You Need A Mindset For Success In Two Areas Of Life
The first area is your personal life .
You have to accept responsibility for what you create ("good and bad") and what you think about, which leads to what you do and what you get. The other is in your business life, and obviously, the two are connected.
What you are about to read in this blog should challenge your current beliefs! I hope it does, because experience tells me that this is where your success or failure is decided.
I’ve seen restaurateurs struggle for years to accept what you are about to learn, but once they do, their business takes off like a rocket. Usually they’ll then say, "Why didn’t I just believe you years ago, when you first told me this stuff?" We will cover why they didn’t and why you could struggle to do so too, but just for now, suspend all judgment and welcome the opportunity to think differently.
Let’s start with a biggie…
Traditional Customer Loyalty Is Dead!
Loyalty is dead, but ironically, successful restaurants are successful because of repeat business. Their owners diligently employ strategies that will create repeat business. They ask themselves daily, "How can I turn a one-off transactional experience into repeat business?" and they take action to make it happen.
The days of lifelong loyalty are long gone. Your dad might have driven a Holden or Ford all his life, but today the biggest-selling cars in Australia are cheap Asian imports. Ford and Holden thought they could always count on their Australian customers' loyalty, so they did nothing to head off the threat. Now they are closing down plants and asking for taxpayer handouts to stay alive.
People who have always used Microsoft products on their PCs are now eyeing Apple computers. Apple computer fans, particularly early adopters, are now looking for the next cool offering from elsewhere as the once rebellious Apple brand becomes mainstream.
In our world, people who once only ate Anglo-Australian style food are now enjoying Yum Cha, Vietnamese Heo Nuong and Brazilian barbeque. Loyalty is dead, which means you have to be proactive to get repeat business.
In the past, it was okay to get customers in order to make a sale. Restaurateurs could count on making a decent profit from that first sale. There were always more customers, choice was limited, and as a result, a certain amount of "loyalty" was a given. It wasn’t really loyalty; people weren’t being offered anything better, so they stuck with what was familiar.
These days, you need to make a sale to get a customer. Sometimes this means not making any money from that first sale, choosing instead to delay gratification and get it from the much more lucrative source of repeat business, or "the back end," as we call it.
Relying On One-Off “Front End” Business To Make Money Is Going To Send You Bust. It’s An Outdated And Broken Model.
Firstly, it doesn’t even make sense. Think about every other industry that sells a replaceable commodity to a consumer and you’ll see that the industry leaders constantly market their goods to get the customer back again. For example, McDonalds, Coke, Apple, Nike, Microsoft, Toyota, and Virgin. None of them sit there and wait for one of their customers to wander by, so why do we think it should be any different in our industry? If that isn’t enough to make you make the shift, here is a very simple fact: there is too much quality competition to not do so.
Secondly, it means you engage in transitory transactions. Everyone is a walking wallet, and you just want your share of its contents. Your business culture reflects this, your staff adopts it as their way of interacting with your clients, and from a customer’s point of view, there is no dining experience.
How many times have you personally had an "OK" experience at a restaurant? Nothing was wrong, but nothing was worth remembering or remarking on either. In short, it was unremarkable. This is the transactional experience, and it’s true for the vast majority of diners in Australia. Yes, the food is good, yes the service is good, but nothing is "special", nothing makes the customer eager to return.
So to be successful in today’s economy, you are going to have to move away from a transactional model and towards a repeat business one . And for many in our industry, that is a massive mindset shift. Why? Because it means accepting that having good food and good service on their own is not good enough!
You may feel like saying, "Well, that’s not rocket science," and I would agree with you. What I challenge you to do, though, is think about how things happen in your restaurant in reality.
Are you truly happy to delay the gratification of getting more bums on seats – or do you want those people through your door ASAP? “In the real world”, most restaurateurs want customers through their doors now.
So, although this might seem like old news, you can only dismiss it as such when you’ve been putting it into action on a consistent basis over an extended period of time.
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