Hang On featuring Kevin Zyskowski

Transcript

Rob Dwyer (00:02.679)
Kevin Zyskowski, you are Next in Queue, my friend. How are you today?

Kevin Zyskowski (00:07.796)
I'm great. Thanks for asking, Rob.

Rob Dwyer (00:10.965)
Well, I have to start by asking you number one. Do you have a nickname? And number two, why isn't it Kay-Z?

Kevin Zyskowski (00:25.806)
I have gone by Kay-Z (KZ?) in the past. Yeah, it has to be done, right? Right now, I would say my number one nickname comes from my youngest daughter, and that's K-Man.

Rob Dwyer (00:28.951)
Yes.

Rob Dwyer (00:40.695)
Okay, okay. Well, your youngest daughter is how young? I mean, it's probably young enough that, oh, well, I mean, she might be, she's probably more familiar with Jay-Z's better half than she is with Jay-Z.

Kevin Zyskowski (00:46.55)
is 14.

Kevin Zyskowski (00:57.992)
Probably knowing her probably

Rob Dwyer (01:00.021)
Yeah, well you are the CEO of CertainlyCX a BPO and I wanted to talk with you about lessons learned from starting a BPO because this isn't even your first go round in doing this. But let's start with. The why why did you ever want to start a BPO?

Kevin Zyskowski (01:17.795)
Right.

Kevin Zyskowski (01:28.3)
Yeah, great question. It's certainly not maybe something that you grow up wanting to do. Although there was probably a interest early on in owning and running my own thing. But yeah, I didn't even know what a BPO was until I was well into my career.

And the reason the short answer is Rob I saw that there was a lot of opportunity to do things way better it's a it's a It's a it's a large industry. It is an industry that can really really help organizations but unfortunately, it has like this kind of like a bad little like

dirtiness to it almost like a used car salesman kind of feel to it because of you know, because of actually the reality of how a lot of the large organizations run in order to squeeze both their employees and their clients and I think I think you know, I saw both of those.

working both from the perspective of within a large BPO as well as a client to a large BPO. But mostly when I was with that larger BPO, I just saw there was so much opportunity and really the opportunity that struck me the hardest as to, there is massive opportunity here is the fact that we knew so much about their customer base.

what was causing their customers friction, how, and it was actually really stuff that was really easy to improve, but we were not sharing it and we were not allowed to share it as a, as a lower down person in the ranks. You were not allowed to whisper that stuff because of how our pricing model was structured, which was at the transactional level. And, and so those were like, that was like a huge light in my head to say like, wow, this, this

Kevin Zyskowski (03:41.346)
would really benefit people. Prior to that experience in my life, I was with managed services and large consulting organizations. So I saw how a group with expertise and specialized expertise can really help an organization who, you know, that's not their strength. They're not trying to be the best in running a call center or a customer support center.

But yet it is imperative to have excellent support to support your customers and to have a successful business. But they, you know, they've got people focusing on product or focusing on the service, but not necessarily the support. a lot of times it becomes like a side hustle in an organization. And, you know, I've been to many organizations where marketing and sales, they're in the nice building. And then the, call center is like,

in the old warehouse. And so even when it's done in-house like that, there's opportunities to do it better. So I saw that and I saw not only how the client could benefit from a better BPO, but also the employees. And that's a big circle, right? Because the employee morale was so low that they didn't care about their job.

So the attrition rate was through the roof. mean, at one point, the one organization, not the large organization I was with, it was like a hundred percent annualized attrition. We would talk about it at the monthly level, but if you actually looked at it at the annual level, we were replacing the entire crew every year. So, you know, there was no like the knowledge and the...

Rob Dwyer (05:18.679)
Yeah.

Kevin Zyskowski (05:35.416)
the amount of training that we had to redo and all of that is cost to the client, not only in just hourly costs, but also in level of service costs. So again, just, saw a huge opportunity and yeah, I thought that would be a lot of fun. then also had the opportunity to work with folks overseas in the Philippines when I was in house and

just really enjoyed that, really enjoyed learning about their culture, learning about how important the call center industry is in the Philippines and how many thousands and thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people it employs there. So thought it'd be amazing to try and do it better and, you know, help people have great jobs and

give people great opportunities and kind of do it how I feel is the right way.

Rob Dwyer (06:39.443)
Yeah, you touched on something there that just kind of took me back in time a little bit. remember, you know, I worked at a very large global BPO that was kind of my entry into the contact center world. And I remember after a few years, talking with a couple of peers and we were marveling at the fact that there were still three of us left out of our class that had

started years before and how uncommon that was because most new hire class and I was a trainer, right? So I saw this firsthand. Most of the new hire classes that we would have in that organization, you would get a pretty steep drop off after a month. And then by the end of a year, like you were lucky to have one or two people left out of each.

individual new hire class. And we were training 20, 22 people at a time, typically in a class. And it's, it's crazy to think in those large organizations, how quickly they churn through employees.

Kevin Zyskowski (07:52.526)
Yeah. It's, it's, it's raw. mean, even in, in, don't even, a lot of times people don't even get out of the training class, right? Before they're like, Hey, where's, so they didn't show up today. That's not uncommon either. But so I really, yeah, I really was inspired by the idea of creating an environment where, you know, people could

Rob Dwyer (08:04.577)
Yeah.

Kevin Zyskowski (08:20.686)
people were excited to do their best and enabled to do their best because I think that was the other thing that I saw in those large organizations were the measurements and the measurement systems, didn't make sense. So that's one of the other things that I really wanted to do differently and why I started this was I was involved in like the recognition programs and all that stuff and working, I mean, so many iterations and variations on

the incentive program and you know came to a realization at one point like is it is is there any good incentive program or do they all like have weaknesses or cause like secondary um issues that you didn't you weren't trying to push but now you've got things working against the larger team but mostly

What I saw were incentive programs and recognition programs that were designed to reward that top 10, maybe 20 % of the larger of the organization. So, you know, when you look at that, it doesn't make sense. means 20 % of your organization is exceeding and the rest are barely meeting expectations, but a lot of them are failing.

But because of how a lot of those incentive programs that I was working with were designed, the top 20%, they didn't have any motivation to help the other, the other folks either. They were more than happy to collect their bonus every time and to let those new people just keep failing and churning, failing and churning. So you were constantly bringing people into that bottom 20, 40, 50 % and they would get frustrated because

Rob Dwyer (09:56.95)
Alright.

Kevin Zyskowski (10:13.314)
They didn't know what those top 20 % people knew and those top 20 % people were never going to tell them because it didn't benefit them to fill them in on the best practices. So was all this weird like, you know, we want to pretend like we're a team. have pizza parties together, but we're not a team. Like we're here to get our own bonus and that's the same crew that gets it quarter after quarter. And they're not letting anyone into the club because that's how the club was designed.

Rob Dwyer (10:21.492)
Hmm.

Kevin Zyskowski (10:43.222)
So again, it's like, man, that's a huge opportunity to do things smarter so that the overall product is better. Because if I'm the customer and I'm calling in, I can't choose to, Hey, I want to talk to someone in the top 20%. I can't do that. and the odds are against me. So just, I, you know, it was, was pretty, I think. Eye-opening for me as someone who.

Rob Dwyer (10:57.217)
Ha ha ha.

Kevin Zyskowski (11:12.238)
thought, you know, think growing up always thought like, the adults know what they're doing and they do, you know, they do things the way they should be done. it's like, eh, not always. Most of the, a lot of the time they do things the way that benefits them. And that was really the case. And at least the PPO space that I saw, but I do think we're not, you know, certainly it's not the only one changing that the way things are done. think there's a lot of newer.

Rob Dwyer (11:22.135)
Yeah.

Kevin Zyskowski (11:41.39)
more progressive BPO is doing things right and really adding huge benefits to their clients.

Rob Dwyer (11:48.519)
It's interesting that you identified incentives as an issue in a couple of different ways, right? The BPO's incentive means that they don't always act on the best behalf of their partners. And the agent's incentive means they don't always act in the best interest of the team, of their organization, of the peers.

Kevin Zyskowski (12:05.367)
you

Rob Dwyer (12:17.207)
Yeah, we typically think of incentives as a really good thing. So I'm wondering then when you started your own BPO, I think this was 2016, how did you approach incentives? And I mean that both from an agent standpoint, but also from an organizational standpoint. mean, obviously BPO has a contract. They make money. Hopefully.

So how did you approach those two different ways of incenting the organization and the people within the organization?

Kevin Zyskowski (12:57.986)
So I've iterated on this a lot, even in the years that I've owned my own BPO. I started off with a very hard line. We weren't going to incentivize for the job. That was kind of how I went to market to the employee population with that was these are the requirements of the job.

were and we continue to be super clear on expectations, the role, all of that stuff. But the idea was we wanted, know, and this, this is highly tied to how you acquire and how you recruit and how you onboard people to, because you have to one, be clear about that in that recruiting and onboarding process with, with those people, but also make sure that you have people that are

at least you believe are motivated to do their best because they want to do their best versus like, well, I could do better, but I'm going to hold out. there are different populations of people out there who some people and unfortunately it's also like conditioned, right? So the other thing we did was we were like,

And we were very hardline about this too. We've loosened up a smudge, but we were very hardline. If they've been with the giants, we don't want them. As what we found the hard way, but we found it out very quickly. Those behaviors were very difficult to condition out of people. and, and we didn't want that. So we were recruiting from like coffee shops, face to face retail, people that like,

Rob Dwyer (14:32.748)
Mmm.

Kevin Zyskowski (14:50.862)
love to interact, solve problems for customers simply because that's what they enjoy doing. They loved problem solving, they loved helping people, they loved communicating, and they were doing a lot of like our original team. They were almost exclusively face to face. We also had a very big musician group. That was interesting. I can get into that too about how we were able to recruit and hold on to these like amazing

You know, they're amazing people. They also happen to be very passionate about their music. They were in bands, they were traveling, all that stuff. it worked out very well for them and very well for us too. But going back to the question, so we've iterated. I tend to still lean towards the roles, the role, and we have pay ranges.

And we talk about minimum expectations for the role. So if you're not meeting those minimum expectations, we will work with you. We will coach you. But there's a set timeline for that. And if you can't meet the minimum expectation, then you're not you're you know, you might be a great person. You might be great on another role, but this this role is not for you. And we still stick to that because

The other thing we've learned and I've learned is, know, if you're rowing the boat down the river and one guy's going twice as hard as the other guy, you're going to be going in a circle. And the guy going twice as hard is going to get frustrated and then he's going to leave, right? So going back to attrition. So all these things tie together. So we still approach it with very clear expectations. These are the minimum expectations from a metric standpoint.

Rob Dwyer (16:25.111)
.

Kevin Zyskowski (16:41.774)
that we need you to hit by this timeline. And then we do open up opportunity for incentive, but we're very, very careful about that. And certainly right now we have what we call gain share and it is a, I actually stole it from an organization I used to work with that was super smart about quantitative things and just how they approach things. But

Basically how Gainshare works and certainly is if you are meeting your minimum expectations, you're eligible for the Gainshare, which is a quarterly bonus payout based on profit. So if the organization, and this is where I'm huge and we certainly are huge on the entire team has to succeed. And when it comes to Gainshare, it's the entire organization. So

you know, not only your client team, but all the other client teams need to be moving in the right direction in order for gain share to be maximized. But then what we do is we take, have a target profit for each quarter. If we hit that target, then gain shares at a one. If we exceed target, like last quarter, we exceeded our profit for the quarter. So gain share was at a 1.24. And then we take the hours you work.

And we have an algorithm that then calculates how much gain share you get for that quarter based on the hours you worked, you met your minimum expectations, therefore you contributed, you know, basically this percentage. So you get this much gain share, you get this much share of the profit. That's how we do an overall incentive at Certainly.

We do have some teams with a performance based metric incentive when, and again, this is where we've had clients who've like just really pushed hard on, well, I want to make sure we're, you everyone's maximizing their productivity and, how do we know they're maximizing their productivity? We need to put an incentive in place. Okay. You know, so we're, we're, not going to fight.

Kevin Zyskowski (19:02.752)
so hard that we would lose a client, but we still do it at that team level. typically there Rob, what we would do is one, you have to be meeting the minimum expectations. That's just part of being on being certainly. then two, you would, there's usually a team component. So if the entire team meets the goal, then

this percentage of the incentive is paid out. But you as an individual, if you're pushing hard, but the team still misses, you can still get paid out. It's a smaller amount than if the whole team was meeting that threshold for incentive. And the reason for that is going back to what I said, I want those best people helping the rest of the team. That's how you get the strongest team. And usually if you do that smart and you re-communicate it,

And the other key thing that I learned the hard way about incentive quarterly is the longest you can go, but I prefer to pay it out every pay period. It's a little more administrative, but it is way better for results. If you spread it out even monthly, even quarterly is too long because everyone's smart. know, they're smart, right? Agents are smart. People are smart. They know when the game's over. And if the game's over,

Rob Dwyer (20:10.123)
Hmm.

Kevin Zyskowski (20:29.534)
mid quarter, that second half of the quarter is going to be miserable. So, you know, tie it to the pay period and you're going to get much better overall results. So those are some of the things we've done at Certainly as far as employee incentive.

Rob Dwyer (20:48.383)
Yeah, it's complicated, isn't it? I mean, it's really complicated. think people don't realize how complicated incentive plans can be because there are lots of just very basic, like there's either there's nothing or there's some kind of bonus tied to this thing or that thing. But to, to really get the results you're looking for, there's a lot of

Kevin Zyskowski (20:51.398)
yeah.

Rob Dwyer (21:18.071)
trial and error that goes into that and a lot of balancing out different competing narratives that go on in people's heads, quite honestly, because we're dealing with people.

Kevin Zyskowski (21:32.026)
We're dealing with people and we're also dealing with... mean the reporting available to us now is so much better than it was even five years ago, right? But it's still not perfect and it never will be, I don't think, in the eyes of an agent because there's always that opportunity for, well, I just inherited that. There were three interactions before me and they messed it up. That's why the CSAT was so low.

And it could be super valid, you know, and you can explain to them as much as you want that, well, you you got the raw deal on that one, but you benefited from the other interaction. It's never going to feel good to that agent that got burned by it because that's the one they're going to remember. And they very well might be right. So another reason, I think, to weigh it heavily on at that team level because like, Hey, everyone needs to contribute.

Rob Dwyer (22:26.049)
Yeah.

Kevin Zyskowski (22:29.294)
to every interaction at a top level, that's how we win. And that is how we win. It's how we win, it's how the client wins, how the customers win. So,

Rob Dwyer (22:39.733)
Yeah. I'm curious from a contract negotiation standpoint as you work with different companies and how your company gets incented. Did you change anything or learn anything about how you're incented so that you could potentially fight that narrative that you saw where it was like, well, but if we tell our partner this,

probably going to lose revenue because they can fix these things. We're not going to get as many calls or chats or emails.

Kevin Zyskowski (23:15.478)
Yeah, and this might make me sound like maybe not the smartest business person, Rob, but so yeah, clearly know that but I don't know. Maybe I believe in karma or whatever. I also feel like

when you operate from a zone of transparency with both inside, you know, everyone on our Certainly team knows if they see something, they don't need to hesitate to go to the client with that information. If they believe it can help or if it's informative to the client, they don't need to. I mean, yes, I'll will help them formulate it, make sure it looks great and it's very clear and all that. But

we're not going to curb the message. So as far as our contracts are done, I originally in my initial BPO, we were at an FTE model. And the, the logic in my head on that was we were focused on winning smaller e-commerce companies. So e-commerce startups, maybe doing

anywhere from five million in annual revenue. And then like our biggest client started off at like two million. then, I mean, two, maybe, maybe three years later, they were over a hundred million. They just, they just went crazy. And they're, they're like a pretty big brand now, which is super fun to watch. Although I, know, as that happens, a lot of the original people are long gone, but the brand still lives on.

But we we we moved away from that FTE model. I originally I thought it was great because it was the sales pitch there It was like you pay for the person and if you need because this team's so small because in a startup environment You're flexing you might need, you know a lot of a Function this week, but next week you might need B function

Kevin Zyskowski (25:26.368)
in this model, we're okay with you moving people's responsibilities like that. And in fact, it actually helped with engagement and it helped attracting great people because that was interesting for people, right? Like we also really stressed, we wanted our people to feel like part of the team. So that that was and continues to be a big part of our negotiation is when we partner with someone, whether it's we're running the entire customer support org or

We do a lot of hybrid co-sourcing where you keep your core team and we scale it for you, or maybe we seasonally increase for you. But feeling and being a part of the team is huge. That's one of the things that we actually do want to negotiate. we moved away from the FTE model because it got, I mean, the incentive can get complicated. FTE can get

super, super complicated because what do you do when someone's sick? What do you do when someone takes a day off? What do you do when someone's power goes out? What do you do? I mean, there's just so many iterations. So it was like, I, know, I had this massive spreadsheet keeping track of all that stuff. And then come invoice time, you had to like, try and try and do it. And then you were either

Rob Dwyer (26:33.078)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (26:48.213)
Ha

Kevin Zyskowski (26:52.302)
feeling like I'm probably cheating myself here or, but I don't, didn't want to feel like I was cheating the client. Right. So then all of sudden your margins that are supposed to be like this are starting to get like this. And the other thing I started finding out was other people were misusing the FTE model and they weren't deducting for when their person was sick or when, so they were keeping all that breakage to themselves. They weren't paying the associate.

but they weren't giving it back to the client either. So that model I feel like has a little bit of a taint on it now too. Certainly we go hourly. So we negotiate the hourly rates. Typically as the team grows, those hourly rates reduce slightly for the client's benefit. So that's the one incentive we have for a client to grow with us is

As as they grow with us their hourly rate comes down but we don't Yeah, I mean as far as like Being concerned about shrinking in fact One of our clients right now that's grown tremendously over the last couple years we've only they've grown well over a hundred percent and our

our invoices have grown about 15 % because just the efficiency that we've we've gained improvements they've made to but also just we've gotten so much better and so much more efficient but you know what they refer to us to someone so that's I think that's how it pays for itself like if you do great work and you do fair work

One, you can sleep at night and you can feel pretty good. Two, I do think that referral model is the best option for future sales.

Rob Dwyer (28:55.605)
Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious. So you started your second BPO in 2022. So there was six years between the first one and the second one, right? Aside from the obvious, we all lived through 2020. aside from the obvious, what changed between that first iteration and then the second iteration?

Kevin Zyskowski (29:25.542)
Yeah, mean, you know, and I know the obvious is the obvious, but it had some implications, COVID, that I don't think I would have guessed if I wasn't involved. The biggest thing was, I've all, so in the early days of my initial organization,

We were remote, then we got an office because the reason was because, well, and we were largely domestic. We were almost exclusively domestic. We started adding offshore agents later into that organization. But originally we were 100 % domestic. And at first we started off, we didn't have an office and that was a tough sell.

in 2016, 2017, that was a really tough sell. And even to startups, they would be like, oh, well, how do you know what they're doing? And how you watch them? All that stuff. it's like, well, you know, we've got these dashboards and we were using great tools even then. Even then Zendesk, you could see exactly what everyone was doing when they were doing it. And, you know, we had time and schedule tracking systems and all that stuff. And we could show them that, but

Rob Dwyer (30:27.815)
Ha

Kevin Zyskowski (30:45.494)
It wasn't what they were used to. so they didn't feel comfortable with it. So that was like a huge get over the, get over the hill from a sales perspective thing. So much so that we ended up investing in an office and it was, you know, to be honest, the office was fun. sometimes too fun. mean, the interesting thing about the office is collaboration happens super fast, both business and mischief collaboration. So

Rob Dwyer (31:13.431)
Yeah.

Kevin Zyskowski (31:14.462)
I mean, so I would spend a lot of my time hearing like after majority of one shift would go, did you know so and so and so and so? I like, I don't like, I don't need to know. I don't want to know, but I shouldn't say I don't need to know because you end up needing to know so that you can manage that stuff. So when COVID happened, it broke down that wall of remote work, having like a taboo around it.

And people were very, very comfortable with it. Obviously they had to be, but they continue to be comfortable. That's no longer an obstacle to sales, which is super nice. think, I mean, the other thing that's happened, I would have never guessed back in 2016, 2017, even 2018, that the starting wage for a domestic call center person would be in the high teens, low twenties.

Uh, like, like I think, like I believe it is now, um, at least to be competitive in the market where I'm in Ohio. And I would say, you know, starting off in a decently, you know, a tier one, not even necessarily tier two skillset, but even tier one, 18, 19 is starting pay. And, even at that rate, you're risking attrition. You're probably risking not getting the best.

candidates as well. And like so that's like I mean I was paying folks $12 an hour back then and I had great I mean great people and they never left. So that's a huge difference as far as I guess really what the inflation of our economy has been in the last six years and and what it's done to to pay rates.

The tough part about that is, it's tough part about that domestically is at the same time, people have started to become more exposed, especially in the startup world to organizations like Upwork. And they've really been exposed to like, wow, there's this, there's all these people all over the globe with amazing skills and they're willing to work for X amount. You know, let's do it. So.

Kevin Zyskowski (33:36.544)
At the same time that domestic labor costs have increased, the hourly value that people are willing to accept, the hourly rate hasn't increased nearly as much. So that's a big difference between that has happened in the last six years is that whole piece on labor costs and pricing value. And then of course, the other big one,

The massive one right now is technology and, and what AI and even machine learning before that. So in the 2016, 2017, 2018, we were largely e-commerce and I'm not kidding you. had, we had clients and this probably not a, not a surprise. had clients where 25 % or more of their ticket types were order status or where's my order.

that type of thing, WISMO, like we would always ask, what's the WISMO count? And now if you have a support tool and someone who knows what they're doing with it, you can pretty much eliminate all those. mean, some will still squeeze through here and there, particularly around the holidays or something like that. But for the most part,

the tools of today can handle those and they can handle them 24 by seven. So that is a massive change. And then now of course it went from that to like, know, tools like Gorgias being able to hook up to your Shopify account and supply and order status, do simple stuff like that, to then doing like building if then logic chat bots that could

basically take you through the FAQs or content that you had built out, but no one reads the FAQs on their own. But if they had a bot that kind of led them through it, you would get a little more success with that to now where you've got these AI bots that are just, you know, LLMs behind them. And you can just talk to them like you would almost like you would talk to a live chat agent. So that,

Kevin Zyskowski (35:53.43)
evolution of technology has been just a massive change. You know, and then even tools like, I mean, e-commerce has just changed dramatically too. Like back then we had, we did have clients on Shopify, but Shopify was a lot rarer. So I remember we had this client that did a, they did a massive Black Friday promotion. And I remember that

the sales were going so quickly that the inventory counts in Shopify couldn't keep up. Shopify was saying that there was quantity available when it was already sold out. So then like we were digging out of that until March. That stuff doesn't happen anymore, right? I mean, all that stuff is so clean and tight now. yeah, a lot of change. I mean, a tremendous amount of change.

Rob Dwyer (36:27.415)
Kevin Zyskowski (36:49.902)
on the people front, you know, people are, are, are still people, think. I mean, our team is more diverse than it was for at least geographically than it was then. Like I said, we were mostly, mostly Ohio based, mostly Columbus, Ohio based. That was a lot of fun because we could actually do physically do things together. And we, tried to, especially like in the summer and.

we had a great office with space outside that we could hang out and all of that. So that part is, is, is less, I guess, fun than it was back then. Probably way more efficient than we, we are way more efficient now than then, because there was always like, like some reason to have some fun that took people away or took their attention away a little bit. but overall.

I think most of the people Concerns are still the same. We still like strive to have really, you know figured out what's going to keep people engaged Not just stay but really engaged in their work doing doing great work each and every day You know, the one thing that has changed is The car stuff like the commute stuff now that we're a hundred percent remote

And that's changed. So that's really nice. It's way easier to be very strict about schedule adherence than it was back then. Like now if someone's just literally like they just have to roll out of their bed and turn their computer on, put their headset on, and also the systems are so fast to log you in at this point, you can be up and running in less than a minute. So if you're not adhering to your schedule,

Rob Dwyer (38:31.681)
Yeah.

Kevin Zyskowski (38:48.206)
It's probably a will problem versus anything like a skill or a technology problem. So that's.

Rob Dwyer (38:54.88)
Yeah.

Okay, Kevin, speaking of change, I would like to know where you would be if you had come up with the Breakfast Baconator.

Kevin Zyskowski (39:13.619)
Did you look at my background?

Rob Dwyer (39:14.999)
Of course I did. But you didn't come up with the Breakfast Baconator. But I want to know, like, if you had, what would have changed for you? What would you be doing today?

Kevin Zyskowski (39:17.759)
then.

Rob Dwyer (39:30.891)
You might want to provide some context for the listeners because...

Kevin Zyskowski (39:33.986)
Sure, sure. So I think where this question is coming from is I was with Wendy's International here. They're based in Columbus, Ohio. And I had the opportunity to, I was doing a lot of project management at that time. I had the opportunity to be the program manager for rolling out breakfast at Wendy's. I was the third go at rolling out breakfast at Wendy's.

And, you know, long story short to Roth, to your point, it was not, it did not end in success, that iteration. But wow, did I learn just, that was such a great opportunity to work with, I think some of, if not the best operators I've ever had a chance to work with. And also just to really, just to really, well,

to provide me with the a little bit of wisdom as to what you get if you stay conscious as you go through your career and really try and absorb what you're experiencing. I worked with this operator who he could walk into any store and you know they could tell him like hey you know these are these are the metrics we're struggling with.

And he could look around that store and within 10 minutes rearrange things. And a week later, those KPIs had improved. Whether it was things going out the back door, you know, chicken patties going out the back door and the trash cans. Like, well, who's taking out your trash? Who's, you know, let me, let me see how you put the bags in. Oh, well, yeah. You got the space between the bag and the bottom of the trash cans where they're putting the stuff. Do you check, you know, I mean, he just.

because he was conscious and he was always learning. it was like, you know, and he was in his seventies when I was working with him, but he just, he loved it. He was passionate about it. So much so like that job is a little challenging on the, the, on the waistline because since we were in breakfast, we were, we would go and we would test, would, you know, do a market test of a store that had rolled out the breakfast that we were rolling out at that time in the morning.

Kevin Zyskowski (41:59.918)
Then we would eat lunch at a store in the afternoon. And then a lot of times he would take Wendy's home with him at night for dinner. But but man, did he know this space? So it just it really was an eye opening opportunity for me to not only deal with all kinds of functions. I mean, we had legal involved, we had real estate involved. The training was huge and the onboarding of

Cause we had to bring in a whole new team. was a whole new day part. There was no one working in the morning. So we had to really figure out how to do that, how to retain them. But the other thing that was amazing about not only did I get to work with the Wendy's operators in-house, but I also got to work with the franchisees. So I really relished that experience to hear from those entrepreneurs about what they

liked what, how they, how they, how they did. mean, in essence, you know, Wendy's supplied a template, right? Here's how you run this stuff. But I had insight to this operator is crushing it. Look at his margins. This operator is like, he's barely squeaking by. He's in trouble. And, and then I'd get to go meet them and talk to them and hear what they do and how they do things.

And so you got to put those two pieces together and really see the difference. Like there was there was a franchisee in the Louisville, Kentucky area. No one could touch him. Like there was a lot of people that were struggling with the margins on breakfast because of various reasons and like how the marketing budget was was dispersed and they didn't want to take from their their, you know, their king day part of lunch to spend on breakfast and all this stuff.

This guy was dealing with all those same constraints, but he was crushing it. And when we went to his stores, was all actually this, this is a great, this is great because it reminds me of why I started to love customer service and experience so much. He was just doing everything a little bit different. His bathroom. So his in, in dining experience was as pristine as it could possibly be.

Kevin Zyskowski (44:21.836)
And he had employees there that were, basically had folks that had been with him forever, working with the new people on the team, but not only showing them how to do things, but infusing in them the culture that he had across all his stores about how much they cared for their customers. They knew customers names. They, I mean, it wasn't just cause I was there and my boss was there, you know, talking and watching them. When customers came in, a lot of them got hugs.

And they had, he had set up a little thing in the dining room where it was like a coffee station. And he had a lady that had been with him for over 20 years and she'd go around and fill up everyone's coffee when they wanted it. So it was like way up service than what a typical, what you would expect in a typical fast food breakfast experience.

But because he did all those things, the bathrooms were pristine. He had incredible team camaraderie. They would do things like, we're going to do a weekend store clean. And he said, and I remember talking to him, he's like, the key to it is I don't miss one of them. He's like, I go to every single one and we laugh and we we find out about each other's families and friends and

what we like to do, stuff we would never find out about, just working the shift. Cause you're so busy. He's like, but when you're sitting there and you're, you're refreshing the paint on a wall in a bathroom, you'd be amazed at what you find out about one another. And once you have that relationship, then it's like, then you can be transparent about, about work too. And you can be honest and you, and you can both know and trust each other. And that trust is what ends up.

allowing you to just perform at such a higher level. So I actually will never forget those lessons from that Wendy's experience. you know, Dave Thomas, they gave everyone the book that Dave Thomas wrote. I can't remember the name of the book now, but it's a fantastic read because it is like, he didn't even graduate high school. I don't even think he went, made it all the way to eighth grade actually, because him and his

Kevin Zyskowski (46:45.506)
brother had to support the family. But he was trained by Colonel Sanders, which is also super interesting piece. And Colonel Sanders wanted him to open up a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Columbus, Ohio. And that was when he came out here and was like, think there's an opportunity for a burger place, all this stuff like that. But the lessons in that book,

are still super infused in their culture. And that whole thing about, you know, this, this, the Patty at Wendy's is square because they don't cut corners. And that's at least when I was there, that is a hundred percent real. They don't cut corners. Everyone. The other, the other thing that I took away from there is again, a training thing. My first two weeks, I was in a store working the drive-through window and

Rob Dwyer (47:41.911)
It's intense, isn't it?

Kevin Zyskowski (47:43.658)
was it was intense and it was awesome. And then when you would go into a store, one, the person there, everyone knows that, right? Everyone in corporate can flip burgers. They can do all of it. I mean, not to the level that someone's doing it every day, but at least they, you have a knowledge of the level of difficulty of the job, which is critical.

because you go in with the assumption then that they're trying their best. There's something in the environment that is not allowing them to hit the levels that we need them to hit. So it's my job. And this is the same thing we do at Certainly to create that environment so that they can. And if everyone can't, then it's definitely a systemic thing, right? So just takeaways like that were huge at Wendy's. It was really cool. if it had succeeded,

I don't know. mean, it was an interesting thing. What happened was the C they changed CEOs and the guy from Taco Bell who was running Taco Bell and Pizza Hut and all that. He came over to Wendy's and he was a big branding guy. And he's like the other problem Wendy's had. So breakfast was kind of like an effort to try and raise revenue on a fixed asset quickly.

But he's like, the other problem you all have, I don't know if you've noticed, but every time you go into a Wendy's, no one has any color hair other than white in the dining room. And and and it was true in the early like 2010s and stuff like that, it was true. And that's when they started, if you notice one, they rebranded all their stores, which was massive. So now it was like, OK.

Rob Dwyer (49:22.231)
That's so true.

Rob Dwyer (49:29.527)
huh.

Kevin Zyskowski (49:38.946)
We got to put a pause on breakfast because we can't ask them to pay for there was certain breakfast wasn't that expensive. It was actually the ROI on breakfast booked really good on paper because you didn't need that many different tools. You could cook it on the same griddles, all that stuff, as long as you just followed protocol and had like a little bit of time in between to make sure everything was cleaned down with the eggs and all that stuff. But.

it was possible with a little bit of a investment, relatively small. But now if they're going to tell you like, you got to put a whole new face on your store and a whole new inside in your store, any little extra costs people are going to be like, it's, you know, they're going to be like oil and water. They're not going to want it. So he's like, we got to pick and he's like, I know what my pick is. And that's, it's the rebranding. So they did the rebranding. And then they also went hard with the social too. That's when Wendy like got,

Rob Dwyer (50:34.613)
Yeah.

Kevin Zyskowski (50:35.502)
attitude and all of sudden she got snarky and yeah, my millennials ate it up and there were people at Wendy's that were under 60 years old and so yeah, it's been a huge success for them. If I was still there, I probably would be happy but always wondering, happy because it is an organization with a lot of great people.

Rob Dwyer (50:41.952)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Zyskowski (51:02.574)
who are very passionate about their work, particularly in an organization that size. I think it's really cool how much passion they have considering the size of that, any age of that organization. It's been around a long time. But I think I'd always be wondering what if I did something on my own? I'm glad it worked out the way it did.

Rob Dwyer (51:26.675)
Yeah, well, we don't have a lot of time left, but I know that you are, I guess, I don't know how you would characterize it, but I know that you've been trying to learn guitar for.

Amateur guitar player I think is how I will characterize it whether or not you feel that's accurate really doesn't matter two-part question

If you were to pick up a guitar right now and have to play a song that demonstrated kind of your skill level where you could go, I can play this and it'll sound good. What song is that? And then the next question is like, what's the Mount Everest? If you could like learn to play any song the way that you hear it in your head, you would just say.

What is that song? So what's the song that you can do? Where's your skill level today? And what's Mount Everest?

Kevin Zyskowski (52:30.83)
This I mean this is embarrassing. I. I want I don't think I've thought about my Mount Everest Rob. I feel like that is my humbling weekly humbling when I go to my who blesses hard even he might be the most patient trainer. Coach that I've ever. You know I ever got to deal with because the my level of success is really low. I mean.

Every year I strive to improve my Christmas songs a little bit because my mom asks. I'll play Jingle Bells, I'll play you know a few others. Honestly I haven't improved too much beyond that. Down by the River, I've got a few that I can do and I can

He's taught me to read music so I can read very simple music and play it at a very slow pace. But for some reason, my hand to brain is still like, it's painful to think about. What is that note? What is it telling me to do? What's the rhythm? What's the scale? All that stuff. I haven't thought of my Mount Everest. I should do that.

I don't know. mean, I love scrolling through Instagram and, you know, watching like, you know, the guys from Zeppelin or whatever other band, do amazing things with the same instrument that I've been struggling with to do much more than jingle bells. And it blowed me away, but I will say like,

Yeah, I mean, again, it's just like anything else, like the 10,000 hours a year that I'm putting or the 2000 hours a year that I'm putting into work makes me an expert there. Those guys are putting in those kind of hours playing guitar every day. mean, even my my my instructor, he, you know, he he tells he's still he's he's in his 70s. He still plays six, six plus hours a day.

Kevin Zyskowski (54:54.542)
Not including the lesson time that he's given. That's why he can crush it. So, you know, I think it's... I don't really have a great answer for you, unfortunately, but...

Rob Dwyer (54:56.884)
All

Rob Dwyer (55:05.865)
Alright, well then I've got a suggestion for you. You're an Ohio guy, right? Mean should probably be Hang on Sloopy like that's.

Kevin Zyskowski (55:10.325)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (55:18.039)
No, I mean Clapton. Sure, I guess, but I mean. That's a song. Potentially about an Ohio U student and jazz singer Dorothy Sloop and you know it's been made famous within the state. Yeah, so so that's my challenge. Maybe in a year will come back and I'll ask you how it's going.

Kevin Zyskowski (55:27.432)
Hang on, Floopy. Yeah, OK.

Kevin Zyskowski (55:35.246)
The speed is up right now.

Rob Dwyer (55:47.499)
Hang on, Sloopy, and you can either triumphantly say, I got it, or you could just say, look, man, I got jingle bells. Either way, I'm fine with it. It's all good. Kevin, really great talking with you today. Thanks so much for joining Next In Q.

Kevin Zyskowski (55:50.098)
All

Kevin Zyskowski (56:00.366)
Alright, I f***ing that rub.

Kevin Zyskowski (56:08.02)
Absolutely. All right. Take care.