A nosy guy with lots of questions keeps showing up at the bars of O’Charley’s restaurants, scrutinizing the operations with an intensity that can prompt a visit from the manager. The attentive visitor offers no cover story for his scrutiny. As CEO of the O’Charley’s chain, Craig Barber knows the keenest insights on running restaurants are often forged at the field level, and pulling up a stool is one of his techniques for keeping the ideas flowing upward.
“Sometimes you’ll hear that one thing that makes you say, ‘What?’” says Barber. “I don’t care who you are, you don’t know everything. There are cases where people know more than you, not just at the management level, but in the stores.”
Like many restaurant CEOs, the full-service veteran was shown the full measure of unit operators’ intuition and creativity when the industry was plunged into the walking nightmare of the pandemic. He sees those people as unsung heroes of the ordeal, the Special Ops forces whose resilience and resourcefulness helped O’Charley’s pull through. By mid-March, the typical O’Charley’s unit was generating 4% more in sales than it had during the comparable period of 2019, and now the 158-unit chain is opening restaurants again.
It’s also embracing virtual concepts as a new growth channel. A seafood concept called Dockside Charlie’s and a chicken tenders venture called Coop & Run are already operating out of O’Charley’s kitchens, and two more brands are under development.
Barber was denied his undercover research technique when dining rooms were closed and bar seating was expressly banned in many states. Yet the sort of insights revealed through the process was never in greater demand.
“We really needed to communicate more,” the CEO recalls. He had rebuilt the management team since assuming leadership of O’Charley’s as president in 2017. The talent, he believed, was undeniably there, but no one in the group, not to mention the industry, had ever faced a situation like that one that was foisted on the business in March 2020.
“We started having daily calls. Sometimes twice-daily calls,” he recalls.
For one thing, he says, “we learned the importance of balloons and tents.” Ditto for those air-blown tubular figures that flap up and down outside car washes.
Without the visible clue of a drive-thru, potential customers wouldn’t otherwise know O’Charley’s restaurants were still open, albeit just for takeout and delivery.
Off-premise business accounted for about 12% of sales when the crisis erupted. It now generates 36% of a typical unit's intake.
Fortunately, Barber says, O’Charley’s was already adopting a number of the measures that would become standard industry responses to the pandemic. It had already invested in technology to streamline delivery and takeout.
Similarly, “we had a plan in place to launch family meal deals,” he continues. “On March 11, we said we’re going to do it a week from now.” Then the pandemic was declared. “We changed to, ‘We’re going to do that two days from now.’ Two days later, it was on and going.”
The meals currently account for about 10% of sales, he adds. The line has evolved to include premium family packs priced at $39.99 and $49.99.
“We had to let other people make decisions that would have otherwise gone up the chain of command,” Barber recalls. That agility may have been born out of necessity, but he and his team have embraced it as a positive aftereffect of the pandemic, along with the heightened communication.
“I don’t know if I changed how I led, but I think it intensified the importance of being clear in communications,” says Barber. “Leadership for me is, Lead by example and lead by being present.
“Listen, and ask good questions.”
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