had a real transformational shift with the brand. First happened in 2016 with one of our stores in Idaho. In fact, in Nampa, Idaho, it was a underperforming store that it did have a full bar, but weren’t happy with the, weren’t, were not happy with the sales. And so we actually did what we call our first Alehouse test, where we, we took that store and it had, I think, eight beers on tap at the time. And so we decided that we were going to reposition our store to Winger’s Restaurant and Alehouse. We remodeled the store. We, we added at the time, 28 new beer taps. So we took that to 40 beer taps and we, we re-imaged, I brought in at that point, a new chef who would, we, we updated the menu. And the day we reopened in that Nampa store, we were up 70% in sales. and

 

Ashish Tulsian:

wow

 

Eric Slaymaker:

in fact, and it’s only grown from, from there and continue to grow. So that’s where 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Alehouse, you know, came in?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah. So, and that’s, 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

The branding did not have the Alehouse before. 

 

Eric Slaymaker:

We did not. We did not. And, and so now as we jump forward to our, to what Winger’s Alehouse is today, we’re definitely a brand that in addition to what we say, great food and the experiences, but craft beer is a huge, of what we do and how we manage that. We want to be when Winger’s AleHouse opens up in your area, we want to be not just the great place to go for dinner, but we want to be the best place that you’re going to go have a pint to. And so we definitely have some sports bar elements, a part of it, but it was at this point that we slowly, over the next couple of years after 2016, then we started taking our funds and reinvesting into our existing stores and converting them into Winger’s AleHouse. And so, you know, right now we’ll open our typical Winger’s that we open, and we’ll have 40 beers on tap. We have some stores that have close to 55 beers on tap.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

ohh

 

Eric Slaymaker:

And you know, the other, It brings into a perfect example is I look at a yard house, 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Yeah.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

and we’re kind of that smaller version in a way. 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

I was actually thinking about a yard house, yeah. 

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Of a yard house, which, God forbid, I don’t know how they manage 115 or 120 taps. I can’t imagine how much beer they have to throw away all the time.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Huge.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

But that’s another example of just a huge location. They need big cells to be able to support that, so they go into markets and they go into locations that can support $7, $8, $9, $10 million in cells. And I feel like, and I think yard house is a fantastic brand and a fantastic concept, and yet I think the beauty of what we’re doing at Winger’s AleHouse is we’re able to bring a similar type of experience and great food and fun and great beers, but we can look at smaller markets than a yard house is going to be able to look at.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

That’s a very interesting positioning. But in this journey of 30 years of Winger’s, you’re at an interesting point where you said out of 22, how many locations, 20, right?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Mm-hmm.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Eight of them are company-owned. Yes. And the rest of them are franchisees, right? As a brand owner, how do you look at, do you look at franchisees as a necessary evil to grow the brand because each store is a, you know, investment is large investment, your stakes go higher. Given a choice, what would you take? All company-owned stores or all franchisees stores?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

I love being a franchisor. I love being a franchisor, and I can say that without a hesitation, and obviously coming from both sides. We’ve been on both ends, and we are absolutely committed to being the best franchisor in the industry. And now you’re right. Are there challenges that come with being a franchisor and you have franchisees? Absolutely there are challenges, and because every franchisee is their own business owner, and they certainly have their interests at heart, and we know it. I mean, one of the jokes is that every franchisee out there, whether it’s a Winger’s franchisee or any other franchisee, they have their five things that they want to do that are specific to their market or their location. And occasionally it makes sense to be able to allow them to do that. But I think one of the things that we pride ourselves in is, I think, I firmly believe that if you understand how to be a great franchisor, you also understand how to manage the franchisee relationship and the franchisee business so that it continues to grow and develop your brand in the right way and in a great way. Now, that’s, it’s not easy.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

I mean, I wonder at times that unless, for example, a brand that is growing to a thousand restaurant target, I understand that probably franchising is the only way.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah

 

Ashish Tulsian:

if you want to go like 10 to 1,000 in five years, let’s say. So then you’re on a different target. But for a brand that can grow, let’s say, a little slowly, and especially with your kind of mix, I wouldn’t have asked you this question if you were like a one company owner and 21 franchisees.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Sure

 

Ashish Tulsian:

But in your kind of mix, I look at that you have two options. One, you go raise capital outside, have company-owned stores, but, of course, your equity is going to be lower in the business because it’s going to be an investor. On the other side, you have these franchisees who, from a margin perspective, you still have a very thin margin. You’re only getting royalties. And then you have a full business owner as a partner to manage. So if you have like 50 stores, you have 50 business partners to manage who are equally, like each of them is an alpha in their own market. They have money. They succeeded somewhere to have that money. They’re not a bunch of kids who are just going to listen to you.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah. Absolutely pros and cons. And yet I will also say, and I’ve seen this time and time again, so often franchisees can operate stores in their markets better than franchisors or corporate stores can.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

But then that’s a problem, right? Because

 

Eric Slaymaker:

No, no, no. That’s a problem? That franchisees run better stores?

 

Ashish Tulsian:

I mean, if you allow them to do that, that hits your scalability, right? I mean, where do you draw that line?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

No, no, no. I didn’t say they run them the way they want to. I said they can operate and run better stores. That doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want. No, absolutely not. And I’ve been a franchisor for 20 years now. So you bring up something that I don’t disagree with. It’s been a learning curve because there’s been a number of franchisees that we’ve had to terminate because if they’re not going to follow the standards and they’re not going to follow all the policies, then they don’t deserve to play in our sandbox. And it’s no fun, but a lot of times you just have to make those calls. And you just can’t let somebody who’s not going to follow the system or is not going to operate their stores to the level that it needs to be operated at. You can’t let them continue in your system. And so they’re certainly, from our standpoint, there’s a learning curve to learn how to be a great franchisor. And I do feel like that we have that understanding now on how to do that, and we certainly have the years of knowing how to do that. And, yes, it’s always a challenge. And yet there are phenomenal, phenomenal companies that are completely built with franchising. McDonald’s, Subway, just a couple examples. And so certainly they have all those challenges too, but they’ve also learned how to make sure that the stores and their franchise stores operate at the right standard and they can keep that consistency among all of their stores. And you bring up your right, and certainly you’ve thought about this through my career a lot.

There’s pros and cons of that. Do you go the company store route where you’re always raising, where you need to raise a lot of money, or do you go the franchising route and certainly have had to cross that threshold? And I’m still, and I believe I always will be, I’m still a huge believer in franchising. It has to be a great control system. It has to be a great franchisor system. A franchisor who is not going to have good control and know how to bring in the right franchisees is not going to be successful. And I feel like we’ve been through all of those wars, good and bad. We’ve had great franchisees, we’ve had franchisees who don’t belong in the system. We’ve learned that, how to vet. And that doesn’t mean we won’t make mistakes in the future. I’m sure we will. And yet I still love the franchising model.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

What do you take care of in the business now?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Right now my main focus is on our development and growth as we are looking to continue to develop and grow with franchisees in the Midwest. And then working closely with our operations team and our support team and our support system, our president and COO who answer directly to me. And so just enough to keep me just barely busy. That’s primarily, yeah. I’m focused pretty diligently right now in continuing. I want to continue to… how we can… get better at franchise marketing, we can get better at exposure, we can get better at selling ourselves. And how we get better at franchisor support and all of our systems and all of our training are top notch. And we continue to make our system more successful and more profitable all the time for our franchisees.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

What has changed in you over the last, I mean you can, over the last 30, 20 and 10 years as a restauranteur, as a brand owner, do you see some change in your thinking, things you were used to obsess about and have those subjects changed? Have they remained the same?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Actually no, probably not a lot. Certainly I guess the main thing that’s changed is just experience. And ahhh.. As you come with, as you get experience and as I’ve gotten experience is, I think the biggest thing that’s changed for me is understanding where our brand belongs and as we grow how to position our brand in the right markets and the right places with the right people.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

What do you obsess about on a day to day? Like what makes you crazy? What makes you go mad?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Well, it is always, no matter how, when you have a multi-store operations, whether they’re company stores or franchise stores, is still getting consistency and training down to that last person in the restaurant. 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

How do you measure that?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

And we’re still working on ways that we can get better at disseminating our training all the way down. For instance, the best example is in September we just introduced a brand new menu with 10 new menu items. And we probably, what I felt, and a lot of our franchisees said, we put together, we worked on the new menu for a year and we worked on our new training and our rollout for a year. We had training videos that every one of our staff members had to go through and test off and we just felt it was great and then we would still go in our restaurant a week or two after the rollout and an item wasn’t made right. And you just still say, how is this happening? And so when you ask what we stress about, it’s those little things. Now obviously I’m stressing about something that any customer or guest that walks in and has it are not going to notice.

And yet myself and our Chief Operating Officer Patrick Deisner, it makes us pull our hair out that one certain item was put down first on top of the plate presentation before another. And so it is little items like that and these were in some of our company stores that I can’t even go and say, well the franchisee is not training all of their people. This was in our company store.

Nobody else would have known this. But it drives us. 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

But how do you keep a tab on that?

What’s your feedback system? 

 

Eric Slaymaker:

So again, we went back and we felt like we put together a great rollout. But when we do a postmortem, we still felt like, you know what, we didn’t do, we still need to do more pre-training and more sessions where our cooks for example will make the items more often.

Because at the end of the day, what in our business when it comes down to making food accurately, it really comes down to practice and repetition. And when a cook in our business gets good at something, it’s because they’ve got a lot of reps. And they just get to the point where they can do it over and over without really thinking.

And so what happens, and those things that are keeping me up at night, is for that first month with new menu items, they don’t have enough reps. And so they have to stop, and they’re thinking about everything. Or maybe they’re not going back and reading the build card, and so they do it slightly wrong. And we as a CEO or the executives just say, how do they get that wrong? Well, the truth is the only way you get good at something, you just have to do it over and over until you get enough repetition. And it just becomes, you don’t even think about it.

And so I mention this now. We’re two months into our menu rollout, or since we’ve rolled out the new menu. All of a sudden now, all of those little issues that we were having those first couple of weeks, we’re not seeing those now.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

So what’s your window? That’s what I’m trying to understand. What’s your window of that feedback? How do you know that they were not doing it right before, and how do you know that they’re doing it right now?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Well, a lot of it is through our QAs. We have a team that’s always out doing quality assurance analysis.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Like visits?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Inspections and visits. And so a lot of that came up through then, and certainly when we’re rolling out a new menu, we’re focused on new items. And so now we’re starting to see those mistakes go away. I guess the learning curve on that, though, is that as early as we thought we started, we need to probably even start earlier, and we need to have more training sessions than we did with our team members at the store so that they get reps in before we go live. And so you asked me the question, what keeps me up? Those were the things that silly things like that. Now the other thing that I was talking about food, I would say another thing that if I could wave a magic wand, I feel like in, and this is coming from somebody with 30-plus years of experience in the business, service training is getting harder, and that with our hires these days. If I could wave a magic wand, I would still want to be able to make our service even better, and we’re striving to figure out how to do that. And for whatever reason, it’s harder now than it was 20 years ago.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

What do you think?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

And I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out why it’s harder now than 20 years ago. It is because I think this generation, they’re great, they’re great people, they’re great kids, and yet I think there’s a lot of other things, whether they’re distractions in today’s life with all the technology that we have and that we’re dealing with or whether it’s just phones or apps, it actually makes service training more difficult than it has been in the past. So it is one of the interesting things that I’ve noticed, being able to go back 20, 30 years.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

So when you say serving staff, is it like full-time or do you have a lot of part-time staff?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

We have a lot of part-time. We have both. I would say it’s almost a combination, probably about half part-time and about half full-time. And so, But I still want our service to be better, and I still want our focus on guest experience to be even more fanatical. And I feel like we’re good. I feel like we do very good. I feel like we’re in the top half of the industry. I feel like maybe the top, and yet I would say that I still feel like we need to get better.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

How do you look at customer feedback? What’s your way of knowing which franchisee or even your own company, your own location, which one is doing better or not?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

One of the interesting things is that has changed because we used to do a lot of secret shoppers back in the day, and you’d have secret shopper companies.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Mystery shopping.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah, a lot of those companies you don’t see anymore. Because right now, with internet feedback, the way that you have it, your guests are constantly telling you, you name it, whether it’s Yelp or whether it’s Google reviews.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

But that really depends on how proactively you read those reviews or you process them. Do you do that?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Oh, yeah.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

How do you guys do that?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah, we have people in our company who specifically go through all the reviews. We try to identify, particularly if we have a review that wasn’t good, and we need to try to go in and contact them to find out. And a lot of times, the other thing too is that you really, when it comes to reviews, because, you know, and I’d mentioned before, we used to have secret shoppers, and you’d have a secret shopper company who would go in and do one or two secret shoppers on a store a month. Well, you know, now any particular store will get 100 reviews in a month on the internet, and they’re all public. But absolutely, yeah, we go through those and we look at them. And number one, we want to try to, if we can, reach out to those people if we feel like that it particularly needs to be done.

And then you also want to identify trends because sometimes, you know, when you get 100 reviews, you might have a one-off that this may have been an overly great experience or overly bad experience, but you also want to identify specific trends on when it comes to service if something happens. Particularly when you’re looking at stores individually, like this, maybe this particular location is having an issue with long ticket times. The food’s not coming out fast enough. Or there’s an unusual amount of reviews that the servers aren’t friendly enough. Or, you know, maybe the food’s not as good at one particular location. They’re just, you know, they’re sloppy with plate presentations. Those are the type of things that, you know, you’re really looking for and looking to identify. And then on top of that, we have, you know, we have a really consistent quality assurance program, you know, in our company. And I can tell you that when it happened, when our stores, when any store’s consistently scoring in the 90% range in our QA program, we know they’re building sales. And there’s really not a situation where that doesn’t happen when they’re really consistently performing in our QA program. So it’s, yeah, and again, you know, this is 20, 30 plus years of learning and doing things wrong and doing them right and learning both as a franchisor, learning as a franchisee, and really being able to hone down to those systems and those activities as a franchisor, which are really effective.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Yeah, you’ve been on both sides quite equally.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

With other brands as well as yours.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Absolutely.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

What’s keeping you excited personally? And rather before excited, what’s your challenge personally? Like, what are you trying to improve, you know, in yourself as a leader?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

I continually want to be a better communicator. And I always feel like I can get better. I like to, in my role, a lot of what I do is kind of a chief visionary too. And it’s one thing to be a visionary, which I think I’ve always had a lot of that. It’s another thing to be a visionary and be able to communicate that adequately. That is exciting and really motivates.

And so I think that’s one thing that I want to continue to get better at and to be able to really expand on that, both with our team and when people come in contact with whether it’s myself or our brand, that they still feel the passion and the excitement of what I would just say is it’s a passion for excellence. Our mission statement for our companies, Wingers USA, Inc., that our mission statement is creating amazing experiences. And it is, that is, it’s three words. It’s not be the most profitable. It’s not grow the fastest. It is to hit our mission as we want. Every time somebody walks in and they come in contact with our company and our brand, we want that experience to be amazing. Whether that’s a customer, whether that’s a guest, whether that’s a team member or employee, whether that’s a vendor of ours, we want them to leave that it was a great experience being able to work with the Wingers AleHouse brand.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

And when you see all these… heavily franchised brands, brands that are, you know, new as well as old, both, growing fast and, you know, with most of them or not, each of them has the founders, people who conceived the brand are at the, at the hem of things. They have hired a CEO from outside, they’ve hired a C-level team from outside, and they are, they have been able to, you know, grow the brand really fast. As an entrepreneur, what’s your, what’s your emotion about it? Do you feel that, do you think about having an outside CEO, you know, just take over the brand and take it, you know, faster, or do you, do you think, do you even think about it?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah, I, quite frankly, I still am interested in developing a brand where we have pretty controlled growth, but certainly growth. I am nervous about, I really, I can see us where we can get to a point where we’re opening 10 to 20 new stores a year.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

No, because, you know, just to, just to complete that question also, not that all the, you know, hired CEOs and, you know, C-level teams are, they’re also running, you know, a lot of good brands, you know, down into the ground. 

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah. 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

So, so, it’s not, it’s, I mean, speed is always not great, but my question is more about the, do you feel, do you think about letting go, do you think about losing control as a plan, or do you, do you feel that no, you know.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Oh, sure, sure. Absolutely. At some point, I’m not there yet, but at some point, I’m, I’m actually working, and I can, my brother is too, my brother Scott is that we see ourselves over the next, not going a year, over the next few years, not going away, but probably just being able to step back and, and, And because, quite frankly, I feel like we have such a good team right now that if I wasn’t there, they wouldn’t miss a beat. And so, I don’t like to underplay because I feel like my role is still important. But at the same time, it’s, you know, part of, it’s the same thing we tell our general managers. A great general manager of a restaurant is only good if they make themselves, they train their team so well that they become irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether they are there or not.

Because they know that that business or that restaurant is going to run just as well whether they’re there that night or whether they’re not there. And that, and that’s part of my aspiration too, is that developing a company and a team that whether I’m there, it, I mean, good lord, it’s probably better without me there. And so, and I can probably say that with ease because of the people that we’ve had and we’ve developed. And so, I, so yeah, I can slowly become less and less relevant all the time. To the, to the company. And then on the other piece is that you’re right, is a lot of, I am a little nervous about a lot of companies where they try to grow too fast and open too many stores. And so, certainly we want to grow, but I think we want to have some level of controlled growth where it just isn’t, you know, because I have, I’ve been around long enough, I’ve seen so many brands where they just try to put as many stores out there as they can, as quickly as they can to, you know, really multiply that, that growth factor and.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

That became the doom, doom for them.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Yeah, yeah. So I, you know, that doesn’t interest me either. I think we want to have, we want to be able to have growth where we feel like we have good control and, and we’re doing it right.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Eric, what’s the, you know, story behind Slaymaker? How do you, how do you get such a cool name?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

So the, so here’s the, when I was in high school and college. You know, the term, like everybody nowadays is the term, you know, slaying this and slaying that. I go around, I’ve got, you know, my wife went and bought some dishes that say slay on them because that word has become so cool. But when I was in high school, my name wasn’t nearly as cool as it is now. So it is, I found it kind of funny that particularly in the last ten years, everywhere I go, whenever I write, that’s, everybody says, whoa, that’s the coolest name, where did you get that?

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Yeah, I mean, honestly, like, if people start, I mean, if I need to get a Slaymaker, it’s all, I need to be knighted, like it’s like a title. It’s not a surname. Somebody has to give it to me.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

It is. I have to admit, it’s, the name just gets cooler every year. Not because of me, but the name does tend to get cooler, and, which is the funny thing, way back story is that when I actually looked up what the name Slaymaker meant, and it came from England, it is really boring. It’s not nearly as cool.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Really?

 

Eric Slaymaker:

It is a little, a slay is a little tiny metal hook that they used in a weaving kit. 

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Ohh

 

Eric Slaymaker:

And so it was one of their trade names that the English used to have.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

I know, we’ll stick to the Gen Z.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

I know, it’s way cooler, I know, it’s way cooler if I’m out, yeah, I’m slaying stuff.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Eric, it was pleasure chatting. All the best for all the plans that you have for Winger’s restaurant and Alehouse in the future.

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Well, great, it was a pleasure. Great talking to you, Ashish.

 

Ashish Tulsian:

Thank you 

 

Eric Slaymaker:

Thank you