Lessons in Franchise Profitability with Jim Bitticks at Dave's Hot Chicken 

(4:55) Lessons learned from scaling Blaze Pizza.
(6:20) Establishing core values for brand consistency.
(7:42) Dave’s Hot Chicken’s origins as a parking lot pop-up.
(9:22) The power of user-generated content.
(14:22) Creative training videos to engage employees.
(20:05) High Google ratings and ROI drive franchisee success.
(24:33) PlayerLync (now Wisetail) ensures smooth video training without buffering.
(35:31) Automation reduces stress and boosts efficiency.
(38:10) Innovation is led by collaboration and tech solutions.

• Dave's Hot Chicken website
• FSTEC
• How Dave's Hot Chicken Became One of the Fastest Growing Restaurant Chains | A talk at RestaurantSpaces
• Preparing Your Kitchen for the Robot Revolution | Fast Casual Executive Summit

Jim Bitticks: We want franchisees that run great restaurants but we also want franchisees that are like really profitable. We want them to make a lot of money so they want to continue to open restaurants and so that their focus is on the business.

Evan Melick: So today we are thrilled to have a true industry innovator joining us.
Jim Bitticks is the president and CEO of Dave's Hot Chicken. Jim began his fast casual journey when he was just 15 years old as a busboy. Since then, he's made a remarkable impact with brands like CKE, Blaze Pizza, and now Dave's Hot Chicken. He was also recently appointed to Batrista's advisory board. Jim has been at the forefront of scaling franchise networks and implementing groundbreaking technologies, including A.I. powered solutions and automated systems that are shaping the future of the dining industry. During his time with Blaze, he was instrumental in taking the company from just two locations to 372. Now, under his leadership, Dave's Hot Chicken has grown from four locations to over 200, with commitments for more.

They're on track to reach 1, 000 commitments by the end of 2024 and expect to have up to 300 open locations by year's end. It's a lot of growth. They've also expanded to Canada in the Middle East with 11 international locations. Thanks to his leadership, Dave's hot chicken has also earned several accolades, including being named one of the top five hottest concepts, A QSR breakout brand in 2022, and making the list of next big things by Jonathan Mays.

Most recently, it was recognized as the fastest growing restaurant chain of 2023, and awarded the title of number one brand of the year on Fast Casual's top 100 movers and shakers. I feel like that is a huge CV that you've got and so I would love to ask a couple of questions about your story.

So you once said that Dave's Hot Chicken is on its way to becoming one of the iconic restaurant brands. You have the awards and accolades to back up that statement. So, love to hear more about your Dave's Hot Chicken story and How you feel about the brand. 

Jim Bitticks: Oh, well, I can start really easily off with I love the brand. It's been such a fun ride. I've been on board a little more than four years now. I joined the team when there were just four Dave's Hot Chickens open. We're up to about 224 locations open as of probably tomorrow, if I have that right. We're very close to that.

It's been a wild and fun ride. Made even more fun by the fact that having just come off of the Blaze Pizza journey, I was there for about eight years. As Chief Restaurant Officer, we did the same thing. I started at Blaze when there were just two locations, and that was my first foray into the sort of franchisor side of things.

I had worked before that on the company operations side of things at CKE Restaurants, which is Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, and I'd always done company operations. When I made the jump over to Blaze, it was like setting up a whole brand and all of the different layers for that, which was a completely new experience for me at the time.

Jumping over to Dave's, my team and I, most of my team came with me, we had all just done it. What was great about doing Dave's was that, because we had just done it at Blaze, we sort of got to avoid some of the mistakes that we made at Blaze along the way. Like, we knew not to do this and only to do that and to put a lot of focus on very specific approaches that we knew worked. 

And we got to scuttle the approaches when you didn't work. I have four kids and by the fourth one, I feel like my wife is an expert. Like she doesn't, she doesn't do any of the dumb stuff anymore. You know, like this last one, he's like money in the bank. Like he was smart and quick and like, just learned everything so much faster than the first one. Who was a little bit of a dud, but that's just cause my wife was learning. I'm just kidding, obviously. But that's just cause my wife was learning her way through what works best. And so Dave's kind of been our second child, if you will, for my team and myself, we got to do everything better and more right than we had done it with Blaze Pizza, which was great.

I mean, it made it a lot more fun, you know, when you make a mistake and you do something dumb, you go, man, that was dumb. But with Dave's, we got to sort of skip all that and just  cut to the end of the story where, you know, you win, where you have like a great experience and everything worked.

Evan Melick: So one of the things that we love to talk about on this podcast is doing the things today that will make tomorrow even better. And so it sounds like you're going to have a lot of tips and tricks to share with all of the listeners, especially since operating a franchise organization is very, very different, arguably, than a corporate run organization.

I know Ryan has several questions that he's probably dying to ask.

Ryan Kramer: Yeah, actually, I, I really wanted to start, Jim, by, just like a quick…Billings, Montana has a Dave's Hot Chicken. And,my wife can be hard to impress sometimes. It's difficult to choose a place to eat, typically on long road trips, we end up passing through Billings, and the number one spot now is Dave's Hot Chicken.

Like, she's obsessed with it now, and it's super cool. Funny thing is, we have kids, so kids aren't waiting for food, I'm in there, which gives me an opportunity to kind of look around, see how things run, the restaurant is busy, and there's always things going on, and I think one of the things that stands out is the brand and the consistency.

And it always gets me thinking about, you know you've talked about some of the non negotiables for Dave's Hot Chicken and how it's important to stay true to the core elements, mind blowing chicken, great service, and an awesome vibe. As a franchisee, how do you do that? And how do you ensure those core elements are being adhered to?

Jim Bitticks: Yeah. So, that was one of the learnings we definitely got from Blaze. We went through an experience, our CEO there, his name was Jim Mises, and he's,core values and, legendary in the QSR business, and he made a big deal about coming up with a mission statement and all of those things early on.

And I remember rolling my eyes just a little bit like, this is a waste of time. Like our job is to get restaurants open. And it was a whole exercise that the entire organization participated in. And we were, I mean, I don't know how many people we had at the time, probably 30 or 40. So it was a lot of people involved in like defining those for Blaze. 

What I saw later on as we continue to grow is that we would come back to many of the values that we had locked in on. We came back to the “keep it simple.” That was one of our values. Another one was “remember the people behind the pizza” or “value the people behind the pizza” was actually the exact wording.

And we would sometimes say those phrases in a meeting when we were getting too far off base and it would serve to bring everybody back. So when I landed here at Dave's, that was sort of one of my very first things to do was to say, what's our mission vision and what are our core values or our company values, because it's an all franchise organization.

We have, I think, 90 franchisees, which means 90 different companies that are sort of interpreting what Dave's is supposed to be about. And so by defining that upfront early on, as much as they're going to have their own mission statement and their own value statements and all of those things for their individual companies.

They get to plug into what we've set for the brand as a whole. So that was one of the very first sort of initiatives that I kicked off when I joined was to define our mission, vision,purpose, and our core values. And one of them was exactly what you said there about the food, the service, and then the vibe of the restaurants.

So I think that was a hundred percent necessary to define those pieces before we start bringing in lots of different franchisees that are all running their own companies. And we made sure to incorporate the original founders who are all still partners in the business and what they initiated, why they initiated it, what their belief system was and what they were focused on, and then as they created the concept. And those are still the sort of the seeds, if you will, or the roots of the things that we've defined and put words around so that they can be communicated and taught and trained. We say that like, teach it and preach it like we can teach it and preach it to the franchise owners and then all of their managers who are going to be running our restaurants across the world.

Evan Melick: One of the things I noticed is a focus on that user generated content as part of your marketing campaigns, and I'm curious if the content that you are curating and using and reposting, and I know you've said before that, that you don't pay for a lot of that content, right? It is just reposts and things showing up on the interwebs for you.

Do you feel that aligns to the core values that you set out? Because so often, right, we set ourselves up with these lofty goals and our mission statement and then, customers don't feel that same thing. And it seems to me like there is an intersection there.

Jim Bitticks: Well, so it's interesting as the brand was kicked off by these three childhood friends. Our mom, Dave, and Tommy, who wanted to make a lot of money and support their families, were all in their mid twenties or so and so they, had lots of different ideas and one of them was to open a restaurant.

Another one was to do a food truck but a major problem with both of those was that they had no money, literally between the three of them had $900. So you can't really open a restaurant or buy a food truck for $900, but they decided to do a restaurant in a parking lot under an easy uptent.

It was sort of popular at the time, that those types of pop up restaurants were popping up all over L.A. and so they did it and they spent a lot of time putting together really good recipes. They found a spot and they opened up and on, like, the fourth day they were open, they got strategically lucky in that they got an L.A. food blogger to stop by.

And why I say strategically lucky is that they were purposely, tagging bloggers on their Instagram account, saying you should come try the food, you should come try the food. So, one of them came out, his name is Farley Elliott, he was with Eater L.A. and he stopped in on the third or fourth night open, tried the food and posted the next day, “late night, hot chicken stand might just blow your mind.”

That evening they had a line around the block of like a hundred people waiting to try the food. That Instagram account was the secret ingredient, if you want to call it that, to getting the brand launched. If you go scroll through our Instagram account, you're going to see nothing but pictures of food and the food looks like griny and delicious and goopy.

And like, there's seasoning everywhere and it looks really real. It looks really authentic. And Armand's focus, Armand being one of the founders and he's our marketing guru. He's like the social media savant, who has always run the Instagram account. He said people really like the way the food looks.

And that's one of the key pieces to why they come and try the food. And so when we expanded into TikTok, rather than paying an agency to create content, rather than putting a lot of emphasis on making, you know, TikTok dance videos or any of those types of things, we just let people post their stuff and then we reposted the stuff because their reactions, their authentic responses to like how the food tastes, you'll see somebody bite into Dave's Hot Chicken for the first time and their eyes will roll in the back of their heads or they're like, wow, like it's like a surprising, shocking, like, wow, that's so good.

That does more for us than some of the created content that people pay for, pay agencies to put together for you. That has been really effective. I think we opened, like started our actual TikTok channel, I want to say in September of 2022 and we're in September of 2024 right now and we are up to, is it 2 million? It's a huge number of followers to have been able to pull in for such a short period of time. And it all comes back to that sort of authentic looking feel, just like the original pictures on Instagram. So, the authenticity of it, the realness of the media,what we're showing, the pictures and the videos. I think has driven a lot of people to be interested in trying it because it does look so real. It does look so authentic and it does look so good.

Ryan Kramer: I really like hearing the backstories of that stuff and you know, I had an opportunity to review one of the presentations you did for the restaurant spaces and you really delve into the history and a lot of what we're talking about here. But, yeah. I really wanted to circle back on the training aspect and especially what you had said to kind of those core values and then training people to those core values to a degree and, I think the most entertaining part of that presentation was the training videos that you're doing, the new training videos, the blow your mind training videos that are kind of on brand , which, I mean, I'd love to steal some of those, honestly. Even just a little snippet that I was able to see. So kind of in that vein, how are you going about this training? This blow your mind training videos and what are you hoping that it's going to accomplish?

Jim Bitticks: Yeah. So I'm very passionate about training. I've always been like very into the idea that when you train people really well, then you get better than normal outcomes. That's when you don't train people well, or when you half train them or partially train them, it takes double the time, triple the time to get the outcome that should just have come naturally.

And so when we were at Blaze, we started with paper training materials and quickly found that they would be out of date and a waste of money. Essentially we'd have inventory of all these printed materials and Juan Lopez, who I've worked with now for, oh wow, like 12 years or 13 years, he's sort of my right hand guy, came up with PlayerLync actually, he found PlayerLync. We were looking at a couple of your competitors for some type of a digital approach to training, and we really only wanted the ability for franchisees, franchise restaurants to pull up the materials digitally, we didn't want all of the bells and whistles of some of the other systems, like a communication system and literally eight years ago, I want to say seven or eight years ago.

And so PlayerLync’s added a lot of different layers to it now that at the time was pretty much just a digital approach to looking at the materials. And that's, that was perfect for us. And it was. It was actually a much lower cost option too at the time than some of the other ones that we had explored.

So we landed on PlayerLync and it became our digital training solution for Blaze. And it was perfect because it allowed us to deliver the paper training materials in PDF format on an iPad. Which was very on brand for Blaze Pizza with sort of a young clientele but also a young team in most locations.

So it was perfect. We had our recipe book and all of our procedures were on a mounted tablet back in the prep area. And it worked, like I said, it worked perfectly. We landed at Dave's and as I was saying earlier, we knew exactly what worked and what didn't work. And so we went straight to PlayerLync and brought PlayerLync into Dave's.

To do the same thing where we've gone to the next level at Dave's is that we went out and we hired a guy to help us produce really good training videos. We specifically didn't choose some of the more tried and true training materials or training video vendors that exist in the market and not because they do bad work or anything like that. I'm sure they do excellent work, but we wanted to do something that was really relevant, really cool, really like special. Not just a training video and not a hackneyed, like, trite approach to doing training videos. So we hired a guy that normally does commercials and music videos. And his name is Ben Hess Productions.

He did a phenomenal job. He partnered with our director of training and together they created like the scripts and sort of the flows for each of these training videos, they all, each one of them, we have 14 of them, each one of them has a different sort of, I dunno, like gimmick or schtick to it.

Like one is, sort of after an aerobics video. Instruction video. Another one,is a take off on sort of a, an airline training video or airline, take off video type of thing. They're all really funny. They're all, really well done. And the best thing about it is that the majority of the people, the majority of the actors in the videos are our actual trainers that go out and open new restaurants.

So there's this very, like, authentic feel to it. That, you watch the videos, they're engaging, you definitely want to see what happens, and at the same time they're educational or they're teaching employees how to perform the necessary steps of each station. So those turned out amazing. The clip I showed at that conference that you were talking about was sort of the preview clip.

We actually just finished them about a month ago and released them to the franchisees, and I'm hearing nothing but great things about them. With PlayerLync, they're big files, but PlayerLync has a compression system. That's one of the reasons we've always loved PlayerLync and, the videos play seamlessly, they're on the, well, you guys know this, obviously, like, they're on the tablets, they update overnight if there's any updates, and there's no issues with buffering or not being able to, you know, watch the videos or any of those types of things. 

So, we've really, I feel like we've really gone to the next level on the training side of things. And I fully expect to see our restaurants perform better and to get more of that brand feel because, how much can you get from a piece of paper that you're reading that, in all honesty, a lot of people may not even read?

One of the, one of the key goals of the training videos was to make the training so good that restaurant managers actually, like, want to use it, like, want to show their teams, Here, watch this video and it'll be great because you're gonna learn everything you need to learn and then come meet me at the station. In 12 minutes or however long the video is, so there are a lot of different layers to it, but that was one of the main ones was to make the training like desirable to use, if that makes sense. Desirable to watch, but desirable to use from the manager's perspective as well.

Evan Melick: So it sounds like you have intentionally and authentically, which I love that, but incorporated technology alongside that human component, right? Knowing that technology can get you so far, but there's still a human shoulder to shoulder kind of experiential thing. One of the things that you said was a desired outcome was the restaurant performance and that brand consistency I know you, and based on that speaking session you gave, you use a lot of tools to help you measure satisfaction and all of the pieces that go into that. Are there any specific call outs? That you would note are more important than others as far as is concerned within those franchises.

Jim Bitticks: From the franchisor perspective, ultimately, we want franchisees that run great restaurants but we also want franchisees that are like really profitable. We want them to make a lot of money so they want to continue to open restaurants and so their focus is on the business. I've worked in other systems before where the profit model wasn't great. 

So what happens with franchisees is they're looking for a return on investment. And so when the return on investment in this franchise isn't great, they say, you know what, I could build three yogurt shops for the same amount of money I'm investing in this location, and I make twice as much money.

Well, they're going to shift their focus and their capital over to doing three yogurt shops instead of doing another one of our restaurants. So the key pieces from that side of it are the unit level economics and making sure that there's a really high return on invested capital for the franchisees.

From our perspective, once they have that, we have a lot of leverage then in that situation to, I don't say force them, because I think franchisees are business people and want to make good money, so they want to do it too, but it gives us some leverage over helping them perform their best and get the most out of those restaurants. So we manage franchisees by the guest metrics. So we look a lot at their Google scores, Yelp scores, although Yelp to a lesser degree than Google. Google's sort of like the everyman's rating system. Yelp is more elite. Yelp is more for like, you know, my wife or my mom, you know, it's not for the age group that usually frequents a day, just to be totally honest. So Yelp is less important to us than is the Google side of things. But we put a lot of focus, emphasis, and pressure on franchisees. For those ratings to be strong and so anytime that those ratings start to slip, we put pressure on trying to get those ratings up, which is why the training aspect of it, where the training videos and having a very consistent approach.

I have four kids and they are all not television watchers. They're like YouTube watchers or TikTok users or any of those things. Like my daughter used to fall asleep watching YouTube as opposed to fall asleep watching TV. That's a major shift. I think my wife just got rid of cable, like, which is like wild to me because I remember getting cable when I was a kid and like it was the best thing ever.

The idea that we don't have cable anymore because you watch all the content on your phone. It's just like, it's I mean, that's just the way it is, but that's where the changes happen. So by moving everything to a video format, including besides just the initial training that you do, additional supplemental training that we're bringing in on a quarterly basis or how we train our first level managers, which is a project for this upcoming year would be to create a video series around that.

Doing all of those things around video is really the medium that I think communicates best with most of the people that are working in our restaurants today. So that’s the impetus behind why we wanted to shift to video and the fact that it's really easy to implement and utilize on PlayerLync is just it's the cherry on top.

Evan Melick: Well, of course, we love to hear that because, you know it makes everything better.

JIm Bitticks: It does. That's true. I said that when we were looking at Blaze for a place to do it, one of the thoughts was that we would embed little 30 second vignettes or videos, like how to sauce a pizza properly and we thought, well, we could just use Dropbox for that like the video vignette could be on Dropbox. They would go, click a link, and it would access Dropbox, and you'd watch the video vignette. I mean, it was a good idea, it just doesn't work like you know, you don't have the bandwidth, or whatever, there's buffering, there's all sorts of issues. That's why the compression piece of and how it works, and how it, like, works so well.

When I was at CKE restaurants, which is now over 10 years ago, yeah, it was like 11 years ago, I think, they had just rolled out LMS training stations in the restaurants, and they were using satellite for internet connections and that was the jankiest, worst applied version. I'm not criticizing Carl's. It was a great group of people and awesome training folks that had been there for years. It's just the technology at the time was just, it was sort of weak, you know? And as much as you wanted them to see a video or whatever, it just didn't work well. And today it's, a lot different, but specifically with the PlayerLync platform, it's really great.

Evan Melick: Well, and going back to your statement about, well, several statements about profitability, right? Minutes matter. And so when you're
taking people off the floor to do training or you have it in those slower periods, all of those moments impact top and bottom line. And so having that accessible at the right time. At the right moment, when someone's available to take the training, I think it's key for a lot of our clients, for sure.

Jim Bitticks: That's for sure and on the video, what's interesting or what's beneficial to the video side of things is like, while the person on the screen is verbalizing, whatever the steps of a thing are or whatever, there are also pop ups happening in the background that are like visual cues. So like if they say wash your hands for 20 seconds at whatever temperature of water a pop up says like it's like a clock showing the 20 seconds or whatever. So there, there are layers to the training or to the teaching that are more than just one dimensional. It's like a two or three dimensional approach, which I think has proven itself to be much more effective for how you actually learn.
How real people learn. So that's another benefit to doing it through video. And then it's always the same, right? Like once you produce a product that people like and think is really good, and then they start using it consistently over time, you start to see the improvement in the retention of information and knowledge that the trainees have or get from that experience.

Ryan Kramer: Shifting gears just a little bit so you're speaking at the Fast Casual Summit later this year, and your topic is on the robot revolution and how restaurants are preparing for it. With the restaurant industry facing the triple threat, which is rising labor costs, shrinking profit margin, and increasing demand for speed and efficiency, how are you tackling this, and how is, Dave's Hot Chicken kind of preparing for this.

Jim Bitticks: So that goes back to that idea of return on invested capital and right now Dave's has one of, one of the strongest ROIC numbers. I think we're under two years to pay back a restaurant based on our average volumes and average cost structures. There are groups that do better than that and obviously I'm sure there are a few groups that don't do quite as well. 

But for it to be on average under two years at an average unit volume of three million is a really strong number and so there is a lot of focus from myself, our entire team, our CFO, our CEO, on making sure that we really protect that. We've started exploring different approaches to automation.

I guess self order kiosks aren't really automation, but they are. A potential way to maybe save money. At least that's what we thought. We fast tracked there was the minimum wage increase that was a big deal here about well, the announcement of it about a year ago. It went into effect April 1st of this year.

And so late last year, we fast tracked the tests for self ordering kiosks for guests to be able to order for themselves with the thought being that you'd be able to cut maybe hours out of the schedule. Since we're going to take this like 25 percent or almost 25 percent wage increase we could find ways to start cutting out some of the labor. 

That was actually an incorrect hypothesis that you'd be able to pull labor out by adding in the kiosks. But what actually happened was that we saw that the check average went up. The kiosk check averages higher by between five and 10%, depending on location which now we're attributing to the idea that when you're doing your own ordering, you're not embarrassed about ordering a shake also or adding on additional food or exploring the menu, which I do all the time.

Like when I take my 11 year old to McDonald's or whatever, I literally go to like sweet treats and like, if they have a new thing, I'll add the new thing. I'll be like, well, let's try it. You know? And that's like two bucks. Whereas I may not do that, like through the drive through or at the front counter.

The other thing we think is that the dwell time on the kiosks seems to be higher, you don't feel as much pressure to go quickly or to make a fast decision because either the person in front of you feels like. They need to get away to go like bag orders or do something different, or even that there's someone behind you waiting to take their order.

So then you feel like you have to hurry up and get out of the way. This increase on the self order kiosk check average actually has been very helpful to the labor model because you're not spending more labor to get this additional increase, but you are actually then redeploying some of the labor because now you've got like three or four kiosks.

And people are ordering and now more orders are coming into the back. So we didn't have, we didn't cut any labor with the kiosks. I said this on another interview that I did with Lisa Jennings and Restaurant Business, and it was on YouTube and some, you know how everybody snarks, everybody's snarky and they make comments on YouTube or Twitter, somebody put it like the first comment is like, Yeah, right. 

You're not trying to cut labor or whatever and what has happened is that we haven't cut any labor. The labor has actually been redeployed, but we're making more sales on it. So it's a more profitable model. So testing that in support of, or in service to the franchisees and the franchise community has led us somewhere that we think is going to be very positive.

We haven't released the kiosks as a test thing for the rest of the country yet. Just because we're a little bit worried about the idea that I don't want to be like and I don't mean to disparage any other fast foods, but you've seen this shift in fast food locations where they're taking out cash registers or P. O. S. terminals, and they're replacing them with kiosks that are just where the cash register used to be, and so now instead of having employees, you walk into the counter and you're just like, it's, you're, it's on you. Like you just go in, you do your thing and that isn't what I want for us. If we're going to put in kiosks, I want it to be like an either or option.

I want to be like, if you prefer to use the kiosk, you can, but we still have somebody here to take your order if that's what you prefer also, we're also trying to set it up so that the kiosks are near the registers, like not quite side by side, but close enough that if you have a question and you're using the kiosk, you're in verbal and visual proximity to a real employee so that real employee could help you.

You could say, you know, I can't figure out how to put in my app over here. Oh, let me help you. And they can just like reach over and help you so we've tried to make it something that is helpful to the restaurants but doesn't diminish the service level of the fast casual experience.

We're also dabbling in robot french fry arms that like reach and they drop the french fries for you. I'm sure somebody might say, oh yeah, you're not trying to cut labor. We really aren't trying to cut labor. We're actually trying to make the cooking process, like, less stressful for our team.

There is a certain amount of labor that you're going to a lot for every dollar of sales. It's like probably 20 cents on the dollar or so, so you can do the math on that, but essentially if I can make the, pressure periods, like the high peak, high volume periods, like less stressful on the employees by taking something like French fries, which is just very easy for a robot arm to drop and pull back up, shake, and then dump into a warming pan. Then that probably makes the experience better.

Same thing for dishwashers. We've been adamant about trying to put dishwashers in the restaurants for lots of reasons, but one of them is it makes the experience better for the employees. As a former dishwasher, busboy, fast food worker myself, like I can wash the dishes as fast as a dishwashing machine can wash them. But I go home a lot more like tired. I'm covered in water. I smell like food. My back hurts. If I have a dishwashing machine there, I don't get to cut labor. Like you still need somebody to operate the dishwashing machine. You still need someone to spray out the dishes. To put them on the rack, to move them in and out of the machine, and then to put them away so they can dry. So you don't really get to cut any labor out. But what you get to do is you get to make the experience not as hated, not as scorned. Like I would much rather wash dishes with the support of a dishwashing machine than I would doing it by myself.

We opened a location here in LA back in 2021. It was so busy and everybody was helping out all hands on deck type thing, pitching in and I went back to help wash dishes and they were like, no, no, you can't wash dishes. The manager, her name is Betty, she was like, Jim, please don't. Like, you're gonna embarrass me. I'm like, there's nothing to be embarrassed about.

Like, I can wash dishes all day long and you can let your employees get trained and learn how to do the line. I don't want to be here next weekend. Quite frankly, like I'd rather wash dishes this weekend and let your people learn how to make all the food this weekend. If that makes sense, I washed dishes for those two days. 

I was in such pain, like physical pain, my legs, my back. I was, like I said, covered in food and water. We called EcoLab the next Monday morning, I was like, I need a dishwashing machine here because it was so much, the volume of dishes was so much. So we've done a lot of that. We've done things with the dishwashing machines.

With self ordering kiosks, now with robot arm, I've got that in two locations that we're testing and none of it is wrapped around the idea of cutting labor. Like, we're not looking for some magic fix to cut labor. And I don't care what comment somebody makes about that. That is the honest truth. But trying to make the job more desirable, more likable, more doable for the employees and for the workforce that's available to the restaurant industry, especially the QSR or fast casual industry.

Evan Melick: Well, and we did a survey last year that really talked about how when workers feel stressed, right, that's when you're going to have high levels of retention challenges. You're going to have workplaces, and quite honestly, that's when the most injuries occur. When they're already feeling stressed out and and doing all of these things. 

And so, it, sounds like your approach, early on we talked about this a little bit too, is coupling and partnering technology, dishwashers or, You know, French fry arms, whatever you want to call them, alongside the humans. And so we know we still need a human component to do a lot of that work. But if we can alleviate some of those incidental stressors, it is and the survey also found that people, that employees, frontline workers want to be loyal to companies. And so if we can alleviate some of those early stressors in a job much higher likelihood of those employees staying within the organization and being really, really valuable assets as they continue to grow, as the companies continue to grow. So I think it serves everyone really well to look at those opportunities to mitigate stress.

Jim Bitticks: I think when you make the process desirable or more desirable than not desirable, that you're more likely to get people to do it as an example. The idea of the dishes, I was just in a restaurant actually on Saturday, one of the ones with the fry arms, I wanted to see it during like a peak period.

And I asked the manager, I said like, tell me, do you still love the dishwasher or do you hate it now? And he was like, no, I love it. And whenever I go in that restaurant, there are never dishes in the sink. And he goes, he told me, he said our rule is that every time there's dirty dishes, you just put them in the dishwasher. Whoever takes the dirty dishes back, rinses it, puts it on the rack, puts it in the dishwasher and he goes, and that way it never piles up. The dishes are always clean and it's sort of a clean as you go approach, which is like an old school phrase that I remember hearing when I was a kid or, you know, you only handle a piece of paper once. That's ike time management 101. Like you never like put it away. You have to put it away later. That approach, which I had never occurred to me for dishwashers, was like a thing, but I see that it works in his restaurant because every single time I'm there, they don't have any dirty dishes because they just handle them as they go.
If you were just doing it in the sink full of dishes, what you would be doing is you'd be waiting for it to pile up. The manager would then send somebody back to bust out dishes for an hour. And then that person would just do dishes for an hour. That makes sense. So there are layers to what you just said, uh, that really do take off some of the stress and they make it easier to run the restaurant, um, over long periods of time.
So, I agree with you.

Ryan Kramer: I feel like this kind of segue really nicely and you touched on innovation so much and that was the piece that I wanted to talk about was a little bit on innovation because you're speaking at FSTech this month and it's a session called Presidential Showdown Leading the Charge in Restaurant Tech. Kind of furthering that, without getting too far into any details about what might be coming in the future, but how do you innovate? How does the company as a whole innovate and bring things further?

Jim Bitticks: So it's a great question. I worked with a guy at Blaze for the last like three years that I was there. His name's Leon Devoyan and about two years ago, I hired him here as our chief technology officer for the Datasite Chicken management team and for myself personally, I rely on Leon to be the guy that's thinking ahead.

Talking about what's coming up, what we need to be aware of and what we need to be focused on and like, the tech group reports into me, which is funny, because I'm certainly not a tech expert of any kind, but, you know what I think works well about the relationship I have with Leon is it's he's a very down to earth, real guy. He gets how stressful technology is for people. So, and he has a way of being able to sort of explain it or break it down so that it doesn't feel stressful. He has that sense to him. Like, oh,like, come here, baby. Like i'll take care of you.

Like on the tech side of things you feel like you can just like, like nestle in our nestle into his bosom and he'll, you know, he'll, he'll fix your email, your Zoom isn't working, like, no problem, honey, like, I'll take care of you all very masculine, like I'm not saying that he would be in any way unmasculine in his approach, but he is very helpful, and he is very forward thinking, and he makes it easy. I'll tell them, I'll go like, these pagers suck. Like, what could we do where you're texting people that their order is ready on their phone because they already have it and they're already looking at it the whole time. They're waiting they're like this the whole exact time.

We will, as a company, benefit from, like, how do we move away from this version to that version. He's that guy that will come up with a solution. So, I think also, we have these trainers, the trainers that I mentioned that are in those videos. They're all in their, like, early 20s.

They're all really, like, smart and pragmatic. One of them's our director of training, and he'll come and say, Hey, why are we doing this? And I'll say, I don't know, what would be better? And he'll say, it would be better if we did this. And then we'll take that back in between Leon and myself and Juan and any of the other people I've mentioned so far.

We come up with like, okay, like, is that even an option? You know, is it possible to do that? What would it take to do that? And I think we've come up with some pretty like, I don't say cool, but like better, better approaches to some of the things that you normally run into. We just made an adjustment.

To the way that we to our KDS system, the way we like manage all the orders coming out of the restaurant, which was a product of the trainer saying it would be better if we did this and us trying to make sort of the FedEx meets Starbucks approach to orders are one of our biggest complaints is order accuracy.

When you walk into a Starbucks and it's a busy Starbucks, they've got this counter full of drinks, but every one of them has a label on it. And you can pick it up and you can say, Oh, this one's for Ryan or this one's for Jim, or this one's for whoever, like, whose order is whose and so we're doing that with our orders now because of that potential for inaccuracy.

And then also the other piece of that is as an order makes its way down the line, we're really busy. Our restaurants are very busy. The idea that each order has a label so that as it goes down the line, you know exactly what order it is. It's sort of the FedEx, like they scan it at every point.

That's how come you can track it and know that it's like on its way or Amazon's version of it to like, Oh, you're the 10th stop knowing where your order is in the system, that's the idea and so we've married those things and Leon's helped us figure out how to do that. So. That's how we do it. It's Leon. That's my answer. It's Leon. Leon Devoyan. That's my answer.

Evan Melick: Sounds like every organization needs a Leon. I like it.

Jim Bitticks: For sure.

Evan Melick: So I want to be super respectful of your time because I know that you are very, very busy and it sounds like you have potentially more stores opening tomorrow, definitely some opening before the end of the year. So I'd like to end every conversation with kind of a left field question for you. If you were to design your own bumper sticker, what would it say and why?

Jim Bitticks: I have a couple of personal mantras. The one I think I like best is this idea of never give up. So I'd probably say like never give up would be the bumper sticker because I always feel like as much as something feels like it might be what's the right word? Like as much as something feels like it's not gonna happen or it's not gonna work out or it always seems to work out.

And the thing is, you just keep, like, you just stick to it, just keep to it. We did a private equity sale at Blaze, and just like any other private equity sale, pretty much everything changed after that. And I remember thinking it was great, I got a big check, I had options, and it was like, it was the biggest payday I've ever had.

But everything changed after that, and I remember thinking like a year later, like, if I could give back the money and have the job the way it was, what would I do, and it's like one of those things where you go like, I don't know, that's tough, like that money was, money I put aside for my kids to go to college,we put money down on a house, so it's sort of a give and take, and like things usually do, They didn't get better.

They got worse for a while. And I thought, man, I got to the point where I was saying that I would have preferred to have given back the money and kept it the way it was. And then this opportunity at Dave's popped up and all of a sudden, all these pieces just fell into place. And I am a hundred times happier as a person, as a professional today, than I was.

You know, that last couple of years at Blaze and everything has worked. I brought almost the entire team with me. We're all better off. We're all, and that's not to say anything bad about Blaze. Like it was always going to be one of those types of endeavors and, and I always wish them the best of luck.

I feel like so much love for Blaze. So I'm not saying in a negative way, but it just worked out to our benefit. to come here to Dave's Hot Chicken. So that's my answer for the bumper sticker. Like, never give up, like, never lose hope or never lose faith in any of those terms in there because you never know it's just gonna like blow up and be amazing.

And it's been absolutely amazing since we've been here.

Ryan Kramer: That's great.

Evan Melick: I cannot thank you enough for your time today. This has been awe inspiring, very, very exciting. I am on my way to my nearest Dave's Hot Chicken for dinner tonight because now I'm hungry.

Jim Bitticks: Great. Glad to hear that.

Evan Melick: We are definitely watching y'all very closely and making sure we support you in every way we can because you're a phenomenal partner for us and we certainly can't wait to see what Dave's Hot Chicken is going to do in the future.

Jim Bitticks: Great. Thank you.

Ryan Kramer: It was absolutely a pleasure. Thank you.

Jim Bitticks: Thank you.