Quick service franchise BirdShack Fried Chicken Jamaica (BirdShack) is experiencing a robust start to its recently opened second location at the Barnett Tech Park on Fairfield Road, Montego Bay. Officially opened on September 15, CEO Wayne Cummings reports that the new store has already hit its budget after one week of operations.

“We are clearly set to continue to do well, if not do better than those numbers,” he predicted.

The Barnett Tech Park, which has nearly 8,000 business process outsourcing employees engaged in call centre operations, has put immediate pressure on BirdShack’s production but Cummings views this as an exciting challenge.

“What is very different for us from Whitter Village [the store’s first location in Montego Bay] is that Whitter Village has tended to be a strong lunch, strong dinner crowd and the rest is made up around that time,” he explained. “But because of the call centres that surround the tech park location, we have had to pivot real quick. Their lunchtime starts from around 10:30 [in the morning] and runs all the way through to 3:30 pm. And they have these half-hour lunch periods which is very interesting.”

“It’s our job to make sure that we reformat our business to accommodate them,” the CEO continued. “So we are excited about that possibility of making sure that our production in the morning is strong in preparation and that warmers are full, ready to go anytime [the customers] get in and get out so that their very short lunch break is taken care of by us.”

Additionally, Cummings mentioned that BirdShack’s reputation is already growing beyond the tech park, particularly among those who live near Fairfield Road. People are coming at night from nearby communities such as Granville, and the restaurant is even seeing drive-through customers from areas not typically associated with the tech park.

“That has given us a lot of motivation to keep pressing forward with our expansion plans,” he disclosed. “So in addition to just being open, we have been on the road… looking to identify additional stores.”

They have already committed to opening a location on Barnett Street by December and are actively looking for a fourth location in Ocho Rios, Drax Hall, Negril or Kingston, which they expect to tie down by January.

One of the challenges to expansion is sourcing labour of the required quality.

“The difficulty is very real,” Cummings confirmed. “The quality of [available] workers is a mixed bag but we were fortunate. We were able to find the 36 people we were looking for, for the tech park.”

“A lot of who we are seeing are very, very inexperienced,” he noted. “They are people who have never worked before. Seventeen, 18 and 19-year-olds are pushing their necks out wanting to try and we are going to make the investment in them.”

The BirdShack executive indicated that their strategy involves searching for labour beyond Montego Bay in nearby parishes like Hanover.

This presents transportation issues, however, and Cummings mentioned that BirdShack is actively working on providing transportation options, especially for night-time shifts, to ensure that employees can commute conveniently to and from work. He acknowledged that it is a challenging aspect of the business, but they are committed to finding solutions.

In the meantime, the CEO says that despite the high demand they are now experiencing, their marketing and promotional activities will continue unabated.

“Marketing is always necessary to remind people that we are a great option for things they already know,” he affirmed. “The competition is strong. The competition makes a lot of good and consistent noise. And then because our intention is to grow you don’t want people to think you are a docile kind of business.”

The Barnett Tech Park location is 2,200 square feet in size and employs 36 staff members making it bigger than the first BirdShack location at Whitter Village which covers 900 square feet and employs 25 people.

The location at the tech park deliberately included doubling the frying and warming capacity, along with substantial increases in refrigeration capacity. This decision was made with the awareness that their next location, which will open at Barnett Street, might not have ample space for extensive refrigeration and storage. The tech park store will serve as a crucial back-end operation to support that newer, smaller location.