How Peter Frey is Reinventing Sonny’s BBQ for the Modern Consumer | Restaurants & Franchises Series

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: 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 Kodespode and today’s guest is Peter Fry, the chief brand officer at Sunny’s Barbecue, which has been serving delicious southern style barbecue since 1968, offering slow smoked meats and a warm welcoming atmosphere in nearly 100 locations across the southeast United States. Their mission is to spread kindness through great food and genuine hospitality. Under Peter’s leadership, the company created the Q the Kindness CSR platform, launched a mobile app with over 100,000 downloads and rolled out innovative marketing strategies that put guests at the center of everything Sunny’s barbecue does. He also spearheaded an agency RFP process for brand marketing transformation, resulting in a successful recruitment campaign that boosted career site views by 88% year over year. Peter is a dynamic executive with a master’s in business administration and has successfully led transformative brand initiatives at SeaWorld and Darden before joining Sunny’s in 2019. His focus on guest centered strategies has helped elevate Sunny’s reputation and expand its reach. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add 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 cash flow by implementing one of our innovative 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 chief brand officer at Sunny’s barbecue. Peter, I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Peter Frey: Well, happy new year, Anthony. Glad to be here. Appreciate you, the offer to speak with everybody today.

Anthony Codispoti: All right. So before we get into talking about Sunny’s, let’s talk about some of the bigger stops that you’ve made along the way. You were with Darden for a long time who owns several large restaurant brands. Which brands did you get to work on and what kind of projects did you undertake?

Peter Frey: Yeah. So I had the good fortune of being there for 14 years, about 10 years with a little brand called Olive Garden, sure you’ve heard of them. And then about three to four years with Red Lobster before they were sped off and went into private equity.

So for me, it was a great training ground. I had started my career in an advertising agency in New York for Sachi and Sachi. Love that experience, but for me, really wanted to get on to the client side and manage big projects and work on kind of the full guest experience, if you will. So with Olive Garden, just so many exciting things. I actually started in local marketing. Work with operators, went out, basically covered half the country, visited almost every single restaurant and would tour with operators and build programs that were centric to their communities. What was great about the Darden experience and a lot of our executives had been through packaged goods background. So we had a lot of that training that was implemented at Darden. So it gave me all the fundamentals I felt I needed in order to be a successful marketer. But they had a great rotation program. So you’d be in media, then you’d switch over to merchandising and then you go into core menu or product development and over to advertising.

So you really were afforded a breath of experience within a short amount of time. I’d say some of the bigger projects we launched a culinary program in Italy. We partnered with a winery there who had a restaurant and facility where we could take managers there to get trained in the art of Italian cooking. So we’d take them over for a week. They get immersed in the culture, train with chefs there. The idea is to bring that spirit back to the United States and bring it to our guests ultimately.

That continues today. So I was part of the team that founded that. We actually had a consumer sweepstakes where we brought guests over to experience it as well. I think another big thing before there was Hispanic marketing or diversity, we launched, I would say, one of the first ever in restaurants campaign for Hispanic consumers.

So we partnered with agencies, developed a whole campaign strategy specifically for those markets. So those are, I would say two of the things I’m most proud of when I was there.

Anthony Codispoti: So that’s interesting what you’re talking about, how they had to kind of rotate through these different disciplines. And at first I’m thinking, well, that sounds like kind of wasteful. Like, you know, you’re here, you’re just kind of getting, you know, an understanding of what goes on here, and then they move you over here. But as I kind of thought through it a little bit more, it’s like, well, what a great way to sort of cross pollinate ideas and get you to understand more of the big picture of kind of how everything ties together. Is that kind of how it worked out of practice?

Peter Frey: Yeah, and it’s exactly, and it’s, you know, as you look to progress in your career, you may not be the master of everything, but at least you have a general baseline and can speak to the activities. So, you know, again, I may have leaned into certain areas where I may have felt I was better prepared or better expert. But as I rose to my career, it gave me an appreciation for the discipline and also helped open our eyes to there’s, there are ways to make improvements, you know, because I’ve, I’ve actually, when I was at SeaWorld, we’ll get to that, but I went into operations for a couple of years, ran a park. So by doing those things, it kind of opens your eyes and gives you a better appreciation of how the whole organization works together versus just how your particular department might impact things. So for me, I’ve tried to employ that as I have gone into other parts of my career, that same philosophy of rotating, you know, get that experience. It’s, you don’t have to do it. But if you, I feel if you want to be successful as a leader further in the organization, it benefits you to have a broader knowledge.

Anthony Codispoti: That makes a lot of sense. What was the timing of when you were doing local marketing specifically at Darden? Was this like early 2000s?

Peter Frey: Numb older than that. So that was in 1996. So I started there. That was my first role. I did that for about two years. So again, you know, the marketing landscape was much different back then. The sophistication digital marketing, it wasn’t there.

So a lot of it was truly grassroots program. You put binders together that had, you know, best practices. It was very, you know, today in today’s standards, it would be arcade, but, you know, good, for brand like Darden too, it’s, it’s about the personal connection. You know, we are, we’re good. We have to connect with team members, our guests. So for me, it was a benefit to be out there and do it in person.

Anthony Codispoti: So yeah, back in 96, there were a lot of people who still didn’t know what the internet was. So paint a picture for us. What did the local marketing look like back then? Was it mostly, I don’t know, like newspaper ads, coupons to the house, like radio spots, TV spots?

Peter Frey: Absolutely. So what we put together is basically a local marketing toolkit. They could resource it and we would actually have to then go out and produce all these materials. So it could be banners, it could be a lunch program, a lot of different things of that nature, but very, you know, rudimentary.

Today I’m going to jump forward, you know, 30 years, talk to you a little bit about what we do at, at Sunnies. We just rolled out a whole new local marketing program. It’s all automated.

All the programs have been thought out. And basically now what we do is we have the operator can go in there and say, Hey, I want to do a school program. They’re able to go in there and look at the creative that we put together.

They can customize it, put their own information in, send it directly to the printer. And really, they don’t need to get us involved unless they need a little bit of assistance. But, you know, our idea now is to sit down with them, help them put plans together, and then let them go find, we have all the tools available where they can actually execute the program. So again, a lot of, you know, very different than it was, you know, 20, 30 years ago.

Anthony Codispoti: And I do want to hear a lot more about the marketing initiatives that you’ve undertaken at Sunnies because there’s some really cool stuff that you guys have already done. And I know are continuing to work on before we get there. I want to hear about your experience at SeaWorld, which you just referenced. There was, there were some big challenges that went on while you were there, specifically something called Blackfish. Can you tell us about that?

Peter Frey: Yeah. So to just paint the picture a little bit, obviously, you know, for most of your guests, we’ll know SeaWorld is a theme park centered around aquatic life. They, beyond just being a theme park, though, there is the scientific aspect that I think a lot of people didn’t, they weren’t aware of at the time that this came out. There was a unfortunate tragedy where a trainer was killed by a killer whale. That came in about, you know, nine to 10 months before I started the company. That incident happened. I came in and I was the vice president of marketing for their parks here in Orlando.

It’s where I live. And I did that for a bit of time before I was tapped into take a senior role on the leadership team in marketing for the whole organization. But fast forward, there was a film created called Blackfish. And that film was a documentary of a particular, one of the whales that had been involved in the accident that took the life of the trainer. And the documentary was, you know, trying to tell the story of how the whale was captured, the conditions it’s held in, not just at SeaWorld, but the larger picture of these animals that are in theme parks or in aquatic centers.

And it’s a one-sided story. So obviously, you know, the company had experienced, you know, different opinions from people throughout the time that the company’s been around. You know, not everybody is supportive of zoos and aquariums and things like that.

So this had a slanted view towards anti-animal captivity and the, you know, the science behind it. What had happened is the film came out. It had kind of low visibility until it was acquired by CNN. And then it was boosted, you know, all across, you know, the United States. And ultimately went on to Netflix and really gained a lot of notoriety.

I think at one time it was actually considered for an Oscar nomination. That was, it was very damaging over time to the brand because one, I don’t think that the organization was one prepared to, prepared for the kind of blow back that was to come. And while I think some may have been more prepared than others, we couldn’t get the organization to unified behind a strategy was more about let’s just let this thing ride out because we know, we know what we’re doing and we know that we’re doing good things. Well, fast forward a couple months and ultimately, you know, things started to unfold and it did start to have, you know, an impact on the organizational structure. We had some leadership changes and it forced us to then come up with a plan to kind of counter, counter the narrative. And I think that was the, the lesson that we should all take away from this is we need to be in control of our brand narrative at all times. And at this point, we kind of stepped back thinking that it was going to just resolve itself. Again, not everybody had that opinion. But when we came to the unified front, like, yes, we had to do something. My team, we already had a plan put together, we implemented it very quickly. And over time, I think we built it built back the brand credibility, but it was an easy journey.

And I could also say if I can survive that experience, I could survive anything. So, and our strategy really was about uncovering the truth and getting it from the voices of the experts themselves, which were the partners that we had that were involved in the care of the animals are vets are scientists that are taking care of them. And a learning that we can get from the park experience, how does that really translate out into the natural world and trying to get our guests to understand that it’s complex, but how do you understand that?

How do we educate them and entertain them at the same time? So a lot of things have changed. But I think the organizations in a much better place than it was, you know, 10 years ago, things are in a much better direction. And professionally, you know, for me, it was, it was, you know, a life changing experience. And again, it’s made me think a better marketer, a better person, you know, and I wouldn’t want to do it again, but I wouldn’t take it away.

Anthony Codispoti: One of those things that you look back and I’m glad I’ve gone through it, but yeah, want to do it again.

Peter Frey: So interesting that I’m curious on a couple of things. Obviously, like you said, the Blackfish film was damaging for the brand. How was that measured in terms of park attendance, like overall sales? I don’t know, like you’re doing surveys on sort of brand affinity? There’s a couple things.

Peter Frey: So I mean, it’s difficult to diagnose the impact of that particular event on the whole organization. There are definitely brand perceptional things that we could look at. And we did some, some ongoing NPS and kind of ran down a few studies. So we really had a good sense over time, how we were making progress and getting back to where we needed to be. The other thing that was going on is you have to understand, particularly in Orlando, we’re in a very competitive market. And we’ve got Disney and Universal.

This was at the same time Universal just launched Harry Potter. So it changed the dynamic of the whole, you know, industry and particularly attendance here in Orlando. And we didn’t have the capital infrastructure and pipeline created to compete with that type of experience. So that in itself changed a lot of the approach of what SeaWorld would become in the future, which is again, I would say it was a quiet sleepy park in the beginning, had a couple rides. Now it’s one of the most, you know, thrilling theme parks you can find in Orlando with many more coasters and attractions. So there’s a lot more energy, but at the same time, it preserved the educational animal connection side. So, you know, that, I think in combination with Blackfish, all the things that happened there and what happened competitively, it changed our strategy of what we needed to do to be successful in the future. Interesting.

Anthony Codispoti: So it ended up being probably long term, a very positive, I don’t know, but you can use that word to sort of cause everybody to take a step back and take stock of like, where are we? Who are we? Where are we going? Kind of a thing.

Peter Frey: Absolutely. It accelerated a lot of growth. I think it also created almost like a mandate of what the brand would be in the future. We had a new CEO come in, very visionary guy, he had a very, you know, concrete plan on what he wanted to implement. And, you know, we did everything we could to bring that to life. And again, I think a lot of folks would have liked to have gone faster, but we were still going at warp speed. So I’m proud of everything that was accomplished in that time.

Anthony Codispoti: So how did the opportunity at Sunny’s first come about? Yeah.

Peter Frey: So we jumped through because I was at SeaWorld for six years in marketing, then I moved over to operations and I ran Discovery Co. That’s a all inclusive theme park where you swim with dolphins. And for me, again, as an experience, you know, managing over 500 people, culinary operations, gift shops, photography, guest relations, all these kind of things, you know, opened my eyes to again, from an executive presence, how do I take my marketing learning?

How can I apply that to operations? When I went back into marketing, I don’t have a better appreciation of when we want to put something through to the guest or into a team member. I think as a, as a marketer, you think it’s pretty simple.

As an operator, it’s pretty darn complex because there’s so many things you’re already doing. So I just wanted to make sure we got that across that, you know, when, if you have an opportunity to try something different within your career, take the chance, you know, and it could be just a two-year stint like I did, but again, you know, it provided me with so much learning and foundation that, you know, I still, I love that opportunity. It was really a lot of fun.

For Sunnies, you know, that opportunity came up. I, I interviewed, I’d always loved the restaurant industry, as you can tell, you know, I’ve been there for many years. And I thought it was a good challenge. It was a different experience. I’d come from very large, multi-billion dollar organizations, big brands, and, you know, now we’re at a restaurant company that has a lot of heritage, been around for nearly 60 years, and, you know, little under 100 restaurants, franchise organization, never done that before.

Everything I’d done before was company-owned. So again, a new challenge. And I think that, you know, as a marketer, you want something that’s different. You want something that’s going to challenge you.

I think if you’re doing the same thing all the time, it kind of gets a little, you know, routine, and you’re looking for a new experience. So for me, I saw the challenge. I liked the people. A lot of that time too, it’s about the culture and if you’re going to fit within the teamwork, the team that presents itself. So yeah, it took the chance and I’ve been there almost six years now.

Anthony Codispoti: So you kind of touched on something that I’m curious about, which is it’s this tremendous legacy brand, right? It’s been around for a long time, great heritage to it, wonderful story, lots of brand recognition in the markets in which it exists.

How do you kind of balance that, that heritage legacy aspect of the brand with, at the same time, like we need to make changes and adapt to new marketing conditions, new consumer demands? It seems like that’s kind of an interesting teeter-titer to sit on. Yeah.

Peter Frey: So about 10 or 12 years ago, the brand had gone through a little bit of a resurgence. They did some remodeling and changed the look and feel, create more energy within the restaurant. But there were still some opportunities. Some of it, again, you have a crisis, you take advantage of the crisis and then accelerates things that you’ve been thinking of. So, you know, kind of going through COVID, coming out of that experience, the restaurant model is different than it was before. The guests are different, how they interact with restaurants and food in general.

One of the things that, you know, a legacy part of the experience was a salad bar. Only a three, four percent of the guests never took advantage of it, but nobody ever wanted it to go away. You know, it was a cost center. It was something that really wasn’t generating revenue.

If anything, it was labor and food waste. You know, so we took the opportunity to say, you know, is this really adding to the guest experience? What could we do if we took that away?

What could we bring to enhance the guest experience? We took it away, had a little bit of rumbling. But again, you know, those are things that you have to look at. Do we keep it because it is part of our legacy or is it something that adds to the future of the brand? Is that something that our guests that we’re trying to attract really are appealed to?

And the answer was no. The guests that the younger generation, they’re not in the salad bar, all you can eat, those kind of things. So we have to adapt some of those elements to match the consumer of today. Again, faced with COVID, we had to institute curbside service within seven days. You know, we shut down the restaurant, no more in dining room service. We were 60 percent of our business was inside the dining room.

What do we do now? Fortunately, we have over 90 percent of our restaurants have drive-throughs. So that helped out.

We could still execute there. And then we set up curbside service where people could order online, come pick it up, and then we would bring it out to their car.

Anthony Codispoti: So did you already have the online ordering component in place?

Peter Frey: We had just put that in about, I think, in 2018-19. So again, we were a little bit ahead when it came to that. Some brands were caught in a position where they didn’t have that online ordering component. So we got through that experience. We actually had some of our best financial years through the pandemic. And when we look back at our five-year performance, we’re still ahead of the industry when it comes to traffic and sales. And you kind of look at how everything, everything’s been up and down.

And as things start to stabilize, but if you look at the long-term run of Sunnies, we’ve been very successful at maintaining that market share that we had gained during the pandemic. So the things that we did implement too, though, with curbside service, we immediately, once things kind of stabilized, we immediately saw that our scores started to go down because we weren’t operating at the right level. Once we started opening the dining rooms, you know, it wasn’t the 100 percent focus that we had during the pandemic. So now is an additional revenue center that we never had before. And we have to manage that on top of the other ones that we have. So we looked at what technology can help us implement curbside better.

And we partnered with a group called Flyby. And they’re basically sits on your, on mobile apps. And when you order through Sunnies, we’re able to track the guest journey from the location where they ordered directly into the spot that they pull up in. We can track that at the restaurant and have that food available when they arrive, you know, and helps us prioritize the orders as well. So again, taking an opportunity, we put something in, it was good, then we could make it better. And I think that’s how I’ve been on our approach a lot of the times is continuing to look at what are the technologies that really add the right type of benefit and return both for our franchisees and for the guests. So we’re not going to be the cutting edge first to market type of brand, but we will be close to follow once we, you know, we see it working and it makes sense for our market.

Anthony Codispoti: Peter, you made the point that customers are different post COVID. Is that mostly people are doing more takeout or what’s the difference?

Peter Frey: Yeah. So again, I mentioned we were about 60% died in prior to the pandemic. Now we’re closer to 50-50, sometimes a little bit more on the died out side. So, you know, a lot more drive through, a lot more takeout. Third party has picked up for us. You know, that was a little bit of a sleeper in the beginning. I think a lot of brands were trying to figure out how to make that work. So we’re embracing that. We’re also seeing our catering business go up, you know, people returning to work. So we’re having to look at in the future. And now we’re, you know, this brand is all about the future.

We have been around for 55 years, 56 years. Now we’re in a position where we want to grow. We want to add additional franchisees. We want to add additional units.

And we think we’ve got the model and the structure to do that. Part of it is looking at smaller buildings. We just opened up one here in Winter Haven, Florida. It went from an average of over 5,000 square feet.

This one’s just under 4,000, about 3900 square feet. So we can operate and still get the same type of, you know, great return with fewer footprint and, you know, maybe a few, you know, redistribute the labor model a little bit too to handle that. So, you know, we’re looking for ways to adapt our model to the markets that we serve. You know, it’s not going to be a cookie cutter. Every single market might have the same type of prototype or labor model.

Anthony Codispoti: So you see these changes probably sticking around longer term. Yes. There’s fewer people dining in-house, more people doing drive through curbside using, you know, the third party delivery services. This is here to stay.

Peter Frey: I think so. You know, and part of it is, again, you look at the younger generation, they’re about convenience. They want it at the time they want it, at the place they want it.

And, you know, I think at the end of the day, there is a balance because we don’t want to be a commodity. You know, we’re not just barbecue. We are an experience. So our task is to try to figure out. And I think, you know, I hope we’re doing it.

I hope it is not the right word. I think we’re doing the right things to make sure that Sunny’s is a lifestyle brand, you know, and no matter where you’re going, we can be part of that experience with you. If you choose to do it in the restaurant, you’re going to have a great time connecting with our servers and our team members and, you know, enjoying the atmosphere that we have. If you want to do it at your own home, you’re going to have a great experience.

If you want to do it on a tailgate or a picnic in the park, we have the perfect product and experience that kind of brings that to life. You know, we’re about making that human connection. So I was going to say, part of our strategy is if you think about, you know, what barbecue is, it is about connection. And for us in particular, we’re about Southern hospitality. And, you know, the idea that we’re trying to convey is imagine yourself a Saturday in the South.

What is that like? It’s about connecting with friends. It’s the one day of the week that you can relax and be yourself. And it’s about going to football games and watching them on TV or whatever it may be.

You don’t have a care in the world. Sunday’s a little bit more stressful because you’ve got to go to work on Monday. So, you know, for us, how do we get that across that every day when you interact with Sunny’s, it’s like a Saturday in the South. And that’s kind of what our goal is.

Anthony Codispoti: Like a Saturday in the South. Yeah. And you guys have a marketing campaign that you’ve introduced. What is it? Everything’s sunny? Yeah, it’s always sunny here. It’s always sunny here. Tell us about that. How did that come about? Yeah.

Peter Frey: So it goes into a little bit of the strategy that I had spoken to earlier, but about a year and a half ago, we partnered with a new agency out of Tampa, Dunn & Co. Very successful award-winning agency has a lot of experience in food service. And we kind of stripped everything back and we said, okay, let’s make sure we really know who we are. You know, again, when you’re a legacy brand, you’ve got a good pulse of what you are.

We also try to identify our consumers and making sure that we have a message that’s going to resonate with each one of our consumers. And there’s, it’s more about the segmentation. So there’s a lot of psychographic information about it. It’s not just about the demo.

It’s about how people are feeling and what they’re trying to get out of life. And we want to make sure that we had a message that could resonate with those folks. We did a lot of research. We looked at, we did focus groups, and we tried to find a position within the marketplace that we could own that would help differentiate ourselves. We’re known already for our pitmasters, the food quality, there’s nothing there that, you know, is in question because that’s what our message has been about the last 10 or 12 years is a bit about our pitmasters. For this, it was about communicating that everyday experience that we’re the everyday man kind of brand. And, you know, we want to be part of your life where it makes the most sense. You know, how can sunnies help you?

And that’s where this whole idea of Saturdays in the South, trying to be that convenient partner when you’re trying to connect with friends and family. We’ve launched it. We’ve seen, you know, increases. We’ve done some brand lift studies post the launch.

We’ve been out about six months now. Awareness is up about 30%. We’ve seen a 30% increase in recall. So a lot of purchase intent about 20%.

So we’re seeing all the numbers that you’d want to see are moving in the right direction. So for us, it’s about the balance of now, instead of always having promotion messages on, can we get to a place where we can really start talking more about the brand experience and less about, hey, come in for this deal or that deal. So as a marketer, that’s kind of the sweet spot. Where can you get where you get the right balance of traffic driving news with sustainable brand messaging?

Anthony Codispoti: And so what is the brand experience? I come in, I’ve never been to a sunnies before. What am I expecting?

Peter Frey: Yeah, if you’re a regular, you’re expecting somebody to know your name almost. And I’m not lying. I have done shifts there where I’ve been the host. They walk right past me. They’re like, Nope, I want to go sit with Claudia. I know exactly what I’m going to get.

I don’t need a menu. Those kind of things. So you’ve got your, we actually literally have people that come in there every day for lunch. So you’ve got those kind of people that it’s just, it’s like cheers.

We’ve used that metaphor in the past. We just know who they are and they’re part of our community. The other part I think will be, you’re kind of, you know, everyday man coming in for lunch, you know, they’re working hard and, you know, it comes in with some buddies. We get a lot of law enforcement. We get a lot of, you know, kind of the blue collar workers coming in, connecting over lunch.

And then at dinner, it’s about the family. You know, it’s a very safe space. It’s very, you know, I would say it’s not a fun, it’s not a TGI fries or something, but it’s a relaxing place where you can be yourself. And I think that’s what we’re trying to say.

Everybody’s welcome here, you know, and you can just kind of kick back and relax and be yourself. So, you know, when it comes to barbecue, it can be at your terms too. You can have a 40 minute meal or you can get in and out in 20 minutes. So, you know, the thing is the food is always fresh. We can serve it at the pace that’s right for you. So, you know, I think that’s a nice differentiator as well.

Anthony Codispoti: I want to get more into some of the other marketing efforts and the technology implementations that you guys have done. But before we do that and get too far away from it, I want to hear more about the franchise opportunity because you said you guys are poised for growth, you are ready, you’re looking for new franchisees, new locations, paint a picture for us. What is the opportunity look like?

Peter Frey: Yeah. So, you know, historically, a lot of the relationships have been, you know, more about opportunities that presented themselves versus really proactively going out and marketing the brand. We brought in a vice president of franchise development in April of last year, and his focus is really building out the organization and a support team that helps, you know, position the brand for growth. We’re actually going out to conferences now and conventions and we’re putting trade booths together and really getting out there and marketing and getting our name out there.

Again, if you’re in Florida, if you’re in the southeast, you know, Sunnies. Here we have a potential to, we’ve talked about going to Ohio and, you know, some of these other markets that are kind of in the fringe of our current territory. So, you know, the dynamics of the restaurant business have changed.

It’s, you know, the pressures are a little bit tougher than they were before. But again, we think we’ve got a right, the right model and the right support structure that can deliver a good profit for that investor. So, we have some large investors that have upwards of 30 restaurants, and then we have some that are one or two or three store operators. So, you know, there’s, it’s not a right size for anybody. We are, you can accommodate whatever makes sense for the market that we’re operating in. So, I think we’re just open for new type of models as well. So, like I mentioned, you know, there may be an opportunity as you get into a more urban area to have a different kind of operating, operating model and unit configuration than we do traditionally. So, I think it’s a great opportunity now to get into this type of business. It’s a very secure when you look at, you know, the years that we’ve been around and the kind of returns that we’ve delivered. I think it’s a great opportunity for investors.

Anthony Codispoti: Are there any particular locations that you’re looking for or that are already spoken for? Which of those lists would kind of be easier to share?

Peter Frey: Yeah, but I don’t have, I’m not privy to that right now. I mean, I think we’re doing a lot of research right now. And the idea is this year will be here that we’re kind of going out there and pushing those markets.

And we’ve already, we just started opening up the pipeline. We’ve got a website out there now. We’re getting about a hundred inquiries a month. You know, so we’re just starting again to open the door to, you know, hearing to potential franchisees of their interest in kind of going through the vetting process.

So, we’re just thinking, kind of taking little baby steps, but I think we’re going to, that’s a big focus on what we’re going to be doing over the next five years.

Anthony Codispoti: Peter, what is Q the kind of this. Wow, glad you asked.

Peter Frey: So another brand similar to SeaWorld that behind the scenes does a lot of great things. And you know what’s interesting is that the franchisees that we have, this is their passion. They’re in their communities. We may be a chain restaurant, but we’re actually home by a lot of like local operators. These are the folks that live in their communities.

And we had a lot of different activities that were going on, but we could never pull it together and put it under kind of one umbrella. So Q the kindness is simply that that bone that ties all of our activities together. And what we really stand for, our version of Southern hospitality is kindness. And we do it through random acts of barbecue, where we go out and we’ll surprise people with a barbecue.

They’re nominated by somebody in their community. It could be a teacher, firefighter, just somebody doing a good thing. We’ve gone to hospitals after you know, somebody’s got food cancer treatment, and we’ve surprised the workers there with a meal. We will do recognitions for different groups and you know, provide meals or monetary donations to different organizations. So it’s really our way of reinforcing how we impact and interact in the community. So we were so serious about this that we created a position called Chief Kindness Officer. And there’s somebody that’s nominated from the field.

It could be a manager or an employee. And they are kind of our representative and help us determine our strategies and our activities. We work with them on our plans and executing that. So we’ve just had, we’ve been doing this since 2020. So we’ve had two Chief Kindness Officers and we’re about to go out and surprise our next one. So he’ll be selected in the next couple of weeks.

Anthony Codispoti: And you just show up and there’s some sort of like a publisher’s clearing house kind of life.

Peter Frey: Exactly. Yep. So we got a group of people who are flying up there and we’re surprising that person. And obviously that person was nominated by their leadership. So we vetted through many people to figure out, okay, who is the best person that can represent this position? We give them, you know, some monetary support. They can either keep it for themselves or a lot of times they’ll donate it back to charity. So, you know, we want to make sure that they’re rewarded in some way for the extra work that we’re asking them to help us with. So yeah, it’s a really, the other thing that we have is a Chief Kindness Crew. So they’re kind of like our board of directors, if you will, and they’re made up of team members. And we meet with them monthly to again work through programs and figure out, okay, well, what are we going to do this month? And, you know, what are the different activities that we can do to bring to life? The other thing that part, excuse me, part of the, the local marketing strategy that we have is we publish, you know, calendars of activities that give restaurants ideas on how they can execute either local marketing programs or random acts of kindness type things.

Anthony Codispoti: What can you give us an example of what one of those suggestions looks like?

Peter Frey: Yeah, so we might like we’re going to be doing a law enforcement thing. So in some instances, we’ll do a system wide promotion work, you know, we’ll open it up and everybody, if you’re a teacher, you sign up and we’ll give you a free meal. In some instances, we’ll make it a voluntary thing and you can go out and set up the program in your community. So in some instances, we do a first responders day, but then we’ll also do one in particular for law enforcement. That’s a voluntary one that our restaurants can elect to participate in or not. There may be food donation drives that they can do.

So again, we’ll set up all these ideas or give them, you know, here are things that are happening in the month of February or March. We’ll give them all the connections and if they want to participate, you know, it’s at the level that they can can handle at the time. You know, it’s it’s difficult to do all these things and still operate restaurants. So that’s a delicate balance, you know.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah, sometimes you can get a little over creative and it ends up choking things down. But exactly. I want to talk about some of the other innovations that you’ve played a part in introducing. Specifically right now, the mobile app and the loyalty rewards program. Peter, tell me if I have these numbers correct, because some of them are almost unbelievable. So 100,000 downloads, 300,000 loyalty members, 83% cart conversion rate. That’s insane. 20. That’s 20% higher than web and 29% email conversion rate all within the first six months.

Peter Frey: Yes, no, these are those are right. Yes, yes. And we were blown away. I mean, when you 100,000, I mean, that seemed really big. You know, again, this is only six months. How many mobile apps do you have on your phone for a restaurant? So we took all that into consideration as we’re developing this. Again, my team is incredible. I’ve got someone on my team, Katie Love. She’s director of marketing. She’s leading a lot of these initiatives and has a passion for digital marketing. So we came from a place where we were doing, you know, a version of CRM already, we had over a million people on our database, we’re marketing to them through email, but it’s not really very customized. You know, we want to get to a place where we can look at behaviors and then start doing behavioral trigger marketing based on the activities that are happening. So we’ve done a little bit of that, but now we’re at a place where we can push these 1 million people into a loyalty program where we can have a more individualized approach.

And I’ll give you an example of something that we had just done. Normally, we would, we don’t send out a ton of coupons, but being part of our email program, which is called our QCrew, one of the benefits is you get inside tips and you get, you know, dollars off sometimes. So we would do a five off 30. Normally, over a, you know, I think it was about a 14 day period, we get about 4,000 redemptions.

Take that same offer, push it through the app now, we’re no longer doing it on QCrew. We had 9,000 redemptions. So smaller base, more, you know, engaged audience, and we doubled the amount of respondents. So that’s the kind of results that we want to get to is, you know, how do we get to a place where we know the guests so much that we can take away some of these bigger promotions and talk to the guests that really are engaged in the brand and offer them incentives to come one or two more times a year. That’s all we’re asking because it’s much easier.

Everybody will tell you, much easier to engage in a current guest that it is to try to win somebody over. So, you know, the numbers that you’re seeing, they’re a little outdated. We’re continuing to grow, but you know, we’re very impressed. Obviously, when you come through the mobile app, you’re more likely to complete that purchase than you were on the web. You might be just kind of shopping around and seeing things, but when you have that mobile app on your phone and you start engaging it, there’s a higher commitment level to complete the purchase. So that’s why we’re seeing so much, the numbers are so much better through that mobile app than they are on the website.

Anthony Codispoti: So the numbers that I gave are actually better today. Yes, yes. They’ve improved. That’s really impressive. I mean, Peter, you made the point that, you know, hey, we’re not going to be right at the cutting edge, but we’re going to be pretty close to follow. I mean, I have to imagine, particularly for a restaurant chain of your size, that you guys are absolutely right on the edge. I mean, maybe there are bigger restaurants than you that have adopted some of these technologies more quickly, but is my perception of that correct that you compared yourself to similarly sized restaurants that you guys are?

Peter Frey: Yeah, I’d say I’d say I like to say we’re punching above our weight class, you know, at times. It’s a good way to. So, you know, when it comes to the mobile app, I think if we would have jumped too soon, we would have looked into white label kind of developing our own thing. You know, this is a, we’re working with thanks. They’ve got a great platform. We don’t, we’re not in a technology business, so we don’t have to do it ourselves. I also feel that for us to be successful and what we have noticed is that we embrace our franchisees. We want to know their thoughts. We had put together a roadmap and we had all this vision, but they also have thoughts.

They want, hey, we were kept, we kept in hearing, we want a mobile app and we want this and that. But we also had to build the infrastructure that could support that mobile app. So what we did is we said, let’s get a couple of our, you know, thought leader franchisees to be part of the journey with us, help them in the decision making process so they could see what it takes to get from the beginning to the end. And when we did that, everything accelerated. Everything, we got people on board so much faster and allowed us to, you know, complete all the other things that we had to do in order to finally get that mobile app in place. So, you know, the, the more opportunities that you have to engage, particularly in our business with franchisees, get their input, I think you’re going to be much more successful.

Anthony Codispoti: What was maybe the biggest challenge that you guys ran into rolling out the app? I think a lot of internal

Peter Frey: conflict in the beginning, you know, different priorities, folks, some folks not believing that we were a brand that needed to have a mobile app, but hey, we’re just too small. You know, we’re not a, we’re not a Chick-fil-A, we’re not a Sennett.

People aren’t going to download the app. So, a lot of it was trying to build the case study and the confidence on, with some folks that were very influential. And I think, you know, we did a good job. And again, a part of that was bringing some of these franchisees to get their point of view and perspective.

Anthony Codispoti: Let’s talk about, Peter, the media attribution system. Tell me what that is and what it’s doing for you.

Peter Frey: Well, it’s again, you know, for us, it’s about having the right partners. So again, this is a technology that’s proprietary to us. It’s something that our agencies now have. And when we partner with Dun and Co, about a year and a half ago, that was a deficit.

You know, some of it, you’re, you’re flying a little blind, you know, and I think marketing in the past has been susceptible to, oh, these are fuzzy numbers or, you know, you know, that kind of thing. Now we have the capability. Before we were working with Dun, we could look at online revenue. So we could see somebody saw our ad or interacted with it. We could track it down to the purchase. But again, that’s only half of our, of our business.

So partnering with them, they’ve got different platforms that they work with. We have tokenized credit cards. So what we’re able to do now is again, if I viewed an ad or I clicked on something and then I went to the restaurant and I purchased with the credit card that links back to my account.

Now I’m able to see that I saw the ad, I actually purchased it and within a certain window, we’ll attribute it to that ad to say, okay, we’re taking credit for that.

Anthony Codispoti: They’ve also done, sorry, let me make sure I understand this before we move on, Peter. So obviously everybody’s all concerned about privacy, especially as you know, pertains to online activity. But what you’re explaining to me isn’t piercing any kind of a privacy veil. You know that somebody, you don’t know who you don’t know.

Peter Frey: It’s all anonymized.

Anthony Codispoti: So we don’t know the person somebody saw an ad and then you got this tokenized credit card information that one of your, you know, partners is able to sort of connect the dots in the background and says that anonymous person who saw our ad yesterday came into the restaurant today for lunch and spent, you know, $23 on a barbecue sandwich and a couple of drinks. And you don’t know who that person is, but now you know that that ad is working to put a butt in the seat at that restaurant. Is that right?

Peter Frey: Correct. Yes. And then they are also able to do some testing to look at the incrementality to say, okay, for those that weren’t exposed to the ad versus those exposed, what did we really get? So we can attribute, we did this yesterday and we were working with some of our agency partners. I’m just going to throw an example out, but you know, we generated $42 million in revenue from the ads and, you know, $5 million was incremental. So that could, that was basically saying, had those person never seen the ad, you know, they probably wouldn’t have come in.

So again, we, you know, we don’t want to take credit for things that you know, that we’re not attributed to the marketing that we’re doing. So we’re really trying to tease out to the, is this a good investment? Are we driving people in?

Is there incremental visitation happening? So, you know, for me, you in the past, you would have to do a medium X modeling, all this weird math to try to, you know, figure out is the marketing working. Now, fortunately, all of our marketing is besides billboards and stuff, all of our marketing is digital now. So we’re on CTV, we’re on, you know, promo gram, promo grammic, we’re on SEO. So anything that is involved, you know, that’s the space we’re at. We’re not an intrestral television or anything like that anymore.

Anthony Codispoti: Gotcha. And I cut you off. You were starting to tell something else about the attribution system that you’re working.

Peter Frey: Oh, well, again, you know, those are things that we’re fortunate that our partners can bring to the table and bear to the table. So again, now we can look at that. And it actually allows us to not only attribute, but then we can do some modeling to say, well, what about if we invested a little bit more money?

You know, what could happen? What are the possibilities based on the return of investment that we’re getting? Could we actually drive additional revenues?

So that’s part of our thinking moving forward as we look to grow the company and look to, you know, drive more sales is investing more behind marketing, an opportunity that we have, you know, we don’t want to be a cost center, we want to be a revenue center, you know, the ability to drive revenue.

Anthony Codispoti: Do you ever see that an ad might perform well, say, in the Orlando market, but not that’s very same ad same timing, not performing the Jacksonville market?

Peter Frey: Yeah, I would say it’s probably more centered around the offer where you’re getting at. So when I’m thinking about the ad, it’s maybe a promotion. So yeah, I think ultimately where we would love to get to is a place where the markets have more flexibility to run promotions. We would have a bank of offers that they could use. And what might work in Jacksonville may not work in Orlando, so they can work on their own. Ultimately, I’d love to just have more of a brand overarching message that we could run to talk about the experience and then locally pull the levers on the different offers that would appeal to that market.

Anthony Codispoti: Peter, say more about the work that you guys want to do in identifying behaviors and having that sort of trigger much more personalized marketing messages. Yeah.

Peter Frey: So beyond done, we also work with an agency out of Atlanta called Crowd, and they handle all of our CRM website. They also do some of our franchisee media planning. They’re helping us again, looking at the audiences that we have. We partner with these two agencies to one segment them into different marketable groups that can be linked back to Resonate and Mosaic targets. But then we’re also looking at the different types of behaviors that are happening in the restaurant and kind of doing some A-B testing to say, okay, how do we move somebody from four visits to five?

What are the activities that we can do to do that? What happens if somebody was a current guest and they drop into a lapsed guest? What is an automated offer or message that could go out to do that? So we’ve got about 20 different scenarios that we’re running in the background.

Operators don’t have to worry about anything. But as the audiences exhibit certain behaviors, they slide into one of the groups and then some type of message or offer may be triggered in order to do that.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, it’s not, I don’t get to interview a lot of chief brand officers, and I’ve got a little bit of a marketing background. So this is a lot of fun for me. What are the questions that I like to ask, you know, more like CEO, COO, CFO or HR folks. And initially it scratched off, wasn’t going to ask you. But as I’m looking at your LinkedIn page, I realize it might actually be relevant, you know, because I hear from a lot of people, it’s still a tight labor market out there, hard to, you know, find good people, hard to hold on to them. And I’m like, well, chief brand officer, this isn’t really your wheelhouse. But I’m seeing on here a recruitment marketing campaign that you launched called A Few Good People, which, and tell me if these numbers are still correct, significantly increased visitation rates and views to their careers webpage by 23% and 88% year over year? Yes. Tell us what this campaign was. How did this look?

Peter Frey: This was our first like unified campaign for the brand. So at a franchise system, the franchisee actually manages kind of works with the team members. We put the train together, but at the end of the day, the employee works for the franchisee. We wanted to put together, coming out of the pandemic, labor markets were terrible.

People were fleeing the service industry going to Amazon, all these different places. And so we wanted to come up with a campaign that we really spoke to our culture and the heart of who we are. And trying to get people to at least, if you haven’t been to us or you haven’t worked for us, just kind of learn more about us. So this whole campaign was about opening up that idea and getting people to at least express some interest. So we did get more people to our careers website.

We had more people interested in kind of feeding that pipeline, if you will, of applicants. So I mean, I wouldn’t say the labor market is great, but it’s stabilized to some degree. It’s not where we were. You’ve seen it come back a bit. Come back a bit. Yeah. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: Peter, what are some things you’re either currently working on or have planned for the future that might be fun for us to hear about? Wow.

Peter Frey: You know, for us, we have been doing so much the last, you know, five years or so. Our big emphasis, like I was mentioning before, is really going to be on growth and franchise development. So we’ll as marketers, we’re going to help shift some of our energy to support those initiatives. I think part of it also is executing what we put in place.

You know, you can at one point, at some point overload the system if you keep adding more and more. So for us, it’s about we think we’ve got the foundations now in place and it’s building on that. So when you kind of look at, well, how are we going to hit our sales target next year?

The first thing we got to do is how do we build on the things that we already have in place before we start adding more things in there? So, you know, I will say on the loyalty program this year in the first quarter, we’re going to be launching a tiered loyalty structure so people will be rewarded at different levels. So there’ll be incentives to get from, you know, level one to two to three. And as you go more visits and more spend level, things will start unlocking. So we didn’t roll that out in the beginning.

Right now everybody gets everything. But we think that this is going to add a lot of value and engagement. So, you know, for us, again, it’s just about perfecting and executing all the things that we’ve got in place.

Anthony Codispoti: That makes a lot of sense. You guys have put in a lot of things that we’ve already covered here today. And it seems like maybe a good time to kind of take your breath and sort of fine tune the dials rather than exactly looking for something else major to bolt on. I’m curious about the loyalty program. Did these still work? Are people drawn in by these? Do they encourage more, you know, repeat purchases?

Peter Frey: Absolutely. I mean, the numbers that we’re seeing, you know, speak for themselves, one in terms of engagement, we are starting, you know, at the end of this year coming up, you know, in 2025, we’ll have a good sense of customer lifetime value in terms of behavior. So we’re still kind of in the early stages. Six months doesn’t give us enough window. But I would say over a year’s time, we’re going to start knowing more about the engagement level, the frequency.

Early indications are that the folks that are in our loyalty program are more engaged. When we do put things out, they are activated against it. They are redeeming the rewards that we’re putting out there. So we are seeing changes in behavior. We don’t have a complete picture yet, but I anticipate that we’re going to continue to see good things from it.

Anthony Codispoti: I want to shift gears on you, Peter, and talk about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome in the past, either personal or professional or maybe it intertwines the two. What was it like going through that? What were some lessons that you learned?

Peter Frey: Ah, well, you know, I think I’ll get a little personal here. You know, well, obviously the Blackfish, that was a big one, but you know, when you’re with a company, there’s a lot of structural changes that happen. And you know, going through those kind of things and making the right decisions. So when I was at SeaWorld, we had multiple layoffs. And you know, trying to go through that process and make the right decisions that are the right thing for the company, but also understanding that there’s real people involved here.

I can remember when I first started, I was there about a month in my role and had to lay off like 20 people. And you know, I’m still the new guy. So I’m trying to establish myself.

So, you know, for me, it’s about balancing the business and humanity. And you know, that the delicate walk, it’s not personal. And then how do you, because it feels personal, you know, when you go through that kind of experience.

So, you know, I try to, team members are really important to me. And, you know, I’m at a place in my career where I feel like I’m more of a teacher or more of a mentor than anything anymore. And, you know, if I’m able to share some of the experiences and the learnings and the goods and the bads with some of the younger folks that I’m working with, that makes me feel good.

I get energized from that. But I think the hardest thing for me is just kind of going through those tough organizational changes and, you know, maintaining your posture as a leader, because you’ve got to get people through it. The people that are not let go, they’re worried. You’ve got to build the confidence that the organization is good and we got it. We’re going to move through it.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah, I’m going to give a little more context to this. There are people who are listening that have never had to let someone go, you know, either, you know, the owner of your own company or, you know, you work for somebody else, but these are people who report directly to you. And so you’re responsible for letting those folks go. It is, in my opinion, maybe the hardest thing to do in life, especially when in the situation that you’re talking about, this wasn’t for performance reasons. You didn’t have somebody who was just slacking off, you know, being, you know, not a team player. Even that is difficult because you know, that’s going to affect that person’s livelihood. But when you’ve got to lay off a chunk of people who have been good performers, good team members, because you’ve got to right size the ship. Wow. I mean, the weight that that puts on a person, because you know that you’ve just affected their ability to provide for their family.

This isn’t something that’s going to be easily turned around for them. I’m curious, Peter, as you went through that, as you’ve gone through that experience, what were some coping mechanisms for you? Who were you able to kind of lean on for support during that time?

Peter Frey: Well, family for sure. My wife is a marketing professional. She kind of sees the same things that I’m experiencing too. So for me, you know, a lot of my success, I attribute to her because she’s, you know, my biggest coach and cheerleader. I think it’s also finding the right type of mentors, you know, people that you can constantly turn to.

I have a mentor that he just passed away last year, but would be somebody I could call in a moment’s notice if I was in, and I have, you know, when I’ve had a challenge, he would meet me at a restaurant and we would chat. So it’s having those kind of people that you can really count on. It doesn’t have to be a large base, but just, you know, a few folks that you really trust. So that’s my support network.

Anthony Codispoti: I’m curious, what was his name? Your mentor that recently Ken and Birch. Say it again. Ken and Birch.

Peter Frey: So he was a, he was my director at Red Lobster, and then he went off to do his own consulting work. He did a lot of brand marketing, just a phenomenal human being. And just, he left, he did leave a true legacy. So that’s terrific.

Anthony Codispoti: Any other mentors or maybe books or other kinds of experiences that you want to give a call out to that have been helpful to you in your path?

Peter Frey: You know, it’s interesting because this, besides Ken and there are folks that I’ve worked with that, you know, I always look at the best of what people can bring to the table. That’s what I also appreciate about Sunnies. You know, it’s a strength based organization. It’s not about, oh, Peter, you’re not doing this or you’re not doing that. It’s really, Peter, you’re really good at that.

What can we do to take advantage of it? I appreciate that. It took a while for me to get to a place that thought like that.

And that’s hard, you know, because we’re going to be our own worst critics at the other day. And I beat myself up all the time. And I’m again, finally at a place where I don’t have to do that anymore. I feel like, you know, the organization appreciates what I bring to the table. But what I try to do is find out the best things out of the individuals I work with and try to emulate them.

So, and I can remember specific people and what they did. And when I’m confronted with a situation, I’ll say, well, what would Christine do? Or what would Kenan do?

Or what would this person do? So, you know, maybe not one person has got the complete, nobody’s got the complete package. But, you know, if you can draw from inspiration and strength from others, that for me has been, you know, it’s kind of like my Swiss army knife. I can pull out different things.

Anthony Codispoti: That’s cool. You mentioned that, you know, Sunnies is a place that really focuses more on people’s strengths rather than calling them out for, you know, what they’re lacking in or struggling with. As you sort of became ensconced in that type of culture, did you notice it changing at all how you manage people? Absolutely.

Peter Frey: Yeah. You know, even in performance reviews, we really don’t do those as much. We do, we’re discussions, you know, what are you, what are your goals? How do they align with the organization?

How can I support you? And we do these, we work with a company called Talent Plus. They do all this testing to really find out where are your strengths? What are the things that we can get to maximize your performance? It also identifies the things that might be holding you back.

Doesn’t mean you punished them for that, but it’s just, you know, it’s watch-outs. How do you work around those kind of things versus try to fix them? But yeah, I think it’s changed the way that you develop people, you work on projects, you coach people. You know, it allowed me to or customize that the projects and the discussions versus, you know, just take one, hey, this is the approach I have with people and this is how I, you know, put together reviews or, you know, we’re putting our objectives together. Everybody’s got to do it the same way, not necessarily.

I think, you know, it’s really about trying to identify what works for people. One of the things that I’m really big on myself, I’m still doing it, I’m still trying to learn how to do it better, is about, man, we’re great marketers, but we’re not always great about marketing ourselves. And I don’t have a big ego, I’ll be honest, I really don’t. I’m pretty humble.

I feel bad saying that. I’m humble saying I’m humble, but I really don’t. I’m a really easy-going guy, but I also know that I’ve got to project a certain image and, you know, I’m kind of one of those, I’m an extrovert at work, but introvert at home because, you know, I just need to recharge. And so you’re on stage and you’ve got to have that persona. So I put together these individual brand personas and we all worked on them and it kind of tells you what your strengths are.

If you had to look at your archetype, who would you be? And what I asked each one of my team members to kind of go through this and examine, you know, based on your strengths and based on everything you know, what is your brand? How do you put yourself up in a statement? You know, what is the thing that you deliver?

What is the unique brand positioning? And so we all have that and we all keep that at the heart of who we are and, you know, we try to stay true to that. The other thing that I did is on top of it is I wanted to make sure that we had unified values and principles within our department. So it didn’t matter if I was out talking to a franchisee or, you know, somebody else on my team, they should expect the same type of service, result, you know, all one team and whoever you’re interacting with, you’re going to get the same experience. So those are things that, again, you know, over time and then it got amplified when I got to Sonny’s to say, hey, this is an organization that will embrace that type of thinking.

Anthony Codispoti: So you have the folks that report to you or work with you. Everyone creates their own personal brand persona. Sounds like this is a little bit more of a hands-on, a different approach to like a personality assessment.

Peter Frey: Yeah, yeah. It’s really, you know, for me, I’ve always been interested in kind of like understanding myself and what makes me tick. And, you know, I’m asking the same thing with everybody else. What makes, what’s going to make you successful? What do you want to be known for to the people that you work with and kind of what do you represent? So it’s just kind of getting that in one place and then sharing it with others.

Anthony Codispoti: Peter, I’ve just got one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. First of all, everyone listening today, I know that you love today’s content. Peter has shared a lot of golden nuggets today. Please hit the share, like, or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. Peter also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you. What would that be?

Peter Frey: Uh, LinkedIn, you know, just, you know, look for me. It’s Peter Fry, F-R-E-Y. You cannot, you know, if you want to, you can share my email on the podcast as well. You’ve got it. I’d be happy to connect with folks. I’m always looking to make new connections and share stories.

Anthony Codispoti: We will put both the LinkedIn profile in the show notes as well as your email address. But we’ll go ahead and mention the email address here on there in case somebody’s listening on the go. It’s P fry. So P F R E Y at sunnies s O N N Y S B B Q.com.

So last question for you, Peter. I’m kind of curious to hear your thoughts on what do you think the big changes are that are coming to your space here in the next couple of years?

Peter Frey: Wow, that’s, you know, everybody’s talking about AI. We were just talking about it yesterday, too. We don’t know. Again, we’re not going to be the leader in that, but simplification, you know, the guest experience. I don’t know what’s going to be happening with the restaurant industry.

I do feel like, you know, technology is going to continue to have an influence. Probably it seems like QSR is the first place it goes to just because of the convenience side service restaurants. Yep.

Yep. I think, you know, for us, we are in between fast, casual, and which is like kind of like a Panera and casual dining. So we can kind of service multiple types of audiences. So I do think AI will have some influence, maybe kitchen automation to simplify some of the back of the house things. We’ve already implemented some POS changes on our side where now we move from kind of a standalone station to now toast, which is handheld POS devices. So anything we can do to simplify that experience, both for team members and for our guests, I do think restaurant sizes, real estate, all those kind of things are going to be changing. You know, if most people are going out to eat and they’re kind of dining in their own experience, you don’t need that square footage that you needed to do before. So, you know, all the things that were happening are just multiplying now. They’re accelerating much faster. So probably what I say today will be outdated by tomorrow.

Anthony Codispoti: How do you see AI being used in the kitchen? Talk through that real fast?

Peter Frey: I don’t know about the AI. I think AI could be used. A lot of folks are doing it through drive through, you know, to do suggestive selling. We have some of that implemented through our online ordering platform. So there’s algorithms that, you know, move guests to different suggestions based on what they’re ordering. I think the automation within the system will be more about equipment automation, things that make it just easier to get things done, take out steps.

Anthony Codispoti: All right. Well, Peter, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it. Great.

Peter Frey: I appreciate the invite, Anthony. Take care.

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