We see the Web as a great voice. We try to make our Web sites very relevant to the local markets. If you want to know what’s playing at the movie theaters, you want to know what time it’s coming out, come to our restaurant Web sites because it’s there. We have inspirational type messages. We give them a reason to come back every day because there’s relevant content to their life beyond just the idea of eating or consuming our product. But they’re always exposed to our image.

Any other thoughts on the Web?

MASON: Online orders are a vehicle, but they’re not really the reason that you’re on the Web. There are local community sites. I live in a city of 100,000 people here in Frisco, Texas. Frisco Online makes or breaks a restaurant in Frisco. If people go into a restaurant right when it opens and they don’t like it, the restaurant shuts down. A good hamburger place like Krystal came in here. They weren’t set up and ready to operate. It was all over Frisco Online. They were out of business in six months.

The Web is, at least in the markets that I’m in, huge. The power of it is probably the most important medium that there is.

ANDREW: Social networking in general is just paramount to the evolution of our brand. If you’re not controlling the message online, your positioning will be done for you. It’s been critical for us to get out front, have a presence on sites like Facebook. Otherwise, people will do it for you.

Make sure you’re a part of the process or helping to shape or mold your image online. It’s just as important to make sure you’re monitoring other independent operators.

A big part of our demographics is the younger generation and baby boomer generation. They’re going online to look for restaurant reviews on sites like Urban Spoon and Yelp. You better make sure you’re hearing what those customers are saying about your restaurant.

We do a lot of guerrilla marketing online. It’s wondrous, low-cost. We do a lot of very strategic guerrilla marketing using e-mail.

What other things do you do to ensure customer satisfaction or to get feedback from your consumers?

ANDREW: We give every customer that comes in a Maddio’s Pizza Joint a feedback card. We’re a new restaurant so getting that feedback right up front is critical to the oversight of our development.

We try to hit on several points within this little form just to make sure that the customer is able to communicate to us what they like, what they don’t like, and how we can improve. We look at those feedback forms daily. Part of my job as the leader of the brand is to look at those and make sure that our teams are assembled to fix issues that we have.

We get a lot of praise about our customer service. That’s good feedback to give to the staff to keep them motivated and engaged.

CROSBY: We design the systems and management to where the general manager is up on the front line the vast majority of the time. We’ve really streamlined the back of the house so that there’s just no need for management to be in the back of the house. They’re up front interacting one on one with the customer. We tell our managers, “Here’s the type of data we’re wanting to draw out today. Make sure to create a dialogue to find out these types of items.”

Our prototype has a large community table. We’re in a downtown location, and there’s different schools around. Students like to come in groups and sit there. Senior leaders—myself or Pal Barger or Rob Thompson—go often and eat lunch. We sit at the community table and ask them, “What do you think about this?” We’ll observe how they’re eating, how they’re utilizing the product. We’ll take notes of that, open a dialogue with them.

And then we have a third approach. We go within a three-mile radius of Sharon’s and go door to door. We do this on a six-week cycle. We have a preset of information that we’re wanting. We find we get the best responses, though, if we’re not reading from a card. So we memorize the five questions.

Once we step outside, we jot down their answer, then go next door to keep this information flow coming in about the concept. How they feel about the tray dress, the level of service from hospitality, the product quality so forth and so on.

How do you make sure that you hire the best people?

CROSBY: One of the things that we did is partner with a company that has a product called Sysdine. Potentials apply online. The program does a survey that gets at applicants’ core values and how those align with our company’s core values. It gives us a visual score card with lights on it—red is a no go; yellow caution; green go. It takes applicants step by step to make sure on the front end that what they’re looking for is aligned with what we as a concept can deliver. Then the automated system generates the list of interview questions.

That’s one of these cases we were talking about earlier: determining the right business partner. It’s a monthly subscription so it’s cheap, fast, and effective.

ANDREW: The tools today are just fantastic, and they’ve made a lot of huge improvements in helping to recruit the right guys for the team. We are in the customer-service business; we’re in the people business at the end of the day. With that being said, we really hire people based on their attitude.

Get the people who walk into an interview and are smiling and naturally outreaching and outgoing. It’s critical.