Dive Brief:

• Fiesta Restaurant Group, parent company of Pollo Tropical, appointed Dirk Montgomery as permanent president and CEO, the company announced Thursday.
• Montgomery has served as interim CEO since Dec. 8, following Richard Stockinger’s resignation. Prior to this temporary role, he had served as CFO since 2019. 
• Since becoming interim CEO, Montgomery said he has been working on key strategic initiatives to improve transactions and margins.

Dive Insight:

One of Montgomery’s near-term goals for Fiesta has been to work with leadership to “optimize the organization for effectiveness and efficiency,” he said during the company’s March earnings call. 

“Our initial organization changes have been aimed at continuing to improve our capability for operation support and realigning and consolidating our customer insights, digital and marketing resources under one streamlined marketing function that we believe will enable us to accelerate growth across all channels,” he said.

This strategy involves four key themes: building operational excellence, improving the guest experience across all channels, enhancing the Pollo Tropical brand and creating strong teams, he said. As part of improving operations, the company is focusing on back-to-basics training and challenging its operations to focus on “guest experience, food quality, speed, accuracy and hospitality,” Montgomery said. The company is also simplifying its operations, improving its peak productivity times and bettering cross-functional support within operations to include IT infrastructure, HR field support and reporting tools. 

Fiesta is also focused on establishing leadership development for its operations management, he said. This year, the company will continue to roll out its leadership development platform across all levels of operational leadership. It is also creating best practices training modules for operations to support its operational excellence goals. 

While these are all works in progress, Montgomery noted that same-store sales have started to improve within the last few months. In December, same-store sales were down 2.4%, but turned positive at the start of 2023, and transactions were positive in its key South Florida markets in early 2023 compared to 2022, he said.