El Arroyo is a Tex-Mex restaurant in Austin, Texas. Established in 1975, the restaurant is known for its assortment of Mexican cuisine including tacos, fajitas, guacamole and tortilla chips in generous portions. Ellis and his wife, Paige, have been the owners of El Arroyo since 2012. El Arroyo’s most famous marketing tactic is its marquees, which house witty messages updated on a daily basis. The marquees have driven social media success for El Arroyo, with a few thousand followers when the marquees began to more than 250,000 followers on Facebook and 600,000 followers on Instagram today. Axial Shift is a software platform created so that frontline managers and staff can learn to be more effective at running restaurants. The Axial Shift platform provides teams with a purpose-driven work experience by delivering transparency into their performance and potential sales opportunities, as well as tools to control their outcomes and improve their own and their store’s performance. The Axial Shift system connects to the POS system and then delivers data to managers and employees via an app on the user’s smartphone or tablet. The services include a microgaming feature that helps managers give bonuses to employees who increase performance or meet goals set by the manager. Quotes “What makes the (marquees) work is the voice. It was always funny, but when we got involved we decided that we wanted to create a voice that was connective and really authentic and would resonate with what people were dealing with in their day-to-day lives.” (Ellis) “The (marquees) gave us an opportunity to connect with people on a daily basis.” (Ellis) “The things (Axial Shift) does tactically is, yes, it gets the manager out of the office (and onto the floor). For the employees, it’s feeding them back sales performance data. It shows where they rank relative to their peers in total sales, sales per hour, credit card tip percentage – key metrics. It positions the data so they can see their own personal growth relative to their team. It drives people to want to perform at a higher level.” (Ellis) “You really gotta go where no one else is bold enough to go. You hear stories of this too. The latest one I heard is a designer or creative who put his resume in a box of doughnuts and delivered it to the office of the agency he wanted to work at. It’s that kind of thinking that brands need. They need people who aren’t going to just toe the line with what they have been told to do, but instead actually think and come up with ideas for how to get there.” (Joseph) “Sales contests really work but only when they’re executed in a tight way and when the information is presented where everybody sees an opportunity to grow. That’s what we do with Axial.” (Ellis) Transcript 00:00.00 vigorbranding Everyone today I'm joined by my friend Ellis Win stanley he has a number of companies from axialhift to el arroyo to texas ranch experience we're going to cover all of those or at least try to in a and normal amount of time. Ah, but before that ellis say hello and give a little bit of backstory. 00:19.24 Ellis Winstanley Everyone happy to be here. Thanks so appreciate it? Um, yeah, so we're we're based in Austin Texas and and we're colocated to Santa Theresa Costa Rica we've got starting the restaurant business years years ago and then ended up in multiple industries along the way including real estate development and. And restaurant software. 00:40.37 vigorbranding That's awesome. Yeah I mean there's just so much to unpack in this episode I forgot to mention that you recently became a board member at the Texas restaurant association as well. So maybe the None big question is how do you have the time to do all of this. 00:54.25 Ellis Winstanley Um, well we yeah yeah, we've got we've got a lot of very longterm folks on our team that that are yeah we we run our company very entrepreneurly the people that that run certain elements have a