How Can You Raise Sales 5-15%?
This is a shortened version of an interview that appears in the December 2004 issue of QSR. To get the full QSR interview delivered to your door twelve times per year, subscribe to QSR.
Raving Brands’ Leading Man
By Sherri Daye Scott

Despite the ongoing success of Martin Sprock’s Raving Brands, the company head shares a cubicle with three other people, flies coach, and stays two to a room on the road. He might be the company’s chief, but for Sprock it is all about teamwork.

Martin Sprock is a 39-year-old North Carolina native who moved to Atlanta in 1988 and entered the restaurant business in 1990. His company, Raving Brands, is home to seven fast-casual brands, including Moe’s Southwest, Planet Smoothie, PJ’s Coffee & Wine Bar, Mama Fu’s Asian House, Doc Green’s Gourmet Salads—and the two newest additions to the family, Shane’s Rib Shack and Boneheads Seafood. Together the seven brands are expected to do about $250 million in 2005.
So why are company meetings held on the patio of the only company-owned Moe’s store? Why is Sprock’s office a converted closet in the back of the one company-owned Mama Fu’s? And why does his franchisee support team share budget hotel rooms while out in the field? The answer lies in Sprock’s approach to business: Keep it lean.
You seem always to be a step or two ahead of the rest of the field when it comes to developing new concepts. What do you see that everyone else is missing?
I am not certain I would say we are always the first to the punch. I think we are the first to spend the time and break all the barriers down and brainstorm, see every angle on a business.
We have so much momentum right now. We have so much hype around what we are doing that we are noticed more. We grow so fast that it looks like we are beating everyone to the punch. But there is always somebody that we have picked off or went in there and thought, “Wow, this is a cool idea, but instead of doing it like this, maybe we could spin it here, maybe add barbecue to the seafood.”
There are always crazy ideas that come from having a group that is not one guy out there searching things out. We have 15 to 20 guys and girls who email each other every day with new ideas. I think the lead we have on other companies—if we do have a lead—is the fact that we listen to so many different people’s opinion.
You are not reinventing the wheel, then?
We are seeing things that are done, putting different components together, and then hiring all the best people and making them partners.
There is not a banker or lawyer or investor in the deal. I am the majority owner, but every one of my partners—guys and girls—own the entire company, 100 percent. That makes them want to work harder and come in from anywhere.
I can recruit the top people from any business around the country and say, “Wouldn’t you like to be a partner in something that’s not only sexy, but fun, too? You get a lot of rope. Sometimes you hang yourself, and sometimes you show all your partners that you are incredibly bright.”
How do Raving Brands franchisee royalties compare to those of competing concepts?
Raving Brands royalties are 5 percent, which by today’s standards, is at the low end. Many concepts charge 6 percent or 7 percent. 
So in terms of your concepts, where is Raving Brands right now?
We started with Planet Smoothies about seven, eight years ago. Then we bought a coffee company called PJ’s, out of New Orleans. That is about a 25-year-old company. We went into Moe’s Southwest Grill. Then we opened Mama Fu’s Asian House…
So we had Doc Green’s Gourmet Salads, which we are very aggressively rolling out right now.
Boneheads Seafood is one of the two newest ones. We have already signed about 10 or so leases on that for some of the best locations in the Southeast, mainly Atlanta. We will roll that one out very aggressively. We have not opened our first store, but we are getting ready to start construction. We are excited about that one.
And then Shane’s Rib Shack…We bought Shane’s. It has a couple units already. We bought the company existing, and we are going to put a new spin on it, kind of like we did with PJ’s. We changed the logos and the design and the flavors and the sides. The one thing we kept intact was our main man, Shane. He is the founder of the business. And we obviously wouldn’t want to do it without him. He is very happy to be involved with us as a partner.
He had incredible ribs and barbeque and chicken and stuff like that. He had a lot of improvement to do in other areas that we are finishing up right now. We are already in construction for three or four units, in addition to the several he already had.
So that’s the full rundown.
Do you have a general timeframe for the opening of the first Shane’s or the first Boneheads?
Shane’s already has a first because we bought the company with two stores. The first new prototype—the new logos and all that stuff we have been working on—will certainly [open] before the end of the year. And we have two or three that we will get out the gate by the end of the year. We should about five Shane’s by the end of the year total.
And then Boneheads…We’ve signed a lot of leases that all come due in about a year. There is a lot development going on in Atlanta and the surrounding areas. We have tagged quite a few projects.
We probably will not get but two or three open in the next six months or so. Then after that, we have no choice but to build another 10 real quick, probably in the next year or so. I would say probably over the next 12 months we might get 10 or 12 or 15 rolling.
With Shane’s, we might get 20 or 30 over the next 12 months. And we might have 20 to 30 Doc Green’s open by next year. Moe’s is getting ready to go up from three a week to four week. That has been a phenomenal success for us. Mama Fu’s is steady at one store per week right now. It looks like, if everything falls into place, that we will be ready to do two a week at the beginning of the year, which is aggressive for us with that model.
Our goal was to build 10 stores a week, and we are about six months away from being on track to build 10 stores a week between all the brands.
Do you have one head chef who is doing the menu development for all these concepts?
Out of our 50 or so partners, we have probably three or four that went to either Johnson Wales or CIA. We plucked them from competing type businesses.
We do not go to the fast-food feeders. We go to the casual dining, or even high-end dining, to find the guy who can deliver the best food, and we offer him a partnership. So, we have guys with experience in real-time in that particular field or genre of the brand. We pulled the best guy for seafood, the best guy for Asian.
We have a committee that I am on because I like to eat. We are constantly working on it. I mean all the time. We are so big now vendors will send us any amount of free food we want to work on so it is fun. Now there are seven concepts which means at least once a day I am on a food committee meeting, sitting around eating all sorts of barbeque dishes and sides. Now I taste a lot of fresh fish.
If you had to guess, about how many calls do you receive each day from would-be franchisees?
It is about 150 emails and phone calls a day.
We only make two or three deals a day. So can you imagine how many people...we would not call them tire kickers. We would not call them under-qualified. We would say the deal probably was not right for us at the time.
We cannot sell you a Moe’s contract in Atlanta because we are full, for example. We can talk to you about Mama Fu’s or one of the other brands. But you might not be interested. So, there are a lot of phone calls where it wasn’t the right fit for either party. Then a lot of time we interview six, eight, ten people a day, and we choose maybe 10 or 20 percent of them because not only do we feel like they’d be easy to get along with, but they do a fantastic job and they want to be a franchisee.
Some people are too creative. There are plenty of great people who come in here that we walk away from because we know better. You know, “Boy that guy has a creative bone in every aspect of the business. And he doesn’t need our help in real estate because he certainly knows it better than we do.” And he might, but we can’t take that chance anymore.
We have to go with people who believe in the system, who are willing to follow the system, and who obviously like our brand enough to have a passion for it because we see our best franchisees are our most passionate. They live and breathe it. So when they come in, and they love our brand, they love our food those are the ones we get most fired up about because we feel like the rest of it will fall in place. We have great training programs. They do not need to be culinary geniuses. They need good operators who run a good business, who pay their employees well, and are all about the customer.
I could have sold 5,000 franchises this year. But we have to make sure we get franchisees in that we can find real estate for. Therefore, I can only go so fast. [Finding] franchisees is not our problem at all. We have to get better and better real estate. We feel like we are good at it, but we are always trying to get better.
Any other concepts on the drawing board for Raving Brands?
You could say its round, and it has cheese on it.
I am scared to get into that one because I do like the product, but we have not been able to figure out a great way to make it as healthy as the others. Although, we do have a very thin crust that we have invented.
I do not even think we will do a deep dish and regular tossed pan. We are going to do thin and crispy. We are going to have gourmet toppings. We have this 96 percent fat-free cheese and leaner toppings that are actually gourmet. We are going to couple it with some cool flatbread subs and some better salads.
I hope nobody else gets it well enough together because we are so swamped right now with what we have—but we never say never. We have also talked to a couple of small pizza guys that we think have done a good job and would be good partners for us. So, if we do pull the trigger, we can start with two, three, four, five, six, ten stores. We have a couple of folks who have actually come to us who want us to franchise. And we get that a lot. Shane’s Rib Shack came to us. PJ’s came to us.

Sherri Daye Scott is QSR’s editor. Contact her at sherri@qsrmagazine.com.

QSR subscribers: get the answers to these questions and more in your December issue!!

  • Why is there this perception that Raving Brands is a leader in several segments?
  • You have a unique approach to franchising and company structure. When and why did you develop this strategy?
  • Why the continued focus on fast-casual?
  • Is there a common customer among the various Raving concepts?
  • What kind of systemwide sales is Raving Brands pulling in?
  • Why is the time right for a fast-casual BBQ and seafood place?
  • One of the concerns about serving seafood in quick-service is that you can’t serve quality fish at a reasonable price. How do you answer that?
  • Which is your most popular brand?
  • Is Raving Brands a franchise company or a restaurant company?
  • How long will Raving Brands remain a privately held company? 

Want full coverage of every QSR interview? Subscribe now!