This week, Nick Portillo catches up with Cody Wong, CEO of CW Management Services. With oversight of more than 120 franchise locations, Cody breaks down the operational strategies that fuel scalable growth, emphasizing the importance of strong systems, smart technology, and disciplined execution.

He shares firsthand insights into managing the complexities of human resources, accounting, and regulatory compliance, particularly in light of recent legislative changes that have driven up labor costs. They also discuss the critical balance between operational efficiency and creating a positive workplace culture, one that empowers teams to deliver exceptional customer service.

Listen for strategies that support sustainable growth in the fast-casual dining space.

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Nick: nick.portillo@portillosales.com

There are a million ways to make money in the food service industry. You just have to find one. On the Titans of Food Service podcast. I interview real life movers and shakers.

In the food game who cut through.

All the noise to get to the top. My name is Nick Portillo and welcome to the Titans of Food Service podcast. Let's jump right into it.

Welcome back to another episode of Titans of Food Service. I'm your host, Nick Portillo and want to say thank you again for joining me here on another episode. Okay.

To my guest today, Cody Wong, CEO of CW Management Services.

With more than 120 franchise locations under his family's umbrella, spanning Carl's Jr. And Dave's Hot Chicken, Cody Wong is a rising force in the fast, casual and QSR world.

As CEO of the operations arm behind CW Management Services, also referred to in some outlets as CW Strong, he supervises the critical back end of the enterprise from HR and payroll to accounting and compliance, and ensuring that the sprawling multi unit business runs smoothly, efficiently, by the book. In an industry where rapid growth often breeds operational headaches, Cody has distinguished himself by embedding robust systems to support scale.

Under his leadership, CW has leaned into technology AI among other things, to safeguard compliance, reduce labor costs leakage, and empower store level teams.

Whether it's navigating labor regulations, standardizing payroll and scheduling, or fortifying financial operations, Cody's steady leadership and meticulous attention to detail have helped position CW as a franchise powerhouse, quietly delivering infrastructure that keeps hundreds of employees and dozens of cushions humming. Without further ado, let's go ahead and welcome Cody.

All right, Cody, welcome to the Titans of Food Service podcast man. Appreciate you taking time to come on and meet with me.

Of course, yes, definitely feel very honored to be on this. Like I said, it's my first one, so super excited to be able to talk about, you know, our business and kind of what we're doing and yeah.

Yeah, I love it on that topic. How'd you get into the food space?

Yeah, so I've actually always been in the food space, I guess in a way. My father is. Has been a franchisee actually for as long as I've been born. So I was born March of 92. He became a franchisee October of 92. Wow.

And so, you know, pretty much kind of as I got older, I was in the restaurants, you know, obviously not really doing much but, you know, cleaning trays here and there, just kind of hanging out in the dining room. And so, you know, Carl specifically, I've just always been around for forever.

So it's, I guess, something naturally that I was going to venture to go to. I think for a long time I tried to steer away from it, like, oh, that's not my lane. I'm not gonna do that.

But just became a thing where it's just like, I can't deny it anymore, you know?

So, yeah, I was born in March 93. So one year out, March 22.

Oh, I'm the 23rd. So there you go. It's just a day off.

Oh, nice.

Nice, man.

So.

So when you were born, that's essentially when your dad opened up his first. Is it Carl's junior Location?

So he. Yeah, he basically got. He bought, you know, the. The stores, existing stores from the franchisor.

So he actually started off, came over when he was 16 from Indonesia, and then started working at Jack in a Box while he was in high school. Basically worked his way up, I think, became, at the time, he was the youngest Jack in a Box gm.

And then his business partners that he's with now asked him to partner up. So they purchased, I think it was like three Carl's Jr. Stores in the Bay Area, none of which are open now, unfortunately, all closed now.

But, you know, then they went from 3 to 7 to 12. Now we basically have about 127. So.

Wow. Yeah, that's impressive. Are you. Are you involved in the business with him?

So I just do the back. The back end. So that's kind of how I got into it, you know, if you want to call it my niche or my pathway into all this. Right.

I will never, ever say that I, you know, at any point do I think I will outlearn what he's learned. Because everything that I've learned at this point is just kind of second nature to him.

Continues to surprise me, and it just kind of seems like it never phases him. And so I. Like I said, I try. I definitely do again, the hr, accounting, payroll, finance, all that stuff.

And so what I try and bring to it is I try and stay separate from the operations.

At the same time, I want to feel like our administrative and back office is supporting the operation so much to a point where they feel like they're actually able to say they're actually able to gain back time right away from the administrative stuff, from the paperwork, and actually utilize that time to just be more efficient towards really serving the guests. Because at the end of the day, that's what keeps guests coming back. Like, for me, in and out, chick fil a even days. Right now is.

Is Those are like the hot brands. And that's why, because when you go in there, you, you, there's an experience that you get there that you're not going to get anywhere else.

And so I think that was something that the, you know, the founders that for days did super well is just kind of bringing that vibe, that experience to the customer. And so that's what, you know, again, my end goal at the end of the day is making sure that they can focus on that.

And I'll focus, trying, you know, everything else on the backside.

That all makes sense. Do you, do you have other family members in the business as well?

No. Well, no. Yeah. No. My brother's a lawyer. He does his own thing. I have two younger sisters. One is getting her doctorate and the other one is getting.

I think the other one may be potentially coach. She teaches dance and she may be trying to do an mba. So either do something with that or maybe kind of get in with us. We'll see.

Nice.

I've got a good friend and she's a real estate agent, her own brokerage. But growing up, her dad owned restaurants and that, that was his line of trade.

And, and now that he's getting older, it's, you know, he has two daughters, one being my friend and it's what, you know, who's going to be the succession plan for the business.

And so she's thinking, you know, I've started my own business here, my own brokerage, and I'm, you know, successful doing what I'm doing the real estate channel, you know, do I want to go help my dad? I want to be in the restaurant business. It's a whole business, as you know, it's. It's six, seven days a week, man.

Yeah. And I will say it's.

Unfortunately, you know, in certain states, it just becomes harder and harder, you know, and it's just one of those things where it's like, it's still California, it's still a great place to be, don't get me wrong. But it just seems like there's just certain things that just kind of come across and it's like I.

It just doesn't seem like they're very small business kind of, you know, mindfulness or like friendliness to it. Right.

But I think the execution kind of how it played out a long term, it's not going to help anybody. It's just going to hurt everybody that, you know, it was originally intended to help.

It's just, it's unfortunate, you know, but it was just stuff we have to kind of deal through.

As again the business owners and I think a lot of people probably just, they see the McDonald's, they see the Carl's, they see all these big brands and they just think they're corporates.

And it's like really we're not, you know, we end up being, you know, yes, we're one of the larger franchisees, but even then we're not, you know, sitting here and you know, million dollar mansions and you know, just kind of on the beach every other day. It's like you said, we're in the restaurants, right? We're in the office seven days a week.

But it's because we like it and it just keeps us moving forward. And it's just that, that's just the kind of, you know, drives us to kind of get up every day. So frustrating, but also really fun.

Is that the regulation that took minimum wage for, you know, fast food up to 20, 20 an hour in California?

Yeah. Yep. So that was the one. And so really it was just, it, it was, it was hard because, you know, from, we had two different sides.

And so it's like, well, how do you, you know, how do you manage that? Right. Without trying to punish the employees?

Of course.

And so that's kind of how we've used Harry is we don't want to necessarily just cut hours. Granted, you have to cut hours at some point, but we want, we don't want to just cut hours.

We also just want to maximize the hour itself and the scheduling. Right. If we have, for example, five employees that are working an hour, that's low volume, but we would consider low volume. Right.

Why do we have five and then on a high volume hour we only have two.

So it's really kind of getting those insights and having our tools really kind of talk to us and give us those really just kind of eye opening graphics to say, hey, we have a problem here. And while from a labor perspective, they're still going to hit their number. You could just be doing so much better. Right.

You might lose that one or two customers in that hour. We only have two people and that waits 30 minutes. But if you were fully staffed properly, guess what?

You're not going to lose those people because you're going to be able to service it quicker.

So a lot of just trying to, you know, try and be proactive as much as possible and not too reactive is, you know, the more reactive you are just, you're just playing behind eight ball and it just becomes really hard to succeed.

So going back to the beginning of our conversation, you were talking about, you know, you do all the back end stuff and the hr, the payroll, you know, making sure that the operations run smoothly, all those types of things. So I would imagine integrating this new law, this new regulation, making sure, you know, it runs, you know that you have to be compliant with it.

Right.

So how did you know? I know you mentioned, hey, we jumped up $7 million in expense and we kept everything the same. Right. It'd be $7 million more than, than.

What it had been the prior year.

Right.

And now you're looking at, in terms of efficiencies in, in, in a way, you know, if it's a busy time, I want to have more people. If it's not so busy, how can I, and then how can I stretch the employee to do more than just one thing?

How are you, you know, 127 locations and I know you mentioned Dave's is not, it wasn't as affected as much, but Carl's, for example, has a lot more employees. How are you able to manage, manage all of that and track all of that?

Because I think if you think about at the, you know, the individual store level, maybe make sense of, you know, tracking the hours and stuff, but when you're on that, that amount of scale, the problem, it becomes more intense.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is making sure that you are building like with this business, right. It.

I think the one thing that may or may not get lost is at the end of the day, if you talk to most franchise owners who are reasonable and rational, they'll know this whole business is around people, whether that's the people you're servicing or the people that are on your team. If you build a really good team, you rely on the people, the people that you trust. Right.

Because like you said, each store is going to know the way that they're supposed to be forecasting and then scheduling. But then how am I supposed to go look at 127 every day, on top of doing the HR, on top of doing the accounting, on top of doing. Like, that's.

You can't. Right. Do you have certain people, they then report to those. And it's like a delegation thing.

And so really what it is is we have reports that we use with, like I said, how do we get our tools to give us a quick snapshot? So if my GM has a quick five minute, or, sorry, my district manager has a quick five minutes between one store to the next, right.

Can I give them useful data in that five minutes where they just look at something and they say, aha, I know what. I know what we need to talk about in our next business review.

When they go to that store, as opposed to let me go to that store, let's try and talk for 30 minutes. Maybe in that 30 minutes we come up with a issue that may be that you could have already seen.

Like, the data is going to tell you, but it's not right there in front of your face. Right? And so that's what, like I said, our tools, like with the hairy, right. That kind of just. It gives it to us right away.

We have weekly meetings that we're doing. Right. So we have district managers for, you know, for Carl's, which is again, built out a little bit more about a district manager.

Every 10 stores, they all report to, like, our VP of Ops, we have a meeting every week with a VP of Ops, trying to be as in tune with everything as possible. And then from time to time, really just kind of sitting down and trying to connect with the district managers and the GMs.

And I think if you really show them as much as you can, as much as you can, that you truly do care, they. They can feel that and they. They want to. They're motivated to kind of try a little bit harder for you.

Not only that, but they'll be more open to communicate back with you. Right? Whereas if it just seems like it's just like a dictatorship and it's just like, do this, do this, do this, they just don't respond to that.

And if they have issues with, you know, forecasting reports or they feel like they're not utilizing the tool at the way they should, they're not necessarily going to come out to you and be like, oh, hey, I'm having this issue. Because they're gonna, in their mind, they think, well, I'm gonna get in trouble because I'm not doing it correctly. That's not how we want it.

It's like, no, we want to, we want to equip you guys to do the best job you can. Right? So, yeah, so the first.

That's incredible amount of growth, you know, in that journey. How have you guys been able to, you know, especially on your end, on the back end, as you continue to add on more stores, scale it up.

Yeah, I mean, I would say the biggest thing is again, it kind of, in the beginning, I would say, is much harder because you don't have the same technology that you have now. A lot of it was still manual work.

So it's like, okay, you got to get a new person, you got to do this, you got to do that now, especially with the prevalence of AI and actually just went to a. It was a call, a seminar, it was kind of like a meeting where kind of AI was the talk of what are we going to do with a.

How is AI here to stay or not stay in the world of the qsr? Right. And so basically we tested out AI in plenty of things, right. Some of it doesn't work at the end of the day, right.

I think the biggest thing is you, you do trial and error, but if it doesn't work, you have to, you have to be like, not too attached where you can just rip the band aid off, right? Because if you kind of stay with it too long, then it's like, you know, that's when it really starts to hurt.

But it's, it's really leveraging, right, the technology and, and how. For example, like, one of the things we do that does work well is we use AI for our ap.

So we have, we basically taught our AI, you know, person how to read an invoice. So if it sees the same invoice every week, every day, every minute, it doesn't matter. It's the same invoice, right.

Once you teach it a couple times, it knows what to do. It takes.

It puts all the information in the correct spot, knows where you know what Jill account needs to go to, and then I basically will batch approve. And then within that, you set certain parameters, right?

And say if this specific vendor has a invoice amount that's this high, you know, kind of highlight it or red flag it for me, and then that's. I can, you know, I don't have to necessarily approve it with my typical batch.

And so Like I said, a lot of it's just trying to build things in an efficient manner.

Having data that's not really cop, you know, the whole kind of copy and paste and going into Microsoft Excel, like that's kind of, you know, in the past and if we were still doing that now, we'd be in a lot of trouble and probably not able to get to the scale we're at.

So again, it's really making sure that these tools will work with each other and try and view it as a partnership because that's the way like I don't, I try to, you know, with the, the vendors, I truly feel like not only do I believe in their product or their service, right.

I've gotten to know a lot of the people on their support team or whoever I, you know, spoken with on a personal level, it truly feels more like a partnership, which kind of, again, there's that separation for me, right? Like I have certain ones that are just vendors, you pay them and that's it.

Then there's certain people where it's just like you kind of have that, you know, camaraderie, friendship type of deal where you, you know, you'll talk to them every once in a while, you'll see them at a conference and catch up. And so it's just, again, it's just kind of kind of connects into that caring part, right?

Where it's just like, it allows you to be like, hey, if I have something that's really going to help us even maximize efficiency more, what you're talking about, how do we scale even more, right?

If we go to 127 to 200, is there something, is there a scalability that I need to work with within the current technological ecosystem that I have that's going to help me do that without having to add a ton of people or do I have to add the people? Like, you know, kind of weighing the pros and cons of all those things.

So them being able to kind of be open to like listening and having that conversation is super big for us.

Oh yeah, I'm sure.

Do you find as, as you've gone along our, are there AI tools that you're able to integrate on the backend side, on the operations side, even at the store level, you know, when, when someone comes in and you know, places an order and things like that?

Yeah, I would say we're definitely steering away from forward facing.

Okay.

Because we still want to have the feel of a human interaction.

The second you kind of lose the human interaction, it just there's something that just feels very, I don't know if icky is the right word, but that's just kind of that feeling that, you know, we have. So a lot of what we do is we leverage a ton of the, the AI on the back end.

And so, you know, my office is able to basically run, I have about like in total probably about like five, six. So we, you know, that deals directly with like hr, accounting, payroll, those type of things. Right.

We obviously, we have like IT people, we have an IT person, we have a facilities guy that's kind of separate, but what do you call it? We. Yeah. So like kind of going back to like the AI if it's, it's got to be like kind of a, in a way a simple task that just takes time.

The AI will shorten that time to basically nothing and then it can repeat that process.

Yeah.

So that's going back to the ap, Right. If you can give it the data and tell it what you need the data to spit back out to you, you're giving it simple instructions. Right.

Almost like a guide that you give to a new hire. So if you can do it with those certain things, that's where you can leverage the AI. We've tested the AI on the, on the forward facing like we did.

We tried to do it with the, the drive through. And that's one where it's just, you know, people don't like it. And at the end of the day, again, this whole industry is about people.

And so listening to their feedback and saying, you know what, we tried it, maybe it's just not for us, you know, or if we're going to keep pushing for a certain thing, how do we, how do we adapt?

You know, how do we, how can we make it so they don't feel like it's so robotic or, you know, kind of trying to humanize it, I guess is more much as possible kind of going back to like what they used to experience going into the restaurants. So I, although I will say, you know, the self service kiosk, I feel like is one of those things that's kind of here to stay.

Yeah.

And I feel like, you know, five years ago, probably just kind of right around Covid, you know, that would never be a thing. Right. Who would go to a self service kiosk?

Right.

You'd be like, oh, well that's, that's silly. I want someone to come take my order. And now you walk in it.

It's almost every, especially in the QSR industry, it's like, if you don't have it, you're kind of a step behind. Right. Because you can still keep that human interaction.

When they get their food, ask them if they need anything, go up to their table, you want napkins, ketchup, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

I remember probably about 15 years ago, there was a restaurant in the city I grew up in and they got rid of any like hostess and servers and it was all Palm Pilots. So you grab a Palm Pilot, you order at the front, you know, remember the. If you're on pilots.

And the concept did not last because at the time, you know, the adoption of that, people were like, I don't. I want to have that interact, you know.

Right.

No human in there at all.

Correct. Where you type it out. Yes. And it was again still before it's time. But now you're seeing it more and more.

I just went to get lunch just a few days ago and had that exact experience of typing in my order. And then I got a number and then I just stand there and then they call my name when it's done.

So it's interesting to see where the industry is going, you know, but if you're, you know, as a business, as you evolve and you get tested and you have different regulations, you have to, you know, comply with that, you know, the businesses are, are changing and they're trying to stay up with.

Yeah.

And that's the thing is, you know, when you're putting a corner, you only have, you only have so many options, you know, and it's, it's not options we would want to do. It's just, it's kind of what you have to do, like you said, to keep thriving in the business.

Totally.

Because at the end of the day. Sure. Just like with anything. Right. We're not here to break even because that will kill us. You know, at some point you're in to make money.

Yep.

So that's what you got to try and do. Like I said, what we try and always just keep in the back of our mind is make money to a certain extent. Right.

Still try and take care of the employees, still try and take care of the customers in the same fashion that we were doing prior to the big change in, in the California law.

Yeah. What about looking down the line into the future? What are some, some paths or projects that you feel passionate about, that you want to pursue.

Like me personally, just within the business. Yeah.

I mean, with the business itself, I would say, you know, a couple things that I've seen kind of coming down the pipeline is getting robots into the back of the house. Interesting. Yeah.

And so trying to retrofit, you know, we, we've looked at some of our stores, like on the Carl side, I think we were trying to retrofit a location for what they call. I forget what they call the machine. I'm not gonna try and figure the name because I'll say it's wrong.

But it's basically, it's a fryer that you have, has different compartments. You load it up based off of the order that comes in the PoS. It knows small, medium, large, what the serving size should be.

Spits it out, puts it in there, shakes it correctly and then dumps it out. The employee comes by, picks it up and then just bags it. So again, utilizing technology in the right way. Right. And it could be the wrong way.

You don't know. Right. But we're testing it because at the end of the day, if we don't test it, you'll never know. Right.

How much does a robot like that cost?

Luckily, we're kind of piloting it, so we were getting it for free right now, but I don't know, I would imagine it's probably something that could. Hundred thousand dollars?

A few thousand. A few thousand bucks?

No, a couple hundred thousand.

A couple hundred thousand for one robot.

Right. So then at that point it's, you know, is it worth it? Right. You got to have enough capital to really invest in that. Right?

Yeah.

Not only that, there's going to be, there's going to be an overlap of like you're going to be spending labor and the upfront cost of that machine. What does that look like? So trying to just as best we can.

Again, we're not there yet, but if we ever get to that point where like, well, we got to pay for it. For example, we have 120 stores. Do we really want to put it in, for example, a high volume store where we can afford to have more employees. Right.

So maybe what we're talking about is more for a lower volume store where the order is coming slowly. It can, it has time to read what it needs to read.

And it's not just freaking out because there's so much data that's just getting sent from all the different, you know, from the drive through, from the line breaker, from the two registers up front, like all these things and then it just, you know, caputs and just freezes.

So again, I think it's good to just kind of, I think the one thing we definitely learned and we, you know, kind of November of 23, going into 24, we had a serious like kind of leadership team huddle. We had an idea it was going to be coming down the, the road and so really we just sat there and said we have one or two options.

We can sit here and complain and throw our hands up and you know, woe is me, but who? That's not going to do anything.

Yeah.

The other option is let's just get really creative and see what, you know, what sticks. So we just thought of some ideas that, you know, kind of worked and didn't work and you know, have helped kind of save some, get some cost savings.

And other times it's kind of, you know, like I said, the biggest, the biggest lesson from all that is you just can't be too invested in these ideas because we just have to know inherently they are a little bit crazy. And so it's like, you know, just don't be too invested into it. Try it. If it doesn't work, rip it off, go to the next one.

Yep.

You know, or at least trying to find a variation that may work. But yeah, we, you know, we, we brainstormed a lot of different things and you know, just try to try to do what we can.

Especially if something costs 200,000, you have 120 plus stores, you know, that would be a pretty huge investment. What, what about within the business for you personally? What is your hopes and dreams and goals in the future?

I mean from a personal level and a selfish level, it's really to eventually allow my dad to kind of truly retire. Yeah. Right. So get enough to the point where I'm, I, like I said, I, I will never, I will never sit here and say I know everything.

I think for me, one of my, I will never pretend that I'm the smartest person in the room. There's so many people, smart people in the world. It's who do you align yourself with and how do you align yourself with them? Right.

A lot of that's just being open minded.

Right.

And not thinking, well, I know all the answers. No, I mean it's okay not to know all the answers, but if you can find the answer, that's just as valuable.

And so, you know, eventually trying to get Hammer to retire, trying to build us out even more. You know, we have our Carl's brand, we have Our days brand.

We have another brand that we're, you know, we have kind of coming up the pipeline that unfortunately I cannot say the name but you know, it's another brand and so really just keep expanding that. Right.

Maybe just kind of basically in my own thing just building a services platform that can go and help out other franchisees and keep them aligned and even if it's not getting other franchisees really just kind of, you know, kind of building that community and do keep doing these type of things where I can learn from other people as much as they may learn from the conversation that, that I have with them. You know, for those that are listening.

What'S the best way to find you, to contact you?

Yeah, I mean I have a LinkedIn.

You know it's kind of an old picture of me but I'm on LinkedIn just Cody Wong, you know, I prefer to try and that's probably the best way I would say because I would say any other ways like a phone and honestly my phone gets blown up from vendors all the time, so totally get it. I've tried to, you know I have, I have two daughters now.

So I try and as best I can separate out the, the business and non business to have some sort of a routine and spend trying to have that family, work or work life balance. Right. As best you can as a business owner.

But yeah, makes sense.

Well, Cody, I want to say thank you so much for taking time and coming on sharing your story and you know I always take, you know, a few nuggets away from every conversation that I have and so, so thank you. I learned some things today and I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you. And I got a very honored to be on here so thank you.

Thank you.