Panel: how to boost customers, not spending

Nation's Restaurant News, Oct 22, 1990 by Milford Prewitt

Panel: How to boost customers, not spending

The market and economic pressures of the 1990s will force restaurant operators to push to new heights of customer satisfaction, according to a panel of executives at MUFSO.

Although they came from restaurant segments whose market spheres rarely intersect and although the financial well-being of their companies spanned a broad range, the executives on the "New World of Management" panel agreed that competition will get tougher in the 1990s.

As a result, the executives outlined plans in what turned out to be a twofold problem they all shared: how to elevate the service and operational capacities of their enterprises while not retarding their companies' financial health.

For panelist Jeff Rogers, president of Pizza Inn, in order to meet the challenge of the 1990s, the company had to review its past.

"Pizza Inn survived almost 33 years of abuse," Rogers said of his company, which had a short-lived sojourn in Chapter 11. "I'm trying to overcome every kind of management trouble you could have imagined.

"I would have rather faced these problems as a college experiment rather than as a 43-year-old president. But our goal right now is to restore integrity to the company because we certainly have an exceptional product."

Steve Leipsner, president of Service America, the giant contract server, said that getting his company's finances in shape in his short-term tactic in the 1990s. Part of that reshaping means retreating from some service segments that may be draining the company's resources, he said.

"It's no disgrace in trying to get your business financially healthy," Leipsner said. "For us, it means pulling out of some businesses that are not as good as they once were.

"I tell my people, `If we don't do it now, you won't have a business to go to.'"

Panelist Ken Reimer, president of the Roma Corp., operators of the Tony Roma barbecue chain, said rapid change in the restaurant industry and the economy would require Tony Roma to respond more effectively to a sharper customer.

"In the '90s, I think we will deal with a world with nothing but change, change, change," he said, "more change than any of us have ever dealt with, and at the same time, our managers will have to improve the guest experience.

"We're going to have a more sophisticated customer who is presented daily with all kinds of food at all kinds of prices, and we're going to have to be ready for that."

But panelist Frank Belatti, president of Arby's Inc., called much of what he had heard on the panel and at MUFSO "rhetoric," arguing that service has always been an essential route to prosperity. He said the reality of the 1990s will force management to be more skilled and flexible.

"If you've got 2,000 restaurants, it's hard to greet every customer," Belatti said. "Not only that, you've got franchisees who are not very entrepreneurial, customers who are not loyal and staff people who have backgrounds that are not service oriented.

"So it has to begin with management. Management has to be a change maker and not a controller. I tell my people, `We don't have to forecast; all we have to do is change.'"

Joe Lee, president of General Mills Restaurants and moderator of the panel, said rhetoric notwithstanding, the demand for customer service and execution persists.

Panelist Frank Steed, president of the Country Hospitality Corp., said his company was concentrating on its Country Kitchen family dinner-house chain to enhance its image as a casual, convenient and comfortable place to dine.

PHOTO : Reimer, right, predicts change as Leipsner listens in.