Maybe you were staring at the six-panel menu on the wall at a Sizzler restaurant when a 6-foot-2 man sidled up next to you and asked how you were making your meal decision. Maybe he asked why you even chose the fast-casual steak, seafood and salad restaurant chain in the first place.
If so, you’ve met Kerry Kramp, who took over Sizzler USA Restaurants Inc. in June 2008, inheriting sales declining as much as 20 percent year-to-year.
He observed the Los Angeles-based chain — first as a competitor when he helmed HomeTown Buffet Inc. — then more intimately as a Sizzler board member for two and a half years. He came into the role of president and CEO knowing what Sizzler had tried to be.
Now, he needed to determine what Sizzler should be.
He began like an average customer would, and he invited HomeTown Buffet partner Dennis Scott to dinner to the tune of a $52 bill and good-enough food.
“The value-to-what-you-got equation was a little bit off,” Kramp says. “So it began a course of discovery to try to understand what really made Sizzler tick — not so much where the direction had been in the past as much as where the guests wanted Sizzler to be.”
Kramp suspended franchise sales so he could evaluate the company from its core. He melded internal employee opinions with external feedback in an effort to rebuild the brand, keeping Sizzler relevant as customers’ expectations changed and, in many cases, their wallets thinned.
“It was to try to understand the uniqueness of this 50-year-old company,” Kramp says. “Where it had been and, really more so, where everybody wanted it to be and how to make it relevant to the consumers that we would need to be attracting in this new world order with the economy changed the way it has.”
