Frank Paci has helped shape some of the most familiar brands in food, from Burger King and Pizza Hut to McAlister’s, Corner Bakery, and Einstein Bros. Bagels. Now, as CEO of Newk’s Eatery, he is focused on a simple but demanding mission. Make it easy for guests to enjoy great food, no matter how they choose to access the brand. In this episode of Give an Ovation, Frank and Zack dive into convenience, catering, and how feedback turns into real improvement.

What Newk’s Eatery Looks Like Today (00:41)

Frank explains that Newk’s Eatery focuses on sandwiches, soups, salads, and pizzas, with a mix of dine in, to go, delivery, and a significant catering business. The goal is to meet guests where they are. As he puts it, “Part of the guest experience is meeting the guest on how they want to access the brand.”

Catering as Growth and Marketing (03:35)

Beyond being a strong revenue channel, catering doubles as a sampling engine. Guests at business meetings may be trying Newk’s for the first time. Frank calls catering “a paid for sampling program,” and notes that office catering has grown as companies bring people back on specific days and offer meals as an incentive.

Designing Simple Systems for Teams (10:11)

Frank stresses that guest experience lives or dies with execution, especially in a world of high turnover. He shares an operating system test. “When I come home, I do not have to think about which side of the garage to park on.” Restaurant systems should feel that simple, so teams can focus on service, not mental gymnastics.

Fixing the Leaky Bucket with Feedback (11:59)

Newk’s uses guest feedback to spot issues, recover experiences, and train smarter. Since adopting Ovation, they have collected hundreds of thousands of responses, with most at five stars. Frank highlights that about half of the guests who had a non five experience and were contacted have come back. One general manager even invited a guest to lunch, which led to a glowing LinkedIn post. “We do not want a leaky bucket where guests have a bad experience and do not tell anybody about it.”

Training, Tools, and Higher Ratings (14:05)

By integrating feedback with their training platform, Opus, Newk’s can act on patterns, not just one offs. Encouraging happy guests to leave public reviews has lifted online ratings by about a full star. For Frank, it all ties back to a core belief. You get convenience and consistency when you design for your people first, then let them take care of the guest.

Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-paci-8b1a56a/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/newks-eatery/about/

https://newks.com/

https://www.instagram.com/newkseatery/?hl=en

Transcript

00:00:00:05 – 00:00:25:20

Zack Oates

Welcome to another edition of Give an Ovation, the Restaurant guest Experience podcast. I’m your host, Zack Oates, and each week I chat with industry experts to uncover their strategies and tactics to help you create a five star guest experience. This podcast is powered by ovation. The feedback and operations platform built for multi-unit restaurants. Learn was actually happening in your restaurants and exactly how to improve while driving revenue.

00:00:26:01 – 00:00:33:10

Zack Oates

Learn more at ovation up.com. And today I’ve got a legend of the industry. Frank Pacey.

00:00:33:15 – 00:00:34:19

Frank Paci

Makes me sound old.

00:00:34:21 – 00:00:55:24

Zack Oates

Know? Well, the legend part may sound old, but once I go through your roster of brands that you have had a huge impact on. Burger King, Pizza Hut, McAlister’s Corner Bakery. Einstein’s now the CEO of nukes eatery that has over 100 locations. Frank, you have had quite the career in food. Man.

00:00:56:01 – 00:01:10:00

Frank Paci

I like to eat. What can I say? I love kind of working in the business where you’re dealing with consumers on a consumer facing basis and trying to figure out, hey, how do we give them a great experience and how do we give them a great deal? That’s really what I’ve enjoyed on my career.

00:01:10:00 – 00:01:18:11

Zack Oates

So but did I read this correctly? You started your career in the automotive industry? No, no. Where did you start? What was your first job?

00:01:18:12 – 00:01:22:11

Frank Paci

I started GE General Electric. I was in GE.

00:01:22:13 – 00:01:25:09

Zack Oates

GE oh yeah not GMG.

00:01:25:09 – 00:01:26:07

Frank Paci

Yeah I got.

00:01:26:07 – 00:01:28:02

Zack Oates

It all right. I was close to the letter I.

00:01:28:02 – 00:01:33:23

Frank Paci

Was, I was a credit and collections guy. I was repossessing TVs and decided hey restaurant sounds like a lot more fun than that.

00:01:33:23 – 00:01:41:20

Zack Oates

So Amen. There you go. So for those who aren’t familiar with nukes, walk us through the guest journey there.

00:01:41:22 – 00:02:08:10

Frank Paci

Yeah. So nukes was founded in Oxford, Mississippi. We’re right around 100 locations, mainly in the South East. Sandwiches, soups, salads and pizzas. And 45% of our business is in restaurant. And then we’ve got a significant catering business as well as to go and delivery. So in today’s world, part of the guest experience is kind of meeting the guest on how they want to access the brand.

00:02:08:10 – 00:02:27:19

Frank Paci

And so we’ve made sure that we’re able I mean, I go back to forever. It’s been quality, service value and convenience in the restaurant business. And to me, convenience today is, hey, I want to get it delivered to my house. I want to pick it up. I want to call you on the phone. I want to come in with my family and sit down.

00:02:27:19 – 00:02:39:03

Frank Paci

And so what’s really interesting is, is that it’s not just one guest experience in my mind. It’s multiple guest experiences. And how do you make sure that you’re doing each one of those as best as you can do it?

00:02:39:03 – 00:03:00:08

Zack Oates

So I love that because at the end of the day, we always talk about the ladder of loyalty, and it starts with convenience. If you can’t get past that first hurdle of convenience for the guest, you’re done. And then the next level up is consistency. And that’s something that you’ve just mastered in your career about. You got to deliver the same product the same way.

00:03:00:09 – 00:03:20:20

Frank Paci

And it becomes difficult when you have all these different service modes, right. In terms of now, fortunately, we’re in a business where most of our food travels pretty well for delivery and to go right. But that’s one of the and then have to look at packaging, right. Which was when you think about how do we have the right packaging, do we have packaging that makes it a good experience for the guests?

00:03:20:22 – 00:03:28:23

Frank Paci

So there’s all these different pieces of the guest experience that it’s a bunch of little things that turns into a big thing basically. Right.

00:03:28:23 – 00:03:35:23

Zack Oates

So and with catering, is there anything that you found that’s helped you to increase and improve catering?

00:03:36:00 – 00:03:55:14

Frank Paci

Well, a lot of our catering comes from building relationships with guests and we’ve got customers that are multiple catering. And then we also get a lot of through the easy cater. We’re out there advertising the brand on easy cater really catering. There’s a lot about execution. And right number one in catering is it’s got to be there on time, right.

00:03:55:14 – 00:04:18:08

Frank Paci

If you’re especially when you think about business to business catering and you’re having an event where you’re having a meeting if the food’s not there when you’re ready to have lunch, it was a failure. It doesn’t matter how good the food is, right? So trying to do all those things and we’re also then now utilizing deliver that to make sure that in the past we did a lot of direct delivery ourselves.

00:04:18:08 – 00:04:37:23

Frank Paci

But the challenge then becomes is you’re competing with the lunchtime guest experience in the restaurant, right? So if we can kind of offload some of these different services to other folks and make sure that it still gets there when we want it to get there, that helps us hit all the different occasions that we’re servicing in the restaurant.

00:04:37:23 – 00:05:00:14

Zack Oates

So and that catering, I think that that is something so powerful to see. That and the brands that we’re finding are doing really well right now. And by really well, I mean, like they’re up in comps, a lot of them have relied on catering, right. Because if you can do catering and you can start your day with a $2,000 order.

00:05:00:16 – 00:05:01:03

Frank Paci

Oh yeah.

00:05:01:05 – 00:05:02:20

Zack Oates

I mean, that’s pretty good.

00:05:02:22 – 00:05:20:18

Frank Paci

The serve managers love it in terms of being able to manage the PNL. Whatever. Right. You get a head start with that catering order. Obviously you’ve got to be able to execute it, but that really helps make the day in terms of getting back in order. And I also I’ve always thought about catering as kind of a paid for sampling program.

00:05:20:18 – 00:05:35:14

Frank Paci

Right. In terms of what I’m delivering to a, especially if it’s a business meeting or whatever. Not everybody there may have know what Nucs is or have been doing. Nucs. Right. And so while the food was good, where’d you get this? Oh, okay. Great. And let’s have another opportunity to go to the restaurant.

00:05:35:14 – 00:05:58:05

Zack Oates

So and that’s why people like Kelly Grogan over at crumbs, who’s helping out to do a lot of catering consulting, she is just blowing up right now. And she’s doing some incredible stuff because people are looking for those incremental ways. And there are businesses who are still providing meals, even though employees in in general, the U.S. is starting to eat out less often.

00:05:58:11 – 00:06:06:13

Zack Oates

And so catering is a great way to bolster that because everyone’s taking price. We can’t take price anymore, but you can find a different additional avenues.

00:06:06:15 – 00:06:29:12

Frank Paci

You are. The other thing that’s interesting about that is as people start to say, hey, I want employees to come back to the office. And, you know, is one of those things. One of those tools that they’ve got is we’ll come to the office on Friday. We’re going to be providing catering from Nucs for lunch on Friday, right, to say, give me an come, come give me an incentive to come to the office as opposed to sit at home and work remotely.

00:06:29:12 – 00:06:44:07

Frank Paci

Right. So there’s me there. I think there are other opportunities like that that are emerging. You know, as you as you start to see more pressure to say, hey, let’s get back in the office at least 1 or 2 days a week, three days a week, some of these places. Right. So you kind of say, okay, great. Well, you’re going to be in three days a week.

00:06:44:07 – 00:07:00:03

Frank Paci

Let’s get catering. So it’s interesting because catering was always busy. It’s like Tuesday for Thursday now. But we’ve seen a real pick up on our Friday catering. So I don’t know whether people are are doing that and that’s what’s causing that. But it’s really kind of interesting to watch that happen from a trend standpoint. So.

00:07:00:06 – 00:07:22:08

Zack Oates

Well, that’s because nobody wants to go in and hear Kevin’s story again unless it comes with the nuke sandwich. You know what I mean? Like, jeez, Kevin, I don’t know who Kevin is, just the metaphorical. But, you know, one of the things that we’ve actually seen too is some of our customers. What they’ll do is they actually will with their catering, they’ll put out a sign that will say catering provided by X company.

00:07:22:10 – 00:07:41:05

Zack Oates

How do you enjoy the food? Get $5 off your next order over there. And so what that’s doing is then, you know, let’s say you have a 30 person catering order. And to your point, that’s free advertising. But if you can get them to scan and answer just a two question survey about how they enjoyed the food, then they get a $5 coupon and they’re going to come in there.

00:07:41:07 – 00:08:00:24

Zack Oates

And typically what what data shows that if you give someone a $5 off coupon, then that person will place an order that is $7 more than your average ticket. And so it’s a win win win because they try the food, they get the $5 and you get a customer that is giving you $2 more than the coupon that you gave them.

00:08:00:24 – 00:08:02:23

Zack Oates

So it’s a pretty powerful method.

00:08:03:00 – 00:08:13:16

Frank Paci

Yeah. Typically that’s what we’ll see, is that people will take the savings and buy additional food with the savings a lot of times. Right. Just what you’re talking about in terms of the check doesn’t change just because there’s a discount on the check. Yeah.

00:08:13:16 – 00:08:22:14

Zack Oates

So but it just it just gets those people who are trying your food gets them to come into the restaurant to experience it in person as well, which is really powerful.

00:08:22:16 – 00:08:53:00

Frank Paci

Yeah. One of the challenge in today’s world is actually the marketing of the brand, right? Especially a smaller brand like us. In terms of or in the past, you would do direct mail, you do all these radio, all these other kinds of things. Now the media is so fragmented. How do you do advertising. And so we’ve always talked about, hey, the best way to do advertising is, you know, we look at putting our brand on third party, putting it on easy cater going bounce backs in store and really what you’re kind of talking about is a bounce back on catering, if you will.

00:08:53:00 – 00:09:05:00

Frank Paci

Right. And so a lot of times what you end up with, right, you end up the discount. But the expense is actually distribution of the marketing materials here. You got free marketing material distribution so you can afford to give the discount.

00:09:05:06 – 00:09:26:17

Zack Oates

So yeah. And that’s the thing is and the other thing is like if you’re going to focus on catering, you got to make sure that you’ve got the packaging and the signage. Right. Because so many people I’ve gone to places where they’ve catered and I’m eating the food and I’m like, this is great, who is this? And nobody knows because the person who ordered isn’t in the room.

00:09:26:19 – 00:09:49:08

Zack Oates

So I think it’s important to also think about with your catering program, how do you make sure that you turn that into a marketing program? Because that’s going to be what really helps drive the needle and helps increase those might be a little bit, but it’s critical to be able to get them to come in and spend their money with you, as opposed to just having their company spend their money on them.

00:09:49:08 – 00:09:50:23

Frank Paci

Right? Absolutely.

00:09:51:00 – 00:10:07:20

Zack Oates

So thinking about the guest experience here, Frank, when you think about guest experience today and you’ve had, like I said, quite the career and I’m sure that some things haven’t changed, maybe some things have changed. What do you think is the most important aspect of guest experience today?

00:10:07:22 – 00:10:26:07

Frank Paci

Obviously the biggest challenge is getting the right employees, right? I mean, at the end of the day, the person that’s going to make that difference to the guest experience is the employee, right? The employee has to have a smile, has to have a greeting. And, you know, especially for us, if you’re in restaurant, we’re delivering food to the table.

00:10:26:09 – 00:10:36:00

Frank Paci

So that’s all part of that. I would I talked about to go, you know, our biggest failure point and to go is forgetting to put something in there. Right. So you have to make.

00:10:36:00 – 00:10:45:17

Zack Oates

Sure Frank, that is so unique to Nucs. I can’t imagine that you have. But I’ve never heard of a restaurant. Have I know I never heard that.

00:10:45:17 – 00:11:04:11

Frank Paci

Right. So how do you make sure that the employee is taken care to do those kind of things? Right? So to me, it’s funny because we always talk about operating systems, right? When I was young, I was confused. So I asked one of these guys, this is know how do you explain the operating system? He says, the easiest way for me to explain the operating system was when I come home.

00:11:04:13 – 00:11:29:18

Frank Paci

I don’t have to think about which side of the garage to park on, right. In terms of it should be that simple to do that. And so the question is, how can you design the operating systems to support the fact that you’ve got huge turnover employees, you’re spending all this time training. You got to make it as simple as possible to execute to me, that’s a great part of how do you get the employees to execute on the guest experience.

00:11:29:18 – 00:11:30:09

Frank Paci

So I.

00:11:30:09 – 00:11:55:17

Zack Oates

Love that. I think that’s a great way to think about it. It’s really simple and I think that’s one of the things that, you know, it’s been really impactful as I’ve been looking in the back end of what people have been following your brand in terms of not just publicly, but also privately, like seen how many people love sharing their feedback with you, and the amount of feedback that people want to share with you is unbelievable.

00:11:55:17 – 00:11:59:11

Zack Oates

I just be curious to get your take on how has it been helpful for you?

00:11:59:13 – 00:12:04:24

Frank Paci

Since we started in August of 24, we only had 300,000 feedback, so.

00:12:05:01 – 00:12:05:15

Zack Oates

All.

00:12:05:17 – 00:12:24:00

Frank Paci

The great news is 75% of those have been a five, right? And so you got to deal with the other 25%. And some of those may be people who are just hard graders and don’t like to give a five. Right. But the big opportunity for us is to recover those guests. Right? So during that time period, we’ve had 81,000 responses that aren’t a five.

00:12:24:00 – 00:12:44:17

Frank Paci

Right. And so those are going to our DMs and allowing us to try to recover. So one of my favorite stories is we had one of our GM’s, got the feedback, sent an answer back to the guest, and the guest responded back and said, is this I because you’re thinking that it’s an automated response and not an actual person?

00:12:44:17 – 00:13:04:20

Frank Paci

And he said he then send the note back, introducing himself as the GM at the store and inviting the guest to come in and medium for, lunch at his next shift. And so the guest came in on the next shift and they had lunch together, and they wrote this great review on LinkedIn for the guy. Right. So.

00:13:04:21 – 00:13:25:16

Frank Paci

Oh, that’s awesome. You know, it’s those kind of stories where you hear those kind of things and you say, you know, that’s I mean, think about saving 40,000 customers who had a bad experience and getting them to come back. It’s over 50%, or it’s right around 50% of the people that have not had a five for us that we know have come back to us.

00:13:25:16 – 00:13:44:03

Frank Paci

Right? So we don’t want to have that leaky bucket where the guests are coming in and not getting a great experience and and not telling anybody about it. So I think one of the great things that we’ve seen with ovation is it’s so simple to do the feedback. The other thing it’s amazing is you don’t have to incentivize the guests to give you the feedback, just what you were talking about, right?

00:13:44:03 – 00:14:05:06

Frank Paci

The old systems that are out there, right. You’re given coupons to get people to give you responses here. We’re getting all these responses without having any incentive to guess. So just what you’re saying in today’s world, people want to share their experience. And the other part of that is obviously as part of the system, you know, we’re inviting the people who have positive responses to go out on the social media and give us a rating.

00:14:05:06 – 00:14:22:07

Frank Paci

So we’ve seen a life of about one point on kind of all of our ratings out there, whether Yelp or Google, as a result of inviting people who had a good experience to rate us, as opposed to I think a lot of times what you get is the people who had a bad experience and are out there rating you.

00:14:22:07 – 00:14:31:08

Frank Paci

So not not really thinking about the fact that, hey, I had a great experience. Let me go put that in somewhere. Right? So all those things seemed to work really well for us.

00:14:31:08 – 00:14:59:12

Zack Oates

So and the reason that you guys have a, you know, literally a one star increase and that’s incredible because the reason that we started ovation and by the way, the name ovation nukes, you think you are a perfect example of why I started ovation is because when you go to get a sandwich and you get the sandwich that you ordered and it’s a good sandwich, are you sitting there being like, oh my gosh, everyone, I got what I pick.

00:14:59:13 – 00:15:21:01

Zack Oates

You got to come here. I got what I paid for. No, you’re thinking, oh, that was good. I’ll order from here again. Probably. But when you make it easy for them to celebrate you and to give you that ovation that you deserve, then they’re much more likely to do it. I mean, the fact is that I don’t know if you want me to share your online rating for this last month, but it’s really impressive.

00:15:21:01 – 00:15:32:24

Zack Oates

Frank, get ready for this. If I get your permission, I’ll share it. Okay. Your average rating for the last month is 4.8 stars across Google, Yelp and TripAdvisor.

00:15:32:24 – 00:15:33:10

Frank Paci

That’s what we.

00:15:33:10 – 00:15:59:07

Zack Oates

Like. I mean, think about that. You’ve got over 100 locations. The amount of operations, the thousands and thousands of people that are coming back in or coming in and trying you out, and the millions of opportunities that your team has to mess something up because you got to get every single ingredient right. And to run. With an average of 4.8 stars, this last month is amazing.

00:15:59:07 – 00:16:18:12

Zack Oates

So kudos to you. Kudos to the team because you’re taking all of this data and actually making things better. Yes, you responding to the guests and you have an incredible response rate. Very fast response time. But it’s not just about that, but you and your team are taking that data and then fixing the problems, fixing the underlying root.

00:16:18:14 – 00:16:38:07

Frank Paci

Right. Because we you know, we look at because we’re integrated with opus, which is our training system. Right. And that we can try to identify, hey, what’s the root cause. Right. This is back to what I talked about earlier. Hey, if we’ve got a procedure that’s not right, and we can make it simpler to make sure that it’s easier to execute, to make sure that we are getting five stars.

00:16:38:07 – 00:16:44:18

Frank Paci

Every time we do that, we need to invest in those kind of things. And I think as a brand, we’ve been investing in those kind of things.

00:16:44:18 – 00:17:00:13

Zack Oates

So and it shows, man. And I just really respect you in the brand and what you’re building. And it’s been a great partnership, helping us get better as we’re helping you get better. So it’s very symbiotic there. Now, Frank, how can people find and follow you or Nucs?

00:17:00:15 – 00:17:09:20

Frank Paci

Well, obviously you go to Newcomb. You know, we’re out there, we’re on social media, but, you know, obviously the best place to go. Scott Newcomb so.

00:17:09:24 – 00:17:18:14

Zack Oates

Awesome. And by the way, last question, Frank, is there anyone in the restaurant industry that deserves an ovation who’s someone that we should be following?

00:17:18:16 – 00:17:32:10

Frank Paci

Well, I think, you know, when I look at brands out there, I look at people like Velvet Taco, which I think are doing a phenomenal job. When you start looking at what they do and to me, it’s a fun brand and they seem to be having some great success out there.

00:17:32:10 – 00:17:49:14

Zack Oates

So and I mean, and Clay Dover has done such a good job of taking that brand to the next level because they are a good product. I actually live right by a velvet taco, and I lived in Dallas and I loved going there was so good. But now that he’s taken it over, it’s been incredible to see what’s been happening there.

00:17:49:14 – 00:18:00:19

Zack Oates

So yeah, definitely velvet Taco Clay Dover a huge shout out there. Well, Frank, for showing us that convenience after all these years is still king. Today’s ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us and giving ovation.

00:18:00:21 – 00:18:04:12

Frank Paci

All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for all the support you’ve given us.

00:18:04:12 – 00:18:28:23

Zack Oates

So absolutely. Thanks for joining us today. If you liked this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We’re all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by ovation, a two question, SMS based, actionable guest feedback platform built for multi-unit restaurants. If you’d like to learn how we can help you measure and create a better guest experience, visit us at ovation up.com.