Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Jimmy Ewe [ph] of Arstuff [ph].
Jimmy Ewe – Arstuff
I think there was mention of some management change at Mimi’s. Could you elaborate on what changes were made in the quarter?
Steve Davis
Yes over the past six months, as you are well aware, we brought in Tim Pulido and Herbert Billinger. We have also brought in a person to become our VP of Finance, Tom Lind [ph] who has a very extensive background in consulting and also in finance. We promoted Sherry Lee [ph] to our VP of accounting, she had been doing nice job for us out there. We just hired a woman by the name of Mimi Summerman [ph] who has great experience in restaurant marketing and casual dining, fast casual, as well as family dining in QSR and we recently promoted a gentleman out of the operations rank, Randall Hugh, to be our Vice President of Operations out in the East.
We felt like those changes are really going to help us out and as I said, move us forward in the five key areas that we had talked about earlier in addition to giving us some fresher thinking in terms of marketing for the Mimi’s café brand.
Additionally we have hired a consultant out of the restaurant space to work with our marketing team as well so we are feeling good about the new faces that we’ve put in place. They’ve got a fresh perspective and the things that we talked about earlier are now going to start to get some traction.
Jimmy Ewe – Arstuff
If I heard correctly you kind of implied, if I look at Mimi’s performance the last few quarters it’s just deteriorated consistently, but it seems to me a lot of that, from your comments, has to do with the geographical locations of those restaurants, but your response appears to be that we’re going to do more advertising. Am I reading that right, because it seems like advertising in areas that are already somewhat compromised may not help, but I guess you disagree with that?
Steve Davis
Well I would disagree because it is a share a stomach challenge now. If you look at casual dining historically, awareness is what drives the brand long-term. We’ve got these new products called the ?Just Enough’ products that I mentioned to you earlier and we’ve got a great idea that nobody knows about. In the environment we’re in you can’t just be a word of mouth player. If you look at Friday’s, if you look at Applebee’s, you know everybody’s doing pretty much the same thing, which is the right sized, right portion strategy, but their advertising and out shouting us and so we’re getting great, great customer feedback on the items, it’s just that people outside of the restaurant don’t know about it.
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