Article Excerpt:
TWST: Would you begin with a brief historical sketch of Shells Seafood Restaurants and then give us a picture of the company as it is now?Ms. Christon: Shells Seafood Restaurants is 20 years old this year. The company began in Tampa with a very talented chef, John Christen, who wanted to bring great, fresh seafood to customers in a very low-key, no- frills setting. The company grew, primarily in Florida, for several years. It went public in 1996 and expanded into the Midwest. The company later closed the outlying markets in the Midwest and returned to its Florida base where we had, of course, been operating all along. In 2003, about 18 months ago, I joined the company, saw that we had terrific fundamentals but that a lot of things needed to be improved.. Our financial model wasn't working for us anymore; our menus were a little tired and dated, and our operators weren't enthused. So just over the last 18 months we have brought on a culinary team to work with us to develop new menu items that are exciting and of great quality, while adding to our variety and maintaining the great value positioning we've always been known for. We first introduced a new menu last February that had about 40% new menu items on it and improvements to the rest of the menu items. We then launched a new, improved service program that we call Ship-Shape service that emphasizes 10 key steps of service for everyone who has interactions with our guests. We found that we received very strong marks from our customers, good feedback scores for the food and service improvements we made. To address the third missing piece in our effort to improve the brand, we felt we needed to remodel our restaurants. We wanted to make them warm, comfortable, relaxing, very Floridian in nature with a lot of photographs of Florida wildlife, water scenes, pictures of the beach, etc., as well as a lot of seaside artifacts such as buoys and oars. Those improvements, again, were very well received by our guests. In fact, we had such a tremendous response from them in terms of sales improvements in our remodeled restaurants that we closed a round of funding to begin to remodel several restaurants. Our goal for the company this year is to remodel all our restaurants as well as build new ones.
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