When Jeff Moody came on board as CEO of Metromedia Restaurant Group (MRG) in September 2005, he felt the company needed to create an operations-based culture. “We had been so financially driven that we lost sight of some of the guest metrics needed to grow the business,” he said. At the beginning of 2006, Moody introduced a new set of metrics to the company.

Metromedia Restaurant Group is one of the world’s leading multi-concept table-service restaurant groups, with more than 800 restaurants that include Bennigan’s, Steak and Ale, Ponderosa Steakhouse, and Bonanza Steakhouse in the US as well as internationally. MRG represents four of the most well-known brands in the restaurant industry and serves more than 160 million guests annually.

“We had some brand reengineering to do across the board, but we managed to change our operations and focus on new products,” Moody said. “Overall, the company is coming out of a phase of not growing, and we’re in the position to embark on a new phase of growth.”

Guest obsession
According to Moody, MRG’s chains haven’t grown much in the past few years. “From an overall operations standpoint, we’re focusing on developing a culture of guest obsession through an initiative called CHEERS,” Moody said. CHEERS stands for cleanliness, hospitality, environment, enthusiasm, raveable food and drink, and spectacular service. “Those are things guests want regardless of where they dine,” Moody said.

CHEERS is designed to work in all of MRG’s restaurants, and the biggest factor for ensuring the success of the initiative is getting all employees involved. The organization now budgets for new product training, which is something it wasn’t doing previously.

“There are several tiers of training in the restaurant business,” Moody explained. “The first and most important is the front-line training—the people who provide service (servers, grill cooks, bartenders, etc). You need to heavily invest in them.

“We now have a formal training program in the restaurants, and each location has to meet certain criteria to make sure they are training people in an environment where employees can experience the right standards of operations and procedures,” he said.

To do that, MRG has created a group of certified training managers throughout the system. “When you internally promote someone to the managerial level, you want to make sure they’ve had basic training in scheduling, motivating employees, proper kitchen procedures, etc. That process needed updating too. We haven’t completely relaunched the manager training; we’re working on the crew training first, and the managerial training will follow,” Moody said.

Catching the drift
MRG recently went through a process where it conducted research to find out who its core customers had been in the past and who they are at present, specifically for its Bennigan’s and Steak and Ale restaurants. Management found there had been quite a drift from its original core customers.

They discovered Bennigan’s had originally been a place that once catered to young adults who enjoyed going to the bar to have a casual meal. But lately, it had focused only on families to the complete exclusion of the original customer base. “We completely lost sight of the bar part of the business with happy hours, appetizers, and munchies, so we needed to reclaim that.” Moody said the company hadn’t focused on casual dining in its marketing with Steak and Ale, so it’s going back to the basics by getting to know its core customers.

To focus on growing its bar business, Bennigan’s created a bar bites menu in combination with a drink menu, which is designed to appeal to the people who want to get an appetizer and drink after work. “We want to attract less of a rowdy crowd and more of an upscale one,” he said.

MRG is also working on a few initiatives as it relates to menu items. Bennigan’s will be introducing several new products, one of which is called the cheeseburger rebellion. “We’ll be bringing the flavor of a cheeseburger to some foods such as appetizer egg rolls and cheeseburger pitas.”

Shared services model
MRG now works off a shared services model in which it manages multiple brands in multiple categories. “Each brand needs its own infrastructure in regard to marketing, product development, and operations. Those functions need to be self-contained because we need the brand-focused expertise,” Moody said.

In regard to purchasing, although the restaurants purchase different items, they all purchase steaks. MRG leverages its scale with a single supplier to get different sizes, cuts, and grades. “We’ve combined the purchasing function across the brands and combined some of the HR services. Our shared services are to support cross-concept synergies and the ability to get the best practices and prices.”