Restaurant Masterminds

Having spent the first ten years of my career as a chef, I always felt my food was the driving force behind the growth in the various restaurants and resorts I was employed by. I knew if we could produce a great product for a good price, through word of mouth, we could develop a reputation and grow our brand. The fact that I had more than my share of successes early on was what shaped my opinion on marketing. I always felt marketing was a job someone in the office did, I really didn’t have a lot of respect for marketing, I mean, how much talent does it take to place ads in the paper, or local magazine.

Fast forward to today’s economy and having made the transition from chef to owner, I now realize that I am a marketer, who happens to market food. This epiphany hit me several years ago and it struck me as kind of funny. It dawned on me that the chains produce food that from a chef’s prospective is average, yet drive by any chain and look at the parking lot. They’re chock full of cars and the restaurant is bustling with action. I realized that what they did better than me was to market their business and promote their brand. Their signage was colorful and concise, the menus were exciting looking, and all their displays were professional and well done. The pretty picture on your table of the drink of the month was enticing as anything, they never mention the eight-dollar price of the drink and you don’t bother to ask. You decide that you want one of those and you order it.

There it is, they don’t even have to sell it to you, all they do is show it to you and you do the rest. It’s amazing when we finally get something, you want to smack yourself in the forehead and say “duh”. The formula is right there in front of us; we need to open our eyes and focus. It’s not just the food, it’s not just the service, it’s the sum of the parts. It’s the entire package, that when assembled in the right order at the right time, can produce extraordinary results.

Recently, the manager in my Italian Restaurant overheard a woman speaking to her friend about our restrooms. She asked her friend if she had been in the ladies room, when her friend replied that she hadn’t, she promptly replied that they were gorgeous and that with a restroom that nice, the food had to be great. Who would have ever thought someone would associate good food with a restroom. The cold hard facts are that they do and customers evaluate your business on many different levels, all leading towards how they rate your restaurant.

When you market your restaurant, you have to make sure all the parts are in place. When you build it, they will come. If you market your business well, customers will come. If you can’t produce, or your drive-by looks tired, your restrooms are outdated and messy, etc., etc., you will have wasted your marketing. You market food and beverage. If you market and can’t deliver, it’s all for naught. Wrap your head around your new job title, pay attention to detail and focus. Write down a list of goals and projects you need in order to take your business to the next level, communicate it with your management team and delegate appropriately. You will be pleasantly surprised by the results as you combine the marketing with the rest of the puzzle. You can’t grow your business if you’re still seating customers every night, or helping the kitchen constantly when they’re shorthanded. These are nine or ten dollars an hour jobs, if you want to make one hundred dollars an hour, develop a marketing campaign that will produce the desired results and hire someone to do the rest.

Dick Varano
Restaurant Masterminds Elite Coach

Ben and Dick Looking Good

Wow, what a summer! I can’t believe it’s already over and my boys are back in school. One thing is for sure, this by far and away was our BEST summer ever, both personally and professionally.

Here’s a quick run down of what my summer consisted of; my wife and a few other friends kicked off our annual summer get away to Las Vegas in early May for four days.

Weekend inline hockey tournaments from May – June for my boys, ice hockey camp four nights a week from June – July (8 weeks), nine day hockey tournament/vacation that started in West Palm Beach Florida and ended in Orlando, Florida, then followed that up with a 5 day vacation/Restaurant Masterminds meeting in Chicago and quickly turned around and journeyed off to Cincinnati, OH. for another 9 day hockey tournament and now just came back from Boston (attending Dick’s Son’s Wedding) and then visiting Maine for a couple more days of R&R.

All of this was made possible because I set goals of things that I wanted to do and accomplish for the Summer of 2009. Not only did I set business goals, but also I set personal and family goals of what I wanted to do with my family this summer. Yes, the list was long and some of it was wishful thinking, but because I wrote it down and set a course with a plan of action, each one of my goals was achieved and properly rewarded.

Here’s a plan of action that you can take in order to be successful when it comes to achieving goals.

1. Goals must be written: Goals that are not written are merely wishes. There is something in the act of writing a goal down that makes it real, gives it permanence, removes if from just imagination to reality. Goals that are not written down are easily forgotten or easily changed, written goals that are reviewed regularly become reality. When goals are not written, the power of conditioning through repetition is lost.

2. Goals must be your own: Goal setting and goal striving become truly effective only when team goals or company goals become the same as personal goals-when it becomes my team or my restaurant. An example would be my management team, they talk about “my restaurant” and “my staff”, and these employees have leadership instincts to help ensure the success of my business because their personal goals are intertwined with the restaurant goals.

3. Goals must be measurable and specific: How much, how many, and by when? If you can’t measure it, how will you know when you achieved it? Even intangible goals need tangible indicators. If you want to increase your income by $12,000 in the next 12 months then you must write down your plan of action of how to increase you net income by $1,000 per month. When I wanted to increase my profits at my restaurant I made specific goals of how I was going to achieve my lofty numbers.

4. Goals must contain a deadline: Deadlines are the foundation of commitment. Deadlines are the adrenaline boosters. Deadlines are the instigators of a achievement and inventiveness. A goal without a deadline is merely a philosophical statement. I love deadlines! This is when I get the majority of my work done. Set
a deadline for every goal you write down!

5. Goals must be realistic and obtainable: If you set realistic goals and continually work on them day after day, you can get big results. It’s like losing weight, let’s say you want to lose twenty pounds of weight. We all know you can’t do it overnight, however, if you set a goal to lose two pounds per week, by the end of ten weeks you will have achieved your goal. You must be realistic in your short-term goals.

6. Goals must be rewarded: A good idea in setting goals is to establish a tangible reward for yourself when the goal is accomplished. If you enjoy a sporting event, go out and buy tickets to an upcoming game. Celebrate by taking the weekend off and heading out of town with your loved ones or simply buy yourself a gift that will always remind of you of your accomplishments.

If you would like to learn more about goal setting and being held accountable when writing your goals, we have a few seats available for our upcoming Diamond Member meeting in Scottsdale, AZ. on November 9 -10, 2009. These seats will go fast so register early.

Ben Martinez
Restaurant Masterminds Marketing Guru

Ben and his better half

I think that most restaurateurs have lousy hiring practices; the tendency is to check for a warm pulse and hire them immediately. In some cases, start them that very evening. Where did this practice start? The time has come for restaurateurs to take a step back and examine the ramifications of this detrimental practice that plagues our industry. We need to take this process seriously and start to reverse this awful trend, which will ultimately lead to fewer turnovers with our employees, and in most cases, a higher employee moral.

The restaurant business is a very unique business, we have daily deadlines that have to be met, we have the public who demand good service and can be difficult at times. We need a full staff on duty everyday in order to properly service our customers. Being short staffed is a way of life and wreaks havoc on our daily lives. We tend to always be in hiring mode, searching for that missing employee. We rely heavily on our employees to network with their friends and introduce potential new employees to us. Some restaurateurs have a standard ad for hiring in the local papers that runs continuously.

Restaurateurs live a different culture than most businesses, we work when most people play. This in itself presents a whole list of negatives, including attracting good employees. Our industry doesn’t require a degree, you aren’t licensed and on the job training is practically an industry standard. We tend to attract high-school dropouts, single moms, transients, and people who just don’t conform to Monday thru Friday nine to five. Sprinkle in a few trained professionals, a couple of laid off school teachers, housewives looking for some extra money and you’re starting to see how this puzzle comes together.

Where we tend to fail the most is by rehiring past employees. When we’re short handed and a past employee walks through the door, we re-hire them on the spot and put them to work immediately. We tend to overlook the fact that we fired them the last time they worked for us, or worse, they quit on us with no notice on the busiest weekend of the year. We pretend the past was an anomaly, and it won’t repeat itself. If history has proven one thing to us, it’s that it always repeats itself. The problem is that the cancer just keeps spreading and eventually taints more employees. Even good employees become affected by your hiring practices; they’re the ones left cleaning up the mess when you’re re-hiring eventually implodes. It’s not if they’ll implode, it’s just a matter of when they implode, and hopefully not lead to full blown explosion and a mass staff exodus.

If you want a staff of trained professionals, who show up on time and take pride in their job and portray a sense of ownership, this takes planning. You need to develop a hiring process, which includes an employee manual. You have to develop your ultimate staff and hire towards it. This is a process that takes several years to complete. Included in this process is a training program that is ongoing, including an evaluation process each year. At the end of each fiscal year, we sit down with our management team and discuss our staff, along with our upcoming year’s staffing needs. What we try and determine is who and if we need to replace on our staff. This can sound cruel and without compassion, the reality is, you can’t build an all -star team with second stringers. Our goal is to constantly improve our staff. In order to do this, there’s going to be some culling involved. As owners and managers, we need to understand that as we improve our staffs, our job actually gets easier. Our costs go down due to the efficiency of our staff, and the decrease in re-cooks coming out of our kitchen.

Speaking of kitchens, stop hiring the cheapest person available for your kitchen, a good chef or cook is worth their weight in gold. A great dishwasher can save you a fortune in breakage and theft. If you’re cheap to your kitchen, they’re going to get their money out of you one way or another. If you have a superstar dishwasher, pay him or her what they’re worth. You’ll be way ahead of the game in the long run. A happy staff is worth a million dollars, start assembling your dream team and watch your turnover decrease and your business grow. A staff that love where they work is infectious, your customers will notice and enjoy dining with you for all their occasions. Write down what your dream team looks like and make it happen, you’ll be amazed at the results.

Dick Varano
Restaurant Masterminds