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Why Thinking Like A Restaurateur Is Bad
Howard Tinker • August 26, 2022
Einstein is quoted as having said, "The last to know about water are fish," meaning they are so absorbed in the stuff that they have no sense of the world outside of it.
This is the same for the majority of restaurateurs. You spend so much time inside the four walls of your business, mentally as well as physically, that you find it hard to think "outside of that box."
Restaurateurs think like restaurateurs, NOT like business owners who happen to have chosen a restaurant as a vehicle to make them money.
At the Restaurant Profits seminars, I often ask restaurateurs what motivated them to get into the restaurant business. Without fail, around 95% of people say their passion for food or hospitality, around 4% have a mix of reasons, and less than 1% say they looked at the profit and loss figures , thought about the financial and time investment, and could see they would get a great return on that investment.
Consequently, restaurateurs often make business and marketing decisions based on passion, emotion, hope, and whim rather than from a sound business perspective.
To have a highly successful business, you are going to have to think about your business and marketing from a business perspective. You are going to have to make decisions based on what makes you money as opposed to what makes you feel good.
This will often mean ignoring what your friends, peers, mother, father, brother, sister, partner, neighbours, graphic designers, web designers, and media agencies tell you. Many of those people mean well, but most of the time they don’t know what they are talking about.
The arbiter of whether something was the right decision needs to be based on whether it actually worked. By worked, I mean, did it make you more profitable? Did it grow your customer base? Did it make people want to come back more often and did it provide a good return on investment (ROI)?
That is thinking like a business owner who has a restaurant and not as a restaurateur.
Want to know more about marketing your restaurant? Book in for a quick, no-obligation chat with Howard by clicking the button below.
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We work with a restaurant that also has a bar/pub attached and they are a real sports bar and this is what they became known for and they chose the sport AFL in Sydney, which as you probably know, Sydney is not the home of AFL, that would be Melbourne.
One of my clients asked me whether the time was right for them to do some social media on TikTok. So here are my thoughts on TikTok marketing for restaurant owners - you might be surprised to learn what I said.
Leading a team to success is a critical skill for any business owner or manager.
As a restaurant owner, you know that there are often two sides to the
story: what's going on in your restaurant and what your customers perceive.
It's important to see things from your customers' perspective and to make
sure you don't drop the ball on the most important things in the restaurant
business: food, service, and hospitality.
As a marketing consultant who specializes in helping restaurant owners grow
their businesses, one of the first things I do with my clients is to focus
on their mindset toward marketing. Many restaurant owners don't see the
importance of marketing for their business and view it as a necessary evil
rather than a critical component of their success.
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If you want have a great “fully staffed” team you've got to do things
differently. Because of the way that he's treating him and his staff, they
are loving working for him.
The repeat business model gives you the chance to create customers for
life. It makes you money now, and it will make you wealthy in the future
too.
There is a difference between how "restaurateurs" and "business owners"
think--and here's why thinking like a restaurateur is bad.
Experience tells me that this is where your success or failure is decided.
Our calendar is amazing because we have everything from New Year's Day to
Anzac Day to Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and Melbourne
Cup.
We used email marketing to successfully launch a new menu. In this case, it
was an autumn menu, and I linked it to a wine presentation where people
could choose to have a bottle for free with their meal.
Remember people nowadays are looking for businesses that have high
standards, high values, and care about them as a customer. It is worth
bearing in mind that this might push a few buttons. I'm sure that some
people will jump to conclusions and say, "Oh, they were really busy, and so
on…" But that doesn't really matter when it comes to having a great
business and also feeling great about yourself as a business owner.
I was business coaching a commercial lawyer who works alongside
accountants, and together they look at other people's businesses. He told
me that he also sees how many people don't proactively market their
business. They sit there and wait for people to come into their business or
to buy from them, but they don't do any outbound, proactive marketing.
Have you ever called a place and your call goes straight to voice mail or you are put on hold and no-one comes back to you or you are put into one of those systems where you are supposed to press 1 for this, press 2 for this…
“You are who Google says you are!”. Why is this phrase true? Because the majority of people searching for you on the internet will use Google.They will search for your name or your business name and whatever comes back is what they are going to believe including the good and bad reviews.
Make sure you link all of your restaurant marketing channels.For example, when you send out an email make sure you put your website and social media links in it; and, make sure those links work and take the recipient directly to those channels.
Emails come from real people not from businesses? So send them from a real person to a real person! When you send out an email from your company, make sure that it comes from a person.
Goldfish Bowl Draws are a simple and effective way to collect data for your database. People drop their business cards into the fish bowl, you draw a card out once a month or once a week and you give away a prize.
Attracting repeat business is something I talk about a lot. Of the 4 Ways to Grow Your Business, it is the second way and it's incredibly important. One way to get repeat business (and also new business) is via 'smart' sponsorships.
Running a Profitable Restaurant is more than just having good food and good service. In fact, if that’s all you've got going for you, you are going to struggle.
Once you've gone through that whole process of getting the chef to come up with new dishes, sourcing the ingredients and writing out the menu items, don’t just stop there.
There are lots of ways for you to run Wine Events - work with the wine supplier, work with a particular brand, work with a winery.You could do something fun and inventive like a 'wine battle'.
Last night was the NSW Good Food Guide Awards and as usual our clients were amongst the awards...
Here's an inventive way to get people into your restaurant. If you have an off-premises license where people can buy and take the wine away, you can market to your list and pre-sell the wines from your wine list.
You can use SMS to say ‘Thank You’ to someone for dining. You can use SMS to remind people that they have a booking. And, you can also use SMS for last minute marketing when it looks like it's going to be a quiet night.
This is a great new business strategy that is easy to run. Focus on your quiet nights and send out a 'Buy one get one FREE' invite to your top clients. Why your top clients?
Once you're collecting a database, you can start communicating with it. Talk to the people on your database as VIP Members and then run events where they are invited solely because they are a VIP Member.
If not, then you should! They're a really great way to make money for your restaurant. All you have to do is promote them on your website, in your bill-folds, in your restaurant; just let people know that you sell gift certificates.
If you are doing Wine Nights, start to segment your database for those people who come to wine events and create your own ‘Wine Club’.When people are dining in your restaurant, tell them about your wine club and ask them to join.
Some of the wineries are going through tough times right now so, why not get on the phone, ring the local wineries and see if they want to get involved with you and run wine nights? If they have their own database too, they can invite their customers to come to your restaurant.
I often talk about who you can partner with in business in your local area. If you have gyms within 3-5 Km of your restaurant, they will be attracting the same people who you want to dine at your restaurant.
We’ve all seen people taking photographs of meals and dishes in restaurants and it is a great opportunity for you to make use of this. One of the things we do is we use MyGuestlist, it is an electronic platform and within that you can run competitions.
Ten years ago, when we first started doing our seminars, I used to ask who is in the yellow pages and I would say that 99% of people would put their hand up and then, I’d ask who’s got website then maybe only 10% would say they had.
One of the best questions that I was ever asked by a business coach was, "Who Has Your Customer Now"?That question doesn't mean: "Who is your competition? Which restaurant are they at now?" It means: "Where are they now? Who else serves them in terms of businesses?"
Let me tell you about one of my clients and what they did one year. So when the family came in for Father’s Day, they took a jar of lollies to the table. It was a jar that they had put together for them by a little company with their own logo on and their own branding so it would belong to the restaurant.
So I talk a lot about Joint Ventures and you'll have heard me talk about solicitors, accountants, stock brokers and hairdressers. What about local theatres? Theatres have mailing lists!
Everyone knows about ‘Wine Matching Dinners’. What about 'Beer Matching Dinners’? Now you might think this wouldn't work. Well, I can tell you, that I’ve worked with lots of restaurants, where they do this.
This Restaurant Marketing tip should be a no brainier - running food-themed events. But, for some people they may have never thought about it. One of the things that we've done over
So this is a great question "How much time TODAY are you going to spend on marketing?" If I put it like that - TODAY - it really makes you focused doesn't it?
How to initiate a "Cocktail of the Week" email! Once you get your database and you're used to doing your email marketing, you can set yourself up with a template for something like, Cocktail of the Week.
This is another reason to market to people - ‘Date Nights’ - they do work. I first came across these in America many years ago. One guy was saying that he did them every Tuesday or Wednesday.
Well, when I am travelling around to go visit restaurant owners often I don’t know where the restaurant is. We will have had a phone call or somebody has emailed and said "Can you come and see us at our restaurant?"
So this Restaurant Marketing Tip is only going to be relevant if you are family friendly or you actually want kids in the place. One of the things you've got to realise is, is when people have children, those children make decisions about where the family eats.
