Ashish Tulsian:

Hi, welcome to Restrocast. Today, my guest is Jim Bitticks. He’s the COO of Dave’s Hot Chicken, one of the fastest growing fast casual concepts in the US today. Jim was an intriguing conversation because his journey from working in, you know, Jack in the Box as a 16 year old to spending first 20 years of his life in CKE, rising up to, you know, top position in operations, building Blaze Pizza for next seven years. And now on to Dave’s. One thing that remains constant is Jim is a chaser. Chaser of scale, chaser of good things while keeping the empathy for people extremely high. Somebody who was pulled ahead in life by people he worked with, but also somebody who was pulling people with him as he’s growing. I found Jim to be hungry, to learn, to just to be self-aware, to to go deeper in things. He is somebody who I found was has a take on operations, which is extremely people oriented, human oriented. He is somebody who, you know, I think I’ve had the deepest chat on how to gamify something as boring as trainings in in QSR operations. I loved this chat. I’m sure you’re going to feel enriched by watching this. Welcome to Restrocast. Jim, welcome to Restrocast.

Jim Bitticks:

Thank you.

Ashish Tulsian:

A lot of good stuff that is happening at Dave’s Hot Chicken. I you know, I actually want to dig in to that part of the conversation later. But in all your career, I see, you know, three large pieces, you know, three, three stints. The third one, you know, going on. My belief is and I say this a lot, I say this all the time, that people don’t really plan to get into the restaurant space. How crazy this industry is and how crazy, you know, it can be. People generally, in my opinion, fall into it. They just slide in, you know, without knowing or fall into the ditch. I that happened to me long back. So what’s your story? How did it all start? What were the early years?

Jim Bitticks:

Definitely the same way. I started when I was in high school. The restaurant industry, I started working for a Jack in the Box franchisee in Tempe, Arizona, where I grew up. When I was 15 years old, I thought I would try to get a job, even though you’re supposed to be 16. And I think I actually lied on my application. I made the year a different year, so it looked like I was 16. I got the job and sort of fell in love with the with the fact that I had my own money, you know, two weeks later. I grew up fairly poor. My mom was a student. And so we you know, I mean, we had food and a place to live, but like, not new shoes or I think Nintendo was new that year. Nintendo or Super Nintendo, I can’t remember. But that was one of the things that I wanted to buy. The thing about my very first paycheck was a bike. I got $181 on that check, so I bought a bike so I could get to work more. And then the next paycheck I bought a Nintendo. And then, you know, it was about things and stuff for me. And, you know, I ended up working there for about a year before we moved away and then I got another job. And so, you know, the restaurant industry just was easy to get a job in. It was on the way home was on the way to school, that type of thing.

Ashish Tulsian:

But then how did it become a career? I mean, most of the 16 year olds would say that they joined the restaurant industry for pocket money. But then. Then what happened?

Jim Bitticks:

When I was 18, I was ready to move out. And so I sort of made the calculation that I could make more money if I took the next promotion that was offered to me. And so I sort of live that life.

Ashish Tulsian:

You were still working at Jack in the Box?

Jim Bitticks:

Actually. So I we moved away for two years. My mom finished school. She she graduated with her doctorate, and we moved away so that she could find a job in her in her field. And then two years later, we came back. And when I came back, I started working with Jack in the Box again and took a promotion to an hourly shift lead position for, like, I want to say, $5.35 an hour or something like that. And, you know, I just sort of always reason that I should take the next promotion that’s offered to me, you know, more money. Like I might as well do that. And so it sort of just fell into it. Yeah.

Ashish Tulsian:

And what, what after that?

Jim Bitticks:

Oh, fast forward. Let’s think about that for just a second. Fast forward a few years and I had the opportunity to work for a company called Rally’s Hamburgers. I worked there for three years before it was acquired. It’s like this weird deal, CKE restaurants, which is Carl’s Jr and Hardee’s picked up Rally’s as as a franchise, everything on the western side of the country. They picked up and they ran it for Rally’s. Rally’s was struggling. And I ended up working for CKE restaurants ultimately.

Ashish Tulsian:

As a part of the acquisition?

Jim Bitticks:

Yes. Yeah. So they they managed them for five years. And at the end of the five year period of time, they offered me a job to move to California. And so I moved to California to be a district manager. By that point, I’d worked my way through the other layers and so I moved to California and had the opportunity to move into like a regional director position, ultimately a regional vice president, vice president operations. So I did that. That was my flow or that was my, my path, if you will. After Carl’s where I worked for, I moved to Texas for two years. They expanded to Texas and they were struggling about a year into the expansion and they basically made me an offer I couldn’t refuse to move there. I had moved a couple of times already with within that timeframe, and so we moved. My wife, myself and our three little kids moved to Austin, Texas.

Jim Bitticks:

They hated the whole idea of it. They’re like so mad at me that we were moving. But it was a good opportunity and two years later they had switched out some leaders and I had the opportunity to go to Blaze Pizza through a lady I used to work for who had landed there and their franchise sales department. She said We need you for ops and when we moved away from Austin, my kids were angrier that we were moving away from Austin. It’d been a great it was a great experience for them. Austin was really cool, so moved back to Southern California at that point and joined Blaze Pizza when there were two locations open as the Vice president of operations and training, sort of on a on a hope and a prayer that they were really going to do what they said they were going to do. They were an all franchise organization. They were going to sell franchises. And, you know, we’re going to have you say we’re going to 1000 restaurants in ten years. Never quite hit that goal. But when I left, let’s see, in 2020 and I started a blaze in 2013, when I left in 2020, we were up to about 372 locations. So from 2 to 372.

Ashish Tulsian:

In seven years.

Jim Bitticks:

Seven years. And we only had four company locations, five company locations at that point. The rest were all franchised. So it was sort of a whole whirlwind of activity and something totally different than what I’d done before. I’d been on the like the company ops side of things my whole career prior to that. When we switched to the franchise side now you’re building all the systems rather than executing all the systems. And so that was really, really fulfilling. I think, you know, it’s sort of like, okay, like that didn’t work over there. We’re going to do it this way here.

Ashish Tulsian:

But that’s a that’s an interesting job, right? So how long were you in CKE in total?

Jim Bitticks:

Total of 17 years.

Ashish Tulsian:

17 years, Yes. And like, why do you leave CKE  to work for a pizza company with two locations.

Jim Bitticks:

So what happened at CKE is they did a private equity deal, which was great for me at the time. My biggest check I ever got, you know, did all the stock options I had earned over the years. But what happens with private equity is, you know, everything changes and the focus of the organization changes. And, you know, there were lots of different adjustments that had to be made. One of them was that my my direct supervisor retired literally two weeks after I moved to Texas. And and, you know, with that leadership change, the the entire organization just sort of morphed. And so by the time Blaze came knocking, it was actually a great opportunity to make a change. I, the new the new leader who came in was a really smart guy really understood operations. He was he was somebody who I learned a lot from. And I don’t know that he was intending to teach it, but his level of awareness and operations and his understanding of how things flow was something that I probably wouldn’t have been able to articulate verbally. I could think it. I understood it like I understood like where you move when you do this or that type of thing. But one time at any restaurant opening, you know, it was very high pressure. You know, he was trying to make a point. And I really there was a lot of this during that period of time. But I’ll tell you that I that I feel like I learned a lot from him. And I got a lot of I advanced a lot in my understanding of how restaurants run, the operational flow that I that credit to him.

Ashish Tulsian:

This was your hindsight wisdom?

Jim Bitticks:

Yes, my hindsight wisdom. And actually, I don’t even know if it was completely hindsight in the moment. I thought I really learned something today, but it was really stressful, you know, And, you know, when I when I moved to Texas, I had just taken it over and it was upside down. He came in shortly after. And so the connection that he made was that Jim made it upside down. And so there was I think that’s my assumption. And so there was a lot of pressure to fix it and a lot of sort of him trying to push through some of the solutions that I had already instituted. And like no that’s not going to work type of thing. And so it just was a it was it wasn’t the ideal situation, but it turned out to be great because I would never have left Carl’s for the Blaze opportunity if everything had stayed status quo. I was living in San Diego before I moved to Austin and we loved that life like it was a great life. It was everything, you know, Everything was really strong for us there. So I don’t think I would have ever been incentivized to jump from Carl’s to Blaze if not for the situation I found myself in.

Ashish Tulsian:

Was was was the you know, the the stock options, the cushion that you got also had to get a part in it or was it just, you know, unbearable or, you know, you’re not feeling?

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah, yeah. I think that you know, in the corporate world and specifically in the corporate world where private equity is involved, there’s a lot of pressure on fixing financials. And the Carl’s situation in Texas was sort of upside down from the financial perspective. Lots of reasons for that. One of them, a really strong regional competitor, Whataburger. And there were just lots of pieces. And so that leadership change sort of made a big focus on, hey, you know, we got to get this thing profitable really quickly, which I agree with. I mean, I was on that. I was on that page as well. So it just changed it just changed the tone and tenor of the organization quite a bit. And I would be on these phone calls that were really stressful and just really uncomfortable, not not life affirming types of phone calls. And I would I would hang up or during the call, I’d get a phone call from a lady that has sort of been part of my career since I was 19. She’s our chief development officer at Dave’s. Her name is Caroline Kennedy. And she would call and I you know, if I picked up after the phone call with my then boss and her first thing was like, Jim, you got to come join us at Blaze Pizza. And, you know, it was like sort of like, like I’m like this hanging up the phone. I pick up the phone and she’s like, this. And it happened three different times after three really, really bad phone calls.

Ashish Tulsian:

She I think she was the one who was making your manager do those things to you.

Jim Bitticks:

Maybe maybe through some some Law of Attraction or anything. So finally on the third, the third time it happened, I sort of had this like moment of like, I don’t know if it was like an epiphany or just this realization that this keeps happening. And so maybe I’m missing maybe I’m missing a message, you know, from my mom would say, Oh, you got to listen to your spirit guides. And there was this moment where I sort of was like, Am I missing something here? Am I supposed to be like, paying attention to this? And so as tough as my life was at that point, like, as far as working with this particular leader and sort of the pressure that was there, I mean, if I had been unemployed in that moment and this job had been offered to me with this leader and all of the pressures, I’d take the job, I would you know, I’d take the job and I you know, if I could get through it. So I sort of finally, like, opened my thoughts to the idea of maybe maybe I should take a look at Blaze. I mean, when when she’d call, I’d say, well, how many restaurants are you guys up to? The first time she calls, she’s like, Well, we have one and we’re going to open the second one next month. And I was just like, I’ve got three kids. Like, you’re crazy. Like, I’m not I can’t make a change. I can’t I can’t jump to, you know, a company that is like not actually a company. Yeah. Yeah. And so I finally, like on the third time, I said, okay, I’m I’m willing, I’m willing to open my mind to it. And we did a phone interview with the founder of Blaze, name’s Rick Wetzel. He and his wife Elise, started the company and opened two locations within a couple of months of each other. And I got on this phone call on Halloween, actually, of 2012. And, you know, the energy that came through the phone line, I was sort of like interested all of a sudden. And and then I flew out for a for an interview, unbeknownst to my then boss or to Carl’s. And it sort of like felt like it wasn’t going to happen. Like, you know, like the salary I was looking for that was too high because they were just a startup and there were just all these layers that you suddenly thought, Oh, well, this was a waste of my time. And I was in the airport, the Burbank airport, and I got this really, you know, like high pressure email with some dumb stuff in it from from my then leader. And I just remember going, whatever it takes, I’m going to Blaze. And I called I called Caroline and I said, Offer me something, give me something. Whatever it is, I’ll make it work. And they did. And four months later, six months later, by March, by March of the next year, I was packed up and we were moving to Southern California again and took a huge pay cut. No company car, like all the benefits you get out of a big corporate structure like CKE, none of that existed walking into the Blaze, so it was a total leap of faith. So it was really it was really scary, but also turned out to be a really great decision. Landed at Blaze. There were only about six of us or seven of us on that team at the very beginning and started making plans for how we’re actually going to build it out and do all the things all the all the things that Rick had promised and Caroline had promised on those phone calls.

Ashish Tulsian:

How was how was that change for you? Right from starting with like starting at early age, you always worked for large, you know, well-set processes, large companies in the restaurants. Right. And suddenly you had you could just build things where you could you could imagine things or, yeah, you know, you were supposed to build it ground up. How did that you know, how did that work for you? What was what is it like the early, early time?

Jim Bitticks:

So it’s funny is that when I was a kid and it was just my mom and I, I’m a single she was a single mom and only only me only child. That’s what it is. And we, you know, we were just the two of us growing up. And so she created this what would I call like a sort of a capitalistic drive in me by paying me to do stuff like paying me for chores or whatever. And so I liked comic books and I wanted money to buy comic books. So, you know, she’d pay me two bucks to clean the bathroom or whatever, you know, And so I could that’s how I got my own money. And so from an early age, it sort of built this sort of drive to to make money. So when I could make money at a real job, it was really easy to just like, say, like, I definitely want to, you know, get a real job and, you know, make my own money. And so what I think that created for me was sort of this entrepreneurial spirit that maybe wouldn’t have been if I had grown up in a more affluent like home where, like the money was just like given, you know, like I just got a free allowance type of thing. And so along the way, throughout the entire career, I think I mentioned it that every time I figured, well, I can make more money if I take the next step, I can make more money if I take the next step. And in running a restaurant or multiple restaurants, you know, the idea of of bonuses, quarterly bonuses gets introduced to you once you’re at the restaurant manager level and you say, okay, well, how do I maximize my bonus? What are the things that I have to do, the levers I have to pull to make the most bonus money? And, you know, usually those are all around, you know, controlling costs and driving sales. And so that that process that my mom trained me on of like how do I make more money sort of came into play where I would figure out like, okay, like, you know, when I was a kid, I got more money if I cleaned the kitchen than if I cleaned the bathroom or vice versa. So I don’t remember. But, you know, and so I would always do those chores and offer up those jobs or the refrigerator. Cleaning out the refrigerator was it was a high dollar, high value job for her. So I would always offer to do that. You know, I would try to make the most money I could. And so with the bonus program or bonus system that you get introduced to, you start figuring out what are the ways that you can drive the most bonus money for yourself and you start managing to it. And so that sort of just worked for me. It fit, it fit who I was or how I thought. And the those opportunities just led to additional, you know, additional offers.

Ashish Tulsian:

As somebody who was, you know, designing operations. And I think I think was very interesting because operations is I don’t know if I should call it thankless, you know, job. But I would say that, you know, a lot of operations people don’t really are incentivized, You know, all the time because, you know, they’re just supposed to make like the the part of the machine that needs to move. So so they are expected to do what they do. As an as an operations leader. Did you also introduce or do you look at your team’s life that way as well, where you you know, for for like do you incentivize your entire ops some way?

Jim Bitticks:

Sure. Maybe not as much financially. Like the assistant manager of the shift leads I would I would share a portion of the bonus with if we made a good bonus. But I think that that whole entrepreneurial spirit sort of drove me to, like, find the most efficient way to achieve whatever goal, whether it’s the food cost goal or the labor goal, or when I was at Rally’s for six months, they ran a program because they were they were very focused on trying to drive the service levels up. And so they introduced a mystery shopper program that they ran for six months and they would do two shops a month. And if you passed both shops, the manager would make a thousand bucks for each one. I don’t know if it’s actually true, but I was told at the time that I was the only one that did it for the entire period of time. I was the only one that made it. And you know, what you end up doing is you end up like coming up with all of the like looking at the the failed shops or the or the shopper form the program and you go, okay, where were the spots where I could potentially lose the money? And then you fill those gaps. So, you know, like if you don’t answer the guest at the speaker box within 5 seconds. Okay, So now everybody has to wear you have two people wearing a headset type of thing, you know, And I mean, it’s no, it’s not anything that’s like life altering or earth shattering in any way. But they’re the things that you start to do to sort of fill in the gaps. And so that whole entrepreneurial drive of like, I want to make more money drives you to create systems and procedures that, you know, make it more efficient or more profitable, make the business more efficient.

Ashish Tulsian:

You know, it’s it’s interesting that, you know, how naturally this occurs to you, the fact that instead of saying that, you know, I figured how to make more money, you said that. I figured, where can I lose money and just just fill the gaps. That’s that’s actually, you know what what you know, Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger, you know, keep saying as well that if you want to make money by investing, just make sure you don’t lose it.

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah.

Ashish Tulsian:

Everything else would take care of itself. Sure. Just don’t lose it.

Jim Bitticks:

Well, I landed at our busiest restaurant in the in the Arizona market for Rally’s. And the the budget they gave me one year was like. Like, sort of stupid. Like it was ridiculously high. Like, how am I going to how am I going to do that? How am I going to I don’t even remember what the increase like probably 10% without any like additional external advertising dollars being spent or anything. They just sort of gave you this budget. And so the the challenge, you know, that I was presented with is how do I drive the sales to this number, whatever the number was, without any of those external components. So I’m I would say I’m fairly creative. I like I try different things. And so I you know, I sort of calculated out I needed to make I don’t know, 100 more dollars a day or whatever the number was. And so I said, okay, how do we make 100 more dollars a day? Well, then I start really pushing add-on sales. So we did a couple of different things. A guy I worked with at the time, he was a funny guy. I’m somewhat of a funny guy and we used to come up with sort of ways to challenge each other, to make a guest laugh. And you know, you do something like hand them like a straw that was like crushed, that came in the box, crushed in the guest would just look at you like, what the hell? And you’re just like, just kidding here you go. Like that type of stuff. But, you know, if I could just sell more cheese, I’d increase the number of dollars. But it was so uncomfortable to sell cheese to say, like, did you want do you want cheese on your Rally burger? That that is I don’t know. Just feels like you’re selling vacuum cleaners or you know, you’re you’re doing that. You’re imposing and I hate that. And so between the two of us, we came up with like, how do you say it the best? And so we started saying, Oh, and hey, by the way, on your Rally burger, say, do you want that with or without cheese? And they would seven out of ten people would go, oh, with cheese. It just sort of it sort of reframed it or sort of changed it. And so it became the like the norm of the way we would we would try to sell it. And then the other thing we did was came up with, Rally’s has a product on the menu called the Big Buford. It’s a double cheeseburger, double meat, double cheeseburger. And so I started having today’s feature and the idea of the today’s feature was that was existing products that we’ve added like bacon or Jalapenos or, you know, something to additional cheese or meat, like a triple cheeseburger, you know, that would make the the price a dollar higher or whatever. And the one that was the most popular was the double bacon double cheese, which was just a big Buford filled with bacon. But we would introduce it like. Hi, my name is Jim. Would you like to try the double bacon double cheeseburger combo meal today and that we’d sell, I don’t know, like 50 to 75, some days 100 of those, which was a dollar more per combo. So anyway, bottom line of that story is that I made the budget and we made the budget by like trying to squeeze more out of the existing guests that were coming through. And so that idea of like, how do you like the operationalization of the pieces? How do you make it more efficient, How do you make more sales, How do you do whatever. You learn your way through it as you grow up. I think in the restaurant industry you like, you know, figure out the ways to make it.

Ashish Tulsian:

As a leader. Does this also affect your perception of how you value people around you? Like, do you do you value do you tend to value chasers more than you know, the settlers?

Jim Bitticks:

Ish. I think you it depends. So the further the further you go up, I think you are you definitely want some some chasers but you have to have settlers that because you can’t have everybody like looking for for a way up constantly not at least not until you get, you know, bigger and bigger. You always want people that want more because they’ll they’ll try harder. But they are also people that get bored and they want to jump out. And so then you’ve got turnover, you know, potentially or but I think that the higher up you go, the more you value like the value system sort of changes. Going back to the, the idea of like the sales piece or you definitely value the people in that particular scenario. I had a couple of guys that could run the drive thru all by themselves. And this restaurant I’m talking about, we only were busy from like 11:30 to 01:30 and on the Rally’s deployment system at the time, like the volume that we were doing would require like 15 or 16 people working. But once the lunch rush was over, you’re only having four people. So where are you going to get ten or 11 people that are willing to work 2 hours a day only, for five days a week? You know, it just the part time it just didn’t work. So you really needed people that were willing to hustle and push through it. So what I did in that situation, like created some free overtime, basically created a system where employees could, if they worked 11:30 to 01:30 every day, they could also close every night. They’d get there. They could get 45 hours a week if they were willing to do that. So that way I could staff it with enough people that we weren’t upside down, which then allows you to build sales because you can suggest of selling, you can do all the things. And then I had a couple of like superstar people who could do like a lot by themselves and. Yeah, high throughput people that were willing to like, you know, bust, bust their butts. So, you know, I mean, I think that’s sort of the essence of like the capitalistic system because, you know, those people that want to make more money or want 45 hours a week or want their weekends off or or whatever are willing to do everything it takes to get there. So. They’re chasers on at least some level.

Ashish Tulsian:

Yeah, No, I see that. I also I also understand what you’re saying because, you know, that’s a part of your evolution as well, right? When you when you start realizing that each part of the pyramid is important and settlers at times are, you know, they bring in a lot of stability, but at the same time, your natural inclination, for example, mine you know, my natural inclination is, you know, I, I actually like your high ownership thinkers. You know, I tend to just, you know, people who get shit done, but at the same time, you know, can put their thought in it. Yeah. I tend to, you know, be with them much more. Than the settlers. I respect them, but you know, I’m not somebody who, you know, who enjoys company of settlers a lot. And I don’t mean in this respect, as I said, I had my own evolution where there used to be disrespect in my head long back. Yeah, I used to think that, okay, not ambitious enough. But then, you know, as as business grew, I run a tech company. I realized that, hey, you know what? Stability is as important. Or rather at times more important than chase. As you grow. So I hear you there.

Jim Bitticks:

Well, it’s funny because, like, at this level now, as president of Dave’s, the executive team that we’ve assembled, the chief, the C suite, the C people, we have a really strong team and they are people that are really good at their jobs and they’re chasers. And you definitely want at this level, you definitely want each one of those people as caretakers of their departments or of their disciplines that are looking for the next sort of thing, like always looking for, okay, what do we do now to push it further? I would say that everybody on our C suite team is is that is that way. Our chief technology officer, his name’s Leon Davoyan and he’s like, he’s always like, What do you think of this or what do you think of that? And kind of coming in with new layers or new levels of things. Our Chief Marketing officer, Brad Haley, is like that also. Sort of like, you know, thinking a year in advance of like different PR, earned media opportunities that, you know, that you have to be out that far on. And that’s that’s much better than, you know, a year ago. Neither of those two guys or a year and a half ago neither of those two guys were on our team in their current roles. And we didn’t have that that level or that layer of push. Our CEO, Bill Phelps, he’s like that, too, He’s is an interesting guy because he’ll say like, they’ll have a piece of paper and go what are you, what are your thoughts on? And some, you know, some it’s not off the wall, but you’re like, I kind of like that idea, you know? And so I think he’s set the tone on thinking in on pushing a little and, you know, and I think you see that in the organization, you know, sort of trickle down for sure.

Ashish Tulsian:

So what I hear is that at Dave’s, you’re a thriving amongst, you know, people who are or chasing or pushing the growth.

Jim Bitticks:

I feel like we’ve hit our stride in the like I mean, we’ve done pretty well. And I’m not saying that, you know, we’ve been lagging in any way. I think that in the last year, year and a half, with some of the additions to the to the team that we’ve made, we’ve really seen the lift and you feel like, okay, like we can keep this going. Like before you sort of like, okay, like we need more, we need something else. And, and now I definitely think there’s.

Ashish Tulsian:

I am going to come back to Dave’s, you know, a little later. I you know, seven years, 372 Blaze pizzas.

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah.

Ashish Tulsian:

Seven years in eight years on that. How how was that like, um, give me a view of of that journey.

Jim Bitticks:

Unbelievable. When I joined the team, we had two locations open and I sort of nothing and nothing produced or developed to open a third. Like there were no training materials, there were no job aids. There was sort of a recipe pamphlet, like two pieces of paper folded in quarters with how you made everything. They had a chef who is really, really smart guy. He had all sorts of degrees in food science and culinary and business and really smart founders that were marketers by trade and serial entrepreneurs. But the idea of like how do you scale it? How do you do restaurant number three? How do you do restaurant number four? How do you do Restaurant five? We didn’t have that and we didn’t have any any level or any any sort of focus on speed of making the pizza down the line. In fact, because it was very chef driven, we sort of had the opposite approach of, you know, you press every dough, ball fresh, you make everything sort of like in the moment, and we’d have lines out the door and you just see people like to look at their watch and like not be able to stay type of thing. And so one of the first focuses that I had was how do we speed this up? How do we make this go faster within sort of what the chef would deem was reasonable for the for the food quality and then what we could sustain over time and then also the layers of like the service pieces. So that was like that was my focus when I landed at Blaze was how do I make it go faster and how do I make the service match the quality of the food when I tried Blaze for the first time, I remember sort of like thinking like, so whenever you know it’s okay and you know, I made whatever pizza down the line and it cooked in 3 minutes and it came out to your table and you could smell it and it smelled really good. And you took the first bite and you’re like, Wow, that’s really good. But that whole of making the pizza was sort of it wasn’t I mean, it was just sort of very calm, you know. There wasn’t it seems really fun to make your own pizza, like, you know, like, oh, I want some of that and I want some of that and lots of that. But that wasn’t really coming through the process or that or the service levels.

Ashish Tulsian:

And so you mean from the customer perspective, like the order taking?

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You just went down the line there like, like, know two or three employees that sort of like, what else can I get you or did you want this or do you want that? But there was no, like, you know, energy behind it or no joy of like making the pizza down line. So, so we messed around with the scripting and, you know, like pushing people to like, make eye contact. And we forced everyone to say hi, how are you today, Or something like that. And it just it just sort of changed the service levels and the service service layers. And then we put a lot of pressure on moving pizzas down the line very quickly so people wouldn’t get bored so people would move through it. You sort of like compared to Chipotle and trying to trying to go as fast as Chipotle went to get you down the line. That was sort of our goal and we put a lot of emphasis on on that. We built out all of the all of the training materials in a really short period of time. I think I joined in March.

Ashish Tulsian:

2013?

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah, of 2013, and we started hosting our first trainees in June. And so that’s like a three month turnaround on everything. I brought in a guy that was really young. I think he was 21 or 22. He worked at Carl’s with us and his name is Juan Lopez. And he, he and I built like all of the training materials, all, you know, based on what they were already doing, you know, and some adjustments that we made along the way. But we we built all of that stuff really, really quickly and then started opening. I think we opened our very first or a third location, my very first franchise location, the first week of July of that year on stuff that was sort of like three quarters of the way done, you know, systems that were sort of three quarters of the way.

Ashish Tulsian:

But from that point onwards, it was almost like, what, 50 restaurants every year? I mean, I’m trying it was not linear, but.

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah, the first year that we opened eight by the end of 2013, so a total of ten. And then the next year I want to say we opened 30.

Ashish Tulsian:

As an ops leader, like, you know what, what, what did you learn more through this? Because I’m sure like journey up from 2 to 372, you might have seen all kinds of, you know, or what kind of breakdowns, what would, what were the challenges that you rose up to or what what built you? What what what are the things you remember as, you know, maybe milestones or anecdotes where you feel that all right, you know, Yeah, those are the moments where, like, we were either in a ditch or, you know, came out really smart?

Jim Bitticks:

So I was I grew up in the Carl’s Jr system, and when Carl’s opens in a restaurant, they send what they call an all star team, and it might be 4 to 8 restaurant general managers from another market. And, you know, at the time they were like 1200 Carl’s Jrs opened. There were 400 and maybe for 425 or 450 company operated restaurants. And so as we were opening Texas, you’d have these all star teams and it was, you know, fairly easy to bring people from from these other markets. At Blaze, we only had one company operated restaurant when we started, and we technically had two, but we sold one right away so that they’d be able to publish the sales and stuff that you weren’t able to talk about without it being like made a record. And so it was sort of a strategy that Rick and Elise had to sell that first location. And then that way the sales were like sort of made made public and the sales. And so the ability to open, you know, 40 or 50 restaurants a year on a base of one location was in my mind, probably going to be impossible. As it turns out, it wasn’t impossible because it just it’s it’s ultimately just a function of money and of of carrying a staff or a team. So that was a big learning for me, sort of like that as it started to work. I can see how this how this can play out or how this works. I would say the biggest challenge is sort of conveying the essence of the brand to brand new people. So if you think about franchising and if you think about franchising a brand new brand, what you what you have in franchising is you have a bunch of a bunch of rich people who have been successful in the past. They were successful when they opened this other brand or they were successful and they did this or that. And so they sort of walk in the door with the notion and the understanding that they’re successful people and that.

Ashish Tulsian:

The entitlement is there.

Jim Bitticks:

Less entitlement, but more self sufficiency or self trust where they, you know, they believe that they’re like, you know, they’ve been successful. So and they’ve done that by following their gut or their instincts or whatever and so to convince them like, hey, we’re going to do it this way here, you know, there’s, there’s a, an inculturation that’s a thing, that’s a word there’s a inculturation process where they sort of you’re building trust and credibility with them that it’s going to work. And, you know, just like anybody, they walk in, they go, well, you know, at XYZ brand, we would never open on a Friday. You always open on a monday, which was true at Carl’s also. But one of the challenges on our side of it was we had to support it with a five or seven person training team. And if you open on a monday, I probably can’t keep enough people there to get you through your first weekend when you are actually busy. And so then or with without it costing more, it cost us more than the franchise fee actually. So I sort of flipped how we were doing it and we would open we do a soft open on a on a Thursday and the big grand opening, which was a free pizza day on a Friday, which is sort of antithetical to the way most restaurants open. They sort of do this slow and steady slide in through through the week. Yeah, Yeah. So it’s interesting as I referred to the the leader at Carl’s where I learned a lot from. We were at a new restaurant opening in Houston, Texas, and he was there to put some pressure on on this opening. And we were walking around the restaurant and he he goes, you’re these cars are moving too slow. And I said, it’s the first day. And he said, It’s the first day, but you have 25 people working. And it was one of those moments where you go because you normally have like for breakfast? Four people or five people, he’s like, you have 20 extra people working. And there is this moment where you go like, that’s a pretty good point. That’s one of those moments when you go, okay, I agree with you actually, when you say it that way, when you phrase it that way, like what he said made a whole lot of sense to me. And so that thing where I go back and figure out, okay, well, where’s the gap then? Like, I do have 25 people working. He’s not wrong. And besides 25 people, I also have like six trainers that are working okay. And the six trainers are there to like guide and support, but still you’re supplementing. And he said it. You said you’re supplementing the the lack of experience by having additional people.

Jim Bitticks:

And so why is there no sense of urgency was the question. I walked around, walked away with like, why don’t we have a sense? Because we’re not training it into the into the training process. We didn’t build in sense of urgency. So during my Carl’s period of time after that opening, I said, okay, how do I build in sense of urgency and how do I make the training process really engaging for these employees that they want to like push orders out quickly? So I started building in games into the training. This is you know, gamification is like, you know, we talk about like with electronic or digital versions of training, but this was in real life the gamification of the training. And so started doing sense of urgency.

Ashish Tulsian:

Entire capitalism is a real life gamification.

Jim Bitticks:

Yes, so we started building in speed of service or, or sorry urgency, sense of urgency, types of games into the training for the next restaurant. And one of them was like at the time, or just right before this period of time, there was a show minute to win it. I think Guy Fieri was the host at the time, and he had all these like, you know, you have one minute to get something done. So I sort of copied that. And we built in this the Oreo cookie challenge, where you put an Oreo cookie on your forehead and you start like manipulating your face, facial muscle muscles to get it into your mouth. And it was a timed activity and you got everybody sort of like putting pressure was a great icebreaker. It was a lot of fun and it was like this idea of go fast, go fast, go fast. We built in several other games also, including something I learned at a at a resort with my kids. It was called Family Puzzle Challenge, where you had this like floor sized puzzle that you tried to build against other families. And whoever wins gets a sundae. We used to close out the training with this family puzzle challenge of different groups of teams. But the idea was like teamwork and like everybody’s like working with each other and it’s timed. And by the third day of training, it went from like a seven minute process to magically a three and a half minute process, which by the way, three and half minutes, this was the service time goal. So all the things connected, you know, we manipulated the pieces so that you would land on that. So like on the first day when they’re doing the puzzle, it would be in a closed box and all the pieces are like scrambled and upside down. On the second day, the box has been dumped on the table, but all the pieces are upside down. On the third day, which is the last day, all the pieces are face side up and you put a leader in charge that gives them instructions on what to do. Let’s start with edges like colors and whatever. And so by the third day they’re able to get it done in 3 minutes. And it’s like this like, you know, big like break the board moment. And but it created like that urgency so that it wasn’t you weren’t introducing speed or sense of urgency on the first day open. We were we were introducing it from the from the beginning, which then connected to when we did Blaze, we built all of those same games into the Blaze training.

Ashish Tulsian:

That is awesome. Does anybody else I mean, any other brand is doing this as a part of their training program?

Jim Bitticks:

I have no idea. But I know Carl’s is. Blaze was and now Dave’s does because it worked. But so with Blaze it’s so funny because Blaze was all about cooking a pizza in 180 seconds, a three minute cook time on the pizza. So we made the goal to get people down the line in 3 to 5 minutes and make the pizza, get out to the gas in 3 to 5 minutes. So at total time of 10 minutes. So that that Blaze experience, which was like high stakes, high pressure where, you know, I was like trying to like not even save my job. I think my job was at risk per se, but sort of proved to that leader like, okay, I got it. I get what you’re saying to me and like and like turn it into a stronger overall experience as we were growing in Texas. I just took that stuff and just transplanted it over over to Blaze and it worked really well, made the training process really fun. It created that, it helped create that trust or that connection to the franchisees when they saw when they saw the roadshow of their training team show up and do like all these fun, funny things that got the employees engaged really quickly, all the ice breaker activities of the Oreo cookie thing or emptying a Kleenex box one sheet at a time as fast as you can, or we did a Skittles relay race like we started to build in like teamwork stuff that really created a feeling of of fun and energy, which I think translated to the process going down the line. And so I give I give his name is Chef Brad, Chef Brad Kent, a lot of credit for the the food he gets all the credit for between he and Elise Wetzel and Rick. They built the like the flavor profile of how good Blaze is. And I think our team, when we landed, we built the service profile, how we were going to serve the guest and how we were going to make the the service match, the ta-daa or the wow moment of eating the food. It’s like I see the example of have you seen the movie The Sixth Sense? At the end of the movie there’s, it’s like 25 years old so I’m going to spoil it like if you haven’t seen it, I’m sorry. At the end the movie you have this realization that Bruce Willis, his character, has been dead the whole the whole movie. You don’t know it the way they shoot it in the way they show it. Bruce Willis is like talking to his wife and and he’s talking to this little kid, Haley Joel Osment, and he’s like, interacting or he seems like he’s interacting. But what you realize at the end of the movie, when they show like quick flashbacks, no one ever replies to him. He’s just in the scene talking to his wife. And his wife doesn’t say anything. She just sort of like walks by him and he goes, you know, like, but you don’t catch it because of the way they shot it, the way they cut it and everything. And it’s that moment at the end. It’s like, Oh my God, like, I can’t believe that happened. That was the goal. There’s that when when a guest bit into the pizza that that hit of flavor like the crispiness of the dough like all of the pieces like and it’s just like this moment when like the service like all everything they just had going down the line matches the food and you go, Wow.

Ashish Tulsian:

This culminates into that one.

Jim Bitticks:

This place is amazing. Like, this is a great place that’s.

Ashish Tulsian:

And I’ve also got to watch that movie now.

Jim Bitticks:

You have to watch it. It’s a great movie. It’s a great movie. So that was what I say my team and I created. Was that sort of the service and the speed that matched the quality of the food.

Ashish Tulsian:

As a, you know, operations leader. How much did you, you know, or rather like did you keep customer feedback or reviews? Or any rating as a benchmark? Not the not the indirect one, Right. But but as a direct feedback, did you keep that at the center, either the organization or you?

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah. So actually what’s interesting is that I’m a big believer in old school mystery shoppers. And the reason I’m a big believer in it is on my very first day at Jack in the Box I was filling drinks, I had watched the drinks video and I came down. I was ready to fill drinks. And in the drinks video there was like a red headed girl that was like, Hi, Mr. Jones, it’s great to see you again. You know, like, she’s just super friendly and interactive and, you know, that’s the role model or the example that they’re saying you’re supposed to be. And I start working and the manager, shift leader, whoever was in charge, said, Hey, and make sure you do everything right. We’re waiting on our mystery shopper. And I go, What’s that? He said somebody, you’re not going know who it is. And if you do a bad job, you get fired. And so the next thing you know, I’m like, hey, you know, how are you doing today? Like, here’s your Diet Coke for you, you know? And I was like, just role modeling or display thing. What I saw role model, you know, just giving it back. And I talk about mystery shoppers with with everybody. The idea behind is because people think it’s antiquated. People think it’s not like, at the end towards the end, in Blaze when things when there’s a lot of pressure on profitability and changing certain things. One of the things we got rid of was the mystery shopper program, which I think was a big mistake because mystery shoppers and that the idea of somebody coming in and sort of checking up on you, it’s like the idea of when you’re driving on on a road and there’s a cop with his radar gun, you eventually become conditioned to know that there’s always a cop on this corner. And so you automatically slow down, you automatically follow the rules or whatever. Or when you see a sign that says, you know, radar detection in use or whatever, you you know what to do.

Ashish Tulsian:

Yeah, for all know for all you know, that radar gun may be a dummy. Yeah.

Jim Bitticks:

And for all you know, there is no plane in the air testing your speed. You just sort of like. Mystery shopper programs, If they’re don well, I think they create what I call invisible guardrails for the employees in the restaurants. Employees at all levels, and especially if it’s then connected back to like compensation. And I use the example that I said earlier about when I was at Rally’s, when we were able to make a thousand bucks a month by hitting by bypassing your mystery shoppers, you you teach to the test. You teach your team all the things that you know will lose you money or will lose you points. You know, if you do it right, in my opinion, you connect the money to the to the mystery shopper points. And now you’ve got a system that’s sort of doing all of the things the way they’re supposed to be doing them, because it’s you know, it’s it’s connected to them directly.

Ashish Tulsian:

Now, I’m a big believer of mystery shopping. I think that it’s I mean, in every business, in every way, they’re like mystery shopping is like, Yes, it’s the it’s the acid test of your. Yes. You know what you say that your business or your service stands for.

Jim Bitticks:

It’s the objective measure. So like comment cards or Google comments or Yelp comments, those are the subject of measure. That’s a guest who says to somebody, oh, the bathrooms were so dirty. And if their bathrooms are dirty, what about their kitchen? You know, that’s that’s that guest’s sort of like focus or their lens that they look at everything. Your mystery shopper program is your your lens, your company’s lens. Like, did I get the right number of napkins that I was my my pizza served at the right temperature? Yeah. We started at Blaze with eight mystery shoppers a month. When I was a kid, Jack in the box used to do four. And so, yeah, it is.

Ashish Tulsian:

Eight is big. Yeah.

Jim Bitticks:

You were never resting. You didn’t rest at Jack, you know, because you were like, Oh, like you knew that you were gonna be held accountable for that result. And so and Jack used to use bonus points. If you did the service pieces, there were bonus points. So we built our, Our Mystery Shopper program that plays with bonus points. We did eight shops a month, two a week essentially, and we focused the entire service model on that, about, I want to say three or four months after I started that Blaze, Rick and Elise brought in a president, president and COO, his name was Jim Mizes. This industry veteran has done a lot of things. Everybody knows Jim. He’s sort of like he knows a little bit about everything. I still use him to this day as a mentor. He’s my phone a friend on anything that I don’t know about. I call Jim. I say, What do you know about this or how do I do this? You know? Oh, that’s easy call so-and-so or whatever. And one of the things when when he landed in there was sort of this this support of the shopper program and the idea that we would do monthly rewards for the best performers between him and Caroline, who I mentioned earlier, who were really like instrumental to like creating, helping create the structure of that that system between between the three of us, we, we sort of built the system around guest service and the Jim brought in a company, the time called New Brand Analytics. They since got bought up and and I don’t know who has them now but he started us looking at the daily Yelp and TripAdvisor and whatever Zomato or whatever it was scores and sort of organizing the company around guest feedback, which turned out to be really helpful. Like I think at our peak we had an average rating of 4.4 stars, a place which was really strong.

Ashish Tulsian:

Average across restaurants?

Jim Bitticks:

Across the system. Yeah, well where it started to go downhill is when we pulled out the shopper program, when we changed some of the scripting because there were a lot of complaints that it was too robotic. And so we changed it a little bit. And, you know, I mean, we try to be collaborative with the franchisees to try to include their their, you know, their essence or like what they what they’re seeing and how they feel. And so we made some adjustments. And I think really that’s where we started to see those things slip a little. But when we pulled the Mystery Shopper program, I think we really lost.

Ashish Tulsian:

I think looking at mystery Shopper program as a cost center is what, you know, I have seen, you know, in the past where businesses after a point. Right. I think I think you know what you’re saying 4.4 across restaurants average, right? It’s almost magic. And somebody was you know, somebody said this to me recently in some other context and he said magic experienced over a long period of time feels like a norm. Hmm. It does. So somebody needs to knock your head again and say, Hey, you know what, Magic. Just because you’re experiencing it every day, it feels like a mom. And that’s where, you know, probably some of these things, you know, go, go, you know, downhill because the value of these programs, you know, you don’t feel them, quote unquote, quote unquote, or month on month because nothing is breaking.

Jim Bitticks:

Well, there are nuances too that you build into the system. So we put in we put in bonus points for saying yes to special requests. So if you think about what Build your own Pizza is all about, So there’s two things it’s about it’s about pizza fast enough for lunch. That was sort of the the business proposition that Elise and Rick were trying to solve for. So like, they’ll tell the story like when they started looking at doing pizza, it’s like, why would you do pizza? Like, there’s so many pizza places there. So the pizza is like just this gigantic category. And they said they started like, like kind of like dissecting it. And they found a big gaping hole in the middle of pizza. And it was pizza fast enough and affordable enough for lunch. So unless you worked in a mall and you go to Sbarro or unless you were like in like New York City or whatever, you could buy a slice having pizza for lunch, like in an office just isn’t really wasn’t a thing wasn’t available. So they wanted to create a, uh, a pizza for lunch concept, sort of like Chipotle. You could go, you know, walk down the line, have a burrito, you know, within 5 minutes of, you know, getting there. And so they they started building it on that, but it had to be fast. And so that’s the other piece of it’s got to be it’s got to be really fast in order to be able to do it, because pizza always had like 45, you know, you’d call and be like 45 minutes before it’s gonna get delivered to your house or maybe an hour. And so that whole speed thing became like sort of the driving force. But it’s build your own. It’s that individual pizza. So like, you know, like the way if you were ordering from Domino’s, you know, you may not like mushrooms. I like mushrooms. You have to get like half a pizza. It’s like a little thing. And so the idea that can go down the line and get my own pizza my way, it’s it’s complicated. It’s a little bit complicated, but it really is sort of part and parcel for what that experience is supposed to be. So we created bonus points in the shopper program designed around saying yes to guest requests. We created bonus points, the shopper program for going out to the table and like picking up people’s trays or interacting with them. And so it created an incentive because, you know, you might get dinged maybe on the speed or you might get dinged on some other thing. But I think it’s very reflective of how guests actually experience your restaurants. Like it’s not just a set number, like, oh, they were slow today. Like, I’m pissed. It’s it’s more like I’m willing to wait, especially when the service is good or when the food is good, you know? And so I think we got a lot of mileage out of that program. We got a lot of mileage out of the Mystery Shopper program doing two a week. It just created this push. We paid for it out of our ad fund, out of our or we would call the creative fund for years and years. It’s when we switched and wanted to put money into like actual ads or actual creative where we started pulling that the shopper program back, which it just changed. It just changed the bit.

Ashish Tulsian:

But that’s exactly how it should be. I mean, technically a good mystery shopper program is going to bring your customer acquisition cost down because your yeah, your repeat rate is going to go up. So your throughput per customer word of mouth is going to be high, right? So like a 4.4 rating across board is going to bring you more customers than any, you know, click or brand campaign can do.

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah, absolutely. So your question was like, what did we learn along the way? Some of those pieces or what we learned is like sort of doing it differently than what every other company has done. We supercharge the training process. It was a two week training program for franchise owners and their managers. When I was at Carl’s, it was a 12 week training program when you when you brought someone in. So, you know, three months of training. We did a personal trainer approach, sort of like when you go to the gym and you got a personal trainer helping you like exercise and whatever it we would do groups of four franchisees or franchisee employees with a trainer and a helper, and they were just focused on them the whole time. And so we created a was a 12 day program, a place that got you trained like completely on the system in two weeks, so that when you got to your restaurant, you were sort of like to the extent that you could be in two weeks ready to open your restaurant, there’s some OJT that has to happen, and there’s that sort of that process in the first two weeks where you’re, you know, drinking from a water hose and you got to figure, figure it out. But it was highly successful. We did almost the the first two years. We did it off of the base of one restaurant. Jim Mises, who I mentioned a minute ago when he landed, he said you got to have more restaurants. And so one of his big directives, right, right off the bat was to get to open four company restaurants. So we opened two at the end of 2014 and two probably in the first quarter of 2015. So we have four restaurants open and now we now we had a base of additional team members and we also had cash flow off of the restaurant. So that helped. And so there were just, you know, some layers there that that you sort of like I learned anyway, some of the like the steps that you have to sort of make or the stepping stones that you have to lay in order to be able to to do it pretty quickly.

Ashish Tulsian:

What how Dave’s happen? And like, what was the transition.

Jim Bitticks:

So so in 2017, I believe Blaze did a private equity deal, sold 40% of the company to Brentwood and Associates out of Southern California. And then they also sold 8% of the company to Alshaya Corp, the MH Alshaya Corp, out of the Middle East.

Ashish Tulsian:

Oh, Alshaya, the Middle East Alshaya? Wow.

Jim Bitticks:

That’s how we went. That’s how we started opening restaurants in the Middle East. What what that did it did a couple of things. One of the best things that it did is my whole focus after I landed at Blaze was I needed enough money to buy a house because remember, I moved from Texas and I took this big pay cut and everything, enough money to buy a house and enough money to put my my daughter and my son. I at that point had four kids. But I just in my mind, I was like, I just need enough for the first two and the third one. If I have just a little bit, like I’ll have enough time to make up. So and you have money for a house and for school, for Ali and Dylan. And a year before my daughter was off to college, we did this private equity deal. I had some shares. I was able to sell half of them. I got the biggest check by far, the biggest check in my life. I had enough money to put down on my house. I had enough money for actually all three kids if they went in-state, I’m covered, you know. And so I was like this was the best thing. But it also just like what happened at Carl’s with the private equity changed, it totally changed the tone and the tenor of the organization. And, you know, it was a great event for everyone who had, you know, equity and stuff. And from that perspective, it was a very challenging event from the perspective of how much it changed the company from that point forward. In the aftermath of that sale, there was a the CEO changed out and a lot of the C-suite left. And so I was almost I wasn’t quite the last man standing, but I was I was almost the last man standing. And in the meantime, Wetzel’s Pretzels, which is was founded by Rick Wetzel and Bill Phelps. And Bill had operated as a CEO for 26 years. He was also one of the original founding investors of Blaze Pizza. And Rick and Bill had been partners since even before Wetzel’s Pretzels. They worked together at Nestlé as marketing people and so they Bill and an investor by the name of John Davis, he’s a movie producer. If you IMDB him, you’ll be surprised by all the movies that you’re like, Oh my God, John Davis, John Davis. So he Bill and John found Dave’s hot chicken and made a deal and we’re going to start franchising it. And I saw a post on LinkedIn when they opened the first or the third location, I guess it was the third location.

Ashish Tulsian:

Which year was this?

Jim Bitticks:

It was in 2019. Yeah. And things had gotten sort of rough and like they were just like, you know, things have changed at Blaze. And so I did this text to Bill saying, Hey, I screenshotted the LinkedIn post to say congratulations and Bill. I mean, I knew on my we weren’t like buddies or anything like that, but I knew him and I had his number and I was like, Congratulations, if you ever need any ops advice or consulting, happy to help. And that sort of my like, you know, like I was like winking. Hey, if you you know what I mean? Like just testing the waters because the last thing I want to do is to change jobs. But it felt like sort of like there was this the sea change afoot of everything. And so I ended up chatting with him a couple of times. And as as the months drew on, I sort of was like, there’s I’m going to have to find a new job. I’m going to I’m going to have to look for something else, because things were just sort of off the rails and and they were getting more off the rails. Like nobody was like saying, wait a minute, these are off the rails. They they were sort of doubling down on the the off the rails decisions and so that sort of some of the leadership changes and just it just was like, you know, we lost our way, to put it mildly. And COVID, COVID happened. And so all of a sudden we were all doing, you know, all the things that you hear everybody talking about to, like get through COVID and at the end of it, my mom is I’m not supposed to tell the story. Bill Phelps tells me, never tell the story, and I tell it anyway. My mom is a believer in card readers and psychics, and she said you should call, her name is Joyce, you should call Joyce. And so I called Joyce and I started talking through some of the some of the stuff. And I mentioned Dave’s hot Chicken and she said, That feels really good.

Ashish Tulsian:

Oh.

Jim Bitticks:

I go, What do you mean? And she said that what you just talked about feels really good. And she started asking questions that were so like spot on that you’re just like, all right. So at the end of that phone call, I was like sitting there going, Oh, my gosh, Like, what does that mean? And so I texted Bill on a Sunday morning. I texted Bill and I said, I really want to come work for you at Dave’s Hot Chicken. How do we make that happen? Or something. And he texted me back and he said, let’s talk on Monday. And so basically he was interested in me and I was interested in Dave’s because they needed some some help at Dave’s. And he reached out to the CEO at Blaze at the time and basically worked it out. And so like a month later I started at Dave’s, which was great. It was a it was a great experience.

Ashish Tulsian:

That is that is phenomenal.

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah, it was super good. It sort of I skipped a step in that in that story. That’s really important actually, as I was, as things were sort of changing at Blaze, I was having this interaction. Not negative, but just very like challenging interaction with with one of the leaders at the time and while I was sitting there was like it was like a text thing. And while I was texting, my phone rang and it was Caroline, the same one who used to call me all the time at, at Dave’s, I mean at Carl’s, sorry. And I answered it and she goes, Jim, I was just at the New Pacific Beach, Dave’s hot chicken opening. Yeah, we need you to come to Dave’s hot chicken. And it was sort of like that moment like that I had.

Ashish Tulsian:

Wait Caroline was at Dave’s?

Jim Bitticks:

She was, she had signed on to be a franchisee. She was one of the C people with left. And she wasn’t a franchise. She wasn’t, she didn’t have a restaurant open yet, but she had gone down to this Pacific beach opening in the midst of COVID. And they were so busy, it was kind of rough. And she said she said, we need you to come to Dave’s, you need to be at Dave’s hot Chicken. And I had that moment, that like epiphany moment of like where it was like deja vu, like it was happening again. But this time because I sort of like, knew the signs or whatever, that’s actually what, what precipitated me calling. I told my mom about it. So you should call Joyce so that that’s that thing right there connected me to it. And so, yeah, so I texted Bill on that Sunday morning. He said, Call me on Monday. And basically, you know, like, you know, we had to play it all on the up and up. There was it was actually all on the up and up. It was I was the initiator.

Ashish Tulsian:

That is that is a phenomenal story.

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah, it was a very cool aspect to it.

Ashish Tulsian:

Yeah, it actually is. And I need to tell you I don’t believe in, you know, astrology or, you know, psychics and, but you know, I was at a last year, I was at a spiritual yoga health and wellness retreat and. These guys called a Tarot reader on the side like, just like a fun activity on the side. I mean, it was not a part of the, you know, program. And my Wife and me were there and she happened to just pass by out of curiosity. She sat down and said, all right, let me let me open like open the cards for me. Yeah. And she came back almost in tears. I was like, what happened? She said, You need to go there. I looked at that. That’s not happening. She said, No, no, Something happened with me. Before I believe this. I need you as a test subject. If it happens with you also that I don’t know what it means, but it doesn’t happen to you. Then. Okay, I’ll just take it as a good chance. I want there. And like, as you said, right? The questions she. I mean, she. Because she asked me, you know, What questions you have. Yeah. And I was like the cocky, arrogant guy saying, I don’t have questions. You tell me what questions do I have? And she asked me questions. Questions were spot on. And so I was reading. I got terrified. Honestly. I was like I was terrified, but I was like, I’m never doing this again. Because. Because I don’t know where is that portal door which I won’t be able to find back. But, but yeah, I think, you know, when you were telling the story, I was like, Oh, damn, that is the that’s I know what it felt. Yeah, well, but you acted on it and you, you acted well.

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah. Well, every time I tell that story, Bill’s like, don’t ever tell that story again. But I think it’s sort of it’s sort of cool. So as I landed at Dave’s one of the founders, his is Arman Oganeshyan and he’s the guy that created Dave’s like the idea for Dave’s and not take anything away from the other founders but sort of his idea and his like master architected plan. And he the plan was for these guys. And if you don’t know the story, there are three original founders. Between the three of them, they scrape together $900 to start Dave’s hot chicken in a parking lot with no no permits and, you know, like completely illegally. I’m sure they did it with a portable fryer and an ice chest and an easy up to cover the to cover the kitchen. And they, uh, planned from the very beginning to inspire some interest from food bloggers so that it would slingshot them. And on the third day, they were open. They only made 40 bucks a day for the first three days. And the third day they were open. A food blogger from Eater L.A. named Farley Elliot showed up based on Arman having messaged him multiple times on Instagram, showed up to try the food. He posts the story the next day and it says Late night hot chicken stand just might blow your mind. And the next day they get back on the fourth day, fourth day open, and there’s a line around the block. You know, 80-100 people deep and they were slammed, busy, and they’re using this tiny portable fryer. And the lines didn’t stop. And eight months later, they had enough money with the help of one of the one of the guy’s brothers that came in and helped with some cash and enough money to open up a brick and mortar restaurant. That opened to volumes of, you know, I don’t know, like probably at the beginning, probably 3 million a year, that the time I joined, they were doing 5 million annualized all off of three guys.

Ashish Tulsian:

One location.

Jim Bitticks:

One location and the location itself is sort of like it’s not prime real estate. It’s not something that you know, it’s not something we’d approved that we would we would say.

Ashish Tulsian:

Even Better, so your rentals are low.

Jim Bitticks:

As I walked I walked up to that one. I’m stepping over like syringes and, like dirty syringes and like, you know, empty hypnotic bottles and homeless people. And you walk up into a line out the door and the food was super good. And it’s sort of like like, wow, like there’s something special about this brand. And so that that guy, Arman, I think he sort of created he’s like a wizard. Like literally like he sort of created this whole thing in his mind and, and like, pulled it, like he manifested it and nobody believes that. But I really think he did it because they just created this brand and they like. They like. And then we’re going to find someone who can help us franchise it. Like this is seven years ago they were talking about this and like somebody, you know, one of their bedrooms or their living rooms or kitchens or whatever, as they were probably like, you know, rolling some joints and getting high. They’re like and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to, you know, we’re going to franchise in order to be millionaires. I’m not kidding. That’s literally what they did and that’s literally what they did. It’s sort of like if you’ve ever seen Ocean’s 11 or one of those movies where they plan the heist, and while they’re planning the heist, they play out a version of the heist, you know, And it’s like in this again, and that’s going to work. And sort of like they did that they sort of imagined what was going to happen. And then and then.

Ashish Tulsian:

So you’re saying that you see this story playing out.

Jim Bitticks:

Just like just like he called it. Wow. Yeah. One time I was talking him on the phone and he goes he goes, I don’t remember what we were talking about. Probably Law of Attraction or something. And he goes, Yeah, that’s how that’s how I came up with the idea for Dave’s. And I said, What do you mean? So I read this book and I go to a book and said, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And I said, Really? And he’s like, Yeah. And that’s what that’s what sort of created Dave’s. Me reading that book is sort of like how I came up with the plan. So I went and bought the book and I started listening to it and it was, you know, it’s one of those things that’s sort of like I’ll say, life changing.

Ashish Tulsian:

I may not believe in tarot, but I do believe in, you know, the law of attraction and manifestation.

Jim Bitticks:

So yeah, so it’s just a really cool story. Those guys are.

Ashish Tulsian:

But that’s awesome. I think, you know, feels like a lot of soul in the brand.

Jim Bitticks:

Yes, that and Arman always talks about the brand gives you back what you put in. Like he’s sort of like.

Ashish Tulsian:

Spiritual about it.

Jim Bitticks:

Spiritual about it. Yeah.

Ashish Tulsian:

Arman is from?

Jim Bitticks:

Arman is from Armenia. They’re all Yeah, yeah. I think he came here when he was two. So he was actually born in Armenia and grew up here.

Ashish Tulsian:

What’s keeping you excited right now?

Jim Bitticks:

About Dave’s or just in general?

Ashish Tulsian:

General? In general that that includes Dave’s.

Jim Bitticks:

So so one of the greatest opportunities I’ve had since landing at Dave’s. So I think earlier I talked about the idea that I wouldn’t have left Carl’s if not for some of the changes that occurred across the same thing happened to me at Blaze. I wouldn’t have left Blaze if the things hadn’t changed. And as it turns out, and I’m actually super grateful for the way it played out in Blaze at the time I was really disappointed because it was just it was sort of heartbreaking to see the change and how everything we built sort of like, you know, I mean, it all, it happens everywhere. Everything evolves and stuff. But just like the stark, like in one year’s time, it was like it went from this to this and it was such a such a big change. And I think we at all believe that we’re going to be working there for 20 or 30 years. You know, the Wetzels had always talked about, this is the last job you guys are going to have. And then all of a sudden it’s like, Oh, jeez, I need I need a new job. I’m going to need a new job, probably. And so the the change was one of those things that at the time I was really resistant to like, Oh, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks. In retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I jumped over to Dave’s. I landed at Dave’s with a lot of knowledge and information and and experience. Having just come off of the Blaze experience to help like scale it and grow it. When I landed at Dave’s, there were four locations open when I landed at Blaze, there were two. It was really close, you know, like the things were very similar. It was even less created at Dave’s in terms of scalable systems and processes and materials and all, you know, all of that, all of the structural things. But I already knew how to do it. You know, I, I was able to hire my entire team from Blaze clandestinely, like under that, under the radar. I hired them all hourly and just started creating materials and job aids and everything. On the way out the door at Blaze, I had asked for more time to sell the last chunk of my options, and there was this whole negotiation that went on where they wanted me to sign a separation agreement that had like a no disparagement policy and a anti solicitation policy and all of these things in there in order for them to grant me whatever six months they offered, they also offered to pay me the money during COVID they they did like a 30% salary reduction to sort of like make sure the company was going to be okay, which was fine. Like they like I want to keep the jobs. So like, do whatever you want to do. And so they offered me if I signed that agreement, the money they owed me as well as the the ability to sell my options, more time to sell my options. And I sort of had the attitude of like, I mean, you should give me the time to sell my options because I built this company for the last eight years, you know, And the guy I talked to said, you know, that’s not how it works. And I was like, it’s not how it works because you’re making it, not how it works. It could work that way. And he’s like, it’s not how it works. And then and I said, You should be giving me the money that you scraped during the crisis because we all worked our butts off to make sure everything was great. And he goes, he goes, Not how it works. I said, Okay, well, that’s fine. He’s like, So should I send the agreement over? I go, That’s not how it works. I’m not signing that agreement. I said, Let me just tell you something. I had no interest in poaching people or anything other than maybe a couple of the key people that would have they would have wanted to switch out anyway cause they wanted to upgrade and add new people and stuff. And I was more than willing to sort of like work with them on that and say, A, I’d like to hire if we had no money. We had four locations. We didn’t have a company store open when I landed at Dave’s. So there wasn’t, you know, we were completely operating off of a very small royalty and the initial capital. So the idea that was like going to hire my whole team full time and steal everybody from Blaze was just silly on its face. But I told him on this phone call, I said, I go, You actually just made it really easy for me because I’m not required to.

Ashish Tulsian:

So you left your options on the table for that?

Jim Bitticks:

I did. Yeah, I did. I said, No thanks. And I like I said, I immediately hired literally the entire team. I was paying like 25 bucks an hour to do. It was, you know, it was actually worked out perfect. It was like this like we didn’t have a lot of money anyways, so like, try to hire everybody in on salary actually supercharged our ability to get stuff up and running really quickly. And they’re sort of forcing me into that position. Made it that much easier to make it happen. So we landed at Dave’s practically my entire team and I and we and.

Ashish Tulsian:

That speaks volumes of your leadership as well because for the team to jump, you know, with you is a big deal.

Jim Bitticks:

Well, we had a great team at Blaze and we have an even greater team at Dave’s and only one or two of the people didn’t come with us. And that’s okay. That’s, you know, Yeah, I mean there’s there’s one one guy that is is the one that got away. But I think it ultimately was the best thing for him and his family to kind of like be stable there. So, you know, it’s good for him.

Ashish Tulsian:

But what’s keeping you excited personally?

Jim Bitticks:

So I was getting there. Sorry. One of the best opportunities that happened from Dave’s during the like the conversation process with Bill. I said I’d love to be a franchisee someday. And he said, we can make that happen. We did it at Wetzel’s Pretzels, a lot of his executives, and I think he did it. Bill is a really shrewd, like smart guy. He’s a super generous, kind man, but he’s also very shrewd. And so he had created the opportunity at Wetzel’s for a lot of his executives to be franchise owners. I think he did that to sort of supplement incomes then, not to pay them a ton, but they were making like, I mean, what is this super profitable. He created such a great business out of Wetzel’s I think it doesn’t get the credit it deserves but you know they they those people who own Wetzel’s Pretzels make a lot of money off of, you know, a pretzel stand in a mall somewhere.

Jim Bitticks:

And so he created that opportunity for several of his executives. And he told me at the time, you know, we did at Wetzel’s and within probably six months of me landing there, he sort of offered me the opportunity to become a franchisee. So our CFO and I are partners in franchising in limit empire of, Southern California. We have two locations open. We’re working on our next two, we have a seven unit agreement and it’s been sort of like a life altering experience. I remember I started my story where I began working at a franchised Jack in the Box. I didn’t even know what a franchise was when they when they said the owner’s coming on that first day. And I said, those commercials with Jack, I go, Jack, Jack’s coming? And they said, No, Neal, I was like, Who is Neal is like, He owns, you know, it’s three Jack in the Boxes. And like, what does that mean? Like, you know, I had no idea. And so we today, my wife and I are franchise owners of Dave’s Hot Chicken and they high volume units. And we’re super stoked. And so we’re pretty excited about what that means for us and, and and our future. And I think that the brand itself Dave’s hot chicken brand. I mentioned earlier that, you know, we’ve got this really strong team and I think that we’re well positioned to continue to grow and and offer a lot of opportunities to the people that came with us to the people that we’ve met here, to the franchise owners. And it’s it’s going really well.

Ashish Tulsian:

How many Dave’s today?

Jim Bitticks:

163.

Ashish Tulsian:

Wow. Four years, no, less than that?

Jim Bitticks:

We started franchising. So we opened the first like like actual franchise store that’s not affiliated with with a founder or somebody from the corporate team in January of 2021. So what is this? This is going to be January 2024. So three, three years.

Ashish Tulsian:

Oh, man, that’s yeah, that’s blazing fast. Yeah.

Jim Bitticks:

Yeah. The first seven restaurants or so or somehow associated or affiliated in one way or another so that it was the eight restaurant was not affiliated in any way. And so you know it depends on what what calendar you’re using. But essentially three or four years. About 150 stores.

Ashish Tulsian:

What’s keeping you excited personally? What are you?

Jim Bitticks:

So my daughter is about to graduate with her masters. My oldest son is about to graduate about a year and a half out. He works at Dave’s with us and then my what I call my middle middle child. His name is Nick. He just started school and he texts me all the time saying, These classes aren’t challenging. I don’t know why I’m here.

Ashish Tulsian:

You have a rebel there

Jim Bitticks:

And then my ten year old, I mean, you know, he’s got the whole world ahead of them. So I’m excited for them and I’m excited for the like sort of the ability to offer them opportunities that, you know, like that weren’t available to to me or to my wife when she was a kid. So I say that’s the most exciting part.

Ashish Tulsian:

Jim. This was this was a phenomenal, you know, story and a great conversation. Many, many takeaways. But I think, you know, one thing I can definitely see is that the, you know, compounding of your work and relationships are what those brought to you, You know, all the opportunities, you know, one, after the other, you know, it is commendable. That speaks volumes. You know, both sides, you know, people who called you for the opportunity as well as people who followed you, you know, for the one.

Jim Bitticks:

You know, when you say the word opportunity that adds that adds one dimension or one sort of component about what’s exciting. To to your point about the people that came with us, one of the things that I’ve always tried to do is to find people within our existing system that have the aptitude or the capability, the skill set to grow. And I think you mentioned at the very beginning about the restaurant industry in general, people who land in the restaurant industry do so because it’s convenient or it’s close by or they’ll work with my hours or whatever that is sort of fall into it, like you said. And a lot of times people end up in the restaurant industry aren’t on a typical college bound trajectory, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not super capable. It usually means that they’re probably the children of immigrants that that either don’t have the knowledge or didn’t have the access or they don’t currently have the access financially. And we’ve built our whole team on restaurant, what I call restaurant kids. I was a restaurant kid and so we built our whole team on these people that have the ability to do something, but maybe they don’t have the original training or they’ve shown some type of talent for it. And you, you sort of grab them and you help them like develop it. And so one of the things I’m most excited about is the opportunities that we’re creating for this generation of restaurant kids who are usually like mostly immigrant born, a lot of Hispanic people, because in California especially, there are a lot of Hispanic folks in the restaurant industry. But you know people of all of our all stripes are in the restaurant industry. And so by offering them opportunities and seeing like Dave’s grow and they grow with it, that’s one of the most exciting parts of it.

Ashish Tulsian:

That is so wholesome and amazing. The fact that you recognize them, restaurant kids is the term that I’m taking from this. That’s amazing.

Jim Bitticks:

Well, the restaurant industry allows you to to apprentice into. You can go from being the grill cook to the owner. And I mean, the amount of time that it takes is completely up to you and the opportunities that sort of present themselves. It took me from 15 to 45 or 40 or whatever, whatever 48 for that to happen. For me, my my oldest son invested in our business. He’s 21, so he went from 15 to 21 where he’s like an actual investor in a business. So it just depends on, you know, he’s a lot smarter than I am and so but it allows you to do that. And so that’s what’s so cool about Restaurant industry.

Ashish Tulsian:

Jim, thank you for this conversation. Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

Jim Bitticks:

I did, too. Thank you.