Paul Damico, a veteran restaurant executive and former CEO of multiple major brands, joins Give an Ovation to discuss what truly drives guest loyalty and long-term success. Drawing from his leadership roles at Blaze Pizza, Fuzzy’s Taco Shop, Global Franchise Group, Focus Brands, and Moe’s Southwest Grill, Paul emphasizes the fundamentals that never change: great food, great service, and spotless operations inside the four walls. He shares why cleanliness is a traffic driver, how training and culture make or break execution, and why seamless technology is now critical for every operator looking to grow.

Inside the four walls first (01:33)

When a guest makes the effort to visit, the experience must be perfect. Paul stresses that in-store excellence drives everything else, including later third-party orders.

“Take care of what is happening inside the four walls. That is my biggest piece of advice.”

Fundamentals never change (03:07)

Great food, great service, and a welcoming environment remain table stakes for any concept that wants to grow.

“If you consider yourself a restaurant, you have to have great food, great service, and an environment people want to come to.”

Cleanliness is a traffic driver (03:53)

First impressions start at the door. Smudged glass and messy sneeze guards send guests the wrong message about the kitchen.

“The front door should always be spotless. It is the first and last impression.”

Tech must feel seamless to guests (09:00)

Stacks now touch ordering, delivery, and in-store ops. Many brands still suffer from weak integrations that add friction.

“Very few are doing frictionless well. The stack has to be top of mind or guests will not use your restaurant.”

Training and culture power execution (11:37)

Sophisticated equipment needs trained people. Without ongoing coaching, even the best tools fail.

“We put in $10,000 ovens and train a new hire for 30 minutes. Then we expect perfection. It will not happen.”

Use feedback to act in real time (13:54)

Zack shares a pizza example where quick alerts flagged an underbaked issue mid-service and leadership fixed it the same day.

Who deserves an ovation (15:37)

Paul spotlights Jeff Alexander of Wow Bao for scaling beyond the four walls while protecting product integrity.

Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/damico5/

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

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

Transcript

00:00:00:04 – 00:00:23:14

Zach Oates

Welcome to another edition of Give Innovation the Restaurant Guest Experience podcast. I’m your host, Zach Oats, and each week I chat with industry experts to uncover their strategies and tactics you can use to create a five star guest experience. This podcast is powered by ovation, the feedback and operations platform built from multi-unit restaurants. Learn what is actually happening in your restaurants and how to improve without just a long survey.

00:00:23:15 – 00:00:55:03

Zach Oates

Learn more at Ovation Up. Com. And I am so excited. Today we have a legend of the industry. He’s on the board of blaze. He’s a CEO past CEO of Fuzzy’s. He was CEO of Global Franchise Group who’s the CEO of Narf, now president of North America for Focus Brands, president of Moe’s Southwest Grill. I mean, I literally needed a podcast just to put his bio in here, but instead we’re just going to do the cliff notes and welcome Paul D’Amico on the podcast.

00:00:55:03 – 00:00:56:07

Zach Oates

How are you, man?

00:00:56:09 – 00:00:57:09

Paul Damico

Good to see you, Zach.

00:00:57:15 – 00:01:03:10

Zach Oates

I do have to ask with, last name like Damico, what are the worst pronunciations that you’ve heard?

00:01:03:12 – 00:01:07:15

Paul Damico

Dan ko just just damn.

00:01:07:15 – 00:01:12:06

Zach Oates

Kuzco oh, yeah. Just making up letters. Just making up stuff,

00:01:12:08 – 00:01:13:01

Paul Damico

Hahaha.

00:01:13:07 – 00:01:33:07

Zach Oates

Now, Paul, when you look at a brand, you you obviously have had such an amazing career in the hospitality space. When you’re talking with a restaurant owner who is growing and scaling, what is one of the things that you normally point them to to say like, hey, this is something that you need to watch out for.

00:01:33:09 – 00:02:06:02

Paul Damico

I talked to a lot of up and comer restaurant owners, and they spend a lot of time with existing multi-unit restaurant operators, and I always tell them, listen, there are so many pieces to the restaurant puzzle. The most important thing, though, is what happens inside your box, right? And that’s the four walls of your restaurant, because today, in many cases, what happens inside that four walls is now ranging from 50 to 70%, depending on catering, online ordering, third party delivery and all of the other aspects of growing your sales.

00:02:06:04 – 00:02:27:02

Paul Damico

But when someone makes the effort to come into your box, they made a conscious decision to get in the car. Maybe with family, maybe with friends, get their part, get out and come in the box. The experience has to be 100% or they’re not going to come back. And those are the people that ultimately will become your third party users and use your product outside the four walls.

00:02:27:04 – 00:02:31:13

Paul Damico

But you got to take care of what’s happening inside the four walls. That’s my biggest piece of advice.

00:02:31:15 – 00:02:56:00

Zach Oates

I love that because usually if someone’s going to order delivery from you, they’re going to come in as well. There’s going to be some aspect of trying it out, seeing what it is, because there’s that trust aspect, and this is the whole thing that people didn’t love about ghost kitchens is like, I don’t know where this is coming from, but when I go into a restaurant and I see that it’s clean, I am a lot more likely to order from there before if I know the staff cares and stuff like that.

00:02:56:00 – 00:03:07:00

Zach Oates

So I think that’s a great piece of advice, because even though things are changing and there’s so much out there that’s different, the fundamentals are still there, right, Paul?

00:03:07:02 – 00:03:19:09

Paul Damico

They have to be. If you consider yourself a restaurant, you have to have great food, you have to have great service, and you have to have an environment that people want to come to. They just do. If not, you’ll be a short term restaurant operator.

00:03:19:11 – 00:03:23:16

Zach Oates

Yeah, or you’re going to be capped at how many locations you could scale to, right?

00:03:23:19 – 00:03:24:05

Paul Damico

Sure.

00:03:24:10 – 00:03:37:17

Zach Oates

So as you’re thinking about the guest experience in your career, how have you seen the guest experience evolve and what stayed the same? And compare that to like, what do you think the most important aspect of guest experience today is?

00:03:37:19 – 00:03:53:21

Paul Damico

Let me relaying what I just said. If you are a restaurant, the biggest challenge we all face today is traffic. Can we get more people to come in and use our restaurants? Right. And so you’ve got to have great food. That’s a given. You’ve got to have great service. That’s table.

00:03:53:21 – 00:03:57:05

Zach Oates

Stakes. That is medium rare table stakes. You can’t. You got that.

00:03:57:06 – 00:04:23:16

Paul Damico

Yeah for sure. And I think the third piece that so many restaurant owners and operators forget about is the cleanliness piece. And I see it all the time. No matter where I’m going, I see that people are neglecting the cleanliness, the housekeeping, the organization. And I think that that is a major driver of whether or not a guest is going to come back.

00:04:23:16 – 00:04:42:22

Paul Damico

Right. You say, oh, they’re when the restrooms were filthy and there’s no way if they can’t keep the restroom clean, how do they keep the kitchen clean? Right? I walk into restaurants. I’m in a restaurant at least once a day, every day of the week, every day of the year, whether it’s to consume or evaluate or go look at 80% of the time, the front door has fingerprints and grease all over it.

00:04:42:22 – 00:05:01:24

Paul Damico

So my first impressions are hours of operation, a door handle, and a dirty door. Right. And so okay, so I set my expectations and it just seems to me that so many restaurants do. They have no Windex. They just have no glass cleaner. There are sneeze guards you can’t see through there, a windows that you can’t see through, and they are front doors you can’t see through.

00:05:02:01 – 00:05:22:13

Paul Damico

And that is what the guest is looking at. While they’re either making a decision on the menu board ordering because it’s an order as you go type of concept, or it was there first, and it will obviously be their last impression when they leave, because that front door should always be spotless. And so cleanliness for me, I put traffic, I put cleanliness right up there with achieving traffic and traffic.

00:05:22:13 – 00:05:42:11

Zach Oates

That’s that’s really interesting because think about it. You compare a restaurant to like a retail store, where how many points of failure are there in a retail store, it’s like you get the shirt from the back, you fold it, you put it out, and then you refold it when someone tries it on or messes it up, and then you bring it up right.

00:05:42:13 – 00:05:50:04

Zach Oates

There’s like seven points of failure in a restaurant. There are like 3000 points of failure 100%.

00:05:50:06 – 00:05:51:18

Paul Damico

And every one of them can be dirty.

00:05:51:18 – 00:06:09:21

Zach Oates

Exactly right. And I think that’s the thing is, like, you think about all the work that you’ve done to create a brand for the menu, for the training, for all of this stuff, and you’re spending hundreds and thousands of dollars to do this for an amazing build out. And you don’t clean the front door.

00:06:10:02 – 00:06:31:17

Paul Damico

And that comes down to training and culture, because if your staff knows you’re all about cleanliness and your staff knows you’re all about organization and having things in their right space, then that’s obvious. When you go into chick fil A, you know exactly where the straws are. The windows are always clean, you know where the napkins are, and you know that from a guest perspective.

00:06:31:17 – 00:06:54:09

Paul Damico

But if you’re an employee there, you know exactly where everything is, and it’s always going to be there and it’s never going to be different, and you can move efficiently through the process of serving a guest. If you go to a restaurant where the employee doesn’t know where the X is and the customer says, can I have an X, that employee leaves the guest experience to go figure out where the X is, and they either never come back, or they come back with an answer.

00:06:54:09 – 00:06:56:12

Paul Damico

That’s not going to be satisfactory to you.

00:06:56:14 – 00:07:32:15

Zach Oates

And I think one of the keys is the training. Like you’re talking about, which is why we’re huge fans of opus. We have an integration with them. I think that training platform is brilliant. Rachel there, the CEO is an amazing person, but as we look at the training aspect, it’s so critical because it’s like I going to I don’t want to throw this specific brand under the bus, but like there’s a brand that I go to and sometimes I go in and depending on who is on shift is depending on like the experience that I get now, you go into a chick fil A, I don’t care what chick fil A I’m in.

00:07:32:17 – 00:07:49:09

Zach Oates

I know the doesn’t make a difference, right? It’s like I can see if there is stuff on the table. I know that there is going to be. I mean, a minute maybe at a chick fil A that someone will leave stuff on the table and it will get cleaned up at other restaurants, no matter how big they are.

00:07:49:11 – 00:07:54:24

Zach Oates

It depends on who’s on shift. And it depends. Is it going to stay clean or not? Depends on the manager. It depends on the staff.

00:07:55:01 – 00:07:57:02

Paul Damico

Training and culture. Training and culture.

00:07:57:04 – 00:07:57:12

Zach Oates

Yeah.

00:07:57:12 – 00:08:16:01

Paul Damico

And the eating out is another example. Those employees all wear white outfits with white aprons. We have restaurants around us that have black restaurants and black aprons, and they can’t keep them clean. But with ketchup and grief in and in and out and everybody’s apron is spotless. How does this happen?

00:08:16:03 – 00:08:35:14

Zach Oates

I love that it’s culture and training. One of the important things there is to know, like, what are you supposed to be training on? Do your point. There’s some table stakes. We need to get everyone to a certain level for this. But then it’s about how do you adapt the specific training based on that location, based on what are they winning and what do they need to work on?

00:08:35:16 – 00:09:00:12

Zach Oates

And I think that’s where you have really great area managers and great tools that allow you to listen in on that and to understand what’s going on even when you’re not there. So is there anything I love? We talked about training and culture. I like the cleanliness. Do you think there’s anything that has changed over the years that you’ve been in restaurant in terms of like something that maybe guests used to care about and don’t, or maybe something that they didn’t care about and now they do.

00:09:00:14 – 00:09:30:22

Paul Damico

I don’t know if it’s something that’s gone away, but something that has drastically changed our world, right, is the technology stack. We used to have restaurants that had a cash register in them, and they had a credit card reader, and that that was about the extent of the technology stack. Today, to run a restaurant, you need to be a master of it in addition to the guest and the service and the food and the cleanliness, you have to know what’s happening and how to fix, or how to engage, or how to move the process along in the technology stack.

00:09:30:24 – 00:09:59:16

Paul Damico

Now with third party delivery and how that integrates, I mean, at the end of the day, it’s all about gaining more share. But what our industry has done is move so fast. Was trying it with trying to maintain that share that the technology is playing catch up and right and I can point to 100 restaurants where the technology is not fully integrated, and it’s a disaster for the customer to get their food, either to order their food, to find their food, to get their food, and whether that’s in store or through third party delivery or through online ordering.

00:09:59:16 – 00:10:17:19

Paul Damico

It’s just in today’s world, it’s in so many locations. It’s just not what I would call seamless. We all you like to use the word frictionless and seamless and easy for the guests. Very few are doing that now. I mean, it’s getting better, but the technology stack has got to be top of mind. Or the guest of today is certainly the guest.

00:10:17:19 – 00:10:20:13

Paul Damico

If tomorrow are not going to use your restaurant.

00:10:20:15 – 00:10:46:04

Zach Oates

By the way, Mr.. Mrs.. Restaurant owners, I hate to break it to you, but your app and your tech and your ordering process and that is not being compared to the restaurant down the street that is being compared to Facebook to Amazon, because those are the apps on the phone and nobody cares that you’re not a 20, 50 whatever trillion billion zillion dollar company.

00:10:46:06 – 00:11:07:06

Zach Oates

All they know is that their app on their phone for you is not working as well as is for Amazon or even worse, DoorDash. If DoorDash makes it easier for them to order, they will pay more for that ease this generation. Nowadays, people are okay. They are okay paying more as long as they’re getting what they’re paying for.

00:11:07:08 – 00:11:16:19

Paul Damico

And that might be just the experience of ordering. And it could be just totally easy. And I’m done. And that’s you know, that’s what Amazon Masters, right. It’s just click, click click done. And it’s at the house the next day.

00:11:16:19 – 00:11:34:03

Zach Oates

Now the benefit is there’s a lot of great tech companies out there that are helping the challenges. How do you create that tech stack. So like you’re building a Lego castle that all of the pieces are actually fitting together to form this experience, right. So I love this conversation around like the strategies talked to you about some tactics.

00:11:34:03 – 00:11:37:14

Zach Oates

What are some tactics that you’ve seen to improve the guest experience lately?

00:11:37:16 – 00:11:56:05

Paul Damico

When you say tactics, what are we actually going to do to make the guest experience what they expected to be? What are we going to do tactically around that? And I will always go back to the training. Right. We just talked about the tech. Now let let’s say we have the best technology stack in the box and it’s all integrated and it’s seamless.

00:11:56:07 – 00:12:11:20

Paul Damico

If the hourly employees that are actually using that tech stack to drive the guest experience don’t know what they’re doing or don’t know how to move it along at the bumps, then the billion dollar tech stack that you put into your restaurant in a box is worthless.

00:12:11:22 – 00:12:13:22

Zach Oates

It’s a grandma with an iPad, right?

00:12:13:24 – 00:12:38:16

Paul Damico

Yeah. It’s so tactically you have to be able to perform every function. We put $10,000 ovens in our restaurant, and then we hire a 16 year old employee that doesn’t know how to turn the oven on at their house, I’m sure. But now we put them in front of this $10,000 box with buttons and lights and digital timers, and we train them for 30 minutes on that.

00:12:38:16 – 00:12:59:10

Paul Damico

And now they’re an expert on an 800 degree oven. How the general public or the people in our world don’t see the difference in that is unbelievable. And so the kitchens we put in to the restaurants today are highly sophisticated, they’re highly technologically advanced, and we’re still putting 16 and 17 year olds in front of them and not spending the time to train them properly on it.

00:12:59:10 – 00:13:12:12

Paul Damico

And you expect the cake, the burger, the fry to come out perfect for the guests in that piece of cooking technology. It’s not going to happen. So those are the strategies we have to rely on. And I go back to training on every strategy.

00:13:12:14 – 00:13:32:01

Zach Oates

Yeah, I love that because I think that makes so much sense, especially those 1617 year olds talking about like other job and retail opportunities. They could go someplace else. That’s a lot easier. That’s a lot less challenging if they’re not on their feet as much, they’re not dealing with as many angry customers, and they could go there if they want.

00:13:32:05 – 00:13:41:02

Zach Oates

They’re in the hospitality. But if you train them and you help them feel like they are adding value to something, that’s why they stay in hospitality.

00:13:41:02 – 00:13:54:16

Paul Damico

Absolutely right. Absolutely. The younger generation today is trying to figure out how to get 10,000 likes on a picture, so they can be an Instagrammer and make a little money that way. Then they’re not interested in sweating in front of an 800 degree oven. That’s not an even in their realm.

00:13:54:18 – 00:14:13:14

Zach Oates

Yeah, well, it’s so interesting to I think about one of our customers. I was at a conference and she’s got a whole chain of pizzerias, and she was telling me that it was a Sunday afternoon, and she got a piece of ovation feedback that said, hey, your pizza was underdone and this is lunchtime on a Sunday. And then she got another piece of feedback.

00:14:13:14 – 00:14:31:12

Zach Oates

Your pizza was underdone. She got a third piece of feedback, your pizza was underdone. And and keep mind you, she’s got 20 locations and they all were coming from this one location. So she literally got in her car and drove to that location to be like, what’s going on? No, the GM wasn’t there. Right. So there’s a shift that was there.

00:14:31:14 – 00:14:49:01

Zach Oates

Turns out that they didn’t have the pizza at the right temperature. And so the pizza, sorry, the pizza oven at the right time. She went over there, turned up the temperature and it was like a difference of like 15, 20 degrees. But when it goes through that conveyor belt, it was underdone compared to what it normally is.

00:14:49:01 – 00:14:51:01

Paul Damico

And every single pizza will be underdone.

00:14:51:06 – 00:15:10:19

Zach Oates

Exactly. And so she was able to like, go there and fix that before even the lunch rush was over. But to your point about training, she didn’t have the tools to train her team on like, okay, here’s what you do. If it things look different on the pizza, slow the conveyor, increase the temperature. Like she just didn’t know that, right?

00:15:10:23 – 00:15:22:07

Zach Oates

Her team didn’t have those tools. And so luckily she was able to like get that resolved. But that was one of the things where training needs to be an ongoing thing, and it needs.

00:15:22:07 – 00:15:24:15

Paul Damico

Every single day somebody should be giving something.

00:15:24:21 – 00:15:37:18

Zach Oates

Yeah, I love that. So now, you know, so many people in the restaurant industry, Paul. So I’d love to get your take on this. Who is someone that we should be following? Who’s someone that deserves an ovation in the restaurant industry?

00:15:37:20 – 00:16:01:14

Paul Damico

That’s hard because there are so many great operators out there and I interact with hundreds of them. You know, if I picked one, I bumped into him last week at a conference I would put up there. Jeff Alexander. Oh, love. Jeff Alexander, CEO of Wow, about he has figured out a way. We all look for silver bullets right in our restaurants to really figure out how do we grow.

00:16:01:14 – 00:16:24:15

Paul Damico

And in most cases, oh, it’s real estate. Oh, it’s finding the right franchisee or having the capital to grow a company stores. He has figured out a way to take his product at that lab out and get it into the hands of thousands and thousands of people. And he’s look beyond the typical brick and mortar store, the four walls, the box I talked about.

00:16:24:17 – 00:16:37:07

Paul Damico

And he has focused on nontraditional and different types of distribution avenues to grow that product. And he has grown that brand in a way that I never thought I would see him doing. And I’m so proud of him for doing that.

00:16:37:09 – 00:17:03:21

Zach Oates

He is such a great guy and so sharp. I’ve had the privilege of being meeting him, being friends with him, and now he’s an advisor to ovation, and so I get the privilege of talking to him all the time. And the way that he thinks about things is so different, because he’s not someone who we talk about the four walls, but he took a brand that was a four wall brand and totally changed it into really.

00:17:03:21 – 00:17:04:21

Paul Damico

Changed the format.

00:17:04:23 – 00:17:21:24

Zach Oates

Arguably the only actually successful dark kitchen that there is. And in terms of like how they run things and what they’re doing in CPG, it’s amazing to see what he’s done because he hasn’t been constrained by here’s how things have to be done. So I think that’s awesome.

00:17:22:05 – 00:17:39:02

Paul Damico

And he’s always kept the integrity of the product forefront. So no matter where he has moved his chess pieces to either procure, manufacture or distribute, he’s always kept the product the way it was intended to be from day one, and it hasn’t changed. And that’s amazing.

00:17:39:05 – 00:17:45:18

Zach Oates

Yeah. And talk about consistency. And they’ve got some big, big plans over there. Wow. I’m excited to see this next phase of his journey.

00:17:45:18 – 00:17:46:17

Paul Damico

But and it’d be great.

00:17:46:20 – 00:17:56:11

Zach Oates

Yeah. So Paul now unfortunately you’re not big on X. You’re not big on posting on LinkedIn. If people do want to follow you, do you ever post somewhere?

00:17:56:13 – 00:18:13:04

Paul Damico

I post on Instagram a bunch, mostly personal stuff, but I’m on LinkedIn occasionally and I have thousands of people that I spend the time to accept them so we can always share ideas. So I am I am on LinkedIn and I am on Instagram. I’m actually on TikTok too. I just don’t spend a lot of time there. Well, I’m there just to.

00:18:13:07 – 00:18:20:11

Paul Damico

I’m just there to see the companies that I work with and how they are performing and how and what kind of messaging they’re sending on their TikTok channels. Yeah.

00:18:20:11 – 00:18:35:21

Zach Oates

Oh that’s awesome. The world needs more of you. And by the way, I just texted Jeff to say, hey, hope your ears are burning. We’re talking about you on the podcast. His comment back in true, Jeff fashion was it was Paul’s birthday two days ago. So.

00:18:35:23 – 00:18:36:22

Paul Damico

Good for him.

00:18:36:22 – 00:18:48:24

Zach Oates

He’s a man of hospitality. Man of the people for him. Well, Paul, for helping share a spoonful of wisdom from your ocean of knowledge. Today’s ovation goes to you. Thank you so much for joining us. And giving ovation.

00:18:49:01 – 00:18:52:05

Paul Damico

Always finds that. Thanks. Appreciate the time.

00:18:52:07 – 00:19:14:19

Zach Oates

Thanks for joining us today. If you like 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.