This story appears in the December issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
A ranking of worst-case business scenarios would likely have, at or near the top, the instantaneous evaporation of a product’s market. And that’s pretty close to what happened to Ovation, a Provo, Utah-based restaurant guest experience platform developer, in March of 2020.
“The restaurant industry was devastated by COVID-19. We lost two-thirds of our customers, and all but three of us were laid off. We spent most of 2020 building up from scratch again,” says Derek Morgan, co-founder and president of Ovation. “But we knew that if we could survive COVID, we could survive anything.”
Ovation did indeed survive, and after the dust settled, the pandemic left the company stronger than before.
“We often say that COVID saved us because it forced us to focus. Up to that point, we tried to be all things to our customers, … and that left us spread way too thin. Once COVID hit and there were just three of us, we were forced to decide what was the one thing we could do better than anybody else, and we decided that’s guest feedback,” Morgan remembers. “We cut loose a loyalty program we’d spent months building, a bunch of marketing tools and other things. It was the right decision because when you try to be everything to everyone, you often end up becoming nothing to nobody.”
By 2021, restrictions began to lift, sending the restaurant industry into a period of supergrowth. Ovation was perfectly situated to ride that wave.
What does Ovation do?
Specifically, Ovation figured out how to capture feedback from any of the many ways customers interface with restaurants, including drive-thru, curbside pickup or delivery.
“We figured out how to leverage QR codes. We put them on the bottom of receipts, on to-go bags and as stickers on tables. QR codes allow us to create surveys that customers can take really quickly and easily,” Morgan says, adding that the opportunity to provide feedback must be pushed to everybody. Typically, online reviews are made by a minority of diners whose experiences have either been especially good or bad and thus do not represent the sentiment of the 99 percent in the middle.
The Ovation concept was inspired in part by co-founder and CEO Zack Oates’ experience in and around his father’s own restaurant and in part by his time as a consultant to Fortune 100 companies.
“Zack saw these huge brands had a lot of resources and tools at their disposal to measure guest satisfaction, and that put smaller, local businesses at a clear disadvantage,” Morgan says. “He decided Ovation would fill that gap and give the smaller restaurants more insight into what their customers were saying.”
Utah’s own Mo’ Bettahs is an Ovation client. Morgan says the chain’s baseline retention rate of dissatisfied customers was consistent with the industry average at about 13 percent — meaning only 13 percent of unhappy customers gave Mo’ Bettahs a second chance. After implementing Ovation, which makes it easy for dissatisfied diners to feel heard and appreciated, that retention rate soared to 70 percent.
After years of bootstrapping and living off seed round funding, Ovation closed a $9 million Series A funding round in June 2024, led by TIA Ventures and backed by several funds, including Utah-based Summit Capital, Peak Ventures and Rocky Woods Investments.
“Taking investment validates the hard work that we’ve put in. There’s also a lot of responsibility that goes along with it,” Morgan says. “We need to level up because people are watching us and expecting big things, and the industry needs big things out of us.”