Name: Hooters’ $30 Million Turnaround Hinges on It Becoming Less Risqué
Uploaded: 2025-08-20T04:01:00Z
Duration: 7 min 13 s
Description: Hooters is remaking its brand image after filing for bankruptcy in March. Hooters Management Corporation CEO Neil Kiefer shares his turnaround plan.

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Hooters is remaking its brand image after filing for bankruptcy in March. Hooters Management Corporation CEO Neil Kiefer shares his turnaround plan. Photo: Bloomberg News, Poste Golden

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250820/44cd897c-aacd-4f67-93b5-22c77948c62d/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Hooters is remaking its brand image after filing for bankruptcy in March. Hooters Management Corporation CEO Neil Kiefer shares his turnaround plan.

Hooters’ $30 Million Turnaround Hinges on It Becoming Less Risqué

I have heard for the last 20 years, well, my wife wouldn't let me go in there.

Narrator: For years, Hooters has been operated by two different companies. One owned by private equity that emphasizes the brand's sex appeal. And the other, which includes the original founders, that says the restaurant is actually family-oriented, and always has been. After filing for bankruptcy earlier this year, Hooters says it's trying to bring all its restaurants back to that purportedly more wholesome vision. And this is the man leading that effort.

What do you think that does to the brand to have these two different operations, basically?

Well, so far, it's not done very well.

Narrator: Neil Kiefer's group, which includes the restaurant's original founders, runs the stores in the chain's two most successful markets. The rest of the locations have been run by private equity since 2019, and have been riddled with debt.

We watched the deterioration of not only the execution of the brand, but also the sales. But we were helpless to do anything about them. We couldn't do anything about it legally. We certainly made our protestations, wrote many letters on behalf with the franchisees to say, "You shouldn't be doing this. Please don't do this." Today, because of social media, you can be affected in your area when you get associated with the wrong Hooters, so to speak.

Narrator: Kiefer's team is taking control of about 100 of the struggling locations. He says his plan is to replicate the success of his Chicago and Tampa restaurants.

The last group of owners, to me, seemed more obsessed on their ROI, their return on investment. How quick can they get their money out of it? And they did, okay? So I think this entire brand going through a bankruptcy was totally unnecessary.

Hi! Welcome to Hooters!

Narrator: The waitresses, known as Hooters Girls, have always worn low-cut tops and shorts. But in 2021, the restaurants owned by private equity launched a controversial new uniform.

They took it and made it, sexualized it. Made it shorter, almost shorter than hot pants. That is offensive to most people, particularly in a restaurant setting. When this brand started and still the way we run our store, it's an athletic fit. In 1983 and the 70s, jogging was huge. The Dolphin short was the short that everybody wore.

Narrator: After receiving backlash on social media, the new uniform policy was updated, giving staff members a choice of what shorts to wear. Private equity firm, TriArtisan Capital Advisors, didn't provide a comment. And private equity firm, Nord Bay Capital, didn't respond to requests for comment. Kiefer says he plans to standardize the uniform across all restaurants to feature the original shorts.

I don't think you're gonna see a bunch of butt cheeks hanging out.

Okay.

And things like that, to be really frank with you.

How about how the servers interact with guests? How might that change?

Look, it's a friendly place.

Hi! Welcome to Hooters!

Thank you very much! Our waitresses do quite well. I think in 2024, they averaged about $27 an hour, where we're at here at Chicago. That's good money, okay? But you gotta be nice to get good money.

But maybe not too nice. My understanding is at the Hooters of America stores, they could actually sit next to guests.

Neil: We don't allow that, okay?

Okay.

There's things in those stores like hula hooping.

Of course, we know how to hula hoop.

Who the heck wants to hula hoop in the middle of a restaurant, okay? You look silly, okay? Sitting down with the customer. I didn't ask you to sit down here. That's a little too cozy. And by the way, my wife's sitting right there. Yeah, why don't you sit with her? That's crossing the line. That's not required for good service. And we've frankly don't allow it.

We're Hooters Girls. And no, we're not on the menu.

So let's talk about the road ahead. How might the menus change?

I wanna make the menu a little shorter, a little easier to execute. Focus on those things. I think our restaurants have a tendency to try to be everything for everybody. And then you have to look in this business, I think, and say, "Well, I may like this, okay, but we only sold 20 of 'em last week." So why are we carrying that? Now let's focus our execution on what we're known for, what we do well.

Narrator: And one of those things is the original Hooters sauce.

It's got all natural ingredients, has AA butter that we purchase from Wisconsin. For our 23 restaurants, I buy about 44,000 pounds every two months of AA butter.

It's a lot of butter.

Best butter you can buy, yes it is. The sauce has no preservative. It's natural ingredients. In the other stores, that's not true.

Why is that butter sauce so important to get back into the restaurants?

It's craveable. I can't tell you why, okay? There's other, some other secret ingredients. I'd have to kill you if I told you and everybody else. But the last time I looked on our P mix, which is product mix sold, about 60-plus percent of our foods that were sold had the sauce on them. From buffalo shrimp to the sandwich from chicken tenders, the bone-in, which is the number one thing. And we also bread them with a secret formulation that gives 'em a little more crunch.

Narrator: Kiefer says seafood is also a top seller at his Hooters restaurants.

Our grouper and mahi are wild caught. Our shrimp don't have any injections of any type in them. We haven't traditionally advertised that because 25 years ago, who cares?

Right.

Today with the advent of the food networks and we all care and we should care. So I think you're gonna see that on our menu and we're gonna tell the public more about that.

How about the training and the servers? How might that change?

A lot, okay? We're not sure what's been going on. We've all been out to eat and had bad servers and we've had good servers. There's quite a difference. It's just changing the, bringing that morale back and the culture back. We usually have a trainer divided up over so many stores.

There's a lot of investment that needs to be done in some of these restaurants. Any sense of how much that might cost?

Probably on an average, about 300,000 per unit, okay? If you times that by 100 units, you can do math. I think our idea is get it right first within the four walls. Do those things that are absolutely necessary, from safety purposes, of course, first. And then we have to strategically plan that. And there's a lot of variables in that. All of these stores that we're acquiring, and we cherry-pick them. There's some that we didn't make the cut. We have their three to five-year history, know that they were doing three years ago before the changes. When we have to get 'em back. And we think not only we get 'em back, now that we get 'em the right way in totality, we can get it above that.

So there's a lot of chicken restaurants out there. Obviously chicken is important part of your menu. And if you know the marketing is more family-friendly, how do you compete with a slew of chicken joints out there?

We've been doing it for a long time, okay? Back in the day, I mean, it's, we're very specific on the type of chicken we spec. We only serve live fresh chicken. Now, that's how we compete. We give 'em a fresh product, great craveable sauce. And frankly, we have not in 42 years had trouble acquiring customers. And we've kept 'em. We've got a lot of regulars, they're called. Families that come in routinely.

So casual dining has had, some are doing quite well, some have filed for bankruptcy. How are you gonna keep this brand strong and not going that route?

I feel real comfortable with what we're doing. The challenge is the turnaround. The hardest part has been the public perception. The typical consumer, including me, I don't know that it's a franchisee or franchisor, I go for a brand. And I expect consistent experience, okay? So I think the problem is re-educating the field, getting the right products in, getting the right advertising and message, getting involved in our communities again. I think all of those things are challenges, but challenges that we're gonna eat out, frankly. That's something we've been doing all the time, and we're anxious to get started and get it corrected.

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