Jeff Perera: Welcome to the weekly run, I'm Jeff.
Aaron: i'm aaron
Jeff Perera: And today we're talking about what's hot at Jeff's Bagel Run. And this week, Aaron, you know what's really hot is new store openings. They are kicking back up and I couldn't be more excited.
Aaron: That's that's always a good thing in this business of ours. I don't that's that's always gonna rank high on the the what's hot meter. news stores are great.
Jeff Perera: Yeah, I think like new store openings, new bagels of the day Not I don't know what comes third. New new app features. That could be third. Sure. Yeah.
Aaron: Yeah, I'll take it.
Jeff Perera: But new store openings are sort of just filling my inbox and giving me and Danielle and probably the ops team and trainings team a little bit of anxiety. But they are coming in now fast and furious. We're getting stick of it's like occupancy, getting health permits passed. It's it's happening. It's happening.
Aaron: Well, it's there's It's and it never happens the way that you want it. It's from what I've learned, and again, you know, software is the least in the real world sort of field. Like we don't really have to exist in the real world and the constraints of schedules and time and and people from like an external standpoint, right? We kinda control our own world. So it's always been really surprising to me as as I've joined done this over the last couple of years that you just can't really predict when these stories are gonna come in. It's just one bad, you know, one Honri certif you know, fire certification reviewer or something like that. It blows you out by two weeks. You know, you just you know, or you know, a gas line that somebody hits with a hammer. It just it's just some random stuff and it's just such an invariable and it's feast and famine it seems like. Either either it's quiet or you've got more than you could handle. And you just gotta sort of deal with it and go.
Jeff Perera: Yeah, and so when you're thinking about construction, a similar situation is taking place. you've got a bunch of stores where you have a plan, you sign a lease, you work with the architects, the permitting agencies, you start building, you've got a general contract, you're doing all the stuff, right? And then You think they've done all the work and you're not like a general contractor, you just run bagel shops, you're a franchisee, right? You're not like you expect them to do a job and the fire marshal comes in to do the fire walk and he walks straight to your electrical panel and he opens it and the electrician never labeled it.
Aaron: Plastic stickers and your opening is moved by two weeks minimum. It's crazy. Yeah.
Jeff Perera: Done. Yeah. Cause then you gotta f get in touch with the G C to get the sub who's the electrician to come back out to label it, who probably forgot what all the stuff was. And so yeah, but
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: the stars and the moon are aligning and bagel runs are gonna begin opening again soon. I'm really excited.
Aaron: Which really for y you know, you and and you know, the training team and the launch team and all that stuff becomes very busy days. Like you guys you guys are essentially I don't know what the comparison is, somewhere between Rockstars touring and like I don't know, like, you know, homeland you know, disaster recovery, somewhere on that spectrum.
Jeff Perera: Okay. So I'll take a rock star any day, that's pretty awesome. yeah.
Aaron: Yeah. But you know a lot of the job is probably more like disaster zoners recovery coming in and like when you all of a sudden have a new bagel shop and you've got tons of people in that first experience, it's it's it we we should say we don't we call them soft launches. It's debatable how soft that launch really is. so you're going
Jeff Perera: They rarely s they're rarely soft opening. Yeah, they're rarely soft.
Aaron: from zero to sixty. That's a lot for a new franchisee that's just getting off the ground.
Jeff Perera: Yeah, so let's break it down because I think this'll be excuse me. Let's break it down because I think this'll be interesting for our, you know, listeners that we go into a new store opening, someone from the training team or myself shows up early like Sunday afternoon before the week of opening. We dial in the big old rolling machine, we roll a few batches of dough, we have that machine ready and those few batches that we rolled we'll use for like test baking the next day because that Monday we start training the team. Monday and Tuesday are full blown training days. We are spending all sorts of time with employees who are brand new to the business.
Aaron: Yeah. First day first days.
Jeff Perera: Like actual day one and day two, yeah.
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: And then Wednesday, we open the door. We just say, Come on in. Let's test these folks with live action because it's really the best way to learn. But
Aaron: Yeah. Is this insane? We don't know. We don't know. Maybe.
Jeff Perera: it's the best way to learn, you know, you you can only make so many fake cinnamon vanilla lattes. You can only
Aaron: It's true. It's true.
Jeff Perera: bake so many fake bagels before you really need the system to start driving your behaviors and that way you can guide the team in those actions in a way that is real world and learning. So so what
Aaron: Yeah. And really the pressure of just knowing there's a customer out there. That I mean, you could even simulate that. It it wouldn't be any value, but you could simulate, all right, let's let's see if we can get through five dozens you know, five dozen bagels baked and in the racks and then we'll take out of the racks and we'll pack and you you could you could simulate everything to the end, but there's nothing like knowing there's an actual customer at the end of the line.
Jeff Perera: Having a having a real human staring at you over the glass changes everything. yeah. I mean they're like right up on it too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aaron: Which happens at openings, you know, when you're when the whole town's lined up at the door. Yeah.
Jeff Perera: so we do that on Wednesday, Thursday, and then Friday is traditionally grand opening. We
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: we try some different things. I think the next door that's gonna be opening is going to open its quiet opening week. And just kind of do business and then plan to market a grand opening a few weeks down the road. Which I think is a a fun new strategy. Give them a real I don't know. Give them a chance to kinda get their feet underneath them before it gets busy. listen, our social media landscape is so tightly knit in the bagel world that new bagel shop opens, I promise you that
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: every Facebook group in that city is gonna pop off and there's gonna be nothing soft about the weekend.
Aaron: It it's hard to purposely do a soft launch. I but you bring up a good point that I think is worth highlighting too, that there's really there's a lot of facets. It's there's a lot of pieces go into a successful opening and it's not just, hey, swing the door open. And sometimes it is. Sometimes whether it's the the walkthrough flow that you have at that location, or if you've just had a lot of hype, you know, there's just been good sort of buzz around coming to town. But Targeted, focused marketing is a huge difference maker. And we've proven that time and time again, just that, hey, as we sort of strategically target that that marketing push relative to when we want it to land, like that's not that's not accidental. A lot of thought and a lot of craft goes into to doing that. And like you said, we've played with it to see when, you know, when works best.
Jeff Perera: Yeah, and we have okay, so the marketing team activates right at the exact moment that certificate boxy is granted because they gotta get that machine turning, right? So they get going
Aaron: Yeah, they're building.
Jeff Perera: three maybe h ideally three weeks before like grand opening. The training teams also engage at that point because they gotta start planning and kinda fit into this jigsaw puzzle of a a training calendar. It's like the least solid calendar that anyone has because those dates are constantly moving, right? So yeah, that's that's fair.
Aaron: Calendar's generous as a statement, as a label.
Jeff Perera: That's fair. It it's they're they're putting this puzzle together where they have to layer in all of these different components because the full training team and full support of JBR comes out to a a new franchisee's first opening. When We've got three of them stacked. It's it gets really difficult to figure out who goes where and the bandwidth starts to to narrow. And so you've really got to be planful. and then the ops team is right there side by side running along with the the training team trying to figure out,
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: okay, well we're back in the weekend after opening. We wanna make sure it kinda runs still smoothly, give that franchisee that level of support in that store to make sure that they have not only just a successful opening weekend, but great guest experience kind of in that second, potentially into that third weekend as well. So there's a lot happening and I don't even want to think about what like Danielle's doing with supply chain and trying to make that magic happen. So
Aaron: Well, it's a curious thing with with all these pieces because i it it's so easy and I'll I'll put myself in the the group of the uninitiated for these sorts of things coming into it. So it's very easy to overlook all the things that have to happen behind the scenes and and you just like, we've got to open, obviously it's gonna be busy, so we have to make sure we serve the customer and s you know we want a great experience and you know, we're shaking out all of our our systems and employees are getting used to to you know what they have to do in the job roles, but even aside from that, it's just a s it's a very large scale of things that just need to get done. And I know one thing that always sort of surprised me when we opened all of our corporate stores. And I think that was an advantage is that we opened a half dozen corporate stores first, just us. And it was I mean, God, we have a whole cast of stories on that, you know, just just would open 'cause we didn't have anybody else. It was just us. It's like, hey dev team, let's go in and help open the store. Let's see what Let's see what we need to do. But but what was really struck me is just something as simple as hey, we've just shipped from our warehouses, from Amazon, from where all these places, the store has received everything that it needs to run. And then you look, and there's just hundreds of boxes everywhere. And just
Jeff Perera: Yeah.
Aaron: the sheer to the point where you're navigating through like a canyon of boxes, you know, that everything you gotta push stuff to the side. And just the sheer fact of opening boxes. unpackaging everything from cup holders to knives to bowls to shelving units. That takes days to do.
Jeff Perera: It's a mountain. It is a mountain of packages and
Aaron: It's a mountain. But that's what opening is. it's a hundred little unknown things.
Jeff Perera: We've gotten a lot better from the days of the corporate stores, where now some of that is coming in consolidated on one palette, so at least it's in Yeah. Is
Aaron: nice. You can break it down in sequence? That's cool.
Jeff Perera: it like it's still a mountain of stuff, but it's at least a organized mountain. Yeah.
Aaron: It's right. It's a six it's well designed mountain.
Jeff Perera: There's still some odds and ends that come in that you have to like manage through. But the the bulk of the smallwares assortment comes in, yeah, in the store. franchisee and some of their team usually get in there and they start setting that up and, you know, we'll help them finish it as we wrap into that first week. But
Aaron: Yeah, it takes time.
Jeff Perera: it takes time. Yeah, that's a that's a huge undertaking. yeah, there's probably like three episodes we just talk about like each of the new store openings. They were so much fun. I
Aaron: I think I think we'll have to earmark that because I think actually having we'll have to bring some folks in. And it'll just be
Jeff Perera: I I
Aaron: it could just be a horror stories. We'll have to prep everybody ahead of time. Like think of your best horror stories and we can just have a horror stories episode.
Jeff Perera: I could just like I'm I'm thinking in my like I'm thinking back to early twenty twenty four and we've launched the app. Yeah, it's a lifetime ago. We launched
Aaron: Lifetime ago.
Jeff Perera: the app. You know, it's you, Burr, and Josh, I think, at that point. There might be one more person. Yeah, for the team. I
Aaron: For the team? Yeah, no, I think it was just us.
Jeff Perera: think it's just the three of you. And it's like, yeah, we've gotta you know make sure a complete like POS software in store thing is operating. Plus we have this customer mobile app which is getting ten to fifteen thousand new users like a month. It's like growing constantly. And it's like, hey, but pause all that, come to this physical location and help us do some like low voltage stuff connecting printers and making sure the Wi-Fi works. Cause there was
Aaron: Yep. Yep. Yep.
Jeff Perera: nobody. There was just there wasn't anyone. It was it really was just us. It was Danielle and I building like shelving units to put small wares on.
Aaron: But I'll say that I think that was just kind of sort of commenting on the journey and thinking about it, I think that was a super important moment. And I would encourage anybody going through a similar journey of building a brand, any brand, but honestly a restaurant brand especially It it would have been so easy to skip over that part and just miss a lot of the learnings and a lot of the empathy and just a just a lot of the good value that comes out of going through that experience. I know for me personally it was not surprisingly our job to set up all the the tech in every store.
Jeff Perera: Yeah.
Aaron: And we have you know, our software runs on just simple iPads and but there is eight iPads per store. And we're opening two and three stores a month, sort of in that little run. And there was a point where I think I had personally powered on and configured and updated like forty iPads, which you know doesn't
Jeff Perera: Yeah.
Aaron: sound like a lot until you've put your hands on forty devices in a row,
Jeff Perera: Mm-hmm.
Aaron: or you know, or across like a four or five week period, and it's a lot. It's a lot. But that's as people that are helping stores open. And now that we're further and we're not doing that stuff anymore, we're helping franchisees do this, it's much easier to be like, This is hard. Here's here's how we're
Jeff Perera: Yeah.
Aaron: gonna help you get through this because we've done it, it's hard, and here's how we can optimize for you. And I think it's an important step.
Jeff Perera: To your point there is like a bit of empathy you feel for the experience that they're going through. you
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: know, I think about our celebration opening, we it's this craziest. It's like we were waiting for final fire walkthrough because they had to It's like you know, it's like in a building with other shops, right? So all of the fire alarms are connected to each of them so that they would go off in sequence or whatever and like I don't know how it works, but whatever, like they had to fix that. So they fixed that. And like they did like a pre walk before the official walk because the G C knew like the guy or whatever and he's like, man, he's like you probably can't have any of this stuff in here for the For the official walk tomorrow. And by all this stuff, I mean like a fully set up store ready to go. yeah.
Aaron: really? I didn't know that.
Jeff Perera: yeah. So we rented a U-Haul truck, we backed it onto the sidewalk right in front of the store, pulled the ramp like right
Aaron: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeff Perera: into the door, and just unloaded the entire store into a U-Haul for the fire inspection, parked
Aaron: Parked it, locked it.
Jeff Perera: it, locked it, fire inspection came through, and then we just reloaded the U-Haul right back into the store.
Aaron: Like God. Hey, that's great though, 'cause the mileage on that U Haul was great. Zero mile trip.
Jeff Perera: Solo. Like, yeah, whatever the distance from the U Haul to the it was so close. Yeah. But but when you have those experiences, but like having
Aaron: That's the kind of stuff. Yeah.
Jeff Perera: those experiences and like being able to look at a franchisee and say, Listen, I know this part's gonna be hard. This is something's gonna happen. And like, hey, before you come out for the final inspection, I wouldn't like and we actually don't send that stuff now until after because now we're like, Don't even have it in there. Yeah.
Aaron: 'Cause we've learned. Yeah.
Jeff Perera: You know. So it's a it's a fun experience, it's stressful, and it's also the time where Operators flip over the skill set that they've been using for the previous like nine months. So the journey of a franchisee is onboarding with Jeff Spagel run, sign your franchise agreement, go look for property. You're you know, suddenly you're like a a real estate prospector trying to find a place to sign a lease for a building to in a building to like open a store. You do that and then you're in construction meetings and you're talking about mechanical drawings and plumbing and all this stuff that you're probably consuming is most likely new to you. You build a store, you're following up with the contractor on a daily weekly basis, and then suddenly it's like, here's the keys. Bye. You're you flip this like totally
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: flip it right over to this situation where you're now running the bagel store and all the stuff you've been doing for the previous, I don't know, six, nine months is gone. Doesn't
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: matter. It just happened and now you run a store. So it's a it's a bit of a mindset switch as well.
Aaron: And next thing you know it's why is my slicer making this noise? And
Jeff Perera: My sink leaks. I can't get my yeah. the
Aaron: With six weeks, but yeah.
Jeff Perera: add so many.
Aaron: But I will say again, that's another thing that that operating our group of stores early and for a solid period of time before we really started to scale the, you know, because there's sales pipeline and all that stuff. So before franchisees really came on and scale, we'd already run a store group and and lived through
Jeff Perera: Yeah.
Aaron: all these pains and another sort of learning that that you know kind of came out of it a little more organically, but you know, our official, unofficial sort of community of owner operators GMs, which was originally just our you know, it was our Slack sort of community of our own GMs and our own stores. It was just easy for us to talk daily with them through that mechanism. And then as soon as we started opening a franchise store, it's like, yeah, just throw them in. And it's great because now it's a self-service sort of community. So when you're like, hey, I see I see this stuff all the time. Like on a weekend you'll see a post of that group like, hey you know, again, the the belt on my dough roller is acting weird. You know, what did I do? And then some three other stores jump in and there's a conversation. And it doesn't I wouldn't say it doesn't require us because we're obviously always there and and present with that. But sometimes that things can be weird enough or insular enough that, you know, maybe only one other store's had this problem. And that person's there and they can chime in quickly. And that's just
Jeff Perera: Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron: super great. You know, we we learn that organically.
Jeff Perera: Yeah, it is a neat it's a neat like side effect of something that you know that we intended to to set out to do. Which was really
Aaron: No, not at all. Yeah.
Jeff Perera: great. Yeah. Alright, so news stores are on the docket. We're opening Cumming, Georgia. So if you're not familiar with where that is, it's like northeast Atlanta suburb. Plantation in South Florida's gonna open.
Aaron: More South Florida, they've been on fire recently.
Jeff Perera: We have Oldsmar, Florida, which is Tampa St. Pete, Tampa Clearwater St. Pete Market. I don't really know where on the map is, but it's Oldsmar. I guess you look it up if you're super interested, if you live in that area. I think we also have another South Florida store. Cooper City is gonna open. And then we're looking at our first Indiana store open this year. So Indianapolis will open, which is really exciting. I don't know if I lost you, Aaron, can you hear me? O the woes of the pod. Hmm. I lost Aaron. he's gone. Okay. Well, Aaron's gone, We'll give him a second to see if he gets back in. But new stores are on the new stores are on the docket. We've got a lot coming. We're super excited and we can't wait to see you at one soon. Alright, so it looks like Aaron's got technical difficulties. So that's gonna be a wrap for this week's episode. Bake Fresh, bring joy, build community. See you next time. Bye.
Aaron: i'm aaron
Jeff Perera: And today we're talking about what's hot at Jeff's Bagel Run. And this week, Aaron, you know what's really hot is new store openings. They are kicking back up and I couldn't be more excited.
Aaron: That's that's always a good thing in this business of ours. I don't that's that's always gonna rank high on the the what's hot meter. news stores are great.
Jeff Perera: Yeah, I think like new store openings, new bagels of the day Not I don't know what comes third. New new app features. That could be third. Sure. Yeah.
Aaron: Yeah, I'll take it.
Jeff Perera: But new store openings are sort of just filling my inbox and giving me and Danielle and probably the ops team and trainings team a little bit of anxiety. But they are coming in now fast and furious. We're getting stick of it's like occupancy, getting health permits passed. It's it's happening. It's happening.
Aaron: Well, it's there's It's and it never happens the way that you want it. It's from what I've learned, and again, you know, software is the least in the real world sort of field. Like we don't really have to exist in the real world and the constraints of schedules and time and and people from like an external standpoint, right? We kinda control our own world. So it's always been really surprising to me as as I've joined done this over the last couple of years that you just can't really predict when these stories are gonna come in. It's just one bad, you know, one Honri certif you know, fire certification reviewer or something like that. It blows you out by two weeks. You know, you just you know, or you know, a gas line that somebody hits with a hammer. It just it's just some random stuff and it's just such an invariable and it's feast and famine it seems like. Either either it's quiet or you've got more than you could handle. And you just gotta sort of deal with it and go.
Jeff Perera: Yeah, and so when you're thinking about construction, a similar situation is taking place. you've got a bunch of stores where you have a plan, you sign a lease, you work with the architects, the permitting agencies, you start building, you've got a general contract, you're doing all the stuff, right? And then You think they've done all the work and you're not like a general contractor, you just run bagel shops, you're a franchisee, right? You're not like you expect them to do a job and the fire marshal comes in to do the fire walk and he walks straight to your electrical panel and he opens it and the electrician never labeled it.
Aaron: Plastic stickers and your opening is moved by two weeks minimum. It's crazy. Yeah.
Jeff Perera: Done. Yeah. Cause then you gotta f get in touch with the G C to get the sub who's the electrician to come back out to label it, who probably forgot what all the stuff was. And so yeah, but
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: the stars and the moon are aligning and bagel runs are gonna begin opening again soon. I'm really excited.
Aaron: Which really for y you know, you and and you know, the training team and the launch team and all that stuff becomes very busy days. Like you guys you guys are essentially I don't know what the comparison is, somewhere between Rockstars touring and like I don't know, like, you know, homeland you know, disaster recovery, somewhere on that spectrum.
Jeff Perera: Okay. So I'll take a rock star any day, that's pretty awesome. yeah.
Aaron: Yeah. But you know a lot of the job is probably more like disaster zoners recovery coming in and like when you all of a sudden have a new bagel shop and you've got tons of people in that first experience, it's it's it we we should say we don't we call them soft launches. It's debatable how soft that launch really is. so you're going
Jeff Perera: They rarely s they're rarely soft opening. Yeah, they're rarely soft.
Aaron: from zero to sixty. That's a lot for a new franchisee that's just getting off the ground.
Jeff Perera: Yeah, so let's break it down because I think this'll be excuse me. Let's break it down because I think this'll be interesting for our, you know, listeners that we go into a new store opening, someone from the training team or myself shows up early like Sunday afternoon before the week of opening. We dial in the big old rolling machine, we roll a few batches of dough, we have that machine ready and those few batches that we rolled we'll use for like test baking the next day because that Monday we start training the team. Monday and Tuesday are full blown training days. We are spending all sorts of time with employees who are brand new to the business.
Aaron: Yeah. First day first days.
Jeff Perera: Like actual day one and day two, yeah.
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: And then Wednesday, we open the door. We just say, Come on in. Let's test these folks with live action because it's really the best way to learn. But
Aaron: Yeah. Is this insane? We don't know. We don't know. Maybe.
Jeff Perera: it's the best way to learn, you know, you you can only make so many fake cinnamon vanilla lattes. You can only
Aaron: It's true. It's true.
Jeff Perera: bake so many fake bagels before you really need the system to start driving your behaviors and that way you can guide the team in those actions in a way that is real world and learning. So so what
Aaron: Yeah. And really the pressure of just knowing there's a customer out there. That I mean, you could even simulate that. It it wouldn't be any value, but you could simulate, all right, let's let's see if we can get through five dozens you know, five dozen bagels baked and in the racks and then we'll take out of the racks and we'll pack and you you could you could simulate everything to the end, but there's nothing like knowing there's an actual customer at the end of the line.
Jeff Perera: Having a having a real human staring at you over the glass changes everything. yeah. I mean they're like right up on it too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aaron: Which happens at openings, you know, when you're when the whole town's lined up at the door. Yeah.
Jeff Perera: so we do that on Wednesday, Thursday, and then Friday is traditionally grand opening. We
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: we try some different things. I think the next door that's gonna be opening is going to open its quiet opening week. And just kind of do business and then plan to market a grand opening a few weeks down the road. Which I think is a a fun new strategy. Give them a real I don't know. Give them a chance to kinda get their feet underneath them before it gets busy. listen, our social media landscape is so tightly knit in the bagel world that new bagel shop opens, I promise you that
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: every Facebook group in that city is gonna pop off and there's gonna be nothing soft about the weekend.
Aaron: It it's hard to purposely do a soft launch. I but you bring up a good point that I think is worth highlighting too, that there's really there's a lot of facets. It's there's a lot of pieces go into a successful opening and it's not just, hey, swing the door open. And sometimes it is. Sometimes whether it's the the walkthrough flow that you have at that location, or if you've just had a lot of hype, you know, there's just been good sort of buzz around coming to town. But Targeted, focused marketing is a huge difference maker. And we've proven that time and time again, just that, hey, as we sort of strategically target that that marketing push relative to when we want it to land, like that's not that's not accidental. A lot of thought and a lot of craft goes into to doing that. And like you said, we've played with it to see when, you know, when works best.
Jeff Perera: Yeah, and we have okay, so the marketing team activates right at the exact moment that certificate boxy is granted because they gotta get that machine turning, right? So they get going
Aaron: Yeah, they're building.
Jeff Perera: three maybe h ideally three weeks before like grand opening. The training teams also engage at that point because they gotta start planning and kinda fit into this jigsaw puzzle of a a training calendar. It's like the least solid calendar that anyone has because those dates are constantly moving, right? So yeah, that's that's fair.
Aaron: Calendar's generous as a statement, as a label.
Jeff Perera: That's fair. It it's they're they're putting this puzzle together where they have to layer in all of these different components because the full training team and full support of JBR comes out to a a new franchisee's first opening. When We've got three of them stacked. It's it gets really difficult to figure out who goes where and the bandwidth starts to to narrow. And so you've really got to be planful. and then the ops team is right there side by side running along with the the training team trying to figure out,
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: okay, well we're back in the weekend after opening. We wanna make sure it kinda runs still smoothly, give that franchisee that level of support in that store to make sure that they have not only just a successful opening weekend, but great guest experience kind of in that second, potentially into that third weekend as well. So there's a lot happening and I don't even want to think about what like Danielle's doing with supply chain and trying to make that magic happen. So
Aaron: Well, it's a curious thing with with all these pieces because i it it's so easy and I'll I'll put myself in the the group of the uninitiated for these sorts of things coming into it. So it's very easy to overlook all the things that have to happen behind the scenes and and you just like, we've got to open, obviously it's gonna be busy, so we have to make sure we serve the customer and s you know we want a great experience and you know, we're shaking out all of our our systems and employees are getting used to to you know what they have to do in the job roles, but even aside from that, it's just a s it's a very large scale of things that just need to get done. And I know one thing that always sort of surprised me when we opened all of our corporate stores. And I think that was an advantage is that we opened a half dozen corporate stores first, just us. And it was I mean, God, we have a whole cast of stories on that, you know, just just would open 'cause we didn't have anybody else. It was just us. It's like, hey dev team, let's go in and help open the store. Let's see what Let's see what we need to do. But but what was really struck me is just something as simple as hey, we've just shipped from our warehouses, from Amazon, from where all these places, the store has received everything that it needs to run. And then you look, and there's just hundreds of boxes everywhere. And just
Jeff Perera: Yeah.
Aaron: the sheer to the point where you're navigating through like a canyon of boxes, you know, that everything you gotta push stuff to the side. And just the sheer fact of opening boxes. unpackaging everything from cup holders to knives to bowls to shelving units. That takes days to do.
Jeff Perera: It's a mountain. It is a mountain of packages and
Aaron: It's a mountain. But that's what opening is. it's a hundred little unknown things.
Jeff Perera: We've gotten a lot better from the days of the corporate stores, where now some of that is coming in consolidated on one palette, so at least it's in Yeah. Is
Aaron: nice. You can break it down in sequence? That's cool.
Jeff Perera: it like it's still a mountain of stuff, but it's at least a organized mountain. Yeah.
Aaron: It's right. It's a six it's well designed mountain.
Jeff Perera: There's still some odds and ends that come in that you have to like manage through. But the the bulk of the smallwares assortment comes in, yeah, in the store. franchisee and some of their team usually get in there and they start setting that up and, you know, we'll help them finish it as we wrap into that first week. But
Aaron: Yeah, it takes time.
Jeff Perera: it takes time. Yeah, that's a that's a huge undertaking. yeah, there's probably like three episodes we just talk about like each of the new store openings. They were so much fun. I
Aaron: I think I think we'll have to earmark that because I think actually having we'll have to bring some folks in. And it'll just be
Jeff Perera: I I
Aaron: it could just be a horror stories. We'll have to prep everybody ahead of time. Like think of your best horror stories and we can just have a horror stories episode.
Jeff Perera: I could just like I'm I'm thinking in my like I'm thinking back to early twenty twenty four and we've launched the app. Yeah, it's a lifetime ago. We launched
Aaron: Lifetime ago.
Jeff Perera: the app. You know, it's you, Burr, and Josh, I think, at that point. There might be one more person. Yeah, for the team. I
Aaron: For the team? Yeah, no, I think it was just us.
Jeff Perera: think it's just the three of you. And it's like, yeah, we've gotta you know make sure a complete like POS software in store thing is operating. Plus we have this customer mobile app which is getting ten to fifteen thousand new users like a month. It's like growing constantly. And it's like, hey, but pause all that, come to this physical location and help us do some like low voltage stuff connecting printers and making sure the Wi-Fi works. Cause there was
Aaron: Yep. Yep. Yep.
Jeff Perera: nobody. There was just there wasn't anyone. It was it really was just us. It was Danielle and I building like shelving units to put small wares on.
Aaron: But I'll say that I think that was just kind of sort of commenting on the journey and thinking about it, I think that was a super important moment. And I would encourage anybody going through a similar journey of building a brand, any brand, but honestly a restaurant brand especially It it would have been so easy to skip over that part and just miss a lot of the learnings and a lot of the empathy and just a just a lot of the good value that comes out of going through that experience. I know for me personally it was not surprisingly our job to set up all the the tech in every store.
Jeff Perera: Yeah.
Aaron: And we have you know, our software runs on just simple iPads and but there is eight iPads per store. And we're opening two and three stores a month, sort of in that little run. And there was a point where I think I had personally powered on and configured and updated like forty iPads, which you know doesn't
Jeff Perera: Yeah.
Aaron: sound like a lot until you've put your hands on forty devices in a row,
Jeff Perera: Mm-hmm.
Aaron: or you know, or across like a four or five week period, and it's a lot. It's a lot. But that's as people that are helping stores open. And now that we're further and we're not doing that stuff anymore, we're helping franchisees do this, it's much easier to be like, This is hard. Here's here's how we're
Jeff Perera: Yeah.
Aaron: gonna help you get through this because we've done it, it's hard, and here's how we can optimize for you. And I think it's an important step.
Jeff Perera: To your point there is like a bit of empathy you feel for the experience that they're going through. you
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: know, I think about our celebration opening, we it's this craziest. It's like we were waiting for final fire walkthrough because they had to It's like you know, it's like in a building with other shops, right? So all of the fire alarms are connected to each of them so that they would go off in sequence or whatever and like I don't know how it works, but whatever, like they had to fix that. So they fixed that. And like they did like a pre walk before the official walk because the G C knew like the guy or whatever and he's like, man, he's like you probably can't have any of this stuff in here for the For the official walk tomorrow. And by all this stuff, I mean like a fully set up store ready to go. yeah.
Aaron: really? I didn't know that.
Jeff Perera: yeah. So we rented a U-Haul truck, we backed it onto the sidewalk right in front of the store, pulled the ramp like right
Aaron: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeff Perera: into the door, and just unloaded the entire store into a U-Haul for the fire inspection, parked
Aaron: Parked it, locked it.
Jeff Perera: it, locked it, fire inspection came through, and then we just reloaded the U-Haul right back into the store.
Aaron: Like God. Hey, that's great though, 'cause the mileage on that U Haul was great. Zero mile trip.
Jeff Perera: Solo. Like, yeah, whatever the distance from the U Haul to the it was so close. Yeah. But but when you have those experiences, but like having
Aaron: That's the kind of stuff. Yeah.
Jeff Perera: those experiences and like being able to look at a franchisee and say, Listen, I know this part's gonna be hard. This is something's gonna happen. And like, hey, before you come out for the final inspection, I wouldn't like and we actually don't send that stuff now until after because now we're like, Don't even have it in there. Yeah.
Aaron: 'Cause we've learned. Yeah.
Jeff Perera: You know. So it's a it's a fun experience, it's stressful, and it's also the time where Operators flip over the skill set that they've been using for the previous like nine months. So the journey of a franchisee is onboarding with Jeff Spagel run, sign your franchise agreement, go look for property. You're you know, suddenly you're like a a real estate prospector trying to find a place to sign a lease for a building to in a building to like open a store. You do that and then you're in construction meetings and you're talking about mechanical drawings and plumbing and all this stuff that you're probably consuming is most likely new to you. You build a store, you're following up with the contractor on a daily weekly basis, and then suddenly it's like, here's the keys. Bye. You're you flip this like totally
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: flip it right over to this situation where you're now running the bagel store and all the stuff you've been doing for the previous, I don't know, six, nine months is gone. Doesn't
Aaron: Yeah.
Jeff Perera: matter. It just happened and now you run a store. So it's a it's a bit of a mindset switch as well.
Aaron: And next thing you know it's why is my slicer making this noise? And
Jeff Perera: My sink leaks. I can't get my yeah. the
Aaron: With six weeks, but yeah.
Jeff Perera: add so many.
Aaron: But I will say again, that's another thing that that operating our group of stores early and for a solid period of time before we really started to scale the, you know, because there's sales pipeline and all that stuff. So before franchisees really came on and scale, we'd already run a store group and and lived through
Jeff Perera: Yeah.
Aaron: all these pains and another sort of learning that that you know kind of came out of it a little more organically, but you know, our official, unofficial sort of community of owner operators GMs, which was originally just our you know, it was our Slack sort of community of our own GMs and our own stores. It was just easy for us to talk daily with them through that mechanism. And then as soon as we started opening a franchise store, it's like, yeah, just throw them in. And it's great because now it's a self-service sort of community. So when you're like, hey, I see I see this stuff all the time. Like on a weekend you'll see a post of that group like, hey you know, again, the the belt on my dough roller is acting weird. You know, what did I do? And then some three other stores jump in and there's a conversation. And it doesn't I wouldn't say it doesn't require us because we're obviously always there and and present with that. But sometimes that things can be weird enough or insular enough that, you know, maybe only one other store's had this problem. And that person's there and they can chime in quickly. And that's just
Jeff Perera: Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron: super great. You know, we we learn that organically.
Jeff Perera: Yeah, it is a neat it's a neat like side effect of something that you know that we intended to to set out to do. Which was really
Aaron: No, not at all. Yeah.
Jeff Perera: great. Yeah. Alright, so news stores are on the docket. We're opening Cumming, Georgia. So if you're not familiar with where that is, it's like northeast Atlanta suburb. Plantation in South Florida's gonna open.
Aaron: More South Florida, they've been on fire recently.
Jeff Perera: We have Oldsmar, Florida, which is Tampa St. Pete, Tampa Clearwater St. Pete Market. I don't really know where on the map is, but it's Oldsmar. I guess you look it up if you're super interested, if you live in that area. I think we also have another South Florida store. Cooper City is gonna open. And then we're looking at our first Indiana store open this year. So Indianapolis will open, which is really exciting. I don't know if I lost you, Aaron, can you hear me? O the woes of the pod. Hmm. I lost Aaron. he's gone. Okay. Well, Aaron's gone, We'll give him a second to see if he gets back in. But new stores are on the new stores are on the docket. We've got a lot coming. We're super excited and we can't wait to see you at one soon. Alright, so it looks like Aaron's got technical difficulties. So that's gonna be a wrap for this week's episode. Bake Fresh, bring joy, build community. See you next time. Bye.
