Top 2 Bottom Presents at Shuckin’ Shack Annual Franchisee Conference

Earlier this week our Top 2 Bottom team was invited to present to at the Shuckin’ Shack Oyster Bar’s annual conference, called “Shackin’ Up 2023”. It had been two years since we attending their last franchisee conference event in Myrtle Beach, and it’s truly impressive to see how this restaurant franchise opportunity has grown. A few things that impressed us most about this emerging franchise brand:

Shuckin’ Shack is Customer Centric

We had the privilege of seeing their CEO, Jonathan Weathington, give his keynote on Tuesday, called Knowing Your Customer. He immediately hit the nail on the head with stories about his marketing team getting bogged down with terms like “target audiences” and “ideal demographics”, “tapestry reports” and constant A/B testing of ad campaigns. For Shuckin’ Shack Oyster Bars, “knowing your customer” means actually knowing the names of the people sitting at the bar and at the tables within each of their 20+ restaurants.

Jonathan quickly, without warning, asked several franchisees sitting in the audience how many names they would know of the people sitting in their restaurants “right now”. Despite asking individual franchisees based in North Carolina and Maryland and South Carolina, all of them had very similar answer: Shuckin’ Shack franchisees would know the names of 80%-90% of the customers sitting within their restaurants today.

This session powerfully underscored the importance of truly knowing your customers and the power of word of mouth. It seems clear that this brand is about connections and establishing genuine knowledge about their customers that goes beyond loyalty cards and mobile rewards apps. Being able to refer to your actual customers by name, shows a legitimate concern for the people of your community and begets greater rewards with word of mouth recommendations between friends, families, neighbors and co-workers.

This Restaurant Franchise is Community Focused

At the back of their conference room, was a large check made out for nearly $80,000. During the prior month, the majority of the Shuckin’ Shack Oyster Bars participated in a multi-state music tour, called The Fresh and Raw tour. This event brought two important country music stars from Nashville, Taylor Goyette and Barrett Barber, to all of the participating restaurants. These professional musicians played together with the local live musicians to establish mini fundraisers for each stop of the tour.

When all was said and done, the 2nd annual Fresh and Raw tour raised $79,867.53 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. As you can see in the picture below, all Shuckin’ Shack franchisees participated with this event and were truly proud of their results. This is a group that doesn’t just talk about community involvement and fundraising in theory, they clearly practice it daily.

Franchisees Who Value Their Time

While the conference this week was filled with experienced Shuckin’ Shack franchisees who opened their bars six or eight years ago, we also met new franchisees who were still getting their locations locked in. New franchisees from Georgia and South Carolina were clearly excited about partnering with Top 2 Bottom Business Solutions very soon. Following the CEO’s call to action about getting to know the actual names of their best customers, doing something as distracting and time consuming as bookkeeping or payroll, seemed like a poor use of time for these new franchise business owners.

If you want to spend more time working on your business and getting to know your true customers by name, let Top 2 Bottom handle the bookkeeping, accounting and payroll for your franchise businesses. Contact us today to get things ready for 2024!