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The Virtuosity of Patience
By: G. Matthew Silvers, Senior Vice President Real Estate & Brand Development
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It has often been said that patience is the companion of wisdom. Regardless of whether finally opening our first new-prototype Flix Brewhouse at West Towne Marketplace on the west side of El Paso proves to be wise, only time will tell. But it does seem as though Flix El Paso is off to a solid start. We are phasing our opening, three auditoriums at a time, between September 6 and October 3, 2019. Attendance has thus far been strong in the Sun City, interest high and team member performance quite good. It will be fantastic to see how this unit performs once completed, polished up and ready for the fall/winter movie season. We have high expectations for this location and are eager to see how our new prototype performs (did I mention that it is a really cool looking building?).
Now back to my axiom. I say “finally” not because Flix El Paso has taken well over a year to construct, nor because it took over two years to design, but because it is easily the longest tenured transaction that I have ever worked on at Flix – or anywhere. This is a deal that has been hanging around a long, long time. I was curious just how long and dusted off my old deal log. I did a double take. I first logged and started chasing this deal at West Towne Marketplace (then controlled by an entirely different developer out of Dallas) on November 29, 2012, just five months after I started at Flix.
When I dropped into the real estate saddle at Flix in June 2012, the first market I attacked was Albuquerque. For virtually all of the same reasons, by autumn 2012 I had expanded my focus to include El Paso and Tucson. Tucson never worked out but Albuquerque generated a few different opportunities, one of which is now a killer Flix Brewhouse. Although I considered all parts of the El Paso market, I latched onto the west side of the intersection of I-10 and Paseo del Norte almost immediately – and never let go. Other than raising three now mostly grown (well kinda) children and starting a second career in real estate, sticking with this opportunity in El Paso is quite possibly the single greatest exercise in patience that I have ever experienced or exhibited. And I expect it will have been worth it. As I reflect on the roughly 2,500-day timeline that is the ramp up to opening Flix El Paso, I realize that as a company, Flix Brewhouse is not much older than the gestation period of this deal and it is in this context that 2,500 days just does not seem like much time at all.
If the definition of patience is: “the ability to endure difficult circumstances such as perseverance in the face of delay; tolerance of provocation without responding in annoyance or anger; or forbearance when under strain, especially when faced with longer-term difficulties” then the real estate team at Flix Brewhouse certainly personifies it. But I feel strongly that it is time to step back and to refocus on the definition of patience as applied to all Flix Brewhouse team members, whether corporate or unit-level. We are a growing company. We have a collective vision. Every one of us plays a unique and vital role in patiently progressing our enterprise toward goals that we set for ourselves many years ago. We could not achieve these goals nor embrace our vision to become America’s Cinema Brewery (one guest at a time if necessary) without the “virtuosity” of patience exhibited by Flix team members. Without every single virtuoso member of the extended Flix team we are nothing but a concept and a bunch of buildings, equipment, documents and ideas. Add our Flixians to the mix and you have a culture, brand and experience that resonates and which is designed to deliver great value to guests and investors alike.
Although the articles I write after a new store opening typically dwell more on specifics, this one is really about what our new Flix El Paso location represents in a more figurative sense. In this instance, it is not just a terrifically well located, brand-new prototype building that is emblematic of what we want our brand to be. It is truly a coalescence of the patience, perseverance and positivity that we have all exhibited over the years to not only design and open our first new Flix Brewhouse prototype building, but to collectively build something great as a company. Flix El Paso is the first of its kind and emblematic of what we all envisioned the future-state of Flix Brewhouse would be in both a literal and figurative sense. So let’s all welcome it and our Sun City team members into the Flix family but also take a moment from our over-saturated schedules to recognize this achievement for what it truly is – a team win that was worth waiting for that is also the launching pad to our future. Congratulations Flix El Paso!
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Why The Non-Alcoholic Drinks Trend is Here to Stay
By: Simon Dodsworth, Vice President of Corporate Support
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It's official: the biggest trend in bars is drinks without booze. Many Americans are looking for a bar experience without the buzz. This may seem like a Millennial trend that will have a long-term negative impact on the hospitality business, contributing to further declining sales in restaurants and bars. But rather than accept it with an “oh well, it is what it is, let’s push cocktail prices up,” it is within our control to actually do something about it.
The non-alcoholic space is growing among consumers and bars according to independent industry studies. Bartenders and consumers in London, Los Angeles and New York were studied and sales and menu data at key accounts were analyzed. Among the findings, 61% of UK consumers want better choices in non-alcoholic drinks, while 55% of London bartenders believe the no- and low-ABV trend will continue to grow into 2020. In Los Angeles meanwhile, 83% of bar managers surveyed say that “no-proof” drinking is part of a growing trend.
But Flix Brewhouse is far more than just a bar so why be concerned? Well, the trend is not just impacting bars. Consumers are actively seeking out better drink options and not just in the alcoholic beverage category. Consumers are voting with their wallets by frequenting establishments offering better tasting, healthier options for adults and children alike. The “no-proof” movement has become much more mainstream and accepted, and the number of press mentions in 2019 to date compared to 2018 is exponential. Online searches for the word “mocktail” for example, are up 42% over the past year, while the phrase “non-alcoholic” is up 81% across global searches in the same period according to Google Trends.
While mocktail media attention might suggest that people have decided to no longer consume alcoholic beverages, that's not really the case. Research shows that bars offering dedicated, non-alcoholic drinks open an entirely new revenue stream. If an establishment has a regular cocktail menu and adds a new alcohol-based concoction, the dollars will exchange between any of the drinks on the menu. If a non-alcoholic drink is added, however, there’s a good chance of capturing someone who would ordinarily order a sparking water by redirecting them to a more sophisticated and commensurately more expensive drink, which often leads to another. Once the second drink has been ordered, the revenue becomes incremental and these incremental sales are where we can capture the revenue to drive up per person average (PPA) sales.
So, by adding these new mocktails to our regular rather than cocktail menu (where they may get lost in the mix and possibly ordered by mistake or not at all) we capture 100% of the guests looking at the regular menu for alternatives to highly sugary and oft demonized sodas, an adult beverage or healthier-perceived choices for their children. There is a risk that by not ordering a second drink, PPA might be eroded. The bigger risk, however, is the guest who prefers to drink better non-alcoholic options and who votes with their feet by patronizing the place that offers that alternative selection. We will be that place. Cheers!
For further interesting reading on mocktails, click on this link: https://www.nightclub.com/industry-news/mindful-operations-serving-sober-sober-curious-and-moderate-guests
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What's Brewing at Flix?
By: Chris Knott, Head Brewer
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2019 has been a whirlwind of a year and also an exciting time for the Flix Brewhouse beer program. What started as a modest idea has now seemingly blossomed into a truly national program and is finally drawing plenty of well-deserved attention in its own right.
One of the more glamorous aspects of any aspiring brewing program is competitions. I can’t say enough how proud I am that on a combined basis, Flix Brewhouse has racked up a total of 48 medals in 7 national competitions so far this calendar year. I’d be remiss not to highlight the Gold medal that we won for Saison de Walt at the ultra-competitive US Beer Open and our Carmel, Indiana brewer winning the top honor of Brewery of the Year at the Indiana Brewers’ Cup. There are too many local specialties to mention, but Lupulus IPA, Luna Rosa Wit, 10-Day Scottish Ale, and our seasonal Oktoberfest also received accolades throughout the year. Our brewers are producing at the highest level and we’ve got some impressive hardware to back it up.
From the brewery operations side, we continue to fine tune and document our best practices in continuous pursuit of nationwide consistency and quality. We’re on round four of quarterly lab testing and blind tastings of our Core 6 beers (our branded mainstays that are always available at every Flix location) and we’re just at the beginning stages of each brewer being able to use these tools and feedback to improve their offerings. The first half of 2019 saw the successful completion of detailed preventive maintenance documentation and sign off forms, which is being rolled out during my site visits to minimize equipment downtime. The second half of 2019 will see the certification of each brewer upon completion of the Brewers Association’s online safety training curriculum and we’ll be launching a brewery waste calculator to track what is lost during processes such as draft line cleaning, keg filling, and beer festivals in order to help manage and track our cost of goods.
The development and launch of our new El Paso unit also saw the realization of a fruitful partnership between Flix and our new brewing equipment supplier, Quality Tank Solutions (QTS). Our first project together was not without its challenges, but we’ve experienced tremendous response and service from their team to quickly resolve issues during startup. Another benefit of working with QTS is their willingness to bid and construct parts of the brewery build that our contractors always struggle with: the steam vent stack for the kettle, the glycol piping and insulation, and the stainless steel transfer pipes used to move beer from brewhouse to the fermentation platform and from fermentation to the serving tank platform.
The future at Flix Brewhouse is as bright as the highly polished QTS kettle and mash tun now on display in our brewery at Flix El Paso, and on our current trajectory, I expect that we will one day soon realize our goal of becoming a truly world class brewing program.
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The Vista From Here
By: Peter Lichtor, Director of Information Systems
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I joined Flix Brewhouse in April 2019 as Flix’s new Director of Information Systems, after a six-year career at Vista Entertainment Solutions, a universal point of sale system developed for the cinema industry that has been Flix’s enterprise software from day one. Beginning with Vista as an Application Consultant, I led multiple deployments to large cinema circuits around the country. After the successful completion of these deployments, I was promoted to Account Manager. For the next five years, I served as the advocate for my clients within Vista and ensured that the software was configured optimally to meet their business requirements. Through the successful completion of these major projects and deployments, I was able to gain a strong understanding of the cinema industry, as well as the in-theater dining segment.
I was intrigued by the opportunity to join the Flix Brewhouse team, since it represented a great chance to take my skill set and experiences with Vista software and apply these to the Flix business model. Luckily, I knew the platform had been in great hands before I got here so it was clearly an opportunity to expand on the pre-existing setup and create new efficiencies and revenue generating processes. This opportunity also gave me the chance to experience the software and industry I felt comfortable with from a new perspective. This has already created new challenges and given me some perspective as to how to approach various problems as they arise.
At Flix, I am working diligently with our team to come up with ideas to streamline the team member experience, create a more stable environment that results in less downtime and related issues, and to utilize the existing functionality we have in place to maximize our ROI. In my time since starting, we have implemented a new line of promotions while also trialing the ability to automatically hold and fire food – an opportunity to make servers more efficient and increase the likelihood of upsells for items like desserts that we have traditionally requested that guests order mid-movie. We have also begun making changes in the corporate side of the system that should lead to improved efficiency and consistency.
Upcoming projects include continuing to coordinate with the Learning & Development department on enhancements to our POS processes and designs. This includes re-mapping how certain items are being utilized on POS, as well as introducing Smart Modifiers to streamline the process of adding/removing items that are part of an item’s larger recipe.
Another major initiative that I am excited to push forward into next year is the introduction of Vista’s Serve module. This newly re-designed POS system was specifically made for use with in-theater dining, with the team member (and increasing revenue) in mind. We are beginning to test this new functionality along with other Vista improvements as part of our upcoming version update later this fall.
Finally, I will be working with other Flix departments that more tangentially connect to Vista, to help facilitate some of their major projects over the next few months, including taking better advantage of the data that exists within Vista, as well as leveraging the Vista loyalty module to its fullest capacity to deliver the top-notch program our marketing team has designed.
As a graduate of the University of Southern California, I am an avid fan of Trojans sports and root for all Minnesota pro teams. My family and I spent the last three years in North Texas (with a brief stop back in our home state of Minnesota), and we are happy to be back in Texas – although we are looking forward to it finally cooling down a bit. In our spare time we enjoy traveling, playing sports, and exploring the outdoors.
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