How a Restaurant Operator Built a Community on X by Being Authentic

You and I are standing here right now because of your courage to post on X and because I'm crazy enough to go on X and I'm like holy shit there's a restaurant owner telling stories on X like I got to meet this guy I got to interview him. You don't need to have tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of followers to get true benefit from telling stories on the internet. Welcome to Restaurant Influencers presented by

Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Sean Walchuk. This is a Cali BBQ Media production. We are coming to you from San Diego at the Coronado Lowe's Resort at the Restaurant Franchise and Innovation Summit. We started this show back in 2022 on a mission to find the best hospitality storytellers, the best technologists, and the best creators. in life, in the restaurant business, and in the new creator economy, we learn their lessons and stories. I have been following today's guest,

QSR Guy, on Twitter, now known as X, for years. And my goal was how am I going to get a restaurant owner operator, a truth teller like him, how am I going to get him on the show? Turns out he's at this show and he's on as today's guest. Ryan, so happy to see you in person. I've been following your content. Twitter, why Twitter? You know, it was a place that I could come in and have

a pseudonym. I was the QSR guy. And I felt like that pseudonym gave me some freedom, like some permission to just be my authentic self. You know, I'm in the trenches every day, working, building my empire. And I just wanted to be able to do it without having to worry about, you know, what is my franchisor is going to think? What am I? lenders are going to think, what are my employees going to think? So I

started with this QSR guy. Now, there's a lot of guys on Twitter and there wasn't a QSR guy. So I grabbed that. There's no restaurant. There's very few. We'll get into it. There's very few. I mean, we talked to storytellers. We built this show to talk to the best YouTubers, the best Instagrammers, the best TikTokers. But this is you are the first guest that has mastered Twitter and X as a storytelling platform. And I'm so excited

to have you on. - Thank you, I appreciate that. - Yeah, that's no joke. That is like legitimate. You've been a guest that I wanted to come on to talk to our audience because storytelling is important. How many restaurants do you operate? - Yeah, we have 35 right now. - 35. - And Little Caesars Pizza, Jersey Mike's Subs, of our own brand, Coco Playa, which I've talked about a lot on X, and then getting involved in

a new brand called Mike's Red Tacos, which I'm super excited about. - Amazing, huge fan. Tell us about Mike's Red Tacos. - Yeah, so it's, you've heard the story before, right? It started out of a food truck and it's now sold over 200 units. nationwide. They have three locations right now. They have the team that brought to you Dave's Hot Chicken, Blaze Pizza, Wetzel's Pretzels, just an all-star team. And I'm lucky to be among one of

the first few franchisees that's gonna bring it to Central California. And we're gonna hopefully see the story repeat like the Dave's Hot Chicken story. - What year did you start posting on Twitter or X? - Ah, man. - Do you call it Twitter X? - You know what, it's tough. I still call it when I post a tweet. - Yeah, it's a tweet. It's not what is it, it's an X? - Yeah, I guess I just,

I think I call it X now. - Yeah, okay. - But I still call it a tweet. But I started posting, I think in 2022. - Okay. And again, I did a whole year of being anonymous. And so, and I was just posting random thoughts I had. - Written content, not photos, not videos. - No photos, no videos, just random thoughts I had about the industry, about the franchising space, about the food space. And it just

started to pick up some traction. I didn't want, I wanted to just be authentic, right? I wasn't looking to go viral. I wasn't looking to build a huge following. I don't really care. I just wanted to put my thoughts out there and then see what happened. And it just started taking off from there. - That's amazing. Can you talk about the community of other people that care about restaurants on X? Yeah, it's amazing. So I've built

some real friendships from it. I've been able to help people that people in my DMs would be like, hey, I have this deal I'm looking at. Like, what would you think of this? And I would help them navigate the deal. And this, again, was happening while I was completely anonymous. And they trusted me. And it's funny because now I'm not anonymous and I like to get my personal brand out there as QSR guy, but still as

Ryan Fugali and And just like yesterday, I got a DM like, "Hey, I ended up doing that deal and it's working out amazing." And like, I just love hearing these stories. I love being able to help people. And honestly, I've been helped a lot by the community on X. There's a lot of times I've posted when we were getting Cocoa Playa spun up, I wasn't sure what POS system to use. So I did a post like,

hey, I'm looking to do this and I'm looking for a POS system. And I got tons of comments, you know, what they recommend and why, what they recommend staying away from. And, you know, we ended up going with Toast maybe because of some people that, you know, gave me that direction and, And yeah, so I've been helped. I've been able to help and build a huge community of people that are like-minded. You know, there isn't really

something like what we have on X. - Anywhere, right? Like a community of restaurant builders, operators, real estate, all the rest of it. Just people that are like-minded. - Truth tellers. - Truth tellers, yeah. - Yeah, I think that's what attracted me to your content was that you weren't bullshitting. Like it was just like, this is the facts. Like these are the facts, these are the reports, these are the financials, this is how I'm thinking about

it. This was how we messed up. I think one of the biggest things that I've learned, you know, doing as much content as we do is the more that I share as a restaurant owner operator, the things that we screwed up closing ghost kitchens like we thought that we were going to be, you know, the Muhammad Ali of ghost kitchens. And it just it didn't work out. But the more honest that we are in YouTube videos

and podcasts like this is how we thought about it. This is what actually happened. And this is our you know, this is our experience. Yeah. Absolutely. I think getting vulnerable is a huge piece of authenticity. I remember one of my posts was just about imposter syndrome. Everyone has it, but not a lot of people like to talk about it. And I was just like, you know what? Yeah, this is very true in this space. You can

have imposter syndrome because you look at all these huge mega operators and you're like, who am I to speak on what it's like to manage employees or build a marketing strategy? And once you get past that and you you actually are vulnerable and able to speak your true self, then it just unlocks so much for you. That's amazing. Why did you go from anonymous to building your personal brand? So it was, it was a couple of

things happened together. Number one, we were about to launch Coco Playa. So I wanted to, you know, put it out there because I've been tweeting anonymously about like me building this brand over the years. So I felt like it was like kind of a part of the story is to finally say like, all right, guys, you've been reading this for so long. Here's what you've been reading about. And this is what the final result looked like.

And, and this is me. And you know, this, I'm not just bullshitting you. I'm not just some AI bot that's talking about, this is real, I'm real, I'm doing real stuff, and join along for the rest of my journey. We're just getting started. - Amazing. Now, do you run the Twitter accounts for your brands also? - So I did, we don't have a really strong presence on Twitter with our brands, but you know, I'm really involved

in the social media strategy, especially for Cocoplaya. Just, you know, it's mostly on Instagram and TikTok. - Tell me about the strategy. How do you guys think about it? - Yeah, so it's, I think that there's a huge storytelling piece of like, you know, what we're trying to do, you know, we're a new brand, so we're just trying to teach our audience about what we are and what we do. And so that was a big component

of the first year. And then the other piece is just, you know, kind of being silly and funny. I think people like content where it makes them chuckle so they can send it to their friends. And then once you can send it to your friend and just the way the algorithm works, it kind of ends up working out great. So it might not be super product specific sometimes, But it's like, you know, one of our best

clips was, you know, you've seen it tons of times, but someone said, oh, I wanted that. I wanted that hot, not ice. And the person grabs the ice and throws it in the face of the employee. Like, you know, it's not super original. We copied it, but like it took off and, you know, people loved it. People are like, oh, you're the girl that got her ice thrown in her face. So just being able to be

silly, funny and also be able to highlight our products. Did you know that Toast powers over 140,000 restaurants across the United States, Canada, and UK? It's an incredible company. I'm on the Toast customer advisory board. They are proud sponsors of this show, Restaurant Influencers. We couldn't do it without their support. They power our barbecue restaurants in San Diego. If you have questions about Toast, if you're thinking about bringing Toast on to be your primary technology partner

at your restaurants, please reach out to me. I'm happy to get a local Toast representative to take care of you. You can reach me at Sean P. Walchef on Instagram. Once again, thank you to Toast for believing in the power of technology, the power of storytelling, the power of hospitality. Back to the show. Talk about consistency because in the beginning, no matter what platform you start on, you don't build a community right away. You actually have

to show up and do the work and do the reps. Yeah, and that's a really great point because I think one of the things that I was already doing was doing deep dives into brands, looking at operators, seeing what they're doing right and just kind of noting our SOPs and how we think about things. Right. So it was things that I was already doing that I just had to go and take and just put it on

X. Right. And and it does get a little bit exhausting being like, OK, I got to do a post today. Like, you know, Creating content, a lot of people nowadays, they're, "Oh, I want to be a content creator. That's my dream job." It's a difficult job. I'm sure you can attest to that. We went five years without making any money. We were just podcasting and we had very few listeners, very few viewers. But I mean, if

you dedicate yourself to the craft and don't quit and keep speaking the truth and getting more open, more honest, more vulnerable, people start paying attention start paying attention and you know the thing is is i you know i do have you know my my whole business that i run and and i did take months big business time it's a big business 35 restaurants is no joke 500 employees like yeah like that is a significant problems that

are happening right now in his phone. He's got somebody emailing him. I got it on. Something that's broken somewhere. The Murphy's Law of Restaurant. Yeah. But I mean, like I had to take some time away from X at certain times over the last few years. And it's kind of crazy. You come back and it's kind of a different world. yeah people that you were following before are no longer posting there's new people that are people people

are reposting and then the algorithm always changes so i think consistency if you really want to be great at this is is key right always just staying up to date with it even if you get busy just checking in making sure things are the way that they were before or what's changing you know you can you know keep up with it can you talk about the humans that you've met because The thing that I, you know,

when I talk to restaurant owners, business owners, entrepreneurs about content creation, obviously it's easy to see the Gary V's of the world and the Mr. Beast and the Alex Hermosy's and you see all of the views. What you and I realize, especially for me from a B2B standpoint, is that there's humans that will watch this and listen to this and then they'll send me a message to your point to the DMs. And You and I are

standing here right now because of your courage to post on X and because I'm crazy enough to go on X and I'm like, holy shit, there's a restaurant owner telling stories on X. I got to meet this guy. I got to interview him. Talk about the human side of like, you don't need to have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of followers to get true benefit from telling stories on the internet. - Oh, absolutely. And

I've made some really great friends, people that I've learned a lot from, people that every time they come to San Diego, they'll contact me and be like, "Hey, I'm in town, let's meet here." And so I've been able to really develop some great relationships. I've had athletes, like professional athletes slide in my DMs and be like, "Hey, I'm getting into franchising, you wanna meet for coffee?" And I've got to meet some great people through that. And

just the amount of people my network has, opened up to because of just random posts of what's actually happening in my life. It's not rocket science what I'm doing. I'm just posting what I'm seeing every day, what I'm doing every day. And it's unlocked so many cool relationships that I would never trade for anything. - What are you looking forward to 2026 and beyond? Is it beyond X, omni-channel storytelling? Are you trying other platforms? Are we

going deeper in X? What are we looking at? - Yeah, you know, I'm digging into X a little bit more. I've tried LinkedIn. I've had mild success over there. I feel like everyone's kind of telling similar stories. So I don't know. I'm more of like off the cuff, you know, tell you how I'm feeling. - How about Reddit? - No, I don't mess with Reddit. - No Reddit. What's up with Reddit? - I don't know. -

I can't find anybody on Reddit. - I can't figure it out. - I can't figure out Reddit. If you know any restaurant that's dominating on Reddit or doing a good job or building a community on Reddit, please send me a DM. I would love to learn more about it. I'm interested to know that. But I think YouTube is a great platform. I haven't been able to tap into that yet, but I think that would be probably

what's next. It is the biggest platform in the world right now. It's the biggest TV channel in the world. Global TV channel. I think that I need to gather a little bit of know-how into making videos. I can translate a lot of my conversations my content into videos once I understand how to do it. - Amazing. What kind of advice do you have for number one, somebody that's getting into the restaurant space, QSR space specifically? -

Yeah, I think that surround yourself with great people. That's what I've been able to do. I'm not the best operator in the world, but I've surrounded myself with the best people and that's what I've been able to find a lot of success. And then I think in general, Ask the right questions. It's always important to ask a lot of questions and ask the right questions. And then don't be scared to put yourself out there. I think

that goes back to my content on X. It's like putting myself out there and just leaving my comfort zone just a little bit has opened up so many new avenues of growth, both personally and in my relationships and in my business. Amazing. If you guys are watching this, I'm weirdly available @SeanPWalchup. Instagram is the fastest for me, but I'm also on X. I'm also on LinkedIn, all the platforms. We're going to put links to Ryan, QSR

guy. You have to follow him on X. That is homework assignment for anybody that's watching this. Before I let you go, I need to ask you about your personal tech stack, Android or iPhone? iPhone. What version? 16. 16. How often do you upgrade? Every two years. Who's your carrier? Verizon. Verizon. Gmail or Microsoft? We just switched to Microsoft last year. Really? Tell me about that. Yeah, it was a huge transition. That's a big switch. Yeah, it

is. So no Google Meets, you're on Teams? I'm on Teams. Really? I got Teams. I got a bunch of Teams Meets. My whole team, every single restaurant of ours has their own Teams channel. We have our area coaches that they roll up to. It's It's super organized. We were going to do Google G Suite and Slack combo. We ended up just doing M365 because it had everything and we're pretty happy with it right now. But one

of the big things we're using is Power BI. We upload all of our financials in there. We built some great dashboards and it's been a huge unlock for us. Okay, great. Phone calls or text messages? Text messages. Text messages. Do you leave voicemails? i would say 50 of the time if you listen to voicemails when people lead them leave them i do listen to them actually i read them do you send voice notes i do you

do yeah really okay um how many emails do you get a day hundreds hundreds how many do you enjoy reading maybe like two how many tweets do you send a day i send around five a week so oh five a week really are they deep dives um no but are you threading i was in the past now i just read it it's not it's not it's not as popular no you just kind of put you know

the as much as you want in the thing and people just press show more and they see like you can do an essay you can do whatever you want uh any tips for somebody starting on twitter x yes go and look at people's lists for example there's you know a lot of franchise lists made and you'll see all the franchise guys on there you'll see me on there you'll see you know ben little you can -

Yeah, name drop some other ex people that we should be calling. - Yeah, Ben Little, Mick franchisee, he's anonymous still, but he's a McDonald's franchisee. Amazing content. I have Chris Hatch, he's a real estate guy. He does the whole Dirt Dogs thing. He's came out to meet me in Coco Playa. Trying to think of who else I really like. Paul Tran, he's great. - Paul's awesome. - Paul Tran is awesome. - Paul Tran is amazing. Pepper

Lunch restaurants. - Let's go, Troy Hooper's here. - And I mean, strip mall guy, Pat Buckley. He did the Franchise Wolf stuff for a while. Now he's got the Empire's Pod. Big fan of him and JT Singh, another good friend of mine. - Amazing. What's an app that you use that you don't think people know about that we should know about? - Ooh, that's a good one that I use. I don't know if I have one

off the top of my head. - What's your notification management? Are you inbox zero? Inbox zero. Inbox zero. Is that all apps? Across all apps? I try, yeah. So you don't have like 76 text messages unread? No. I don't know how people do that. No, I don't know. It drives me crazy. Absolute madness. Yeah, I got zero emails. I mean, right now I probably have a bunch, but by the end of today, it'll be zero. So

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity? I'm really enjoying Claude co-work right now. Everybody is just sweeping. Claude has just taken over. He's taken over, yeah. You don't use chat anymore? You still have paid version? I still have paid chat. You do paid Claude? I do paid Claude. Okay. Look, I think that- If we give 20 bucks to every AI platform, Like it'll be at my direct TV, my old direct TV bill. I think so, but I think

it's worth it, right? If you're talking $20 to test the future. That's true. It's a small price to pay for getting to actually understand like, all right, why do I like chat GBT more than Brock versus FOD? Oh yeah, how's Brock? - You know, I love Grok for when I want-- - Paid or not paid? - It's part of my X subscription, right? But I love Grok when I wanna get like, for example, I'm looking for

a standup comedy special to watch. Like, hey, what are people saying about this comedy? 'Cause it actually uses X for feedback and I really like to see what people are actually thinking about things. - Amazing. - Yup, yup. - X is obviously the best platform for people to connect with you. - Absolutely, yeah. QSR guy on X. - I have Instagram, I have LinkedIn, but I mean, if you wanna read my content, it's gonna be on

X. - Amazing. And the brands, the Coco Playa? - Coco Playa, it's a drive-through coffee, cookies, dirty sodas. We got Little Caesar's Pizza, Jersey Mike's Subs, and then Mike's Red Tacos, which I touched on a little earlier. - Amazing. - Yep. - We appreciate you guys. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. As always, stay curious, get involved, and don't be afraid to ask for help. Give my man a follow on X. Thank you for

watching. Thank you for listening. If you've made it this long, you are part of the community. You're part of the tribe. We can't do this alone. We started, no one was listening. Now we have a community of digital hospitality leaders all over the globe. Please check out our new series called Restaurant Technology Substack. It's a Substack newsletter. It's free. It's some of our deep work on the best technology for restaurants. Also go to YouTube and subscribe

to Cali.com. barbecue media cali bbq media on youtube we've been putting out a lot of new original content hopefully you guys like that content if you want to work with us go to the show.media we show up all over the united states some international countries we would love to work with you and your growing brand on digital storytelling you can reach out to me anytime at sean p welchef on instagram i'm weirdly available stay curious get

involved don't be afraid to ask for help we'll catch you next episode