Mad Mex's new direction for 2012

Mad Mex have ambitious growth targets for 2012 to at least double their store count. Find out in this interview with their CEO and founder Clovis Young how they are going to get there and how their business is changing.

QSR Media: How was 2011 for the Group?
Clovis Young: 2011 was a great year. In 2012, we’d like to continue some of the progress we’ve made, specifically I think around technology. We’ve been a leader at developing our social media strategy. In 2011 we grew our Facebook fans, for example, from 3,000 to 12,000 fans. Part of this was achieved through innovation and using more sophisticated mechanisms to get our message out and to try to bring customers into our conversation. So in 2012 we’d like to continue focusing on technology and on how we communicate with customers.
Mad Mex has a variety of things happening with product development, so we’re quite keen to continually upgrade and promote some of the core competencies. We have unique position as the provider of the best quality and most flavorful Mexican food in fast casual space, so in 2012 it’s about pushing that competence, whether its improving recipes and cooking techniques or simply how we delivering our food to customers.
The biggest question for 2012 is how we think about our business as we go from 15 stores to 40 stores. While we are first and foremost a food company, the paradigm has to change from a food culture to a training and development driven culture. Right now we’re all about bringing in the passionate trainers and development managers to help us execute and push a training and development culture into the business. And focusing on the franchisee and staff training systems to make sure culture and values are occurring at the store level, which is obviously where our business takes place. As a result our single biggest challenge as well as our biggest opportunity is how we deliver the customer experience in a larger number of locations.

QSR Media: What’s planned for 2012?
Clovis Young: I think 2012 will be a year of, again, technology innovation. While we will continue to develop and promote Mad Mex through Twitter and Facebook, and through interactive online nutritional calculator, in 2012 we’ll be introducing a digital loyalty program. In the US, loyalty is probably more widely accepted and a necessary component of any business strategy, but in Australia I think there have been some great examples of recent successes. Sumo Salad has done a great job of rolling out a fantastic loyalty program. We would like to build on some of their success and we have some relatively radical and new ideas on how we can develop that loyalty program to increase customer penetration, increase the convenience and offer a unique value proposition for customers.

QSR Media: The nutritional calculator, what percentage of your customers would use this and has it changed the way you talk to your customers?
Clovis Young: The nutritional calculator is there to help educate people that Mexican food is in fact healthy and our made to order service style is another way. Inherently our business model lends itself to transparency and the nutritional calculator is really a chance to reinforce that. For example somebody might come in and leave feeling like they’ve had a healthy meal however people like personal trainers, for example, still say, ‘Yes, but I’d like to see some evidence’ The nutritional calculator has been a fantastic tool in this way for customers. Last year 37,000 unique viewers went on and calculated the calories in their meals. That’s a pretty big number. With a million and a half actual meals sold per year, you could say it’s a 3% penetration rate. The reality is, is that our customers come into Mad Mex once a week, so if we have a million and a half meals sold, that means we have 250,000 customers. So that percentage of our customers that have actually had an opportunity to use that nutritional calculator is probably, more realistically, 15%. And those are the people who generally care about what they’re eating. So really it’s a pretty dramatic impact when you look at it in those terms.

QSR Media: What value do you place on PR in growing your business?
Clovis Young: PR is an important part of our marketing plan. PR is both a vehicle to deliver messages into the hands of the users who can then add it to their conversation – but they’re also great sounding voices: is this something that people want to hear; is this really what they want to talk about? So from a strategic standpoint, using a PR firm is quite helpful in tailoring some of the strategic development/growth models because they have a good pulse on what this generation of media writers and by extension customers are really interested in. So for us, if we had to stop advertising or stop using PR, we would stop advertising. PR is that important.