Full Course is a restaurant development and investment firm that incubates and accelerates emerging fast casual restaurant brands, focusing on restaurants less than five years old with 1-10 locations. Full Course has a special focus on businesses run by women, minorities and immigrants. Cleanliness and creating an appealing dining environment is important. Restaurant owners need to make scheduled cleanings – including annual deep cleanings – a priority. Full Course works with designers to help restaurants improve their appearance and atmosphere. They create dining environments that speak to the brand’s story, purpose and mission while avoiding some of the unnecessary costs associated with creating custom materials. Full Course realizes that one of the benefits of fast casual dining is that it’s fairly recession proof. Consumers may cut corners on higher end dining during a recession, but fast casual dining is usually always within a consumer’s budget. Each Full Course client goes through an initial assessment that analyzes the restaurant’s finances, staff and leadership, marketing strategies and points of differentiation to find opportunities for Full Course to add value. Quotes “One of my favorite restaurant hacks is when you walk in and you just watch. You watch what the managers do. We all know how to do it by the book, but really great managers are proactive at putting systems in place where there may be a gap.” (Lauren) “The best ideas come from doing, especially in the world of restaurants.” (Lauren) “You can tell how well a place is managed if you just look up at the vents. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked up at the vents and said, ‘Guys, that’s so gross.’” (Joseph) “We eat with our eyes first and when you walk into a restaurant and it looks like it’s in disrepair, that matters. Those details matter. It shows a letter of care and concern about the environment and a way that you’re creating an experience for customers.” (Lauren) “We’re very attuned to efficient spending when we’re building out these units. We spend a lot of time and energy designing these restaurants so that they communicate the values of the brand but in an efficient and effective manner.” (Lauren) “People will cut spending in a lot of places, but food isn’t one of them. We all need that moment of community. We need that moment to go out and get a break from being at home.” (Lauren) “Our staples in the American diet are delicious, but we don’t need another burrito. We don’t need another hamburger. What we need is something fresh and something that is bringing something different to the market.” (Joseph) Transcript 00:00.00 vigorbranding Everyone today I'm joined by my friend Lauren Fernandez she is the Ceo and founder of full course which we are going to unfurl fully in this episode Lauren wont we start by you saying hello and giving a little bit of backstory. 00:11.92 Lauren Fernandez Yeah hi I'm Lauren ah former attorney turned restaurant owner turned restaurant investor and developer and I started full course a little over two years ago it's been about a 10 year dream of mine to work with. Earlyage restaurant brands and they're really in their emerging years. Um, when they're anywhere between one and five years old and somewhere between 1 and 5 units and that is exactly what full course does so we are a fullservice solution for early stage. Fast casual restaurant concepts you can be anywhere from one to None units. We'd love to talk to you. We have a private equity fund that we use to back our investment in these brands. But we're a little bit different in our approach. We take a minority investment stake. We leave our restaurant partners in charge of operations and in control of the business while we focus on deploying the capital to our growth plan that we develop with you with our development team. So we invest in folks for about 5 years and it's a pretty differen