Stay in the middle
Thanks to the time he spent in the field, Kramp received input across the board. The challenge was deciding which ideas would work.
“If the guests would have wanted something that we didn’t have to offer — and we couldn’t execute it — then it doesn’t mean that you make your operation inefficient to chase after a guest,” Kramp says. “You go to the least common denominator of what’s the consumer coming to us for and what can we deliver at an exceptional basis. Surround yourself with things that fall within that sphere of influence.”
Sometimes, those intersections are obvious. Kramp knew customers had trouble deciding what to order from such a broad menu and cooks had trouble delivering, so it was an easy decision to eliminate 22 low-selling, hard-to-prepare items and re-engineer the quality of the rest. He had seen dishwashers struggle to keep up with extra cups while servers rushed to bring refills customers said they didn’t need. So he created refill stations where thirsty guests could top off their drinks.
But it’s not always that clear, so to rein in workable ideas, Kramp had employees visualize a golf course.
“I like to get my money’s worth in golf, so I use almost the whole fairway,” he jokes. “I go from the left to the right to the left — I just stop counting somewhere along the way.”
That translated to a safety zone for new ideas.
“We decided that we wanted Sizzler to be in the fairway,” Kramp says. “If you play the fairway, you always get from the tee box to the hole. You may not get there in the least amount of strokes. You may not get there as fast as somebody who takes shots over the sand traps or over the water hazard or over the trees. But we wanted to be safe in that we were consistent in what we delivered.
“If there was a way to shorten the route without taking too much risk against the business, then we were willing to take some of those deviations. We’re really open to movement from side to side within that fairway to try ideas.”
The measuring stick was long-term success through customer satisfaction. Kramp didn’t want employees taking drastic measures to earn extra profit this quarter if it wouldn’t align with the company’s core in 50 years.
Changes should encapsulate what customers want and what employees can deliver with quality. Still, results aren’t always predictable. So if franchisees brought ideas that didn’t seem too far off-course, Kramp tested it.
“We’ve got [184] restaurants, and to us, there’s [184] different places you can test things,” he says. “We would say, ‘OK, let’s take a couple of stores. Let’s do a product mix evaluation before you put it in. Let’s do it for four to six weeks and see what happens with guest counts and the profitability and the product mix.’ That began to show them where we were headed with respect to where the consumers were, and then they could buy in to what we were looking at.”
The key is to not prescribe a single solution.
“We created an environment that was really collaborative,” Kramp says. “We just wanted it to be right — not our way, not their way, but the way that the guest wanted it to be. We began to build credibility with our franchisees; they understood that we were in this for their interests.”
By building changes around customer feedback and employee input, Kramp overhauled the Sizzler brand, unleashing a value-priced menu with 35 refashioned dishes made fresh and often including the salad bar — previously a $3.99 add-on. Within three months, sales turned around, totaling $311 million in 2009. In February, he relaunched the franchise program, and he’s seen same-store sales increases in 14 of the past 18 periods.
Still, Kramp continues monitoring feedback to keep the company relevant.
“One of the biggest things that we learned is that you couldn’t go back to things that you had tried before that had worked at a different time,” he says. “It was really a time to look at things and break the rules from the past. But don’t do it in a vacuum, that you think you know what the guests want. Do it in a collaborative method to find out what makes you relevant in their life.”
How to reach: Sizzler USA Restaurants Inc., (310) 846-8750 or www.sizzler.com
