๐๏ธ How Does Athletic Drive Transform Restaurant Leadership? Anthony Valletta’s Story
In this dynamic episode, Anthony Valletta, President of bartaco, reveals how he evolved from a results-driven competitor to building sustainable high-performing teams across 34 locations in 13 states. His journey shows how personal growth and genuine hospitality create exceptional dining experiences.
โจ Key Insights You’ll Learn:
- Transforming athletic competitiveness into organizational success
- Building innovative dining concepts beyond just food service
- Leading through personal growth and feedback
- Balancing drive for results with team sustainability
- Creating tech-enabled, personalized dining experiences
๐ Key People Who Shaped Anthony’s Journey:
- Joey Kregnalli: Bertucci’s founder who taught restaurant fundamentals
- Executive Coach: Transformed his leadership approach
- Former Managers: Provided crucial feedback on leadership impact
- bartaco Founders: Created the innovative concept and culture
- His Children: Helped balance work and family priorities
๐ Don’t miss this powerful conversation with a hospitality leader who learned to celebrate the journey while driving exceptional results.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE
Transcript
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 Cotispodi and today’s guest is Anthony Balletta, president of Bar Taco. With two decades of executive restaurant experience, Anthony is passionate about creating an unforgettable experience for their guests. He has overseen the strategic operations planning, revenue and profitability growth, and market penetration of multiple concepts. Presently he is focused on Bar Taco, their upscale street food concept which has a relaxed and stylish atmosphere where you can enjoy specialty cocktails, beer out of a bottle, and hand held foods delivered on metal trays.
Founded in 2010, they have 34 locations in 13 states and DC. Don’t let the name fool you, they’ve got a lot more to offer than just tacos. 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 proprietary programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.
To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, the president of Bar Taco, Anthony Belletta. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today. If I understand correctly, Anthony, you joined Bar Taco back in 2021, which is several years before the company was founded. Before we get into the path that led you to Bar Taco, can you just tell us a little bit about how the company itself was first founded?
Anthony Valleta: Yes, we turned 15 this upcoming year in 2025. And the original two founders, Andy and Sasha, had a restaurant called Barcelona. So it was a Spanish tapas restaurant that started doing tapas before it really became big in the U.S. And they had always been kind of infatuated with coastal culture, Uruguay, South America, Southern California. At that point, no one was really doing tacos in a full service environment. And they kind of speculated and talked about what a restaurant might look like if they brought that world to life. And their CEO at the time, Scott Martin, who’s our CEO and co-founder today, it’s really them got together and opened a location that actually started because they were trying to sign a lease for the other restaurant and ended up falling through. And they said, yeah, this is going to be a good spot to try out this taco concept. And we opened up what we thought was going to be more of a kind of casual, fast, casual countertype perspective.
And we found Lightning in a Bottle. And the restaurant literally just took off. The chefs from Barcelona all started the menu. And we had something that we didn’t quite know what it was at the beginning, but it evolved over the first, I mean, still evolving, only 15 years later. But over the first year, it evolved into something that was really incredible, a full-suggest restaurant, kidder and a family’s in late night and cocktails.
And it was really, every day was a new challenge for the team. And we grew from poor Chester, New York, our first location, which is on the border of Connecticut. Did a few more in Connecticut than prove the concept by going to Atlanta. And then from there, kind of the rest is history. We filled in from there all the way south. And now at 34 locations, it’s been a good run.
Anthony Codispoti: What was the Lightning in a Bottle? What do you think? Was it because the small plates was novel at the time?
Anthony Valleta: I think it was a little bit of everything. I mean, the small plates was novel. I think no one, at that point, tacos were known as Taco Bell or Chili’s.
I mean, that was just, it was one of the two. And I think people were looking for something a little bit different. We provided that. We also provided really culinary focused menu.
We opened, we were doing things a little bit more obscure than we’re doing today. When you take chefs from a, you know, true chefs from a tapas style restaurant, you get some really creative ideas. But I think more of it was the way that they designed it. You know, Sasha, one of our founders is a creative at heart.
And when we designed the space, they actually started originally with it being a lifestyle brand. They didn’t know what we were going to do for food or for drinks. They just said, we know what we want to feel like.
Anthony Codispoti: We want to feel like that beach culture, again, Uruguay and Southern California. And they kind of created more of the feeling of what this place was going to be. And then everything with the concept kind of came after it. So when you look at a lot of the touchpoints and things we do in the restaurant, it all supported the initial thought of what is this feeling and vibe and lifestyle brand that we want to build and what makes the most sense for it.
And Bartako was kind of the baby of that thought. So I think it was more because a lot of brands come out and they say, I want to open a steakhouse. I’m going to make a menu and then I’m going to see how it feels. They kind of have this typical playbook. And we flipped the playbook in reverse and said, what do we want it to feel like and what’s going to be different about this place when you walk in or for that matter, when you walk out?
And we’ve always still kind of used that same filter today. But it’s not just about what walks into the restaurant. It’s about how you feel when you leave and our menu is derived from that. The music is derived from that. The design is derived from that. So I think that was the lightning is that most people weren’t doing it that way many years ago, 15 years ago.
Anthony Codispoti: I was going to ask in the couple of decades experience that you’ve had in the restaurant space, have you ever seen that approach be taken before?
Anthony Valleta: Not completely like that. I mean, knowing you’re going to start a brand but not know what the brand is at all.
Anthony Codispoti: You don’t know what the food is. Yeah, I mean, it’s wild. So I think it’s really interesting. But when you think especially now, I mean, hindsight 15 years ago, we think now people are looking for an experience, looking for vibe, they’re looking for environment. It’s not just a great plate of food.
They want the whole thing and value really has to do with that whole package. And I think that foresight 15 years ago, it’s paying dividends when the brand has been able to grow so well and why it’s very well today. So Anthony, you’ve been involved in the restaurant industry for over two decades, right? What was it that first drew you into the hospitality space?
Anthony Valleta: You know, I was young and need to save money for a car and said, you know, there’s what’s quick, fast money and got into flipping pizzas at this, you know, divey sports pub type place. And there was something about it out of the gates that just hold me it. It’s the excitement. It’s the rush. It’s the engagement that you’re really, you’re taking care of people all day long, both your staff and your guests.
But when you go up and realize that food and booze makes people happy, like most people always feel better after they’re eating or drinking or both. So I got infactuated really young with this really kind of cool feeling of hospitality. You know, I know it’s, my house was always a revolving door of people coming in and out in a good way, like visiting family and friends. And I just grew up with my parents always entertaining.
So to me, it just felt very normal. But I kind of got the hook and then I went from there and worked at a full service restaurant for a guy named Joey Kregnalli, who’s original founder of Bertucci’s, which is a brand up in the Northeast. And he opened a place called the naked fish. It was a seafood Cuban restaurant, this behemoth restaurant back when there was smoking and non-smoking sections and all that kind of stuff. But I worked for him and he really taught me the ropes of the restaurant business, you know, the kitchens, the bar, music, all of it. And I worked just by their position, that restaurant over my time with them. And I just fell in love. It’s just something about it.
No two days are the same. You get to be a jack of all trades, but mastery of none. You wear your marketing hat one day and your HR cap the next day and finance the next day. To me, that was, that just excited me. And I just kept kind of going from there and expanding my career in the industry all different sides.
Anthony Codispoti: Before finding the Bartaco experience, what do you think was your most favorite stop along the way?
Anthony Valleta: You know, I worked for the Frisco Steakhouse for seven years. And I was the director of operations for them. It was when we were, we went from private to public to private during my time there.
So that’s probably a whole nother podcast than of itself. But the time there, we had an incredible team, really just an amazing concept and incredible growth, great cities. You have to really be a part of so many incredible events across the country, from sporting events to celebrity events to just, you know, big nights in the restaurant. And it was just the people I was surrounded by with a brand that was in such a cool phase. But I think outside of my time today was probably the best and most favorite time of my career.
Anthony Codispoti: And so were you actively involved in that process of sort of public to private back and forth?
Anthony Valleta: I got to be kind of like the secondary realm of, you know, the executive suite was the one that was taking care of everything. But we got to see the difference of what companies are when they’re privately holding, growing well to when they’re publicly held to why we went back to being private. I mean, that process is really interesting and kind of a wild world.
And, you know, when you’re on the ground trying to make sure that the culture and the guest experience and our staff is always taking care of during that process is a big challenge. You know, there’s pros and cons to each. Just at the time, it made sense for us to go public at the time. It made sense for us to go back to being private at the time as well.
Anthony Codispoti: Did you feel like you were under a microscope when it was public?
Anthony Valleta: You know, it’s not a microscope, but it’s every quarter of a year you’ve got to find a way to get better and better. And if things aren’t in your favor, whether that’s labor going up or commodities going up, you got to find a way. So like it forces you to be creative.
But when you’re not creative, you are under a microscope, right? And the reality is you got to increase earnings per share. You got to take care of your shareholders. And it’s the same when you’re privately owned. You got to take care of your investors. But at privately owned, there’s a little bit more understanding for trial and error. You have more conversation about what’s realistic and what makes it more sense strategically. It’s hard to go to the street and say, you’re going to reduce your EPS and expect your stocks there. So yeah, there’s just a little bit of different forgiveness, I guess, is a better way to put it than microscopic.
Anthony Codispoti: And so what was it about the Bartaco experience that drew you to it?
Anthony Valleta: I was always watching the brand from afar. The CEO that took over from the founders and helped them sell our first big transaction was one of my old mentors. So when he left, I was actually working with Del Frisco and he came over to run both brands. I was always watching from afar, but I was always really infactuated with the way that they did things. And they were, again, doing Topos before people did Topos. They brought this taco restaurant that no one really had thought of in this capacity. In the old days, the GMs ever saw P &Ls at the brand was insanely profitable. Just like they just kind of defied all odds.
And I always like to use expression if it’s not broke, break it, like find your own way. And these guys did the same thing. So I always had watched from afar. And when the opportunity came up, my previous mentor had sold oddly enough to Del Frisco’s restaurant group after I’d left, but sold to Del Frisco’s and then changed hands a few times until our current P from Gaudis. And when they took us back, they wanted to get the sole back of the brand. They brought the co-founder back, Scott, our CEO, to kind of get the lifeblood back and all those great things that made us grow. And they were looking for someone to run the data operations and kind of lead the brand in the future. And when I heard the opportunity, I said, this is incredible. This is a brand I’ve watched for a while.
It’s a brand that I believe in a lot of the values and the way they approach things. And now I get to sink my teeth in and kind of be at the helm. So it was kind of just like, it was a perfect combination of everything I’ve done. I’ve worked everything from QSR to Michelin Star Dining. And this is like the perfect hybrid everything I’ve done, which I think is a great way for me to kind of continue my career.
Anthony Codispoti: Yeah, for somebody who hasn’t been to Bar Taco before, can you kind of paint a picture? What is the customer experience like?
Anthony Valleta: Yeah. So, you know, the big part of us, like I mentioned earlier, is the vibe and the feel. When you walk in, the best comment we get is someone says it feels like a really high-end beach house.
It’s got this indoor outdoor culture, beautiful plants everywhere, friendly, not familiar music that you listen, but you’re not quite sure exactly what the song is, but it feels like you know it. We fresh squeeze all of our drinks, so you’re going in and getting this beautiful smell of citrus and fresh fruits being kind of squeezed at the bar. It’s a vibe. Like you go in, you’re hearing the tin shake from Margaritas, and you’ve got these beautiful basket lights that were inspired by Trip to South America.
So, it feels like you’ve been kind of transported is our goal. And the feeling is if you were to, you know, if you and I were to drive our truck to the beach or the mountain and kind of hang out and watch the sunset on a Friday night have a fire, how would you eat? You eat on trays because they’re easy and you’re somewhere with being a tin can and everything would be relatively simple but really fresh and that’s where we get all of our inspiration from. The dining experience, we’ve, we’re developing one of the first we call Omni Channel dining experiences. So, when QR codes became popular in COVID, we leaned in even more than most people, most just you saw it in the menu and it was a PDF and you’re trying to scroll in, you know, to look at the one thing you wanted to see and it was a little arduous with the process. We actually made it a full digital ordering platform where the guests now can control their experience on their phone and they also have what we call a service leader, someone that’s actually taking care of them. So, we’ve blended the convenience of tech where there’s nothing worse than sitting at a table and wanting to refresh your beer and you’re looking around because you can’t find the server or you got kids that are screaming and you want to pay the check but you can’t find the server. We put those friction points back in the guest hands. At ease of access, click of a button, they can now do it instantly. But by doing so, the fact that the guests now has a little bit of the ordering on their side, we have more time for our staff to engage with the guests.
The process actually, we monitor our success by guest site, that’s number one for us. In our sentiment coming out of COVID, we break on a scale of one to five, was in the high threes. When we switched this model, we’re now running like a 462, 463 guest sentiment for about 18 months straight. So, it really helped take the mundane part of the server’s job away and we replaced it with just sheer engagement with the guest and it worked. The guests are now feeling better experience, better sentiment, better overall time in Bartaka, which pays dividends in the long run.
Anthony Codispoti: Okay, so let me dive into this a little bit. I want to understand this better because when you’re telling me that you’re using the tech so that customers can place their orders, I’m like, oh, that’s really fiscally prudent. Like, you know, probably, especially when there’s a labor shortage, you know, probably relying on so many servers, but you’re like, no, like, what it allows us to do is it allows those servers to spend more time interacting with the guests. So, what does that interaction look like if they’re not doing the order taking?
Anthony Valleta: So, they’re still guiding them through and they still greet you when you come to the table and welcome you in and kind of give you your opening spiel. The only thing they’re really not doing is it’s the order component and some guests want them to and we do. Like, the guests can kind of still not.
Yeah, they can pick their path. But those guests that like the ability just go in and say, yeah, because it’s top of style. So, you order more frequently than if we went into an Italian restaurant and said, I’ll get my salad, my pasta and so on and so forth. So, it’s convenient for the guests because you’re thinking about like, oh, I could eat one more taco because our tacos are only two or three bites.
They’re small street style. So, it’s convenient to them. So, during that time, they’re still servicing the table, you know, clearing plates and filling water and bringing drinks out. But the additional time is really just meant to get to know our guests and that’s what people go out for.
It’s the old Cheers philosophy, right? You want to go, or whatever your name, we’ve really pushed that into our staff’s minds that their job is to truly get personal with the guests. And some guests don’t want to be because they’re maybe on a business meeting or and that’s fine. You read the table and you provide the service they want. But most of our guest base comes out is looking for an experience or looking to have fun. Like we always, our expression is we sell fun, not tacos. That’s the first thing that we do. So, to have fun, you got to be able to get the table and kind of joke around and understand if it’s a family of, you know, family with kids. We give out like full coloring books, not the little crappy pages you see everywhere else.
Anthony Codispoti: It’s a little bit. You got my attention. Yeah, right? But parents always look because I got three kids too. And like, do I just tear a page out? Like, no, the whole thing’s free. It gives us a chance to create these little tiny moments that really make a big difference. And, you know, we stress
Anthony Valleta: doing the things that the restaurants might not do. You know, I have a story I love to share that we had a employee came on a restaurant or I’m sorry, guest on restaurants, and she had a custom cake made for a birthday. And when the woman walked in to the front, she tripped and fell with a cake in her hand, hit the ground and the cake top like it smushed was a mess. And she was like in tears. So I said, let’s take the cake out back.
Let me see what we can do. And this assistant manager tried like hell and just no matter what, the cake was just there’s no say. So on the box was the name of the bakery. So the manager called the bakery and said, listen, I have a little bit of an issue. Told her the story was able to leave, pick up a replacement cake before they finished and brought it back and presented the cake to the guest.
Wow. And the guest, of course, you know, there was tears, a mild death. But in a typical, you know, serving environment, you don’t have the time to do those things necessarily. And if you do, it’s it pulls you so much away. This has given us opportunities to do though. And that’s obviously a very extreme circumstance. But there’s so many things between a coloring book and that that happened every day in our restaurant that I don’t think would happen if they had so many other things filling their time. So to us, we most people said, oh, you want to save a ton of money, we actually reinvested all that money. The money we save, we reinvest either in more like higher end labor in terms of engagement and managers, or we reinvest reinvested in benefits for our team. So we didn’t see the savings we saw as an investment in our people and them taking care of our guests, which has really helped them grow our business.
Anthony Codispoti: Yeah, this leads me into a question I always like to ask my episodes, because I know that it’s tight labor market for everybody. Some people say it’s loosening up a little bit here, and we’re recording this early December of 2024. But I’m curious, you know, somebody who’s you want to take those savings and you reinvest them into your team, what are some things that you have tried in terms of recruiting and retaining folks that has worked well for you?
Anthony Valleta: Yeah, you know, we’ve been fortunate when everybody came out of COVID, at least in our industry, a third of the workforce left and decided they weren’t really going to come back. And it started to change to your point now, we’re seeing almost pre pandemic levels today.
But for us, we came out, we were like 92% staffed about six months after COVID, which was wild. I think there’s a few things that we did differently. You know, one, I think the service model really changed things a lot, because if you want to be a part of something new and different, it’s not the same thing.
So I got to come and experience something different. The big component that we really worked on is we’ve learned more and more as we’re, you know, we hire a lot of millennials and Gen Z in terms of our kind of hourly and salary managers. And more of them want to go to a place now that they align with the lines of their values, they’re proud to say the brand stands for something. So we’ve worked on, we worked the company called green places in terms of our environmental impact, we’ve gone carbon neutral. We’ve shifted the compensation package, which, you know, when I started it was just what’s my salary and bonus and the rest of the stuff is like, yeah, I don’t care about that, just just want my paycheck. And it’s now turned more into this total comp of what else is being offered in terms of creative plan time off in terms of vacation, in terms of benefits. You know, we have headspace great for, you know, some kind of personalized psychiatric components.
We’ve got help with a company called peanut butter funny enough that helps with student loan forgiveness. Even little things like we pay for Duolingo for our teams. And it’s all this kind of little ancillary things that we found people got excited about because for a while, it was a, you know, kind of blanket approach of here’s the package we offered everybody. And we’ve tried to get more personalized and say, well, here are a variety of options you can have as an employee with us.
And I think that really helped us because we were thinking very differently. So our compensation has always been, you know, 75th percent tower up is what we try to be. Some markets are high, some might be a little bit lower depending where we are, but we want to make sure they’re taking care of the job they’re doing. But we want to make sure internally that they have all these other benefits that let them know we’re investing in them. Part of the reinvestment that we did post COVID in the savings that we found in labor, we actually invested in a leadership development module where every salaried employee in our company was given executive coaching of some sort, which normally is reserved for just C-sweets. We brought it all the way down to a 22 year old manager and really wanted to work on the soft skills that a lot of companies train you to say, here’s that to be a good restaurant manager or a good, you know, analyst or whatever it may be, we wanted to train them on life skills on things that allow them to transport to a company or go to a different industry and still move those with them. So I think that type of environment got people really excited and said they’re doing something different during a time when most companies were pulling benefits back. We were adding benefits, we’re adding a 401k match. When companies were pulling away on learning and development and pulling away on growth, we were growing faster. We were investing in leadership and development. So we, similar to our story, I guess you’re kind of seeing a trend, like we did the opposite of what most were doing. I think that helped us get some really star players when most were starving for them. And then the environment, our job there was to make sure we took care of them fair and out.
Anthony Codispoti: So how many locations did Bartako have when you first started with the Anthony? 19. 19. And now you’re up to 34. So when the restaurant first started, you guys were doing some different things. You started with the idea of what’s the vibe that we want and then sort of backfilled the menu to fit with that. The fact that you guys were doing tapas and like nicer tacos than, you know, Taco Bell, like these things were different in novel at the time. But here it is many years later, and you guys are not losing steam, you’re picking it up.
We’ll talk about, you know, growth plans here in a moment. So clearly like the novelty, if there are folks listening who don’t know what tapas are, who kind of haven’t been out in a restaurant in a while, it’s just this, rather than sort of like ordering like one big entree and a salad that, you know, it all comes out a little bit later, like you order lots of little plates and you share them and they come out more quickly and you don’t have to order them all at once. And so you’re kind of there for a little bit longer and you’re hanging out.
It’s, you know, it’s a more casual setup. So but the novelty of the tapas and, you know, the nicer tacos is it’s kind of worn off now. So what do you attribute your continued ongoing success to now that those things are not as unusual as they were when you first started?
Anthony Valleta: Yeah, I mean, when I think back to when we started, you think about timeless style restaurants, Italian steakhouse pizza, maybe you’re like, you know, Chinese type restaurants, like ones that just kind of seem to, no matter what, they’re always around, they’ve always lingered. And I really think over the past few years, like Mexican culture and Mexican food has become one of those staples, it’s become kind of the same as those. So I think that’s the, that exposure has helped. I think the fact that people really have, you know, the joys of having yourself on, I guess, at all times, they really understand food a lot more than they did even 10 years ago.
And they care where it came from, they care that it’s freshly done, they understand the difference of equality versus non quality margarita or, you know, how pork belly might be made or something of that nature. I think for us, we’ve kind of been ahead of our time, but we’ve continually tried to innovate ways that we can be better and better. You know, when this cocktail culture came out big in the past decade, it was all about these craft cocktails and, you know, frilly things and smoking and all this kind of stuff. And it still exists, but there’s fads that come in and out.
And we’ve always stuck by the principle that keep it simple, give great food, be nice to your guests, and have a really cool experience. And that becomes almost timeless. And they go out of these brands that we’ve seen over our tenure, they try to keep up with the Joneses too much. And they’re always chasing the next trend.
That’s right. And it’s hard. There’s only certain restaurants that can continually change. The fact that our menus tapas helps because we can, when Asian flavors became big, we pulled Asian flavors into our menu. The traditional Mexican restaurant, you know, we all can name the menu, and chaladas and all these things. While people call us a Mexican restaurant because we serve tacos, we don’t call ourselves a Mexican restaurant.
We call ourselves a taco restaurant because that just means it’s a vessel that has a taco shell that we’re putting something in. But we use Mediterranean influences, Asian influences, South American influences in food. And I think that helps us not be kind of pigeonholed into one category where we kind of constantly say, what’s your competition? It’s a long list because there’s no one doing exactly what we’re doing, which I think is why we’ve had such a good run is there are Mexican restaurants to do some of what we do. And there are great bowl restaurants to do some of what we do. And there’s Asian restaurants to do some of what we do. I think the fact that we can be a lot of things to a lot of different people, we tend to cast a wider net than most people do.
Anthony Codispoti: So 34 locations presently, 13 states and Washington DC. What are our future growth plans? What does it look like?
Anthony Valleta: Yeah, so we’re going to be doing seven or eight in 2025, it looks like. So about 20% growth that next year. And we’re going to continue somewhere around that trend, maybe eight to 10 for the following years to come.
We’re from Boston to Miami, we’ve got one in Chicago, one in Wisconsin, two in Colorado, so mostly East Coast. And we’ve been, even though it seems like big growth for our size, we’ve really been very specific on real estate. I think the downfall of the industry, but good for us, I guess a lot of these small restaurant groups are closing. And it’s sad because of, you know, million different things have happened the past few years. But what’s helping us out is there’s some great real estate out there. And we’ve really tried to make sure that it’s not just the same carbon copy in every restaurant. A lot of brands, and they get to our size, you walk in and they all look the same, they feel the same.
Anthony Codispoti: Economies of scale, that’s easy. We’ve got a blueprint, we just rubber stamp it over here.
Anthony Valleta: And we just, we don’t like that approach. So that’s, we, you know, could we open up 20 next year the same way? Sure, we could, we don’t want to. We want to look at it and say we want to be part of the community, we want the restaurants to really feel like the environment they’re in. And we opened in Charleston, South Carolina this past year, and we pulled reclaimed iron from around the city to build part of our bar.
The building itself was from 1896, the rafters are from 1904, original wood, we left the rafters up. Like these pieces that really let you know that we’re not just a typical, and I hate the word chain restaurant, that we’re really a lifestyle brand that wants to be part of the community is important. So when we’re picking real estate, we’re really specific to how the brand fits in the community, how it fits amongst the co-tenants that are in whatever market that we’re in. And how the restaurant’s going to look and feel. Is it feel like we make this restaurant feel like it belongs in Charleston or coconut grove, Miami or wherever it may be. And if we can’t, you know, we have that question because a big part of what we are is feeling like we’re a local restaurant to everybody. I get the funniest compliment I get, like I live in Connecticut where we started, and people are like, oh, the president of the brand, that’s cool. So you just go around to your four locations, because we have four in this market, like three, four. You’re out of Connecticut, and then I go to Atlanta and they say the same thing. So all of these markets we’ve grown, they feel like it’s their brand, they feel like it belongs to their city. And I love that because that means we’ve done a good job being a part of the community, being a part of the culture, and not just building, you know, these carbon copies across the country.
Anthony Codispoti: Now, all 34 locations as well as the new ones coming, they’re all corporate owned, no franchise opportunities here. That’s correct. Has there ever been a consideration of that?
Anthony Valleta: There hasn’t been, you know, at this point, we’re so fanatical about quality and vibe and experience. And the second you relinquish that to a franchisee that might, you know, depending on how the franchise agreement is written up, could sway some of those.
It’s really challenging at this time. You know, never say never, things could happen in the future, or maybe it’s international franchising. But for us right now, we want to be company owned, we want to control our destiny at this point. We don’t feel about that size that we need to be at economies of scale and just start blowing this thing up across the country and getting to 100 units that fast. We want to do it the right way.
Anthony Codispoti: So you mentioned the number 100 units. Is that a magical number for some reason?
Anthony Valleta: No reason. Just to sound like a round number can have top might have.
Anthony Codispoti: As a business owner, you know, I’ve been asked this question before, like, what’s your five-year plan? What’s your 10-year plan? And it’s like, I don’t, I’d be curious to hear your take on this. It’s like, man, it’s hard to say. Like, I don’t know what’s going to happen next year.
Like, I know like what my growth, like where I want to get to, but to ask me to project the future five or 10 years out is pretty tough. Same in your boat, or do you feel differently about that?
Anthony Valleta: 100%. I mean, I’ve been asked the same question. It’s like, sure, I could give you what I’d love to be in five years, but the reality is, I don’t know what happens tomorrow, little next year, or two. So I can spend time building a five-year plan, but I’m going to rewrite it five times the next five years. So why bother? I think it’s important to have a North Star.
Right? It’s important that you at least say, hey, whether it’s I want to sell or I want to be 100, you throw some number out there like 100. I think it’s fine to put out some pie in the sky thing, at least you’re reaching for something, but the change is so frequently that we just like to make sure our goal is that we’re better today than yesterday. That’s if you do that every single day, your five-year plan will look 10 times better than does if you wrote down paper. And that’s just kind of the way we look to approach the business.
Anthony Codispoti: I’m curious to hear, Anthony, how you think about building a company culture across so many different locations in so many different states? across the country?
Anthony Valleta: Yes, it’s a challenge. I’ll tell you, we spent, since I came on, trying to recover from something as big as COVID our industry was tough. It was a cultural head for so many different reasons. And I believe firmly in the waterfall effect that things just fall from the top down and that you’ve got to really kind of model the behavior and set the way. So we came in and it was about building a good coalition in terms of our directors and our operations field and really making sure that they have a place that their voice is heard, that we’re being very transparent.
They’re being very introspective. Those things are a big part of our kind of ethos. And we commit to that all the time. So I think a big part is you got to put down what you really believe in and then show them. So a lot of companies write a mission statement or values and they put them up on a wall and they talk about them.
Then you look and like it’s not really a filter, it’s just a cool thing to put on paper. It sounds great. We don’t do it that way. Of course you don’t.
Anthony Codispoti: You guys do everything differently.
Anthony Valleta: How do you approach it? The difference between us is, we always say, we do what we say and say what we do. We’re not going to provide lip service. The original video of the two founders, they start off and somebody asks a question, like what’s the difference between you and everybody else? So the difference between us and everybody else is that we don’t have around and they kind of laugh, but they’re like, yeah.
Anthony Codispoti: I didn’t quite catch it. The difference between you and everyone else is, we don’t F around.
Anthony Valleta: I don’t want to curse in your projects. But the point was is he’s like, we do what we say and say what we do and we always will. A lot of companies will sit down and have a meeting and talk with another meeting and they do a lot of talking. We do a lot of acting.
Like great, go do it. And I believe that speed is really important. That I would rather have done something faster, maybe not as clean, but a time we fail three times, my competition’s only failed once. And that failure, I believe that failure is an important part of success, that you have to evolve seeing the books on them, right, fail fast, fail forward, all these things.
I believe that. I asked my team often in my conversations, what have you failed at since your last book? And at first people will give this look, like I don’t want to tell my boss where I failed.
So I’m going to get fired. But we embrace it of if you’re not failing, you’re not actually trying hard. That means you’re not pushing the limits. And to really create a culture that people feel that they can try new things and that we want to continually innovate and that we want their feedback, we promote that culture a lot. And then on the backside, you have to reward and recognize people. They have to make sure that they understand that as hard as we push and as high as the expectations may be that we set, that when they hit them, they’re well rewarded for it. They’re taken care of. And we’ve taken a lot of feedback from our team directly.
And that’s changed most of our culture, honestly. They say, hey, this isn’t landing well. Great, how would you suggest we do it? And when we pull people into the solutions, you start to create all of these soldiers in the field that are now singing the same dance that we are in the executive field. And it’s never perfect. Like you hear it all the time, the senior leadership is detached from the bottom. And unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to not ever have that come around, but we do our best to be in the field all the time.
Like I’m in restaurants every single week, talking to my team, making sure I understand what the impact is for them. And I think those are the moments where culture is created. It’s not a class, it’s not a conversation, it’s not a podcast, right? It’s like, it’s actually living it every day. And we hold ourselves to a really high accountability the fact that if we’re going to say we’re gonna be introspective, then we have to be that way seven days a week. And if we’re going to be intolerant of anything less than our best, then we have to be intolerant 365. And I think we’ve really done a good job sticking to a simple message and it’s kind of our filter for everything we get.
Anthony Codispoti: I’m curious, Anthony, how often do you actually use that question, what have you failed at today?
Anthony Valleta: Oh, all the time. Yeah, because- Multiple times, multiple times. When you said that, like a light bulb went off in my head because I hear this talked about all the time and I’ve done it in my own companies where it’s like, I wanna promote that same culture of don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Like don’t make sloppy ones, right? Because you weren’t thinking or you weren’t careful but if you went into it with a plan and the plan just didn’t go the way that we thought, that’s okay. Like we learned something, we move on. We pivot, we modify and we try something new but it’s really hard to get that into people’s brains because, right, everybody is on the defensive. I don’t wanna do something wrong. I don’t want my job at risk.
But when you mentioned that question and the way that you asked it, what have you failed at recently? Like that just flips the script on its head. Like you’re inviting that.
Anthony Valleta: And we celebrate it, we talk about it. We have a monthly call with all of our operators and I’ll share conversations of, hey, you know, I talked to Jane Doe and this is what they tried and what they failed and now look at what they’re doing. Like it’s the and that changes it. Because it’s hard when you speak to a failure of, hey, I failed at this, it brings you down but then it’s the next piece of, and okay, so then what?
And that’s always my, that’s typically a follow up question that I use a lot of, okay, great. So then what? We failed, we tried, what were you trying to do? So then what did you learn?
Or so then what are we doing next? It’s about constantly going and I think when people understand that you’re supposed to fail. Most of us have failed countless times and I mean, I don’t have a long enough time to go through all the failures you’ve gone through.
But when you embrace the fact that that’s part of it, it’s huge. Like when I first brought this up, I used the Elon Musk story when he brought the Cybertrap. We probably all seen the video where it’s like, oh, this is a penitential glass, it won’t break and he throws the thing against it and it shatters. And it’s interesting, like there’s actually another video that I’ve shared, same thing with Musk, that when they were launching a SpaceX, one of them, when they were all blowing up in the beginning, it blew up and the whole place erupts in celebration. And then like they celebrated their failure because they failed less than last time and they know why they failed this time.
And they created this environment of like, that’s part of this process. Cause every failure we have is something we’re never gonna repeat again. We’re gonna learn from that versus a lot of people I’ve found that are successful, not highly successful, but people that have success within departments or even companies, sometimes you ask them and they don’t have a good answer.
It’s probably because they’ve stumbled into something but they don’t know how to recreate it. And that’s always the challenge I think of economies of scale is I tell my team all the time, hey, that’s great that your restaurant is number one for whatever metric fill in the blank. How did you do it? And if they can’t give an answer, I said, well, then you’re not really number one. You just happen to be there, but you can’t teach someone else how to do it.
You can’t recreate it. Therefore, you’re not trying hard enough. Whereas the ones at the bottom might be failing time and time again, but I’ll tell you what, when they rise, they’re going to stay there because they’ve learned all the things.
Anthony Codispoti: They learned a hundred ways not to do it. And they finally figured out a way to do it. And they’ve got a stack of things to contrast it against.
Anthony Valleta: Yeah, and I think when you see the process and you make it part of your process, and when they get success and you say you’re not successful yet until you failed, that kind of encouragement of good failure, all of a sudden just becomes normal. And then people laugh it off of, it’s great, yeah, I screwed up, here you go. And it’s more ownership too, because the fear of failure and accountability, see people always ask, well, who was responsible? What they’re really asking is who screwed up? Rarely are you asking who’s accountable for achieving a result?
Who’s the one that’s actually going to go out there and get it done? So when you flip those scripts, I think that really drives the culture. It’s very different. And we believe it helps us stay innovative and stay top of mind, but it’s not easy to do. It’s taken a long time and people have come from the outside, still don’t believe it at first. And we promote a lot internally because our culture is very different. And people from the outside just have a hard time accepting that we’re actually going to celebrate them screwing up, it’s very strange.
Anthony Codispoti: Well, they need to see some social proof first. So they need to be on the inside and see that it’s for real. That’s right. I’m curious, Anthony, to hear about a particular challenge that you’ve overcome, personal or professional, and how you got through that, maybe some lessons learned coming out the other side.
Anthony Valleta: Yeah, when I was first running multi-unit in restaurants, I was still younger and probably a little too cocky at the time. And I was running a handful of restaurants that were making incredible money. We were top of the charts for everything. The restaurants were just absolutely gangbusters on paper.
So everybody from the outside is looking in saying, whatever’s happening there is great. And internally, I failed to understand what that success meant on my team is that I was never satisfied where we’re at. And I drove my teams literally nuts to the point of where I was losing people, good people, to competitors, to other industries. And I constantly just told myself it was because they couldn’t hack it. They couldn’t work hard enough. They couldn’t keep up with me.
And I did it for a long time, and the success kept coming. So I said, well, it can’t be them. There can’t be me.
It’s gotta be them. Clearly I’m right. Like the numbers year after year, I’m beating projections and I’m making more money and we’re growing the business. And when I finally had two managers at the same time that left me and both collectively gave me the feedback and just said, the day you realize that you have people that would literally lay in front of a bus for you but don’t want to anymore is the day you’re gonna be 10 times as successful as you are today. And I took it really hard. No one had ever given me that direct feedback. And I started spending a lot of time on 360 evaluations. I brought in an executive coach and asked them to do confidential feedback from all of my team one-on-one.
And when I received my first report, I almost fell out of the chair. I was a highly respected person and I don’t think hated is the word, but like just, there was no loyalty to what I was doing but they believe that I could build that. And it took me a number of years to really digest this and understand that you can achieve amazing results while having a great environment and you don’t have to just drive people to the bitter end. And it was a really big change in my career. And shortly after I moved into an executive role as CEO of our company and it stuck with me ever since.
But that challenge was, it was a painful process. It’s hard to hear that kind of feedback. I think people ask general feedback but when you ask really specific feedback, you get really specific answers. And the challenge with that is that if you really take that feedback seriously, you have to actually do something about it.
That’s why most people don’t ask specific feedback. It’s like, how am I doing? Oh, you’re pretty good.
Okay, great. If I give you specific feedback and say this is something specifically that you are failing at, right? I don’t like the way you’re doing it. Well, then that means I have to either do something about it. I have to change or communicate differently or just have a tough conversation of, hey, let’s me just explain the why. And I did a lot of that for a number of years and I’ve tried to do my best now to get ahead of it with my teams. And it’s an ongoing challenge. Like it was very serious at the time and luckily I was able to turn it around but it’s always something that I have to remind myself every, you know, when we get a tough times in my guide. I know what my instinct is, we’ve got to pull back and use the power of the team and I’ve been able to build, I think some really world-class teams because of that but it was a rough couple of years. It was really tough.
Anthony Codispoti: I want to peel back some of the layers of the onion here because I think there’s some real gold in here. You’re a high driving restaurant professional, been in the industry a long time, you’re having lots of success, numbers just keep improving. Whether you realize it or not, that builds the ego, right?
It builds confidence. And like, I know what I’m doing. I’m good at this. I’ve learned a lot along the way, like, hey, if you can’t keep up, then you’re on the way out.
And for you to kind of have this like, hang on a second moment, like, let me go and check myself here. I’ve lost some good folks. I’m gonna go and I’m gonna ask my team, you know, what do they think of me? Did you have a sense in that moment what that feedback was gonna be like? I don’t think he did because the comment you, sorry to cut into your answer, you said it almost fell out of my chair.
Anthony Valleta: You know, I had a sense, but not to the severity of what it was. I felt like I just needed to change an approach, but the intensity was fine. And I just needed to understand how to communicate externally better to my team. I expected that answer. What I received was very different. Was in fact, the things I thought I needed to do, I was doing well, but it was the messaging and the intensity and the lack of being able to pull people up with me. It was, here’s the mark, if you don’t hit it, you’re either gonna be squashed down or you’re gonna be squashed at the point where you’re gonna take twice as long to get back up. And I just ran at such a fast rate that the mentality was, I’m going as fast as I can, keep up. Cause all I’m gonna do is just keep pulling and pulling until you’re either, like you say, a dog, the leash getting pulled from behind.
And at some point that doesn’t become motivating. I think the biggest fall of the chair moment was, I thought by driving people, I was an athlete my whole life. So to me, I’d put in the old school days, not today where coaches just, they beat you up. It was like, you don’t get the job done, run sprints. You’re not fast enough, get faster. You’re not tough enough, get like, I just kind of use that same sports ethos that keep raising the bar and push them. They will call themselves up because they’re here to play.
They’re in the big leagues. And I think that worked in previous generations, but as new generations came in, they’re like, absolutely not. That’s not, that’s the hard way to do it. There’s a smart way to do this. And that expression we always heard works more than harder. I thought I was being smart cause that’s how I was brought up, but I was actually working harder in that time of my career than I had to be. And making that shift really helped but seeing the feedback and how specific and, you know, calling out certain circumstances.
I was like, oh, I thought that was fine. The one thing that got called out, and I still remember like it was yesterday, I was running one of my stakehouses in Boston and we were trying to achieve an annual sales mark. We’re gonna have $20 million for the first time. And I was like, we were pushing it like three days left in the year and we hit it.
And I was next to my managers, we ran the report. He’s like, we hit 20 million and he’s jumping up and down. And in my mind, I was like, I have 36 hours left of the year. I’m not done. And I immediately walked away and got back to work and I’m pushing the team like, let’s go, let’s go. And everyone kind of gave me this look of, you didn’t even take a moment to recognize how far we came and the fact that we hit a major milestone. You immediately were on to the next goal. The next goal was how far beyond it can I get. And that moment really stuck with me that I don’t need to celebrate myself.
Like I’m just not that type of person, but people around me do. And the power of a position becomes more and more real that when the president or the VP or whoever takes the time to recognize the success of those that are working hard for them and does it really well and genuinely, that carries emotional weight forever. Like, and it’s those moments that I constantly have to get a better job of. And I’ve tried my absolute best to do that.
I was never a rainbows and butterflies type of guy, not that I am now, but I need to be more of a cheerleader for the team and celebrate their small wins to get the big ones. And that, those are things that like I fell out of my chair thinking, man, we hit a mark, what are you talking about? Like, you know, we don’t need to celebrate this, keep going, the celebration was hitting it. So it was feedback like that, that I’m very thankful that I had a team that was open with me and cared enough. And it’s amazing the team during that time that worked for me, a handful of them worked for me today at Bartaka. They’ve left, they’ve moved with me from company to company, because I think they saw the fact that I took feedback seriously and made a really big change in my leadership. I think they appreciated that. And now I’ve got amazing one of us that I wouldn’t go anywhere without.
Anthony Codispoti: So what you’re describing is classic. Like I hear this from a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business leaders, we’re always moving the goalposts. Here’s the goal, it’s, you know, man, it’s big, huge rock we want to get to. We get there and immediately, and it’s exactly what you did immediately without delay, you move the goalpost again. That’s right.
It’s classic. I’m curious, when you first got that feedback, was there a part of your ego that kicked in and became defensive, or were you immediately receptive and realizing I have to make big changes?
Anthony Valleta: So the helpful part is, is I had an executive coach at the time, if it was not for that, I know like my mind mentally immediately went to defense, but he had done an amazing job helping me understand, you know, what it’s like to be on the other side of me, and kind of knowing what my opportunities are. So I give a lot of credit to him because without him, I guarantee I would have been in defense mode and the hands would have gone up and would have been fight, but he really helped me understand why it’s important and to not get defensive. And I think I’ve carried that since then, which has been really important that typically, especially when you’re at the top, the person making all the decisions and paving the way for the future of your company, you typically think you have those answers, or you’re like, hey, I know I have this idea, we’re going to push it forward. And sometimes you have to, or think it’s important to not do it defensively and to take the feedback along the way that I might paint a great picture, but someone else finds a brush stroke I missed, or someone else finds a new way to add a color that just makes the picture look that much better. And being able to check the ego, I believe now very much so, like ego and jealousy are two words I don’t believe should exist in leadership, which we take out of the dictionary because they get you nowhere. I wouldn’t have said that 15 years ago, but I believe it wholeheartedly now.
Anthony Codispoti: What did that path look like for you? You mentioned a business coach, was there anything else that was kind of helpful to you? Because you don’t just flip a switch. You don’t come up with a realization like, oh, I’m going to be a different person. Like that takes work to kind of undo old habits and patterns and replace them with new ones. Yeah.
Anthony Valleta: I mean, I had him involved in every part of my work routine. I would be CC him on emails to my team. I would have him sit in on one-on-ones, quiet, like I tell my team, this is to benefit me. I’d have him sit down on group meetings. I would do quarterly meetings that he would lead on feedback sessions where I wasn’t allowed to talk.
I was allowed to be in the room, but we would do full feedback sessions on like a start-stop, continue type component. He really increased my vulnerability in a good way. Like there’s good vulnerability and bad vulnerability, right? The good one is being vulnerable to saying, I want you to tell me what I’m doing wrong, and I actually want to hear it.
So much so that now, and I actually just got to the end of your one and funny enough yesterday, but twice a year, I have a call with my direct reports and I asked them for feedback on how I’m doing. I said, I’m just going to be quiet. The price of admission is participation to this call.
And I want you guys to carte blanche. Like what’s going well? What’s not going well?
What would you want me to change? And the first time I did it, I did it with all my directors like three years ago. And it was, they were like tiptoeing. Because it’s abnormal, right? That’s abnormal to be on a call with 10 other people.
And the community helps because when one person talks, then you feel like, oh, I can speak up because they did. And then once the ball gets rolling, it rolls. It’s almost like, okay, we’ll have to break some of it. But I continue to do that today even without my coach present because I just, that muscle I think is so great to build. So I think most of it to me was just creating good vulnerability and good habits from that.
And communicating the team of here’s what I plan to change, hold me accountable. Because most times we’re managing up, right? And we’re at the top, there’s no one managing your day to day.
They just look at the other operation. But my job is to keep the health of the operation intact for years to come so we can build our business. And the way to do that is the people that work for me need to feel like they’re invested, they can speak up. So I think those tactics that I worked on during that time, I still execute today. And I think that’s made a huge difference in allowing me to build great high performing teams and great companies and great cultures that drive them.
Anthony Codispoti: Yeah, Anthony, you mentioned a few minutes ago about how you were an athlete, younger growing up. Behind you, I see quite a bit of sports paraphernalia. I’m gonna guess this is all from different activities that you’ve been involved with. Can you talk a little bit about how those athletic experiences were formidable for you?
Anthony Valleta: Yeah, I mean, since a young age, I was in sports year round. Just it was, whatever I get my hands on, I played. I just enjoy competition. I’m a very competitive person just by nature. So sports was always a great outlet for me just to be competitive and fuel energy as a kid.
And I continued to play and play. And when I was in high school, I ended up having multiple knee surgeries. And it was brutal because I missed, I was a baseball player at the time. And I missed tryouts every year. So I ended up switching to play lacrosse because I could make the tryout because it was after. So picking up a sport later in life is challenging. I wanted to play a little bit in college. And then I switched from playing lacrosse to boxing in college, seemingly a good idea at the time.
But to me, sports was always a part of what grounded me, being able to get out there and whether it’s aggression or speed or just challenging yourself to be at the next level was always great. I always wanted to go against the guy that was better than me. I was never the biggest guy. I was never the fastest guy, I was pretty quick, but I always wanted to go against them. I remember playing when I went to school my first year, there was a kid that was an All-American that towered over me at like 50 pounds.
And looking up and I was like, I want to play against that guy. And I think to me, it just shaped the mentality of, there’s always someone out there working harder than me. I think sports taught me that.
I even teach my kids that today. There’s always someone out there that’s training harder, that’s doing it better, or that’s willing to put in more time than you. And if you really want to be the best, that’s the mentality. You look at Olympic athletes and world champions and to your point earlier on, it doesn’t just happen on accident. These things are years and years of build. And we see that one moment when they get a gold and their necklace is like, oh, it’s gotta be cool.
You didn’t see them at five and six and seven years old, probably doing this seven days a week. And not that I expect this to be that intense, but I think the mentality of what athletes have is really impressive. I think they have something that most people don’t, which is why they’re professional athletes. But I like to apply a lot of what I think drives sports into our business.
I used these able from the Olympics on a call earlier this year. If you saw the guy that won the pole vaulting, the gold medal, I looked him up and he had already won gold, but he wanted to go again to break his own world record. And he took them three tries and he ended up doing it. And you look at his history, and most guys in the public like hit and they kind of plateau.
This guy is literally point one, like every time he’s just gone up a tiny bit. And to me, I think that’s the mentality I try to push my team is like sports. Is if you’re really a good competitor, you just gotta be 1% better than yourself. And that’s what we push in our restaurants. So I just love the parallel to sports and to work.
Anthony Codispoti: Anthony, do you think it’s a father of young children that your kids are also benefiting from the professional transformation that you put yourself through?
Anthony Valleta: I believe, I mean, I like to believe so. Well, I guess we’ll find out when they’re 18, they go off on their own, but no, I really do. I spend a lot more time talking with some of my kids, even though they’re young. I came to realization my oldest is 10. And when he turned like six, I was working for a company, I was traveling a ton.
I was on the road like 240, some odd days that like last year of the company. And as a six year old, you don’t realize, how much impact do you have on them at that young age? And he hated when I traveled and he used to give me the cold shoulder when I came home. And I said, there’s something here, there’s feedback here that he can’t tell me, but I have to be vulnerable to hear it. And I believe in that job and I moved jobs because of that. So I think it’s allowed me to be a better, hopefully a better dad to them and appreciate it. And I also explained now he’s a bit older, he knows I travel, but I explained to him, like here’s why I travel and here’s what it means and here’s what we’re gonna do when we’re home. And I think that dialogue process I do with my team helps me like stay close with my kids.
Anthony Codispoti: Anthony, I just have one more question for you. But before I ask it, I wanna do a couple of things. Everyone listening today, you like today’s content, please hit the like share or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. Anthony, I also wanna let people know the best way to get in touch with you. What would that be?
Anthony Valleta: Yeah, my email is the best way. It’s A, my last name, Velletta, V-A-L-L-E-T-T-A at Bartaco.com. Also on LinkedIn, feel free to hit me up, it’s a good spot as well. Those are hands down the best two ways, love being able to open new connections and meeting new people.
Anthony Codispoti: All right, last question for you Anthony, I’m curious how you see the restaurant industry evolving in the next couple of years. What do you think some of the big changes are that are coming?
Anthony Valleta: Yeah, I think the big thing mostly with how rapidly evolving technology is that you’re gonna see a lot more personalization in terms of things even that we’re working on of, we’re trying to find ways where if you’ve got an analogy, the menu pops up automatically for you, that you’ve got historical, you’ve got suggestions based off order history. When you looked at the past 10 years, a lot of the personalization was broad stroke.
Like you and I both got the same evil, even though our tastes and habits might be different. I use the analogy a lot, like it’s for shopping for a washer and dryer, all of a sudden you get all these ads everywhere, but then after you buy the washer and dryer, you keep getting ads for like six months after, it’s the same thing and I think about in restaurants, is the tech needs to catch up to the point of where there’s an event that triggers something and really starts to cater. Every message should be more and more catered towards the individual person and your individual preferences, and it’s not one email that goes to my email list.
It’s one core email that gets distributed a thousand different ways to the right different people and segments. I think that’s really gonna change people’s connection with restaurants. I think ones that don’t evolve it and still use the blanket, here’s your deal and it goes across the board, will eventually feel disingenuine, and people will start to see through that, whereas the brands that are really like taking tech out in the right way and evolving their technology, I think you’re gonna allow guests to feel so much more connected and appreciated and heard. I think when people are heard in any business, whatever business that may be, I think they become very loyal and frequency will go up and spend will go up and all those things will happen. So I think traditional loyalty programs will die and this new wave of loyalty, which is personalization will come in. I think it’s gonna completely reshape the way that guests engage with brands.
Anthony Codispoti: What do you, can you give me an example of what that personalization might look like?
Anthony Valleta: Yeah, I mean, I think about, we send out, we run a secret taco, so it comes out and it’s a pork belly taco. Well, if you’re a vegetarian, I shouldn’t be sending that email, because now I’m actually not listening, you’ve told me you’re a vegetarian and I’m sending you a pork email telling you to come in and you’re looking at me saying you’re nuts. As a matter of fact, I might not come back in.
So, and that’s a small example, but there’s a zillion of those every day that happen. And we have all this data that tells us about our guests, being able to personalize that out and say, these people should not get that email, we should send them something different that pulls into their own personalization preferences, because then they’re gonna be like, wow, I’ve never, I didn’t get that pork belly email. Why did you get that?
Oh, well, because I don’t eat pork. That’s really cool. They’re doing something special for me, they’re not doing for you. And I think enough of that over time, those moments guests realize, and they will start to appreciate the effort that goes into doing that. I think it is the small things. I don’t think there’s a big nugget to find here. I think this is a random acts of kindness, if you will, done a thousand times a month, will pay dividends huge over the next couple of years.
Anthony Codispoti: And you have that data because either they filled out a form that indicates their preferences, or if you notice the things that they work around the menu on a regular basis.
Anthony Valleta: And other than that we’ve got now that people are on their phones, we have profiles that they make on their phones. So we have all that customer data. So fault us for not using it. That’s the biggest mistake people have is with all the technical thing that’s going on, we have more information on our guests we’ve ever had. I think companies are slow to use that the right way. And the ones that’ll be fast, or ones that are gonna take off.
Anthony Codispoti: And where are you in that adoption curve? Like still kind of figuring out how to plug it in or already doing it?
Anthony Valleta: No, we’re way ahead. We own our own data. We’re already starting to run these personalized campaigns and testing them out. We’re not all the way there. I always say we’re 25% because we got a long ways to go. But I think we’re much further along than almost anybody else in our kind of sector of the industry.
Anthony Codispoti: Well, Anthony, I wanna be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today.
Anthony Valleta: I’m grateful for that. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today. And thanks for watching. See you next time. And we’ll see you in the next episode.
REFERENCES
๐ Connect with Anthony Valletta:
- Website – https://bartaco.com/
- Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyvalletta
๐ฏ Special Thanks to Anthony Codispoti & AddBack Benefits Agency
๐บ Watch on YouTube: Inspired Stories Podcast by AddBack Benefits Agency