Shane Murphy (00:02.158)

Welcome back everybody. Today we're joined by Steve Smyth, who has been the director of restaurant technology for Taco John's International, and they're over 350 locations for over 19 years. Steve, we're so excited to have you with us today. Thank you for joining us and sharing your story and your experiences of implementing technology over at Taco John's through the years.

Steve Smyth (00:26.297)

Shane, thanks for having me. Really appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit about restaurant tech. It's something I'm very passionate about. And yeah, I've been grateful to have the opportunity to work for Taco John's for over 19 years and kind of help us build out our tech stack over, you know, into a cloud -based system over the last five, so.

Shane Murphy (00:47.822)

That's awesome. Yeah, we're going to have some real, real treats in the discussion today. But maybe before we do just dive in, could you share a little bit about yourself and maybe about Taco John's in general as well?

Steve Smyth (00:59.449)

Sure. Yeah. You know, Taco John's started here in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I'm still based here in Cheyenne, Wyoming. So our headquarters here, 55 years ago actually. And, it's one of, sometimes referred to as a legacy brand, but, we've been serving tacos and burritos for a very long time in the upper Midwest. as you mentioned, we have over 350 locations throughout the United States. And, you know, we just opened a couple of restaurants in Massachusetts last year out in Boston. So that was pretty exciting to finally get to the East coast. But yeah, we really have, our footprint is continuing to move east. So we're excited about that growth. And, you know, Taco John's has been around for so long that a lot of people just, it's one of those things like, it's kind of got this craveability to it with our potato lays and our nacho cheese and our tacos, obviously.

Shane Murphy (01:34.446)

Yeah, broke out in the Midwest.

Steve Smyth (01:58.137)

And so a lot of people just remember it from like visiting small towns throughout the upper Midwest and like, I know that taco John's place. I remember that place. They have really good potatoes. They have really good tacos. So, but yeah, it's, it's, it's been, just so much fun over the last few years. Really. we, we ended up, opening a support center out in Minneapolis, Minnesota, out in St. Louis park about three years ago. So now we have our support center in Minneapolis and our headquarters are still here in Cheyenne, but a lot of innovation, a lot of different things that we've been doing as far as moving the brand forward. So.

Shane Murphy (02:44.91)

That's awesome. And you've been with the brand for almost two decades now, which really gives you a lot of breadth of the types of technologies that you've been able to implement through the years. What role has technology played on the marketing side for Taco John's?

Steve Smyth (02:54.745)

Yeah.

Steve Smyth (03:04.057)

Sure. You know, you look back at around 2016 when mobile ordering really started to kind of come about. And that opportunity to kind of reach out to guests via apps that probably didn't exist so much for like everybody, you know, McDonald's, a lot of the other bigger players had apps and of that nature. But, you know, we really at Taco John's, it was something that was slow.

It was a very slow pace for us to get involved with. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that we're just a smaller company and we're in the upper Midwest. Technology kind of comes in from the outside, from the coast and makes its way into the middle of the United States is how it seems from time to time. But, so really about 2016, 2017, we started looking at the evolution of our.

tech stack as far as marketing is concerned and bringing in Olo and Punch as our loyalty provider and To this day we're still with both very, you know, very excited about the partnerships that we've built with both those companies and the evolution of our app that's occurred over the last even Last year we've done a lot of a lot of growth in our app a lot of improvements we partnered with a company called fly by for a

geolocation tracking of, to make it a more seamless opportunity or more seamless experience for our guests when they come to our restaurant, place mobile orders. And I think the pandemic really helped build out third party delivery and first party delivery, which is something that we're focusing on right now heavily and just the mobile ordering landscape in itself. So.

Shane Murphy (04:55.406)

Yeah, that really is, there are so many components that come together, but there was a shift in that 2016 to 2017 period where online ordering was starting to become more popular. And at the time, everyone was focused on the transaction and making the online order itself happen and get that transmitted. But through the years, it's opened up a lot of opportunities to better communicate.

Steve Smyth (05:17.241)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy (05:24.718)

to your guests and to your audience. And that communication really does have substantial revenue impact and just impact on the customer journey and the connection that people have with the brand. I know that you've implemented a lot of marketing solutions through the years. What have been some of the ones that you have been most excited about? And you may not have even...

actually implemented it, but you've gotten exposure to lots of different types of technology. What are some of the things that have gotten you excited in that customer communication and marketing end?

Steve Smyth (06:06.361)

You know, honestly, the very first time that we sent a mobile order to a restaurant was was probably one of the most exciting moments of at least my career in restaurant tech, right? Because a lot of a lot of folks don't understand how long that process took, you know, in 2016, 2017, you know, and it took almost a year to build all that out that infrastructure and get the POS company and, you know, working hand in hand with with Olo. But then having a new.

Shane Murphy (06:16.686)

Yeah.

Steve Smyth (06:36.089)

a new way to communicate and like you said, to communicate with our guests, a new way for them to interact with us. And it kind of just, it was slow, obviously in the beginning, it was very slow. And I kind of mentioned this before with the pandemic, we ended up seeing like, you know, all the restaurants had to get on mobile ordering very quickly. But we also saw this ability to communicate to our guests, you know,

with offers and things of that nature through our loyalty app. And while our loyalty base grew over that time period, our mobile ordering was considerably, there was a considerable shift in our mobile ordering platform as well. And so we get a lot of feedback from our guests regarding like our app and their experience. And so we continually try to, we always put the guests first.

and we want to make the best experience possible. And we're still learning though, even to this day. I mean, eight years later, we're still learning how to be good in regards to our app and our experience and how to interact with our guests. I don't know if anybody's ever got it totally perfect, but definitely keep trying.

Shane Murphy (07:57.39)

Yeah, I love what you highlighted that, you know, you put the guest at the center of it. You put them first and then seek to make it as smooth as possible. Implementing new technology often requires like change and that change, there's change on the operations of the business and how employees interact with.

you know, the brand and things, but then there's the customer's side where they have to get used to something new. And sometimes there's a natural resistance to change, even if it's a great thing for the consumer. And when you do place them at the beginning, make sure their voice is heard and just seek to keep iterating and making things smooth. You know, that that makes makes it a win win for everybody at the end of the day.

Steve Smyth (08:54.393)

Yeah, I think, you know, and even looking back at the amount of training that we had to do for our restaurants, it wasn't just that you turned on mobile ordering and all of a sudden, you know, everybody just knew what to do. We spent a lot of time working with our teams to understand like, you know, go ahead and make the food. It's okay. You know, we want it to be hot and fresh for the guests. That's always the most important piece. But when the order shows up on the screen, don't be afraid to make the food.

That way the guests can walk in and get their food and get back to the, you know, what they want to do. That's why they want to use the app. That's why they want to use mobile ordering. they also want to take care, you know, they want that loyalty piece. we have some very loyal guests. as you're aware, we, you know, we have these things called potato lays and our guests are just extremely loyal to potato lays. I don't know if you've ever seen the comments online. It is, it's just unbelievable how, how committed they are to,

to great tasting potatoes at Taco John's.

Shane Murphy (09:57.998)

Yeah, and maybe to touch on loyalty, like there's obviously the consumer's loyalty to the brand, then like actually building out a loyalty program that incentivizes the loyalty and the repeat purchase frequency of those guests. How has Taco John's thought about structuring that loyalty program to incentivize their guests?

Steve Smyth (10:25.845)

Yeah, I mean, you know, we in the beginning we we did not have a point based program and last year we we finally decided let's move to a point based program, which you know, again, it's just listening to the guest and and what and meet them where they want us to meet them at. Right. So point based program just made sense. We've also noticed that, you know,

Shane Murphy (10:27.438)

to keep coming back.

Steve Smyth (10:54.585)

I don't know if you use anybody else's app other than Taco John's. Obviously, I only have the Taco John's app, but apparently there's a lot of other offers out there inside of apps. And I think it's just getting very competitive. You gotta be able to kind of cut through the noise and have a good offering and make sure that it's relevant to the guest. Make sure that that offer is something that they're gonna use. And hopefully though, we'd all love to have guests that come back every day, right? I mean, that's just...

That's a win no matter what, but I think we're all fighting for the same guests over and over. We're all fighting for the same space on their phones. How long do they keep the app on their phone? Is too much communication too much? Is it not enough, right? Whether it's email, SMS, app notifications, I mean, we can really get into a hit.

Shane Murphy (11:36.91)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy (11:52.91)

Yeah.

Steve Smyth (11:53.849)

the guest with a lot of information, but are they listening? And I think that's what the most important part is, is that over the last few years, you've really seen that with the other, with, you know, just the feedback we're getting from guests is that, you know, they don't want to be, they don't want to be overindulged in that manner. They want, they want to come to us and we meet them there and have good offers and make sure that it's relevant to what they want to, what they want to, you know, serve themselves or their families. So.

Shane Murphy (12:11.918)

Thank you.

Shane Murphy (12:23.246)

Yeah, and when you're collecting that feedback, how are you going about hearing the voice of the customer regarding these things? You're right. Like if you over communicate, people are going to just turn off the notifications. It's really easy to do. If it's text, you reply stop. If it's an app, you delete the app or turn off notifications. If it's email, you hit unsubscribe or it just goes to spam. And so,

Steve Smyth (12:33.593)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy (12:53.166)

understanding what your customer wants is so crucial. How do you go about gathering that feedback?

Steve Smyth (12:57.789)

You know, we use a lot of different platforms to get to get feedback from our guests. But one of the things that I really appreciate, you know, at least from our marketing team, is that they go through a lot of those comments one by one. Nothing is, you know, they we search through those comments and make sure that, you know, if there is something that's, you know, if there's relevance in there in those comments, we need to take, you know, it needs to be addressed.

And I would say that our marketing team is one of the best at that.

Shane Murphy (13:31.822)

Fabulous. That's at the heart of the brand. It's like that Midwest culture of like we're, we're a people brand. We're not just, we're not just slinging tacos for tacos sake. We're, we're given tacos to real people and people that come and participate in the experience of eating a taco. And that's what I've always, I've always seen that from taco John's is there's this focus on people, you know, a lot of your stores might be in rural areas and you know,

Steve Smyth (13:41.209)

Exactly.

Shane Murphy (14:00.814)

not in the big, big large metros. And there's a different culture that you have to have with your customer as a result of that.

Steve Smyth (14:07.321)

Yep, we have a very personal connection with our guests. Especially because a lot of the restaurants that are out, you know, as you mentioned in rural areas, a lot of them, you know, Taco John's is maybe one of five different restaurants, maybe even less in that community. And they look to us to be a partner in many different facets, whether it's just, you know, hey, I'm bringing my family to eat there, or, you know, sponsorship opportunities, things like that. And our franchisees are just

They're tremendous what they're giving. They do so much work within their own communities to build those relationships and take care of those communities that they're in. So it does make it to where that family, that feel that you get when you walk into our restaurants, like most of the people know each other in that community. And so growing up, even here in Cheyenne, Wyoming, you know, we only have 65 ,000 people.

I worked in our restaurants for a number of years in the beginning of my career with Taco John's and I knew everybody and they knew me. So it does make it, when it comes to that relationship piece, they'll hold you accountable and they expect it. They expect good food and so you gotta deliver on all the aspects of it, right? Quality, service, cleanliness, so.

Shane Murphy (15:35.534)

I love that. Now, my insights on this are likely super out of date, because eight years ago when I was the head of sales over at Jolt, I remember I was working with you and Rocky on the operations team, and we were taking a lot of time to really deeply understand Taco John's process for testing out and implementing limited time offers in various regions throughout the brand. What role do LTOs,

Play for Taco John's.

Steve Smyth (16:06.041)

Yeah, you know, they're one of the most important. You know, just just last month we introduced a taco pizza and you know, our culinary team really I can't believe the amount of work that went into this thing and and the product was just simply amazing and it's unfortunate. I think a lot of people probably didn't really understand when they heard taco pizza. You know, you hear taco pizza, you're like, I've had a taco pizza before.

Shane Murphy (16:30.83)

Yeah.

Steve Smyth (16:35.225)

This was something special and it actually had eight slices. It came in a huge pizza box. I mean, it was like a, it was a 14 inch pizza and you know, it was meant to be shared, but the amount of work that goes into those LTOs, I mean, from, from the conception part to the, you know, the ideation to actually bringing it to life, getting it into our restaurants in the test phase. I mean, those are like, it's like six months to get an LTO into, into production.

Shane Murphy (16:44.622)

Wow.

Steve Smyth (17:04.601)

and make sure it's worth, you know, there's always an LTO that doesn't make it as well, right? That just doesn't, you know, fit the footprint. But, you know, just like our taco piece was something that I thought, you know, as far as our entire company, really put for such an effort to get this into the restaurants and it really paid off. We were excited about it.

And we continue to look at LTOs, whether right now we're running tostadas, which to me it's like a little personal pizza. But so when we got rid of the big pizza, we went to little personal pizzas. But yeah, I mean, we continue to float in between value and just new offerings and such. So right now on our Cheyenne market, we're testing some spicy burritos. By the way, they're phenomenal.

Some of the best burritos I've had at Taco John's, I'm not gonna lie. If you like heat, they're right on point, right? And they're two for six bucks, but we're gonna continue to look at those processes of the LTO and make sure that we get them out and it's just gonna be a constant flow of new. We'll always have the tried and true, right? Meat, potato, burrito, standard. Crispy tacos, best in the business by far. Best crispy taco in the business.

And we'll always have those staples, but I think our guests expect us to have something fun, something new. But they always know that, and then we have potato, lays and nacho cheese, so they always come back for those.

Shane Murphy (18:48.59)

Yeah. And so when, when Taco John's thinks about the LTOs that you're implementing, there's obviously this, the novelty side of there's something new, it's fun, and it adds to the flavor of just the, the recurring menu that everyone's used to and loves. And then there's, there's obviously the side of, Hey, this has to financially work for the business. And oftentimes, ideally should produce.

Steve Smyth (18:54.827)

Mm -hmm.

Shane Murphy (19:18.542)

produce additional revenue and value to the business. How does Taco John's marry those two things of like the novel and the economic financial side? And how do you think through that mix when you're trying to implement a new LTO?

Steve Smyth (19:38.009)

You know, I mean, I think our marketing team really thinks about like, you know, that float in between value and novelty, right? A taco pizza was not something that, you know, just was easy to implement into the restaurants, but we did it, you know, and, and tostadas are a little more in our footprint, right? So it makes sense to, and they're a value offering and we kind of float in between each one. It seems like on different promotions, depending on what we have out there.

But we also, you know, we do a lot of consumer research. Our support center out in St. Louis Park, we bring in a lot of guests in that area and they provide a lot of feedback on, you know, what they think is going to be good for us in the future. Very Brad, Chef Brad, as we call him, he comes up with some crazy stuff at times, but there's other stuff that, you know, over the past year, the cheddar crunch taco, the taco pizza, I mean,

just items that, you know, the cheddar crunch taco was like a flatbread, kind of like a chalupa type thing, but it was actually seasoned with our potato au lait seasoning. And it had like a bunch of different cheeses, like kind of melt, ingrain. Kind of just, it was baked with it. Yeah, yeah, it was crazy. And then we fried it and it was just, it was delicious, right?

Shane Murphy (20:58.606)

while you're talking about it. Yeah.

Steve Smyth (21:06.265)

And those are those things that our guests like kind of keep. They want to see us be innovative, but they also know that, you know, by the way, we still own Taco Tuesday, so to speak, right? We started it. We've had it forever. You know, so Taco Tuesday, Taco Bravo Thursday, these are all in our wheelhouse still. And like I said, our guests expect those parts of that loyalty or I'm sorry, that value piece to always exist at Taco John's.

Shane Murphy (21:37.134)

I think those are great insights. And Taco John's has just done such a good job of always putting that customer first and having that loyalty at the center of everything that you've done. So thank you for coming on today and sharing your experiences, your insights and all these things. This has been super fun. Where can people learn more about either you or Taco John's?

after this.

Steve Smyth (22:08.217)

You know, you can always find us on LinkedIn, right? And then any of our websites, our mobile ordering sites. And, you know, you can continue to see us innovate, right? So right now we just launched a voice AI in a couple of our restaurants. So we, we actually call her internally. We call her Olena kind of after our potato lays, but Olena will be happy to take your order at our, you know, through our drive through in a couple of restaurants right now. So.

We're always looking to innovate our technology stack and always make sure it's something that fits our brand. So we're excited about the future of tech. We're excited about the future of marketing and continue to meet our guests where they want us. So.

Shane Murphy (22:54.094)

Awesome, Steeble. Thanks again for coming and sharing your experiences. This was great.

Steve Smyth (22:56.601)

Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate you having me.

Shane Murphy (23:00.942)

You bet.