Chad Franzen 10:44
Did you guys come up with the recipes than yourselves?
Shain Buerk 10:47
We did. It’s true. So back then, of course, that was pre-internet. So the the recipes came from family experiences. And they came from eclectic things. And they came from some suppliers. And we, even today, we bring in outside influence from corporate chefs, we hire, we hire people who are familiar with food service, and what flavor profiles are emerging. We do a lot of that. And we did it in the very beginning to we relied on our food suppliers to help us direct us. And but the interesting thing, if you look at them, if you really looked at our menu, and most breakfast and lunch concepts menu, and you go through it, and you see a lot of eclectic offerings, which is how we started in the beginning, you started Oh, well, we have to have, we have to have some crazy things like we have to, you know, have a, you know, a vegetarian version of eggs Benedict, or whatever the case might be, you’re trying to come up with the eclectic offerings with unique flavors. But for breakfast and lunch, if you look at the velocity reports on what actually is purchased, what people buy, if, if in a month’s time they they buy 1000 orders of French toast, and they buy 800 orders of pancakes, and they buy 1100 orders of omelets. They buy about 5000 orders of three eggs, two strips of bacon hashbrowns and side pancakes. We call it our classic. And that is what people actually ordered. So creative as we all we all want to be. We follow what guests really want. And so developing that menu was more of a factor of refining the concept for what guests want, what you find is what gets one is a pretty traditional and not a very complicated meal.
Chad Franzen 12:35
I noticed on your menu, you have some I think you talked about it a little bit is that bottomless french toast, I think you have bottomless pancakes, what led to that and do people will take advantage of that.
Shain Buerk 12:44
Absolutely. So we started that some time ago really to combat the fact that as we all know is you know, being in the foodservice industry, food costs are challenging. There’s some items that are very high food costs like hamburgers for quite, quite honestly, especially in today’s time very high food cost item. And some items are low food costs like coffee, or for that matter, pancakes. And so we’re all facing this dilemma of pricing in which we were looking at $5 stack of pancakes or $6 stack of pancakes or how are we possibly going to get more than that for a $7 stack of pancakes, it became obvious that we just really want is large portions of flavorful food that they don’t want to make at home. That sounds like pancakes. And so very quickly, we develop the concept of saying, we’re going to make all of our griddle bottomless all of our pancakes, as much as you can eat, all of our french toast will keep it coming until you say you don’t want anymore. All of our waffles, ask for another and we’ll bring you another one until you say you’re done. We’ve actually had a couple of times done some two contests in the restaurants we have, you know, the, the traditional contest to see who can eat the most orders of French toast, right. It’s a fun way to promote the fact that we are all of our all of our grill options actually are bottomless and, and it’s a relatively low food cost item, no big surprise on that. And it’s something that guests fill up quickly. And they really want a lot of them for whatever it’s worth just of interest on a quick anecdote on that, you know, our french toast is not what you get if you’re going to want a large change french toast. So if you go to one of those places, you’re going to typically get two slices of French toast, which are cut corner to corner and therefore they’re shingled on the plate, half slice, and that’s a pretty traditional order French does. In our case, an order of French toast is a it’s an oversized loaf with three-quarter-inch sliced bread of sourdough. And we use for full slices shingled, so it’s double the portion size, which you normally see that’s what our traditional French toast is. So when somebody orders more than one order of French toast, everybody goes wow, this guy’s really hungry orders another half order another full order of French toast. That’s eight pieces of French toast. So I tell you this because we had a contest one time when we brought everybody and said hey, let’s go Find out who can eat the most French toast. And the skinny little guy, skinny little guy. He comes in and he orders this order for sauce kid fine. And they say, Oh, I’ll take another and he orders. This eight pieces, eight whole pieces of French toast the capitolo for bread. Okay, fine. A piece of French so skinny little guy eats it all. No. then he says, I’ll take another. And so we bring them out a 12 pieces of bread sauce this guy’s had now. And he’s he goes through it. And he’s he’s working through a pretty good and we’re cutting all look. And I’m like, Ah, I don’t know, how much more can you take? And he stood and he said, You know what? I think I can handle one more. Give me one more. Four orders a French toast. I mean, 16 pieces, like an entire loaf of bread he’s eaten, covered in powdered sugar and eggs and cinnamon and sugar. He ate the whole damn thing. And when he was all done, he said, You know what, I think I’ll take a half a French toast. Well, I can eat a half more. So I’ll total 18 pieces of French toast. And he said I could probably a little more. But I wouldn’t do I’ll regret it tomorrow. And I gotta go back to work. And we were like, you have a nice day, sir. Very much for impressing us on Wow,
Chad Franzen 16:05
amazing. Yeah. Hey, what? So? So you started in Toledo? What’s kind of led to your expansion? Did you were you guys operating more than one restaurant at one time at some point.
Shain Buerk 16:18
Indeed, of course, we grew from one store to two to four to six and about 10 restaurants, which I was owning and operating and running around taking care of managers, hiring supervisors who could take care of those managers, and make sure the operations were consistent everywhere. That’s really when the franchising model began to say, you know, what, if we invest some time into learning how to franchise the concept, how to support franchisees how to sell the concept to others, how to how to, you know, run a marketing department that goes along with this concept, we could expand it through the franchisee model. And that’s what we began to do. And that’s really where the expansion came some markets for us that have developed in Cleveland or in Cincinnati, or in Detroit, our franchise markets, and they’re ones that with, you know, there’s a there’s a big advantage to franchising, of course, which is that you get to expand with limited liability, because others are coming into your system. And but there’s another huge advantage that potential franchise doors, people think about do I don’t realize, and that’s that you’re, you take a concept that maybe has a dozen restaurants that you’ve been owning and operating, you think you’re doing it pretty well. But when you bring somebody else in who’s got food service experience, and cares about making money the way you do, because they’ve put their money on the line, then they can help develop the concept with you, you get the expertise of a lot of other people. So the people that that have joined us in our first 30 restaurants, this is about where we are now, about half of them are corporate stores, and half of them are franchise stores. And our franchisees have a huge impact. They they design new menu items, they come up with new systems for what works well. And so it’s a, it becomes more collaborative, if you know when these large systems where there’s 200 300,000, restaurants, we all know, franchisees get the value of a, a model that’s tried and true, certainly buying power and definitely brand identity. But what they don’t get is any input. And so if you get a system that’s big enough, which ours is to have 30 years of experience, and dozens of other restaurants currently operating alongside of you. So enough stability, and yet small enough that it’s growing and needs influence from Sharp people, then you can really make a difference. And so it was really the franchising model that allowed us to move from the first 10 stores into the expanding into many, many markets. So yeah, franchisees are a powerful thing, both for the opportunity to grow, but also for the influence that they can have over developing a good concept.
Chad Franzen 18:53
Sure, sure. What, what, yeah, so you have like 25 We have more than 25 locations, primarily in Ohio, a couple of Michigan. What makes Scramblers a good franchise opportunity specifically?
Shain Buerk 19:06
Oh, well, there’s three things. If, if your listeners out there thinking about, you know, maybe get involved with breakfast in a food service franchise, the the fact is, I’m a little partial, but for 30 years, I’ve sung the song of saying you want to concentrate on doing only what you do best. And because it has three main advantages to to taking that route. So in our case doing only what we do best is breakfast and lunch. And we think about food service probably 20 years ago became very very segmented it as it it for history lesson. If you think back to what foodservice-wise but the restaurant business looked like 5060 years ago, the most common restaurant type was what was normally considered American cuisine so we would call it today. It was a mix of things. there’d be items on the menu from meatloaf to stir flock stir fry, you might find salad on the menu and they also have cod dinner. Right? So I mean, it’s, it’s all over the board and that the idea was to appeal to a large group of people, because the foodservice industry was still developing. But it wasn’t until really 20 or 30 years ago, when the idea of really focusing on a particular segment became popular. And now we all know in our everyday life, if you want a good taco, go to the Mexican place, and do you want a good pizza go to the Italian place. And if you want a good steak, they probably sell it at the seafood house, but it’s not going to be the best steak. So go to the steak house, if that’s what you want. And same thing is true when we decided, hey, we’re gonna just kind of do breakfast and lunch, because we’re going to concentrate on only what we do best. So. So if you if you get to that point, there’s three main advantages to doing just breakfast and lunch, which is what our franchisees look like about our concept and what we we love about it. Number one is, you take advantage of that marketing niche. On Sunday morning, if you want to take grandma out to breakfast, you’re gonna go to the place that has the concentrates on breakfast, that’s all they do. And so that drives foot traffic because you get market identity in that way. So certainly, that’s a big advantage. Secondly, is the economies of running a single shift of operation are dramatic for those again, not involved in food service can’t appreciate that, to have a single shift of management that is the same person opens the restaurant as close as the restaurant every day, comes in at six o’clock in the morning goes home at four o’clock in the afternoon. One shift of management, which means I don’t need a day manager, Night Manager, shift manager, bar manager or county manager now we have one general manager runs that store with some supervision that helps on his days off or her days off. So I don’t have to change the product over on the line, right? I don’t, I don’t have to have multiple SKUs have a large quantity of inventory that’s kept in the walk in cooler, which you have the challenges to keep fresh. When you are when you concentrate on only one day part. It makes it much more efficient so that our food costs are lower than other industry, other parts of our industry. And our labor costs are lower. And which really leads to the third main advantage of being breakfast and lunch. And that’s that it’s a lifestyle choice. I mean, it’s a lifestyle choice two ways, not only because needless to say, I like going home in the middle of the afternoon. And quite honestly, I have six children and my wife if she’s she if I haven’t walked in the door by four o’clock she’s sending me texts like Hey, buddy, where are you we got you know, algebra, you got to come home. And so I’m not I don’t spend much time you know, past four o’clock from the restaurants we’re only there doing that deeper and and that’s, that’s a great way to raise a family. It’s a great way that our franchisees say all the time they they get to play in the golf league every afternoon if they want to they can coach the kids Little League teams if that’s what they want to do. It’s it’s a reasonable lifestyle in a very difficult industry when it comes to lifestyle. And the last part that’s kind of valuable about that, of course, is the other challenge we have in food service especially now is the challenge of labor, very difficult to find qualified people, talented people motivated people and people who are stable enough that will want to stay in one location. But when you’re doing just breakfast and lunch when you constantly just that it’s a firt first shift, that it’s a preferred shift for most of our staff. And as a result, our staff, they, in many cases will tell us Yeah, I took a pay cut for this job because I can I can hang out with my family and I or I can go to a summer or night school at nights and still have this job full time. So it’s a big advantage for lifestyle in lots of ways to so that’s the reason for breakfast and lunch. And that’s, that’s that’s why I recommend that that’s what makes breakfast lunch and Scramblers kind of unique in foodservice Sure.
Chad Franzen 24:02
Is there anything specific that maybe you look for in a franchisee? And what should they be prepared for once they get going?
Shain Buerk 24:10
Great question because there are really two ways to think of it. The large largest franchise groups spend a lot of time looking for multiple location operators. And, and we do too many of our franchisees have, you know, four or five, six locations. So certainly that’s a great model. But what it lacks is the ability to run your own restaurant to physically know how the store runs. So while while not all of our stores have a few of our franchisees have a single unit and it’s an owner-operator type operation, what we absolutely look for in franchisees, no matter how big an operation they plan on having is that they’re going to be committed to spend some time in the store. rec I’m sorry, the restaurant business is not one that is a passive business. And again when I go back After those cocktail conversations, which people think they can own and operate their own restaurant, it seems fairly easy. They don’t appreciate the fact that if you’re going to run it as a passive business, it is not going to perform in the same way as an active business. So I look for franchisees who not necessarily have food service experience, and not even people who say, I’m going to make this my only career for the rest of my life. But people are committed to say, I’m going to learn how this business works inside and out, you’re going to teach me everything that you’ve learned over the last 30 plus years, we’re going to be very good at this. And so that I can run that restaurant such that after I hire General Manager, I don’t just supervise them from the bathtub, right, my mom used to always say, Mom shouldn’t be barking orders from the bathtub, if you’re in the bathtub, who the heck knows what the kids are doing. That needs to be true for the general manager to you need to be a person who is supervising your general manager and knows the advanced knows that when they when they come in and say hi, I just can’t get my food cost down to 23%. I don’t know how corporate does I just can’t get my food cost that way. You want to be able to go back to them and say, No, don’t tell me you can’t do it. It can be done. And I’m going to show you how because I know how to do it. And you need to have that skill to be really good and efficient at at foodservice.
Chad Franzen 26:19
What are you most proud of about Scramblers and kind of its evolution.
Shain Buerk 26:25
That’s nice of you to ask, I’d say that. The our, you know, what makes us unique? We’ve touched on a couple of times. Number one, the size of the business is just big enough that we’re we’re stable company, a long history and yet small enough that our franchisees and our and our associates, the people work in the restaurants make a huge impact they become family do I know our franchisees and their spouses and their children, many of them working in the restaurants, and they know mine. So that family is a really great, great atmosphere to work in and become family to with our staff. One of the things just about family, if you don’t mind is that in food service you think about what regular customers look like. And when it comes to regular customers prior to this, to being on Scramblers, we actually were franchisees of the Wendy’s concepts my family was, it’s kind of how we learned food service many, many years ago, I grew up in the Wendy’s concept, and my dad was a franchisee. And that’s kind of what we learned. And when when we were at Wendy’s, we would say, who was a regular customer who was someone that would come in regularly enough that you should recognize their face, you should maybe know their name. And you should probably remember what they ordered last time. So you have built a relationship with them? Well, quite honestly, that would be somebody come in your restaurant about not less than once every two weeks. Because that mean after all, you have a lot of lunch lunch options. Every day, we all have choices where we can go for lunch, you can go to go to go to sit down, you can get a bag Brett brown bag, it you can eat in the cafeteria, or maybe you’re going to get fast food, whatever it was. But if you get the same person to walk in your store every two weeks, that’s a regular customer, you don’t know who they are. And if I said to you, okay, so think about your favorite dinner restaurant, like your favorite dinner place. What’s your favorite dinner? You think of it in your mind dinner? Okay. And now I asked you, how often do you eat at your favorite dinner place? Most everybody says the same thing. Like, I don’t know, once every couple months. I mean, maybe once a month that I really love it. It’s rare. You just don’t eat there more often than that, because it’s the nature of dinner. Ah, but breakfast are regulars. They come in every day. They come in twice a week, three times a week. Again, some sit at the same table and know the server lightly. You know, the server knows how they like their eggs. And the they like to read the paper and drink their coffee just that same way. And they like to sit at the same corner table. And they come in every day to do it. Our regulars become our very regular because of the nature of foods or I’m sorry, nature of breakfast and lunch food service. It’s a very habitual meal. So they become family. Honestly, they do. We’re open for example, 364 days a year 364. We close on Christmas, which incidentally, I probably would want to be opening soon my wife he’s like, No, you stay home with the kids. That’s fine. So we’re only been around three and six, four days a year. But if you think about days like Thanksgiving, if you think about Thanksgiving, when we announced that we’re open for Thanksgiving for customers, I get a mixed reaction halfway. Some people actually send me hate mail. Like how dare you be open and make your employees work on Thanksgiving? That is so rude. You’re a cruel business person. But what they don’t understand is the employees that work on Thanksgiving, usually volunteer force, they want to be there because the customers who are coming in are their family. That’s who that’s who’s coming in on Thanksgiving morning. Incidentally, we’re only open on Thanksgiving from ate until noon for four hours gives them the chance to see those people that come in, they have a nice breakfast and then they enjoy their Thanksgiving, you know, Turkey with, with family in the afternoon. So it’s a good kind of to meal day. So as a result, family becomes not just part of my company in my business, but also a big part of what our customers and our employees are too.
Chad Franzen 30:21
Great. Hey, I have one more question for you. But first, just let me know how people can find out more about Scramblers as a potential customer, or as a potential franchisee?
Shain Buerk 30:30
Absolutely, thank you for asking, you can find us at scramblersbrands.com. That’s, that’s the base website, they’ll tell you everything you want to know. But you certainly can also search for franchise or franchising and Scramblers. And you’ll be able to find as well, we we do quite a quite a bit of blogging our website, we do quite a bit of letting people understand, share some of the knowledge that we’ve accumulated over the years. So you can definitely search for Scramblers and we have a great website to help direct you toward that and franchise director will be happy to send you information about just what we do. So thank you.
Chad Franzen 31:04
Okay, sounds good. Hey, if you were to go to Scramblers as a customer, what would be kind of your go to item?
Shain Buerk 31:10
Oh, yeah, no question. For me. Personally, I eat crab cake eggs benedict. I love the crab cake. It’s it’s the perfect portion size with that rich, rich creamy hollandaise sauce and the end the pungent flavor of crab cake that goes along with our English muffins, you know, served with hash browns or fresh fruit if you wish. So personally, I like crab cakes, crab cake, eggs, Benedict, but there’s a full range of stuff. Breakfast and lunch. Very nice.
Chad Franzen 31:39
Very nice. I’m starving. Now when you guys come into Colorado.
Shain Buerk 31:44
Yeah, that’s not out of the realm of possibility. We’re certainly looking for options.
Chad Franzen 31:47
Hey, Shain. I really appreciate your time and your stories and all of your thoughts tonight. Thanks so much.
Shain Buerk 31:53
Nice to Nice to talk with you, Chad. Thanks for making
Chad Franzen 31:55
You as well. Thank you. So long, everybody.
Outro 31:57
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