How to Rebuild a Struggling Restaurant Region with the VP of Operations of Emmy Squared Pizza

0:00There's a lot of positives to this industry, but it is absolutely unique and can't be treated like any other industry, nor can any model be kind of forced upon it that would not reflect the true kind of idiosyncrasies of what befalls a general manager every day. companies fail at moving quick enough in attaining the right labor or the right leadership. Once you find that individual, whether it is a server or bartender, it could be a dishwasher, it could be an assistant general manager, regional director, doesn't matter. They are the diamonds in the rough and you need to be able to immediately communicate your vision for your brand, how they're going to dovetail in that trajectory and growth plan and get them on board as quickly as possible.

0:52Topher Bertone-Ledford: I'm Conor Sheridan, and this is What's Cooking, the show for operators running hospitality businesses at scale. There's a split happening across hospitality right now that doesn't get talked about enough. The restaurant groups that opened after COVID built their operations for a world were actually in. Leaner teams, faster decisions, tighter margins, all from day one. But the groups that existed before COVID and survived it are often still running on assumptions from a different era. And a lot of them are now finding out the hard way that surviving the pandemic and surviving what came after are two distinctly different problems.

1:31Topher Bertone-Ledford: Today's guest has spent the last few years living inside exactly that gap, taking a struggling market and rebuilding it from the ground up. Topher Bertone Ledford, Vice President of Operations at Emmy Squared Pizza. Welcome to What's Club.

1:52Topher Bertone-Ledford: Topher, welcome to What's Cooking. Thanks so much for joining us. Connor, thank you so much for having me. You're the VP of Operations for Emmy Square. You have a pretty interesting career trajectory to get to the role that you're in today. A little bit of acting, some bartending, a couple of operational roles. Maybe talk to us about how you got to the role today and a bit on your journey in hospitality. Sure, of course. So I think back in the day, we would have called that being a Renaissance individual. And yes, my journey is a very kind of curved line to get to where I am today. You know, grew up in a, you know, small little town of Slice of Americana in the Hudson Valley and did a lot of different things growing up.

2:37My parents, you know, afforded me the opportunity to try a lot of different interests. And I thought that made me a very well-rounded individual, someone who knew what they liked, knew what they were passionate about, and was able to kind of leave the rest to the side. And as a result, I think to me, to get to where I am today, it's been about people, right? I love sharing stories with other individuals, whether they're friends or strangers. And I love getting to know other individuals and kind of listening to their hopes, their dreams, their goals, their aspirations, and helping them along that path to help them achieve where they want to go.

3:20You know, the hospitality industry is obviously about people. It's about serving your community. But, you know, from an operator's perspective, it's about teaching your team how to be passionate every day, even if they don't feel that that specific day, it's they have to be able to walk in and and lead and guide their teams. And so to me, it's always been about the people.

3:48Topher Bertone-Ledford: nice um you mentioned that the kernel for for this entire journey goes back to feast of seven fishes christmas eve maybe a hundred folks in in your house cooking happening in each room maybe talk to us a bit about that and how that how that seeded the journey that you went on sure of course so in sicilian tradition the feast of the seven fishes is you know kind of paramount of all festivals and kind of religious celebrations and it just so happens that the Feast of Seven Fishes is intricately tied to food and hospitality. So the Feast of Seven Fishes obviously has religious undertones but in my family it was an opportunity for every single member of the family to usually come to Fort Lee, New York, or I'm sorry, Fort Lee, New Jersey, where there was a large house that could fit everybody.

4:49And then different rooms had different cooking equipment. And you literally would go into different rooms to get your different types of food, obviously, all different types of seafood. And all the different, you know, kind of patriarchs and matriarchs of the family would bring their specialties, right? The calamari, the skunjil, the bacalao. And so it was a festival. It was a true party. It was an opportunity to kind of share your year's exploits. Obviously, a chance to get into it with your cousins and your uncles and let them kind of tell their long tales um but really it was it was a chance to obviously just at the base of it bake break bread and uh kind of remember why we're all here which is to to support each other to love our family

5:46Topher Bertone-Ledford: nice yeah and i similar experiences growing up back in ireland uh although minus the quality of the food i think the people were there but the food was uh we weren't quite having some of the dishes that you've described unfortunately and so a little bit jealous um well we move a little bit into today right if we if we come back to today running off you said something super interesting which we see with a lot of the restaurants we work with in ori is there's pre-covid and post-covid and they're very different operating models and very different experiences in terms of what brands are experiencing in market today.

6:28Topher Bertone-Ledford: You touched on to say brands who set up post-COVID are almost experiencing a mini cheat code, right? They have the operations for the right environment. They're leaner. The margins fit better. They're better adapted to a new consumer style of eating and going out. Maybe talk to us a bit around how you think of that dichotomy between the two experiences if you're operating a brand that thankfully persisted during COVID and came out the other side, or if you've just set something up from scratch, say, post-2021? I would say pre-COVID models. They weren't necessarily as defined. Pre-COVID models were, I had a great idea for a recipe, or I've always wanted to try to open my own restaurant, or, yes, I want to go after that Michelin star, or yes, I want to be that counter service concept.

7:21But there was much more trial and ever. There was much more organic movement through who you were and what you were offering to the community. And you could play in a lot of different sandboxes. You could be that little mom and pop restaurant that also had really nice stemware and, you know, nice linens and, you know, a type of linen-like seafold napkin in your bathroom that made you feel like you were in Paris kind of walking out of the bathroom, you know? So there was a lot of, hey, you know, what's frivolous, what's not frivolous? It wasn't like something that we had to make a decision on. It was like kind of who are we today?

8:12Who are we tomorrow? Who are we next year? in kind of figuring out the operations and what we felt like was a part of the brand and wasn't. Post-COVID, the margins obviously are even slimmer than they were. And that's saying something because the margins were slim pre-COVID as well. But I think people coming into this industry post-COVID have realized that there needs to be such a discipline and deliberateness to every choice made about your operations from the beginning, right? There can be very little trial and error because every dollar wasted on something that doesn't necessarily support the core essence of the brand is a dollar that you can't afford to lose.

9:00And so, you know, I made the, I used the example of a linen rollout, right? Right. You know, mom and pop restaurants are looking at their operating expenses and they obviously have their prime cost. And they're like, OK, we know that, you know, if we could be 22 percent or under in our OPEX, we would make a little bit of money at the end of the day. And now, right, like you can't 22 percent that, you know, you're underwater. Right. And so it's how are you looking at every aspect, every line item of your P &L and truly understanding like, hey, is the difference between a paper napkin and a linen napkin truly worth the brand kind of perception?

9:47and if so, how are we making up that revenue to allow us to actually generate that 5 % to 7 %? And the restaurants that are successful are profiting at a really high level in certain categories because the restaurants that are profitable are profiting at much higher numbers than they used to be, I would say in the fast casual categories because they found that like, okay, we're going to streamline our operations. We're going to cut away all of the fat and we're going to just focus on the things that make us successful. And then they're able to leverage, obviously, their buying power and things like that.

10:32And the other side of that, the true fine dining kind of Michelin star, are$80 ahead,$150 ahead,$400 ahead restaurants, are also kind of digging in in a very specific way as well. Obviously not with the same margins, but they really doubled down on, okay, there's a level of excellence. There's a level of opulence to this experience that we're going to invest in. And then everything in between has kind of disappeared, right? The mom and pop restaurant that had really great service and that amazing pork chop at$35 a dish, that just doesn't exist anymore. You have to run to the edges in order to be successful.

11:23And so I would say post-COVID has required operators to be so, so specific about who they are, what they're spending money on, how they go about really defining their brand and where they can pivot. and it's reduced that middle area of hospitality where it was like these kind of more organic, you know, meandering brands that could kind of be a lot of different things all at once.

11:55Topher Bertone-Ledford: Yeah, well said. You talked a little bit previously about winners and losers in this market having to operate a certain way. So you've touched there around a requirement to be super focused having like the entire B plan and operating plan regimented pre-breaking ground and knowing who you're going to be and where to spend and from a margin profile but also from like an AUV profile you mentioned something previously around information sharing and the speed at which operators can move today being a defining characteristic around whether or not you can be successful or not is that something maybe you could just talk us through around what that means for you?

12:36And first it starts with, you know, kind of culling the data that is not going to be helpful, right? Like you can get lost in the data just in like in any other industry in terms of understanding, you know, your benchmarks and kind of, yeah, you might not be hitting your year over year comp, but there are wins to be had and wins to be celebrated. But in terms of having data to work for you, sharing that information across your leadership team, whether that's, you know, two brothers starting a restaurant or across a true kind of corporate structured executive team.

13:20It's driven by, okay, the CEO, the COO, you know, the CFO is going to say, hey, this is what we're focusing on. This is what we need to drive. whether it's an AUV, whether it's just, you know, top line, year over year comp, whether it's in the prime cost and controlling the controllable profit, right? Or R &M for that matter, right? Like there, you can't be focusing on everything, you have to like, truly kind of break it down into maybe two or three metrics for a specific given a specific amount of time. And then obviously you can move on to your next initiative. I'm always about conquered territory.

14:02What territory have we conquered? What's the timetable to conquer that territory? And how quickly can we move on to the next challenge? To me, where I say that most restaurants fall behind is in leadership acquisition or just labor acquisition in general. You know, again, I spoke about this earlier, but, you know, post-COVID, you have, and honestly, with changes to the tax code in the United States and the IRS being more punitive to, specifically to the restaurant industry, the restaurant industry is not a cash rich industry right in fact many operators actually prefer credit cards because it removes a layer of complexity to their operations right there's tips are are posted and allocated using you know tip pool calculators and things like that there's more data and more easily trackable data to go out there and actually know what your numbers are in a short period of time, right?

15:21Because that's me, I think also speaks to how successful an operations is. Are they basing their decisions on the most up-to-date and accurate data possible, right? If you are constantly basing your decisions off of a P &L from two weeks ago, right? You're always going to be two weeks behind the bell curve in terms of, you know, how to respond to the external stimuli. That being said, as it pertains to the labor force, right? Like people went to, you know, the Uber deliveries, they went to construction, they went to so many different other industries that are a little bit more, what do they call that?

16:02Not niche, but a gig, right the gig economy right they're their own quote-unquote boss they can control that a little bit more um and so those who have you know continue to pursue uh you know either a server position or or a general manager position in hospitality industry that talent pool has shifted right and so you know obviously danny meyer kind of says it best where it's like i i can teach uh pnl i can teach, you know, how to take an inventory properly and really control your margin. What I can teach is passion and engagement, finding that little special sauce that makes restaurants really successful, which is the service aspect of it.

16:51You know, to me, as it, you know, and this is a very long way of coming back to why companies fail at moving quick enough in attaining the right labor or the right leadership is once you find that individual, whether it is a server or bartender, it could be a dishwasher, it could be an assistant general manager, regional director, doesn't matter, right? They are the diamonds in the rough and you need to be able to immediately communicate your vision for your brand, how they're going to dovetail in that trajectory and growth plan and get them on board as quickly as possible, get them into your company, get them kind of swimming in the right direction with you.

17:46And what I find is that specifically in you know, HR and talent acquisition, HR tends to be a very siloed aspect of operations. And then the people that are making these decisions with hires, they're usually very conservative because they don't want to hire the wrong person because of past experience, whatever it is. And what ends up happening is, you know, that person ends up getting scooped up by another company that was able to, you know, connect faster, share information faster, share their vision for that individual and their growth plan for that individual. And as a result, a lot of times it has nothing to do with the salary or even the growth potential.

18:32It just happens to be about how quickly you can make decisions and share information.

18:39Topher Bertone-Ledford: When you look at the lack of supply of a professionalized GMs or rock star GMs, because ultimately your location kind of survives or thrives depending on the quality of the leadership team at your scale what are you doing at any me to try and maintain a um a good what is the worst a good uh a good line of or a good bench of talent that you can you can bring true to run the venues so yeah i mean the word bench is the key right like can can your payroll afford uh an individual that is potentially like kind of waiting in the wings that's not not directly supporting generating revenue currently um and i know a lot of models right now a lot of business models that can't afford that, you know.

19:34And so, you know, that means that you have to look to your hourly, you have to look to your team to be, you know, kind of brand ambassadors and are constantly on the lookout for that one or two individuals that they think could potentially three months from now, six months from now, you know, grow into somebody that could really create value for your company. And so one, it's about, again, sharing data in real time and holding yourself and your team accountable to that data, right? We have a staffing matrix, right, that we update on a monthly basis that goes location by location and kind of grades the current leadership team, not just on their performance, but also on their, you know, the fact that they may be a flight risk because they want, you know, they want to grow faster than we can offer them opportunity, or maybe it is performance-based or whatever it is.

20:40And then as part of that leadership matrix or labor matrix, we're also starting, it is a bench, so to speak, but it is a list of individuals that are the potential up and coming. And just like you're building a baseball team, you have your AAA and your AA affiliates that are kind of bubbling up their next shortstop to the major league team. You're someone who wants to be an operations manager for a larger company like a Cobb or something like that. And they spend every day of their year building the next menu and the next kind of rollout and really optimizing that, right? There's a lot of value to be gained at an Emmy squared of us going in there and saying, okay, six months, you know, if we want to launch a menu in six months, what are we doing today?

21:29What are we doing at the five month mark, four months, three months, so on and so forth. And then what are these KPIs that we need to check off in order to get to that, you know, day before launch? And we feel really confident that 26 restaurants are going to go out there and execute a menu that not only is it to spec, but it actually gets people really excited, right? And so you can find ways to include people and build up their strengths and get them more involved without having to constantly do a carrot and stick kind of analogy.

22:04Topher Bertone-Ledford: Yeah, nice. Zooming in more specifically to Emmy's operations, he took over the New York region two years ago. it was in a challenging state right in terms of maybe some deferred maintenance and support and some engagement challenges you talked there about focus and i completely agree oftentimes as operators um every quarter like let's solve every problem in the business at once and you you make some progress but often not material enough to make a dent in the culture or the p &l where did you start how did you decide what do we need to fix first here to get this back on course so right or wrong and this might just be my ocd speaking but i equate cleanliness with respect and um honor and energy and so when i took over me squared specifically the northeast least, we had a lot of opportunities in creating a restaurant that you walked in.

23:15The word I was looking for was pride, pride, right? That you walked in as a dishwasher, server, expo, blind cook, and you felt proud to be working for this brand. Now, you know, obviously pride can manifest with, you know, its cultural relevancy, you You know, it's, you know, cutting edge approach to X, Y, and Z. You know, the amount of celebrities that walk through the door, right? Pride can come from a lot of different places. But honestly, to me, pride comes from we respect this industry. And to respect the industry means you walk into a clean restaurant. And so the first thing we did was we set a new standard for what a clean restaurant is.

24:03Like when I walk through a restaurant, right? And I think operators, you know, we talk about it as having a restaurant eye, right? What is your, how is your restaurant eye? Has it been sharpened? Are you seeing what I'm seeing, right? Are we aligned on the current state of affairs? Because if I walk in and you walk in and we just see the restaurant completely differently, the reality is the reality. Um, and so that was first and foremost was I would walk restaurants with my current GMs and say, are you seeing what I'm seeing? Right. Is, is this, you know, whatever this is, right. The way it's supposed to be.

24:44And if they said, yes, I said, okay. Right. Like explain that to me. Cause I, I, I don't understand yet. Right. And I don't want to get too, too far into the weeds of that. But I found very quickly who were completely like just okay with the status quo and just there to collect a paycheck and who like actually saw what it was, what it used to be, and just lamented the fact that they didn't really know how to get back there because they didn't know which levers to pull basically.

25:23And the people that we didn't see eye to eye on the current state of operations, they got off the bus pretty quickly. And I brought on new individuals and I said to them, like, from day one, right, there was no sugar coating it. There was no rose colored glasses. This is a challenge. We were walking into a challenge. But together with, you know, day to day support. If I need to be, you know, in your restaurant with a bunch of magic erasers cleaning the walls and, you know, and scrubbing the toilets and rebuilding your kitchen so that you can see underneath, you know, equipment so that you can sweep under there.

26:04Or if you need seven shop backs in different corners of your restaurant so that you can get to, you know, so that you always have access to vacuum something up, then let me know. I will happily invest my time and my money into those products and those services. Because to me, walking into a clean restaurant is the bare minimum, right? And then from there, we can build on the legacy, you know, feeling of this brand and what we were and what we are now. And how can we kind of bridge that gap? But it started with, are we on the same page about the current state of affairs? And those leaders who didn't see it the way that I saw it, like I said, we moved on from them.

26:50We brought in individuals who acknowledged that, yeah, this is not where we need to be. This is how we're going to do it. And then, you know, to get to that next level, right, it was, okay, we're okay with X right now because we're focused so much on cleanliness and just some basic like operational cadences, right? Like are our servers and bartenders showing up to work on time? That was enough for us. Not do they know how to make the recipes the right way? Just are they showing up and are they showing up on time, right? And then we got to the next tier of are they showing up on time and are they engaged in the service or are they on their phone the whole time?

27:34Okay, and then we got to the next tier that are they engaged and they know the recipes inside and out. Okay, now are they actually communicating that to the guests, right? So we were never going to be like, okay, we got to clean our restaurants. We're going to rip them apart, put them back together. We need new leaders who are going to see it the exact same way as I do. And we're going to like work on our 12 steps of service. And we're going to completely rebuild that and expect our bartenders and servers to speak to the emotional intelligence of our menu and be able to make strong offerings and speak to our award-winning burger all in the next three months.

28:13You know, that would have been a ridiculous approach to the current state of affairs. And so it truly was a, okay, here's the goalpost now, right? At this point, we can get to that next level. And at that point, who else can we bring in to support this trend, to support this gradual growth back to a level of excellence that I could see in the future, but we were nowhere near executing or practically approaching. And so it was a top-down approach from a leadership perspective. It was a bottom-up approach from a four walls perspective. And then we kind of met in the middle, right? And I'm happy to say that like a year and a half into it, we started a three-month steps of service campaign in New York City and Connecticut, for that matter, where we could go and take three months and really flush out what does it mean to have a dining experience at an M-squared and spend, you know, a couple of weeks on each step so that we could be not only coaching new information, new initiatives, right?

29:34Like step one of our company two years ago had nothing to do with reading the guest or having a smile on your face or, you know, looking them in the eye. Well, now, step one of our steps of service is the greet with a smile on our face and making eye contact. And who is responsible for that? Well, that is every single person in the restaurant. So I don't care if you walk into any Emmy Squared from here on out, you are expected to be greeted with a smile and an eye contact and the word welcome. Right. And that is a that was had we been having this conversation two years ago. a level of frivolity that we were not able to afford at that time.

30:24And I'm happy to say that like over time, by kind of staying with it and kind of seeing the journey, we were able to get to.

30:36Topher Bertone-Ledford: Nice. And the proof is in the, obviously the metrics too, right? I think the New York region is the top performing from a profitability point of view. So all of those things are trickled down, trickle down economics right you can get the basics right you can you can push the business yeah i mean the guest you know the guest doesn't know you know kind of the guest never knows the numbers nor should they right the guest just knows their experience right and they're comparing it to every other experience that they've ever had while going out to eat or or ordering food right and so So like while they're, while, you know, it's interesting, like New York, some might say, well, it's easier for New York because they have so many people and, you know, they have, you know, they have all of this, they have all of this kind of talent pool, not talent pool, but guest pool to, you know, to leverage.

31:40We also have a lot more competition in the New York City region. And so you have to be able to differentiate yourself compared to maybe a restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, or Short Pump, Virginia, or something like that, right, where there might only be three or four restaurants in a 10, 20 mile radius. But the experience and how you leave the restaurant, right? To me, I had a mentor say that, you know, whenever we were taking a price increase and looking at the individual cost of each dish, right? And we understood the theoretical cogs of that dish and kind of the price, the elasticity, the price elasticity of that dish um and we were like oh yeah well we could we could take a dollar 50 on that no problem right because like look at where we are and look at the the protein in that dish and so on and so forth and he would always have to remind me that it wasn't about the dish itself it was about the total at the end of the at the end of the experience they're going to see a total and they're going to do like a split second equation in their head of does this total match the experience that I just had, right?

32:57And if they had a service that was just, you know, beyond and a server that connected with them and offered them, offered to guide them through the experience in a way that they never would have if they just, you know, had an order taker come over and say, what do you want? What's your appetizer? What's your entree? Do you want a martini? Okay, great. like let's do this um then the sum of all those parts like that equation is an easy one for them to do but they're like yeah this was an amazing experience right like the service and everything everything kind of you know fit together perfectly and if they don't right then they are going to you know kind of look at it line by line and say okay was this really worth it right do i did i get the value for what this ended up costing me.

33:44And, you know, that to me is, that's, that is this, right? That is this whole experience, right? Like we, as operators on the inside, we can, we can, we know all the magic tricks, right? We know all of the ways to get to that end result, going out there and executing that, right? On a day in, day out basis, right? The consistency of that and the ability to make a guest feel, that's hospitality, right? Bringing ketchup from the expo to the table, that's service, right? And so, you know, that to me is like, that's the interesting thing is that, yes, the numbers will ultimately end up telling you if you're doing a good job or not, but the steps of service that we created allows them a foundation of hey how do like what's winning here like how do i know if i'm doing a good job and then because i feel really comfortable about knowing that i can go be myself more and that's where this really comes comes down to and people like you know you walk up to a table and it feels very uh you know canned and and machine-like right like yeah so every once in a while like you know you're at a steak dinner and you're you know you're hosting a bunch of execs right they want that kind of like tunnel vision i'm in my own world kind of thing but for the most part right like i think people want that little something extra and that ends up if you're able to create a path towards executing that on a daily basis, yeah, that ends up showing up in your P &L.

35:35Nice.

35:36Topher Bertone-Ledford: We're going to move to the quick turn, which is rapid-fire questions. So these are five questions. You can give me the first thing that comes to your head, and we can go from there. So what's the first number that you look at in the morning? Year over year comp. Okay. And why is that? To me, it's the benchmark for understanding, you know, are we making strides towards building back our top line, right? Every year we need to be doing better sales than the year before because the reverse of that formula means that we're going to go out of business. If you could hand every GM one skill overnight, what would it be?

36:23Emotional intelligence, right? Knowing what needs to be bubbled up to me and what are things that they can immediately act on, right? Knowing the difference between what requires a little oversight or, you know, a little bit of a brainstorming session and what are things that just need to be solved. and they have to solve it as best as they can based on their experience, that to me is the effectiveness of if I've been able to do my job well, of them knowing the difference between those. Okay.

36:56Topher Bertone-Ledford: And last one, what's one thing the industry needs to stop doing and then the inverse of that, start doing? The industry needs to stop pretending like it's any other industry. The hospitality industry is a truly unique industry with truly unique pinch points and business models. You know, a banker doesn't show up to work that day because they're sick. And rightfully so, they are staying home for the public good, for themselves, for, you know, the sake of their family, whatever it is, right? That bank doesn't suffer, right? A line cook on a Friday afternoon doesn't show up to work and you only schedule one line cook on a Friday afternoon because that's what your labor model is telling you to do, right?

37:51that's you know that's going to be the next six hours of hell in your life right like as the gm you are now calling every single person that you've ever known to come in and try to you know work a shift usually an hour before uh you open or you personally are having to cook uh and potentially have to dust off your recipes in your brain of like am i making this to spec the rest of your team suffers because you're, you've subtracted a disproportionate, you know, amount of value in your operations. Um, and the level of anxiety and stress is through the roof, right? And that is every day in this industry.

38:32Um, so there's a lot of positives to this industry, but it is absolutely unique and can't be treated like any other industry, nor can any model be kind of forced upon it that would not reflect the true kind of idiosyncrasies of what befalls a general manager every day. Okay, nice.

38:57Topher Bertone-Ledford: Well, Topher, that's the end of the quick turn. That's the end of the podcast. I really appreciate you joining us today. Thanks for the insights. Some really great nuggets in there for the listeners. And thanks so much for your time. And it was awesome to have you on. So, Connor, I really appreciate it. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. And yeah, really loved it. Thank you.

39:21Topher Bertone-Ledford: Topher, thank you. That was genuinely useful. If there's one thing I'm taking from that conversation, it's the point about where the delay actually sits. Most of us think that we have a data problem, but Topher's describing is closer to a permission problem. The information is usually somewhere in the building. He used the example of a broad line supplier constantly delivering mispicks or wrong orders, which really degrades the service, really puts pressure on frontline teams and can lead to poor engagement and often staff turnover. But the feeling is there's no permission to punch this up the chain and say, hey, there's a problem here.

39:55Topher Bertone-Ledford: We want to change it. Where the inverse is true. The CFO wants to know which of their suppliers is not playing ball and make a move if they can't come to a reconciliation. it's just that nobody's able to act on it fast enough for it to matter that's what's cooking if you got something out of this one follow the show wherever you're listening it genuinely helps more operators find us and if you know someone who should be on the show i'd love to hear about it i'm connor sharon see you next time