0:00:03 Taylor Wilson: Hey, hey, hey, all you lovely people out there.
0:00:07 Taylor Wilson: I know you’ve got a lot going.
0:00:08 Taylor Wilson: On in your day, and you have.
0:00:10 Taylor Wilson: Big dreams for your brand.
0:00:12 Taylor Wilson: Are you ready to talk some shizzle and learn some shizzle from entrepreneurs, leaders, change makers, and overall interesting people who like to shake things up? I’m your host, Taylor Wilson, founder of Creative shizzle, and I’m stoked to bring you a fresh episode of Talking shizzle today. This show is all about helping you think differently so that you could grow.
0:00:39 Taylor Wilson: Your business or your cause.
0:00:42 Taylor Wilson: Check us out on the web at creativeshizzle.com now let’s get into it and talk some shizzle.
0:00:51 Taylor Wilson: What’s up, folks? We’re here with a new episode of Talking Shizzle, and I’m super excited to talk about food today with Adam Reed. He is the VP of marketing at Dilez Quesadillas.
0:01:02 Adam Reed: You said it right.
0:01:03 Taylor Wilson: I said it, right, right?
0:01:05 Adam Reed: Yeah, yeah. A lot of people don’t.
0:01:06 Taylor Wilson: Well, I’m from Texas, and I’ve eaten a lot of quesadillas, you know, and it’s like quesadilla. I mean, it takes me back to Napoleon Dynamite every single time, if I’m being really honest.
0:01:16 Adam Reed: Well, that’s how it started.
0:01:17 Taylor Wilson: Is it? Yeah, I figured it was. Come on.
0:01:20 Adam Reed: Yeah. So the founder was in college and he wanted a quesadilla restaurant. He’s actually really pretty enamored with Chipotle. So Chipotle had just opened in Austin, University of Texas. And he was like, man, this is great. But his. His like, go to late night food and go to food in college quesadillas and figuring out new and unique recipes. So he was kind of working on his master plan of, you know, quesadilla domination. And they were trying to figure out what the name was going to be, and they saw Napoleon Dynamite. It just so happened that that came out and it was a cult classic. And he’s like, dillas. That’s exactly it.
0:01:56 Adam Reed: From that line where she was like. Or he was like, get yourself a day in quesadilla. Or Quesadilla.
0:02:01 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, Quesadilla. I love it, though. Okay, so wait, Chipotle started in Austin?
0:02:07 Adam Reed: No, no, no. It had just come to Austin. Okay. I started in Denver.
0:02:11 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, I thought so. Okay, so let’s talk about. So you’ve been in the restaurant marketing industry for quite a while, and I’m probably get this wrong fast. Not fast food.
0:02:23 Adam Reed: I’m thinking casual.
0:02:25 Taylor Wilson: Fast casual.
0:02:26 Adam Reed: That’s usr. They kind of meld together.
0:02:29 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. So Tell us a little bit first, like intro yourselves, kind of like give us a vibe for your experience and what you’ve done. And then I want to get into some trends in the fast casual and just restaurant industry when it comes to marketing in general.
0:02:42 Adam Reed: Well, I never like anticipated that I would have a career in restaurants or restaurant marketing. I actually just was really looking for, you know, a good solid footing in business. So my actually my first job out of I went to University of Texas at Austin. I went to the University of Texas at Dallas and got an MBA there. My first job out of that was with IBM and I was doing hardware and software services, sales.
0:03:08 Adam Reed: And I had the great state of Wisconsin as my territory, which I went up once a quarter and drove through the cold of the farmland of Wisconsin and called on clients in the small and mid market territory. So I enjoyed the relationship side. I really disliked what I was selling. You know, I appreciate technology, but I didn’t really want to sell servers and software to CIOs and IT directors. So I kind of fell backwards in the restaurant industry. I had a girlfriend at the time and she’s like, you know, because I wanted to be in ultimately be in marketing, she said, you should go talk to my friend who is a marketing manager or a director of marketing for this brand, Chipotle.
0:03:49 Adam Reed: And I’d never been. And I went to Chipotle and I had it and I was like, man, I really don’t like it. And it was mainly because I got the wrong thing. I think I got like a burrito, but I got hot salsa on it and I’m not like a spicy person, but it just looked red. I was like, oh, that red salsa looks good. And they didn’t explain to me what it was. And my lips were on fire. And I was like, I don’t understand this place. But I got in touch with that girl and she told me what to get and I went back and I got it and it was great. And I was like, you know, I’m really interested in that role.
0:04:18 Adam Reed: And at IBM I was working in like a three by three cubicle space and calling on clients. It’s just not fun. And when I started interviewing with Chipotle, they had me do like an in restaurant experience. And I was dicing jalapenos in the back of the house at 7am and I had music just blaring in my face. I was like, man, this is great. This is exactly what I want to be doing. Because I was just out of that boxed in environment.
0:04:40 Adam Reed: So I Fell backwards into Chipotle, got that job, did local store marketing with them. And then that was kind of around when they were up and coming. They just went public, had a lot of locations, but they were really expanding into new territories. Was there for a few years and then also found Raising Canes by circumstance. That same girl who was my manager at the time, after I’d been there three or four years, said, well, let’s go meet for our annual meeting at this new place called Raising Cane’s.
0:05:09 Adam Reed: I was on this like health kick and I was like, oh, it’s fast food. I pulled up and I saw the drive thru. I was like, oh, this is fast food. I can’t eat. But walked in and I was just completely unique, completely different. They had only had about when I went there and tried it, probably 60 locations. And they just entered the Texas market. They were mainly out of Louisiana. And I just grabbed my resume off my apartment desk and walked over to their office, found out where their office was.
0:05:33 Adam Reed: I said, hey, look, this is a great restaurant concept. I would love to work here. At some point they’re like, we don’t have any marketing positions available. A year later they called me and I went to work for there. And I was there for 11 and a half years through explosive growth. I probably started at restaurant number 80 and when I left to come to dilla’s, close to 700 restaurants. So about 10x growth over about 11 and a half years.
0:05:57 Adam Reed: So I saw a lot change. And then also it was just a really great time for restaurants to grow. And then now I’m at Dilla’s. Dilla’s a startup and has 11 locations. And the founders are married and they’re great. They’re polar opposites. I could never, I don’t think work with my wife in a business like they work, but they works for them. They’re doing a great job. And Dilla’s case ideas just focuses on, you know, quesadillas is the hero.
0:06:22 Taylor Wilson: Only quesadillas. Like we’re not doing any tacos. No bowls, nothing.
0:06:27 Adam Reed: No tacos. You can get a salad. So you can make any Dilla salad. We do have side dishes like grilla fries, which is basically like really good cheese fries. It’s a little bit of an American sling on a quesadilla. So the recipes are all pretty American sounding. You know, we have some with like french fries and ground beef and bacon. And so they’re very kind of like indulgent, familiar recipes for quesadillas. Just using the quesadillas the vehicle.
0:06:54 Taylor Wilson: And you guys are only in Texas, are you? Texas and Louisiana.
0:06:58 Adam Reed: Texas. Louisiana, yeah. East Texas. There are other markets and we’re kind of hybrid growing. So franchise and company owned growth. So there are other franchise states that are available and we’ve got some interest primarily in the sec, if you will.
0:07:14 Taylor Wilson: Okay.
0:07:15 Adam Reed: Okay.
0:07:15 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. I think you and I talked about that when we first met. So my son, like, loves. So I don’t live in Texas anymore, but I grew up in Austin also went to UT like you. Maybe we were there around the same time. I don’t know. And so whenever I go back to Austin to see my parents, my brother, you know, like, all my family lives in Texas still. Raising canes is like top on the list for my kids.
0:07:38 Adam Reed: Oh, yeah.
0:07:38 Taylor Wilson: Oh, yeah. No, like, they’re literally like, they’ll talk to me for a month before the trip. Like, are we going to. Can we go to racing canes right after we get there? Like right after we land at the airport, I’m like, I got to get a car first. Yeah, okay.
0:07:53 Adam Reed: You know, but it’s a great business. It was. It was a great business to hop on board after Chipotle. Chipotle had a cult, like following. And then canes, after a while, really started harnessing that too. And I think a lot of it is how true they were to who they were. I mean, it’s a very authentic and genuine business. And then I also think a lot of that too, was the fact that they just delivered consistency in the product. You know, they kind of cornered that market. There were other chicken finger places.
0:08:25 Adam Reed: They’re just doing it better and really honing in on that one thing. And they didn’t get distracted by a lot.
0:08:31 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. Okay, so I wanted to ask you about that. So you, you started there when they had 80 stores and then were there all the way up until they had seven. So that’s massive growth. What were some of the things that you in marketing at a business that’s just growing like crazy like that that you saw helped to scale and grow the brand and then what were maybe some challenges that you experienced over those years?
0:08:58 Adam Reed: So I think I’ll start with what helped that business to grow. I think that operationally it was an operations driven business. So there are marketing driven businesses that, you know, really just try to eclipse year over year percentages off of ltos and releasing new product and, you know, kind of hopping on the latest thing. And typically from an operations perspective, that can pull the team in all sorts of different directions and Then the team can wind up churning and turning over and then that all yields to like a, you know, poor customer experience.
0:09:32 Adam Reed: And then there’s bad reputation and then it’s hard to like macro scale. And I think Chipotle too, both of them, Cane’s, when I came on board, did have franchisees, but they were strategically placed franchisees. They’re mostly north of the Mason Dixon line. And then most of the company owned restaurants were down south and Chipotle all company owned. So there was a lot of control over the operational performance of the restaurant.
0:09:57 Adam Reed: And also they knew that they had something that was a unique vehicle, that really there was space in the industry to capitalize upon it and make it something special. So those are the things that were done right from a marketing perspective. A lot of it was just leaning into what we’re really good at. What are our differentiators? When it was Chipotle, when I was at Chipotle, they had a sign that said gourmet burritos and tacos. It was a part of their signage. They also did a really good job. Chipotle did of kind of running away from the rest of the industry.
0:10:27 Adam Reed: They ran away from like, you know, a lot of the pricing stuff that was going on. They ran away from a lot of like the ltos are like, no. All we’re going to do and focus on is communicating the fact that we are gourmet burritos and tacos and Cane’s the exact same thing. All they really stuck into communicating was premium chicken tenderloins, fresh, never frozen. That was a huge deal. And quality chicken finger meals. That’s what we do, that’s what we offer to the customer. And we’re going to be the best at it.
0:10:57 Adam Reed: So typically, the brands that I’ve resonated with have had some sort of niche. Dilla’s is the same way. We’re going to focus in on quesadillas. We’re going to be the best at doing grilled to order quesadillas, crispy shell, gooey cheese, the best product we can find. And we’re really going to try and make that the driver. The marketing piece of it was really important, but it was really, how do you capitalize on the message? And marketing is a percentage of converting the number that you can get in front of, particularly in your core demographic.
0:11:29 Taylor Wilson: You know, yeah, I like to focus on the message. And then you also said something about consistency, like a really consistent product. I think that’s like what.
0:11:38 Adam Reed: That’s the hardest thing to do.
0:11:40 Taylor Wilson: It’s so hard.
0:11:42 Adam Reed: Yeah. It’s the hardest thing to do. I think Chipotle had that a little bit cornered because in a way, because, you know, the customer is watching it getting made in front of them.
0:11:49 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.
0:11:50 Adam Reed: You know, that’s to a benefit and also to a detriment.
0:11:53 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.
0:11:54 Adam Reed: Dependent upon who is making your food. Right. And also what the kitchen looks like. You have an exposed kitchen, you have exposed team, all that good stuff. And I think that Cane’s. When I walked into a Cane’s, it was like this little slivered window.
0:12:10 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. You don’t see much. It’s very secretive.
0:12:13 Adam Reed: Yeah, it was. When you see the product, you trust the product because you’re like, oh, that product looks really good. You know what I mean? And I think over time, Canes did a really good job at telling people what they were doing back there, you know?
0:12:27 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.
0:12:27 Adam Reed: All those kitchens are impeccably clean, but I think with Chipotle, it was obviously more exposed. They’ve become less exposed. I’ve noticed. You know, I’ll walk in and the grill’s right there, but there’s a big wall. Didn’t used to be that way. It was like, here’s the line, here’s the grill, here’s everything behind it and kind of see in the prep area. But, yeah, I mean, I think that the convenience part of it was huge for that timeframe. And I also think the communication of quality and how you did that. But, yeah, both of those concepts I’ve been very lucky to have gotten experience at, because they’re both absolute behemoths.
0:13:03 Adam Reed: And then Dilla’s has been great because I knew Kyle and Maggie going in. They’re also. Kyle was from Cane’s. I met him at Cane’s. He left Canes to do his quesadilla dream, and I hopped aboard that. And the challenges here, much different in a smaller business. But I’ve kind of been in all facets, you know, I’ve been in the small business, the emerging business, and the big one.
0:13:25 Taylor Wilson: Well, I’ll have to pick your brain sometime. You know, my dream is a coffee shop. I’ve got this whole big plan for coffee shops. So I’m going to come knocking on your door when I’m ready to do this.
0:13:34 Adam Reed: Let’s talk coffee. Let’s talk lattes. Flat whites. Yeah, just focus on the flat white only.
0:13:39 Taylor Wilson: Just. We’re flat white only.
0:13:41 Adam Reed: I like.
0:13:41 Taylor Wilson: Ooh, I like that.
0:13:42 Adam Reed: Yeah, There you go. Sugar.
0:13:45 Taylor Wilson: We’re not doing pumpkin spice.
0:13:47 Adam Reed: That’s right. Yeah. Straight to the point.
0:13:50 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, right, to the point. Okay, so let’s talk about. I want to ask you about the copycat problem in the restaurant business.
0:13:57 Adam Reed: Yeah.
0:13:58 Taylor Wilson: So many restaurants sort of seem to, like, recycle. Similar branding, menu styles, marketing tactics. How can people, like, stand out? And we talk. I feel like we get that. Got there a little bit talking about Canes and Chipotle. But what are some other things you’ve seen work really well and, like, restaurant brand, where you’re like, oh, they would just do this. Like, maybe they would take off.
0:14:22 Adam Reed: I think that what happens is, is that there’s a lot of distraction. So with the amount of restaurants that are in the marketplace and they’re all competing against each other, you. If you see a restaurant do something and they wind up grabbing a lot of shares, then the temptation is, you know, well, why didn’t we do that? Or how do we do that? How do we do that? But put a different spin on it? And then the copycat game kind of goes down the rabbit hole. And typically it dilutes itself as it continues to go down because, you know, you’re never going to do it as good as whoever did it first.
0:14:55 Adam Reed: And sometimes that stuff is a little bit like lightning in a bottle, because the reason is because the brand is just being very authentic to itself. I think where marketers kind of get hung up is they get mired in data. I think good marketing is 50% data and 50% gut. And I think that. I think that that kind of applies to everything. I think it applies to creative messaging. I think it applies in terms of, okay, well, I know who my core audience is and what they like.
0:15:19 Adam Reed: I need to be involved in that stuff, you know, And I think that there’s a problem sometimes in marketing departments where the data is. It’s more of a 70, 30 game or an 80, 20 game, and the data takes 80%. And then you kind of lose sight a little bit of the. What’s the core purpose of that business? You know, what do you really want? What are you really trying to do? And then also who you’re really trying to communicate with, and what are they like? And outside of that, what feels right?
0:15:50 Adam Reed: Is it cool? You know, use your gut on some of that stuff. And some of that can be risky, but I think that’s when there’s some magic that happens. There is some uncomfortableness in trying something or doing something different that kind of goes against the grain or goes the other direction. And I think that’s where marketing departments and even brands to A specific extent can. Can really make a leap.
0:16:18 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. What’s one that maybe you’ve seen that you think like, wow, that was cool that they went there.
0:16:24 Adam Reed: If I had to like really think about brands that have done really good things. I mean, I’m not a fast food person, but I think Taco Bell is pretty amazing in terms of their marketing. Like they did in 2019. They did a. They created like a hotel experience. Taco Bell hotel. I thought that was crazy because there are Taco Bell fans that just love the product. But I mean, they created an entire hotel around it.
0:16:46 Adam Reed: And the pillows were like hot sauce packets and they had a pool and they had floats that were hot sauce packets. And they did like great things for their guests and let them try new food items. And it was like a very viral thing. But it was also a. It was just really neat. I mean, I think a lot of it has to deal with your resources. You know, what resources do you have to put against things? Chipotle, when we were kind of like up and coming, like, it dates me a little bit, but I remember when every year they would do burrito and it was a big deal. You know, like it was like dress, dress like a burrito and coming in, get a free. And it was on Halloween and come in and get a free burrito, burrito bowl orders, order tacos or salad. And people would kind of take that to an extreme.
0:17:29 Adam Reed: It came. It became like a thing where there was. Sorry, no one dismissed. Sorry, I just got some sort of teams notification.
0:17:37 Taylor Wilson: I don’t know, you’re fine.
0:17:38 Adam Reed: Yeah. But it became a thing where people would come in and they would just wrap their pinky in foil and they were like, see, I dress as a burrito, so can I have a really. They kind of try and game it, but they would still get it. So it was a great way to like, you know, trial. And I also think getting people talking about your brand, especially if you have a cult worthy brand, those are the things that I’ve seen that have worked really, really well and have created a lot of excitement.
0:18:03 Taylor Wilson: Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about messaging. Like, let’s go a little deeper on messaging. You mentioned it before. Messaging that sticks. And let’s also talk a bit in that around this state of the world today. Like, what are you seeing in terms of like, it seems to me like based on our little bit of our offline conversation, fast casual restaurants are experiencing a little bit of a decline. How can people work around that and why is that happening?
0:18:35 Adam Reed: Right now, I think that the appeal of fast casual and QSR in the past, particularly through the 2010, 2019 era, was the price point. I mean, I think it was price point. And quality and convenience. Price point, quality and convenience. Those three things. Quality has maintained. But I do think as commodities have taken a lift, there have been some cuts around how do we make our, how do we still make a quality product but maybe cut some corners. So there’s some of that.
0:19:04 Adam Reed: I also think that there’s been some pricing. Everyone’s had to take price. So the industry, it’s really hard in a consumer facing industry where the consumer is feeling it in their pocketbooks, but the business is too, and the business still has to make money. And restaurants are already very like low margin business. And so they have to take price and they do the best that they can in order to take the price that makes the most sense.
0:19:29 Adam Reed: But now you’re losing frequency, you know. So I think the appeal recently, I think I was talking to you about Chili’s, why I think Chili’s is so brilliant was Chili’s essentially saw Chili’s had been through the biggest rut of any, I think casual dining. They’ve done two things recently. They’ve gone back to their core products and the things that make them really good. Kind of like the Chipotle or the Arcanes or whatever they had, they had core set menu items that made them like really, really great.
0:19:57 Adam Reed: So they really focused on that. And then the second thing they did is they recognized the pricing game was getting really tight. So QSR and fast casual had to continue to take price. And they kind of caught up with casual dining and they just basically said, hey, we can compete at that. So they put out that free for me deal for 10.99. It’s like $10.99 kind of a steal. And it’s almost better priced than most fast casual or qsr.
0:20:20 Adam Reed: So they really had started eating up some market share. And I think I talked to you also about how people are so discerning with their dollars now through social media. They’re able to cook more at home because recipes are easier and everyone’s throwing recipes out. So they’re gonna cook a one pot pasta and eat on that for two or three nights and then they’re gonna save their money up and go have like an experience on the weekends.
0:20:42 Adam Reed: So you see it through the week and you see it through how people are actually behaving when it comes to where they’re gonna put their money. So it’s made it a little bit of a challenge. I think trying to break out of that through messaging is again, really understanding who your core audience is and then being involved in what they’re involved in. Care about what they care about, particularly on a community, hyperlocal level.
0:21:05 Adam Reed: Be there for them in terms of that. Support the things that support their kids. Softball tournaments. And be there and make connections and then get them into your restaurant and then really deliver. I mean, the biggest thing is the delivery piece, really delivering on the experience. And that gets into operations, which is not my forte. But I will say that I’m probably more of a restaurant guy than I am a.
0:21:28 Adam Reed: I mean, I’m a marketer by trade, but I love restaurants and I love the full picture of them. And I think that’s kind of where it gets. You can get dangerous in messaging if you understand that all of this.
0:21:40 Taylor Wilson: It’s funny, I’m just like, thinking about personally too, my experience. I actually noticed Chili’s. We have. I mean, I live in a small town now in Boone, and there’s one Chili’s, one Chipotle. There’s like one of everything. There’s only one.
0:21:54 Adam Reed: No Dillas yet. No Dillas yet.
0:21:56 Taylor Wilson: There’s no Dillas yet. I hope I would eat there a lot. So the Chili’s was, like, basically dead. It was basically dying. And all of a sudden we’ve noticed it’s very busy there all the time now. And I think you’re right. We were commenting, like, trying to figure out why there was even like a 30 minute wait recently at Chili’s. And we were like, this place was about to shut down, like, you know, eight months ago.
0:22:21 Taylor Wilson: And now it’s like, booming. And I think it’s that thing they did bring back, that kind of stuff that I used to remember getting at Chili’s.
0:22:28 Adam Reed: I think that there’s a nostalgia going on in the country right now, too. And I think capitalizing on some of the nostalgia is really important. And Chili’s is nostalgic. I mean, they’ve been around for forever. So I even saw recently there were some influencers that were doing like. It was like, I just got this new hot reservation at one of the hottest restaurants in town. Come with me to Chili’s. This is really difficult to get in. And it was really funny because there’s so much of that in the influencer world. But they were applying it to Chili’s, and I thought that was really smart. It was basically making fun of that culture, but putting it in the Chili’s where they’re like, try this Presidente Margarita. It’s incredible.
0:23:08 Adam Reed: I hear they don’t make very many of these. I mean, it’s just really funny. They made it kind of like it was supposed to be exclusive, but it wasn’t. So it’s great.
0:23:15 Taylor Wilson: That is funny. And the Presidentes are not bad. Okay, I want to talk kind of close it up with pushing boundaries. Okay. You mentioned a little bit about. And yeah, we live in this Instagram, you know, TikTok world where save lots of recipes on Instagram, like probably 10 a day.
0:23:33 Adam Reed: I do too.
0:23:34 Taylor Wilson: I save a ton of them.
0:23:35 Adam Reed: But how many do you actually revisit and make?
0:23:40 Taylor Wilson: Not that many.
0:23:41 Adam Reed: Yeah, that’s like maybe 10% for me. Maybe.
0:23:45 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, exactly. So it does sort of like give me ideas that then usually I pick from the back of my mind when I’m like, okay, what do I have in the fridge today to make for dinner? And then I’m like, I can maybe put these things together because you know, there’s like 10 different videos that I saw.
0:24:02 Adam Reed: But it’s always sun dried tomatoes. Yeah, always sun dried tomatoes. Heavy cream and some sort of pasta.
0:24:09 Taylor Wilson: You know, I did something similar last night. My son, I ended up making basically like an Italian fried rice. Rice and tomatoes and chicken. Cause my son was like, why don’t you just throw this stuff in too, Mom? I was like, that’s a good idea.
0:24:23 Adam Reed: The one pot recipes are great.
0:24:25 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, I love them. So food porn is the thing people want to see. Yeah, I want to look at food online. If you are marketing food, how can you do it to where it’s not overdone? You know, like, I wonder if some people sort of overdo it a little bit in terms of like restaurants or businesses. You see, marketing food and what is. How do you kind of create a sustainable brand in the food industry on social media and not puzzle.
0:25:02 Adam Reed: These are big. These are big questions.
0:25:04 Taylor Wilson: I mean, you can answer something else if you want.
0:25:06 Adam Reed: Well, no, I like it. I think that. I think that again, the business has to be more than about just the food product, you know, so at Cane’s, it was being actively involved in the communities and it was supporting the communities. And then it was also, you know, very into making sure that the crew were taken care of. At Chipotle was food with integrity. And it was really talking about their big mission was changing the way people think about and eat fast food when they were coming out because, you know, they were a big mover and shaker in that regard.
0:25:42 Adam Reed: I think that you have to be just about something else. You know, you obviously need to sell your product, but there are other layers to the onion that when you peel them and someone wants to know more about the brand, there are other things that they’re involved in. Here at Dilla’s, it’s building community through primo quesadilla meals. So still very hyper localized, but being a place where people can connect with each other.
0:26:06 Adam Reed: And we even have a campaign out right now that’s connecting over quesadillas. And it’s kind of a little bit more of a catering message because it’s driving, you know, 85% of our business is done off site. It’s not even done at the restaurants. People like taking out big quesadillas, sharing them with friends. I think that there’s that piece of it in terms of social and how it’s done. I mean, it can’t all be in the restaurant. It can’t all be food in the restaurant.
0:26:33 Adam Reed: Overindulgent things that people aren’t necessarily eating or why they really come to you. And I do think adding some personality like it. Kyle, who’s our founder, really likes to be involved in the shoots. And I think it’s great for him to be involved because he has essentially the story of where this came from and why we put it together and here’s why it’s really good and here’s a good thing that you can do with it and it makes it interesting.
0:27:00 Adam Reed: I think good social media involves a lot of really genuine and authentic things with customers. And I also think there is an influencer space, but I think really making sure that the influencers that you engage with also kind of, you got to vet those people really well and make sure that their content is something that you would want to feature, that it’s not the same, that it’s engaged. Well, the follower trap can be a really big thing for brands on social media. Just trying to grab the people with the most followers, really. You got to look at their engagement rates. And even if they’re micro influencers, if they’re targeting the.
0:27:36 Adam Reed: If they’re targeting your customer and knowing your customer really well, then there’s someone probably to engage with. So I think it’s a lot of that. I mean, the food shots over and over and over and over and over again are only as good as what’s actually delivered at the restaurant. I remember looking at food shots from Cane’s and I was like, man, it’s very representative of what you get. And Chipotle didn’t do a lot of that stuff.
0:28:01 Adam Reed: I remember when I got there, they didn’t. They always showed the burrito wrapped in foil. They never showed like these glamorous food shots they do now. And I do think that it’s okay to evolve and change, but they’re also about other things, bigger things. Some of their most successful ads were talking about their story and what they were trying to achieve versus just the burrito. But that being said, you could post about anything and under the comments would be, come to Greenboro, South Carolina.
0:28:34 Adam Reed: Why don’t you have a store in Houston yet? Like, no one’s really paying attention to the content. You know what I mean? The customers will tell you kind of like what they’re wanting. And if you have a good product, typically it’s like, why aren’t you as accessible as you should be? Like, why aren’t you in Fort Worth yet? It’s pretty fascinating to see.
0:28:51 Taylor Wilson: Is Dylan’s in Austin yet? I don’t think you are.
0:28:56 Adam Reed: No. It is a small business. It is 11 restaurants. I think the next leap will be getting the restaurant to 25 to 50 restaurants. That’s a different strategy altogether in terms of marketing because I do think that it takes two things to grow a restaurant, and that is money and momentum. And you kind of have to have both. As restaurants become more accessible, you’ll notice, I don’t know when it was that Dutch Brothers went public, but I remember just one day I was like, what is that joint?
0:29:23 Adam Reed: I saw Dutch Brothers everywhere. I was like, what is that place? And then someone had to tell me. I was, oh, it’s just like place to do coffee and drink something. Like, do they have food there? Like, and it sparked my interest just because I pure, just purely because I saw them and they started popping up everywhere. Salad and Go was like that too. Have you ever been to Salad and Go before?
0:29:41 Taylor Wilson: No, I’ve never heard of it.
0:29:42 Adam Reed: Okay, okay. Salad and Go. Look it up after this. Salad and Go is essentially just like a drive thru only business.
0:29:47 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.
0:29:48 Adam Reed: And they do affordable salads. And the reason they’re affordable is because they have a giant commissary where they’re able to. Where they, they strip out the middleman. So they’re able to, you know, they have their own distribution and logistics and like that. So they’re able to keep the salad costs low, but it’s quality products really playing in on the value. But they take up a very small real estate footprint.
0:30:09 Adam Reed: They’re able to pop up kind of all over the place. And there is some momentum in that. The accessibility of a restaurant, there is some momentum, but you have to be able to deliver the product consistently. So the money part comes in in the real estate game, which is a whole other story, which is a nightmare.
0:30:25 Taylor Wilson: I can only imagine. Well, I think this has been really. I’ve learned a lot because I do.
0:30:33 Adam Reed: Oh great.
0:30:34 Taylor Wilson: I live so much of my marketing life in the SaaS, you know, sort of B2B space. And I just, I love talking about, you know, B2C spaces and industries and just having some fun conversations about food and like learning about new stuff. So I think it’s been really good. I also think that for marketers listening, like the principles apply no matter what you’re marketing. There’s a few things that Adam said here today.
0:31:04 Taylor Wilson: He talked about messaging, having messaging on point and relevant messaging. He talked about community. And that is something that I talk about all the time when I’m kind of getting presentations on brand. So I think whether you’re marketing a restaurant, whether you’re marketing shop, whether you’re marketing a non profit, whether you’re marketing some enterprise, you know, SaaS, platform, messaging, community, being relevant to your ideal customer profile is really.
0:31:35 Adam Reed: Yeah, being authentic, not getting scared and getting too like mired in the data. Because yeah, I think authenticity, I think customers, because they’re consuming so much, I mean, people are dead. Scrolling like crazy, right?
0:31:49 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.
0:31:50 Adam Reed: And I think because you only have such a small amount of time, a small window, the attention spans of customers are just like fleeting. So a lot of it is creating the most impactful message for that small moment of time. The last thing I’ll say about it is this is not a rush on ad, but I’m a guitar player and I was recently like very interested. So I do like John Mayer. I’m a blues guitar player just on the side.
0:32:18 Adam Reed: And I saw this ad for Ernie Ball Strings. It was basically like an ASMR ad. And it’s like the one ad that’s kind of like stuck with me. Now I won’t buy these strings because I’m very loyal to my strings. But I did watch the entire ad and I don’t know if it’s because I was a marketer because like it just piqued my interest. But the ad for these strings, for these John Mayer strings were his music playing in the background.
0:32:40 Adam Reed: And then it was these strings like pulling through a guitar. And the sound, that sound is very familiar to me. It was like the pack of strings like falling down onto a guitar string that already been strung. You know, it was just like all of these like very intense sounds with his music playing in the background and then promoting his string. I was like, man, that is. That like had my attention. And I think it had my attention because it was kind of slow.
0:33:04 Adam Reed: It was meaningful, it was purposeful, and it had some sort of authenticity to it, to what a guitar player is. And I was like, man, that kind of ad needs to be adopted through other industries, you know?
0:33:17 Taylor Wilson: I love that. That’s great.
0:33:19 Adam Reed: So look it up.
0:33:20 Taylor Wilson: I’m gonna go look it up. Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, Adam, if people want to find you online or anything like that, get in touch. What’s the best way?
0:33:28 Adam Reed: Well, really just LinkedIn. That’s kind of like where I live. My professional life is LinkedIn. So Adam T. Reed, I believe is the, the handle there.
0:33:38 Taylor Wilson: LinkedIn.com and if you’re on DFW, go to Dillos. Have a quesadilla.
0:33:42 Adam Reed: Yeah, come have a dang quesadilla.
0:33:46 Taylor Wilson: I have to take a flight to have a dilla, so I don’t know.
0:33:49 Adam Reed: Well, let me know. Yeah, let me know when you’re in town.
0:33:51 Taylor Wilson: When I’m around, I’m gonna let you know. And thanks for, thanks for joining today. I hope this was helpful. Guys listening. Until next time, go get all that shizzle in.
0:34:06 Taylor Wilson: Well, hey there. That was fun. I love how much mind blowing and mind opening shizzle our guests bring to us with every single episode. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. Make sure to hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast players so that you don’t miss a beat of the Talking shizzle podcast. And if you’re listening on Apple, be sure to let us know what you thought and leave us a review.
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0:00:51 Taylor Wilson: What’s up, folks? We’re here with a new episode of Talking Shizzle, and I’m super excited to talk about food today with Adam Reed. He is the VP of marketing at Dilez Quesadillas.
0:01:02 Adam Reed: You said it right.
0:01:03 Taylor Wilson: I said it, right, right?
0:01:05 Adam Reed: Yeah, yeah. A lot of people don’t.
0:01:06 Taylor Wilson: Well, I’m from Texas, and I’ve eaten a lot of quesadillas, you know, and it’s like quesadilla. I mean, it takes me back to Napoleon Dynamite every single time, if I’m being really honest.
0:01:16 Adam Reed: Well, that’s how it started.
0:01:17 Taylor Wilson: Is it? Yeah, I figured it was. Come on.
0:01:20 Adam Reed: Yeah. So the founder was in college and he wanted a quesadilla restaurant. He’s actually really pretty enamored with Chipotle. So Chipotle had just opened in Austin, University of Texas. And he was like, man, this is great. But his. His like, go to late night food and go to food in college quesadillas and figuring out new and unique recipes. So he was kind of working on his master plan of, you know, quesadilla domination. And they were trying to figure out what the name was going to be, and they saw Napoleon Dynamite. It just so happened that that came out and it was a cult classic. And he’s like, dillas. That’s exactly it.
0:01:56 Adam Reed: From that line where she was like. Or he was like, get yourself a day in quesadilla. Or Quesadilla.
0:02:01 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, Quesadilla. I love it, though. Okay, so wait, Chipotle started in Austin?
0:02:07 Adam Reed: No, no, no. It had just come to Austin. Okay. I started in Denver.
0:02:11 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, I thought so. Okay, so let’s talk about. So you’ve been in the restaurant marketing industry for quite a while, and I’m probably get this wrong fast. Not fast food.
0:02:23 Adam Reed: I’m thinking casual.
0:02:25 Taylor Wilson: Fast casual.
0:02:26 Adam Reed: That’s usr. They kind of meld together.
0:02:29 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. So Tell us a little bit first, like intro yourselves, kind of like give us a vibe for your experience and what you’ve done. And then I want to get into some trends in the fast casual and just restaurant industry when it comes to marketing in general.
0:02:42 Adam Reed: Well, I never like anticipated that I would have a career in restaurants or restaurant marketing. I actually just was really looking for, you know, a good solid footing in business. So my actually my first job out of I went to University of Texas at Austin. I went to the University of Texas at Dallas and got an MBA there. My first job out of that was with IBM and I was doing hardware and software services, sales.
0:03:08 Adam Reed: And I had the great state of Wisconsin as my territory, which I went up once a quarter and drove through the cold of the farmland of Wisconsin and called on clients in the small and mid market territory. So I enjoyed the relationship side. I really disliked what I was selling. You know, I appreciate technology, but I didn’t really want to sell servers and software to CIOs and IT directors. So I kind of fell backwards in the restaurant industry. I had a girlfriend at the time and she’s like, you know, because I wanted to be in ultimately be in marketing, she said, you should go talk to my friend who is a marketing manager or a director of marketing for this brand, Chipotle.
0:03:49 Adam Reed: And I’d never been. And I went to Chipotle and I had it and I was like, man, I really don’t like it. And it was mainly because I got the wrong thing. I think I got like a burrito, but I got hot salsa on it and I’m not like a spicy person, but it just looked red. I was like, oh, that red salsa looks good. And they didn’t explain to me what it was. And my lips were on fire. And I was like, I don’t understand this place. But I got in touch with that girl and she told me what to get and I went back and I got it and it was great. And I was like, you know, I’m really interested in that role.
0:04:18 Adam Reed: And at IBM I was working in like a three by three cubicle space and calling on clients. It’s just not fun. And when I started interviewing with Chipotle, they had me do like an in restaurant experience. And I was dicing jalapenos in the back of the house at 7am and I had music just blaring in my face. I was like, man, this is great. This is exactly what I want to be doing. Because I was just out of that boxed in environment.
0:04:40 Adam Reed: So I Fell backwards into Chipotle, got that job, did local store marketing with them. And then that was kind of around when they were up and coming. They just went public, had a lot of locations, but they were really expanding into new territories. Was there for a few years and then also found Raising Canes by circumstance. That same girl who was my manager at the time, after I’d been there three or four years, said, well, let’s go meet for our annual meeting at this new place called Raising Cane’s.
0:05:09 Adam Reed: I was on this like health kick and I was like, oh, it’s fast food. I pulled up and I saw the drive thru. I was like, oh, this is fast food. I can’t eat. But walked in and I was just completely unique, completely different. They had only had about when I went there and tried it, probably 60 locations. And they just entered the Texas market. They were mainly out of Louisiana. And I just grabbed my resume off my apartment desk and walked over to their office, found out where their office was.
0:05:33 Adam Reed: I said, hey, look, this is a great restaurant concept. I would love to work here. At some point they’re like, we don’t have any marketing positions available. A year later they called me and I went to work for there. And I was there for 11 and a half years through explosive growth. I probably started at restaurant number 80 and when I left to come to dilla’s, close to 700 restaurants. So about 10x growth over about 11 and a half years.
0:05:57 Adam Reed: So I saw a lot change. And then also it was just a really great time for restaurants to grow. And then now I’m at Dilla’s. Dilla’s a startup and has 11 locations. And the founders are married and they’re great. They’re polar opposites. I could never, I don’t think work with my wife in a business like they work, but they works for them. They’re doing a great job. And Dilla’s case ideas just focuses on, you know, quesadillas is the hero.
0:06:22 Taylor Wilson: Only quesadillas. Like we’re not doing any tacos. No bowls, nothing.
0:06:27 Adam Reed: No tacos. You can get a salad. So you can make any Dilla salad. We do have side dishes like grilla fries, which is basically like really good cheese fries. It’s a little bit of an American sling on a quesadilla. So the recipes are all pretty American sounding. You know, we have some with like french fries and ground beef and bacon. And so they’re very kind of like indulgent, familiar recipes for quesadillas. Just using the quesadillas the vehicle.
0:06:54 Taylor Wilson: And you guys are only in Texas, are you? Texas and Louisiana.
0:06:58 Adam Reed: Texas. Louisiana, yeah. East Texas. There are other markets and we’re kind of hybrid growing. So franchise and company owned growth. So there are other franchise states that are available and we’ve got some interest primarily in the sec, if you will.
0:07:14 Taylor Wilson: Okay.
0:07:15 Adam Reed: Okay.
0:07:15 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. I think you and I talked about that when we first met. So my son, like, loves. So I don’t live in Texas anymore, but I grew up in Austin also went to UT like you. Maybe we were there around the same time. I don’t know. And so whenever I go back to Austin to see my parents, my brother, you know, like, all my family lives in Texas still. Raising canes is like top on the list for my kids.
0:07:38 Adam Reed: Oh, yeah.
0:07:38 Taylor Wilson: Oh, yeah. No, like, they’re literally like, they’ll talk to me for a month before the trip. Like, are we going to. Can we go to racing canes right after we get there? Like right after we land at the airport, I’m like, I got to get a car first. Yeah, okay.
0:07:53 Adam Reed: You know, but it’s a great business. It was. It was a great business to hop on board after Chipotle. Chipotle had a cult, like following. And then canes, after a while, really started harnessing that too. And I think a lot of it is how true they were to who they were. I mean, it’s a very authentic and genuine business. And then I also think a lot of that too, was the fact that they just delivered consistency in the product. You know, they kind of cornered that market. There were other chicken finger places.
0:08:25 Adam Reed: They’re just doing it better and really honing in on that one thing. And they didn’t get distracted by a lot.
0:08:31 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. Okay, so I wanted to ask you about that. So you, you started there when they had 80 stores and then were there all the way up until they had seven. So that’s massive growth. What were some of the things that you in marketing at a business that’s just growing like crazy like that that you saw helped to scale and grow the brand and then what were maybe some challenges that you experienced over those years?
0:08:58 Adam Reed: So I think I’ll start with what helped that business to grow. I think that operationally it was an operations driven business. So there are marketing driven businesses that, you know, really just try to eclipse year over year percentages off of ltos and releasing new product and, you know, kind of hopping on the latest thing. And typically from an operations perspective, that can pull the team in all sorts of different directions and Then the team can wind up churning and turning over and then that all yields to like a, you know, poor customer experience.
0:09:32 Adam Reed: And then there’s bad reputation and then it’s hard to like macro scale. And I think Chipotle too, both of them, Cane’s, when I came on board, did have franchisees, but they were strategically placed franchisees. They’re mostly north of the Mason Dixon line. And then most of the company owned restaurants were down south and Chipotle all company owned. So there was a lot of control over the operational performance of the restaurant.
0:09:57 Adam Reed: And also they knew that they had something that was a unique vehicle, that really there was space in the industry to capitalize upon it and make it something special. So those are the things that were done right from a marketing perspective. A lot of it was just leaning into what we’re really good at. What are our differentiators? When it was Chipotle, when I was at Chipotle, they had a sign that said gourmet burritos and tacos. It was a part of their signage. They also did a really good job. Chipotle did of kind of running away from the rest of the industry.
0:10:27 Adam Reed: They ran away from like, you know, a lot of the pricing stuff that was going on. They ran away from a lot of like the ltos are like, no. All we’re going to do and focus on is communicating the fact that we are gourmet burritos and tacos and Cane’s the exact same thing. All they really stuck into communicating was premium chicken tenderloins, fresh, never frozen. That was a huge deal. And quality chicken finger meals. That’s what we do, that’s what we offer to the customer. And we’re going to be the best at it.
0:10:57 Adam Reed: So typically, the brands that I’ve resonated with have had some sort of niche. Dilla’s is the same way. We’re going to focus in on quesadillas. We’re going to be the best at doing grilled to order quesadillas, crispy shell, gooey cheese, the best product we can find. And we’re really going to try and make that the driver. The marketing piece of it was really important, but it was really, how do you capitalize on the message? And marketing is a percentage of converting the number that you can get in front of, particularly in your core demographic.
0:11:29 Taylor Wilson: You know, yeah, I like to focus on the message. And then you also said something about consistency, like a really consistent product. I think that’s like what.
0:11:38 Adam Reed: That’s the hardest thing to do.
0:11:40 Taylor Wilson: It’s so hard.
0:11:42 Adam Reed: Yeah. It’s the hardest thing to do. I think Chipotle had that a little bit cornered because in a way, because, you know, the customer is watching it getting made in front of them.
0:11:49 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.
0:11:50 Adam Reed: You know, that’s to a benefit and also to a detriment.
0:11:53 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.
0:11:54 Adam Reed: Dependent upon who is making your food. Right. And also what the kitchen looks like. You have an exposed kitchen, you have exposed team, all that good stuff. And I think that Cane’s. When I walked into a Cane’s, it was like this little slivered window.
0:12:10 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. You don’t see much. It’s very secretive.
0:12:13 Adam Reed: Yeah, it was. When you see the product, you trust the product because you’re like, oh, that product looks really good. You know what I mean? And I think over time, Canes did a really good job at telling people what they were doing back there, you know?
0:12:27 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.
0:12:27 Adam Reed: All those kitchens are impeccably clean, but I think with Chipotle, it was obviously more exposed. They’ve become less exposed. I’ve noticed. You know, I’ll walk in and the grill’s right there, but there’s a big wall. Didn’t used to be that way. It was like, here’s the line, here’s the grill, here’s everything behind it and kind of see in the prep area. But, yeah, I mean, I think that the convenience part of it was huge for that timeframe. And I also think the communication of quality and how you did that. But, yeah, both of those concepts I’ve been very lucky to have gotten experience at, because they’re both absolute behemoths.
0:13:03 Adam Reed: And then Dilla’s has been great because I knew Kyle and Maggie going in. They’re also. Kyle was from Cane’s. I met him at Cane’s. He left Canes to do his quesadilla dream, and I hopped aboard that. And the challenges here, much different in a smaller business. But I’ve kind of been in all facets, you know, I’ve been in the small business, the emerging business, and the big one.
0:13:25 Taylor Wilson: Well, I’ll have to pick your brain sometime. You know, my dream is a coffee shop. I’ve got this whole big plan for coffee shops. So I’m going to come knocking on your door when I’m ready to do this.
0:13:34 Adam Reed: Let’s talk coffee. Let’s talk lattes. Flat whites. Yeah, just focus on the flat white only.
0:13:39 Taylor Wilson: Just. We’re flat white only.
0:13:41 Adam Reed: I like.
0:13:41 Taylor Wilson: Ooh, I like that.
0:13:42 Adam Reed: Yeah, There you go. Sugar.
0:13:45 Taylor Wilson: We’re not doing pumpkin spice.
0:13:47 Adam Reed: That’s right. Yeah. Straight to the point.
0:13:50 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, right, to the point. Okay, so let’s talk about. I want to ask you about the copycat problem in the restaurant business.
0:13:57 Adam Reed: Yeah.
0:13:58 Taylor Wilson: So many restaurants sort of seem to, like, recycle. Similar branding, menu styles, marketing tactics. How can people, like, stand out? And we talk. I feel like we get that. Got there a little bit talking about Canes and Chipotle. But what are some other things you’ve seen work really well and, like, restaurant brand, where you’re like, oh, they would just do this. Like, maybe they would take off.
0:14:22 Adam Reed: I think that what happens is, is that there’s a lot of distraction. So with the amount of restaurants that are in the marketplace and they’re all competing against each other, you. If you see a restaurant do something and they wind up grabbing a lot of shares, then the temptation is, you know, well, why didn’t we do that? Or how do we do that? How do we do that? But put a different spin on it? And then the copycat game kind of goes down the rabbit hole. And typically it dilutes itself as it continues to go down because, you know, you’re never going to do it as good as whoever did it first.
0:14:55 Adam Reed: And sometimes that stuff is a little bit like lightning in a bottle, because the reason is because the brand is just being very authentic to itself. I think where marketers kind of get hung up is they get mired in data. I think good marketing is 50% data and 50% gut. And I think that. I think that that kind of applies to everything. I think it applies to creative messaging. I think it applies in terms of, okay, well, I know who my core audience is and what they like.
0:15:19 Adam Reed: I need to be involved in that stuff, you know, And I think that there’s a problem sometimes in marketing departments where the data is. It’s more of a 70, 30 game or an 80, 20 game, and the data takes 80%. And then you kind of lose sight a little bit of the. What’s the core purpose of that business? You know, what do you really want? What are you really trying to do? And then also who you’re really trying to communicate with, and what are they like? And outside of that, what feels right?
0:15:50 Adam Reed: Is it cool? You know, use your gut on some of that stuff. And some of that can be risky, but I think that’s when there’s some magic that happens. There is some uncomfortableness in trying something or doing something different that kind of goes against the grain or goes the other direction. And I think that’s where marketing departments and even brands to A specific extent can. Can really make a leap.
0:16:18 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. What’s one that maybe you’ve seen that you think like, wow, that was cool that they went there.
0:16:24 Adam Reed: If I had to like really think about brands that have done really good things. I mean, I’m not a fast food person, but I think Taco Bell is pretty amazing in terms of their marketing. Like they did in 2019. They did a. They created like a hotel experience. Taco Bell hotel. I thought that was crazy because there are Taco Bell fans that just love the product. But I mean, they created an entire hotel around it.
0:16:46 Adam Reed: And the pillows were like hot sauce packets and they had a pool and they had floats that were hot sauce packets. And they did like great things for their guests and let them try new food items. And it was like a very viral thing. But it was also a. It was just really neat. I mean, I think a lot of it has to deal with your resources. You know, what resources do you have to put against things? Chipotle, when we were kind of like up and coming, like, it dates me a little bit, but I remember when every year they would do burrito and it was a big deal. You know, like it was like dress, dress like a burrito and coming in, get a free. And it was on Halloween and come in and get a free burrito, burrito bowl orders, order tacos or salad. And people would kind of take that to an extreme.
0:17:29 Adam Reed: It came. It became like a thing where there was. Sorry, no one dismissed. Sorry, I just got some sort of teams notification.
0:17:37 Taylor Wilson: I don’t know, you’re fine.
0:17:38 Adam Reed: Yeah. But it became a thing where people would come in and they would just wrap their pinky in foil and they were like, see, I dress as a burrito, so can I have a really. They kind of try and game it, but they would still get it. So it was a great way to like, you know, trial. And I also think getting people talking about your brand, especially if you have a cult worthy brand, those are the things that I’ve seen that have worked really, really well and have created a lot of excitement.
0:18:03 Taylor Wilson: Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about messaging. Like, let’s go a little deeper on messaging. You mentioned it before. Messaging that sticks. And let’s also talk a bit in that around this state of the world today. Like, what are you seeing in terms of like, it seems to me like based on our little bit of our offline conversation, fast casual restaurants are experiencing a little bit of a decline. How can people work around that and why is that happening?
0:18:35 Adam Reed: Right now, I think that the appeal of fast casual and QSR in the past, particularly through the 2010, 2019 era, was the price point. I mean, I think it was price point. And quality and convenience. Price point, quality and convenience. Those three things. Quality has maintained. But I do think as commodities have taken a lift, there have been some cuts around how do we make our, how do we still make a quality product but maybe cut some corners. So there’s some of that.
0:19:04 Adam Reed: I also think that there’s been some pricing. Everyone’s had to take price. So the industry, it’s really hard in a consumer facing industry where the consumer is feeling it in their pocketbooks, but the business is too, and the business still has to make money. And restaurants are already very like low margin business. And so they have to take price and they do the best that they can in order to take the price that makes the most sense.
0:19:29 Adam Reed: But now you’re losing frequency, you know. So I think the appeal recently, I think I was talking to you about Chili’s, why I think Chili’s is so brilliant was Chili’s essentially saw Chili’s had been through the biggest rut of any, I think casual dining. They’ve done two things recently. They’ve gone back to their core products and the things that make them really good. Kind of like the Chipotle or the Arcanes or whatever they had, they had core set menu items that made them like really, really great.
0:19:57 Adam Reed: So they really focused on that. And then the second thing they did is they recognized the pricing game was getting really tight. So QSR and fast casual had to continue to take price. And they kind of caught up with casual dining and they just basically said, hey, we can compete at that. So they put out that free for me deal for 10.99. It’s like $10.99 kind of a steal. And it’s almost better priced than most fast casual or qsr.
0:20:20 Adam Reed: So they really had started eating up some market share. And I think I talked to you also about how people are so discerning with their dollars now through social media. They’re able to cook more at home because recipes are easier and everyone’s throwing recipes out. So they’re gonna cook a one pot pasta and eat on that for two or three nights and then they’re gonna save their money up and go have like an experience on the weekends.
0:20:42 Adam Reed: So you see it through the week and you see it through how people are actually behaving when it comes to where they’re gonna put their money. So it’s made it a little bit of a challenge. I think trying to break out of that through messaging is again, really understanding who your core audience is and then being involved in what they’re involved in. Care about what they care about, particularly on a community, hyperlocal level.
0:21:05 Adam Reed: Be there for them in terms of that. Support the things that support their kids. Softball tournaments. And be there and make connections and then get them into your restaurant and then really deliver. I mean, the biggest thing is the delivery piece, really delivering on the experience. And that gets into operations, which is not my forte. But I will say that I’m probably more of a restaurant guy than I am a.
0:21:28 Adam Reed: I mean, I’m a marketer by trade, but I love restaurants and I love the full picture of them. And I think that’s kind of where it gets. You can get dangerous in messaging if you understand that all of this.
0:21:40 Taylor Wilson: It’s funny, I’m just like, thinking about personally too, my experience. I actually noticed Chili’s. We have. I mean, I live in a small town now in Boone, and there’s one Chili’s, one Chipotle. There’s like one of everything. There’s only one.
0:21:54 Adam Reed: No Dillas yet. No Dillas yet.
0:21:56 Taylor Wilson: There’s no Dillas yet. I hope I would eat there a lot. So the Chili’s was, like, basically dead. It was basically dying. And all of a sudden we’ve noticed it’s very busy there all the time now. And I think you’re right. We were commenting, like, trying to figure out why there was even like a 30 minute wait recently at Chili’s. And we were like, this place was about to shut down, like, you know, eight months ago.
0:22:21 Taylor Wilson: And now it’s like, booming. And I think it’s that thing they did bring back, that kind of stuff that I used to remember getting at Chili’s.
0:22:28 Adam Reed: I think that there’s a nostalgia going on in the country right now, too. And I think capitalizing on some of the nostalgia is really important. And Chili’s is nostalgic. I mean, they’ve been around for forever. So I even saw recently there were some influencers that were doing like. It was like, I just got this new hot reservation at one of the hottest restaurants in town. Come with me to Chili’s. This is really difficult to get in. And it was really funny because there’s so much of that in the influencer world. But they were applying it to Chili’s, and I thought that was really smart. It was basically making fun of that culture, but putting it in the Chili’s where they’re like, try this Presidente Margarita. It’s incredible.
0:23:08 Adam Reed: I hear they don’t make very many of these. I mean, it’s just really funny. They made it kind of like it was supposed to be exclusive, but it wasn’t. So it’s great.
0:23:15 Taylor Wilson: That is funny. And the Presidentes are not bad. Okay, I want to talk kind of close it up with pushing boundaries. Okay. You mentioned a little bit about. And yeah, we live in this Instagram, you know, TikTok world where save lots of recipes on Instagram, like probably 10 a day.
0:23:33 Adam Reed: I do too.
0:23:34 Taylor Wilson: I save a ton of them.
0:23:35 Adam Reed: But how many do you actually revisit and make?
0:23:40 Taylor Wilson: Not that many.
0:23:41 Adam Reed: Yeah, that’s like maybe 10% for me. Maybe.
0:23:45 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, exactly. So it does sort of like give me ideas that then usually I pick from the back of my mind when I’m like, okay, what do I have in the fridge today to make for dinner? And then I’m like, I can maybe put these things together because you know, there’s like 10 different videos that I saw.
0:24:02 Adam Reed: But it’s always sun dried tomatoes. Yeah, always sun dried tomatoes. Heavy cream and some sort of pasta.
0:24:09 Taylor Wilson: You know, I did something similar last night. My son, I ended up making basically like an Italian fried rice. Rice and tomatoes and chicken. Cause my son was like, why don’t you just throw this stuff in too, Mom? I was like, that’s a good idea.
0:24:23 Adam Reed: The one pot recipes are great.
0:24:25 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, I love them. So food porn is the thing people want to see. Yeah, I want to look at food online. If you are marketing food, how can you do it to where it’s not overdone? You know, like, I wonder if some people sort of overdo it a little bit in terms of like restaurants or businesses. You see, marketing food and what is. How do you kind of create a sustainable brand in the food industry on social media and not puzzle.
0:25:02 Adam Reed: These are big. These are big questions.
0:25:04 Taylor Wilson: I mean, you can answer something else if you want.
0:25:06 Adam Reed: Well, no, I like it. I think that. I think that again, the business has to be more than about just the food product, you know, so at Cane’s, it was being actively involved in the communities and it was supporting the communities. And then it was also, you know, very into making sure that the crew were taken care of. At Chipotle was food with integrity. And it was really talking about their big mission was changing the way people think about and eat fast food when they were coming out because, you know, they were a big mover and shaker in that regard.
0:25:42 Adam Reed: I think that you have to be just about something else. You know, you obviously need to sell your product, but there are other layers to the onion that when you peel them and someone wants to know more about the brand, there are other things that they’re involved in. Here at Dilla’s, it’s building community through primo quesadilla meals. So still very hyper localized, but being a place where people can connect with each other.
0:26:06 Adam Reed: And we even have a campaign out right now that’s connecting over quesadillas. And it’s kind of a little bit more of a catering message because it’s driving, you know, 85% of our business is done off site. It’s not even done at the restaurants. People like taking out big quesadillas, sharing them with friends. I think that there’s that piece of it in terms of social and how it’s done. I mean, it can’t all be in the restaurant. It can’t all be food in the restaurant.
0:26:33 Adam Reed: Overindulgent things that people aren’t necessarily eating or why they really come to you. And I do think adding some personality like it. Kyle, who’s our founder, really likes to be involved in the shoots. And I think it’s great for him to be involved because he has essentially the story of where this came from and why we put it together and here’s why it’s really good and here’s a good thing that you can do with it and it makes it interesting.
0:27:00 Adam Reed: I think good social media involves a lot of really genuine and authentic things with customers. And I also think there is an influencer space, but I think really making sure that the influencers that you engage with also kind of, you got to vet those people really well and make sure that their content is something that you would want to feature, that it’s not the same, that it’s engaged. Well, the follower trap can be a really big thing for brands on social media. Just trying to grab the people with the most followers, really. You got to look at their engagement rates. And even if they’re micro influencers, if they’re targeting the.
0:27:36 Adam Reed: If they’re targeting your customer and knowing your customer really well, then there’s someone probably to engage with. So I think it’s a lot of that. I mean, the food shots over and over and over and over and over again are only as good as what’s actually delivered at the restaurant. I remember looking at food shots from Cane’s and I was like, man, it’s very representative of what you get. And Chipotle didn’t do a lot of that stuff.
0:28:01 Adam Reed: I remember when I got there, they didn’t. They always showed the burrito wrapped in foil. They never showed like these glamorous food shots they do now. And I do think that it’s okay to evolve and change, but they’re also about other things, bigger things. Some of their most successful ads were talking about their story and what they were trying to achieve versus just the burrito. But that being said, you could post about anything and under the comments would be, come to Greenboro, South Carolina.
0:28:34 Adam Reed: Why don’t you have a store in Houston yet? Like, no one’s really paying attention to the content. You know what I mean? The customers will tell you kind of like what they’re wanting. And if you have a good product, typically it’s like, why aren’t you as accessible as you should be? Like, why aren’t you in Fort Worth yet? It’s pretty fascinating to see.
0:28:51 Taylor Wilson: Is Dylan’s in Austin yet? I don’t think you are.
0:28:56 Adam Reed: No. It is a small business. It is 11 restaurants. I think the next leap will be getting the restaurant to 25 to 50 restaurants. That’s a different strategy altogether in terms of marketing because I do think that it takes two things to grow a restaurant, and that is money and momentum. And you kind of have to have both. As restaurants become more accessible, you’ll notice, I don’t know when it was that Dutch Brothers went public, but I remember just one day I was like, what is that joint?
0:29:23 Adam Reed: I saw Dutch Brothers everywhere. I was like, what is that place? And then someone had to tell me. I was, oh, it’s just like place to do coffee and drink something. Like, do they have food there? Like, and it sparked my interest just because I pure, just purely because I saw them and they started popping up everywhere. Salad and Go was like that too. Have you ever been to Salad and Go before?
0:29:41 Taylor Wilson: No, I’ve never heard of it.
0:29:42 Adam Reed: Okay, okay. Salad and Go. Look it up after this. Salad and Go is essentially just like a drive thru only business.
0:29:47 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.
0:29:48 Adam Reed: And they do affordable salads. And the reason they’re affordable is because they have a giant commissary where they’re able to. Where they, they strip out the middleman. So they’re able to, you know, they have their own distribution and logistics and like that. So they’re able to keep the salad costs low, but it’s quality products really playing in on the value. But they take up a very small real estate footprint.
0:30:09 Adam Reed: They’re able to pop up kind of all over the place. And there is some momentum in that. The accessibility of a restaurant, there is some momentum, but you have to be able to deliver the product consistently. So the money part comes in in the real estate game, which is a whole other story, which is a nightmare.
0:30:25 Taylor Wilson: I can only imagine. Well, I think this has been really. I’ve learned a lot because I do.
0:30:33 Adam Reed: Oh great.
0:30:34 Taylor Wilson: I live so much of my marketing life in the SaaS, you know, sort of B2B space. And I just, I love talking about, you know, B2C spaces and industries and just having some fun conversations about food and like learning about new stuff. So I think it’s been really good. I also think that for marketers listening, like the principles apply no matter what you’re marketing. There’s a few things that Adam said here today.
0:31:04 Taylor Wilson: He talked about messaging, having messaging on point and relevant messaging. He talked about community. And that is something that I talk about all the time when I’m kind of getting presentations on brand. So I think whether you’re marketing a restaurant, whether you’re marketing shop, whether you’re marketing a non profit, whether you’re marketing some enterprise, you know, SaaS, platform, messaging, community, being relevant to your ideal customer profile is really.
0:31:35 Adam Reed: Yeah, being authentic, not getting scared and getting too like mired in the data. Because yeah, I think authenticity, I think customers, because they’re consuming so much, I mean, people are dead. Scrolling like crazy, right?
0:31:49 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.
0:31:50 Adam Reed: And I think because you only have such a small amount of time, a small window, the attention spans of customers are just like fleeting. So a lot of it is creating the most impactful message for that small moment of time. The last thing I’ll say about it is this is not a rush on ad, but I’m a guitar player and I was recently like very interested. So I do like John Mayer. I’m a blues guitar player just on the side.
0:32:18 Adam Reed: And I saw this ad for Ernie Ball Strings. It was basically like an ASMR ad. And it’s like the one ad that’s kind of like stuck with me. Now I won’t buy these strings because I’m very loyal to my strings. But I did watch the entire ad and I don’t know if it’s because I was a marketer because like it just piqued my interest. But the ad for these strings, for these John Mayer strings were his music playing in the background.
0:32:40 Adam Reed: And then it was these strings like pulling through a guitar. And the sound, that sound is very familiar to me. It was like the pack of strings like falling down onto a guitar string that already been strung. You know, it was just like all of these like very intense sounds with his music playing in the background and then promoting his string. I was like, man, that is. That like had my attention. And I think it had my attention because it was kind of slow.
0:33:04 Adam Reed: It was meaningful, it was purposeful, and it had some sort of authenticity to it, to what a guitar player is. And I was like, man, that kind of ad needs to be adopted through other industries, you know?
0:33:17 Taylor Wilson: I love that. That’s great.
0:33:19 Adam Reed: So look it up.
0:33:20 Taylor Wilson: I’m gonna go look it up. Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, Adam, if people want to find you online or anything like that, get in touch. What’s the best way?
0:33:28 Adam Reed: Well, really just LinkedIn. That’s kind of like where I live. My professional life is LinkedIn. So Adam T. Reed, I believe is the, the handle there.
0:33:38 Taylor Wilson: LinkedIn.com and if you’re on DFW, go to Dillos. Have a quesadilla.
0:33:42 Adam Reed: Yeah, come have a dang quesadilla.
0:33:46 Taylor Wilson: I have to take a flight to have a dilla, so I don’t know.
0:33:49 Adam Reed: Well, let me know. Yeah, let me know when you’re in town.
0:33:51 Taylor Wilson: When I’m around, I’m gonna let you know. And thanks for, thanks for joining today. I hope this was helpful. Guys listening. Until next time, go get all that shizzle in.
0:34:06 Taylor Wilson: Well, hey there. That was fun. I love how much mind blowing and mind opening shizzle our guests bring to us with every single episode. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. Make sure to hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast players so that you don’t miss a beat of the Talking shizzle podcast. And if you’re listening on Apple, be sure to let us know what you thought and leave us a review.
0:34:34 Taylor Wilson: We’d love to hear from our listeners so that we can bring you all the good, juicy business growth shizzle that you’d like to hear about. Be sure to get in touch with us and follow along at creativeshizzle.com or shoot us an email at podcast at creativeshizzle.com now until next time, we hope you go get your big shizzle done.
