Building a Lasting Local Presence

EMILY: I’m Emily Washcovick, Yelp’s Small Business Expert. Every episode I pick one review on Yelp and talk to the entrepreneur and the reviewer about the story and business lessons behind their interaction.

Lets see what’s behind this week’s review.

CHADRICK: Yeah, if I bring them to the office, I’ll set them in the break room and they’ll be gone immediately. And most people – they cut their donut in half like, ‘I can’t eat this whole donut’ and then they’ll come back and get the other. And I mean, I’m like, “don’t kid yourself, you know you want the whole donut.”

I mean, they’re so good. And they got so many different kinds. I mean, you bring a dozen of these donuts, they’re not going to be around for long.

EMILY: That’s Chadrick talking about a personal favorite business of mine – Cranky Als. Located in the heart of Wauwatosa, WI where my family is from and where I lived from middle through high school. Cranky’s has evolved over the years. We’ll learn a bit more about that in a bit, but first, let’s hear Chadrick’s review

CHADRICK: Best donuts in the Metro Milwaukee area. Worth the drive for one donut alone; the tequila lime. It’s a hardy Bismark that is filled with El humidor tequila and key lime buttercream topped with vanilla icing, graham cracker crumble and lime drizzle on top. Not sure how you top this donut as this is the one that puts the Crank in Cranky Al’s, and the one that made me fall in love with this place. Don’t get me wrong – all their other donuts are so damn good too. But this one is the one that keeps me coming back. Cranky’s also has a host of other breakfast items and drinks, so stopping here makes it an all around go-to for all things morning. Pre-ordering is the best bet as it will be ready and all set for you to pick up.

Good stuff, Cranky Als!

EMILY: I love this review. Cranky’s is known for its unique and eccentric donut selection, like the Tequila Lime. But I’m more of a classics person myself. Long Johns, glazed raised, bavarian cream, they have it all. I also like to gamble a little, and just show up on the mornings that I have a craving, rather than order ahead on the app. But the app is brilliant – especially when you have a larger order, or want specific donuts.

JOEY: Obviously it’s still called Cranky Al’s, but now we go by Cranky’s for short. That joke is because I always tell people I killed my uncle. But we just, we always just wanted to change it up. But initially it’s still Cranky Al’s and their whole shtick was, my uncle was soup natziesque.

You came in here and you’re like, “what do you want? Get in line. We close at noon!” kind of thing. And then my aunt was super sweet. You know, she’d be the one saying “Al, shut up!” You know, she’d be like, “Hey, you keep talking to people like that, and I’m gonna stab you.”

So as a kind of that mix between, you know, sweet and salty, salty, a nice kind of. I always joke like the sour patch kids before they got famous, like they’re sour, but sweet, you know?

EMILY: That’s Joey – current owner of Cranky Al’s and the nephew of the original owners. He’s the kind of owner you see most of the time when you stop by his business. Either chatting with customers, restocking donuts or wiping down tables. He’s in the mix and he’s constantly working to evolve and maximize his business’s profile and value to the community.

JOEY: So we started the breakfast food probably a couple of weeks after I moved up here. My aunt & uncle were always kind of doing it, but it was kind of like, it wasn’t important, but Hey, well, let’s kind of offer it.

And then we slowly started doing more and more sandwiches. We just started with the breakfast sandwich. So it was a bagel and you had your choice between bacon and ham. Like it was literally – ham egg and cheese, bacon, egg, and cheese. And then we grew it, shortly after that to breakfast burritos, breakfast tacos, and then we’ve added breakfast bowls. Scramblers and then like the breakfast pizzas too, and the quiche. So we’ve really grown through the last 11 years with our breakfast, but obviously the donuts are the show.

EMILY: Rather than simply offering other things for the sake of options, the slow progression of choices created a demand. Joey’s right – the donuts are still the main show, but some people come specifically for the breakfast food. Or they’re amazed to see the options when they do show up expecting just donuts and coffee.

Joey’s all about maximizing the profit and serving a need. When the pandemic hit, they like many had to close their doors at first. And when they did start serving the community again – it looked different. At first it was order ahead only. You couldn’t do walk ups of any kind. But that too evolved.

JOEY: Literally once we got word that we were able to be open, what we did was we just said, Hey, if you want donuts, you got to place your order online, right?  And that’s what we did. You can come in, pick them up, but we’re basically gonna have nothing really in the case itself. Just because there’s no guarantee that anybody’s going to come in here.

From the pandemic side, we started out with just doing pre-orders only, then we started doing it to where we’ll make a little bit more and sell them in the case. A little bit more, a little bit more. Set up the social distance lines, even more. And then all of a sudden here we are back to normal. But we also progressed. We started with the online ordering. We still did curbside, you know, all of that.

It has hiccups along the way, but to me it’s more like a challenge, right? And that’s how we approach everything, right? It’s a challenge. Things are going to go wrong. It’s just how well you don’t mess them up. It’s how fast, how much you don’t mess up.

EMILY: Similar to the progression of a larger breakfast menu, Cranky Al’s evolution during the pandemic happened over time. First it was strictly online orders run out to cars, then it progressed all the way to “normal” by pre-pandemic standards. Where customers come in and order from the counter until the donuts are sold out. BUT online ordering still exists. And now a huge percentage of customers have been conditioned to order through the app, which allows Joey and the team to more accurately predict what they’ll need. But it’s still not a perfect system.

JOEY: I like to think that we got it figured out, but we really don’t. I can tell you that we track the number of doughnuts we make, the number of donuts we sell, the number of donuts we throw out, what the weather’s like, and it’s so inconsistent from week to week, month to month, year to year.

And that’s the hard part is like, I’ll give you a prime example. I was looking at this today. Last week, we sold just shy of 300 crawlers on a Thursday. But literally the week before that we threw out, you know, more than that. So it’s so tough.

And you just, you try to like, look at why do people come in for these? Why didn’t they buy these? And it’s just like, you never know. I wish I knew. And that’s the hardest part is because then you end up throwing them out and it’s not the product itself that costs the money. It’s the labor. And when you see the amount of hours or extra hours that those guys worked and not so much like that I care, but I am more like, well they could have been out of here. They didn’t have to work that hard. And that’s where I feel kind of a little bit bad.

EMILY: So while it can be hard to predict demand, and sometimes staff have to work a tad longer than usual, online ordering helps in many ways – particularly for those customers who know exactly what they want, and have a large order. And let’s face it, the online ordering function creates a more seamless in-person experience for everyone. Now let’s hear a customer’s perspective from Chadrick …

CHADRICK: Yeah they do have a very smooth operation. I mean, there’s three to four people at the counter, especially on a busy Saturday morning. On the weekdays it’s just a couple and they’re taking the line and getting people there, ordering and getting them out. A lot of people call ahead, so a lot of people just go up to the counter and they already paid and they get their box of donuts and go. And other people are, you know, ordering stuff on the spot. So they are a busy, bustling business.

Customer service is great. You walk in, they greet you with a smile. They have masks on these days, you know, which we’re all so used to, but you can see them beaming through the mask and, they get you what you want, whether it be donuts or whether you’re ordering food, you pretty much sit back and they will serve you.

So staff is on point. Great service and no complaints about how they serve you up.

EMILY: We’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back we’ll hear from Joey on how he curates a team that is so attentive and positive towards its customers.

EMILY: And we’re back! Something I love about the Cranky Al’s front of house staff is that they’re made up of local high school and college aged students. Here’s Joey sharing how he makes that work for him and the business.

JOEY:  From the people in the front, we’ve been lucky, you know, we’ve had good neighborhood kids. We’ve had people in transition, whether they’re going to nursing school or they’re in college. And that’s where we get most of our turnover. right? When they’re about to graduate college or graduate high school. Then we kind of got to find a new crew to get in here. But a lot of it’s young kids that have never had a job before and be willing to put the time in with them and show them like, ‘Hey, this is what our expectation is. This is how we do things.’

And a lot of that is sometimes you’re pulling your hair out or in my case I’m pulling my beard out. right? But my aunt and uncle were patient – as much as people don’t think my uncle’s patient, but we are. And we work with them and, you know, we work around their schedules too. Like we know that this isn’t their forever job, but I tell everyone I hire, like, this is my forever job.

EMILY: Over time, Cranky’s has become a staple in the community and a place people know of even outside of Milwaukee. But that isn’t just because they’ve been around for a while. It’s because of the many collaborations and moments of exposure for their product and their brand over the years. Cranky Als has scaled through partnerships and collaborations – starting with local coffee shop, Valentine.

JOEY: Start with Valentine, right? That was our first collaboration, right? The two owners, when they first started, they were in here bugging us to sell their coffee. And for the longest time we’re like, oh, we’re good with ours. And then all of a sudden the kind of the coffee that we were getting – we weren’t as happy with.

So we gave them a call and we’re like, Hey, this is what we want. We want this type of blend, this type of roast. And they just knocked it out of the park. So we started buying their coffee and then it’s over time, you know, eventually I started, bringing them donuts and stuff. I’m like, Hey, I think you should start selling our donuts. I mean, we’ve been in business together for X amount of years. I think you should really give us a shot.

And so that’s kind of how it first all started. And then that grew, and really, I am thankful for Robin and Joe, because that’s how Alton Brown actually had our cruller. He was at Valentine. He was getting a cortado, I believe, and grabbed one of the donuts. He’s like, where do you get those? And they’re like Cranky Al’s. And literally, he wasn’t planning on coming here and came out, came down the street. And so that’s our first main spot where we started.

And then it grew from there to doing the pizzas at Hoyt Park Beer Garden. As well as Camp Bar and I would say Hoyt Park has been really good. And my aunt and uncle had a big part of helping regrow that pool and the beer garden stuff. We actually named a donut after them. It’s called the hoity-toity. So it’s a chocolate buttercream.

EMILY: Local collaborations and partnerships have brought visibility from people like Alton Brown, but more importantly created steady supply and demand. You may have caught Joey mentioning their pizza business. There was a time where you could have pizza at Cranky Als in the evening, but it quickly spread the team too thin. So rather than get rid of the pizza business all together, they leveraged local partnerships and local fame to broker relationships with bars who didn’t serve food. They also partnered with a local swimming pool and beer garden to create custom items.

Beyond collaborating locally, another thing that Joey and the Cranky team does is gather ideas and inspiration from other donut businesses across the country.

JOEY: The variety I do enjoy doing. I saw what a lot of places were doing in Chicago and Seattle. And I just really saw that there was really nothing like that out here at the time. And instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, of course I’m going to see what they’re doing and either put our twist on it or try something different. So that’s where I got a lot of the inspiration from, and it really took off.

Like, I remember when we first started putting like six or seven m&ms on a vanilla donut and now there’s probably like close to over an ounce of m&ms, right? Like it really starts one way and then just progresses. But what we really like to do is just see what things have been done and put our little spin on it.

And when we talked about collaborations, we teamed up with a couple of liquor companies and that’s where we did like the Irish whiskey donuts with Slang Irish whiskey.

We did the El Jimador tequila and key lime doughnut. And so we’ve done those things out of it.

EMILY: I think sometimes people are afraid of ‘stealing’ ideas from other businesses, when really it’s gathering inspiration! An important thing Joey pointed out is putting their own spin on things. Making it local, or adapting a special offering to speak to your audience. Every holiday is an opportunity for them to make a seasonal donut offering. Collaborating with other local businesses, or even taking it to the next level and collaborating with brands can be a great way to diversify your offerings and spread the word about who you are and what you do.

Social is another way to spread that word! Any while Joey admits that they don’t have the most in depth social strategy, they do encourage and reshare engagement from their customers online.

JOEY: The sharing and the re-engaging – I absolutely love that. Like when people post a photo of us or post a picture of their donuts or anything, I love reposting it. Cause in my head it’s literally free marketing, right? It’s a free advertisement. And then I don’t have to come up with a creative post.

I would say that’s the one place where we do lack though, especially within the last six to eight months, especially from the pandemic. It’s just like out of everything that I want to do – that’s the last thing I want. So when people post stuff or tag us, like, I love reposting that stuff. It’s fun. I mean, you get to interact with them. They appreciate it, right? I feel like they spent the time to take that photo and post it on their Instagram. So the least I can do is repost it. And that’s where I really like, we do our best to obviously inform people and stuff.

I prefer the engagements from our customers. I love when people are posting, tagging us. That’s what I love. I’d rather just repost that all day long, then even have to come up with a photo of a donut.

EMILY: You can’t be perfect at everything. And Cranky’s is killing it in alot of areas. It’s alright that their social strategy isn’t their number one priority. But what’s important is maximizing what’s already out there. Not missing simple AND FREE opportunities at exposure, like when a customer posts a picture online and tags you.

To close us out, I want to talk about reviews. To start — here’s Joey sharing his perspective on reaching out and responding to customers; particularly when they have criticisms to share.

JOEY: So obviously when I get the five star review, I love it. There’s that little tinkle inside that you’re like, yes! Killed it! Knocked that out of the park. Earlier, when I first started, getting a one-star, two-star even three-star review – it hurts.

And I don’t care who is looking at that review, when it’s your own product, it hurts. Because no matter how much you can separate yourself from the business, it’s still a piece of you. And when you see that someone either just had a terrible experience or just doesn’t agree with everyone else, that hurts. And there’s like no way to comprehend it if it’s never happened to you, right? Like it hurts.

But I would say over the years, what I have learned instead of taking defense to it right away or being like, they don’t know what they’re talking about – is like, take a step back. Read it, let it hurt me a little bit and then move forward of how we can either fix the problem or how we can make their experience better the next time.

And literally, I would say on probably 99 or 95% of my reviews that have three stars or less, you will see that I will respond and I will put my cell phone on there. And I would say maybe 10% ever call me back because I do want to hear, because words, when someone can sit back behind a computer and type, right, you don’t always know the tone that’s coming from, but what you can assume is that anything from a three or less, they weren’t happy, right?

So what I do is, ‘Hey, I’m sorry about the experience.’ We’ll reach out most of the time, unless it’s some crazy thing that I know that I have no control. But I will reach out no matter what and say, Hey, this is what I’m sorry about your experience. Can you please call me on my cell phone so we can talk about this? And I put my public cell phone for most of those bad reviews. Most people don’t call back and I think that’s. I get upset the most is when obviously someone took the time to write that review out of their day. So I already messed up by ruining their day or by not living up to their expectations. But then when I reach out to someone and say, Hey, can we talk to figure out how we can make it better or how I can learn from this?

Because I’m not here to defend my employees. If someone gave you bad customer service, right? Like we know that there’s no taking that back, but what I can do is I can learn maybe what was said, how was it said? Was it a tone? Was it a nod? You know, that kind of stuff is where I like to talk to people about. And there’s definitely been a handful of times too, where I’ve been able to fix it and move forward. But then most of the time people don’t, aren’t willing to have that conversation.

EMILY: It’s a reality that some critical reviewers won’t continue the conversation if you do reach out, but that shouldn’t stop you all together. Responding to reviews is a great way to reflect your customer service practices and show all future customers you care about feedback and your consumer’s experience. In fact, through my own work at Yelp I often point business owners to this stat – that 33% more likely to upgrade their critical review on Yelp if a business responds with a personalized message within 24 hours. And for reviewers like Chadrick, it makes a huge difference when businesses take the time to respond to reviews.

CHADRICK: I’ve had both, so I’ve had it where I’ve given positive feedback on a business and I get the owner or someone will actually comment on my review and say, thanks for the glowing review. It’s always great to hear that it really motivates you to want to write more reviews.

I’ve also had just the opposite where I’ve written more of a critical review and the business owner responds and says hey, come try me again. We’re not usually like this so you know, the shoe goes on both ways.

It definitely deepens my relationship to the business. It actually makes me realize that Yelp is making a difference and that the business owners are looking at what people are saying about their business, and that’s important. So it makes me want to write more reviews and keep up putting quality reviews online.