Shaz Khan, Integrator and President at Tono and Frank & Andrea, left a career in engineering to apply his systems skills in an industry often rife with chaos: hospitality. He built a thriving muilti-location restaurant business with his best friend, Antonio Gambino. As they grew, they found that the systems they had built on spreadsheets and WhatsApp weren’t scaling with the increased complexity of running multiple locations.
Shaz is a tech enthusiast and passionate partner to many software platforms, including as a customer advisor for Toast, Meta, Homebase, and Doordash. With his deep software knowledge and systems-oriented mindset, he went on the hunt for the best software to run EOS at his business. Shaz found Strety, and shared with us how Strety helps his team run EOS while bridging the strategy/execution gap to keep building something his team is proud of.
Can you tell us about your background and how you got into the restaurant business?
I’ve always been a technical person—I’m an engineer by training. After graduating from the University of Minnesota, I worked in industrial automation as a programmer. But I’d always believed people shouldn’t be limited by their educational backgrounds. There are so many different industries that could use analytical thinking, and I wanted to expose myself to different ways of thinking and different systems.
My best friend Antonio Gambino approached me about opening a restaurant. His dad came from Sicily, his mom from Philly, and they had great pizza recipes. Antonio wanted to do his own thing—authentic Philly cheesesteaks and family-recipe pizza. We flew to Philly, did a tour, and I just saw how passionate he was about curating the perfect cheesesteak. This passion demonstrated itself in incessant tweaks that I couldn’t even perceive sometimes in terms of the flavor profile and the presentation and whatnot.
I know there’s this adage that says don’t do business with friends or family. Honestly, worst advice ever. With friends, it can get sticky, but that stickiness only comes about when you don’t have clear communication. But who better to do business with, and who better to endeavor a new thing with than people who you call friends and whom you trust?
That was the premise on which I said, “Yeah, let’s do this.” And it was really watching his passion for food. Of course, I was like, “Well, what am I going to do?” I have nothing to do with this industry. In fact, you put me in a kitchen, we’re probably not staying open. We decided that I would figure “everything else” out and Antonio would handle the food. I’d had a few experiences in the business realm in other industries, but I started doing the due diligence on the legal side, the real estate side, the costing side and the financial side, marketing. And we put together this whole plan, and we opened our first location together.
How has your hospitality company grown since opening that first location?
We opened Frank & Andrea on the University of Minnesota campus in 2016 — named after Antonio’s brother Frank and his father Andrea. Frank is from Philly, and Andrea from Sicily, covering our cheesesteaks + pizza concept.
Three years later, we opened our first Tono location. Antonio had discovered an oven that changed everything about the pizza — the look, feel, consistency, shape, size. We couldn’t call it Frank & Andrea again because the pizza was showing up differently, so we named it Tono after him.
Today we’re at 11 total locations across Minnesota with plans to grow to 16+ across four unique concepts. We’re building brands, we’re building consistency, and building dependability in the community, and also we’re building a true hospitality company. I really do believe that with the culture and everything that comes with it, that we’re putting together something that people will continue to be proud to be a part of.
This industry has molded me and is curating me constantly to be the best leader I can be for the organization and for our customers. There’s such intention behind what we’re putting together here. And hopefully next year, we’ll be announcing the name of my hospitality company that represents three unique concepts in this QSR (quick service restaurant) pizza space, plus a fourth concept: our first full service restaurant. We’re really growing into this landscape, and intend to make a mark.
What was your first experience with EOS?
My first exposure to EOS was back in 2012 while I was still in engineering. It wasn’t a great experience, to be honest. I’d read the book Traction, but I didn’t know enough about it at the time to separate out my experience with the execution of it from the core essence of what it was and how useful it could be. I didn’t run my own business then, so I was just like, “Oh, this sucks.”
But the reason it sucked was because of the way it had been handled and how onboard everyone in the organization was. With any system, if you don’t have everybody rowing in the same direction and they treat it lackadaisically, the impact of the system is only as good as the people using it.
When did you decide to implement EOS in your restaurant business?
When we opened our sixth Tono location — our seventh restaurant overall — we were just beginning to form what I’d call a corporate team. The team had grown, we had managers, and the communication was multiplying in terms of its complexity. We were operating out of spreadsheets.
One of my partners came across an old friend of mine who had been using EOS in his business, and that rekindled my memory. I was like, “Oh yeah, there’s this book, there’s this thing that I did. Okay, we’ll give it a shot.” So we just started rolling it out, giving everyone the book, and getting refamiliarized with the entire platform and premise.
“Coming from the chaos that we’d been living in — a lot of information loss from phone calls, WhatsApp, spreadsheets — people were very appreciative that EOS® was something to help capture and consolidate our work. It’s often through the pain of not having that you begin to appreciate the gift of having.”
How did you structure your team on EOS?
The first thing we did was figure out who’s who. We took a crystallizer exam to figure out roles. It was very obvious — I’m the analytics/systems person, and that lent itself to performing the Integrator role.
Being able to take Antonio’s vision and facilitate it — this is about his family legacy, his story, the recipes, the culture he builds between people. I don’t want to be a rock or boulder in the way of that — pun intended. I want to be a facilitator for that.
Antonio is very good at building people. Systems are something I think he would admit are my stronger suit. His ability and humility to sit in places and do things that perhaps somebody else in his position would find unnecessary — it’s astounding. That’s why we’ve been friends for so long. We both understand we’re here for other people. This is hospitality. We’re here to build something great so people can enjoy and thrive and find opportunity.
Building an Accountability Chart is always one of the toughest tasks for Integrators. How did you approach it?
We developed the Accountability Chart based on the buckets or needs and functions of the brands. At that time, our team was about a third of what it is now. The buy-in wasn’t difficult. There wasn’t pushback. Coming from a lot of the information loss that happened from phone calls, WhatsApp, spreadsheets — people were very appreciative that the EOS framework gave us a focused point to rally around.
I’m very intentional about things. We name departments based on qualities. Excellence is a thing we want to achieve in hospitality. So we call them Operational Excellence, Financial Excellence, Digital Excellence, People Excellence, and Brand Excellence.
If you’re head of operations or director of operations, that can mean a number of things to a number of people. Our customers may be confused. But when people communicate internally and externally, how we convey ourselves and our position relays and reflects our intentions. That word “excellence” has real meaning. People don’t need to derive what it is—you’re part of the Operational Excellence team. If I’m not receiving excellence, then there’s something missing. That’s easier to address, and it gives us a sense of accountability on what exactly we’re doing and how we’re doing it, because it is meaningful and words have power.
How did you find an EOS software platform?
We tasked our HR person with finding a platform that could facilitate EOS. Being tech-forward, I knew we needed something beyond spreadsheets but I wanted to do our due diligence.
We came across a number of platforms to run EOS® — Ninety.io, Bloom Growth, EOS One. After evaluating those, we chose to start with Bloom Growth.
How did Bloom Growth work for you?
It was a great platform, really. For where we were coming from — from spreadsheets to now having a place where meetings can live and information can continue to exist, people can communicate and gain visibility, and especially having our accountability chart on there — that was a huge uplift.
For a hospitality company, we have a lot of meetings — I’m not proud of it because ‘death by meeting’ can totally become a thing. But coming from the relative chaos we’d been in to actually having this cadence to the meetings and L10s and being able to store information and drive the organization properly in Bloom Growth really helped.
We used Bloom for a year. But as with using any platform, you become very familiar with it and its shortcomings and capabilities and lack thereof. Our needs expanded as we went all in on EOS®.
The ability to manage information between meetings and between teams, especially when it pertained to issues and how they showed up — now we’re getting into that level of excellence of execution where the nitty gritty does matter. It’s not just about documentation and collaboration and having things in a platform, but the speed of that information showing up clearly where it needs to be, managing where and how things are being presented, managing projects — these things became more of a need as we grew, and we could see that the platform we were using wasn’t evolving along with our needs.
How did you discover Strety?
Another mutual friend mentioned they’d come across Strety. At first glance, I love the colors and the presentation and the fonts. There’s a level of presentability that was very on par with many of the SaaS platforms out there — it looked very up to date, modern.
But I didn’t want to be fooled, so I reached out to somebody to see how this thing actually works. I got a great demo from Stephen, and then got put in touch with Derek who has been phenomenal in answering my questions. Love the chat feature on Strety — highly responsive support.
“When we talk about partnership in our tech stack, I look at it as a real partnership. It doesn’t just mean we use their product and they get money from us. I look at it as a symbiotic bilateral relationship where we’re communicating our needs and they’re making adjustments to the product in a manner that is receptive to what we’re saying and impactful for what we need.
I want to look into the ethos of the company. Why do they exist? What are they looking to solve? Can I talk to the founder? Can I develop a relationship with people within that organization? These things are important to me because I want to work with people who care about what they’re doing. When they care about what they’re doing, they’re going to make better products and offer better service, and we as customers are going to get better as a consequence.”
Strety is a company that really exhibited these qualities I’m looking for in a partnership. There’s collaboration and passion behind the product driving innovation. I don’t look at it as just another software company; I look at it as a communication platform.
What made you finally make the switch?
When you’re busy running a business, you don’t have too much time for change management. It just kind of sat there on our Issues in the other platform: “switch to Strety.”
But then we looked at the pipeline and we were opening six locations in six months across four brands. One of them was out of state, one was a different type of service model. I knew, “This is about to get really complex, really fast.” I really need project-based work alongside EOS. I don’t want to buy another tool because death-by-SaaS and tool fatigue is also a thing.
So I said, “Okay, well, let’s start investigating and actually using Strety, because it has built-in projects.”
“Once we started using Strety, everyone was just like, “This is phenomenal. This is great.” We haven’t looked back since. I am a huge proponent of this platform.”
What does your EOS meeting/team structure look like in Strety?
We have one meeting for every department and one at leadership. There’s a representative from each of our excellence departments at the leadership level.
Then I have brand-by-brand operational excellence meetings where stakeholders from the store level — the general managers at each store — convene either digitally or physically in one space and have conversations about all the To Dos and Rocks and IDSing to precipitate best ideas and work through challenges.
Those per-brand L10s consist of a person from every store. We don’t necessarily assign them Rocks because they have a bunch of stuff to do — they’re customer-facing and managing a lot of platforms already. So we do an L10 minus the Rocks. We’re not EOS pure. I’m not a cultist with this. If something doesn’t fit, you just have got to work with what works. We stick with EOS maybe 85%, and we will ask the questions about what we can do to make what we’re trying to achieve fit within the system. But there are times where you just can’t. So when that happens, we’re not EOS pure by any means.
“The flexibility in Strety supports us the way we actually work by allowing us to include or exclude tools in meetings as needed. So we can easily have meetings that have all EOS tools except for Rocks, for example, in that specific instance.”
How has EOS helped your team collaborate?
I haven’t assembly-lined the organization. I’m not trying to take its soul away. I’m not trying to Lean Six Sigma this thing. I’m trying to improve that which needs improvement and allow people the freedom to do what they need to do while creating clarity in the organization. So EOS is less about enforcement and more about facilitation for us.
Having people who feel like stakeholders across locations talk about what’s worked and what’s not working, get to know each other, break the ice — it’s a space to collaborate and document these collaborations and push the needle forward in pursuit of company goals that are visible to everybody. That unification and streamlining is what has given us a lot of horsepower.
“Strety is a space where they can document things as they happen and then come together and talk about what they’ve documented. I’m quite pleased with what EOS and thereby Strety has allowed us to accomplish as an organization together.”
How does Strety support the way you implement EOS?
I love that Strety is an officially licensed EOS software — there’s street cred that comes with that. But I also love that it’s not just another EOS pure platform with zero innovation. I just can’t stand that because at the end of the day, I’m sure Gino and whoever else intended this to be a framework for functionality, for purpose, for an outcome. When it doesn’t work or can’t work, locking people into forcing it to work when it doesn’t — it doesn’t even serve that outcome.
“I think Strety is a breath of fresh air, as well as this honest reflection about what’s happening here. People are figuring it out and they need systems, but sometimes the system doesn’t always work. So let’s manipulate or use other things to complement that system. This platform’s ability to retain that street cred while also empowering that adaptability is admirable.”
What challenge did you run into with pure EOS as you scaled?
When we open a new restaurant, there are many departments involved, many people in those departments involved, a lot of tasks that need to get done. What happens with EOS pure is if we simply segment all those tasks and rocks into their respective departments, there isn’t a whole lot of cross-collaboration or cross-department clarity.
The execution problem is inherent to scaling with EOS. Okay, you went from chaos to some semblance of structure to EOS to departments and now to accountabilities and Rocks. But what happens when this person’s Rock is dependent on that person’s Rock, and they’re in two different departments? And now it’s happening with three, four, or five departments, and they’re all dominoing with each other on timeframes?
We needed a way to manage this from a project perspective.
How are you using Strety’s Projects feature?
What I’m using Projects for is to manage our new restaurant opening process that takes the hundreds of steps that everyone needs to do and go from “we want to launch a new restaurant location” to “that location is open.” Everything in there involves people from multiple departments.
It’s a space that we can tie into with the Rocks thanks to Strety and watch progress move and have those conversations without the segmentation that blocks us in EOS pure Rock management.
How did you set up your project template?
I created a Project called “my template” and saved that as the template so I have an easily accessible source of truth for how the project should look.
I have all the accountability holders — the stakeholders — in there documenting their tasks. When I create a Project from a template, it doesn’t carry through the assignees or the due dates, and that makes sense. But just to accommodate that, I created two custom fields: one for “phase” which speaks to whether I’m in pre-construction, construction, grand opening phase, etc. And another field for “department.”
Those custom fields actually carry in the template. So when I bring them over blank with no assignees in a new Project, I don’t have to think about the task and go through hundreds of steps to figure out who owns it. I can just look at the department and know who to put on that To Do. I’m using that as a kind of pseudo-template for the project and launching a new one for every new restaurant opening.
What other Strety features are you using?
I love the Slack integration. We live in Slack at corporate. When somebody assigns something in Strety, it’s nice to see that bot pop up and say, “Hey, you got a new task assigned to you by so and so.” And the little “view in Strety” button is really nice, especially on mobile because it just opens the Strety app.
I do use 1:1 meetings. The ability to step into people’s direct report spaces and see where they’re at on things, especially if I’m not in their meetings, is super cool. The ability to set up 1:1 meetings with people that don’t have an accountability to me is also really cool.
“I love the reports — the ability to see a timeline and see who did what. I’ve caught a bunch of things that maybe shouldn’t have happened or accidentally happened, that way. The activity log, the analysis of what’s open, who’s got the most to do, what’s completed. My organization has 260 To Dos open and 390 closed at this moment. We’ve got a lot going on here.”
Love the Inbox feature where we can subscribe to things and get notified on them. Generally speaking, I’m just really an enthusiast of the platform. I’m excited anytime I can consolidate platforms — hell yeah, bring it on because I’m tired of opening 20,000 apps.
What results have you seen from running on EOS in Strety?
We’re becoming less Ma and Pa and more formal organization, but without losing our soul where customers or staff or the ambiance feel sterile. It’s still very much a local business. We want systems, but we don’t want it to feel corporate.
It’s a rarity that I see a lot of systems inside the hospitality industry, specifically local restaurants within hospitality. But as you scale, you meet more sophisticated business operators and owners, and they do have systems. It’s nice to see EOS kind of cracking through that industry.
We’ve got internal surveys that go out on how people are feeling about capturing things and documenting things and being heard. I’m quite pleased with what EOS and thereby Strety has allowed for us to accomplish as an organization together.
What advice would you give other hospitality business owners considering EOS?
Call me. No, but seriously—I don’t know why you wouldn’t. If you’re multi-unit, you should absolutely be thinking about your systems.
What would you say to someone evaluating Strety?
One of the things I do just being the person that I am is dig through every nook and cranny I can find, every feature, click on every menu, click on everything. I want to learn the platforms inside out so I can be a true power user and be able to highlight the things that it is and isn’t doing and have a meaningful voice at the table.
I have found Strety to be incredibly helpful to me as my role as President/Integrator and it empowers my team through not only our EOS implementation, but also our daily execution.
It’s the best software platform I have ever discovered.
Thank you so much, Shaz! For anyone in the Minnesota area looking for the most delicious and authentic cheesesteaks or pizza — or both! — you must find a Tono Pizzeria + Cheesesteaks or a Frank & Andrea near you.
If you’re a fellow hospitality operator looking to implement systems to help you scale without red tape dragging your team down — learn more about running EOS on Strety’s EOS software. You can book time with our team here, or if you prefer to explore on your own, start your free trial today, no credit card required.