Veteran franchisee and restaurateur Scott Slaymaker is the Co-owner of Wingers, a sports restaurant and alehouse with a family-friendly atmosphere. Working alongside his brother Eric, Scott was able to expand the franchise to multiple states by implementing and improving the strategies he’s learned from his career working at some of the best-known legacy hospitality brands.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- Scott Slaymaker shares his veteran experience in the hospitality industry
- Tips on expanding and testing new menu items
- Scott discusses the importance of catering to customer experience
- How to create a brand culture shared across management and team members
- Scott’s insights on the biggest mistakes franchisees make
In this episode…
In this episode of the SpotOn Series, join Bela Musits as he welcomes Scott Slaymaker, Co-owner of Wingers. They discuss the fascinating journey of a local brand turned multi-state franchise, ways to reliably test new menu items before launch, and the most common mistakes junior franchisees make and how to avoid them. Scott also shares important steps in creating a memorable customer experience that comes with developing a powerful brand culture across company locations.
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Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show, powered by Rise25 Media, we featured top founders, executives and business leaders from all over the world.
Bela Musits 0:20
Hello, listeners, Bela Musits is here host for this podcast, where we feature top restaurant tours, investors and business leaders. This is part of our SpotOn Series. SpotOn has the best-in-class payment platform for retail. And they have a flagship solution called SpotOn Restaurant where they combine marketing software and payments all in one. They have served everyone from large chains like Dairy Queen and Subway to small mom-and-pop restaurants. To learn more, go to spoton.com That’s spoton.com. Hey, this episode is brought to you by Rise25. We help b2b businesses get return on investment clients referrals and strategic partnerships through custom done for you podcast. If you have a b2b business and want to build great relationships with clients, referral partners and thought leaders in your space. There is no better way to do it than through podcast and content marketing. To learn more, go to rise25.com That’s rise25.com or email us at support@rise25media.com Today’s guest is Scott Slaymaker. Scott and his brother Eric run Wingers restaurants, Wingers was started with the best wings recipe in the world and now has expanded to include salads, burgers, tacos, and winger brothers beer, which has resulted in consistent growth and expansion of the Wingers brand. Scott has worked in the hospitality business for over 40 years, developing and operating numerous brands. He has seen tremendous change in the evolution of the restaurant business. Welcome to the podcast, Scott
Scott Slaymaker 2:19
Bela. Thank you. Great to be here.
Bela Musits 2:21
Yeah, you’re very, very nice. Nice for you to take the time to be here with us today. So let me ask you a question. What was the inspiration for starting Wingers?
Scott Slaymaker 2:30
Oh, wow, that goes back a little bit. But prior to that it’s gonna it’s a I’m trying to make a long story short, but Eric and my father had been in the state planning business but always wanted to be was a fret or frustrated restaurant or wanted to be in the restaurant business. Eventually developed a number of Restaurant Brands was a Sizzler franchisee and Alaska Chi-Chi’s franchisee in Utah and Idaho, as well as a couple of others at TGI Fridays. And that’s really how I got involved in the business because Eric and my father was a tremendous entrepreneur, but as I like to say, couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag in a restaurant. So he sort of nabbed me out of college and we got involved in that. So getting back to Wingers, Wingers was the idea of taking everything that we had known and providing it in a more of a tertiary market, a B market so that your Fridays, your Applebee’s, your chilies, these, these legacy brands, they wouldn’t go into because it’s simply the size was they couldn’t make the unit economics work for them. So our idea was to take take a lot of what we have learned from that and put that together in some of these smaller markets. So that’s that’s how it happened. Our first one was in Bountiful, Utah, which is a suburb if you will of Salt Lake City. I know the bountiful people will probably get mad to hear me say that but it’s just outside of Salt Lake City, but that’s really how that was really sort of the genesis I guess you might say a Winger’s.
Bela Musits 4:14
Yeah, excellent. So you kind of carved out your own geographic niche from a graphic perspective. Yeah,
Scott Slaymaker 4:20
correct. Our attitude was we didn’t want to go on to big regional malls and compete head to head with these guys. It didn’t make sense. But we did feel like there was an opportunity in some of the smaller neighborhood markets to go in and and make a mark. And, you know, I think it’s fair to say that it’s been relatively successful for us.
Bela Musits 4:38
Yeah, excellent. So what were those early days like?
Scott Slaymaker 4:42
Oh, wow. Well, it’s interesting. Let me tell you that you know, Wingers and today actually the full name is Wingers restaurant and Ale House, but that is a far stretch from where Wingers was when we started. Where’s actually the first one And our brother in law had this great recipe for a sauce. We played with the wings. We ended up bringing in a Pullman train car, put it on a piece of property in Salt Lake City, it was really sort of a beta test, I guess you might say. It was not full service. The Winger’s. wiggers is full service casual dining today, it would be what you would consider fast casual at the time where you had a counter and actually started as calling it California at sea and our California because that’s where our brother in law, who at the time and partner with us had come from CNR stood for chicken and ribs, and we had some great chicken and ribs. And that was really what started with it. The lease we had, again with the developer, he had told us we had a year to year lease because he had eventual plans for developing. So when we finally after, I don’t know what it was five or six years got the word that we had to vacate. We thought we had something we like what it was doing. And so the first actual Winger’s was established in Bountiful, Utah. So that’s, that’s a long story to get us to where to where we started.
Bela Musits 6:14
Yeah, well, that’s that’s a great story. And so when, when, what year was the first winter started
Scott Slaymaker 6:21
the first actual Winger’s opened in Bountiful, Utah in September of 1993.
Bela Musits 6:28
Got it. Got it. So when you were starting this original pre Wingers restaurant that was sort of in a Pullman car, how did you know that you had the right recipe, if you will, to actually, you know, take this and turn it into ringers? What were the what were the metrics that told you, Hey, we got something here.
Scott Slaymaker 6:47
You know, I’d like to say that we had all sorts of data and everything else, but at the end of the day, what it was was people just loved it. We were fairly adjacent to downtown Salt Lake City, we had all kinds of Utah Jazz NBA players that would come in and buy wings, Shaquille O’Neal came in and bought wings. In fact, it was fun because in the old Pullman car, they died states sign their names up on the walls and stuff, you know, that sort of stuff. So that’s kind of where we got the idea that you know, this is resonating somewhere people are liking that. We would have a number of NBA players when they would visit Salt Lake to play the Utah Jazz would would come to Wingers and and again, I don’t want to represent that it was this, you know, beautiful. This was an old Pullman train car for hexane. We stuck a counter and a kitchenette and a couple towels. So it very humble beginnings. Let’s say that.
Bela Musits 6:54
Well, it sounds like it had a lot of character.
Scott Slaymaker 7:46
It had character. There’s no question about that. Yes, sir.
Bela Musits 7:50
Right, right. So over the years, you’ve expanded the menu. So how do you know when it’s time to add menu items?
Scott Slaymaker 7:59
Wow, you know that that’s such a great question. And you know, it reminds me I was a panelist at a recent conference in Nashville, Tennessee and somebody brought up the the statement that I love I wrote it down and I still use it is the restaurant business is simple. Simple is hard. And I love that because it speaks in my mind to certain menu disciplines and coming from a background of I think I said TGI Fridays, Chi-Chi’s, Sizzler, prior to that, Tony Roma’s, we had 16 Tony Roma’s at a time, one of the biggest challenges we always have, particularly with, for example, TGI Fridays, whose menu was voluminous, is what sort of menu discipline Do you have? Because the more items you have on the menu, the more clear convoluted things can get, the more inventory you carry, the more prep there is, everything just kind of builds on that. So we did know that when we lost our lease on the California CNR. And we had decided that we wanted to be in the casual dining and do a full service experience, that we weren’t going to be able to do that just with wings and ribs that were basically packaged for takeout. So that’s what it started. But again, it was very simple. It was a placemat menu that sat in front of you. And we probably had 20 items, we expanded doing some, some burgers, a couple of very simple salads and whatnot. And, you know, over the years, that has expanded and in fact, particularly since the pandemic and that it has contracted quite a bit as well, due to supply chain issues and simply just trying to simplify, you know, what we do because of the lack of staffing that everybody’s dealing with, and continues to deal with.
Bela Musits 9:53
Right? Right. So how do you how do you sort of test a new menu item?
Scott Slaymaker 9:59
That’s actually Great question. You know, the first thing that we do is we have a our Director of Operations, Patrick Detener, is a is a certified chef. And so one of the things that we really like to do is to think in terms of a somewhat of a chef driven menu that is very simple to produce. Because, as you know, the, the more you proliferate in numbers, the bigger challenge it is in maintaining that consistency, which is was so important. But the first thing we do is we actually test it in one or two of our restaurants, we may test it in a market. For example, we have one restaurant in Pocatello, Idaho that is relatively isolated, if you will. So we’re able to put something on the menu there and sort of track and see what happens, see what part of see what kind of menu share we can get. See what happens when you market versus not marketing it. But that’s typically the way we like to do it. But then, you know, getting back to menu discipline on the simplicity, one of the questions we ask ourselves in the leadership team meeting them is if this is going to make it to the menu, what are we going to take off the menu and trying to keep that and that’s where one of the biggest challenges, not just us, but I think any restaurant tour has because everybody wants to please their guests. And you know, you have one guest that comes in and said, you know, you gotta have a spaghetti sandwich or something like that. And the first, the gut reaction is, oh, my gosh, we got a rush to do this sort of thing. We really like to try to be data driven, and prove that actually it sells, while at the same time being believable for the brand.
Bela Musits 11:41
Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. So you have multiple locations? How do you sort of ensure consistency, both on the front end of the house and the back end of the house? So that you have a consistent experience for your customers?
Scott Slaymaker 11:56
Well, that’s you know, that’s the age old question. And some people do it a lot better than others. We worked very hard at that. I would love to say we’re perfect. We’re not. I was just in one of our franchise locations in northern Utah yesterday and noted a couple things that that, you know, this isn’t exactly the way the plates supposed to be set up or some things like that. That’s, that’s the biggest challenge. But one of the things that we do is we we’ve invested a lot of time and energy into communication, we have an entire training program we have, we call them build cards. So anytime a new menu comes out, we have a build card that has basically a sensitivity guide that says, These are the things that go on it, this is what it looks like there are photos of it right there. So from a back of the house standpoint, that that is what’s expected. And in fact, when we do reviews, I know I do reviews in restaurants, I actually we have a make a quite a bit of the food. And I have the bill card sitting right there when they bring that off the table and say Okay, now let’s look at this, and see how this compares to what it’s supposed to. And it’s it’s uh it’s interesting how creative some of our team members like to be sometimes. So I’ll just leave it as you know, that hasn’t been said the same thing goes to the overall experience. I mean, you know, one of the our mission statement of Wingers is creating amazing experiences. And, you know, the, the experience is not just food clarity, it’s food driven. But is what does that experience from the service standpoint? What does it look like the first time you drive up to the restaurant, you walk in? What is your greeting? So we actually have what we call a QA. And it has all of those things listed. We have an entire training program, Steve Rashard, who was our director of guest experience. He’s got a training program all against those things, that works toward that, actually, with hands-on activities, and we invest a lot and we commit a lot to training and making sure that we’re just doing it over and over again, understanding that, at least from our, we’ve never hit perfect. But, you know, that is the goal with the understanding that we probably never will be absolutely perfect. There’s, there’s the human element, and that’s what we try to work with.
Bela Musits 14:17
Yeah, excellent. So let me ask you another question. You mentioned that sometimes you have creative people, you know, who like to put their own touches on on various different things. Do you have a system for sort of capturing some of those because some of those may be great suggestions and improvements?
Scott Slaymaker 14:33
That’s that’s a tremendous question. And and I say that because if you look back in history, some of the the greatest the biggest selling items now for example, the McDonald’s for a fish was divided come up by a franchisee you know, with so and you know, that may be I don’t mean to blatantly advertise for McDonald’s, but you know, God gonna when you talk about consistency, that’s one thing too. They get right for it. Yes. So we actually do that as part of our QA. And again, I can go into a restaurant and I’ve got the whole thing on an app right on my phone here. Part of that is we actually will take photos of these things. It’s all stored in the cloud, our director of guest experience, deep Rashard will go through, we’ll look at discrepancies. And you know, some of those discrepancies may be a prey presentation, or, you know, we’ve had other franchise partners as well as managers in our own restaurant that say, Hey, this would be a great way either to do this, or you know, some brand new thing. And then again, we have a form, if you will, that, okay, what is the recipe? What are the portions? Does it? What does it cost out? Can you sell it for a price where you’re going to get a suitable return to net, but still provide a value for your guests, and then it we’re kind of going backwards. But then if we decide that we can make all those things happen, then it goes to the test that we were just talking about? So let’s test that in a restaurant and just see what the guest results. You know, it’s interesting, and I’m guilty of this as well. We have so many managers might go back 44 years now that say, we have got to do this, because my guests are just screaming for it. And then you say okay, so what exactly and who is it? Well, it’s this guy that comes in once a month that wants to do that. But, you know, that’s, that’s the human condition. Somebody tells us, we need to do something, we’re so conditioned in the hospitality industry to want to please, that all of a sudden, there is this great demand for something that may or may not actually be there. And that’s why again, we really try to be as data driven as we possibly can be.
Bela Musits 16:49
Yeah, yeah. So your some of your stores are franchise franchise and other ones are company owned? That’s correct.
Scott Slaymaker 16:57
That is correct. We, as a company operate nine company restaurants, there are 23 Total restaurants in five states. We’re in Utah, Idaho, Nevada. What did I miss? Oregon, pardon me? With that? And we actually are moving into the Midwest. Right now. We just signed a multi-store development agreement for Oklahoma City, and we’re working with some other potential franchise partners in the best Midwest. That’s kind of our focus moving there, as well as some of our current franchise partners are looking at developing their second, third and fourth restaurants as well.
Bela Musits 17:37
Sure. So what do you look for in a franchisee candidate?
Scott Slaymaker 17:41
Boy, Bela? How much time have you got for heaven’s sakes, because I can tell you this, one of the biggest mistakes, and I’ll admit, you know, anybody that’s been in this business and said they’ve never made mistakes, it’s just flat out lying to you. But you know, one of the challenges that we had in Winger’s, we were much bigger at one time, we had over 30 restaurants. But one of the things that we found was, we were so eager to franchise that we would award a franchise, hey, if somebody’s got $40,000, and we think they can build a restaurant, hey, let’s do it being we got another franchisee we actually over the past five or six years have realized that we actually had to get a little bit smaller before we can position ourselves for growth again, because some of our franchise partners as much as they were great people just weren’t cut out to be a great operator. And so that’s one of the first things is we’ve had a number of people that have come to us that say, Listen, I’ve got the money to do this I want to do and the first question is, tell me what your operations team is going to look like. Because if you cannot deliver on the promise we’re making to the guests, we’re all wasting our time here. Secondly, the other thing that is very important to us, we happen to use Cisco as our primary supplier, other people use FSA or you know, whatever that may be. But one of the things we have found is we have certain proprietary items that if we can’t be within the footprint of a Cisco, it makes it very difficult to get those proprietary items to, for example, our original amazing sauce, which, you know, we ship that stuff all over the world, we ship that to Saudi Arabia. It’s it is addictive. I can’t I can’t lie to you and that it works on just about everything with the exception of pancakes, French toast and waffles. That’s probably not a good idea there. But so we look for we look for an operations team or operational ability. We look for the ability for product distribution, and then something that really has just really gained our attention over the past eight to 10 years is what is the human capital like in the markets with that because if you cannot hire and retain great people, you’re going to really struggle as far as operating. I don’t care what restaurant it is. And you know, we’re all being challenged by that right now.
Bela Musits 20:11
Right, right. So as you guys have evolved, earlier, we talked about, you know, you looked at sort of second tier market, so you’re not competing against other sort of bigger chains. Has your location criteria evolved over time?
Scott Slaymaker 20:26
It really has Bela. And the simple reason is, you know, we thought that, for example, we could go into a Laramie, Wyoming and we’d never be touched by anybody else. Well, five years later, here’s Applebee’s building one right down the street. And then Chili’s is there now and and all of the other things. So, you know, one of the things that became clear to us pretty quickly is we have got to take care of what we do with on our own four walls, the competition is going to be there, regardless of who it is. And frankly, in most cases, regardless of where it is, for that. So yes, we have we’ve gone into some larger markets now. Still probably aren’t going to take the, the corner pad side out on a major mall or something like that. But we are competing in those major markets, but just more neighborhood locations.
Bela Musits 21:15
Yeah, excellent, excellent. So you know, when you walk into a restaurant, immediately, immediately as a customer, you get a feel, you get a feel for how you’re greeted, the way people treat you the way they react to you sort of the culture of the place. How do you sort of think about culture? And how do you sort of instill that into both the company owned restaurants, and the franchisees,
Scott Slaymaker 21:39
you know, you boy, you read my mind on that. We, we stress culture and leadership. Every single day, I was just in Pocatello, sitting down with our general manager there, who’s a wonderful young lady. He’s been with us for quite some time now. And that’s what we talk about is how do we continue to develop our leadership? How do we continue to develop our culture because there’s something very interesting in that I’ve got a dear dear friend, he’s a college fraternity brother. And he’s he’s a brilliant consultant and leadership development. He he’s, I rarely see him he travels the world working with large companies. He’s worked with Disney Toyota, you know, things like that. But I remember on a fishing trip in Canada, once we’re sitting on the side of the river, because we were about five days after the steelhead had moved out. So we had nothing to do other than talk. And he made a profound comment to me once and it said, if you are not actively involved in developing your culture, a culture will still develop, it just may not be the one that you want. And so and it’s hard to change, oh, it once you get that it is hard to change. So that’s something that we and we see the same thing, even with our relatively small brand, is one store outperforms another one that we keep saying, why is that? Why is it as you say, you can walk in, and there’s just a vibe that, yeah, this is going to be a good experience where you go on the other one, and it’s like, something’s not quite feeling right. It all comes down to leadership and culture, for it. So we focus a great deal on that. We’re even focusing more that’s really where I in the past couple of years have spent almost all of my time is in leadership development. Because we have, we can show you data where a restaurant that has had a longer term consistent leader continually outperforms the other restaurants from a unit economic standpoint, whether it’s sales, food cost anything else, it’s all about leadership and culture.
Bela Musits 23:42
Yeah. So when you had that situation where one restaurant, you know, has great leadership, and it is outperforming, how do you sort of peel back that onion and figure out what those secret ingredients are? So you can replicate that in your other locations?
Scott Slaymaker 23:56
That’s that is such a great question. And I think it’s gotta go back. This is this is actually a conversation we were just having in our leadership team meeting here a couple of weeks ago. And you know, one of the things that it comes back to is you’ve got to hire the right people, and particularly in today’s world, where staffing is such a challenge. And it’s not just hourly staff, it’s it’s management and, and quite candidly, the hospitality industry has kind of gotten a little bit of a bad rap by a lot of people saying, well, they don’t pay anything. There’s no opportunities that slave labor. I would argue that because I’ll tell you, we’ve had some people that have been very successful, you know, working with us as operating partners and whatnot, but that but that being nevertheless, it really comes back to to getting the right people in the right place. And we call it putting aces in their places for and you’ve got to hire the right person. We have made the mistake time and time and time again. Where out of a sense of urgency to fill position. Yeah. It’s like, Are they walking? Are they upright? Yeah. Okay, great. And, and there’s a funny thing. And it’s not just in the restaurant business it’s in, I just think it’s in life. All of a sudden, we bring somebody in, we give them a couple of weeks training, we give them the title of manager, a general manager. And by some great process of osmosis or something. Now, we think that they know everything, and we can just leave them there, and they’re going to do their thing. And we are learning, we continue to learn that every time we make that mistake, we’re going to be back reworking and we’re addressing the same mistake again. And I’m not blaming the people all the time. I’m blaming the leadership team from assuming it starts starts right here. And yet after 40 years, I find myself occasionally still making the same mistake.
Bela Musits 25:55
Yeah. Hey, Scott, I want to start wrapping this up. We’ve been we’ve been at it for 25 plus minutes. Is there something that I’ve not asked you that you would like to share with the audience?
Scott Slaymaker 26:04
You know, I think more than anything else. My father, who, who’s who’s been gone for 27 years, and I told you about it was an incredible entrepreneur. Never could manage a restaurant never understood it, never wanted to understand it. He was a little bit, a little bit ADHD in that in that respect, but he always had a statement and it comes back to people and I remember he used to always tell me, all the brick and mortar in the world does you no good, unless you have the right people that are operating that. And I have found that in what have I worked with five or six different concepts. Now whether it be Tony Roma’s, TGI Fridays, Chi-Chi’s, Sizzler, it’s about the people, the hospitality industry is about the people. And there are some tremendous opportunities in the hospitality industry, whether it be a career or whether it be a stepping stone, and the the organizations that recognize that and foster and work with those people are the ones that are going to be the most successful in my humble opinion.
Bela Musits 27:09
Now, well said well said. Well said Scott. So if listeners want to find out more about Wingers or get in contact with you, where’s the best place for them to do that?
Scott Slaymaker 27:20
Best place? We have a website www.wingerbros.com. My brother Eric and I have somehow become the winger bros over the years. I’m not sure how that is, but we’re bros.com or you can email me directly at Scott@WingerBros.com.
Bela Musits 27:42
Excellent. Excellent. Hey, Scott, thank you for being a wonderful guest on the podcast. You were really good. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Scott Slaymaker 27:49
Pleasure is all mine, Bela. Thank you.
Outro 27:52
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