Transforming America’s Favorite Seafood Restaurant: Shawn Harrs’ Digital Vision | Restaurants & Franchises Series

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 Codispoti and today’s guest is Shawn Harrs, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Red Lobster. They are the world’s largest and most beloved seafood restaurant company committed to sourcing sustainable and traceable seafood while serving high quality dishes at great value. Shawn has played a crucial role at Red Lobster overseeing IT strategy and modernizing the brand’s digital experiences. He’s facilitated the company’s M &A and integrated enterprise systems while achieving impressive returns on technology investments. For example, a 2x ROI from online ordering upgrades, a 10x ROI from migrating analytics to the cloud, and a 2x year over year sales growth through the My Red Lobster Rewards program. Before joining Red Lobster, Shawn led transformational initiatives at companies like Ygreen Energy Fund and Vital Pharmaceuticals, shaping his expertise across financial services and entertainment sectors. His passion for innovation and technology transformation has helped Red Lobster enhance the guest experience and drive sustainable growth. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdBac 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 adbackbenefits.com. Alright, back to our guest today, the CIO and Executive Vice President of Red Lobster, Shawn Harrs, I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Shawn Harrs: I’m feeling it’s great to be here. Thank you for having me and very excited to be able to share a little bit about my story with your audience.

Anthony Codispoti : Alright, well let’s jump into it. So your role as CIO at Red Lobster today, is it your first work experience in the hospitality industry? Tell us about your other hospitality work experiences and how that prepared you for this role today.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, thank you for asking that question. My first job out of college was with Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. I started there as an engineer and I spent about 15 years at Disney.

During that time, I had several roles in several functional areas within the company. And I think that really shaped my view of how each function contributes to the guest experience across all different kinds of touch points. And at Disney, we used to say no one owns the guest experience, but every one functional area owns the guest experience at one given moment.

And so having that ability to see the entire guest experience from the view of every different functional area in the company was very formative in terms of my career. But even before then, I grew up in the island nation of Barbados. Barbados is known for its welcoming culture of hospitality. And so when I joined Disney and having had that experience growing up there, that really got me out of the gates ready to fully understand what it meant to shape hospitality every day.

Anthony Codispoti : And so you were in technology roles, I’m assuming, Walt Disney World, is that right?

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, various technology roles, engineering, IT, but also in business departments, marketing, operations, legal, finance. So I didn’t start my career and I didn’t spend actually very much of those 15 years, two years in total in IT. They were all in other sort of non-IT departments. But IT adjacent, if you will. Gotcha.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, that makes sense. Whether it’s right or wrong, we think of IT, we think of sort of being back behind a server wall and being sort of ensconced in just zeros and ones. And so I was going to ask about how you sort of came to embrace so much of that customer first mantra that came from Disney. But it sounds like you moved around into lots of different areas. And so you had sort of a 360 exposure to what was going on there.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, absolutely. And it also helped me learn about what in many cases these functional areas do. I wasn’t, these were early sort of formative years, pre-executive roles where I had an opportunity to also, working in a large company, see the span and scope of what an excellent functional capability looks like. And if there’s anything that Disney does, is their focus on absolutely being excellent at everything. So if you’re working in operations or legal or finance or supply chain management, you’re working with the most talented, experienced people in any given industry, the talent that they’re able to attract is quite remarkable.

Anthony Codispoti : And so that leads us to, how was it that the opportunity for Red Lobster came about for you? How was it that they were able to recruit such amazing talent from the Disney folks?

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, you mentioned earlier, I transitioned out of financial services. That was my last role with the Wigrain Energy Fund was my second head of IT role. And in the time that I got introduced to Red Lobster as they were looking for a new head of IT, I had conversations with what is now my peer group with the CEO, with the board of directors. And I’d say that all of the experiences I had along my career up to this point, prepared me similarly to what I mentioned earlier on in viewing the guest experience. Every stakeholder in that interview journey had a different point of view in terms of what they wanted or needed from the role, the type of leadership, the type of executive thinking, strategic thinking, tactical execution that was sort of going to lead to their decision making on me being the right fit for this role. So my experience in my career helped be prepared for that interview process. And I was very excited when I got this role a little over two years ago.

Anthony Codispoti : So many of our listeners will know that Red Lobster filed for chapter 11, which is the reorganization for bankruptcy. And as I understand it, you started working there just before this restructuring became necessary. You kind of walk us through the pivotal moments when you realized that change was inevitable, and maybe how you navigated some of those early challenges to keep the company on course.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, I mean, if there’s been anything that’s been a constant in my career, it’s working with change. So one of the key things that you’ll read about that we were facing as a challenge was attracting guests into the restaurants. And so we introduced a product that ended up being not as profitable as we wanted it to be.

Yes, it did bring guests back to get reintroduced to Red Lobster, new guests that hadn’t experienced Red Lobster before, but it wasn’t a profitable product. And it wasn’t yielding from a revenue perspective what we were looking for. And so that was towards the tail end of my first year, and then a restructuring became necessary. And we realized that the path forward was going to be financially restructuring, but also restructuring our product. And that is now what we’re underway with.

Anthony Codispoti : So what was that product that was successful in bringing people back in but not profitable, so ultimately it had to be removed.

Shawn Harrs: It’s the $20 all you can eat shrimp. And we had a great variety, it was a great product in terms of guest satisfaction, but then from a profitability perspective, it wasn’t as successful in terms of what we were looking for.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, so a positive learning experience that you can take away from that. So something we tried, it didn’t work. Now, how do we pivot? Like what were some of the new promotional strategies that you guys decided to try?

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, coming out of that now, under our new leadership, our new ownership, and a new executive leadership team with our new CEO, our focus is on really a more well-rounded versus a single product, sort of attraction for guests. The things that guests really have continued to come to Red Lobster for like Lobster Fest or Crab Fest, those limited time offerings. But then for every day, having a menu and other offerings that are exciting and enticing to make our guests want to visit us more frequently. And so our approach versus a single product strategy is more of a well-rounded strategy now.

Anthony Codispoti : So kind of walk us through. I’ve got really fond memories of Red Lobster as a little kid. There was one close to my dad’s office, and I don’t know, once every few months, we would meet him there after work. And this was a nice dinner out for everybody. And I got the popcorn shrimp and the hush puppies. But now it’s been years since I’ve been back. What would somebody experience today as they go into Red Lobster? What’s the customer experience like now?

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, our focus is on two things. On hospitality, we want to be exemplary at the guest experience, hospitality first. And then from a product offering, and you mentioned hush puppies, we’re introducing favorites of our guests that we’re bringing them back. So hush puppies are back. Lobster rolls are back. Our menu has really been modernized. We’re introducing things like everyday happy hours have been introduced. So we’re rolling out the red carpet for our guests and inviting them to come and experience the Red Lobster that they may know from the past and that they were fond of and experience it again in a new way. And also attract new guests to become loyal customers of ours.

Anthony Codispoti : So how did you decide, obviously, prior to you, there had been decisions made to get rid of some items that had been on the menu. How did you decide which items to bring back? Was there some sort of a polling or a survey of customers that said, hey, these are our favorites?

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, I mean, you want to have a menu mix that, you know, when someone comes to the restaurant and they sit down, they may not necessarily know exactly what they’re coming into Red Lobster to have that day.

You want to have an exciting menu mix that will fulfill someone’s desire for what they’re feeling like having in the moment. And that’s really what hospitality is all about. It’s how you make the guests feel. So we want to have a menu mix that will give our guests, you know, that feel good experience about what it is they’re able to select and choose. And sometimes there are things that were, you know, less of a fan favorite that don’t add to that feel good mix that’s on a menu. And in the restaurant industry, that’s what companies are doing, you know, from time to time things appear and disappear from menus over time.

Anthony Codispoti : You know, I’ve heard you mentioned before about wanting Red Lobster to be America’s everyday restaurant. What specific innovations or enhancements are you most excited about that are going to encourage more of those frequent casual visits?

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, last November, we introduced happy hour. So there’s that, you know, every day after work, you know, group of folks from the office or this, you know, after their pickleball group, and they’re going to come into Red Lobster and just have that fun experience at the bar. We’ve got a revised lunch menu. So you’re having a business lunch or you’re going out with some work colleagues to celebrate one of your team members birthdays or company anniversaries. We’re introducing offerings that will give our guests opportunities to think about Red Lobster beyond the big birthday celebrations, the big Mother’s Day, the monthly visit to the restaurant to have the opportunity for us to be thought of in a more diverse way and visit us more often.

Anthony Codispoti : So maybe in the past, people viewed Red Lobster as the, you know, the special occasion once once in a while, once every kind of like I talked about as a kid, it was like once every few months, maybe we got to do it. And now sort of positioning the customer experience in the menu so that it’s more of a maybe not everyday affair, but certainly more regular.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, you can come and celebrate those big events with us, birthdays, anniversaries, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day. But in between, you can come and celebrate with us on a date night. You can come with your group or even individually to enjoy happy hour. You can come during the lunch period. And that just creates an invitation to experience more often.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, checking out your menu online here, lots of good looking stuff. We just happened to be recording this on a Thursday. And I see the specials for Thursday, Shrimp Linguini Alfredo and Cajun Chicken Linguini Alfredo. So it’s not just seafood.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, that’s that’s what I was referring to earlier on about that feel good menu mix where, you know, Thursdays is from a lunch special perspective. It’s Italian day at Red Lobster. Yes, obviously, there’s seafood on there. We’re leading with shrimp.

That’s what we’re known for. But it’s an Italian sort of forward lunch offering. So maybe your group at the office is, you know, let’s do Italian Thursdays at Red Lobster.

Anthony Codispoti : I like that. You know, and maybe one of the reasons as I’m thinking about this that I haven’t been back is half of my family doesn’t care for seafood. Myself and my oldest son, we love it.

But my wife and my youngest son, not so much. Knowing that there are non seafood options, you know, opens this up to be something that we put on to our to-do list. Absolutely.

Shawn Harrs: We’ve got great steaks. We’ve got great burgers. We’ve got great non red meat options. There’s, like I said, a very great mix of menu offerings to offer anyone what they’re really looking for in that moment.

Anthony Codispoti : You know, and I also see, you know, linked up the menu page here. You’ve got an allergen list. So people can look at every single item on the menu and it tells you, does it have soy or egg or dairy or wheat or and so that can be really helpful for, you know, folks who have, you know, particular dietary restrictions too.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, that’s one of the ways that we’re very hospitality guests forward. We want our guests to know what they’re going to experience and be very open about it. That’s really part of our promise in terms of hospitality.

Anthony Codispoti : So Sean, we mentioned a little bit in the intro. One of your major achievements has been modernizing Red Lobster’s online ordering and digital experiences with rather impressive ROI. What do you think made these particular digital initiatives so successful in driving customer engagement and growth?

Shawn Harrs: We took a lot of, and I joined sort of after that, but as a company, we took a lot of what we learned in really shifting heavily to online ordering during the pandemic. And we took those learnings in terms of what the guest was looking for in an online experience.

As we continued, we were welcoming guests back into the restaurant. But a lot of the population, especially a younger generation, has gotten accustomed to thinking about ordering from a restaurant during the week. We’re going to, you know, I’m hungry, I’m going to order something online. And so we have a multi-pronged approach to our digital presence, our online ordering site, the ability to call and speak to a human and put in an online order, or working through one of our third party partners where you can go on their mobile app and order from us. We really took a lot of what we learned during the pandemic and used that to modernize our online ordering experience.

Anthony Codispoti : And so it’s just more customer friendly, user friendly, just more streamlined, easier to kind of find what you need? Yeah.

Shawn Harrs: And also the partnerships that we have then on delivery, how we package it and how we think about making sure that what arrives at your home is as close to as fresh as it would be if it had just come out of the kitchen to the table.

Anthony Codispoti : I’ve heard from some others in the space that the process of updating the technology, these ordering apps and whatnot, it’s sort of like an ongoing process. It’s not like, here it is, we’re done, we’ve arrived. Like they’re talking about, once every 18 months to three years, they’re having to completely redo the whole platform. Are you finding this as well? Yeah.

Shawn Harrs: I mean, the pace of, I mean, I’m not even going to talk about what’s happened in the last two years around AI, but the way the web and mobile apps have evolved over the last 20 years since the early days of e-commerce and online ordering, the expectations of customers for ease of use, you think of the big brands out there that make it very, very easy to order online, make it very easy to know what you’re going to get and when, and have that consistency. You need to be constantly looking at the marketplace. So it’s really not just a technology-driven redoing of those experiences. It’s that every 12 months to 18 months, customer expectations evolve because the entire economy is introducing new experiences. And customers then sort of gravitate to that.

And that then becomes sort of a de facto expectation for anything else in their world. So voice ordering or voice commands, that is very prevalent today. I referenced AI right now. It’s sort of with AI anticipating what it is that I will want in a moment is sort of where AI is now leading. So we’re going to see a lot of that in the next 18 months in terms of AI anticipating what you will want, whether it’s to know something or to get something, and it will transition beyond just the time dimension. It’ll be four-dimensional. It’ll also be spatial. So it’s going to be where you are and when you are, that AI will know what you will be looking for in a given moment.

Anthony Codispoti : Can you give a specific example of that? I was going to know what it is I want before I know.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, absolutely. We all obviously offer through our use of technology a lot of data. So we are volunteering a lot of our behavioral needs and traits to these digital platforms. So suggestive marketing has very often been sort of time dimension-wise in the moment. Here’s an offer for a discount on a particular product that you generally might enjoy at this moment in time, or maybe we’re incentivizing you to come in when you otherwise wouldn’t have, so that’s an additional visit. But what it very often does not know is, you know what, I’m a half hour away from your closest location, and so maybe that’s not the best offer for me right now, or maybe it’s a cruise.

Well, you know what, I’ve used up all my vacation this year already. So there’s a spatial dimension to it where, hey, I’m driving by that coffee shop and combining that proximity to this moment in time when the AI knows that you would be very willing to come in if you had the right offer, the combination of those two will really make for a very powerful guest experience in the digital space.

Anthony Codispoti : So if I’m connecting the dots on what you’re saying, it’s probably not only analyzing sort of my past behavior to see what my tendencies have been, but maybe also kind of creating avatar buckets. So it’s like, oh, you sort of match the purchasing behaviors of this group of people, and they tend to really like happy hour on Tuesday. And so we’re going to, even though maybe I’ve never come to a Tuesday happy hour, it’s going to say, hey, you know, here’s a happy hour special on Tuesday, come see us.

Shawn Harrs: The capabilities of AI are going to be so unique to your persona. It’s going to transcend what traditionally historically and up till very recently have been lookalikes. So your behavior matches a pattern of a particular group or data set that we’re looking at.

So we’re going to tailor our offer to that. AI is going to look at you very discreetly and very individually. So in the areas of healthcare, for example, you know, healthcare practice in the past, when you think of a, for example, an insulin pump, it is reading in real time what it needs to do in terms of your current insulin level. But if you’re combining that with some other wearable technology or some other way of gathering data about your current behaviors, even while your insulin levels are good, it can predict for you that, hey, you need to do something. Otherwise, in the next hour, you’re going to have the need for some insulin. And so it can look ahead and say, hey, you need to eat a banana right now, or you need to get up and go for a walk. And so AI is going to be used to really tailor an experience that’s uniquely your own.

Anthony Codispoti : And, you know, I think some people hear that and they get a little bit weirded out about it. Here’s my take on it and be curious to hear your perspective. It’s like, well, that’s just made life better for me. Like, what’s the point in me getting an advertisement for all you can eat broccoli when I hate broccoli? Right?

Wouldn’t I rather see something that’s like a shrimp and hush puppy special or a happy hour that my wife and I can go to, something that would be relevant to me?

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, I think the biggest issue I would say to consumers who have concern about their data is really around the privacy of it. How is your data, the data that is your own and uniquely your being protected? We have been providing data about ourselves to groups, business groups, whether it’s our physicians or in schools and teachers to our employers for the longest time. And we’ve now over the last 25 years been voluntarily giving data to tech companies, you know, behind a login with the assumption that it’s going to be protected. And so if the security of our data is one that we can’t call into question, and I think that’s an area that really needs to get stronger, because if you look at the news every day, there are very big and reputable companies. And I’ll say that that is a huge focus of mine. I do not compromise on the security of our company, companies, digital and security capabilities.

That’s my first charge. Secondly, then bring about a great best guess experience, but I can’t do that without ensuring that it’s secure. And that’s sort of in the vein of the same promise that we make when we show on the menu what the allergens are in food.

I want to promise our guests that when they turn over their data to us, for example, in our loyalty program, that they can rest assured that that data is secure.

Anthony Codispoti : So when you see some of these tech breaches at other large companies, you know, knowing what you know and all the effort that you guys have put in behind the scenes at Red Lobster to secure customer data, do you see those other examples and think they just got a little sloppy?

Shawn Harrs: Sometimes this is a case and to borrow the term, you know, the bad guys only have to be right once. And technology is so complex, and we’re introducing so many technologies into the ecosystem, and particularly have a large enterprise, is that the ability to breach and compromise just every day, there’s something there.

And so you have to be defensive, you have to be offensive, you can’t hold your breath. You know, I can’t fault many, many of the companies who encounter this. But in some cases, yeah, and that’s why regulations are being introduced that are going to hold companies accountable for data breaches when it was avoidable. In many cases, it isn’t. There’s a quote from a former FBI director, it’s not a matter of whether you will be compromised, but when. That’s reassuring, huh?

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, it is.

Shawn Harrs: But do everything that you can to make it as hard for possible? Absolutely. Every day I start out my day thinking, and not in a negative way, because I want to turn that into actionable things that will continue to build that trust with our guests and also our team members who come to work for us is what could happen. And then I think about that, and then we work to build guardrails around it, because we want our guests to experience and our digital capabilities to go fast. And to do that, I have to have those guardrails in place.

Anthony Codispoti : So tell me if we got this right in the intro. A 10x ROI from migrating analytics to the cloud, is that number accurate?

Shawn Harrs: That is not a made up number. You can actually go online. There are a lot of publications out there about getting 10x value from your data. I can’t take credit for that number, but that was the challenge that I put to my team when I joined the company. I said, that’s the benchmark.

And I could have said, let’s exceed that. But I think in an organization like ours, particularly in the restaurant industry, that is a very margin-driven business, enabling data-driven decision making is so critical. We have a lot of data.

We’re accompanied with a lot of history. We serve a lot of guests every day. We have a lot of employees. So we have a lot of data.

A lot of it might not provide value. And that’s the key thing, is to separate out what are really valuable actions for the business to take, versus whack-a-mole looking at all kinds of data and not knowing what to do. And so I reshaped the data analytics team, restructured it, and made that our focus.

We want to get 10x value out of our data. It’s a treasure trove of information that can help every function in our organization be more effective. Operations, supply chain, human resources, all of the departments to be more effective in how we serve our guests and be profitable.

Anthony Codispoti : Let’s pick one of those departments that you just mentioned as an example. How has this treasure trove of data helped human resources, for example?

Shawn Harrs: In the human resources space, it’s more effective scheduling, making sure that we have the right employees in the right positions. And it’s not about having too few. You don’t want to understaff either, because there’s lost revenue opportunity. There’s potentially a poor guest experience if you’re understaffed. But then also in a margin-driven business, you don’t want to be overstaffed. So you’ve got to use the data to get to the Goldilocks solution, so that you’re balancing cost and guest experience and revenue. And when you can take those margins of accuracy and move them from, let’s say, 95% accuracy, or you’re moving from one sigma to two to three to four sigma accuracy, and you’re introducing AI in your forecasting, you’re getting that much better at making sure you’re going to have the right people in their positions to provide that great guest experience and not erode your margins.

Anthony Codispoti : Sean, tell us about the My Red Labster Rewards Program. What is this?

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, we have a loyalty program. I think your audience is very familiar with it from other food and beverage companies, but everything from airlines, another big area. Companies have loyalty programs. And the My Red Labster Rewards Program is we lovingly like to call it Internally Merlior, which is what it abbreviates to.

Anthony Codispoti : I’m glad that’s not on the commercials though.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, no, it doesn’t really roll off the tongue. That’s sort of an internal. But yeah, our Rewards Program offers additional incentive to, again, become that everyday restaurant that our guests visit. They’re getting loyalty points for ordering online. They’re getting loyalty points for visiting us in the restaurant. And those then translate in subsequent visits into discounts or up to and including a free meal. And then on top of that, we add additional incentives like discount coupons and things like that. So we leverage that as a way to show our guests that we appreciate their loyalty. And that really then creates almost a perpetual motion engine for our guests through that loyalty.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, you saw a 2X year-over-year sales growth just within the program.

Shawn Harrs: Of our loyal customers. You see a very high repeat visitation and loyalty from the groups that use the program a lot. And so if you’re loyal to an airline, you see that a lot of benefits come from moving up in the tiers within that loyalty program. And that drives a reciprocal behavior because you want to get every year to that highest level in the program. So you’re going to become loyal to that airline, even if sometimes you have to have a layover when a competing airline has a direct flight.

Anthony Codispoti : Tell me if I’m right or wrong on this, Sean. It seems to me a little bit unusual that a CIO would also carry the title of Executive Vice President. But as we’re talking here, it’s clear to me, you’re involved in a lot more than the technology and the information, because I hear you talking about lots of big picture and operational strategies.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, I mentioned earlier on my formative years in my career having worked in all of the functional areas. So I know what it’s like to sit in the seat of the CMO because I’ve worked in the marketing department, in the HR department, in supply chain, in operations.

So I know in finance, I know what those areas have to do to be successful. And they’re my internal customers. So I wear that as a CIO hat, and that’s how I see my role. But to your point, I also wear the hat, and I think this is the hat that I wear first, is I’m a member of the senior leadership team. And I have an opportunity to contribute to the organization’s success as part of the thought partnership that as a group together with our CEO, that we look to use in developing our strategies and how we execute and how we create a great hospitality and guest experience. So everything, I have an opportunity to shape that as well with my experience and not just be the tech guy.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah. And in your experience, this is an unusual sort of combo. I mean, at least, so for me, most of the tech guys I’ve met have been tech guys. They started as tech guys, they continue to tech guys, they’re really experts in tech. But that tends to be their silo.

It seems to me like you’ve sort of camped out in all the different silos. And so you kind of have this 360 view that maybe is a little bit unusual.

Shawn Harrs: And I would like to think that if I came up in my career through IT proper and sort of came up in that functional vertical, I would still have this mindset because IT has a supporting role in an organization, as well as a P &L role in terms of the digital experience for customers to help drive organizational growth. So having that lens is something that anyone that I’m mentoring in an IT function, and I’m saying, you want to get better in your career, you have to understand what it’s like to work in those functional departments and look at what it is that they’re needing to do. That’s the best way for you to be able to support them.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s great advice for people listening, wondering kind of how do I level up? How can I get to be a Sean at some point in my career? How about growth strategy? Maybe we’ve touched on it already, but what growth strategy has been most successful for you?

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, I talked a little bit about moving around within functions. Another one has been to get myself out. I spent 15 years at Disney, and then I moved to Universal Parks and Resorts. And so after quite a bit of time and having had a couple of executive positions also then in the hospitality space, I said, how can my experience translate into doing something in another industry? So getting out of the hospitality space, there are industries where it makes sense if you’re going to spend your whole career in that industry.

But I found in the opportunity to join Lenard Homebuilding a great opportunity to learn about a different industry, supply chain management, project management, construction management, financing, all the things that Lenard does that are great. But bringing that guest experience to the home purchasing decision making, buying process, and then also shaping the product that people were buying to add a digital experience to it the way we had done it in the theme parts. You took a theme part that was built 50 years ago, and now it’s entirely connected with mobile queues. You’re not standing in line anymore.

You’re using wearables to purchase your meals or charge it back to your room and get access to your door. What Disney and Universal did in the time that I was there by introducing digital into a very legacy physical space and still maintaining that great experience. Being able to take that experience and bring it about in a completely different industry, getting yourself out of that comfort of everything there is to know after 18 years in hospitality, and I know what the next steps are, I know what the career trajectory in hospitality looks like, moving laterally into another industry and having to learn everything anew. I look back on that and the difficulty of doing that.

Having the courage to take that risk and say, I could fail at this, but I’m going to give it a shot, and then come out on the other side learning so much and also being successful. That’s something I would definitely recommend to folks who have a great set of skills, a great set of experiences, and can find an adjacent business, industry, even startup to help themselves grow in that way.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, not only are they helping themselves grow, but they’re helping the companies that they’re with cross-pollinating ideas from different industries.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, I mean, the greatest products and companies bring great talent in from other ways of thinking and that diversity of thought and how to approach and tackle problems. I think about that first engineering job I had at Disney. I worked with nuclear engineers, I worked with former NASA scientists, and what better group of people to think about creating amazing theme park experiences, right? When you get on to the mission to Mars ride at Disney World, you really feel like you’re lifting off in a rocket.

Anthony Codispoti : So, one thing I’m curious about is, as I’m thinking about this, Red Lobster is huge, hundreds of locations, right?

Shawn Harrs: 545 now.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, and thousands of employees, right?

Shawn Harrs: 30,000?

Anthony Codispoti : I mean, the numbers are incredible. I talk to a lot of people, and the sense that I get, some places, some industries, the labor market’s softening a little bit, but a lot of folks are still having a hard time recruiting and retaining staff. And given how huge you guys are, I’m curious, and I know HR isn’t the position that you’re largely focused on, but what’s the approach, what’s the strategy there to find folks and hold on to?

Shawn Harrs: I have to say we are and have been investing very heavily in the employee experience, and then also in my role in the digital capabilities that support HR. And so, the work that my peer and that organization does with the talent acquisition experience, with onboarding and training of individual contributors, of our management training program is top in the industry.

And then what we’ve been doing to layer on top of that to make that experience even better, particularly when you’re thinking about someone who’s looking for an hourly role. When college starts back, you know, college kids are going back in the fall, they’re all going to, you know, many of them are going to be looking for a server job. That’s a big group that we’re looking for, and they’re not just applying at Red Lob, so they’re applying elsewhere. And, you know, the best of them are the ones that we want to create an organizational sort of culture that makes them want to come work for us, but we can’t take a week to get back to them. We want to be able to respond to our applicants and say, you know what, we value that you have considered us, that you think of us as the place where you want to come and work, we want to welcome you. We don’t want them to have to feel like they have to wait for the door to open.

The door should be open to them, just like it would be for a guest in the restaurant. And so from our apply to hire process, just making that so much simpler, leveraging technology to make it easy for them to be notified that we’d like to meet with them to screen and just replying with a text message, here’s my availability using, you know, machine learning or AI to review resumes and get a good understanding of what an applicant’s experience is like so that our talent acquisition team can look at our resume and have intelligence sitting side by side. So they’re more easily and readily prepared to meet with an applicant.

Anthony Codispoti : They kind of got a resume there and sort of the tool on the side that say, why don’t you ask them some of these questions?

Shawn Harrs: And just getting them through that whole process, if they’re coming to work for us for the first time, you know, getting all of their work authorization information and you know, it can be very cumbersome getting a job and getting all this paperwork together. And the manager in the restaurant has a bunch of other things to do. So making that experience using technology, easy, seamless and cutting that timeline between when someone says, you know what, I want to go work for Red Lobster, I’m going to apply there and make it fast, seamless, easy for them to get from an application through the screening, through the interview and getting placed into their position and to start giving them shifts. We have significantly reduced our open headcount and our turnover numbers.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s impressive. So not only are you using tech to sort of help with that screening and interviewing process, but once the decision has been made to hire the employee, they’re able to do a lot of that sort of paperwork and that onboarding in a digitally. Yeah. That’s great.

Where do we want to go next? What’s a tool piece of software or maybe even just like a framework that’s attributed to your own success? Maybe other people listening are like, oh, that’s something I’d be interested in checking out.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah. You know, one of my, and gosh, this was like straight out of college, very early computer engineering problems that I was given at Disney was to take data off of the theme part rides and make it available to the mechanics and engineers who had to do troubleshooting. This is before Wi-Fi, before Bluetooth. How do you capture that data and make it available? So I was building software tools that would enable them to get that data and very easily run it through a program to do a root cause analysis on some kind of a failure because they did have sensors on these rides. But how do you get at the data and how do you make sense of it? We take a lot of that for granted, obviously today with IoT and, you know, near field communication, Bluetooth and all of that, that data streams into computers today.

That didn’t exist when I first graduated. And so starting out as a computer engineer, but and working on these embedded systems, the key thing that added value to the business here was analyzing data. And so after a couple of years, my first job in IT, I got asked to join the IT organization was to help them with their data platforms and help get them stable. I was working on what I was told at the time by our partners of the company that it was the largest data warehouse of its kind in their company, big, big, before the term big data actually existed. But it’s a big data platform company. And I brought that engineering mindset and that’s what they wanted.

They couldn’t figure it out internally. Engineers are, you know, very, very focused on quality, on reliability, on uptime, on, you know, just making sure things work. And I brought that mindset. But again, the outcome and the value for the business was the availability of data. So my career got then in many of the roles, actually, I’d say most of the roles my success was about getting value out of data. And in, as my roles proceed, you know, subsequently, I took on broader spans of control. Certainly once I got into my first, second, and now third CIO roles, I have responsibility for everything from IT security through IT operations and everything in between. But the area that I gravitate towards the most is getting value out of data and how we use it. Data resiliency, disaster recovery, you know, making sure transactional systems are up and reliable and working so that the data is available. People can clock in.

Our customers can make payments securely. All of my success, I would say, or at least the areas that I found the most interest in interest in have been around data and data platforms.

Anthony Codispoti : How often do you find that data doesn’t lead to actionable insights?

Shawn Harrs: Oh, very often. I mean, you know, I like to use the metaphor of a pilot in a cockpit. You go into a commercial airline and they’re all these buttons. And, you know, commercial pilots go through years and years of training to understand what they all mean.

But generally, the metaphor I use and right or wrong, because there might be a pilot here in your audience, but, you know, generally, they’re looking at just a handful of things, the critical things that they need to look at in that moment, right? Their altitude, their speed, you know, just a couple of things. And if any of those things are off, the pilot knows that they need to take action. All those two, three hundred other little lights that are in the cockpit, they’re not seeing anything. But when the pilot needs to take action around one of them, it lights up and it calls attention to it. Well, here’s a thing that I need you to go look at. And so when an organization has massive amounts of data, right?

And we’re talking companies have grown out of gigabytes and terabytes, they’re in the petabyte ranges, just massive amounts of data. Being able to focus on the ones in the moment that tell you what it is you need to do. If all the other things are looking good, if in my business, the labor schedules look good, if the guest forecast is accurate, if the orders and the inventory I have to serve guests between now and my next order are all accurate, why should a manager have to go and look at that to validate that they’re all like that? They should be like those little light bulbs in the cockpit, they should be off. They shouldn’t be calling attention to go look at those things. And that should free people’s time up to focus on those two or three things that matter in the moment.

Anthony Codispoti : So with huge data sets like that, you’ve alert system set up. Hey, as long as the values are within this range, we’re good. They slip one way or the other, fire off an alarm and let somebody know.

Shawn Harrs: Four things that matter when they do, when they fall outside of control limits. And then the other thing is, it doesn’t matter if that particular metric or KPI or they wouldn’t be a KPI, but that particular indicator of your business or measure of your business is out of whack. Because it could be many things, but the two key ones that I sort of say is, can you do anything about it right now? No, okay. Well, don’t worry about it. Focus on the ones you can do something about.

And then secondly, the other one is, does it matter? Yes, it’s out of whack, it’s out of control limits or it’s going in a particular direction, but does it have any impact on the ones that matter? Is it going to affect the guest experience today?

Is food not going to come out and be absolutely picture perfect and taste absolutely amazing? All those things. Is the employee experience going to be affected? None of those things, right? Our payment, our payment is going to be in any way compromised. Those are the things that matter. So there’s so much data that companies are looking at and one of the things that a good data analytics organization, whether it’s in the business, because I’ve run several, actually most of the ones I’ve run lived in the business, was sort of finding the things that mattered to the business and then structuring actionable insights around.

What are the things that you can do or should be doing ahead of time or in the moment and then ignore the rest because you can’t look at 90 petabytes of data that doesn’t matter.

Anthony Codispoti : Does it matter? And can we do anything about it?

Shawn Harrs: Maybe next week you can change your order size, but this week you can’t.

Anthony Codispoti : All right, let’s shift gears for a moment. Sean, would be curious to hear about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome. Personal, professional, maybe a combination of the two. What did you learn going through that and how did you get through it?

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, I’d say a personal challenge. I sort of mid-career, sort of at the manager level. I applied for a position I was really keen on getting. And I have to say this is one of the things that I really took in my career from that, which is what do great leaders do? And I didn’t get the position and I was really bummed out. It was a point in my career where I had either been sort of like brought into new positions because there was a challenge that somebody saw, hey, I don’t know what this looks like, but I know Sean can figure it out. Or I applied for a position and I got it. And so this was like a career rejection where I had to not take it personally. And the growth there was, I have to say from the hiring leader, very constructive. Sean, I have no doubt that you have the aptitude, but you have an opportunity to learn a few things. And I took that down. And there were a span between hard skills and soft skills as well. And I really took those to heart in a way that I said, you know what, I’m going to take those as a challenge. And I tell this story not because it was obvious, not because it’s obvious to me now, but because that hiring leader told this story in a meeting once afterwards, because three years later, I was working for him.

The person who got the position left. And in that time, I took it upon myself, I’m going to go learn these things. So I volunteered, I went to other leaders in the organization that were managing things that I got in that feedback. So I could say, hey, look, I want to volunteer to be on a project here, I’ll take that on as a stretch goal. Or I got with HR and I said, where can I go and learn how to do X or Y. And that person left after three years and I applied for the position. And again, and I got it. And I got it within a couple of days because the hiring leader knew that I had acquired those skills.

And it was like a slam dunk. It wasn’t easy. It was hard to go about finding out how to learn these particular things. These kinds of things, sometimes when it comes to work experience are not easy to come by. How are you going to go and find work experience in a particular area if you don’t have that job? I know entry level people deal with that very often.

This is an entry level job, but you need two years experience. That doesn’t make sense. But I figured out a way how to navigate it. And then in a meeting, a couple of weeks into the job, he told that story. I said, hey guys, and I think it was to doing around performance review time, here’s an example. And he used me as an example of how to grow and develop yourself. I’m pretty humble. And I said, I didn’t even see myself in that regard. But that makes sense.

And so yeah, my advice here is that kind of rejection is hard sometimes. But a hiring leader has a responsibility to the person who is the most talented to bring them on. And a responsibility to the organization to bring the most talented or the right talent or fit for the role. I very often tell my leaders hire for aptitude, hire someone more junior and help them grow and develop because of that experience.

And very often, I get leaders who come back after a while and say, you know, Sean, that was a great decision hiring someone more junior, but with a high aptitude, they bring in fresh perspective and so on. So that was hard, but really served me well.

Anthony Codispoti : So the hiring manager told you some of these things that you needed to learn. Yeah, hats off to you for being receptive to that, because it’s a crushing moment, right? You’ve been on this trajectory, like you had success in your career. And now it kind of feels like a punch to the stomach that somebody says, I’m not ready for this thing.

I really wanted you could have just been angry, you could have laughed, you could have sort of turtled up in your shell. So he gives you here, she gives you these things that you need to work on. Did they also kind of coach you as to how to learn those skills, or was this sort of like on you and you kind of got your hands dirty trying to figure out, how do I do that?

Shawn Harrs: I know there wasn’t any guidance there. You know, feedback is a gift, I like to say. So I got the feedback that was the gift, the how that I would say to anyone listening, that gift has already been given to you. Your gaps in terms of that position that you aspire to has been shared with you explicitly. And this is why I would say to anyone, and this is why I take the time to mentor people or find mentors for my team members, because mentors also help give perspectives that are different to mine to help people look at things from a different way, look at things differently than how I might look at it.

And so you’re getting all these angles. And so when I mentor someone and I say, if you have a performance review, and it seems less than, your rating for example, seems less than what you think you should have gotten, but the feedback isn’t strong, open yourself up to that feedback to being uncomfortable with hearing where your gaps are, not that you don’t have gaps in terms of the competency to do your current role. If you’re a meets expectation, that means you’re not just showing up to work and, you know, thank you for coming to work today. I mean, you’re working hard. I mean, people work hard and that’s okay. Meets expectations, if you’re working hard every day and you’re working smart and you’re bringing value, a meets expectation is okay.

But because there are higher ratings, there’s more that you can be doing. And that hiring leader is telling you that, and I would say to, not hiring leaders, I would say to leaders in performance reviews, you’ve got to give people actionable feedback, even if they’re a meets expectations. Here are all the things that you did great. You’ve set these objectives, you met them in some cases, you exceeded them. But where’s the what else? So if you’re not getting it from your leader, feel comfortable asking and be okay with the feedback that they’re going to give you on the things that you can learn and do better because that’s a gift.

That’s how you grow. They’re telling you what you need to do to a year from now, be in a position to get a higher rating, be in a position to get a new role. And if they don’t, it’s okay if they don’t tell you how to go about it, but then be okay asking about that too. You know, this hiring leader, I’m sure if I asked them to mentor me, they could have, but I got that feedback and I took it as an opportunity as a gift.

And then I went and navigated the how I close that gap. And, you know, sometimes people aren’t self starters like that, and that’s okay. It’s okay to ask. Ask for the feedback, ask how to go about closing it, ask if you can have resources, ask if your leader will connect you with a mentor. What’s the worst that could happen?

Anthony Codispoti : Be open to feedback, ask for it, seek it out, use that as ways to improve yourself and grow.

Shawn Harrs: You’re demonstrating your curiosity, you’re demonstrating your commitment to growth. Good leaders will recognize that and see it for the value that it has to them and their organization.

Anthony Codispoti : Sean, I’ve just got one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. First of all, everyone listening today, I will invite you to hit the like, follow, share, or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so that you can continue to get more great interviews like we’ve had today with Sean Harris. Sean, I also want to let people know the best way to either continue following your story or to get in touch with you directly. What would that be?

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, I’m very active on LinkedIn. You know, my name is right here in the window. There’s only one of my spelling on LinkedIn. You know, connect with me, follow me. If there’s an opportunity for us to do something together, you know, obviously as an IT leader, I get a lot of sales reach outs. But if someone’s here in your audience really looking for insight into their career, into how they develop themselves, or they’re facing a situation where they can’t make a decision about a career path or the decision on a technology that I might have some insights on, I have a big peer network of CIOs I can get an answer to. I’m happy to have, you know, people connect and reach out.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s very generous of you. So last question for you today, Sean, and we may have already touched on this. But as you look to the future, what are the changes in this industry that you’re most excited about diving into?

Shawn Harrs: Well, I think about the hospitality industry, the industry I’m in, and the excitement that I have around the evolving landscape of restaurants. I mean, even, you know, restaurants that have been around for as long as us, they continue to evolve too. I mean, you think of some of the big names that have always been around, they still have their marquee product in the marketplace.

I don’t think some of those will ever go away. That coffee shop that you love that has grown into a worldwide chain is still going to have a great cup of black coffee available to you. But around it, the expectations and needs and wants of customers is going to evolve. So the tastes of customers is going to evolve. And that’s something I’m very excited about.

I’m sure there are a lot of foodies in your audience here. In the technology space, the advent of the capabilities of AI and every day you’re turning the news on and the big leaders in AI are introducing models that they just trained that are twice as good as the ones that they introduced yesterday. So, you know, we used to hear about Moore’s law and timeframes of multiplication being measured in years coming down into double-digit months and so on. The evolution of the capability of AI is growing in hours and minutes now.

And so, yes, it’s a buzzword, but it’s real. I mean, some of the capabilities I’m seeing of what intelligent agents can do to help with marketing and customer experience. I was at a hotel last week and I called customer service in the evening.

And normally you get someone at the front desk, you know, in the evening customer service desk as close. This was an AI agent. And I could kind of tell that the audio and the speech and so on was pretty good, but it was 98% there. The thing that stood out for me, I said, okay, let’s see how this goes. And so I stutter a little bit on purpose. I change my question in the middle.

I said, you know, actually, and then I switch it to a different question. I’m trying to stump it. And, you know, there’s a concept in the computing world around when a human can’t determine the difference between interacting with technology versus another Turing test. And the Turing test, right. And I tried to Turing test this thing. And I’ll say it was a sheet. And boy, did the AI nail it. Yeah.

You know, I kind of whispered at one point. Hit the nail on the head. Answered every question followed up.

Is there anything else I can help with? I mean, those experiences, you know, the, you know, five, 10 years ago, we were introducing these chat bots on websites. And they were just like a very basic decision tree. I mean, to have any random question that I could think of be posed that was relevant to the hotel and switch it up like that and get all those questions right in my industry. Ordering out of drive through is AI. Calling a contact center to put in a phone order includes AI.

I mean, these are very sophisticated capabilities that will really change experiences for customers. You want to get information on your healthcare or anything. You know, I mean, you think of your industry, there are use cases that are going to, you know, you have a meeting with lawyers from two different companies. And as soon as the meeting is done, there’s a draft contract immediately available that is based on all of the discussion, bringing together all the different types of terms and conditions that these companies usually use for.

And when you think of the days and weeks that that would normally take an attorney to draft and the back and forth, it’s pretty remarkable. I’m very excited about it. Yeah. Likewise.

Anthony Codispoti : We’ve come a long way in a short time and the next several months to couple of years, it’s going to be fun to see how things evolve. Well, Sean, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Shawn Harrs: Yeah, Anthony, it’s been a pleasure and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to share it.

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