– Yeah. It is funny how often that if something works well for the crew and the team, it actually delivers a better customer experience. It becomes a threefold relationship because happy team, happy customer means a well run restaurant is probably more likely to be profitable. All right, I thought I was in trouble after that third wing. I was having a hard time even focusing on what you’re saying, but I feel like the heat has subsided.
– Oh boy.
– That scared me at first, but it’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be.
– Yeah.
– Awesome. I tasted a lot of pepper and I was like, this is just gonna get worse.
– The second it hit my mouth, you could feel the pepper. I thought uh-oh.
– It’s actually good.
– So far it hasn’t built.
– Ah, this is your sauce too. That’s delicious.
– That worked pretty well. All right, maybe I’m getting overly confident. Maybe they’re gonna smoke me now on the number five and six, but I think we’re doing pretty well.
– That felt good.
– Okay, next question, number four. This is a personal question, right? As a leader, we all have our own strengths and weaknesses. If I were to ask your team to candidly speak about you, what would they say is your superpower? Like what do you do that is unique and special and different that allows you and your team to be successful?
– I have like a weirdly like detailed memory, but what’s helpful about that is like it lets me kind of absorb things. And with so much going on in every day, everybody’s lives get busier and busier, but I can hop into a call on something that maybe I haven’t talked about or had to deal with for a couple, you know, couple weeks, a month, two months, a quarter, the team needs me to jump in and do something and I’ll be able to pull things back and be like, “Wait a second, is this what?” And they’ll be like, “Yeah, yeah.” So like, I don’t know, it’s just, I can retain information in a certain way and I’m not really sure how or why. If you asked me anything about managerial accounting or like the Roman Empire from college, zero clue. But stuff that like my brain just somehow says, you should remember this, like I can kind of pull back. And it’s very helpful in understanding like a lot of where I deal with is how systems integrate with each other and how vendors play and that it becomes very useful to kind of know that on the fly as opposed to having to, you know, go kind of dig and figure out who can do with this and work with what.
– This is kinda a unique kind of superpower in terms of memory. It’s kind of a specific recall, which is, look, I may not remember what I ate for lunch last Tuesday. You can talk to me about a technology project we implemented six months ago that we need to recall in order to think about an upgrade or a new integration. And you can remember the details in a way that caused the team to say, “How does this guy remember this? MJ’s got some kind of superpower”
– I can do it with with work related items in that regard. And then also random golf courses and rounds of golf that I played. But then anything like important from, you know, parts of life where I paid for college and paid for all these classes that, no clue, no clue.
– All right, we ready for number five?
– Number five it is.
– I don’t know. I feel pretty confident. We’ve been doing a pretty good job here.
– I think the worst is behind us. I really like these wings.
– That was easy, huh?
– I think they tricked us. I think this was like secretly the hot sauce, like the hottest sauce, like number three.
– I totally agree. I do not agree the order in which they rank us. Who knows? Maybe they just laid ’em out, but.
– We do have one more left and it, that one could actually hurt a lot. So maybe I’m wrong.
– It’s working. My nose is running.
– Great for yeah, great for allergy season. I don’t have the, I don’t trap a lot of humidity or moisture in my hair here.
– My hair gets soaky wet when I eat spicy food. And like a crown in my head is just like, it’s like I’ve been running, you know, a five mile sprint or something. Before we eat our next one, I’m gonna tell you the question so we can think about it. Oh, we still gotta do, yeah, we got number five. Okay, you talked about AI as being the biggest game changer in the industry and I think that’s right. And we talked about AI having a role in automation. What part of, I think about Five Guys in the business, what part of the operation would you love to automate?
– Like I said, scheduling.
– So forecasting and automatic scheduling, automatically building the roster.
– It’s not necessary. You’re just trying to check a bunch of boxes to get people in the door at the time of the day that you need them and make sure that you’re meeting their requirements so that they can, you know, live their life if they have family obligations, school, whatnot. Forecasting, kinda the same thing, right? You know, we’ve dabbled in it a little bit. I think we see that AI forecasting can be really, really impactful. Whether it be, you know, taking into consideration, things that we just don’t think to look at. Like, you know, oh man, we did under forecasted, but we didn’t look back to see the last year massive snow event, you know? Last year, there was a massive car accident and we just didn’t see the car and foot traffic that we thought we would because the road was closed for two hours, you know? Like AI’s not gonna forget any of that. AI’s gonna look at and if you do it right, it’s going to look at things that could impact you in the future that you just aren’t aware of. You know, like, you know, whether it be like national cheeseburger day or state football playoffs near a store. You know, just random little things that-
– I live in Texas on a Friday night during football season, away game versus home game, night and day difference.
– Yeah, it’s unreal. So like I feel like those are things that it can do smarter, that it’s just kind of a no brainer to me, right?
– You know, it’s interesting. Look for it’s what it’s worth, you and I didn’t talk about these questions beforehand, but your answer lines up exactly where we’ve been investing, right? So we’ve got data sciences been working on, AI forecasting, AI auto scheduling now for five, six, seven years. And it’s been the area where we’ve seen the biggest impact in deploying AI in our products, right, which is, you look, a really, really good manager can build a good schedule, but like why, like why use all that time and effort to build a schedule when you can do it automatically. And like you said, the computer doesn’t forget. And where we see the biggest impact, of course, is in like a young or less experienced manager, right, who’s or maybe move opening a new store, right, where you don’t have that good data set, they’re not sure. But even the AI will even look for lookalikes, right? Like this store looks a lot like these other two stores, three stores, four stores, or maybe a hundred stores in a chain your size and can then start to forecast in a way that no one ever could. And the thing that’s kind of maybe interesting as it flows down to the team member is what we’ve seen is when folks rely on the AI forecast and build a schedule using AI, there’s many fewer changes to the schedule. I’ve got one customer, sat down in a quarterly business review with them and they weren’t using our AI forecasting tool. We saw some stores where managers were making 400 changes to their team’s schedule. And so imagine if you’re a team member, right, and it’s like, “Hey, I had a date,” right? “It was my son’s birthday,” right? “I was taking my daughter to her recital.” And you book that time off and your manager’s calling up and saying, “Hey, I need you to work.” That kind of turmoil and uncertainty just drives work is crazy. It makes a team members like lose their mind.
– Like, AI can’t make a mistake when it comes to availability. A human can still overlook and accidentally be like, “Oh, sorry, Bob, I put you in for that shift even though it clearly says that you couldn’t work, you know?” it’s the same thing with like on the revenue side like AI always upsells, the human doesn’t always upsell. Why wouldn’t I want AI to do a lot of my sales, right? We see it with drive-through call-in kiosk.
– Okay, let me ask you a follow up question because look, you and I are singing from the same hymn sheet, but I did bump into customers who say, “Look, they’re kind of nervous about AI,” right? “They’re worried about turning something like scheduling over to AI.” Why do you think there’s some resistance in the industry to technology and artificial intelligence in particular?
– The answer to your question is my least favorite part of our industry, which is the adversity to change, right? I don’t think that change is always the best, but I think that we expect it to be the worst way, way more, right? We take a very glass half full mentality to change and ultimately that leads to apprehension, right, naysayers, right? Ultimately, like I’m not saying that everybody would embrace every single new thing that comes on the block. ‘Cause if we did that, we would just never actually have time to settle into new things. But at the same time, when there are things that make a ton of sense that people typically use in their everyday personal life and either don’t realize it or just don’t want, they just don’t understand, I could also do use this in my professional life and that’s okay, right?
– I use that technology to actually drive to work, but I don’t wanna use that technology to manage my schedule,
– Right, I know tons of people that have said, you know, I save X amount of time using ChatGPT and stuff like that on a weekly basis that lets them reinvest that time in themselves, in their family, in their relationships or back into their work on the things that AI can’t do. How is that a negative, right? So like at some point, it’s just relinquishing that control a little bit, understanding that there are other ways to do things and that change is okay. But I totally get why, you know, we like to dip our toe in the water very carefully. I just think that we could be a little bit faster.
– Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I do think that the industry tends to be a little slow sometimes in terms of adopting technology or driving change, but the carrot, right, the benefit in doing so, which I think you articulated perfectly, is that I can take things that were onerous heavy administrative and take that time that I was losing to those activities and reinvest them in things that were much better, right? That might be training my team, right? It might be more time at home, right? Being store manager’s tough, right? And so if you could take those extra three or four hours or freeze up by using AI and be home for dinner an extra evening or two a week, that’d be a game changer for sure.
– People, I think, expect long hours in this industry, but it’s not mandated. If you can go from working 60 hours a week to 55 hours a week just because of AI, nobody’s gonna say, “Well, you still have to work 60 hours a week,” right? There’s an output aspect and there’s an hours aspect and it’s okay if you can be more efficient and then use that time for work-life balance.
– Yeah, for sure. And on the margin, the extra time is worth so much, right? Worth so much as we all know from having, you know, spent many hours working in our careers. All right, should we go for that last wing?
– Last one. Little baby guy here. Back to vinegar again. Woo. Let’s go go.
– I think they spared us. Oh, now it’s kicking. Yeah, now it’s kicking, but not too bad, right?
– I haven’t been able to breathe this well with allergy season in like two months. This is great.
– I’m gonna change this one up a little bit based on where our conversation’s going. Clearly, look, we’re in the business because we love the industry, but at the end of the day, it’s a business, business are meant to make money. How are you thinking about profitability maybe different now with technology bringing to market some of the innovations we’re seeing in AI than you did maybe five, six, seven years ago?
– I think there’s is optimization. A lot of optimization, right? I think that a lot of times, I think businesses look at opportunities to either increase revenue or decrease costs, right? But AI kinda lets you do both at the same time a little bit more, right? It feels like it’s always been a focus of when things are good
– Optimization, yeah.
– So just pure optimization, right? Top to bottom, it lets you balance those initiatives way better than it used to. It feels like before, if you were focusing on revenue, you focused on revenue and that was typically when sales were down. And then when sales were good, you focused on costs and optimizing there. But now you can do both, and you can find ways to do both at the same time, right, because naturally when you bring on new revenue, you might have some growing pains and some costs, right? But then on the flip side, you’re also going to have, you know, a better chance of higher buying power, right? When revenue’s up, you’re gonna have, on a scalability, right, you know, positives around scalability and negatives around scalability.
– You should meet my chief technology officer, Christian Berthelsen, because, you know, he’s been kind of the architect behind our Fourth iQ applications as we’ve basically rolled out IQ into each of our applications, right? So it’s not like a new product per se, but it’s applying IQ thinking, IQ decision making. It’s about deploying AI capabilities into our products, right, AI thinking, AI forecasting, AI optimization, AI recommendation. And your point here, right, which is it’s not about do optimize revenue or do I optimize costs, it’s more a holistic optimization of the business. Some parts of the day it’s about driving more revenue. I may actually want to increase my cost by bringing more staff members on board. Another time it might be, look, I don’t see the volume, so it’s okay to take those resources back down. And I think, you know, across every element of the business, that optimization potential is what is what AI’s all about.
– Yeah, a lot of it is like the time, right? For the longest time, restaurant owners just don’t have the time to do both. And now it’s like, yeah, now I can, you know, because everything’s easier and all the grunt work, you know, 80% of the work to get to a goal is done for me. The 20% is just executing.
– I can tell from how you think about technology, you could kinda see the next two or three, five years playing out where a lot of people I talk to in the industry are almost afraid of what’s coming, right, mot sure how to think about it. And I think that if we can have more industry players, leaders see the potential to make their life easier, right? Because I could argue that right now, being a store manager is the hardest it’s ever been, right? It’s tougher to get labor, right? Food prices are rising. We’ve got more regulation in terms of labor and such than we’ve ever had before. We probably put more pressure on our managers to look at the reports, look at the financial statements. But to your point, you can be afraid of this, but if you look at the future, you see that AI, it’s like help coming, our jobs are getting easier, not harder. We’re gonna be able to do more, not less.
– Absolutely. Yeah. And people also like should not be afraid that AI is gonna take your job, right? An AI bot or tool or collection of tools cannot replace a restaurant manager, right? Maybe at some point in the future, right? We’ve seen movies where these things happen, but right now, no, right? It can make your life better. It can make you more profitable, make your business more profitable. But yeah, don’t be scared, just be happy that you live in a time where your job can get easier as you get busier. And that doesn’t really happen all that often and it hasn’t in history.
– That’s interesting. You mentioned that, look, it’s gonna get better, it’s gonna get easier. When we were first talking about Fourth iQ, I kind of said, “Well look, let’s think about these as like superpowers.” But my CTO said, “Well look, it’s more like an Ironman suit than it is superpowers, right?” Like it’s something that’s gonna enable and enhance the skills of a worker, not replace a worker with somebody who’s, you know, that’s a machine, which I think is a great way to think about it. It should help people get maybe more comfortable with that. All right man, look, I think we survived. Those wings were actually really good.
– They were delicious.
– I thought I was gonna not make it all the way through. So thanks for your encouragement.
– You made Canada proud today.
– Yeah./li>