Success Story

Veggie Galaxy Drives Sales Growth and Repeat Business with a Renewed Focus on the Guest Experience

Toward the end of 2016, Adam Penn, the owner of Veggie Galaxy in Cambridge, MA, hired an experienced general manager to help fill a management vacuum that had existed between ownership and staff for the prior two to three years.

It was a wise decision - one of many.

The vacuum "had created a negative culture under which staff were not receiving the support that they needed," Penn recounts, "and guests were therefore not receiving the experience that we wanted to provide."

While great hospitality was something Penn had tried to emphasize since the day the restaurant opened in 2011, "We noticed that the guest experience had deteriorated over the last couple of years to the point where we were losing formerly very loyal customers and receiving far too many negative reviews on social media."

Penn says that the decision to hire a GM was born out of necessity. "I had reached a stress point at which my options were to either sell the restaurant or find someone who could manage it on a day-to-day basis."

The move worked, he reports. "While we're still not perfect, we've been able to build a management team much more able to provide the support that the staff needs to better focus on their jobs rather than on putting out fires."

As a result, Penn continues, the culture has become much more positive for everyone, and staff performance has improved both in the back and front of the house. "Our hospitality has returned to high levels, though we continue to want to raise the bar and shoot for nothing short of exceptional every time."

By turning the guest experience around, Veggie Galaxy has been better able to retain customers and drive sales growth.

Having largely tackled his hospitality issues, in March 2017 Penn rolled out some new menu items in the hope of creating excitement and bring more people through the door.

"We really pushed the new menu items on social media, confident that once we got people in the door our improved guest experience would have them coming back for more," he notes. The strategy worked: when all was said and done, sales grew by 36% in 2017, more than he and his team "ever would have imagined six years into the business."

Adam Penn, Owner of the Veggie Galaxy

The going hasn't always been easy, though. At least in the Boston area, the restaurant business just continues to get more and more competitive, with new restaurants seemingly opening every day, Penn reports. "This creates stiff competition, not just for customers but for staff."

Indeed, he describes competition for good back-of-house staff in particular as "intense, as the industry wage gap between back and front-of-house continues to widen."

In response to that trend, Penn has implemented a 3% so-called Close the Gap fee on every check that goes exclusively to back of house staffers so that they can also benefit from busier shifts and increased sales in such a way that helps close the gap versus tipped employees."

Penn and his management team recently listened in on RestaurantOwner.com's three-day webinar titled Delivering Your Ultimate Guest Experience."We're so excited to take the tools that we learned from this to continue to build upon our recent success."

Using templates from the webinar, Penn continues, he plans to "drill down into everything that happens at our restaurant so that we can intentionally design both the employee and guest experiences. If we're successful in creating the kind of experiences that we're aiming for, both employees and guests will want to be here regardless of the competition."