Tom Orbe didn’t set out to be in the restaurant business. However, the avid surfer and motorcyclist personified the laidback lifestyle promoted at Wahoo’s Fish Tacos. So when he and his daughter had the opportunity to become franchisees of a location in Temecula, Calif., he jumped at the chance. Recently appointed VP of the chain’s franchise program, Orbe is playing a big role in the restaurant’s recently announced growth plans. SeafoodSource talked to Orbe about the aggressive five-year, 100-location expansion.
Forristall: How did you get involved with the franchise?
Orbe: I knew one of the brothers from another company — we had done some promos together so we got to know each other a little bit.
Even further back, I surf and skate and ride motorcycles and always ate at the restaurants. So just as a person with business marketing experience, not only do I love the food at the restaurant, I highly regarded their business model. They have tremendous service consistently throughout and have a great brand.
So I thought, “Gee they have a great brand, and wouldn’t it be neat to have one of these — as a dream.” And then my daughter graduated from college with a nutrition degree and did different catering events with them and she liked it, and they put her in the store. She worked her way up to manager and worked in eight different stores and helped opened up the Hawaii store.
The brothers thought she knew what she was doing and decided she could have a franchise. Back then they weren’t franchising unless they knew you.
Why expand now, especially in this economy?
The company is very financially sound so this is as good of a time as any.
After I became a franchisee and got to know the business and the brothers better they said, “Hey, would you like to work with us?” One thing led to another and we looked at five years down the road and where we want to be in planning the future of the company. It makes sense to develop — we have a lot of requests and a lot of people want a Wahoo’s — so let’s take all these requests and have it help grow the company.
Basically we’re all about steady and calculated growth because we want to make sure the integrity of the brand and the service are maintained. We felt over the next five or so years that 100 franchises would be very manageable given the right people and the right locations. Right now we’re focused on California and Arizona.
Wahoo’s is really kind of in the heart of what people are moving to, even in the recession. The recession showed us we’re recession proof — quality food at a value. We thought, “If we’re doing really well in the recession, can you imagine when this thing turns around?”
Also, right now there are lots of opportunities for real estate and leases at really good prices, so we thought let’s give our franchisees an optimum opportunity to go in at a very favorable rent situation.
Explain the lottery system you’re using to select franchisees.
We anticipated that we’re going to get a lot of people with very similar qualifications. People with passion for the brand, community [involvement] — that’s part of our brand — restaurant experience and financial capacity. Those are our key criteria, but we’ll get people with very similar backgrounds.
So we tried to figure out how to do it in the fairest way possible. So out of 130 people, we’ll pick 30 and then we’ll pick Sally Sue and say, “Sally Sue, here’s the location, and it’s your opportunity if you want it.” Then the other 25 will stay in the hopper for the next locations.
We’ve already got a lot of people interested; it’s just kind of hectic sorting through the qualifications and giving them all the info.
Are there plans to develop outside the four states where locations already exist?
Yes. We call it the “smile belt.” If you took a map of the U.S. and drew a line from Oregon and brought down through California, Texas, Florida [and] up to Virginia, that’s where we’re going.
We have a restaurant in Austin [Texas] that’s been open for couple of years and it’s doing extremely well. That location basically showed us this brand, if we can take Wahoo’s surf/skate culture and have it do well in Texas, it’s going to do well anywhere.
We’ve also had foreign inquiries. We’re not going to develop internationally right now, but it’s a definite possibility.
There’s a lot of demand for food and franchise and long-term growth. We can spread the word throughout the country; we don’t want to hoard it all in California.
Are there plans for new menu items to accompany the expansion?
We actually have a little thing going on now — we’re having some fun with it. We held a contest called “Taste it, Name it” with three menu items. Customers got about two months to name them. Input ended [on 31 August]. The winners get a card for food for a year from Wahoo’s. Once we’ve chosen names, all three will be added to the menu.
The other thing we’re looking at is adding wild salmon to our fish offerings. We’re figuring out how to prepare it and how we would do it. We don’t know yet. We’re testing it out in Colorado and they’ve been doing it for a while and it’s been a big hit out there. Salmon fits, we’re about fish and people that are into fish typically will eat salmon.
