How Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Transformed Buffalo Wings & Rings

In 2004, Nader Masadeh decided to take the entrepreneurial leap, leaving the corporate world for something new. The path Masadeh took was to buy a small 4 store restaurant chain called Buffalo Wings & Rings. Fifteen years later, Masadeh has transformed the business and brand, growing it to over 80 locations. We sat down to talk about his journey, how restaurants continue to evolve, and why he decided to take the path of entrepreneurship through acquisition.

Dave Knox: What was your first experience in the restaurant industry and where did Buffalo Wings & Rings start fitting into that?

Nader Masadeh: My first time in the restaurant business was actually my first job in high school. I was working at the Burger King as a dishwasher where my uncle was the manager. I continued to work in the fast food industry throughout high school and college. Then my dad got into the restaurant business when he bought a franchise of Gold Star Chili so I started working with him during college. So it’s been in my blood since my high school days.

Buffalo Wings & Rings came about when my dad sold his Gold Star and found an opportunity to buy a franchise of Buffalo Wings& Rings in Milford, Ohio. At that time, I was graduated from college and working in the corporate world. Ihelped him get that purchase underway and get that business going. I started really enjoying it more than the corporate world. I decided to call up the owner of Buffalo Wings & Rings to find out if she would consider selling the overall business, which was only a handful of locations. It turned out that at the time, she was getting ready to retire.  So in 2005 with a couple of partners, I put the group together, put the deal together and bought Buffalo Wings & Rings in 2005 with four locations or so. We grew it up to this point where we are now at 80 plus locations globally.

Knox: What was the situation with the brand when you acquired the business?

Masadeh: There really was no existing brand. There wasn’t even a consistent menu across the handful of locations. They were all operating as an independent restaurant, pretty much. What we bought was a name, an operations manual, some recipes, and that was it. Nobody was paying royalties, nobody was adhering to any rules, regulations, or branding. So we had to start pretty much fresh looking into the brand, what it stands for, what it could stand for, where is the consumer, where is the market headed, etc. We knew there was a good market segment being in the wing business around the sports bar but we had to decide what is our take on that piece of the market? From day one, we decided it’s going to be the family piece, the less manly piece and focused on the quality of the food. We started driving everything towards that goal and our take on the market.

Knox: If you look over the last 15 years of being the owner of Buffalo Wings & Rings, how have you evolved the brand, and what have been those big milestones?

Masadeh: As the business has evolved, we have what we call our generations of restaurants. What we bought, we call it Generation One. So immediately we started working on Generation Two, which is a consistent look and feel of the space and the separation. It’s funny, when I look at the journey, early in 2005, the big thing was the separation of bar and dining room. That’s how you would have a balance between having a sports bar and having family dining. So that was our take on it. And then that thing evolved to more, hey, listen, people are more comfortable now coming to these places and having to be with their family and kids. They want to feel in the dining room, but they also want to look over and see the bar and feel that energy from the bar, but not be in the bar. So the evolution for Generation Three became it’s all one big space with the bar on one side, the dining room on the other side, and you feel comfortable sitting anywhere. And since then, again, things have evolved even more. And now we’re in the Generation Four that we’re going to launch shortly. 

Generation Four is driven mostly with the millennial guys thinking totally different about the experience and what they want out of restaurants. When we ask them, “What do you want?,” they say, “We want different experiences. One day I am with my wife and kids, I want to sit down and have a normal traditional meal. Somebody delivers a menu, somebody take my order. But sometimes I’m with my friends and I just want to hang out and not be bothered by anybody.” And we were losing those occasions to somewhere else, mostly to the breweries and some of these other places that are more of a hangout place.

So for Generation Four, we started thinking about what can we do to capture that side of the business and try to give them a customized experience, so it’s not the same experience everywhere in the restaurant. And in parallel, was the growth of the off-premise, people consuming food outside of the restaurants through carry out, pick up, delivery, and catering. This space was growing exponentially so we wanted to think about how we capture that piece? We looked at all of these elements and decided that there is going to be the G3 model where you walk in, you get a choice of experience. You want your traditional experience with a dining room and a menu and a server, great. Then you’re going to have another experience by the bar where it’s actually a self-service, something different and unique to have two different experiences within the same four walls. You can order it through your app. Food will get delivered to you and you don’t have to talk to a server or anybody else. Through the use of technology, you call a server, pay at the table, all of these abilities you will have. And at the same time, we address the off- premise where we created a valet pickup of sorts, where you can pull up with your car and then somebody would come to your car, put the food in there and off you go. You don’t have to have to come into the restaurant or be bothered by leaving your kids or dog or anything in the car. You can just pull up, food will be put in your car and then off you go. So those are the new changes that we’re going to be testing with our G4 model.

Knox: The last six months obviously have been tough for the restaurant industry. How has Buffalo Wings & Rings responded? 

Masadeh: You can plan all you want for things, but sometimes you just get hit with something that was not expected. But what I always tell people, the pandemic really did not change our business model much. All it did is put on steroids. It speeded up things that we were working on already. So if you think of the off- premise carry out piece of business, that’s been growing for a number of years and what happened now, it’s just went on steroids. We sped up contactless pick up, curbside pickup, and enhancing online ordering. Safety and sanitation has always been big in the restaurant business anyways. So really there wasn’t a whole lot of need to do anything different. Obviously, other than abiding with the state rules of masks and gloves and whatever is necessary, the six feet separation, the capacity pieces. We brought our menu down some so we can manage inventory better. And then the menu has to evolve in a way that is going to work best for carry out delivery. So if a menu item doesn’t fit well with that piece, it needs to be taken off the menu. So those are some of the things that we’ve made changes. We jumped on it quickly because we were already working on it and we had plans to be honest, in the background with the G4, which helped us be a little bit ahead of everybody else.

Knox: You mentioned the shift of delivery driven by companies like Doordash. In what other ways has technology impacted your day to day business

Masadeh: The way we view it is what is our consumers expecting us to deliver? And so that’s really the first question. It’s not about the franchisee. It’s not about the franchisor, to be honest. It’s about the customer and what they need. The use of technology to help us deliver a better experience is a win-win for everybody. A win for the restaurants saving on the labor, a win for the consumer, it gets them what they need. It’s a win-win for everybody. Now, you can choose to be a technology-focused company that has a restaurant below it, or a restaurant that uses the technology. We chose to be the latter. We’re going to use a technology to help enhance our business. We’re not going to be in the technology business, meaning that the technology is going to lead everything we do. From that perspective, we were already working on our technology platform. And funny enough, while everybody else was cutting down on spending money, when the pandemic hit, we’ve actually increased our spending in the technology to speed it up, as far as delivering it to the consumer and the marketplace. We were planning on revamping our app next year. We’ve decided to pull that back in and get it done this year. Our new platform will include a new POS with a new app that you’re able to order online through it. It’ll alert you when the food is ready. It’ll tell you where the food is at and you’re able to use it inside the restaurant to order food, pay for your meals, split a check, call a server. A lot of pieces under that technology are going to be coming out to the consumer. Along with the technology at the store level, we’re launching a new POS system where the franchise location and as well the servers, are going to be using a tablet where they take the order at the table and saves them a lot of steps. And that same tablet, they can use it to pay at the table or take the orders and cash people out, split checks, give them receipts. It speeds up the service time and it also cuts down on labor. So it should be a win-win for all.

Knox: The restaurant industry has at times been a laggard in the practice of branding. Why have you taken a different approach?

Masadeh: Brand is extremely important. That’s one of the first pieces you really have to look at when starting a new restaurant or any business for that matter. The problem with branding is you can’t show it to somebody and say,” Oh, this is the brand.” It’s something you feel. It just puts a picture together. But you really can’t pinpoint to it. When you take a menu and you hold it in your hand, you have no idea how much work went into this menu, the research, the visuals, the photography, the topography, all of that comes into play. But you really don’t see that all of that work that’s been done or you see the finished product. That’s the challenge with branding is, is you deliver a finished product and all of that work that was done behind the scene is not visible to anybody. And that’s why people honestly miss it. And they think,” Okay, I’ll just put it together and be done,” and without a whole lot of thought or research, and then it’s going to feel to the consumer, confusing. But they don’t know why it’s confusing. And that’s the piece that you can’t explain to people very well. And that’s the difference between brands and single operators that they don’t have the luxury or the financial means because it’s a very extremely expensive proposition to get all of the brand elements to align together.

Knox: Going back to the beginning, with your experience in restaurants why did you decide to go the route of entrepreneurship through acquisition by purchasing a small brand instead of starting a new concept from scratch? 

Masadeh: I think it’s a challenge for a lot of entrepreneurs that can grow their business from zero to 50 mark but they can’t grow it past that point. Entrepreneurs are great at starting stuff, but the transition from an entrepreneur, owner run company to a professionally run company is extremely difficult and people seem to miss that piece. We decided to focus, hey, we’re not true entrepreneurs, although we are. Me and my partners all came from professional companies, from Procter and Gamble and Ford Motor companies, and so we grew up around professional management. To create something from scratch is a very difficult proposition. To get something that’s already existing, that has potential, that’s the space you could play in if you have the expertise of professional management background. So entrepreneurs create, but then professional management take it to that next level. And that honestly, it’s been a success for us is that we took something that’s already existing and has a great base, great potential, and we converted it from an entrepreneurial enterprise to professionally management company. And that’s really been the secret of our success, is hiring the right talents, hiring the right people, understanding our own limitations and having a management team that can compensate for those deficiencies, and off you go.