Restaurant Masterminds

Every business owner deals with adversity in his or her own way. In the midst of this economic downturn, it’s interesting to see how individual business’ react to the downturn in revenue. Some owners utilize ostrich management techniques, you know, when you stick your head in the sand and pretend there’s nothing wrong. I think this is typical for a number of owners in a situation like this. Another way to deal with adversity is to clam up and stop communicating, let’s face it; you can’t let management know your bleeding red ink. What if everyone panicked and quit on you.

As an owner of three restaurants with completely different concepts, I’ve had to approach each one a little differently than the other two. I think this has helped me to deal with the downturn more effectively than the average restaurateur. I run my company, I’m not involved in day-to-day operations, and this has aided me in observing each restaurant from an outsider’s point of view. I think this is critical to understand as a restaurateur, to realize it’s time to open up and come clean with your management team as to exactly where you stand. How can you function as a team if the owner isn’t honest with you?

If you want to go forward and come out of this downturn in tact, the time to seek outside advice is now. Sit your team down and brainstorm, formulate a plan to reduce costs and grow sales. If you don’t take the time to develop a strategy, you may miss your window of opportunity. Tap into every available source you have, consult with your vendors. Most major vendors are offering help with marketing strategies and training programs. Network like never before, poll your customers, you’d be amazed how many own business’ of their own, or work in corporate America. There are so many tools at your disposal; the key is not to be afraid to ask for help.

Before you can do any of these suggestions, you have to be honest with yourself. Step number one is to make sure you have accurate numbers, if you do; you’re half way there. With information comes power, the trick here is, what you do with the information. The longer you postpone the inevitable, the more difficult the task becomes. This is where being brutally honest comes into play. You need to know what exactly you need for income to survive. Once you identify your needs, developing a plan to obtain them becomes a lot easier. Take a systematic look at your company from the inside and the outside. The possibility exists that you are over your head and need a little professional help. This is where it’s critical to solicit outside advice. You need someone on the outside to be brutally honest with you and share your shortcomings with you. Finally, listen, if you aren’t open to listening, you’ll never make it. A good manager or owner is a great listener. Once you listen, gather all the information and share it with your team, you’ll be amazed at their response. People truly love a challenge and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t pull for the underdog.

Step out of your comfort zone, listen, learn and grow. Opportunity is everywhere, get out in front of the curve and you can beat this economy. Restaurateurs are some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met, develop your plan and take action.

Dick Varano
Restaurant Masterminds

We all market our business; some do it better than others. If you are active in your marketing and pay attention, you’ll notice other marketing pieces everywhere you look. It’s hard to read a magazine without noticing the ads; our eyes always migrate to the ads that are well executed. If you want to take your marketing to the next level, it’s time to notice the subtleties that make up a good ad or marketing campaign.

When you look at a good postcard or magazine ad, they all have great photos in them. The pictures are inspiring, they make you want to travel to faraway places and dine in exotic restaurants. A picture truly inspires a thousand words. The key is to incorporate this quality into your ads, your website, your postcards and every poster or marketing piece you produce. This can be an expensive proposition, quality photos can be cost prohibitive in certain instances. The million-dollar question is, “How can I get my marketing pieces to look professional on my budget?”

The solution to this quandary is a combination of a number different pieces, some we can do ourselves, some we need to farm out. I recently purchased a nice camera and have been taking pictures of food. If you’ve never photographed food before, it’s really difficult. There is a reason the big companies hire food stylists to set up their food shots. The secret here is to buy yourself a light box kit, I purchased one at a local camera shop and have been taking a lot of pictures of the food on our menu. There’s been a learning curve to having the photos come out the way I envision them, the good news is that I am now taking food shots that look amazing and are appealing to both the eye and palette.

This doesn’t mean you have to run out and buy a thousand dollar camera, take photography lessons, buy a Mac computer, learn I-movie and start producing your own videos and slideshows. However, I would recommend everyone of the above, I now produce my own videos for our websites, put together amazing slide shows for presentations and have all kinds of great food pictures to use on our websites, posters, postcards, ads and anything else I may have the need for. The freedom I’ve achieved from this whole process has been both worthwhile and fulfilling.

I realize not everyone has the time or interest in learning how to shoot photography and edit videos; there are other ways to achieve the same results. Go to your local camera shop and talk to the recent graduates and ask them if they would be interested in shooting photos or video in trade. The reason they work in a camera shop is to pay the bills; it’s like a struggling actress working as a waitress. You could even post an ad at a local college for student photographers, post an ad on Craig’s List, there are a number of out of work amateur photographers who would welcome the possibility to shoot photos for meals.

The key is to make sure that before you do your next marketing campaign, spend the time to make it look like a professional did it. Start small; maybe work on a poster or table tent for your restaurant’s four walls marketing. As you conquer each project, you’ll be empowered to take on larger projects and have the skill to take them to the next level. You need to plan for your marketing and schedule your photo shoots, you’d be amazed what a dinner and a couple of free drinks can get you. You never know, you just might go out and buy that Mac and start producing your own media. What are you waiting for? Start planning your next marketing piece and you’ll be amazed at the results you can achieve.

I’ve been working on this for years…and my recent vacation to Florida and the DisneyWorld hot spots just brought it all up again.

$6.00….you heard me, $6.00 for 16oz. of Pepsi….and it is probably less ounces of pop than that with ice! The lines are a 20 people deep, the cups in the trash verify that another couple hundred spent that….do I need to add a roller coaster, clown and 100 degree weather to my restaurant, just to charge outrageous prices? But boy do they have it all done right…the aroma in the amusement park heightens exactly around the lunch hours and dinner hours….just when you are starving from standing in lines (which I might add have strategically placed concession and novelties to attract the kiddos!)….the magnetic wallet pulls your family to the $6 popcorn…..

So….tell me, should I look into the cost of adding a roller coaster to my rooftop? Whatever it is, it’s our job to create an EXCEPTIONAL dining experience. What is it that you do in your restaurant that allows you to charge more than your competition? In order for you to separate yourself from others and charge more you need to be unique and then your guests will not mind spending the extra $$$ per person in your restaurant. Take a look around your restaurant and ask yourself, “what makes us special and unique from other restaurants?”, or take the time to develop your own version of a “Roller Coaster” and you to can begin to charge $6 for a pepsi.

Ben Martinez
Restaurant Masterminds Marketing Guru

I just got back from a FANTASTIC trip to Florida, it was a Nationals hockey tournament for my sons and their teams and not only did we play some great hockey, but we took in the awesome sightseeing that happens when you go to Florida! My bronze tan on my rippling 12 pack wasn’t the only highlight at the beach (oh, I’m talking about my Coors light 12 pack of bottles), I watched as my family enjoyed the Atlantic Ocean in 90 degree temps….ahh….vacation!

But, I will of course tell you that although I was on vacation, I’m always on alert when dining out…and on vacation, you can experience just about everything! I have to tell you about a dining experience that made me just shutter…

We had ventured out that day to Sea World in Orlando, and the 90 degrees plus 85% humidity was taking a toll on us thin air Colorado families….some good friends of ours joined my wife Lori and the boys for lunch. We decided to leave the park and have a nice sit down meal in an AIR CONDITIONED restaurant. I wasn’t driving, but our friends chose TGI Friday’s (gulp…I am always looking for the independents!!)…needless to say, no matter the restaurant, I learn from each.

Our party of 15 was greeted by our server, Carl…who began taking our orders. The kids being very hot and tired, just wanted to order right off the bat….and so we did. As he began taking the orders, I of course noticed that he wasn’t writing it down….hmmm….impressive! 15 drink/lunch orders? Wow….okay, hot shot, show me what you got. As he made his way around the table, I kept thinking, there is NO WAY he is going to do this…..so, the mischievous butt-head that I am, when he came to me I started with, “I would like a margarita on the rocks, with salt, limes on the side, a dinner salad with ranch, no carrots, the double cheeseburger medium with the cheese between the two meat patties and cheese on the top, hold the tomato, and if you could bring my salad before the meal that would be great. My family is hungry, so an order of cheese sticks as an appetizer would be great”…..(insert my wife kicking me under the table and on a sunburn that hurts!).

As the server began to repeat orders he stumbled, crashed and couldn’t do it….his attempts were pitiful and to make matters worse, one of the kids (not one of mine) said, “Dude, you should of written that down, don’t they give you pads here?” He had to continue to “guess” at everyone’s order and truly test the patience of each of the kids and adults….after all we were hungry and tired and needed food. When he finally made his way away from the table, I took out my wallet and laid $20 on the table and said, “I’ll bet he forgets my salad”…and of course out of the 15 orders, he forgot my salad….how did I know that? Because it is just too easy to forget the items that can be easily “covered” by just bringing out your meal….when in fact, to the guest, it can be the most important (heck, it was the only vegetables I had while on vacation!!)

So, to all of those “hot shot” servers who think they can repeat an entire table of orders, hats off to you when you succeed, but the ramifications of failure go beyond the “impressiveness” of your memory…leave them with a good feeling of being all about them and not so much about YOU, the server!

My hungry kids now waited an extra 12 minutes while he tried to juggle the right order….and when the order came out, items were missing or wrong and it wasn’t so impressive after all.

We did enjoy our venture back to Sea World….my kids convinced me to sit in the splash zone and the ONE time Shamu decided to SLAP his big fat tail THREE times was when I sat down in front of him…..drenched but laughing, we had a great time.

….ahhhh vacation…one down 3 more this summer to go….

Ben Martinez
Restaurant Masterminds Marketing Guru

Whenever we decide to run an e-mail marketing campaign, we tend to agonize over the content and how to maximize our results. The first objective should always be, what are the results I’m trying to achieve with the campaign? Who am I targeting? These are critical questions that must be answered before you can ever hope to have a successful e-mail marketing campaign.

My wife and I own a Prime Steak House and due to the economic times have had to reposition our dinner menu, we now offer an eight item menu of dinners priced twenty-one to twenty-eight dollars and each entrée includes two sides. This is a major shift from our initial a la carte menu we offered when we first opened. The word on the street is that we are a pricey restaurant and to avoid unless you bring your checkbook, or are celebrating a special occasion. Our goal is to re-educate our customers through our new menu and multiple advertising campaigns. We recently ran a campaign where we sent an offer to our top two thousand rewards customers, the offer was a buy one, get one free. The offer was for our new menu items only. The results were fantastic and I honestly feel we are on the right track towards re-educating our clientele. Direct marketing through the mail is a great way to get your message out; it brings in the best results, although the price can be prohibitive.

We are now assembling an e-mail campaign to try and expedite the process and start a viral marketing campaign. The results we are trying to achieve are to bring in all the rewards customers we have that have never visited our Steak House. We own two other restaurants that are casual and upscale casual, in total our three restaurants have over twenty three thousand rewards customers. Our goal is to tap into this massive database and make it work for us, driving in as much new business and first timers as possible, including friends and family of our rewards members.

In the past, this type of campaign would have been too costly to direct advertise to our entire database. The key is to make sure when you capture your customer’s information; you get their e-mail address. We have over ten thousand current e-mail addresses. Our objective is to take these ten thousand plus addresses and leverage them. We are going to send out an offer to our rewards customers, thanking them for their patronage during this awful summer weather we’re having and let them know the weather might keep away the tourists; but thankfully our faithful members never let us down. It is for this reason we will give every member an offer to come in and dine with us and receive the second entrée half off. We will then give our members the ability to forward this e-mail to their friends and family. If every one forwarded this e-mail to two to four friends, the results would be staggering. I’ve never launched a campaign of this magnitude; I think the potential results could push our summer business over last years. In this economy, if you can grow your business, you’re in the minority. Our goal is to maintain our relationship with our customers and create a win/win situation where everyone benefits.

Communication is the key to marketing, leveraging your database in a viral marketing campaign can unlock the results you’ve only dreamed of. What are you waiting for, put your database to work for you today. One last thing, if you unleash this potential onslaught, you’d better be staffed and be ready to handle the business. The last thing you want to do is have the results turn into a negative.

Dick Varano
Restaurant Masterminds