About the Guest

Otto Othman is the CEO and Co-founder of PINCHO, an award-winning, burger and kebab fast-casual with 10 locations based in Miami, FL. Otto has a background in creative design and is known for being one of the most innovative, out-of-the-box marketers in the restaurant world.

Episode Summary

With most restaurant sales down more than 70% as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, it’s nice to finally hear some positive news. In this episode, we talk to Otto Othman, CEO & Founder of PINCHO about how a close relationship with customers, first-party digital ordering, and creative marketing campaigns have helped drive positive YoY sales growth despite the crisis.

Episode Transcript

Zach Goldstein

(00:01):

From fake meat and robot chefs to ghost kitchens and delivery drones. The restaurant industry is rapidly evolving. Welcome to Food Fighters, bringing you interviews with the leading industry trailblazers. I’m your host, Zach Goldstein.

Zach Goldstein

(00:19):

Welcome back. I’m Zach Goldstein and this is Food Fighters. Excited today to have with me, one of the most innovative leaders in the restaurant industry. Otto Othman is the CEO and Co-founder of PINCHO, an award-winning burger and kebab fast casual concept with 10 locations based in Miami, Florida. Otto has a background in creative design and is known for being one of the most innovative out of the box marketers in the restaurant world. Excited to have you on the Food Fighters podcast today Otto.

Otto Othman

(00:50):

Thanks for having me Zach. Likewise man.

Zach Goldstein

(00:52):

So we’re recording this in mid April. We’re in the middle, still, of the COVID crisis. So we’ll spend a fair amount of time talking about that before we jump over to some of the more innovative marketing that you did pre-crisis. I thought I would just note here that Otto and I first met at a restaurant conference and who knows when those are going to come back. And our initial conversations had nothing to do with with restaurants. We were sitting at a bar.` And little did we know we’d find ourselves on a podcast years later. So great to be chatting with you Otto despite what is a really tough time for the industry that we both love.

Otto Othman

(01:31):

Right? Right. Likewise man. Yeah it’s been uh, it’s been crazy, surreal, you know, happy that everybody that we know at least is healthy. So just taking it one day at a time.

Zach Goldstein

(01:42):

The crisis has fundamentally disrupted restaurant life and we are hearing from across the industry the challenges of how do you quickly adapt. Most restaurants are meaningfully down and struggling to have closed dining rooms and all kinds of changes that they had to make really on the fly. Miami has, has seen a pretty significant outbreak. Go back to when you were making that decision that “we have to fundamentally change, we have to consider shutting down or we’re being mandated to shutting down dining rooms.” It all happened very quickly. How did that happen for PINCHO?

Otto Othman

(02:21):

You know it was I dunno, first week of March, I think it was like March 11th or 13th or one of those days. I didn’t even know what today is, to be honest. And it’s been pretty crazy. I quickly got on I remember I spoke to our head of operations and they said, Hey, you know, we’ve got to get on a zoom call with all of our general managers right away. And which is something, you know, that we barely do because we always see each other. We meet in person, we got on the zoom call and, and I knew that instead of panicking, we needed to be a source of strength. So I needed to talk to all of my team members and let them know, Hey, this is going to be okay. We’re going to get through this together. And also we’re going to be here for our community. Everything happens so fast, right? We got on this call, I talked to everybody and I tell them, Hey guys, here’s what we’re going to do. Don’t worry about you, if you have kids at home because they’re not in school. Don’t worry. Not only we’re going to feed you, but we’re also going to feed your family. So take food for your kids. It’s all good. God forbid something happens, and we need to shut down. Don’t worry, because we will take care of you, right? We are a restaurant. You’re not going to go hungry. That’s all I can promise you. Right? And it just happened so quick, man. You know, and we said, okay, let’s, let’s adapt. Let’s figure out next steps. Right?

Zach Goldstein

(03:35):

Ultimately you did end up closing some dining rooms, right?

Otto Othman

(03:39):

For us, we’re so lucky because PINCHO is sort of a high touch, sort of fast casual. We have this position called runner. So traditional, fast casual, you stand in the line, you place an order. Somebody gives you a buzzer or whatever and then you know, you go and you pick up your food. We don’t do that. We actually have the position of a runner. So for us it was like, we actually ended up closing the dining rooms before it was mandated because to me the most important thing was to protect our team. So protect my team, protect our guests. Like I did not want to be the restaurant that was promoting all of these folks going inside and being careless. So we actually closed down the restaurant and we created a virtual sort of like a pickup window. Right? That’s what we did. And since we already had these runners, we said, okay, it was very, very easy for us to just say, instead of running the food to the tables inside, we’re now going to run food to the cars outside or run the foods to the window. So it was sort of like a natural thing for us.

Zach Goldstein

(04:39):

It’s an ability to, to adapt quickly that seems to be really differentiating those who are managing through the crisis. And I’d say overall you’re doing more than managing through the crisis. Certainly some of your stores at least are performing quite well.

Otto Othman

(04:56):

Again, you know, my whole thing was protect my team, protect my community. So we made a decision to not furlough any employee. I said, whatever it takes, you know, if we all need to take pay cuts, if we all need to spread out the hours, whatever it takes, we’re going to protect each other. We’re going to get through this, right? I literally told my team, this is a race. We’re going through the desert. We have X amount of water. We’re going to share it until we’re out of this desert. And we did that. So I’m very proud to say that we have not furloughed, not even one employee, even if we’re operating at a loss, it is what it is. This is what we’re going to do. But you know, we quickly decided to be the strength for the community and we said 50% off to all first responders and hospital workers every day going forward until further notice. And that sort of created a viral moment locally that really, we got a ton of love back from the community and a ton of support. So some of our stores, obviously we’re all, we’re all down, but actually some of our stores are up against last year.

Zach Goldstein

(05:55):

Wow. That’s unheard of.

Otto Othman

(05:57):

Yeah, we’re, we’re very fortunate, very fortunate, very lucky.

Zach Goldstein

(06:01):

Well, it leans into a brand that you’ve built that has always been community focused and loved by the community, but a great product obviously, no doubt your ability to adapt quickly and service demand in a more digital off premise world is part of that. So what do you attribute to that success? Being able to see stores that are up in the middle of a crisis where other restaurants are down 80%

Otto Othman

(06:26):

It’s a couple of things. It’s a little bit of a lot of things. I guess. Think first and foremost, we have a unique brand. PINCHO was a beloved brand in Miami. Our entire mantra is to always be there for the community. We’re a genuine brand. We treat our brand like a person, right? Even from the way that we communicate in our Instagram, we have meetings, hours upon hours about captions. It has to really have a personality. We are a person. So I think we’re much more connected to the consumer than most brands. That’s definitely one. And then second, we’ve been very fortunate to have invested in our technology early on, even working with you guys and you know, rebuilding our entire mobile app and rebuilding our, our web ordering platform. So all of that played to our advantage. When it was time to act quickly into deploying digital marketing or talking to the consumer, we are able to connect to people at the level that other brands can’t. You know, it’s not something that we created overnight. This is something that we built over the last 10 years.

Zach Goldstein

(07:29):

Yeah, I mean to see sales among your loyal customers – so the members of your loyalty program – actually up 99% in the last month means you are doing a couple of things right, as you say. You are building deep relationships with those customers such that they have brand affinity and they want to support your mission. You’ve given them the tools to keep transacting with you even in a time of crisis. And I think it sounds like digital ordering is one portion of that, but also the ability to adapt your in-store business model to service that demand.

Otto Othman

(08:05):

Absolutely, right? I think I’ll never forget I was home and then I wanted to eat and I placed an order via I think it was like Uber Eats or Postmates. It was a third party delivery. And then I was so worried about eating that food in that moment. I said, okay, you know what? I think everybody’s feeling this right now. This exact same feeling. Everybody’s feeling this. What are we going to do about this? And I decided to be as transparent as possible. We took it to our social media channels, we communicated with the guests, we’ve deployed videos, we told them everything that we’re doing, you know, we protected our team internally. All of these things really helped us in winning the loyalty. I mean, winning our customers trust to say, “Hey, you know what? PINCHO’s doing a good job.” So that was part one, right? Letting them know that, “Hey, here’s all the things that we’re doing.” And then part two was, okay, how do we leverage our technology to really drive these sales, right? With innovative marketing, with ideas, with, you know, any sort of offers. And we started thinking – you know us Zach, you know us. We’re pretty crazy when it comes to marketing, so, so we’ve done some really cool things in which I can share in a little bit, but you know, we’ve been very successful.

Zach Goldstein

(09:22):

I’d love to talk and we will talk about some of those award-winning campaigns that you had done before the crisis, but in many ways you’ve kept them up during the crisis. Your 4/20 promotion sold out. Is that right?

Otto Othman

(09:34):

Yeah. Lesson learned. Yes. yeah, we decided to do a, a really cool 4/20. We said, okay, let’s bring some happiness to everybody now, especially now that a lot of people unfortunately have lost their jobs and people are tight when it comes to cash. You know, and we’re not a brand that sort of discounts, it’s not who we are. But you know, we saw an opportunity for 4/20 and we said, Hey, South Florida, we love you and we want to bring some happiness to you. You know, on Monday on 4/20, all of our burgers are going to be $4 and 20 cents via our app only right? Via our ordering channels. Any burger you want. And I didn’t think it would take off as, as it did, it’s, it went viral. You know, and I think every brand should try to do this. And you know, again, I’m sharing this so I can, so if you’re a brand out there listening, it’s so important that you create some really cool campaigns cause this stuff works, right? So here’s what we did and everybody can apply this to their business. You know, we, we found an opportunity, we said we’re going to do X via our app because what we were trying to drive was people to download our apps. As you guys know, it’s very tough to get people to download your, your brand’s app. So we said, let’s do this campaign. And man, it went viral and we were up that Monday 120% against last week and we were 55% against last year. We ran out of burgers by 7:00 PM. I was scrambling in Publix trying to buy American cheese and potato steaks and delivering myself, together with my leadership team, to the stores. It was, it was crazy. You know? And at that moment I realize like the love that Miami in South Florida has towards our brand. It was such a humbling thing, man. I can’t believe to tell you I, when it was all said and done at 10:00 PM at night, I looked at my team, I’m like, Holy crap, this was insane. Like people love what we’re doing. We are so thankful. We’re so grateful. So it was pretty crazy.

Zach Goldstein

(11:31):

Numbers like that in the middle of the crisis are close to unheard of. Sounds like it was a lot of effort, but it’s, it’s worth the pride that you clearly have for your team and for your community to have been able to do that. I’m pleased to hear you talk about the importance of, of driving consumers to your own digital channel. Right? And one is do you feel healthy with something delivered through a third party? I think you pointed that out and that’s one point. But obviously there’s a massive margin impact here for you, the restaurant operator of getting those customers through your own channel and I know that’s something you’ve thought a lot about.

Otto Othman

(12:08):

No, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean we’ve all been battling third party, right, and it’s just the way the world is and COVID has absolutely accelerated any trend that we’ve been talking about. Right? Um 100% this situation has accelerated that and delivery is one of them. Now the, the fruits of our investments in tech has finally paid off massively during this time. The fact that people can download our own app and place an order for delivery from our channels and then we can create more of a connection with that consumer and reach back out to them and service them and give them a customer service level that otherwise a third party company wouldn’t be able to is extremely valuable.

Zach Goldstein

(12:54):

Through a period where traffic is tough overall, your loyalty signups are up pretty considerably. I think it’s almost a hundred percent almost doubling and it’s because those people are placing orders on a channel you own and then becoming part of your CRM as opposed to through Uber Eats or someone else where you don’t even know who those people are. Right?

Otto Othman

(13:16):

Absolutely. I mean it’s very hard to change consumer behavior. Right? And the UX experience is such an important thing and I don’t think a lot of restaurant brands understand that like UX matters, right? It’s all about the experience in ordering and how tough it is, how easy it is, the whole thing matters. So the fact that we have a very super easy and beautifully designed mobile application definitely helps a ton. And now that every time somebody places an order, because of this UX that you guys at Thanx created together with a lot of feedback from, from us, uh restaurant operators, 100% of our transactions right now are being made by loyalty, loyalty guests. We’re converting 100% of our guests into loyalty members, which is phenomenal.

Zach Goldstein

(14:02):

But it becomes an asset that you in particular are well positioned to use because of the creativity of your marketing. So let’s talk about that because you have been an out of the box restaurant marketer for a long time and luckily the awards have come to recognize that behavior. What are you most proud of? Brand changes, specific campaigns? Let’s talk about some of the fun ones.

Otto Othman

(14:27):

Okay. So we have a couple of fun ones, but I think the one that I’m most proud of right now, right now is actually our brand change. So we dropped “factory” as you know, we used to be called PINCHO Factory and we dropped “factory” about a year ago and we created this whole campaign, you know, where we didn’t have a budget and we actually basically faked the theft of one of our signs in one of our locations. And we leaked it in this sort of–.

Zach Goldstein

(14:54):

Physically.

Otto Othman

(14:54):

Right.

Zach Goldstein

(14:54):

Ripped off the restaurant.

Otto Othman

(14:56):

We literally hired somebody, we got like security camera footage and we leaked footage of a perpetrator going up a ladder at two in the morning and stealing the word “factory”. And then we posted it on Instagram the next day and people were like, what the hell is going on? And then two days later we did it to another location and all of a sudden there was this serial factory thief and it went bananas locally. You know, we, we spent, I think, I think it was like 900 bucks in media and media buy and we, that’s all we needed to spend. And we, we got 1 million Miamians saw the results.

Zach Goldstein

(15:33):

It’s unbelievable.

Otto Othman

(15:34):

Very proud to say, and I’m actually saying it here first, cause I haven’t even mentioned this to anybody yet. As you know, we won a couple of awards for this campaign a couple of weeks ago and we were finalists for the Shorty’s Award, which is a prestigious award. And it was us, Chicken Popeye’s, you know, the, the chicken Wars, Taco Bell, Cheesecake Factory, and Arby’s. And we won.

Zach Goldstein

(15:58):

Wow.

Otto Othman

(15:58):

So we just received a, we won for best social media campaign. So we won the audience award and then Popeye’s won another award as well.

Zach Goldstein

(16:08):

You consistently do this type of marketing that is incredibly cost effective, right? It’s all earned media as opposed to, you know, paying for impressions. That’s clearly part of your strategy.

Otto Othman

(16:22):

Yeah. I owe this to a very dear friend of mine. His name is André Matarazzo. He used to be a Chief Creative Officer… I think that’s what his title – Creative Director at Sapient, where I used to work, once upon a time before, before restaurants, I used to work in an advertising agency and then he told me once, he said, “Otto, the best ideas are the simple ideas as you know, but something very, very, very, very cheap that can reach a massive audience. These are the best ideas.” And that’s sort of been my, my ethos when it comes to advertising. Yeah.

Zach Goldstein

(16:53):

Food Fighters. Stay on the cutting edge.

Zach Goldstein

(16:56):

The other thing that I’ve heard you say before and that I think is really interesting when you’re trying to find ways to get attention without spending a lot of money is go where other people are not. And probably one of the best examples is you actually looked at Tinder in the early days of the dating app and said, this is an opportunity for me to sell burgers. Right? Hard for people to connect those dots. But tell us about that campaign because that’s really one of the most unusual ones I’ve ever heard.

Otto Othman

(17:25):

Right? Yeah. So you know, when Tinder first became hot, we were looking at, and like, how do we make something here? So we have a burger called the Toston Burger, which is a burger between two plantains and it’s a delicious burger. You know, it’s been on The Today Show. It’s like, it’s an awesome like product and it’s very recognizable. So we said, Hey, let’s create a Tinder profile and we’ll create like a girl profile, a guy profile, and our default picture will be the Toston Burger. So we basically extended our radius and we swore, and I think I was, I was the guy and then my co-founder Nedal was the girl, two different phones. And we just swiped right in every single person that we could. We just swiped right, you know, in the radius of like 25 miles. And man, we got shut down by Tinder twice. We got thousands of matches and every time we got a match, we said, Hey, you know, you swipe right, you know, as you know today’s Valentine’s, so give me your best pickup line and I’m yours tonight. And that was the thing. And then people would just, they were just cracking up and they would just throw their best pickup lines, you know, their worst and best pickup lines.

Otto Othman

(18:33):

And then we said, Oh, that was amazing. Just go to one of our restaurants and redeem a free burger on the house. And we had about almost 400 redemptions I think it was, if I remember, it was, it was amazing. It was really, really cool idea. And we got, and we got press, alright so Eater wrote about us, you know, Miami New Times wrote about us. And again, this is all about being innovative and being, you know, doing something that nobody’s doing and something that’s creative and something that people really like and enjoy. And I think that’s really the secret.

Zach Goldstein

(18:58):

And you enjoy it, right? I mean you can hear as you talk about this, you have fun thinking of these things and building a brand and you take a lot of pride in it and you’ve clearly built a culture of your team that feels the same way. So let’s, let’s talk about that culture. How do you make that level of innovation and creativity part, not just of the executive team but of the entire identity of PINCHO.

Otto Othman

(19:23):

Innovation really has been at the core of the brand since year one. And this is a story probably a lot of people don’t know. We struggled very much to get sales in the beginning. Like the first year we opened PINCHO it was like we did 200 grand the first year and then the second year we did like 300 and something like it was, cause we had like a really, like our real estate was something that we only had $77,000. So we opened this little hole in the wall far away from civilization and we needed to create, you know, and something to drive people to the stores. And I’ll never forget. And Nedal and Adrian, which is our other Co-founder and Director of Culinary, they used to do this thing called “Try Me Tuesday”. So every Tuesday they’ll create three sliders. Every Tuesday for an entire year they’ll create three brand new burger sliders.

Otto Othman

(20:15):

So every week they needed to come up with three, which was nuts for a whole year. So that then became a monthly special, which is our LTO. So every month we have an LTO. Every month. Right. Obviously we couldn’t keep up with three a week. It was just too much. And so it became part of the brand. And then people wait for the beginning of the month because it’s sort of like, you know, a shoe drop or you know, what is PINCHO dropping this first of the month? So it’s always, you know, it’s part of who we are. And you know, I, we get into arguments sometimes when something is not, you know, to the level of where it needs to be because there’s a specific standard that we have to have. You know, we’ve raised the bar and we have to continuously keep raising it. So innovation has been definitely part of the brand. We do a lot of fun things internally where we talk to the team members and we get their ideas. You know, we do competitions for team members and whoever wins, you know, the next LTO will be named after them or it will be something that, you know, they’ll win an award for. So we try to keep that, you know, part of the, of the brand and part of, you know, the DNA of, of everything that we do.

Zach Goldstein

(21:22):

I try not to talk about Thanx on this podcast, but it’s worth noting that as a customer, that makes you a very challenging customer because everything has to be exactly right to reflect your brand and it makes sense, right? You’re putting a lot of energy into exactly what that LTO is, what that image looks like, what message we’re sending to our customers. And you want that reflected in your loyalty program and your digital experiences. So you take a lot of pride in that obviously.

Otto Othman

(21:53):

No, absolutely. I mean I don’t say this slightly, God bless you guys with dealing with us in the beginning and everything that we wanted done, not for anything. Your team’s amazing, you know? And ultimately the product that we built together with you guys just looks like badass. It’s amazing. And we like it a lot. We like it a lot. And our guests, I don’t know if you remember our app prior to this with a certain company, we had like a 1.4 star rating in the app store. We have a 4.9 now. Man. It’s crazy.

Zach Goldstein

(22:23):

That’s interesting. An interesting point. And I don’t think I did remember that. But the idea that you would be spending this much time worrying about and caring about a monthly LTO that is on brand that your customers are going to resonate with and exactly what the imagery is and the marketing. That doesn’t work if the only way for consumers to experience that is through a bad user experience. And so you highlighted this early on as you think about UX mattering, one of the points that I have made before is that DoorDash employs like 300 designers. So that’s your competition, right? Where do you think restaurants are going wrong with UX? What are the things that when you come across… You’ve mentioned large images, that’s clearly one, but what are the things that you come across when you see these experiences and you think if I could only just tell that operator they need to fix that?

Otto Othman

(23:15):

You know, I think about that all the time. Every time I see a brand that I enjoy the food and then they look at their UX and their design and I’m like, why? Right. And it’s just so hard to understand. And maybe because we are a brand founded by quote unquote millennials, is that we have a specific perspective that other brands don’t. I think it’s so important for other brands to hire, you know, the younger generation to really make sure that they look the part when it comes to their digital properties. I remember in the beginning when we first started working with you guys, you know, if you even work with the team who helped me rebrand PINCHO, it took us 14 months and at the point they were like, Otto, you know enough. But guess what? At the end of the day, the final brand looked so much better because doing simple things are actually very hard. You know, and it’s very, very hard for you to design something simple and effective and straight to the point where people don’t get confused. So people usually tend to just throw too many things. So all of these sites that have like, you know, bad UX is because somebody said, Oh no, we need a buy now button here. Oh no, oh the online order. The order now needs to be big, the logo needs to be large and they start throwing whatever matters to their respective teams because they have some sort of KPI in the backend and everything needs to be above the fold. And you know, me working in an advertising agency, that was our dilemma day and night, but where the best experiences are the simple ones, the clean ones where you’re like, it’s just so easy. All I have to do is open the app, click twice and call it a day.

Zach Goldstein

(24:54):

Ease of use is probably the number one, and I actually am reminded of a quote I just heard recently from Greg Creed, the former CEO of Yum! Brands that I’ll probably end up repeating multiple times on this podcast, but he was answering the question, “which of the new consumer behaviors that have been learned in the COVID crisis are going to stick for a long time and which are the things that will revert back to the way we used to do them?” And his answer was “whichever is easier will win and become the new normal.”

Otto Othman

(25:29):

Absolutely. Absolutely. Look, here’s, here’s a nugget for all the fast casual operators right now and here’s what we’re doing. Here’s what we think is going to happen. Everybody keeps talking about, you know, how are we going to open up our dining rooms again? So the first thing that I’m going to do, is I’m not going to allow people to line up and wait in line to place an order. No. Just go and sit at your table, place an order with your app and we’ll bring you the food. Boom. That’s it. We don’t have to, that’s the most annoying part of a fast casual experience is waiting in that line. Now that you know, almost 35% of our sales are going through mobile through our own channels. Okay, welcome to PINCHO. Grab a seat, place an order, and we’ll bring you the food. Just let us know which table you’re in.

Zach Goldstein

(26:15):

It’s really interesting because some of the moments of the traditional dining experience that are small are going to become perhaps the ones that have a bit of a stigma. The giving your credit card away, which now has touched some system that I don’t know, the grabbing a pen that other people touched, using a screen that other people are touching as opposed to using my phone, which I’m the only one touching. I mean these are now questions of technology, technology and process, I should say that restaurant operators have to start thinking of, because they all represent those moments where a consumer might get the eww factor,

Otto Othman

(26:53):

Right? Yeah. Condiment stations. Right, are people going to trust going there and filling up their own sodas and grabbing their own mayo and their own ketchup? No. We’re going to have to rethink the whole thing and figure out what’s the best new way to do that while keeping everybody safe.

Zach Goldstein

(27:08):

That’s a good place for us to leave it. It’s a little bit more depressing than exciting marketing campaigns, but, but as you think about how to go about finding those new normals, how to try out new things and determine what matters. Is it as simply as talking to customers and playing guess and check? Are there ways that you’re going to more systematically determine changes for your restaurant as you start opening dining rooms?

Otto Othman

(27:35):

Right? I think intuition, right, plays a lot into this in terms of what you feel, right? Put yourself in the guest’s shoes and say, okay, what do I feel is going to be a problem and what’s not? And I think we’re going to have to try a lot of things. You know, we’re going to fail, but fail fast and fail carefully, but most importantly fail forward. And I think any brand that sort of is, is going to be not trying to adapt and change is going to fail. You’re going to have to be quick. You’re going to have to be nimble. You’re going to have to be able to communicate to your team members on the ground very, very fast. Right? Right now we’re using WhatsApp channels, right? Where before we were emails, emails, right? Now it’s just very quickly texts, texts, texts, hey, what’s going on? What are we going to do here? What are we going to do there? We’re talking about curbside now, curbside is the new is the new drive-thru. We’re actually talking to other restaurants next door to us where I’m reaching out to other restaurants saying, Hey, you know, how about we make this entire parking lot our dining room collectively. Right? And each parking spot will have a number and let’s share a map and going forward let’s deliver hospitality to all of our guests even though we’re competitors. And these are the kinds of things that we’re trying to do now, which is stuff that we would never otherwise try to do.

Zach Goldstein

(28:43):

That’s fascinating. And I agree with you that the concept of curbside and tableside, two that you’ve, that you’ve highlighted here at the end, they were really nascent. No one had thought much about them pre-COVID. I think we’re going to see a lot more thought about how do you incorporate those into your day to day operations going forward?

Otto Othman

(29:03):

Absolutely.

Zach Goldstein

(29:03):

Otto, uh this is incredibly insightful. It’s great to hear your, your optimism and your energy and frankly the success when there’s a lot of negative news coming industry-wide. So congratulations on everything that you’ve done in building a brand and a technology foundation that, that you can drive sales through. And thanks for sharing those insights with the Food Fighters audience.

Otto Othman

(29:29):

Oh, absolutely, man. Thank you guys so much for everything that you do. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the fact that we were prepared and we had the right tech in place, we probably would be having a much different conversation. So thank you to the Thanx team. I really appreciate it.

Zach Goldstein

(29:42):

Thanks Otto.

Zach Goldstein

(29:45):

You’ve been listening to Food Fighters with me, Zach Goldstein. To subscribe to the podcast or to learn more about our featured guest, visit thanx.com/food-fighters. That’s Thanx, spelled thanx.com/food-fighters. This podcast is a production of Thanx, the leading CRM and digital engagement solution for restaurants. Until next time, keep fighting Food Fighters.