Since Alex Berentzen joined Thompson Hospitality in 2022 as SVP of operations (he soon elevated to chief operating officer), he’s helped open 18 restaurants and flip three others. But the reality was, Berentzen always had bigger plans.

Thompson Hospitality—the largest privately held, Black-owned foodservice group in the U.S.—has been an organization rooted in diversity since its founding 32 years ago as a restaurant company.

That notion, however, refers both to hiring and internal makeup as well as how it’s branched out over the decades. It owns a Hilton property in Reston, Virginia; provides F&B to post-secondary schools, often through its partnership with Compass Group (the biggest portion of the business); and also runs a facility services division and one that handles colleges and universities. The “restaurant” piece of this jigsaw was central to the backbone of the company but not broken out as its own entity.

So for the past two years or so, Berentzen has been revving up to change that with the launch “Thompson Restaurants” as a separate division. It was quietly done late last year and announced officially in early August. The pillar, which is the fastest-expanding at Thompson Hospitality, is expected to generate $180 million in revenue this calendar and cross $200 million the next.

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The move was hardly done solely for the sake of branding. Berentzen says the restaurants (14 brands across 70 kitchens), which include Big Buns, Matchbox, Wiseguy Pizza, Makers Union, Mike & Honey, Cut 132, Hen Quarter, Velocity Wings, The Ridley, Ralph Sampson’s American Taproom, The Delegate, Locals Tacos, The Rub, and Social House, were disconnected in a lot of ways.

There were eight point-of-sale systems. Now, there’s one (Toast). The company tipped on cash and bi-weekly paychecks. Neither worked, Berentzen says. Today, there’s GradShare, which allows employees to receive money electronically every day. There wasn’t a manager log. Every restaurant upgraded to the web-based ShiftNote. Four different scheduling systems covered the brands. That’s consolidated to one as well. Berentzen built a private events team and installed management software Tripleseat. All third-party integrated with Olo. Every store is presently on ezCater. There’s a uniform learning system—Wisetail.

In plain terms, Thompson Restaurants rewrote every piece of training and digitized and assigned it to every associate in the company, Berentzen explains. “Everybody trained, retrained, certified,” he says. “That’s ongoing.”

The company implemented Mirus Restaurant Solutions as a business intelligence tool. Eighteen months ago, it couldn’t even run a report. It’s also leveraging Zendesk to create tickets for IT, HR, and marketing collateral. “We can measure everything. Everything is right here on my phone,” Berentzen says. “We’re uniquely positioned for growth, and getting better.”

There’s a good reason Berentzen put in the hours these past two years. He had a vision of bringing Thompson’s trusted brands under one roof, where it could provide guests uniform levels of service, hospitality, and quality throughout multiple occasions. Essentially, if Thompson was going to grow—internally as well as into fresh channels—creating a repeatable standard was critical to providing measurable and scalable value, whether it was around the DMV or South Florida. “There’s a lot of value in our guests saying, ‘hey, I had an amazing pizza at Wiseguy. Now, I’m going to go for brunch at Matchbox,’” Berentzen says.

There’s convenience of choice, too. That breadth of brands, from pizza to fine dining to healthy halo concepts to family to catering, empowers guests to stay within the Thompson lineup.

And it dovetails into some other synergies, like pooled resources for ad buys and an upcoming launch of universal gift cards. Berentzen says the group will then pivot toward one access point for guest data and all that follows, whether its targeted communications or invites based on personalized experiences.

“And not to mention,” he adds of what creating this division achieved, “this is also a great opportunity for our people. We have been promoting from within quite a bit this year. Some people wanted to leave D.C. and move to Virginia. We were able to give these folks a job in a different concept but stay within the company. We have some people move from D.C. to Florida. So for us, this launch is just the logical next step in the evolution of our company. And we’re on a mission to dominate the DMV and South Florida market.”

Berentzen came onboard two years ago in August. He built a team and restructured the company in the shadows, so to speak, in anticipation of this progression. Berentzen hailed from fast casual Organic Krush, where he served as president and COO for more than three years and before, was VP of operations at Fox Restaurant Concepts, and director of operations with King’s Signature Group prior to that.

He created the steakhouse concept Cut 132 at Thompson and then began to define buckets. Fast casual went into one, quick service another, specialty restaurant group restaurants (one-off full-service brands) into a third. Matchbox, which the company acquired in November 2020 as it emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, got its own as well since it had multiple changes on deck.

Milk & Honey, a New Orleans-themed Southern brunch concept that currently has store No. 14 under construction, was also placed into its own corner.

After Berentzen defined things, he strengthened financial planning analysis and developed a marketing team. He curated a design construction and facilities team under one banner. All roll up to him.

“Once I had those people in place, then we went to work,” Berentzen says. “Of course, we have shared-support services. Our finance department still helps us with our invoices and P&L and account bookkeepers. And HR still helps us with onboarding and reviews and pay increased—all that stuff. But once I built a team and the structure, then we really went after technology.”

Over the course of the coming months is when Berentzen and Thompson Restaurants built the tech stack and uploaded the operational tools listed earlier. The key, he says, was to ensure everything, from UltiPro to UKG to Fourth to Toast, spoke to each other. When somebody onboards now, they automatically get their training materials assigned at night. “It’s such a relief to be where we are today,” he says.

It’s also vital from a growth perspective as it concerns future acquisitions. A new brand or restaurant site gets streamlined into Thompson’s systems versus the company having to react and adjust on a case-by-case basis.

Berentzen says the newly created arm will continue to look at adding to its portfolio. Namely, it’s exploring “non-vented brands,” like dessert, coffee, bagel, sandwich, healthy, etc. Something where Thompson Restaurants can complement current offerings to become more agile and attractive to landlords.

Another element Berentzen plans to explore is catering. Recently, the company hired a director for the channel. Presently, Thompson Restaurants offers the service fleet-wide, but it wants to evolve toward a brick-and-mortar facility where it can also conduct offsite catering for weddings, corporate events, and staging, in addition to smaller private events. The ability, in other terms, to take care of the operation from chairs to tables and own the entire process. “We see huge opportunity there,” Berentzen says.

Additionally, Thompson Restaurant is looking at nontraditional growth in airports. He notes the company is holding conversations with “several” partners that could run the airport F&B with about five concepts that have proven effective in the format.

And lastly, Berentzen expects to delve deeper into hotel operations. The company owns one already and does F&B in three others (D.C., Charlottesville, Virginia, and Columbus, Ohio).

Couple these whitespace areas with development within the current portfolio, Berentzen continues, and there’s plenty for the freshly minted division to get moving on.

Meanwhile, success will build off fundamentals, as it always has at Thompson. The company lifted its online reviews from 3.9 in 2022 to a 4.4 average this past July.

Berentzen says there’s no “silver bullet” as to what changed. “We’re not recreating the wheel or coming up with something new,” he says. “We are obsessed with food, service, facility.”

The company has a hands-on model where founder Warren Thompson and Berentzen spend three days per week in the office and the other two in restaurants. There’s a rule called “Showtime.” During lunch and dinner, company employees can’t conduct meetings. That’s when they get on the frontlines and push on food and service quality. “We want our restaurants to be noticeably and sparkly clean,” Berentzen says. “Because at the end of the day, we can sit in front of a computer all day long and look at reports, but people go to restaurants first and foremost for the food. Secondly, on how we make them feel through service and hospitality. And thirdly, they’re going to notice if your restaurants are clean or not. That’s the basis.”

Thompson tries to encourage hospitality through recognition. It has contests where, say, somebody gets mentioned by name in a review, and the company will grant them a gift card. It will conduct contests in-store and across the organization where units that have the most five-star reviews receive trips to Florida, etc.

“We encourage our team members to engage with the guests,” he says. “And if the guests had a great time, there’s no shame in saying if you leave us a great review that would help us tremendously.”

Berentzen predicts the company’s annualized turnover rate this year will end up at 68 percent blended. Naturally, quick service and fast casual run a bit higher, but only 3 or 4 percent. Either way, the baseline is well ahead of industry norms, which typically clock into the triple-digit churn realm and beyond.

Thompson had a goal this year to fill 25 percent of management openings internally. Year to date, it’s nearly 60 percent. “And these are not battlefield promotions,” Berentzen says. “These are people who are ready. We’ve got a bench. We have a process that we call a people board. We have this virtual board with every store and every supervisor and above is on that board and are color coded and we discuss weekly who is promotable. Who is in training. Are they in training? Who is a flight risk? Who is not performing? Should they go on some type of improvement performance plan? So we take it really seriously.”

And, again, the diversity of concepts has provided Berentzen the chance to move pieces around. He can try a promising employee at a small fast casual before moving them to a large sit-down, and so on.

Up next will be the launch of Olo GDP (guest data platform), the aforementioned universal gift cards, and one loyalty program.

“So all of our customer data base is one system and we can literally target everybody that’s ordered a pizza or everybody that likes a certain wine,” Berentzen says. “That really allows us to target and create that customer journey, which 18 months was just unthinkable. That’s exciting to me. We’re doubling down on marketing this year when others are pulling back. And doubling back on the basics.”