Dining on Data: How Alistair Levine is Changing the Restaurant Industry’s Back Office

Intro  

Welcome to another edition of inspired stories where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes, how they’ve overcome adversity, and explore current challenges they’re facing.

Anthony Codispoti (02:53.589)
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codaspoti and today’s guest is Alastair Levine. Alastair is a restaurant owner of the Vine Hospitality Group, a collection of multiple restaurants. And we’ll hear a little bit about that. But his main focus is as a partner with Kitchen Sink, an organization that provides outsourced

corporate office services specifically for other restaurants. That includes things like bookkeeping, payroll, HR, financial and operational advisory, staffing, recruiting, and marketing. They are essentially the full back office for many leading independent restaurant groups across the country. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Ad Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line.

One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cashflow by implementing one of our proprietary programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefitsagency .com. Now back to our guest today, the CEO of Kitchen Sink, Alistair. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Alistair Levine (04:15.113)
Yeah, of course, happy to jump on excited to go through it with you. I will just one small clarification. I am not the CEO of Kitchen Sink, but I am a partner there. Alex is our CEO. So don’t want him getting upset with me. yeah, I’m one of the main shareholders.

Anthony Codispoti (04:19.614)
Alright.

Anthony Codispoti (04:35.574)
Thanks for helping me clean that up. And what is Alex’s last name so we can give proper credit to him?

Alistair Levine (04:38.354)
Okay.

Racky Opie. I will not try to spell that off the top of my head.

Anthony Codispoti (04:47.477)
Fair enough. Alex, sorry to step on your toes. I’m sure you’re doing a wonderful job with Alistair there. Maybe at some point we can have you on the show as well. So Alistair, let’s talk first about the restaurant group. So Vine Hospitality Group, there’s a collection of multiple restaurants. So let’s talk about each one of them. What’s the name? Where in the San Francisco area are they located? And what’s the concept?

Alistair Levine (04:56.829)
Absolutely.

Alistair Levine (05:15.733)
Yeah, so we’ve got 10 different restaurants across five different concepts. And so we’ve got four left banks and then one petite left bank, is exactly as it sounds, a smaller version of a left bank. We also then have two Elbe Steaks, Mesa and Camper.

And so they are all around San Francisco Bay Area, but none of them actually in the city of San Francisco. So we’ve got two up in Marin County, in Tiburon and one in Larkspur. We’ve got two over in the East Bay, one in San Ramon and one in Oakland. And then we’ve got two on the peninsula in Menlo Park. And then we’ve got another four down in the South Bay in San Jose.

one downtown San Jose and three right across the street from the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose and kind of a valley fair area, if you will. So, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (06:19.797)
So how did all that come to be? I mean, that’s quite a few different restaurants along different concept lines. How did this all kind of evolve?

Alistair Levine (06:30.485)
Yeah, so, you know, my dad started the business in 1994. We started the first restaurant. So we just celebrated this in July, our 30th year of business at the first restaurant, which is a milestone. Not that many restaurant operators get to. So we’re pretty, pretty pleased around that front. Prior to that, he was the CFO of Ilfernaio and Gordon Giers, which are two like large.

Gordon beer, she not really doesn’t, doesn’t, I don’t think have that many locations left, but for awhile, they were very successful kind of on that early stage brew pub kind of craft beer early stage piece. and then he obviously wanted to do his own thing. So he started the group. and unfortunately he passed away about seven years ago and I inherited the business. And so at that point we had five restaurants. we’ve in the last seven years, basically doubled.

Anthony Codispoti (07:01.959)
They were growing pretty hot. Yeah.

Alistair Levine (07:24.329)
the size of the group in terms of restaurants and top line sales and number of employees, which is good and bad. I generally, I have the opinion that anytime you double anything, everything breaks. And so that can be fun. So we’re dealing with some of that right now, which is always a good time. But yeah, effectively that’s kind of how we got into it. And so, you know, it’s been something.

I’ve grown up with, right? Because it took three or four years to raise money for the first restaurant. And so he started raising money when I was about five years old for the first restaurant and opened the first restaurant when I was seven. And so, you know, it’s been a really long run of it being just sort of like this other member of the family, almost in some ways, not exactly, but sort of right.

So yeah, that’s kind of how it came to be.

Anthony Codispoti (08:26.739)
Are there other family members involved?

Alistair Levine (08:30.053)
Yeah, I mean, my mom sits on the board of the restaurant group as well. And my brother, he works for actually a supplier on the Kitchen Sink side, another software vendor that we work with, but is also kind of a board observer and has a background in the culinary side. So he weighs in there where he feels confident on that side. So it’s still very much a family held business despite, you know, sort of the scale and scope we’re at with

know, 600 plus employees and, you know, doing in excess of $50 million in revenue. It’s a, it’s, it’s kind of a major animal in some ways.

Anthony Codispoti (09:09.105)
That’s a pretty good size group. Which one of the concepts, if you can say, is your favorite and what’s your favorite menu?

Alistair Levine (09:18.311)
Yeah, I mean, that’s always, it’s funny. That’s like always a question everybody asks. And, you know, I think, I think like anything else, it’s like asking somebody like, which your favorite child is. And like, I think probably by, by day that might vary for most parents. I don’t have kids myself, but you know, I think it’s like, you know, one kid ran in and was like, man, we’re taking that kid to the ER. And you’re like, maybe this kid isn’t my favorite today. And then, you know,

Anthony Codispoti (09:40.925)
Ha ha.

Alistair Levine (09:42.803)
The next day they have a really do something really cute or adorable or really heartwarming. You’re like, no, this kid’s my favorite today. So I think it’s very much that way. You know, I think we’re really excited. So we just opened a Rolati last year, which is Italian American. We’ve been super excited, both in terms of like the operational performance of the restaurant, but also looking at how guests are engaging and getting excited about that experience.

Anthony Codispoti (09:49.449)
You

Alistair Levine (10:11.667)
So, you know, that’s certainly one that I’ve super enjoyed. There’s a, we do a mortadella pizza there that I really, really like. And the hot honey one is pretty good there. And then I really like in terms of like every day, cause as much as I love Italian American food, like I can’t really eat chicken parm every day. or I mean, I could, but it just probably wouldn’t be good for me. And I’m not sure I’d feel great after doing so. So I really like Mesa, which is our Mediterranean concept, little more like light, fresh.

You know, fatouche salad, some grilled prawns. We make our own two different types of our own sort of pita in -house, one that’s fried and one that’s baked. And the fried one sounds kind of intense and whatnot, but it’s actually like really light and fluffy, not greasy at all. So, I would probably say on a day -to -day basis, Mesa would be my choice, but you know, for a little more special occasiony thing, or, or that more indulgent meal.

Rulotti and you know, I think I grew up in one of the in left bank and L ‘Orxper, you know, going all the time. And so there’s always that sort of nostalgic opinion about that, where it’s like, you know, I remember going there at, you know, 10 or 11 or 12 with a group of friends and sitting at my own table and, know, all of those, those, those sort of like fundamental building block moments, let’s say.

Anthony Codispoti (11:36.624)
I’m looking at your website here and for those people who are listening, want to check it out, it’s vinehospitality .com. And each of the different concepts is linked off to their own website where you can check out what the interior looks like and all the ones that I’ve checked out so far look really cool. You can see the menus, you get an idea of what the food is like. I’m curious, Alistair, how fun it is that you have multiple concepts here and you

kind of get to play around with different menu items, different decors. But I would imagine that also introduces its own challenges, right? Like it would probably be easier if all of these restaurants were the same concept, like roughly the same footprint, the same interior design. Talk to me about that.

Alistair Levine (12:24.723)
Yeah, I mean, it’s absolutely a trade off, right? And I think, you know, one of the great quotes about the restaurant industry that I heard a couple of years ago that I just absolutely love is restaurants are simple and simple is hard. And I think that’s probably true, not just for restaurants. It’s true across a lot of businesses, but restaurants in particular are very much a nickel industry. So it’s a lot of, hey, I’m going to make this little incremental change here and that’s going to drop one more nickel and one more nickel and one more nickel. And so it’s a

It’s so much of that incremental improvement every single day that, that if you don’t, where that becomes hard when you have multiple brands is what, what is my ethos of French food or what’s my ethos of Italian food? And when you need somebody like living, owning and breathing, what is this brand about? How do we get the experience better for guests every single day? That, that can be just come distracting because

You know, not surprisingly, there’s a little shiny bird syndrome that occurs where it’s like, Hey, this is the hot new, cool, fun concept we’ve never done before. And we get to go try a bunch of new places and you get to, you know, eat at a bunch of things and have fun, conceptualizing a menu. And all of those things are really fun and new decor, new, new vernacular about, well, what kind of, what do we want this to look like?

Because it can be exhausting and challenging to just every day be trying to be 1 % better, 1 % better, 1 % better. That’s not for everybody. And so that piece can be challenging. as a restaurant group, you’re always kind of looking like, how am I either giving the same quality food at a cheaper price for my guests so that there’s more value for them? Or how am I giving them something that’s innovative that they may not have had or may not have had in this way?

that I can command a price premium for, so that I ultimately can be a successful profitable business. So, you know, I think that’s where, that’s where it’s like awesome to have multiple things. Cause if you get bored, but if you get burnt out on one piece, you can kind of jump to the other, but it’s also that very much that double -edged sword. yeah, I mean, you, you look at a lot and from a valuation perspective, you look at a lot of restaurant groups.

Alistair Levine (14:45.063)
Most of those that have sold for large valuations are single concept scaled because it’s an easier for an investor and outside person to understand, okay, I’m going to buy this. Here’s what the brand ethos is. Here’s how we go forward with it, et cetera, et cetera. And so there’s some risks there and there’s some challenges there. And we’re actually in the middle of looking at a reorg right now to morph heavily align around the brands.

and create sort of those individual brand champions for, you know, as we sort of think through that. And that’s, would say for the larger restaurant groups, let’s call them 10 to 15 unit, fully mid -market, starting on their way to enterprise in terms of like the overall industry dynamics. They’re all sort of thinking about centralized management and how do you empower the sort of individual brand champions to…

help you build that brand and become a partner in that brand and really give them an ability to like live and love in that brand, right? And so I think that’s where that’s a little different. But I think that helps to negate that sort of double -edged piece where it’s like, if all you do, if you’re in charge of say the French brasseries and all you do is think French brasseries 24 seven, 365, then you know, it’s.

You negate some of that concern where it’s like, I’m switching lanes constantly and trying to figure out, wait, was I talking about this thing or was I like, you know, like it’s easy to get things muddled.

Anthony Codispoti (16:21.391)
So is there a desire to grow any of these concepts outside of the Bay Area?

Alistair Levine (16:28.381)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve looked at a couple locations in LA in the past. We haven’t found one that we’re like, man, we love this. California is a challenging regulatory market. So we’ve certainly thought about looking further afield from California. Oftentimes what happens is you kind of go Bay Area, either to Hawaii, or you go up to Tahoe or Reno. And if you’re in SoCal, you’re oftentimes LA to Vegas.

Scottsdale Phoenix is sort of the logical, just from a pure basic logistics of, where can you get to in about an hour or an hour and a half plane ride? cause as soon as you’re sort of bi -coastal, it’s like, if something goes horribly wrong, you are a minimum of six hour plane ride away and that plane isn’t likely not leaving for a few hours. Like you’re probably not there the same day. Right. And so the, it requires a completely different thing.

in terms of like from a management structures process systems. And I just, we’re not there yet, but clearly like goal is to get there as we continue to, build and grow the restaurant.

Anthony Codispoti (17:37.337)
Well, kudos to you for understanding that the infrastructure isn’t quite in place to support that yet, but that’s certainly on the roadmap. Any thoughts about franchising any of these concepts at some point?

Alistair Levine (17:48.787)
Not really. I mean, I think we were much, we’re far more bullish. Yeah. We’re in, we’re in sort of the fine casual or whatever kind of segment you want to think about. I wouldn’t say we’re like a full scale, like fine, like full on fine dining in terms of like, we’re not getting a Michelin star. That’s kind of not what we’re, we’re looking to do. but you know, we’re obviously also not, you know, Applebee’s or Chili’s at that segment.

Anthony Codispoti (18:17.529)
You typically don’t see franchise concepts at the quality level that you guys are.

Alistair Levine (18:17.725)
Right. we’re kind of.

Alistair Levine (18:23.378)
Not a lot. mean, you can kind of use, it’s like Ruth’s Chris, Capital Grill. It’s a lot of steaky concepts at that point. There’s not, you know, Cheesecake Factory, but they don’t franchise. So most of the like large scale operators that are in the space and are in our segment oftentimes are not franchising. It tends to be a lot more on sort of the QSR, know, Chipotle, Starbucks.

whatever, you know, whoever you want to kind of think of in that kind of, know, Chick -fil -A, McDonald’s, of course, would be like classic examples. So anywhere in that fast food to sort of like QSR is far more common just because the sort of volume of those restaurants is a little bit lower. The build out costs, it’s more, you know, when we’re building out an eight to 10 ,000 square foot restaurant, the build cost is pretty expensive. And so it’s a capital intensive piece.

know, franchises work really well where it’s kind of this lovely business in a box for oftentimes first time business owners or other sort of people who are wanting to get into a different segment or market that they aren’t currently in, et cetera. And they kind of, I wouldn’t say it’s like with training wheels, but like it’s somewhere around that, right? It’s like, Hey, like we’ve got the designs for you. We’ve got like great, we know exactly what the fixture.

Anthony Codispoti (19:45.655)
You get a lot of support. Yeah.

Alistair Levine (19:47.005)
These should be, like there’s a lot of, there’s a, as I say, business in a box, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of like, Hey, like let’s, let’s build this like an Ikea set. You still have to obviously operate it and execute on it. And there’s still obviously a ton of variability there for you. But I find that concepts that are a little more. Capable of being put in that box are far more successful. And so it’s just not a path we’ve actually looked at very much. and I think, you know, for us we’re.

We’re pretty excited about continuing to build the brands we have and, you know, certainly look to scale those brands and, you know, potentially create an exit down the road within some of the brands or part of, know, like that’s the nice thing about being brand centric is like, Hey, somebody loves the Mesa say, and they want to buy 14 of the 14 that we get to at some point, like, great, let’s do that transaction and we can, you know, choose to continue to sort of build and incubate other brands within.

for you.

Anthony Codispoti (20:45.559)
So you grew up in the restaurant industry and I’m gonna guess that from those experiences, that’s where the inspiration for Kitchen Sink came from. What I’ll call back office in a box for restaurants.

Alistair Levine (20:56.981)
Yeah, yeah. mean, I think really, so where it started was in 96 when we opened the second restaurant, my dad was kind of wearing every hat and that quickly became unsustainable with two places. With one, it was kind of sustainable. With two, it became unsustainable. So he started a company called Vine Solutions. And then we merged Vine Solutions in 2021 with Kitchen Sink. And we’d gotten to a point where we were looking at sort of technology, what was next.

How do we make this process significantly more efficient, both from a experience of the operators and the owners of the businesses we were serving, as well as how do we make the fulfillment portion more efficient internally? We were doing a lot of manual process, a lot of systems that maybe didn’t talk to each other. And I think this was sort of true for the entire restaurant industry, not just our category. Coming into the pandemic, many things were done in the same way as they were done in

in the 80s or the 70s. so it was a lot of legacy process. And that’s totally fine because again, like, you know, it’s in many ways, it’s pretty manual business. But we saw a huge opportunity by putting the two companies together to really deliver more on the technology front and deliver better insights, more actionable insights and just a better experience for the operators where we saw there were huge gaps in the marketplace, both.

from my own experience operating my own restaurants and then what we were seeing across our larger customer base at the time. And so that’s very much sort of how we ended up with Kitchen Sink and kind of where we are today is very much on that focus of like, how do we make this process easier? Because your average restaurant owner is very much like an artist of, is a good way to think about them. as I highlight to most people like,

There’s not a lot of like wildly business, business, successful artists. Like you could probably name it’s like Wayland, Dale Chihuly, like there’s probably maybe Peter Lick, photographer.

Anthony Codispoti (23:03.478)
The part of the brain that needs to light up to be creative in those ways is typically different than the part of the brain that lines up to be efficient and set of processes and hire and manage people. they’re two different skill sets.

Alistair Levine (23:15.859)
Yeah, right. And yeah, a hundred percent. And the same is true for if you look at architects or interior designers or any of the creative professions, most of the creative people and blessed like bless them that it’s great. We need people who are wildly creative, who are coming up with awesome ideas in my industry, like creating great new food items or awesome menu items that are innovative and interesting. Oftentimes those people though are not great at operating businesses and not great at

especially on the the numbers side of the business, but ultimately need that information in order to stay in business and be successful. And so, you know, I think that’s very much sort of the genesis of where like we live is like, you know, our tagline is we turn great restaurants into great businesses. And, you know, it’s all about how do we take somebody who has oftentimes like exceptional food, great guest experience, great guest satisfaction, but is, you know,

kind of lighting money on fire because they’re just not paying attention to it. So how do we create a little awareness, not diminish those factors, but really help them help their business thrive? And I think that’s pretty critical.

Anthony Codispoti (24:31.594)
So I’m looking at the kitchen kitchen sink website and for folks who are listening, it’s kitchen and then sink is spelled S Y N C and it’s dot us not dot com but dot us. So kitchen sink dot us and yeah, above the fold here, it’s expert bookkeeping payroll and HR for restaurant groups.

But there’s a lot more here, you know. mean, HR has got multiple levels to it. There’s recruiting. You also offer marketing services. this has grown into quite a breadth of options available for these restaurant clients.

Alistair Levine (25:09.821)
Yeah, we also do insurance. We’re looking at a couple other verticals as well right now. And a lot of it’s just naturally sort of evolved, right? As we started doing bookkeeping, and then when you’re doing bookkeeping, oftentimes the person they have potentially internally doing the bookkeeping is also the person doing their payroll. And they’re like, well, if you’re going to replace that person, then

I need, how am going to do payroll? So what are you going to do for me on the payroll side? It’s like, I go find another company? And it’s like, no, okay, we’ll do payroll for you. And then when you’re, once you’re doing payroll, especially a huge amount of our clients are in California and New York, you’re sort of basically doing HR by the time you’re doing payroll in those two States, because of the amount of like regulatory, minefields that you kind of have to wade through. now you’re like logically doing HR. And then, you know, when you’re giving somebody all this information, it’s like,

What do you do with it? So operational and financial consulting and advisory come out of that. The marketing actually came out of that as well, where what we saw is we had some clients who were struggling to drive sales. And they’re like, well, cool. You guys are experts. You see all these restaurants. What do I do? And we’re like, well, we don’t actually do marketing and that’s kind of what you need. need some more demand generation, right? Like they’re like, well, but my cost of goods and my labor numbers are awful. And you’re like, yeah, that’s cause you’re

not selling enough product every day and you’re at your minimum levels and like that’s the solve, right? And so we try to always at the core level be like, here’s the information, do with it what you will. But if you want us to sort of, I sort of refer to it as bumpering for you, like you want us to be the guard rails on the road, we can also do that where you’re like, hey, if you’re go drive down the road, we don’t want you driving off the road.

But we do want to empower you and your team to like learn and get better. And we’re happy to help explain processes and systems and do education and mentoring of the management team. How do you read a P &L? How do you read operations reports such that they’re actually usable and actionable? Because again, all the stuff we do is awesome. But if you don’t use any of it, it’s all kind of a waste of time. And, you know, so for us, it’s also garbage in, garbage out.

Alistair Levine (27:24.381)
So that’s where if we, you know, what we see a lot of times is clients come to us, their existing financials are rough because they’re, they’re trying to like muddle through them. They’re not an expert on them. And then they’re making good decisions off bad data. And they’re kind of struggling on that front. So that’s kind of very much like the way we, we, look at solving the problem. And so oftentimes, you know, insurance became a kind of a no brainer where we had all these clients who were like, we’re seeing how much they’re paying on insurance. seeing like, man.

your renewal notice pops up half the time you don’t have time to shop it or think about it. And then all of sudden you’re like, cool, well, I’ll just sign up again. Cause you gotta have insurance. And you know, we’ve, we’ve, we found, you know, 30 to a hundred K savings annualized for clients, like fairly routinely. And they’re like, this is awesome. Like, cause who wants to pay more for insurance? nobody really.

And, you know, it’s just simply like, hey, like we’ve got the time to shop it. We’ve got all the information you need, you know, because we’re doing your payroll. We can look at workers comp stuff. We can look at the workers comp reporting, right? So it just becomes like these logical sort of bolt -ons. And, you know, for us, it’s like, if you’d like them, they’re here, they’re available. We’re happy to support. And if you don’t, no problem. They’re not, it’s not an all or nothing approach with us.

Anthony Codispoti (28:43.593)
So Alistair, when you guys think about adding one of these new bolt -on services, whether it’s marketing or it’s insurance, are you going out and acquiring a small group to bring that skill set in -house? Are you referring those deals out to other players? Are you just kind of hiring somebody who’s sort of an expert in that area to kind of head it up?

Alistair Levine (29:06.621)
All of the above. We have done every single different one of those. really, it depends on the category, right? So, you know, we stood up a sister company for on the marketing side. It’s called Super Hungry because we kind of were, you know, we had the joke internally. Well, nobody wants to buy marketing from their accounting firm because accounting firms aren’t exactly known for being like the most sexy dynamic things. I was like, okay, well, we need a separate flag post here for this. And we work with clients that aren’t kitchen sink clients at Super Hungry as well because

you know, there are other people who want marketing that maybe don’t want, you know, already have a good solution and are happy with the rest of their back office, right? It’s again, not all or nothing. And then on the insurance side, sort of similar thing. So, you know, what we have, you know, we, we, we’ve done some, some mergers and acquisitions as well. We’ve bought a couple of firms and, you know, obviously the current iteration of kitchen sink was a merger between the firm I owned and the firm that Alex owned and

It’s kind of how we ended up to where we did. so we’re always looking at opportunities. I would say for us, everything is on the table in terms of, hey, we need to go solve this problem. What are the options? We could go hire somebody. We could go buy a company that does it. We can partner with a company that does it. Do we want to own this? Do we feel like this is accredited to the business? Or is this something that we actually never want to get into doing, but we still need to find a solution for?

And so that’s kind of where we think through on a corporate business development standpoint. How do we think about solving this problem? How much do we want to own it? What do those resources take, et cetera? And so for us, we’re always looking at purchasing as a big category. We’re talking about internally. We’re talking about legal internally. We’re looking at tax, because all of those things are kind of directly IT.

IT is another one that I think there’s a huge opportunity for IT and kind tech system management. So, know, we’re looking at kind of all of those various options and being like, do you buy it? Do you partner it? Or do you build it? Right? And that’s really kind of the way we look at it. And, you know, if you’re building it, that could be hiring an expert and having them come in and build a team and department around it.

Alistair Levine (31:26.997)
which is basically what we did on the recruiting side. we launched recruiting in 2021 because we had so many clients that were just like, I can’t find people to help. I have one manager, they’re working 80 hours a week, they don’t have time to screen their resumes. Can you guys help with that? And that’s kind of where it came out of. And so we hired a recruiting person and director of recruiting and they built out a team and we went through multiple iterations of pricing and okay, what does this look like and how to…

How does the offering evolve and whatnot? Because that one felt like, hey, this seems like the best path forward for this particular thing versus we acquired a company called Hone earlier this year that was on the tech side. we’re like, OK, this is a way. It’s a way, but they’ve spent three years working on this problem. That has real value for us as a shortcut. So we kind of just look at all of those things in a process -based approach.

What’s the price? What are we hoping to get out of it? How do you justify it?

Anthony Codispoti (32:30.929)
So Kitchen Sink at its core is targeted specifically to restaurant groups, right? But since you guys have acquired some other businesses that I’m assuming had clients before you acquired them, some of those standalone services are outside of the restaurant niche. Is that right?

Alistair Levine (32:37.961)
Yeah.

Alistair Levine (32:52.085)
No, it’s all within restaurants. we’re still all within restaurants because it’s a massive market. There’s more than a million restaurants in the United States. 60 % of those are chain franchisee franchise or 40 % of them are are are independent. We’re still talking about a total addressable market in the US of 400 ,000 locations. We’re at 450 locations. We have a little bit of room to run, let’s say.

You know, if we, if we would be ecstatic to get to between one and 5 % of the total addressable market, like we would be work like a multi -billion dollar company at that point. So like, you know, I think that’s, that’s where, when you like, look at the math, you’re like, yeah, like we can, we can kind of stay put. Now we do some restaurant adjacent businesses. have clients that have wholesale bakeries. have catering firms, a couple that have like small ends.

So, you know, we’re, absolutely do those types of things where I would say it’s like more on the broader tent of hospitality. but oftentimes it’s like there are adjacent businesses where it’s like, Hey, wholesale bakery. Yeah. Makes total sense. We totally understand that. You know, we have a bunch of our clients are buying from the same wholesale bakery, right? Like it just, it just makes life easier.

Anthony Codispoti (34:17.594)
Well, I think, you know, from a client perspective, somebody, you know, coming to you and shopping for these kinds of services, however many of the, you know, almost dozen services that you guys offer is, you know, if they’re in that restaurant space, what a treasure trove of experience they’re getting with you guys, right? I you grew up in the restaurant industry, all of your clients are in the restaurant or, you know, closely related field. You guys know what the numbers are supposed to look like.

You know what the data should be. You know the levers to pull. You know the common mistakes. It’s not like some accounting firm that’s like, yeah, I got a restaurant client, but I’ve also got dentists and landscapers. There’s a lot of value in having so much institutional knowledge that’s baked within the restaurant industry.

Alistair Levine (35:11.541)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s some uniqueness to the restaurant industry. think the industry itself oftentimes is like, man, we’re so unique. I think everybody convinces, every industry convinces themselves that they’re so wildly unique. And I think most things are 80 -20, where it’s like 80 % is kind of just business and 20 % is like, what is it unique to your sort of industry? And I’m sure there’s a little bit of a sliding scale on that. But yeah, no, mean, that’s really why we’re so deeply focused on

It’s not an industry that has had terribly great financial services provided to it historically. Because so many of the operators lack acumen in the category, that it makes it a harder to serve category. But as we’ve already discussed, it’s a massive market. There is a massive amount of demand and desire and just core need within the marketplace.

You know, even with clients that I talked to who don’t end up going with us, most of them are still like, Nope, I don’t have this category figured out. Like maybe, maybe they’re going to do something other than me. That’s totally fine. But they’re still very few, very, very, very, very off, very like rarely do I talk to somebody who’s like, no, I’ve nailed this totally got it figured out. Right. And, and it’s just, it’s just not super common. And so, you know, I think as a result of that, it,

It’s, it’s nice when you, it’s like, Hey, like whether you use me or not, like, and certainly, of course, I hope, you know, as many people use me as possible, but whether you use me or some other service, or you do it in house or however you solve the problem, the fact that so many people aren’t solving the problem successfully just, you know, continues to, to, fire and fire us up and motivate us to, to know that there’s just a massive need in the space. And because it’s been somewhat neglected over the years, I think that

That makes it more, there’s more challenges there, but I think that’s also where the opportunity is, right? I will say it’s not easy. It’s certainly super hard. There’s a huge amount of variability. But that’s also why there’s not 50 competitors in the space doing exactly what we do and the way we do it. So, like anything else.

Anthony Codispoti (37:29.242)
What does growth look like? I think you said you’re serving 450 locations right now.

Alistair Levine (37:35.221)
Yeah, we’re growing at about 30 % annualized rate. So that’s on the organic side. we did an acquisition this year. We did an acquisition two years ago and an acquisition in 21. So those obviously then, we sort of exclude those in the 30%, which obviously means we’re doing more growth than that. But we kind of look at that as in a separate bucket.

because it’s like, hey, we’re going to just buy this firm. We’re going to bring them in. that strategy sort of continues to evolve for us and the way we think about those transactions and how to structure them and what that kind of piece looks like. Because I think what we found is a lot of people have really personal relationships with their bookkeeper because their bookkeeper kind of like, know how much money is in your bank account. I know if you’re paying your employees appropriately.

It’s a pretty revealing relationship, right? So there’s a fair amount of sort of built up trust there that isn’t as easy to transfer in some of the acquisitions as I think we would have thought originally and can lead to some fallout. So I think for us, how you structure and do those deals,

Anthony Codispoti (38:34.285)
You feel very exposed.

Alistair Levine (38:58.865)
is certainly evolving and continue to evolve that we continue to want to do more of those deals. Because we still think it’s a great way to pick up good chunks of business all at one go. Because the go -to -market is an expensive go -to -market within our category.

Anthony Codispoti (39:16.547)
go to market for the restaurant or go to market for you with your new clients.

Alistair Levine (39:21.511)
For us to land clients, it’s because it’s a lot of, you know, one location, two location, three location, and so you’re a lot of touch points, decent, you know, sales cycle can be a little bit… Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then your, you know, implementation takes a month and a half, right? And so to two months, because it’s just a lot of data going back and forth and we want to make sure we get it right. And so there’s just a lot there. so…

Anthony Codispoti (39:31.577)
It’s a long sales cycle. Yeah, you’ve got a lot of conversations you have to have to make them comfortable.

Alistair Levine (39:50.772)
If you can pick up a few hundred clients in one whack, oftentimes it can be super helpful.

Anthony Codispoti (39:56.697)
And so how are you and these new prospects finding each other? You guys doing some kind of promotions, advertising, and growing at 30 % per year when you exclude the acquisitions is impressive.

Alistair Levine (40:05.939)
Yeah, so we

Yeah, so we stood up a sales team in January of this year. That was the first time. Before that, I was actually managing the sales process and basically everybody prior to that, I pretty much personally sold onto the platform. lot of word of mouth. It’s a very tight -knit industry, so everybody talks to each other and everybody kind of knows each other. so a lot of word of mouth, a of referrals historically.

And we were sort of working to scale that back go to market motion, is hence the sales team. we’ve got six people on that team now. And they kind of really got going in January. And I’d say over the last few months, they’ve really started to kind of hit their stride. We’re doing some marketing, some paid advertising, Facebook, Instagram type posting.

And, really starting to build out sort of content that’s, that’s educational content. cause we, we see that there’s just, you know, we have so much innate knowledge in house in terms of we’ve got a director of HR and we’ve got a person who does benefits all day and we’ve got a payroll manager and we, you know, we’ve got all these people who are really good at their jobs and know what a lot of information that the average operator doesn’t know. so.

We see a big opportunity to continue to build our thought leadership in the space and to use that as a marketing funnel, if you will, for, cool. What are 10 tips I should focus on? And everybody loves the listicles, not my personal favorite. But they get a lot of clicks, and that drives a bunch of traffic. But hey, what are five things you should know that this quarter for?

Alistair Levine (42:05.139)
labor law compliance in California or whatever. Those types of things were just starting to kind

Anthony Codispoti (42:11.424)
And so who’s your ideal client, whether it’s revenue, locations, employee size, how do you know somebody’s kind of a good click for you?

Alistair Levine (42:19.477)
Yeah, I mean, so we really like the sort of three to 15 unit operators. We work with people bigger than that and smaller than that. But that’s kind of really our three to 15 unit independent operator. Most of the people in that sort of space are it’s no longer sort of a hobby business. Right. If you’re a one unit operator, it could be, well, whatever this is like, it’s a fun, cool toy to have and whatever. Or maybe it’s a business, but it’s really just like.

It’s you and your wife who work there or whatever the answer may be, right? Like oftentimes the one unit operators, especially like if they’re lower turnout, like lower volume sales volume, they’re just kind of like, hey, we’re just going to do this. it’s either lifestyle business or whatever it looks like, right?

When somebody, by the time somebody’s getting to three units, they’ve really decided that this is a professional business that they are going to build and grow and scale and operate much more akin to a business. They may not be doing so today, but they kind of are gonna get their hand forced just in terms of things like, you one of the key examples I use is like, people don’t sue other people for the most part on the labor law side. They tend to sue like businesses because, you know, if I’m working with you,

12 hours a day in a hot kitchen and I’m the owner of the business you’re gonna have a you’re gonna be like well this dudes in the trenches with me 12 hours a day like you got to do some really terrible things to like end up getting sued at that point because like there’s just a certain level of like respect and like no this guy’s right here right by my side like we’re both just doing what we can right as soon as you remove yourself from that situation and you now have like say a manager in between it’s like well

Screw this guy. Like, what’s the owner doing? He’s probably just sitting at home doing nothing. Of course, not true, but like, you know, it very quickly, it’s like, that’s the perception. And then it’s like, cool. Well, I’m, I’m not getting paid overtime in the way I should or whatever the thing may be quickly. So that’s usually that, that sort of three to five unit range is where you start seeing a little more like labor law litigation and compliance, especially California and New York. So you have that and you now oftentimes are going to have like a

Anthony Codispoti (44:08.299)
That’s the perception.

Alistair Levine (44:32.981)
Director of Operations who’s between you and maybe even general managers at the store level. You’re starting to build some layers of management. You need above store level reporting. You might change the structure of your business. Like all of a sudden now you’re gonna start hitting a lot of these like scaling challenges of like, how do I do labor law compliance at scale? How do I manage employees working across multiple locations with common ownership where there’s huge labor law compliance things around that in California? Like there’s all these things.

Hey, I’m more than 50 employees. now have Affordable Care Act reporting requirements. how do I do that? Right. You say you just start hitting all of these like kind of milestones. And in many cases, we’re able to help clients proactively avoid slamming into the proverbial brick wall of those milestones because it’s like, Hey, to your point earlier, it’s like we’ve been here. We’ve done this. We get to see it. You know, we see more restaurants than any of these operators get to see themselves. And

As such, it’s like, Hey, we think you’ve got this problem coming. Let’s help you proactively, like not slam into the wall. Like let’s turn around the wall or let’s put our brakes on or whatever, whatever, you know, example you want to use on that front. So for us, like, that’s really why we, we, we like working with that sort of scale and scope because they want to learn, they want to get better. They’ve decided this is a real business. They want to make it as profitable and successful as possible. And oftentimes they need a lot of help in terms of.

Formalizing and professionalizing the business in terms of how do you do financial reporting? What KPIs do you look at like there’s all there’s so much stuff there That it can be just wildly overwhelming

Anthony Codispoti (46:12.65)
And that’s not to beat a dead horse, but that really seems like it’s the value of working with a group like yours. You’ve worked with hundreds of locations at different sizes and help them grow to additional sizes. And so you know what’s coming around the corner. You know, the next thing that they’re likely to run into that they have no idea because they haven’t been there yet. I’m curious, Alistair, what are maybe some of the most common mistakes that you see these small restaurant owners making?

Alistair Levine (46:42.995)
Yeah, I mean, look, I think at the core, it’s just like, are you looking at books? Do you have good books and are you looking at them? Like, I know that sounds again, like we go back to restaurants are simple, simple is hard. Like the amount of people who like don’t know what their cost of goods sold is or what their food cost is or their labor cost is, or understand the basics of like how financials are put together and thus what

You know, we’ve talked earlier about, like all of this is sort of worthless if you can’t put it into action. But what do I need to look like at on my PNL or my ops reporting that I can then directly drive an operational change around? And what should the cycle and cadence be of that? How do I read these reports? How do I understand what that looks like? Like to me, that core foundational level just is potentially one of the single biggest.

hurdles we see consistently. Because it’s not just at the ownership level, it’s at the manager level. And you have a workforce that has incredibly high turnover in the restaurant space. you’re constantly turning through bodies. Like most restaurants are running in the excess of 100 % turnover rate annualized. that makes that problem much harder, right? Because you’re like, cool, this person’s here today. Three months from now, they’re gone. So like,

You know, it’s, so how do you, how do you put a process and structure around that so that the team can clearly understand here’s what a good job looks like. Here’s what a bad job looks like. Here’s kind of where we are today. Because I don’t believe anyone. mean, there’s probably some people, but the vast majority of people don’t show up to work being like, I’m going to be terrible at my job today. That’s not how people go to work. Oftentimes they don’t know what success looks like. They, they don’t know where they’re at in terms of success, but most people genuinely. Yeah, they don’t, but they want to show up and they want to do a good job.

Anthony Codispoti (48:30.654)
I don’t know what to do next.

Alistair Levine (48:36.221)
Right. And so if we can give them some structure and framework, you know, that makes that process significantly more successful and more possible. And then I think the other piece, the other biggest one I would say is, HR HR and sort of payroll compliance. Like. Regulations change all the time. They’re incredibly challenging to keep up with their weird. change randomly. Like it’s, it’s, it is.

It is hard to stay on top of everything. mean, across my 10 restaurants, for example, I think we have four or five different minimum wages and we’re all in the Bay area. Right? So you like, you just think about like that where you’re like, wow, now I’ve set this, this person’s now getting paid 20 cents less an hour than they should be. And, know, we’ve done an incredible job not having that be an issue, but like, you could see how very quickly if you’re a small business owner, you’ve grown quickly, you’ve got a very successful concept people are excited about.

you’re open in a couple of locations, you may not realize that, you know, might be 10 minutes up the road, you’re at a completely different minimum wage, there’s different requirements around leaves and, you know, FMLA, family.

Anthony Codispoti (49:47.944)
And you can take all of this headache and hassle off your client’s plate. They don’t have to worry about it, they don’t have to think about it.

Alistair Levine (49:54.553)
Yeah, I mean, wouldn’t you know, we’ve got it’s a partnership. So we’re gonna we’re gonna be educating them. We still need them to behave appropriately. Yeah Exactly and to just be like hey, this is this is a problem. You might want to address this quickly We’re not it’s your business But we you’re going to end up in litigation if you do not solve this problem some people are like

Anthony Codispoti (50:01.256)
They can’t check out, but you’re there to help them and coach them. Good.

Alistair Levine (50:19.059)
You know what? That’s fine. I’ll roll the dice. And I’m like, that’s insane. Please sign this waiver and release for us. and then they do. And, know, we all go on about our merry days, but you know, most people, even ownership wants to treat their, like nobody, most, most of the people we work with don’t want to treat their employees badly. They want their employees to be successful and to show up and do a good job. So they, they win. Right. And so that’s it. You know, there’s another area there around goal alignment. Hey,

What does ownership want? What do the hourly employees want all the way through? How do you ensure that there’s clear goal alignment so that, you know, if the employees are doing an exceptional job and the owner’s making a ton of money, I personally believe that the employees should benefit in that. Like they’re the ones doing the day -to -day work. There should be a clear like, here’s, here’s, if you do this, you get this. Here’s how we win together. Right. And I think that doesn’t always.

Again, it’s not always the case because oftentimes it’s like, Hey, I’m a chef and I worked 12 hours a day. And now all of a sudden I’ve got this concept and it’s taking off. And all of a sudden I’m going from like one unit to three units to five units. I don’t, none of that was true for me at one unit. I didn’t have to worry about any of that because I was the one there for 12 hours a day. Now, like I’m at four stores, four hours a day.

you know, or whatever that three hours a day or whatever it might look like, like, Hey, like now I’m an each employee only sees me for three hours. They’re like, this dude doesn’t work that hard. Right. So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, I say, this is why for us, that sweet spot is that three to 15 is there’s just so much to be done. And, and when done correctly, massive value creation for ownership for the, for the individual shareholders, if there’s shareholders, but then for the individual employees, just make

you know, things much clearer, easier, handbooks, know, benefits, like all of the stuff that you end up getting into. just, but it just becomes that kind of compounding.

Anthony Codispoti (52:23.283)
So I want to talk about employees for a minute, because I think you would have a good perspective on this, Alistair, given the size of both of your companies and the fact that you’re helping your clients with this as well. Because the labor market has been especially tight since COVID and probably no truer for any industry than the restaurant industry. I’m curious what things you’ve tried and found success in to both recruit and then once you’ve got somebody good to retain them.

Alistair Levine (52:54.389)
Yeah, I mean, think two separate things. So we’ll talk about recruitment first. Yeah, certainly really challenging. 2021, I would say, was incredibly challenging. I think actually labor market’s kind of easing at this point. Certainly we’re finding it’s easing. More availability of good talent. I don’t know fully what to attribute that to, but.

Certainly we’re having less challenges on that front where for a while it would be like, I just hope anybody shows up. Do they have a pulse? Cool. They were hired. Now it’s like, Hey, like, no, let’s actually get somebody who’s good. The nice thing about that is what I think part of the problem that occurred in 21 and into early 22 is when you’re hiring anyone, oftentimes they’re not a good cultural fit. They’re not a good fit for the team. You’re kind of just like, I need a body, please plug them in. And it can actually create this like.

Negative ripple effect of like this person’s toxic or they’re challenging or and like it just or You burn, know, I think a lot of restaurants burnt a lot of people out because they couldn’t get enough people to work and Then you have you’re like cool. You want to work overtime you want to work double time? They’re like, yeah, like people will be like sure, of course I’ll do that and but it’s like you’re burning a resource I sort of think of it like a candle right you can burn it

but at some point you burn it out, right? And so I think those two things sort of compounded with each other to create such a challenging circumstance. On the recruitment front, it’s not that complicated. Again, it’s a lot of simple stuff here. Do your existing employees like you? Like, you training and developing them? Like, is it a good place to go to work? Do they feel valued?

Everybody works in these like siloed industries for the most part, right? So like whatever industry that you’re working in, you probably know a ton of other people also working in that same industry. If you guys all hang out at a bar or go out for dinner, you’re likely all going to trade some form of war stories from whether it’s about clients or whoever you’re serving or coworkers or ownership. Those are pretty much the three things that people like to talk about.

Alistair Levine (55:19.389)
If you’re terrible and you’re a terrible boss and you have terrible bosses…

Most of your applicants you want are going to know that well in advance of them applying with you, unless they’re like brand new to the area and don’t know anybody. So like to me, the two kind of go hand in hand. I also think fundamentally restaurants historically looked at their employees as replaceable assets because it was like, no, if you’re gone today, I’ll hire somebody else tomorrow. That’s fundamentally changed. There’s a huge number of reasons for that. Demographic changes, lowering birth weight, blah, blah, blah, blah.

There’s just less people actually fundamentally entering the workforce and there’s less people who want to work in restaurants, amongst a ton of other professions. We probably don’t have it quite as bad as every electrician, plumber, all of the trades people I talk to are like, my God, good luck finding like an apprentice. I know I’ve heard stories of like electricians showing up on other people’s job sites and literally being like, I’ll give you a thousand dollars today. If you come work for me and like, what are you getting paid? I’ll pay you $10 more.

So like wild stuff. So I think this is true across, there’s definitely some segments in the labor market, but restaurants is one of them that certainly there’s some applicable for. And so as a result of like less available talent, you got to develop your talent, retain your talent to your point. Like how do you do that? Well, again, pretty simple stuff. Do they feel valued at work? Are you acknowledging what they do? Have you made it fun to come to work?

How do you incentivize good behavior? How do you clearly identify, here’s what a great job looks like. How do we get you on the path to where you want to get to? And I think historically restaurants have struggled to create the idea of working in restaurants as a career. It’s challenging, it’s high stress, long hours. You’re oftentimes working when everybody else is not working. Holidays, nights, weekends, et cetera. Not for everybody, right? But.

Alistair Levine (57:16.585)
I think also even for the people that it is for, so many of them haven’t sort of been put in our career path. So how are you getting mentored? How are you getting trained? How are you cross training? Like, how do you learn more and get, you know, so that there’s the actual growth there for you. Now, some of that is much easier when you’re at my scale than when you’re at like one or two units. If you’re one or two units, you have maybe, you know, a manager or two managers per location, three, four, depending on the size of the operation.

You’ve got a very limited pool of, well, if you’re the GM of one store, you could go be the GM of another store, but there’s not really, you’re not, there’s nothing kind of beyond that until that ownership group either opens another store and then you could, maybe there’s an opportunity for you to be a director of operations or whatever that is, right? But there’s limited growth opportunities. So for us, part of our reason for growing is so that we can give our existing people that we want to retain.

more opportunities to grow and get promoted internally. So we try not to hire anyone externally to run rest, to be a GM of a restaurant. So you don’t get to be a general manager unless you’ve worked for us internally. So we will hire people who are previously general managers, put them in, become an assistant general managers with a clear path to getting them to be general managers. But because we really like want our culture, our sort of ethos, like

We don’t just like hire people in from the outside because we just have found that’s unsuccessful. But also because we’ve now got a track record of building and promoting and developing internally. And we certainly could be better at this. I don’t think we’re perfect at it. I don’t think any company ever is perfect at this, but like always working on it. Again, as a result, we have a lot more employees who’ve stayed with us for a long period of time. Right. And again, like, you know, like

I don’t have any employees who were with us from day one at this point because they’ve all retired. Like, because for a 30 year old restaurant, they worked for, I think our longest serving employees, 26 or 27 years at this point. So, but I think like, you know, but again, if you have those stories and you have those employees who stay that long, when you’re asking employees like, Hey, can you, do you have any referrals?

Anthony Codispoti (59:38.765)
That word of mouth means everything.

Alistair Levine (59:41.917)
Of course. Right. It’s like, Hey, it’s way easier to like, Hey, you hired this AGM that everybody likes. Oftentimes AGM is going to bring their favorite bartender, their favorite server, a couple of busboys, a line cook from their previous job. Because if they’re a good AGM, all those people really liked working for that manager. mean, there’s some saying about like, you know, your boss is, you know, like you can love the company you work for and hate your boss and you’ll leave the company or whatever. Right. Cause like.

It’s, it’s, have so much kind of impact on your day to day existence. And it’s hard, like, you know, for us, we’re constantly working to evaluate and we have our fair share of managers that for whatever reason don’t work out. You know, challenging, we get that feedback. take that feedback really seriously, but I think the two kind of feed each other is kind of fundamentally my belief is most of this also isn’t that, that hard. you’re, know, how are you asking the employees?

you know, what benefits are you providing? Like our number one benefit people love is just an emergency bilingual helpline. It’s our single cheapest benefit we provide and they can kind of call and for like emergency mental health support, or they can get referrals to like a doctor or an attorney or like it’s, it’s just sort of a catch all thing. It’s literally the cheapest benefit we provide. And when we’ve surveyed employees in the past, it is their favorite benefit.

And so it’s funny, like oftentimes where those types of things come out, where it’s like, you know, do I think most restaurants would think about like mental health in that way? Probably not, but you know, it’s a very high stress challenging job and you know, to have it be bilingual, you know, a huge amount of our staff, native Spanish speakers, right? So again, I think it’s about meeting people where they are. So long rambling answer, but it’s something I’m super passionate about.

Anthony Codispoti (01:01:34.432)
I can tell. Yeah, lots of good stuff in there. Alistair, I just have one more question for you, but before I ask it, I want to do two things. If you’re listening today and you like today’s content, please hit the subscribe, like, or share button on your favorite podcast app. Think about who else would enjoy today’s interview. Alistair, I want to also tell people how to get in touch with you. What’s the best way to make that happen?

Alistair Levine (01:01:55.379)
Yeah, you can you can reach out at kitchen sink that us. So it’s just my first name at kitchen sink that us is probably the best way to get ahold of me or you can follow me on LinkedIn or ping me on LinkedIn. I post, you know, two to three times a week, usually ranting and raving about random things in the restaurant sort of hospitality space. So if you’re in the space or you’re curious about the space, you know,

would always love feedback or thoughts or suggestions on that front. Those are probably the two best places to kind of get a hold of me for the most part. So yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (01:02:33.418)
Okay, and Alistair is spelled A -L -I -S -T -A -I -R. Levine is L -E -V -I -N -E. So you can put together his email address or you can find him on LinkedIn to follow the different things he rants about. And then the last question I have for you, Alistair, is I want you to think whether it’s on the personal and professional side about a particular challenge that you went through in life, something you overcame and then the lessons that you learned coming out the other side.

Alistair Levine (01:02:49.332)
Yep.

Alistair Levine (01:03:04.693)
Yeah, I mean, think for me, know, COVID was obviously about as challenging as it could come for our industry, right? We went from, hey, normal business operations to nothing within the span of 10 days. And it was unclear, especially in the Bay Area, we really didn’t come back to normal operations until 2021. So you went pretty close to a year in a heavily disrupted

Operation thing and so we tried a ton of stuff. We launched a virtual brand called Mac and cheese shop The OBR CEO the restaurant group was you know instrumental in in sort of standing up We we we just sort of were flinging things at the walls And on the kitchen sink side, we were basically weaving one step more review from that where we were reliant on our Restaurant partners that we support making good decisions

for their businesses so that we could continue to get paid by those businesses and service them. Well, every other week there was a new PPP or ERTC or other financial implication thing. Now, obviously plenty of free money floating around, which was nice, but it was certainly very, very dynamic. The good thing for me, and one of my favorite sort of sayings is don’t let a good crisis go to waste.

Because what I find, so we were in the middle, when COVID hit, we were in the middle of a massive AP system of migration. So we were moving from one AP system provider to another. And we ended up basically completing the entire migration in three months that would normally have taken us 18 months. Because the volume, weren’t buying, restaurants weren’t buying a lot of products. I’ll just tell you in March and April of 2020 in Northern California and.

the other areas that we service. And so as a result, like the volume was way down. So that made it easier to move. People were also kind of at home and whatever minimal chaos we were adding to their life was nothing and was an irrelevant rounding error compared to the chaos that was already occurring in their life. We were sort of an afterthought on that.

Alistair Levine (01:05:24.871)
Hey, you guys are making some changes. Okay, whatever. We’re all making changes. I’m changing everything. Everything’s changed every three weeks. Like I, like, I don’t care. Go ahead. Right. And was it this music thing? Could we have done things differently? Absolutely. But you know, for me, you can spend a lot of time kind of wallowing in headwinds, or you can get on with figuring out how to sort of where’s the opportunity in this space. Right. I mean, are you look at

You look at any of the last major recessions, tons of startups came out of them because people got laid off and were like, well, I’m going to chase my dream. Airbnb, Uber, you can go through. There’s a whole long list. If you haven’t pulled it up, I’d suggest Googling this at some point. But yeah, I think, know, for me, it was incredibly challenging. You know, was working a ton, was basically trying to save, you know, both businesses.

was unsure at times whether they were savable, which was as stressful as it comes, especially when you inherit businesses, there’s an element of like, you kind of got given this thing. But also at the same time, there’s this expectation on legacy. And it’s like, it’s the…

Anthony Codispoti (01:06:40.894)
You didn’t want to be the one where this all unraveled. Yeah.

Alistair Levine (01:06:44.499)
Yeah, no, you don’t want to be the one who’s like, well, this is the guy who made this fail what was otherwise successful, right? There is a different level of pressure there. Good, bad, kind of indifferent. But I think so for us, that would certainly mean for me, that level of headwinds, I don’t think we’ll see again. But I also think the truth is it’s made and is making the industry a significant better place.

and did the same for my companies. Because we had to learn, we couldn’t just do things the way they’ve always been done. Which is always, know, everybody quotes that adage, like, it’s so dangerous. And I agree, but oftentimes, change is hard. People don’t like change, they’re not inherently ready for change. And so force change can be really, and especially massive, unprovoked, unrelenting force change can be incredibly challenging. And it certainly was for our industry.

And I still don’t think we’ve seen sort of the end of the shakeout on that front. You know, you see all these bankruptcies this year and Red Lobster and all these other large restaurant groups. I still think all that’s COVID hangover. just were able to have enough debt, but then that debt burden with interest rates adjustments become challenging, et cetera. So, you know, I think we’re still shaking all of that out, but certainly for me, that was

That was about as challenging as it gets, but I also like you, learned more in an accelerated period of time and we were able to make major changes that we kind of wouldn’t have. We reduced our menu sizes at our restaurants. We are now more simple menus, right? So, which are more profitable and easier for the staff to execute on and like, but you know, prior guests would have kind of been like, eh, I don’t know about this, or at least that was our perception. And then, you know, it’s like,

guess I was just now like, well, you’re still open. This is awesome. Yay. Right. and so I think, you know, yeah. And this is why I say don’t let a good crisis go to waste. And also I think if you sit and moan and mope and, and. You’re giving up your power. Like you have the choice of like how you’re going to address, and it ain’t going to always go your way. You’re going to fail. Some businesses are going to fail. Like it’s not always, you’re not always going to come out.

Anthony Codispoti (01:08:42.538)
It’s a new bar.

Alistair Levine (01:09:08.531)
you know, ahead, other than that you’re going to have a lot of knowledge that you wouldn’t have previously had. But I just, I would never want to give up the power I have about like, if it’s, if it’s, if if it’s things that I can do to control and change. And as long as I continue to think about them in that way, I haven’t sort of given away my power. So it’s like, well, this is happening to me. I, nothing I can do. You’re like, cool. Well, then there’s nothing you can do. And you may as well just go home. Like, so,

Anthony Codispoti (01:09:36.808)
I love that. I love a couple of things there. I love the don’t let a good crisis go to waste. You guys found ways to take advantage of the situation, to leverage it in positive ways, to tighten your belts, to make simpler menus, which certainly helps to control your costs. And I really love that you turned Eeyore into a verb. I’ve never heard that done before. But Alistair, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story today. I really appreciate it.

Alistair Levine (01:09:37.524)
Yeah, that’s kind of my

Alistair Levine (01:10:05.973)
First, thank you for having me.

Anthony Codispoti (01:10:07.486)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.