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Q&A Raymund Magdaluyo

Q1: You are well admired as the owner / part-owner of many successful
local-concept restaurants like Red Crab, Sumo Sam, Claw Daddy all
known for their excellent food and good customer service. You also
ventured into fitness centers with FTX in October 2011. Whats your
thinking process in coming up with new ideas?
I have been a full time restaurateur since 1999. On one hand I led a bunch of mostly
seafood dining formats such as Red Crab Alimango House, ClawDaddy, Crustasia
Asian Bistro, Blackbeards Seafood Island, and BluFish Contemporary Coastal
Cooking. Under this cluster I loosely term as The Red Crab Group, we also run New
Orleans Bourbon Steaks and Oysters, our newly launched Komrad Maos Hunan
and Sichuan Kitchen and others.

On the other hand, I am part of another group The SumoSam Group of


Restaurants, and I am in charge of business development, especially franchising as
well as provincial expansion efforts.

I have been expanding, through these years, my personal and our collective mission
for our group. Initially, we just wanted to be a niche player and create a small casual
crab & seafood-dining segment for family and special gatherers. This mission has
expanded to then push seafood dining toward different directions. From there, since
our competencies have grown outside just building and running seafood
restaurants, our mission has grown to building a house of home-grown but world
class restaurant brands.

Now I have two general business and personal objectives:

First is I want to pick a few of the concepts and start building CHAINS out of these 2
to 3 highly scalable restaurant brands. Second, I also want our group to expand our
reach outside food and include other areas of the hospitality business we can
develop.

You see, a lot of the things we do in planning and building restaurants are the same
for building gyms, spas, and retail stores i.e., getting good locations, having them
designed, coming up with service design blueprints, etc.

Also, I wanted to put up something that will be good for my wife and my own health
and fitness.

Q2: We are sure you considered many options before choosing a final
concept. How do you actually decide which one will become your final
concept as well as determine the right price for it?

For restaurants, aside from our usual customers, the first market we have to satisfy
are our landlords. Most of them are mall developers and expert property managers
who have extensively researched on the community/ trade area they want to serve.
It is important to us that we know what they want to achieve, and how we can fit in
Q&A Raymund Magdaluyo
serving their customers. We ask them what cuisines (of course, in our case it is
mostly a choice of our existing restaurant concepts) they need or what their focus
group discussions reveal as far as dining preferences are involved.

After the space has been allotted to us, we then see what concept of ours best fits
the micro market (eg. mall, street, strip, etc.). We look at our neighbors, especially
the very strong ones and see how we can complement them. You see diners now
are polygamous and often patronize several restaurants. Weekday preferences,
especially for office goers are usually the same. Weekend preferences, especially
when with family always vary.

Of course, we try to check out prices of our neighboring establishments, the general
income levels of our community, as well as our internal sales and profit targets. For
instance, with some of our restaurants in BPO complexes, we try to adjust our
offerings to cater to their budgets.

Q3: Service excellence needs good and well-trained people. Can you
enlighten us with your recruitment and screening process?

Service Excellence, especially in casual (and fine) dining establishments is a lot


more dynamic and variable (i.e., non standard). There are no cookie-cutter scripts
and robotic employee manuals that tell them exactly what to do. What we do is arm
and empower our service staff with what I call the 6 Petals Of Enlightened
Hospitality:

Script (standard and dynamic) and service sequence

Service standards (how to bus out, serve, open and serve wine, etc.)

Dining dynamics (more like knowing strategic dining positions not far from
basketball positions) host, order taker, runner, expediter, back ups, eye,
etc.

Offensive moves (15 to 20 time tested small strategies to delight customers)

Defensive moves (15 to 20 moves addressing usual service fail points)

Menu mastery

We usually get a team balanced by two types of people those trained in HRM and
culinary schools and those trained at the school of hard knocks. Lately, many of
those who join us for their OJTs and practicum become potential hirees. Partnering
with schools is an effective way to not just have access to good practicumers, but
also a way of getting low cost recruitment program going.

We also do the usual mass hiring and screening for those applicants who have gone
abroad. We find that many of them who have spent a lot of time abroad settle back
Q&A Raymund Magdaluyo
in the country because they have already saved and now want to be nearer their
families. These ex-OFWs are good recruits since they bring with them automatic
skills and usually automatic American or European accents.

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