Inspire Brands leaders on closing a major restaurant acquisition during the pandemic

Well, we talked a lot about and just really maximizing the value of being a multi-brand portfolio and learning from each of the individual businesses and applying those learnings to the various brands as they were going through their own set of challenges. Every brand had its own set of challenges that it had to face, but the learnings, the operating chief operating officers doing daily calls with each other, sharing learnings, and morphing the model of Jimmy John's to be able to do stand-up drive-thrus, morphing the model of Buffalo Wild Wings to go from being a sports bar to more or less a QSR takeout delivery concept overnight and applying those learnings, and just everybody pitching in. And that's staying with us. Those relationships, there's nothing like a crisis in a way of really building strong relationships and that constant form of communication is just continuing I think made us stronger in 2020. But a lot of that is just carrying over with finding out in 2021.

Yeah, a lot of companies talk about having a depth over of skill sets and a depth of capabilities within their management teams, which we do, but we saw the real value of the breadth and just seeing so many different experiences. And quite honestly, it validated our thesis on the value of putting this together, the kind of multi-brand portfolio that we have and kind of helped build our confidence a bit for the Dunkin transaction to be quite blunt. And what we saw happening during the early parts of 2020 and how we were able to do things that maybe some others were having a harder time doing, whether it be supply chain or some things you talked about of digital and operating capabilities to kind of really validate that thesis of multi-brand and made us more confident to about doing the Dunkin transaction.

All those that we've done three we had done three already, so. I mean there are a lot of things, you know, not meeting anyone in person during the process are really all and which is interesting when you go through and have conversations with the management team, but it's all virtual. And even going through the process with investors and going through the process of raising money and all that not actually being in person once through any of that is really kind of mind-boggling to think about it, right? If you go back to 2019 you said, 'Okay, we're going to do a $11.3 billion acquisition and not meet anyone in person in the process.' You would have thought we were crazy.

Yeah, we did it faster than we did any other transactions as well.

I think it's been very important for us. I think it was and I believe all of our brands were really well positioned coming in because of some of the investments we made coming into 2020. So, like Buffalo for example, I think their digital sales, e-commerce sales grew six more than six X from the start of the year to the end of the year and that ramped was very quickly very fast at the start of the year. And we wouldn't have been able to have the results we did last year if we hadn't made some of those investments because you really can't ramp if the consumer demand was there, you just can't ramp up to meet that demand unless you build the digital capabilities. We've done a lot of work on personalization, which has become more and more important people wanting to I mean this is all consumer driven. People want to be able to order on the channel that they prefer and order products that they want and they expect brands to understand that and talk to them in that way. So, our channels and our media and how we reach our consumers we've built personalization into that so that we can do it more effectively. And both of those factors and our scale factor I think drove our ability to be able to do that. Whereas if we had a single drive brand, well, the growth of digital channels is the most exciting thing going on in the restaurant industry and really ultimately the driver of the journey that we embarked on with Inspire is the belief that there was going to be a fundamental shift in the way that technology, the role of technology plays in our industry, whether be with our customers interface with our brands or how we actually use technology from an operations stand point. And COVID has accelerated that trend. It was already in place, but we as enterprise did two times the dollar volume of digital sales across our portfolio in 2020 than we did in 2019. And we nearly, you know, almost doubled the number of loyalty program members in the process. And just think about how transformative that is. If you go back even five, certainly six years in the restaurant industry, the relationship with your customer our customers started when they walked in the door and stopped the moment they walked out the door. Right? We had no idea who they were when they left. We had no channel to communicate directly to them as an individual. Or way to build relationships with them when they weren't in our restaurants. And now fast forward, you know, five years, particularly after 2020, and a large percentage of our customer base we now can have a direct channel to them. We can personalize messages to them. We can personalize offers and it fundamentally changes the entire business model in many ways. And even after this big shift that we went through in 2020, quite honestly, we're still compared to other industries really early days in this. And that's where we're spending most of our time and energy from a capability building is in that part of the business.

Well, we have a program that we rolled out called People First at Inspire and there are multiple pillars because the way we want to approach this is a very programmatic approach in making sure that whether it comes to how we recruit people into the system, how we actually create opportunities, particularly for people in our restaurants to continue to move up through the operations ranks, whether we actually create an environment within our support centers that allow team members to continue to move into the next level, or what we do in the community. Those are our four pillars of People First around how we want to make sure that in each of those areas we are fostering a highly inclusive environment and creating and removing barriers if there are barriers to people moving up through the ranks and maximizing the opportunity here whether it be with us or ultimately if they end up leaving and going to other places as a lot of people do within the operations teams, that they actually have the best opportunities throughout their career based upon what they learned while they were here with us.

You get to go first on this.

Exactly. I thought about that. Um I would I mean I always start with two places. One is our guests. And the second one is our team member. And then they're both the order is not does not designate importance. So with your guests, you need to listen to your guests and build things whether it be experiences, products, restaurants, the formats that the guests appreciate and what they want. It's not necessarily what they say, it's anticipating where consumer trends are going and getting there first and being in the right places. With your team members, have the best try to have the best team members and treat your people right so that they want to grow with you and they'll perform for you. Those are where I end up.

Yeah, I think everything we're doing with technology and personalization is because of our guests and because of our team members. With our guests, they expect they expect a better tech to interact with us in new ways and with our team members, it's about making them be able to do their jobs better than they can today. So all of this is empowering those two groups for me.