Yazan El-Shalabi and Yasser Ali are the Founders of Shelby’s, home to legendary shawarma, poutines, falafels, and more! Their journey began as two young college students and now they run a multi franchise brand. Tune in to hear Yazan and Yasser’s rise to the top and how they’ve mastered growth pertaining to social media advertising, franchises, and more!

Here are a few highlights from this episode:

What is the most important aspect of the guest experience?

“Communication is key. Obviously, the quality of the food has to be there, but things happen, delays happen. If the chef or waitress came and told me ‘unfortunately there will be a bit of a wait, we understand if you don’t want to stay’ than I might sit and wait for my order to be ready. If I am just waiting and there is no communication, then I’m just going to think this place doesn’t care about me, they just want money. Communication is a big thing.”

-Yasser Ali

What are some successful tactics you’ve seen or tried lately?

“Focusing on the operational aspect of the restaurant industry. When we decided that we wanted to expand this brand, we began to look at our product and we saw how challenging it is to scale, because there’s a lot of you steps from preparation, to serving, to storing. How Can we make this process easy so that we can replicate and be consistent, because that’s the key to successes: being consistent in the franchise business“

-Yasser Ali

Who deserves an Ovation in the industry?

“I would encourage every young business owner that believes in technology, that Ovation is gonna make your life easier, and it’s gonna make you recover more customers. Every customer costs you. If you can’t recover a customer, you just lost a $1,000. You can recover him and there’s a chance that you gain that $1,000 back with Ovation. It will be easier to communicate with customer.”

-Yazan El-Shalabi