One Organ at a Time: Chris Demery’s Approach to Restaurant Technology Implementation | Restaurants & Franchises Series

Anthony Cotispodi : 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 Cotispodi and today’s guest is Chris Demery, Chief Technology Officer at Blaze Pizza. They are a fast-casual pioneer known for serving delicious custom pizzas using fresh dough that’s fermented for 24 hours and baking them in an open-flame oven in just a few minutes. They focus on quick service, quality ingredients and a fun customer experience.

They’ve received praise for their innovative approach expanding to hundreds of locations worldwide. Chris spent many years in the military working on a number of cutting-edge communication technology projects. That was before switching over to restaurant technology and operations where he has over 20 years of experience. He’s worked at companies like Domino’s, PF Chang’s and more where he helped build digital solutions and improve service delivery. He is an expert in off-premises dining and digital integrations, helping restaurants stay ahead of rapidly changing customer needs. Now under his guidance, Blaze Pizza has been rolling out new tech to enhance ordering, loyalty programs and overall guest satisfaction. Before we get into all that good stuff today, our 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 addbackbenefits.com. Alright, back to our guest today, the CTO of Blaze Pizza, Chris Demery. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today. Thank you Anthony for having me today. Alright, so Chris, before you found your way to the restaurant business, you were working on some pretty interesting military projects and you were on the fast track to become a general. Can you maybe talk about one or two of those interesting projects that you delved into? Sure.

Chris Demery: My last year in the military, I was working for the Undersecretary Defense for Acquisition at the Pentagon. My primary role was helping manage contractors that were building weapons systems. One of them was the Abrams tank, little known fact is there’s over 20 miles of cat 5 cable within an Abrams tank and the tank isn’t that big. I was also working with contractors that were building submarines, nuclear submarines. When you think about complexity and compared to the restaurant industry, some of those weapons system programs were very, very interesting and significantly complex when you think about what it costs for a single tank or a single submarine. I have no idea how much they cost today, but they cost a lot back when I was working on them. It was fun. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Anthony Cotispodi : How many miles of cat 5 cable? 20 miles. In a single tank? In a single tank, yes. Cat 5 cable, for those who don’t know, it’s like a data communication cable. My computer doesn’t have one of those ports anymore, but it is a way that you can hard wire yourself into the internet. Yes, that’s right.

Chris Demery: It was before fiber optics became more prolific, but yes. There’s a lot of cable in a tank, believe it or not. All of the computer systems, these tanks are highly computerized systems. Technology makes weapons systems better versus the old World War I and World War II tanks that people just drove around blindly. These are highly technology-based solutions. If you could just imagine being able to fire while you’re moving along at 50 miles an hour and keeping the gun stable. There’s a lot of technology that goes into tanks.

Anthony Cotispodi : Sorry, I know this is probably a relatively minor point compared to the really cool tech that you built, but I can’t even wrap my head around how a single vehicle, even if you wanted to just lay the raw cable inside of it, how there would be room for 20 miles of it.

Chris Demery: Well, it’s pretty tight inside a tank. The tanks are pretty tight, but they still put a lot of stuff inside of them.

Anthony Cotispodi : You were on the fast track to become a general. Talk more about what that means.

Chris Demery: I was a regular Army officer. What that means is I worked for the President of the United States from the perspective of my career. When you’re in, I was in, I hate to say it this way, but I was in the top 5% of my year group in the United States Army as an officer. Almost every year, I would get promoted, or every time I had an opportunity to get promoted, I would get promoted ahead of my peers, which put me in the top 5%.

You have to be in the top 5% to even really be considered for to progressively get additional responsibilities. I was in 13 years and I moved 16 times because the branch of the military that handles personnel kept saying, hey, you need to go to your next progressive job. You need to go to your next progressive job because I was demonstrating leadership excellence, or I could have just been in the right place at the right time when, you know, sometimes that’s what happens in a career. But as a combination of those things, I elected to get out because I was in the right place in the right time for a new career choice. But the military was very good to me. It helped me get my master’s degree in computer science. And I would have loved to stay in and become a general, but I elected to make other choices.

Anthony Cotispodi : And what was that next choice that took you out of the military?

Chris Demery: When I got out, a lot of what I did in the military is I supported special forces teams out of Fort Wreck, North Carolina. When you’re doing that sort of work, what they show in all the movies is probably 80% accurate, except it’s even worse. You get deployed all the time. You can’t tell people where you’re going, whether it’s your kids, your wife, your mother, your dad, or your friends.

And so the life of people that are in special forces and or support special forces is very difficult. And it’s a choice you make. And I thought for the longest time, I was just going to continue down that path. But I did eventually realize there’s a life outside work in 20 hour days, you know, getting up at 4am and going to bed at midnight. When I got my master’s degree, you know, I realized, hey, there’s a life outside work.

And so I just went through a realization that while I wanted really to be a general officer, there were other opportunities. And I did go to something called Commander General Staff College, which happened during the first Iraq war. So all of the people in that year group missed the first war that had happened essentially since World War II. And the discussion amounts amongst all of the officers of my year group were if I was currently a general officer, and I was looking for somebody to go to war with me, would I want somebody that went to school, or those that went to war? And so our year group, they wouldn’t let us go to war. We all wanted to go to war, but we couldn’t. And so they kept us in school for that 10 month period.

Anthony Cotispodi : And they didn’t want you to go to war? Why?

Chris Demery: I don’t actually know. The only people that got to go to war from our class were six chemical and biological officers, because everybody believed there was chemical and biological warfare going to happen during that war. So they let them go and all of the other infantry, artillery, signal, all the rest of the branches stayed. We were the top 5%. They were going to get us educated one way or another or continue our education. So they kept us. And to me, that hurt me as a career officer.

Anthony Cotispodi : You said 80% of what you see in the military movies is correct. What’s the 20% they get around? A lot worse. A lot worse in terms of the extra hours or just the stress of the warfare that you’re having to witness and take part in.

Chris Demery: I think it’s a combination of those things. It’s the stress. And you learn to deal with it. But everybody talks about PTSD. That’s real. People that experience those sort of emotional traumas, they go through it.

I honestly don’t believe a lot of TV shows express that very much. You hear a little bit about it. But it’s, you know, I had friends that went to Grenada while I was at Fort Bragg, which was a little skirmish if everybody remembers Grenada. And my friends that came back, they were different. You know, they mentally, once you see things that get killed in front of you, it’s a lot different than just working in a restaurant.

Anthony Cotispodi : How did that impact you personally?

Chris Demery: It didn’t really personally, although I saw my friends change. I had some of my team go to that skirmish, that battle. But my team didn’t really change. It was really, so that skirmish didn’t really have an impact on me as a person or my team. I saw other people change.

It just kind of sort of cements in your head. There are a lot of things that are a lot worse than having a bad day at the office. And so our military forces, they do that all the time. And so you should always thank them for their service because they deserve it.

Anthony Cotispodi : Great. I agree 100%. You say you saw them change. Can you put a finger on what was different?

Chris Demery: How they expressed the best events of watching people die. It seemed to me to be more callous than I personally would have communicated it. It’s like they were proud of the fact. You know, they were proud of the fact they were defending their country, but they were happy. They shot people.

Anthony Cotispodi : And so it seems like there’s probably a, I don’t know if mental disassociation is the way to sort of think about it, but there would have to be a process that the brain either willingly or unwillingly goes through to rationalize the events that took place.

Chris Demery: Yeah. I mean, you have to, you absolutely have to or you wouldn’t be able to perform the next time you had to do that. And you have to think through, it’s okay that I’m shooting people and I’m killing people.

And so just think about it when those people come back to a life where it’s not okay to shoot people or kill people. That’s part of, you know, I’ve never had post-traumatic stress syndrome, but I’ve seen shows on it. I’ve seen write-ups on it. It’s true. It’s a real thing. And I think the brain’s ability to revert back to normalcy becomes triggered and becomes more difficult for those people.

Anthony Cotispodi : Back then, did you see were there ways for people to get help and cope with that? Or was it maybe even less understood than it is today?

Chris Demery: Oh, much less understood than it was today. That’s my opinion. I mean, maybe it was well understood then and I just didn’t have availability of that information, perhaps because of what I was doing in the military. But people, I think people thought about it differently then. Yeah. Okay.

Anthony Cotispodi : So let’s shift back to your career in hospitality. What was the first foray into the restaurant space for you?

Chris Demery: So my first foray was that I was working for NCR, Retail Systems out of Atlanta, and NCR had a contract with Domino’s Pizza, and they needed some help to have somebody go in and, for lack of a better term, recover the program management side of that contract. So NCR had a contract with Domino’s to provide program management, which was my specialty. What’s program management?

Program management is the ability to lay out a strategic plan of where a project or set of projects is going to do to accomplish the overall goal of the business. The NCR had a contract with Domino’s and Domino’s strategic plan was to get all of their franchisees onto one technology platform so that they could increase sales, become more profitable, make their franchisees more profitable. And so their program was standardized technology across all their franchisees so they could become more profitable. So NCR had the contract to go in and help them do that, and the NCR leadership felt that they were at risk of losing that contract with Domino’s. So they, I was working for NCR at the time. Once I got out of the military, I went to work for NCR, and they said, hey, we’re going to reassign you and you’re going to work for us to recover this program with Domino’s Pizza.

And so I did that. That was my first foray into the restaurant industry. I was learning about the Domino’s Pizza technology struggle, and I successfully recovered that program for NCR. Subsequently, Domino said, hey, you’re doing such a good job. Can we hire you? And of course, I said, yes, because they were going to pay me more money.

Anthony Cotispodi : That’s a good reason. So what was the, I don’t know, what was sort of the fix that you had to come in and put in place? Why was NCR at risk of losing this contract from Domino’s and how were you able to save it?

Chris Demery: The risk was almost all companies that provide professional services have a bias towards their own technologies. NCR does, Oracle does, Microsoft does. They want to promote their technology services versus what’s, in my opinion, best for your customer.

And so Domino’s was a customer. They wanted the best program management. They didn’t want, necessarily, they didn’t want NCR hardware and software. They also didn’t necessarily want IBM hardware and software. They wanted what’s, what would it help them achieve their objectives?

And so I went in and I, I’m just a totally transparent person. And if something’s not a right fit for your customer, you have to say it’s not a right fit. Here’s a better fit based on what you’ve expressed to me. It’s similar to what I do today in the restaurant industry is if a guest doesn’t want to walk into your restaurant, instead they want your food at home. That’s what they want. And so you always work to accomplish, in my opinion, what you think is best for them or best for you. So as I started working that program with Domino’s Pizza, I displayed that for lack of a better term talent and that transparency and said, I know I have hardware and software to offer you and I know IBM has hardware and software to offer you and lots of people have it. But here’s probably what’s best for you. And they liked that approach.

Anthony Cotispodi : Yeah, it’s customer centric. It’s the way that it should be.

Chris Demery: But that’s my belief it’s customer centric, but you know, some professional services teams don’t work that way.

Anthony Cotispodi : Yeah, understood. Okay, so from NCR to Domino’s, there was a stop at PF Chang’s along the way. And then how did the opportunity at Blaze Pizza come about?

Chris Demery: So I went from, I rolled out technology at Domino’s Pizza, Bain Capital owned them, I then went to Blumen Brands, which was a Bain Capital company. Now, I went through a couple other places, but like you said, I was at PF Chang’s and the CEO of Blaze Pizza reached out to me and said, I really need some help with technology. Now, I had worked as a peer and as a subordinate to the CEO of Blaze Pizza. Her name was Mandy Shaw.

And we stayed friends for years, even while we were at Blumen Brands. And she reached out and said, I need some help, we need to grow up. Her vision was to grow Blaze Pizza incrementally over the next three to four years by opening new restaurants.

And she felt that their technology footprint was inadequate to do that. And so she said, well, you come and join us in Pasadena as CTO. And it was a good opportunity. It was for a friend, as well as a coworker. And it was a CTO position. I had wanted to be a CTO in several instances. And this was my opportunity to become a CTO.

Anthony Cotispodi : And so you’ve been with Blaze for how long now? Just over four years. And in that four years, I don’t know, let’s talk about maybe the first big project that you undertook when you first came in the door.

Chris Demery: The first big project was convincing all the franchisees they needed to replace their point of sale solution, which was at least, they had had the same point of sale solution for 10 years, but it was a 30 year old point of sale solution from NCR. And it would not allow Blaze to innovate their guest experience. So it was old enough and difficult enough to integrate with.

If we wanted to go down the path to solve the guest experience dilemma, we couldn’t do it with a point of sale solution. So my first big project was rip out the old one, but in a new one.

Anthony Cotispodi : But you said, so there’s a technology piece of that that you’ve got to sort of figure out and implement. But were you also having to sort of convince and strong arm the franchisees to get on board? Or was that something that could be mandated on them?

Chris Demery: Well, that’s an interesting question, because I could have mandated it. It’s sort of like, I mean, there’s, I’m sure there’s a perfect analogy. My analogy is your insurance company could come in and say, hey, I’m going to charge you $300 a month for insurance. And so take it or leave it. And your option is take it or leave it. And that’s how the franchisees look at it. If, if we don’t help them solve their business problem and become more profitable, you’re just a problem. And so the way I undertook solving the problem was I’m going to give them a new point of sale solution that allows us to innovate. And I’m also going to save them money and put more money in their pocket every month with every location. So having done this work at Domino’s and at CKE, I knew that to win over your customers, in this case, the customer was the franchisee, I have to provide them with a business model that is attractive to them. And then I have to prove my business model and my ROI is accurate.

And that took some time, but by laying it out correctly, it went very smoothly. So all of our restaurants are now will be on our new point of sale solution.

Anthony Cotispodi : Okay. So the strategy that you talk about makes a sense to me rather than force this on people, let’s make the business case for it. Let’s get them excited and, you know, on board with it. In order to do that, you’ve got to make the business case and you have to have stats and numbers. So did you introduce the new POS system to like a small select group of stores first so that you could collect data and then make a business case to

Chris Demery: absolutely in almost any technology solution, you have to put in some form of pilot in place. So we put in a pilot with our corporate restaurants first, made sure all the systems connected, made sure all the pipes were flowing.

My analogy in the technology industry is if your pipes aren’t connected correctly, the data doesn’t flow correctly and everybody makes decisions on data. And so in our corporate locations, we piloted, made sure all the data was flowing correctly, proved out that I was saving money on a monthly basis from a license fee, a hardware license and a software license fee. Then I became a salesman. I went out, I picked a couple key franchisees that I knew had a lot of experience and said, here’s our agreement. We want you to put this in, I’ll prove to you that you will save money. And it went almost flawlessly.

Anthony Cotispodi : So give us some examples on how you were able to save the money and make the more money with this new system.

Chris Demery: So there’s a hardware cost and a software cost to every piece of technology you put into a restaurant. My job, if I’m going to do a business case, is to say, I need you to put some money down, but because your monthly fees are going to be less, your ROI on this new technology is going to be six months or nine months. Most people from a technology perspective target around two and a half to three years is feasible.

If I wanted to go fast, I had to prove it in that it was doable in less than six months to 12 months so that I could go faster. So I negotiated a cloud-based point of sale solution that included hardware and software and there was an upfront cost to switch. It was about $2,700, which included the travel of installing, the travel to install all the hardware. But I was saving $300 to $400 a month for each location that installed it and so their ROI was paid back in around nine months.

Anthony Cotispodi : What was the $300 or $400 a month that you were saving? What were you saving that on?

Chris Demery: Software license costs associated with the point of sale solution.

Anthony Cotispodi : So that they had been paying before?

Chris Demery: Right. So let’s just say you pay $500, $600 a month for a license fee. Now it goes down to $300 a month. You save $300 a month for a license fee. But you had to put something up front, right?

And so you look at the return. When am I now truly saving $300 a month? And it works so well is that some of my franchisees that had an option to do some installs later, they accelerated their install to get all of their restaurants on much faster than normal. So I thought it was going to be about a two and a half year rollout.

We did all of our locations, almost all of our locations in about 13 months. Wow. And what’s- Go ahead.

Go ahead, Chris. Because it allowed them to innovate and a type of integration or innovation would be, can my HR system talk to my point of sale solution? Yes.

It couldn’t talk to your own one, but this new one can talk to your HR system. How long will that take? Three to four weeks. They’re like, it can’t possibly go that fast. Like, no, it can go that fast. And we demonstrated it. So there was a combination of things around money and innovation that moved those franchisees along faster.

Anthony Cotispodi : And that was actually going to be my next question, is what are some examples of what the new tech platform would allow them to do that they couldn’t do before?

Chris Demery: So there’s a lot of back office systems we don’t mandate. Food management systems, HR management systems, data analytics systems. So the old technology was a file server within the restaurant that had to pull data through multiple touch points. The new solution is a cloud based solution that uses JSON file formats, which is a specific type of file format that is very efficient. Most programmers today and most integrations today leverage it. And so they could just integrate much faster with this new platform to solve their other business problems, like invoice management, cost of goods management, people management. The old system, you had to remote into a restaurant and can manually configure people. Now I can have a system talk to a system and do it in milliseconds versus people taking days to do it. And so it just allowed overall business practices to improve.

Anthony Cotispodi : Now whether it was the old system or the new cloud system, either way you’ve got to have network uptime. I understand that to help with that you put in some kind of a 5G backup network. So talk about that.

Chris Demery: Well one of the things around the restaurant industry is most CTOs fail around doing point of sale rollouts. And it’s typically, so this is my fourth one, the typical issue is you try to replace all the body organs at the same time. And so I was smart enough, having done this several times, that I replaced the heart, which was the point of sale first. Then I started attacking the next most likely business problem. The next one is our new network stack, which we’re dependent on off-premises orders.

If you’re not connected to the internet, nobody can order from you if they’re sitting at home or sitting in their car or wherever they happen to be. So our next big project is adding backup capability to our network stack. Now everybody, not everybody, a lot of people would tell you, well you could just put in two internet connections to a restaurant, you’d have backup. Yeah, at a cost of about 200 to 300 dollars a month you can do that. But the restaurant industry is a penny business, penny profit.

Anthony Cotispodi : And so you had to look for the most efficient way to do it.

Chris Demery: Look for the most efficient. So the most efficient is really, I only need that second line when I need it. So when my primary internet goes down, I automatically fail over to a 5G and I still get my internet orders. Then I work on, and my team helps, my team gets that primary internet connection back up. And if it takes a couple days to get back up, I’m doing ordering and credit card processing, all of that over a phone line, but I’m still profitable and I’m not losing orders. So for the network stack, part of the ROI is you no longer have downtime. When, you know, if one percent of your business was off-premises, if my internet went down, that’s fine.

But when you’re at 30% or 35% or 40% and your internet connection goes down and you lose 35 to 40% of your business, and it could be for a day or two days or three days or a week, you just can’t afford to let that happen very long. So that was the next big project that we’re going through now is retrofitting all the locations with a more sustainable internet.

Anthony Cotispodi : And you do 5G versus the redundant internet connection because it’s more cost-effective.

Chris Demery: More cost-effective. You only pay for it when you use it.

Anthony Cotispodi : And you said that most point-of-sale replacements fail, and it’s specifically because rather than going one organ at a time like you’ve learned to do, they try to replace the entire system in one fell swoop and it’s just too much of a shock. Well, it’s… There’s too many failure points. No.

Chris Demery: Well, it’s… I’ll go back to my analogy of an M1 Abrams tank or an Abrams tank. They’re replacing everything all at once, and that’s a 30-year project. So in the restaurant industry, if you can’t get something done in 6 to 18 months, you’re overcome by events. And so you can’t replace everything in your system all at the same time. It’s too risky.

You’re in the process or the mode of, I’m selling to my guest, I need to maintain my profitability. So I can’t replace all my organs at the same time. It’s just too risky. A lot of… A lot, in my opinion, of CTOs think they can replace several organs at once, and so they try, and so that they’re not limiting their risk. I was replaced in the heart. I didn’t want to do the heart and the lungs at the same time. And so an example of the lungs, if the heart is the point of sale, is let’s replace our credit card processor at the same time, or let’s replace our network stack at the same time. And through years of project and program management, you just don’t do everything at the same time. It’s too risky because we’re about selling food. If you take away the ability to sell food for multiple hours, you’re not going to last.

Anthony Cotispodi : Yeah. I want to talk about your… The first-party ordering system that you’re in the process of replacing again. Before we do that, actually, I want to take a step back. And I want to hear more about the Blaze Pizza brand for those folks who have never been in a Blaze. What’s the customer experience like?

Chris Demery: Well, I would say we should ask our customers. But what our marketing, what we’re known for is what we call the walk the line experience. You come into a Blaze Pizza, and if you’ve never been with us before, you go, you get in line, and you pick your crust and your sauce and your cheese, and then you get unlimited toppings, or as many as you want, for one price. So every pizza company is a build-your-own company. Domino’s is a build-your-own, right?

But if you go order a large Domino’s Pizza, then you do pepperoni, Italian sausage, ham, mushrooms, all of that. Every one of those toppings adds a cost, typically. Ours is one price. You can add whatever you want for one price.

So we are a build-your-own, and 85% of what we sell are build-your-own. But our guests get to make their pizza their way, and because we make fresh crust or fresh dough every day, it’s high quality, tasting crust. It’s lighter weight, if you will, than Domino’s thick crust, or what they call hand-toss crust.

So it’s a thin crust model, and it’s a very reasonable price. So we used to be primarily a lunch business. So you come in, walk the line, you have your food in nine minutes.

You can do a 30-minute lunch. With COVID, that all kind of changed. We became more of a dinner business, a lot of off-premises orders, things like that. So our guest experience has changed. We still like to focus on walk the line until you get to know us, and then you can have us delivered, come and pick it up, all of that. So since COVID, we’ve been refining that guest experience, because since Domino’s, my motto, or my mantra has been, the guests are always right. Give it to them where they want it, when they want it, how they want it. And so anytime I’m working on digital or anytime I’m working operational technology problems, it’s around what does your guest want. Not what I want.

Anthony Cotispodi : You know, as I’m hearing you talk, Chris, it strikes me that, and tell me if I’m right or wrong here, your title is CTO, Chief Technology Officer. And I guess I’ve got it in my head as Chief Technology Officer, right?

You’re worried about the cables and the hardware and the software, which you clearly are. But I hear you talking a lot about the customer experience, business operations, profitability, like very big picture kind of view. Is that unusual in your type of role?

Chris Demery: Most people that know me say, you’re not a technology person, you’re a business person. And what I learned at Domino’s is, if you’re just a technology person as a CTO, you’re missing the whole purpose of being in business. And I think that’s a lot of CTOs are so technology focused, but you really need to be business focused. You have to learn the terminology of your business people, because that’s the only way, in my opinion, to be successful. I don’t know another way to do it.

Anthony Cotispodi : Now, the technology should be seen as a tool to achieve all the business operational goals.

Chris Demery: We’re in the food business. If you’re not, we’re a supporting branch. If I said branch, it’s like I’m still in the military. We’re a supporting organization, right? And I could do lots of things like you have to go do this technology thing. And the franchisees say, no, or we don’t like that choice. So I learned early on in multiple parts of my career, you have to compromise and meet in the middle. I’ve been very successful in the restaurant industry because I talk operations. Now, having said that, I’ve been in two operational roles, one at Blumen Brands and one at PF Changs.

And that role was help us roll out off premises. And the reason I bring that up is a lot of restaurant operators are what I call four wall operators. They can handle what they see within their four walls. Once it’s outside their four walls, they can’t see it. And technology has to make what’s happening outside your restaurant viewable or visible to you. Blumen Brands, I had to sell a general manager on how many orders there are or possibly outside their restaurant.

They’re like, what are you talking about? Like, how many tables do you have in a restaurant? I have 60 tables. How many seats? I don’t know, 150.

Okay. How many seats are in a three mile radius of your restaurant? He’s like, 100,000. I’m like, just think if you only got 10% of those, you’d have 10,000 seats a day. Think about all the money you could make. And they’re like, yeah, but how do I do that? I’m like, I’m going to make the data available to you so that you can see what your guests outside your restaurant want from you. And then how are you doing to deliver it? Because if you can do it as well, off-premises as you can on-premises, you’ll be hugely successful.

Anthony Cotispodi : And so what’s in that specific example there, what’s the data that you’re able to show him about those 100,000 to 10,000 seats that he could have access to?

Chris Demery: What they’re ordering most often, which all comes out of your point of sale system. How fast are they getting their product? It’s just, it’s really operational data. It’s manufacturing data. How satisfied are your guests around off-premises? Typically, off-premises orders are colder, right? Because they travel in a vehicle. They don’t taste as good because they’re not as hot. Or they’re in bad containers.

So you have to leverage technology to make that data available to everybody. I had the prior CEO of Blumen Brands, Liz Smith, told me, you cannot provide calamari from Carabas to be delivered. I’m like, why? Because seafood hold is awful. And I said, why don’t we let our guests tell us? And our P-Mix, percent of mix of sales of calamari was higher in restaurant.

I’m sorry, off restaurant than it was in restaurant. Same thing with the Blumen Onion. The president of Outback Steakhouse said, Blumen Onions are going to fail dramatically because they’re grease-filled, right?

And our percent mix for off-premises for Blumen Onions was higher than it was in restaurant. They’re like, how do you explain this? I don’t know, they’re guests. Why don’t you ask them?

Anthony Cotispodi : What do the guests have to say about that? We want what we want. Old calamari is good to eat because I got it where I wanted it.

Chris Demery: Right? So what we learned through a BCG study, Boston Consulting Group, is that your flavor profile and your quality profile is different off-premises that it is in restaurant. So it’s OK if it’s not quite as good as long as it’s still good and you’re predictable. And consistent.

Anthony Cotispodi : Customers are OK. They have an expectation that something in takeout is going to be a little bit different than it is eating it on-premises. As long as it’s still good in meeting their expectations, hey, we’re good to go.

Chris Demery: And so another example is the then president of Bonefish Grill. I couldn’t touch Bonefish Grill because it was all seafood. I was told that by the CEO and the CFO. The president of Bonefish Grill came to me on the side and he’s like, hey, can we run a test in one of my locations in Tampa, Florida?

I’m like, well, as long as you don’t get me in trouble with the CEO and the CFO. So we turned on Uber Eats at the Bonefish Grill in Tampa. And after three weeks, we had to turn it off.

So the president came back to me and said, Chris, we got to turn it off. I’m like, but your off-premises sales are up like through the roof. He’s like, yeah, I have too many Uber Eats drivers standing in my bar.

So I’m not doing as much bar sales as I am off-premises sales. So everybody loved the food, but they didn’t have the right design for the location. Like Alback and Corabas had. So it’s around all the data that impacts your ability to meet the guest where they want it. So seafood, does it travel as well as sitting down in a seafood restaurant? No, but guests will still order it and buy it.

Anthony Cotispodi : And so Bonefish just abandoned this rather than trying to figure out, hey, is there somewhere else we could have the Uber Eats drivers hang out?

Chris Demery: They had to start redesigning their locations. I don’t know if they did it or not. But Alback and Corabas had separate areas built into their locations. Bonefish and Flemmings did not. I did the same thing with Flemmings, which is a prime dining location. People that travel and stay in hotels do not have a lot of options for a fine dining experience. They would order from Flemmings. And when you’re selling a $92 steak, those off-premises orders are pretty profitable.

Anthony Cotispodi : That’s interesting. I would be in the camp of people who would think nobody is ordering a $92 steak to have driven across town to their hotel.

Chris Demery: Well, I mean, I used today’s prices. I went into a restaurant the other night. I was in Las Vegas at a conference. Somebody took me to dinner and I think one of the steaks was $192. But the cheapest one I found was $92. When I was back at Bloomin’ Brands, it was probably more like 64.

Anthony Cotispodi : Even still, I’m thinking a steak isn’t going to travel that well. Like I’m paying for a premium steak. I want it the way it comes right off the grill. But you’re telling me I’m wrong.

Chris Demery: Data proves me wrong. You’re in your pajamas. You’re sitting in a hotel room. You want room service? Some part experience or if fine dining is available, would you take it delivered? And they would take it delivered.

Anthony Cotispodi : Now, here’s something interesting. As I understand it, you built out a first-party ordering system three years ago and you’re already in the process of replacing it. Why?

Chris Demery: We had at Blais Pisa, we had a custom front-end experience that was available. It was optimized for our guests. It’s set on top of the Olo e-commerce platform. I inherited that project when I came here four years ago. And it’s an expensive project. A custom front-end is always more expensive than what we call a white label front-end. Which is, it works well, but it’s sort of generic. So there’s certain things you can customize, but you can’t 100% customize it. It just became too expensive over time. When you do a custom front-end, everything that you built, you have to pay to change.

So it just became too expensive over time. So we’re moving into a very well-known white label front-end that also sits on top of Olo. Remember, you don’t replace all of your body parts at the same time. So we’re keeping our e-commerce engine just changing the front-end a little bit. It will be very cost-effective for us in our franchisees.

Anthony Cotispodi : And do you think that this platform then you’ll have more longevity out of it because it’s a white label, the platform that’s probably doing a lot of its own development and updates on the back-end?

Chris Demery: They do a lot of their development on the back-end. It’s a technology company that they have to keep everything in sync. So they have to keep all their security standards updated. They have to do all of the Google and Facebook and integrations that security and privacy are very expensive these days. So to make those changes, they’re going to stay on top of it, whereas my team won’t have to stay on top of it.

Anthony Cotispodi : What’s another technology project we haven’t talked about yet that is coming up that you’re excited about?

Chris Demery: Well, my end game, my program was speed of service. What I found at Domino’s, and it’s still true at Domino’s and it was true at Blumen Brands is that guests are becoming, they want convenience, but they want predictable convenience. There’s an example, Amazon.

Amazon is tremendously convenient and they’re very predictable. It’s difficult to create that off-premises experience, but if you can, those guests will always come back to you. So the first step in understanding the experience is how long is it taking me to produce food in restaurant or off-premises? So all the food is produced in the restaurant, but how long is it taking me to get an order ready for Anthony? Is it five minutes or 10 minutes or is it 15 minutes or 20 minutes?

In the I have a vendor, FreshTech KDS, that they help me measure speed. And it’s from when the order starts to when the order is ready to go into the hands of the customer. A fast, casual guest, their expectation is eight to 12 minutes. So if you’re taking 15 minutes to produce it, that guest, they’ll be fine for that event, but their expectation was eight to 12. So next time, they’ll consider somebody else. But if you give it to them within their expected timeframe, it’s human nature to say, hey, last time it was a good experience.

I got it within my expected timeframe. It’s high quality. I’m going to go back. And so it’s, as an operator, if you don’t know how long it’s taking you to produce food, reliably, all my operators tell me, I can walk in with my phone and time how long it takes. Like, how often are you in your restaurant? Well, you know, I go in my restaurant like every day. And how often are you timing? I don’t know.

Just a couple of times. I’m like, okay, how statistically relevant is that? And for my black belt six Sigma experience, if I can get a million transactions recorded, the significance of my measurement is way better than yours on your phone. And so we can track it by day part. We can track it by 15 minute increments. What that allows me to do is provide that data to the operator that says on Fridays, when you shouldn’t be expecting a lot of business, it’s taking 20 minutes for people to go through your line, they’re going to go someplace else. So until you understand speed, you can’t understand how to solve your traffic problem. That’s my philosophy.

Anthony Cotispodi : Chris, you talk a lot about the guest experience and trying to manage what their expectations are. And I heard you talk a little bit about sort of how things have changed since COVID. Do you see that level of change slowing down, accelerating, staying the same in terms of what the guests expect from you?

Chris Demery: Golly, I wish I could predict what the guests are going to change to next.

Anthony Cotispodi : Is this a constant evolution?

Chris Demery: You cannot ignore the fact that your guests are changing. I don’t know the next thing that’s going to change my guest’s perception or the dining experience. Is it going to be drones?

Yeah, I don’t know. But there are drones that deliver food today. All I know is you have to have the mindset from a project management perspective or program management is that we’re not going to get a perfect, but you have to be able to react fast enough to change as you recognize your guest changes. So everybody said all the Blaise Pizza guests love to come in and walk the line. They love the walk the line experience.

I’m like, well, what about the, how do we know that? What if they love Blaise Pizza, but they just want to come in, order from their table and have it delivered to their table? Like why would anybody do that? Because I don’t know, that’s an experience.

So let’s test it. Right? So why do people use kiosks at McDonald’s or any place else?

Because they don’t like to interact with guests. So those are all projects that are on our horizon is how do I order from the table? How do I put kiosks in? So all of those have been proven. Those are just things in my arsenal to say, franchisee, if you think in your market, these are things that you want to test or pilot. I have solutions for you because I know some, you go ahead.

Anthony Cotispodi : Have you tested or piloted ordering from the table or ordering from a kiosk?

Chris Demery: And that’s our new strategy going forward. I call it skip the line. So when you walk into a blaze pizza, there’s no hostess to seat you. There’s just tables and a line. So if you want to skip the line, sit down at a table, order from your table, we’ll bring the food to you.

Anthony Cotispodi : What data can you share about the test that you’ve run?

Chris Demery: The average ticket is normally $2 higher. So and that’s, it’s dine in, dine in experience. So if I walk the line, I’m going to pay in restaurant pricing. If I order from the table, I’m going to pay in restaurant pricing.

But for some reason, seeing pictures of the food already made and my technology consistently upsells. Hey, I see you ordered a pizza. Would you like a salad? Oh, do you want to drink?

It’s very difficult operationally to get the people that are manning the line in the restaurant. You go, Hey, by the way, Anthony, would you like a drink to go with that? Would you like a dessert?

Anthony Cotispodi : So my technology, they’re busy. They’re tired of repeating themselves.

Chris Demery: They’ve had a bad. Yeah, sure. It’s just the human element. It’s human element. So I don’t want to take humans out of the restaurant. That’s what makes us. But I want people to be able to make a decision about, I don’t want to deal with humans. I’m just going to order from my table. So one is average tickets higher, typically a dollar eight of the two 30 higher. So I use $2 tips are about the same, believe it or not. That does surprise me. I don’t have to wait behind the other four people that were in front of me in the line on a Friday.

I can just sit down and get my spot. And by the way, do you know very many people that use iPhones? Like everybody, right? And so people are used to using their phone for everything. So it’s no longer a phone. It’s an ordering device. It’s a mobile kiosk. So kiosks also work. You know, somebody walks in the restaurant. There’s 20 people in line to go over the kiosk. They order.

They go sit down. So it’s all around what kind of experience do you want Anthony? Do you want to stand in line? You want to sit at the table? You want to order from a kiosk? What do you want to do?

Anthony Cotispodi : Well, I’ve got two crazy little boys. I want to sit down at a table and keep them corralled. You know, I can sort of play zone defense on them while my wife does the order. And we’re not up in the line having them like bounce into people. So that’s my choice.

Chris Demery: And you know, when I joined Blaze, I was a little surprised. We have a lot of moms with small kids that come in. And because the kids like, I don’t want what you’re eating.

I want my own thing so they can get it. And it’s very cost effective. So we have a lot of young women with kids that come into our locations, which is not necessarily what you would get from a dominoes, right? Interesting. Client help. Yeah.

Anthony Cotispodi : Okay. Shifting gears, Chris, I’d like to hear about a serious challenge that you’ve gone through in your life. What was it? How’d you get through it? And what were some lessons that you learned?

Chris Demery: So I’m a hunter. I do large game hunting. And I used to hunt all the time with my father-in-law, but he was much older than I am. And I wanted to go after an elk because I’d never shot an elk.

So I contracted for this hunt in Idaho with a local guide and his wife. And they gave me all the parameters around, okay, you have to be in really good shape. And so you have to work out.

You have to be able to do all this stuff. So I did. I did all the things. So it was a horseback hunt in Idaho, high country.

And so I arrived, rode up the mountain with my guides to 12,000 feet. And gorgeous country. And but it was a late winter. And the elk weren’t at 10,000 to 12,000 feet like they normally were. They were at 6,000 feet. So the guide said, okay, we’re going to walk down to 6,000 feet. Now I had just rode up 6,000 feet on horses.

And I’m like, okay, let’s go. What I learned after about three hours is there’s no downhill. So I had worked on the treadmill. I was running and I was working on the treadmill, but I had never walked 6,000 feet downhill on lichen and rocks. And so you were using different muscles.

Anthony Cotispodi : I was using what you were trained for. I was using my front thighs that

Chris Demery: I actually don’t believe I’ve ever used before in my life, even running marathons. And so we got down at the bottom of the mountain and we didn’t see any. We heard some elk, but we didn’t get any elk. He’s like, okay, we’re going to go back. I’m like, I can barely walk. So it turns out I could walk uphill very well. So we walked up the hill back to 12,000 feet, went to sleep.

The next morning I couldn’t move. He’s like, yeah, we’re going to go out. We’re going to go back to 6,000 feet. I’m like, I can’t walk.

And it’s the first hunt ever in my life that I tapped out. I said, you know what? I’m not going to be able to move for like three days. I just, my legs were stiff and it’s a waste of your time. I paid the full price for the hunt. Didn’t get an elk.

But it’s one of the only times in my life I’ve tapped out of an event. And a funny thing about it is they took me down the mountain on the horses. I got in my car and I’m driving away in Idaho. And I went through a small town that had speed zone, a speed limit.

It was like 30 miles and I was going 40, I think. And a cop pulled me over. And he walked up to the window and said, driver’s license. I’m like, sure, I was speeding.

Just give me a ticket. And he’s like, well, you appear to be pretty tired. I said, I just went on an elk hunt. I can’t walk. So please don’t ask me to get out of the vehicle. He’s like, never mind. I’ll just give you a warning. He showed mercy.

Anthony Cotispodi : He must have done it himself at some point. So it’s interesting that you choose this as sort of the big struggle. And I think what I heard you say is this is the first time in my life I ever tapped out of something. And you were a military guy, fast track for general. You’d had, and I don’t know where this was sort of in your career arc, but you’ve had success at multiple places of leadership along the way, different employers that you’ve had. This was probably pretty unsettling to the identity that you had for yourself.

Chris Demery: I’m very competitive. I’m so competitive sometimes. Don’t invite me to a bar and challenge me to dance on the table. So I’ll probably do it. You’ll do it, huh? I might take a couple tequila’s, but I’ll do it. And so I’m very competitive.

So yeah, it was kind of unsettling. In my industry, with people I work with, I’m known to get projects done. And I would credit that back to probably the first few years at Domino’s and my military history is, you’re in a military to be competitive. You want to go do things typically, or at least I was. And I think that carried over into the restaurant rear. I’m always looking for the next challenge. Not always, but I’m not afraid to turn one down.

Anthony Cotispodi : So this was a challenge that in your mind got the better of you. And that was just, that was a hard pill to swallow.

Chris Demery: I thought it was going to happen when I had to put in SAP. If you’ve ever heard of SAP software, I had never met anybody that did it successfully. And at Blumen Brands, we decided to put in SAP financials with my peer later to become the CEO of Blaze Pizza, Mandy Shaw. And we sat down and we said, this project’s going to work or we’re going to die doing it. And we came in exactly on time, $1 million under budget. And it’s the only SAP project I’ve ever heard that’s successful.

Anthony Cotispodi : If so many of them are unsuccessful, why do so many people use it?

Chris Demery: Well, if you, once you get it installed, it lasts forever. It’s a, you know, it’s a well engineered product. Let me put it that way. Unless you customize it to fit your needs, but it is a very, very well engineered product.

Anthony Cotispodi : Any thoughts of trying the Elkhon again? I did do another Elkhon,

Chris Demery: but I went where I knew the Elkhon were sort of at versus up and down. I was, so was the guide. The guide was flabbergasted that all the elk were at the bottom, because normally they’re up where they set up camp. And I just, you know, I picked that time of year that, you know, it was bad for them, bad for me, worse for me, apparently. Because this guy was 10 years younger than I was, and he looked like an antelope, hopping around on the rocks. And I was like, oh my God, this is going to kill me.

Anthony Cotispodi : You just, you just had the wrong exercises in your prep routine.

Chris Demery: If you find an exercise machine that emulates walking downhill on rocks and lichen, I’d be interested in, because I’d go back to Idaho.

Anthony Cotispodi : Go back to that same spot again. You conquer it this time. Chris, do you have like a recommendation for our listeners, maybe a book or a podcast, another course or a framework that has been helpful for you? And your career development that might benefit some other folks?

Chris Demery: What I do today in every organization I go to is if you’re not familiar with the concept of agile, an agile philosophy, it originated with software development, a small team software development, it is now migrated to larger teams. There are things that are called agile that are prescriptive ways to run projects. That’s not agile. That’s like Kanban project management, things like that. Read any book on agile around the agile mentality of how you change your project team to work the way the team is most productive.

Right off the top of my head, I don’t know the best reference, but I learned it early on when I was working at Domino’s Pizza. There’s a consultant out of the Ann Arbor area that teaches agile and the agile philosophy. Keep in mind, it’s not a project management technique. It’s a philosophy of how you organize teams to manage projects.

Anthony Cotispodi : Based on the makeup of your team?

Chris Demery: Based on the makeup of your team and the philosophy that every person on a team contributes in different ways, and you jointly decide to how to manage the project. Now, there’s some guidelines you need to live within, but one of the things I do every workday is I have a stand-up, which is a 15-minute period, and this is an agile philosophy. It’s one of the 20 techniques you can use for project management. Every morning, I have a cross-functional team. We get together and sometimes we’re on the phone for one minute, and sometimes we’re on the phone for 15 or 20 minutes.

But the guideline is no more than 15 minutes. Tell me if you need my help today, or this week. Cross-functionally, people love it because they’re like, I can get help from IT just by talking to Chris, and there’s no barriers. So you could be a manager, you could be an individual contributor, you could be whatever you are, but you’re from a department that makes your organization successful, and people thrive when they understand they’re not on an island, and if they have a project, then they have a project need. How do you get it organized? And so a stand-up is a way cross-functionally to get a team to pull in the same direction.

Anthony Cotispodi : Chris, if we were to talk a year from now, what’s something that you would hope to be celebrated? Well, if I’m still at Blaze Pizza, we have something called Project Incubator.

Chris Demery: Project Incubator is we’re going to turn our restaurant operations in a direction we believe our guests wanted to go, which is a technology-infused restaurant environment that allows guests to experience Blaze the way they want to experience Blaze. So it’ll be all the options we’ve talked a little bit about here. Our guests will realize that we can become predictable, we can become consistent, and technology will help us get there. So that’s what I’m predicting in a year. We will have some number of Blaze Pizza locations that are much more predictable than they are today. We’re predictable today. We’re just not predictable the way people want us to be. You mentioned hunting.

Anthony Cotispodi : What else do you like to do for fun outside work?

Chris Demery: So I used to be a scuba diving instructor. So a scuba dive hunt. I also like to build things with my hand. I’m much better at destruction than I am at fine details. So I just do a lot of that stuff.

Anthony Cotispodi : What’s something you’ve destructive recently? Well, I also show dogs. I’m an AKC judge. So I like to go out with my dogs and watch them run around the field and chase lures and stuff like that. So I have a lot of hobbies.

Anthony Cotispodi : That’s fun. Something you recently deconstructed?

Chris Demery: The kitchen in my house. I just moved to Atlanta in October. My wife and I said we’re going to build a new kitchen. I’m taking it all apart. Now we’re waiting on the plans to come back from the builder. They’re going to build us. I’m not going to build the kitchen, but I destructed it.

Anthony Cotispodi : You tore it down. Yeah. Chris, just one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. First of all, I’m going to invite everyone listening to hit the follow button on their favorite podcast app, get more great interviews like we’ve had today with Chris Demery. I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you, Chris, or to continue to follow your story. What would that be?

Chris Demery: Probably LinkedIn. I do a lot of LinkedIn and associations. I think it’s a fantastic tool for staying connected to people. So LinkedIn is good. I don’t do well with cold calls, but I go to conferences.

I go to Mertek sometimes multi-unit restaurant technology, FS Tech, food service technology. So if you meet me in person, my rule of thumb is with a partner. If you look them in the eye in person, it’s really hard to say I don’t know who you are. If you do a cold call, it’s really as they go, yeah, I don’t know who you are. Sorry. So come and meet me in person is the best way. All right.

Anthony Cotispodi : Last question for you. As you look to the future, what are the most exciting changes that you see coming to your industry? And that’s a… Just pick one. Well, I think there’s a lot of talk about AI

Chris Demery: and a lot of misnomers about artificial intelligence. The truth is what’s happening in our restaurants is our labor is younger. Our leaders in our restaurants are younger. They don’t have as much experience. So they don’t have what I call situational awareness because they’re doing hands-on stuff because somebody called out or they’re being forced to hit labor targets and they just don’t have the experience when something goes sideways in the restaurant.

Let me give you an example of something that goes sideways in a restaurant. I forecasted 10% of my orders were going to be off-premises orders, 90% dying in. So I allocate labor to handle those volumes. But all of a sudden it starts raining outside to get 40% off-premises.

If I don’t know situationally that I need to redeploy labor because I’m in the back doing something, I’m prepping or whatever, you can lose a lot of business and things can go sideways really quick. I think there’s a place for… I don’t know the right term for it. I… One of my vendors, I called it the whisperer where if AI could whisper something in the ear of that general manager that says, you know we forecasted 10% digital. You’re now at 40%.

You probably should evaluate do you need to change anything. Not to tell them what to do, to give them the opportunity to make a choice. And so really all we’re doing is we’re surfacing near real-time data. By the way, we did this at Domino’s 10 years ago without AI. But AI has the potential of exponentially making this available to everybody, I think.

Anthony Cotispodi : Is this on your project development roadmap or is this kind of multi-steps down the road?

Chris Demery: I’ve introduced this concept to two of my partners, QBion and FreshTechKDS, and said if I was a Batman, this would be what I would focus on and it could be five years away. Because you have to harness that compute power with your near real-time data and that’s a problem for every restaurant.

Anthony Cotispodi : Well Chris, this has been a lot of fun. I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories Podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.