Research the change
Initially, management was dead against serving full liquor in the establishments. The leaders were so against it, they tried shutting down the franchisees who were already serving it without permission.
However, management was also hearing from some franchisees that they needed to serve some form of liquor in order to compete in their markets.
To drive any change and continue to succeed, you need to listen to other’s opinions.
“The one thing I have learned is that it is very important to get different perspectives and different viewpoints,” he says.
They decided to do some formal, controlled research to find out if serving liquor would offend their core customer base. They want to be able to cater to the family coming in after a soccer game, but they also don’t want to lose the mom or the golf foursome that wants a Bloody Mary.
Beef’s hired a consultant company who had previous experience in the restauranti ndustry to help them survey 1,300 customers in about 10 stores across the country.
“We only hire (consultants) if we are trying to find something out,” he says. “Wewon’t do just a general, ‘Tell us about Beef’s.’ Generally, it’s very focused, and we do it when we feel we have a particular issue we want to address.”
The management team would work with the consultant team on what they wouldwant to find out because the consultants were very good at forming the question ina way that would solicit the best answer.
“You know that they can word questions certain ways to get certain answers,” he says. “You want kind of a clean question that doesn’t really lean one way or the other.”
Customers were asked to fill out a survey and were given an incentive, like a free dessert, for completing it.
Surveys are kept to about 10 to 12 questions because any more than that may lose someone.
“On the phone, and even in person, thereis only so much people are going to put up with before they go, ‘Unless you’re paying me, I’m done,’” he says.
Normally, Vojnovic finds when gathering information for a change, you want to ask specifically about the change and keep the research focused.
However, in this instance, they were actually surveying about something else, and added the liquor question at the end.
“We threw the alcohol question in there because we had partners kind of pushing us for it, and we wanted to show them with the research that you shouldn’t do it,” he says. “But the research actually was the opposite.”
The results showed 91 percent of those surveyed said they would come to Beef’smore often or the same amount they had been coming.
“The research kind of gave us the light bulb moment that maybe it’s not as a bad as we thought; maybe it’s not that big of a deal for folks,” he says.
Aside from surveys, Vojnovic did a little investigating of his own the old-fashioned way to really make sure the change was worth a test run. He would visit restaurants himself and ask the customers directly about the possible change. Through that research, he found the same opinions expressed in the surveys.
“I’m all about (being) in the stores,” he says. “I’m all about talking to customers, talking to owners, and I’ll just start asking hundreds of people, ‘What do you think?’ It’s anecdotal, but sometimes you start getting a sense. And I came back — we havean executive meeting once a month and we have very robust conversations. I said, ‘This is anecdotal, but I’m not getting a lot of push back on this deal. I’ve only had one person out of probably 100 people I’ve talked to who even had a little bit of an issue with it.’”