John Owen, CEO of Blaze Pizza, has spent his career helping restaurant brands grow while staying focused on the guest experience. From leading Subway Russia to holding innovation and strategy roles at McDonald’s, John has seen firsthand how hospitality principles translate across cultures and markets. In this conversation with Zack Oates, he explains why personalization, consistency, and listening to guests are the foundations of successful restaurant brands.

Personalization Beyond Customization (03:53)

“Personalization is more about how I treat you and make you feel like you’re the only person in my world for that one particular moment.”

John explains why restaurants need to move beyond simply allowing guests to customize products and instead create interactions that make guests feel recognized.

Innovation Starts With the Guest (06:32)

“You cannot forget to ask the customer what they think.”

John shares why successful innovation requires balancing internal ideas with real customer feedback and understanding what guests actually value.

Measuring Guest Experience Through Trends (09:21)

“You’ve got to look at the trends. It can’t just be a point in time.”

John explains why restaurant leaders should focus on long-term guest experience trends instead of reacting to individual pieces of feedback.

Making Change Stick (12:31)

“You’ve got to verify that change occurred.”

John discusses the importance of following up after operational changes and ensuring restaurant teams have the support needed to execute consistently.

Why Consistency Creates Loyalty (14:13)

“They’re just very consistent and I think worth a watch.”

John highlights Chick-fil-A as an example of a brand that earns loyalty through dependable execution and strong team culture.

Who Deserves an Ovation? (14:09)

John recognizes Chick-fil-A for its consistency, strong hiring practices, and ability to deliver a reliable guest experience across locations.

Links:

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

https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-o-73422325/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/blazepizza/

https://www.blazepizza.com/

Transcript

00:00:00:12 – 00:00:25:22

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 AI feedback and operations platform built for multi-unit restaurants. Learn what’s actually happening in your restaurants and exactly how to improve while driving revenue.

00:00:25:23 – 00:00:45:20

Zack Oates

Learn more at Ovation Up. And today, I’m excited because not only is this someone who has taken over a brand that I love deeply, but also just found out that we both lived in Eastern Europe, and so that’s always fun to connect on that John Owen is recently been named within the last year, the CEO of Blaze Pizza.

00:00:45:20 – 00:00:57:18

Zack Oates

He’s got over 35 years of restaurant leadership experience, from McDonald’s to subway and most recently COO of Scooter’s Coffee. John, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, great.

00:00:57:18 – 00:00:59:06

John Owen

To be here. Thanks for having me.

00:00:59:07 – 00:01:03:02

Zack Oates

Well, maybe I should say.

00:01:03:04 – 00:01:28:03

Zack Oates

So. John, you were CEO and president of Subway Russia. Yeah. And you were there. You lived over there for four years. I’d love to just kind of start with like, what are some things that you find that maybe some things that maybe transfer some things that don’t transfer. As you look at your experience of running, of what hospitality means in Russia versus what hospitality means in the US.

00:01:28:05 – 00:01:49:12

John Owen

Oh, wow. Okay. So in Russia you have to earn somebody smile. So, you know, Americans we just smile naturally. And that’s just not the case there. You walk down the street, you catch somebody. I if you smile, there must be something wrong with you. So you’ve got to earn that smile and you’ve got to earn that loyalty. I think a whole lot more in Russia than necessarily in the US.

00:01:49:13 – 00:02:13:22

John Owen

But what you find out really quickly is we’re more alike sacked than we are different across the world. And so the same things that people like in terms of service and quality and just cleanliness of the restaurant, just all the basics, they’re all the same. But it means a whole lot more to earn somebody smile, to earn their loyalty in Russia than does here, because we’re just more naturally give it to somebody else.

00:02:13:22 – 00:02:16:10

John Owen

So I just found that very interesting when I was there.

00:02:16:11 – 00:02:40:10

Zack Oates

I keep a Russian nesting doll doll right behind me in my office, and I find that to be so just quintessentially Eastern European in the sense of like in America, it’s like we’ve got kind of two layers, right? We have our very friendly exterior, but it’s hard to become like a close friend in America. But we’ll be friends with everyone in Russia.

00:02:40:11 – 00:02:59:07

Zack Oates

I feel like I live in Ukraine for two years, and it’s like the opposite where it’s they’ve got a very hard exterior, but once you’re in, they are like friends with you for life. And I think it’s just so interesting that I love how you say that. You got to earn that smile. You got to work a little bit for it, right?

00:02:59:08 – 00:03:18:05

John Owen

Well, you do, and I’m glad you said what you did because the term loyalty, once that actually happens, we say, hey, that person will give you the shirt off their back. A Russian really would a Russian would come over and give it to you off their back. I can’t tell you the number of times where, you know, I might have needed a little bit of extra help and then say, hey, just let me know what you need.

00:03:18:06 – 00:03:32:13

John Owen

No. They would just come over and say, I’m here. How can I help you? And so you’re right about that. The loyalty is very, very deep. It’s very deep to family. It’s very deep to business to country, very deep loyalty ties there.

00:03:32:15 – 00:03:52:24

Zack Oates

So when you think about the guest experience, what are some things that you’ve seen in your career? Because, I mean, you had a really interesting role at McDonald’s specifically. I was looking at that and being over innovation and things like that. How do you think about guest experience in terms of what the most important aspect of that is today?

00:03:53:01 – 00:04:16:08

John Owen

You could say it’s the basics. And I already talked about the quality of the product service, the cleanliness of the restaurant. But what it really comes down to today’s ask is personalization. You’ve got to make each experience personal to that guest, and it could be something as simple as calling them by name. So for example, a blaze when we take your name at the beginning of the order, as that order moves down the line, you interact with different people.

00:04:16:08 – 00:04:37:04

John Owen

It’s important that that person addresses you by name. When they ask what different proteins or different products you might want on your product. So some might think that it’s about customization, but that’s just how I might make your product. Personalization is more about how I treat you and make you feel like you’re the only person in my world for that one particular moment.

00:04:37:04 – 00:04:57:08

John Owen

And so I think as we get more and more deep into just social media, in those different things, that the ability to personalize the experience, especially if you’re a member of a loyalty program and to know what you might have wanted in the past but you didn’t get at this time. And I can say, hey, you usually like X, how about getting it this time?

00:04:57:08 – 00:05:18:05

John Owen

Those are different aspects of personalization, and I believe they’re becoming more and more important as we sometimes get less and less close to those that we think that we’re friends with. To go back to the loyalty piece, but it’s more in acquaintance than it is in actual friendship. And so that sense of belonging that used to be, I don’t really want to talk to a person.

00:05:18:05 – 00:05:23:14

John Owen

I feel like that’s coming back more and more, and that’s where the personalization aspect comes back in.

00:05:23:16 – 00:05:49:04

Zack Oates

Yeah. And I think that’s a really interesting distinction there, because one thing that I’ve learned from my travels is that no matter where you live, everybody wants to feel important, right? From Africa to Ukraine to us to South America to the United States. Like people want to feel important. And if you use their name and you look at them in the eye and you say, hey, John, would you like extra pepperoni on this?

00:05:49:05 – 00:05:52:04

Zack Oates

Like it’s a little thing that goes so far, right?

00:05:52:07 – 00:05:53:19

John Owen

Absolutely. Yeah.

00:05:53:20 – 00:06:19:01

Zack Oates

Now, one of the things that I’d love to understand a little bit about is because I know that you were the vice president of strategy and execution for a while there. McDonald’s. And one of the things that we always talk about in this podcast is how brands like McDonald’s and Starbucks, at times are bellwethers of the industry. They’ll tell us of cusp of trends because there’s so much R&D that’s going on there.

00:06:19:03 – 00:06:31:23

Zack Oates

Anything that you could pull back the curtains on that you’re not under NBA on how that works. Like what should restaurants be looking at as they’re looking to innovate and be on the cusp of new trends and things like that?

00:06:32:00 – 00:06:50:21

John Owen

Yeah. So it comes down to how are you going to build market share? And I’ve always been taught and then always practiced that there’s only two ways to truly build market share. You either have to be best in class or you have to be first in class. And if you’re both, then you have market disruption. So as you’re innovating, you have to decide which are you’re going to try to be.

00:06:50:22 – 00:07:13:14

John Owen

And in our industry, not really easy to be first to market, to be first in class. And I don’t mean first means best. First means literally first. Yeah. No. More often than that, you choose to be best in class by outperforming everybody else with the best quality or the fastest service. Again, back to those particular basics. And then after that it becomes, how am I going to resource it?

00:07:13:14 – 00:07:36:01

John Owen

And underneath all of that, you cannot forget to ask the customer what they think. And so they’re just lots of examples out there of brands that go down a path with the senior management team and then the rest of the staff absolutely convinced that they’re doing the right thing, and they fail to take the time to understand whether or not they’re meeting the customers needs state or the customer’s motivation states.

00:07:36:01 – 00:07:55:01

John Owen

And so as you’re doing the innovation and you’re out, you’re doing a market testing. You’ve got to talk to customers and understand what we think. This is what you want, but is it really what you want? Because customers may say one thing in a survey, but vote differently with their wallet and with their feet, and it’s important to marry those two things up.

00:07:55:02 – 00:08:19:23

Zack Oates

I think that’s such a smart way to look at it, because, I mean, one of the things that we always talk about at ovation is that while we are a feedback tool and grateful for the partnership with Blaise, I look at it and it’s like feedback is not the panacea of restaurant problems, right? Because what guests experience and what they feel is going to be pretty different, because how a guest feels about things.

00:08:19:24 – 00:08:41:09

Zack Oates

I mean, you just talked about that, about the difference between how they feel about it and what you’re actually giving to them. And so how do you justify it? How do you marry that together? When you look at how we’re guest feels versus what actually happened? Because like, for example, you may have someone that gives you a piece of ovation feedback that says, I’m so mad.

00:08:41:09 – 00:09:09:19

Zack Oates

I waited 30 minutes for my blaze pizza. Now you can go back and look at the tapes and you can look at the ticket times, and you could look at exactly what happened. And they actually only waited 15 minutes, but maybe that 15 minutes felt like 30 minutes to them for whatever reason. So what advice do you have as brands are looking at marrying the feedback of how guests feel about things and then the reality of what actually happened?

00:09:09:21 – 00:09:43:04

John Owen

Yeah, well, it’s their reality. So you have to remember that that’s the case. It all comes down to what did you promise them. And then that sets up their expectation. And then how to do you deliver against that. So you see this in like speed data around drive thrus all the time, where customers will say that a drive through experience is slow, but they say that because they got set up with the expectation that it would be a very fast drive through versus another brand who may be well known for customer satisfaction and is super busy in their drive through.

00:09:43:04 – 00:10:05:02

John Owen

Times are literally really long, but because of the experience that they have, the customer feels like they’re shorter. So you’ve got to measure what’s the expectation versus what’s the actual reality of it. And then the other piece is don’t get hung up on single pieces of data at any one point in time. Yeah. It has to be all about where are you trending?

00:10:05:02 – 00:10:20:23

John Owen

I actually when we start working with an ovation, I don’t actually care what the actual raw number is, I care. Are we improving that over a period of time now? Oh for time, I also look at the entire enterprise, and I’m going to look at my locations that are performing less well and figure out how we bring them up.

00:10:20:24 – 00:10:50:18

John Owen

At the same time, looking at the locations that are doing a great job and understand what are they doing well, how can I scale that across the system? But in general, I’m convinced that we’ve got to focus on the trends. And so, for example, we just launched a whole new line of salads last week, and every time we do change in our system, I look very closely at our ovation scores on a daily basis to understand, okay, we just introduced a bunch of change into our system, how our restaurants performing, how are our blazers handling that change?

00:10:50:18 – 00:11:10:12

John Owen

Because what I know from experience is those scores are probably going to drop because a lot of change and people getting used to that change. But over time, they should not only come back up, they should plateau at a higher level. Yeah, because you’re doing a great job at the execution piece of it. So I look very closely at the customer SAT scores whenever we launch change into our system.

00:11:10:14 – 00:11:27:00

John Owen

Hopefully the expectation is that those scores don’t go down. But when they do, what do we do to bring them back up very quickly by identifying barriers, using that data to then get solutions quickly out to our system. So those pieces are all very important. But to come back to your original question, you got to look at the trends.

00:11:27:00 – 00:11:31:01

John Owen

It can’t just be a point in time because everybody has a bad day.

00:11:31:03 – 00:11:56:18

Zack Oates

Right? Exactly. And I think that’s so interesting because as you look at any one experience might not be indicative of a trend. It might be indicative, like you said, of a bad day for the guest or a bad day for that, or whatever the case may be, mitigating circumstances. There’s all sorts of issues there, but as you look at overall, there’s going to be a lot more experience of what’s going on and what you need to improve on.

00:11:56:18 – 00:12:18:20

Zack Oates

Because if you get two people to take a survey in a week at a location, you’re going to focus on those two surveys. If you’re getting 20, 30, 40 a week, you’re going to be able to see what’s actually happening in your restaurant as opposed to just like a blip in time of more like a secret shop than it is a guest experience survey, right?

00:12:18:21 – 00:12:24:09

John Owen

Yeah. You ended up with a mystery shop instead of a customer satisfaction score, so completely agree with that.

00:12:24:15 – 00:12:31:06

Zack Oates

Yeah. So any tips or any tactics that you would suggest to other restaurants to improve the guest experience?

00:12:31:08 – 00:12:55:03

John Owen

You’ve got to verify that change occurred. So when you’re introducing change into your system, you’ve got to spend time actually sending people out there, whether it’s mystery shoppers or your own folks or your suppliers, how are the restaurants actually doing with whatever it is that you decided to change and then report back out on it, and you’ve got to have an idea of, again, what are the best restaurants doing and how do you scale that?

00:12:55:03 – 00:13:20:15

John Owen

Where are there barriers to the execution that you’re doing, and how do you quickly overcome them and get those that information out there as well? So you can’t just make change, introduce new products and just expect that everybody’s going to do okay as soon as you as the whether you call yourself a support center or the home office, as soon as you take your eye off of that, then they’re going to be focused on the next thing instead of focusing on what you just changed.

00:13:20:18 – 00:13:30:01

John Owen

So the verification is really important. And then, as I said, looking at the SAT scores on a daily basis, also really important and looking at where those trends go.

00:13:30:03 – 00:13:52:23

Zack Oates

I love that. I mean, I think about that. I mean, with my kids, right? It’s like, hey, can you do this? Sure. And then half hour later I’m like, hey, whatever happened to that? Oh yeah, I totally forgot, right? I mean, it’s just human nature. We all we all do it. And that’s one of the things where when I’m in a meeting and someone says, oh yeah, I’ll do that and I don’t see them write it down, I’ll stop the meeting and be like, do you want to write that down?

00:13:52:23 – 00:14:09:06

Zack Oates

Because you can forget things real easy. With all the chaos and all the things that are going on in our lives. Right? Love that. John. Well, John, are there any brands that you follow or that you think are doing a great job with guest experience that you think others should follow?

00:14:09:07 – 00:14:10:16

John Owen

You mean besides blaze.

00:14:10:19 – 00:14:13:10

Zack Oates

Besides blaze? Absolutely. We’re getting to that one.

00:14:13:13 – 00:14:37:16

John Owen

Yeah. You know what I’ve watched for a long time? Chick fil A and just their capability to be incredibly consistent. You never get a answer that’s different than my pleasure when you’re asking for something. And then they take care of you. And as I was talking before about actual service times, their capability to take orders ahead of time out in the drive through to have the right people, because that’s really what it comes down to.

00:14:37:17 – 00:14:57:21

John Owen

I think they’re very good at picking the right people to be a part of that brand, that then offer the experience that they expect that guest to have. And so actually, for them, I think really comes down to who’s there, who’s hiring, how did they train them, what’s the expectation? What’s the follow up? They’re just very consistent and I think worth a watch.

00:14:58:02 – 00:15:18:00

Zack Oates

You use that magic word of guest experience which is consistent. And I go around the country and I talk about how there’s other brands who have better chicken sandwiches. There are no other brands that have a more consistent chicken sandwich. So that’s why literally, I’ve asked this question to thousands of people and I’ll say, does Chick-Fil-A have the best sandwich?

00:15:18:01 – 00:15:49:13

Zack Oates

They’ll say no. Who do you go to most often for chicken sandwiches? And it’s chick fil A, right? Because when you have that consistent experience and you know what you’re going to get. Im more willing to pay that premium knowing that I’m going to get exactly what I’m paying for. That’s tricky for you guys over there ablaze, because you have so many modifications that you can do to your pizza, to everything, which is awesome, that it can be so customized, but it’s also adds a whole layer of complexity.

00:15:49:15 – 00:16:07:03

John Owen

It does. But you know, the customers right there with you that whole time telling you exactly how they want to have it. I think if it was more of an issue of you got some sheet of paper that said, here’s 20 different variations I want on my pizza, that’s a lot more difficult to execute than having somebody right in front of you watching.

00:16:07:03 – 00:16:21:24

John Owen

And you know, it’s all part of the experience. It’s all part of the theater. It’s all part of that personalization that makes that experience fun and inviting. And it’s why the majority of our guests eat in and dine in with us, because that’s who we’re all about. That’s how the brand started.

00:16:22:04 – 00:16:30:01

Zack Oates

Love that. I mean, it’s so powerful. What a great way to end here. John, how do we find and follow you and blaze pizza?

00:16:30:04 – 00:16:37:12

John Owen

We’re on Instagram, we’re on TikTok, we’re on Facebook. Any of those platforms you can follow Blaze Pizza and see all the exciting things that we’re doing.

00:16:37:13 – 00:16:42:00

Zack Oates

Awesome. And do you post online quite a bit because I’ve seen a few posts recently.

00:16:42:01 – 00:16:54:20

John Owen

We post quite a bit. I don’t personally post too much, but yeah, we do. And we use user generated content as well as influencers as well as our own stuff that we all do in-house. So invite everybody to come follow us.

00:16:54:22 – 00:17:03:22

Zack Oates

Awesome. Well John for putting the blaze in trailblazer the person and personalization. Today’s ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Giving Ovation.

00:17:03:22 – 00:17:06:01

John Owen

Thanks. Very glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

00:17:06:07 – 00:17:28:00

Zack Oates

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.