Back to Basics

[00:00:01] It's episode number 254 of the Restaurant Strategy Podcast. And today we are going back to basics. Don't go anywhere. [00:00:09] There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking. [00:00:40] Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close and this is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated solely to helping you build a more profitable restaurant. Each week I leverage my 20 plus years in the industry to help you build that more profitable and more sustainable business. I also work directly with operators all over the world through my P3 mastermind program. And we, and we've actually just opened up a third group. That's right, we filled up the first two. Right. They're totally capped. And so now we're launching a third group. So if you've got a busy restaurant but struggle to generate consistent, predictable 20% profits month after month, then set up a free 30 minute strategy session with someone from my team. We'll get to learn more about you and your restaurant. You'll get to ask some questions about the program. To see if you're a good fit for the program, visit restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule. As always, you'll find that link in the show notes. [00:01:30] Now, are you frustrated with managing your catering and private events with pen and paper or outdated programs? Introducing Triple Seat, the catering sales and event management software built for hospitality professionals by hospitality professionals. With Triple Seat, you will increase revenue and efficiency, all while streamlining your operation. Let Triple C be your catering and event management assistant. Generate leads, create tailored BTOs, facilitate online discussions, obtain electronic signatures, process payments and everything else Triple Seat has you covered. Elevate and simplify your event management and take it to the next level with Triple Seat so you can focus on what truly matters, providing unforgettable experiences for your clients. For more information, visit tripleseat.com restaurantstrategy that's triple seat.com restaurantstrategy that link is also in the show notes. [00:02:25] So again, episode number 254 of the Restaurant Strategy podcast. We're now about four and a half years into the show. If you've been following following from the beginning or near the beginning, you understand sort of what makes me tick. You know what I believe on both the marketing side and the operation side, but I'm guessing plenty of you guys are are coming to this just in the last year and so maybe you don't know my shtick. You don't know what we spend a lot of time talking about because we talk about a lot. And for me, the foundation is core. So we've certainly talked about this in the past, but very few episodes where we've condensed it with all into one solid episode, one 30 minute chunk that you can just take in. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to go back to basics. I'm splitting this episode into two different sections. First, we're going to talk about marketing. Then we're going to talk about operations because we really do have to think about them separately. Even though they are connected. I want to talk about them and think about them separately so that we can then figure out a successful way to stitch them together because they really do require each other to be successful. So without any further ado, we're talking about getting back to base. Basics. Let's dive into marketing. Three things that we have to cover when we talk about the basics of marketing. First and foremost, we have to agree on a definition. Now you can go all the way back to the very first episode of this show. I, I, I talked about this in the very first episode. But if you, if you haven't had time to go back 253 episodes, let me bring you up to speed. What is marketing? For me, it's not a jumbled academic definition. It's very, very simple. And I come to this simple definition because I spend a lot of time talking to operators and I'll talk to a restaurant owner, for example, and I'll, it'll be early in our conversations, maybe even our very first conversation. And I'll say, hey, talk to me about your marketing. And they always say one of two things. Number one, I'm not a big company, I can't afford to do marketing, which is wrong. Or then number two, they start telling me about their social media. And social media is not marketing. It is a tool available to the marketer, but on its own, it is not marketing. And I think we do this with this easy way out. We think an easy solution, we could say, well, oh yeah, okay, that's a way to reach millions of people. So I'll just do that. Except the way that you're doing social media or the way that most people do, social media is not working to attract millions of people. Probably not even thousands of people, maybe just a couple dozen or a hundred people. We'll get into that. But before we talk about how we, how we do marketing or the tools available. We have to agree on a definition. Like I said, when I talk to operators, oftentimes they'll say one or the other, oh, I can't do marketing, or this is what I do for marketing. It's social media. [00:05:08] And that neither of those things are true. Let's dispel the first myth now that I said, right, I can't afford to do marketing. If you sell a product or service to other human beings, then by nature you have to do marketing. You are already marketing. Maybe not successfully, efficiently or effectively, but you are already doing marketing because if you sell a product or service to another human being, you've got to figure out what kind of human being would like that service or product. You have to figure out who. [00:05:36] Who out there, which human beings are most apt to buy your product, right? So let's just get clear on that. Social media is not marketing. It is part of marketing. It's a tool available to the marketer. And yes, you absolutely have to do marketing. So if we can assume then that, yes, you have to do marketing and you have to be able to do it efficiently and effectively, and certainly more effectively than just posting on Instagram every other day, then let's agree on a definition and then dive in a little bit more deliberately. First and foremost, again, like I said, we got to. We got to define it. We have to agree on a definition. What is marketing? You can go all the way back to episode one four and a half years ago. It has not changed since then. Marketing for me is just answering three questions. What's the product? Who is it for? And how do you reach them? That's it. That's the whole thing. And the thing is, in restaurants, we're especially guilty of skipping over those first two questions. [00:06:29] What's the product? And who is that product for? We jump right to the third question of how do we reach them? And until we do the deep work on those first two questions, we lose out. [00:06:40] And unfortunately, most of our time is spent doing social media or sending emails or focusing on our website. And all of that is the third question, right? What do we do to reach them? How do we reach them? Again, three questions, right? How do you define marketing? For me, it's just answering three questions. What's the product? Who is it for? And how do you reach them? Now, let's talk about how to do that more deliberately. There's two frameworks that I've talked about before here that all of my clients, all the members of my mastermind know very, very well, first, I want to introduce you to something I call the abcds of marketing. ABCD stands for Audience, Brand, Competition and Differentiation. Right? It's a. It's a simple framework. It's a building block upon which we can build the rest of our marketing. [00:07:24] A is for audience. We start there because we have to talk about the who, right? Who is your product for? Now, I've said this before. Maybe you've heard me say it. It's worth. It's worth hearing again. There are two ways to market. Mostly we do it the first way, right? Which is that we create a product and then go try and find a customer for that product. [00:07:41] But the second way is actually the much more successful way. And the best companies in the world do this second way, which is that you look for an audience and then you create a product for that audience, right? So you find an audience that has a problem that. This is where we start, our ABCD framework. Abcd, Audience, Brand Competition and Differentiation. We start with audience. We look for a group of people or a kind of person or a type of person that has a problem, a problem that you are uniquely qualified to solve. So who has a problem that we're uniquely qualified to solve? That's the A in the ABCD framework, right? We start by looking at the who. We look for a group of people, a type of person, somebody in our market, and hopefully we find enough of them so that we can be successful. Who is a problem that we are uniquely qualified to solve? Be then brand. Brand is our company. Our company, our service, our product, the experience we craft. And that's what we are doing. We are crafting experiences in the restaurant industry, our product, our experience is the solution to someone's problem. So a audience is about figuring out who has a problem that we're uniquely qualified to solve. B. Brand, Our brand is our company. [00:08:56] Company exists to solve a specific problem for a specific kind of person at a specific time, right? And that's really, really important. So you have to figure out then who has a problem and then what is the solution we are crafting to that problem. If you go about your business, if you build a business, if you look at your market and think in terms of who can I help and how would I help them, who has a problem and how can I craft a solution to that problem? [00:09:23] If you change what you do to that framework, right? If you just take nothing away from this episode, but just change the way you do the A and the B, it'll change your business. [00:09:34] Now we continue on because I Think the C and the D are equally as important. But even if you didn't do anything else, you just changed from a push marketing to a pull marketing. You took an empathic stance, right? Bring empathy to the work that you do. [00:09:50] It will change your business. It will change the relationship you have with customers. It will make it a lot easier to attract customers. So the ABCD framework we start with A is for audience who has a problem that you're uniquely qualified to solve. B is brand. Brand is your company. Your company exists to solve a specific problem for a specific person or specific kind of person at a specific time. [00:10:11] C is for competition. Competition or anyone else who's trying to solve the same problem you are. Now, I always say this about competition. It gives you two important things. Number one, competitors help validate your idea. And two, it gives you a category. And a category ends up being a short list. You end up. You end up not being considered with all the other restaurants in town, but just the other restaurants that are like you in your category, right? So if you got a sushi restaurant, you're going to be in a category probably of other sushi restaurants in the neighborhood or in the town. If you are on a certain block where there are other restaurants, you are going to compete with the other restaurants from that block. Because somebody who's on that block, maybe to see a movie or go to theater or who lives on that block doesn't want to walk very far from their home, they're going to say, let's just run out for a quick bite. Oh, what do you want? [00:11:01] You're only on a short list with three, four, maybe five other restaurants. And that's a good thing. That's your category. Now, restaurants can be in multiple categories. And the way you come up with a category is you think in terms of this and I said it, and I'll say it again. [00:11:15] Who out there is trying to solve the same problem you are? So if we think in terms of problems and solutions, right, The A was for audience figuring who has a problem that we can solve. B, our brand, our company is the solution, the competition. The C is about figuring out who else is trying to solve the same problem. So if you got a fine dining restaurant that's trying to cater to people who are celebrating special occasions and all that, you're going to look to other places who also cater to people trying to celebrate special occasions. Hey, we want to be the special event place. We want to be the celebration place. That's one way to give yourself a category. And then D stands for differentiation. You got to figure out how you separate yourself from the other people in your category, right? [00:12:00] Who is a problem that you can solve? How does your brand solve that problem, or how can it solve that problem? [00:12:07] Who else is trying to solve the same problem you are? And then how do you separate yourself from those competitors? How do you stand out in a noisy market? No, you don't have to be in New York City to have a noisy market. Every market I go to, every small town is noisy. There are choices that people have. [00:12:25] There's probably less choices, but there are less people. And so in order to be successful, you need whatever it is, 50 covers, 100 covers every single night of the week, 200, 300 covers on a Friday night, on a Saturday night, whatever those numbers are for you, you have competition. So you have to separate yourself from the competition. When I talk about differentiation, I always talk about you know, not, not finding some, some big magic, whatever, to differentiate yourself. But by starting with you, you are the biggest differentiator out there. Your restaurant is a. Is an extension of you, of what you. What you believe, your tastes, quite literally your tastes. So we start by answering the following question. What are the stories only you can tell? That's how we differentiate ourselves. And now, even if you're just a sub shop, you can say something to the effect of, hey, we're the only sub shop in this shopping center, or we're the only independently run sub shop in this shopping center, right? You can say something as simple as that, and it begins there. We're the only sub shop that I own, meaning it's the only restaurant that has me at the helm. That's a big deal. [00:13:33] You can talk about just about anything. Anything that separates yourself from the competitors that helps, helps you stand out in a noisy marketplace is a story worth telling. Now, if you go through, you should be able to write 10, 20, 30 of these, no problem. If you have trouble getting to even 10, then, yeah, then this is where you have to do work. Then you've created a product that is undifferentiated. And if it is undifferentiated, it becomes a commodity. Now, let's talk about commodity. I talk a lot about the commodity mindset and the luxury mindset. This is another important thing we have to talk about when we talk about the foundations of marketing. The commodity mindset says, all things being equal, right? [00:14:14] All things being equal, a consumer will make their decision based on one of three criteria. Familiarity, convenience, or price. And you don't want to compete on any Any of those. Because familiarity means that you're the most well known. You're the one that people go to over and over and over again. I don't think you're going to win that race. You could win for a handful of people, but not for a large market. Right? And if you've got 10, 20, 50,000 people, even in your town, that's a big enough market, you're never going to beat Applebee's. You're never going to. You're never going to beat some of these other places. [00:14:48] So you don't want to compete on familiarity, you don't want to compete on convenience, and you certainly don't want to compete on price, because price becomes a race to the bottom. So ultimately, the question you're looking to answer is, what would we have to do? How could I create a product that is worth people going out of their way for, worth maybe paying a little bit extra for? Why would they pay more if they could get the same thing for cheaper? They won't. Why would they go out of their way if they can get the same thing but closer? [00:15:18] And so if you compete on convenience and familiarity and price, it is a race to the bottom. You're never going to win. You're never going to be convenient to everybody in town. You're going to be convenient to some of the people in town. Right? You're never going to be the cheapest one out there simply because you can't get the preferred pricing that a giant corporate chain can have. Right? Because they have huge purchasing power. They've got contracts with national distributors, and they naturally get a lower price so they can charge less and still guard their margins. You can't do that, nor do you want to compete there. So when we talk about marketing, we've come up with a definition for marketing. We talk about the ABCDs of marketing, audience, brand competition and differentiation. That gets us into creating a differentiated product. Right? Something that is remarkable, that is unique, that is different from anything else out there. It is the only way to succeed in the year 2023 and beyond. [00:16:14] Finally, then, we've got to talk then about how we actually go about doing our marketing. So I want to introduce you to another framework called the triangle principle. The triangle principle simply states that there are only three things you need to focus on. Three areas. I would say three buckets. When I have people build marketing plans in my. In my program, they come up with three sheets of paper. [00:16:35] On the top of one, you write attraction. On the top of the other, you write retention. And on top of the third, you write evangelism, attraction retention, and evangelism. Those are the three sides to the marketing triangle, to our triangle principle. It basically says, all you need to do is find a way to get people in. You got to find a way to get people back, and you got to find a way to get people talking. This is firmly what I believe is required for marketing a restaurant, not a website, not social media, not, not SEO, not emails, although all of those are important. [00:17:07] But stop focusing on the things you do and start focusing on the results you need to get. When you start focusing on the results, you will get much better results because you'll be focused on what you need to happen. Well, then you figure out, what do I need to do in order to make this happen? Meaning what are the tasks? What are the tactics? What are the strategies I need to employ? [00:17:29] This is now where we inject social media into the conversation or our email marketing or our website or SEO practices and all of that. That's where we start injecting those in. [00:17:42] But they're all a means to an end. What do you need at the end? What's the result you need? [00:17:47] I need to get new people in. What am I doing to try to acquire new customers? And it's either working or it's not working. [00:17:55] And P.S. it's not just one thing. It's probably eight or 10 things. It's probably eight or 10 Things in each of these areas. In each of these three areas. So attraction, retention and evangelism. If you want to be more intentional with your marketing, if you want to do marketing better, be better at marketing, be more effective at it. I'm telling you, adopt this mentality and think of the end in mind. Everything you do needs to achieve a certain goal. It's either achieving that goal, you do more of it, or it's not achieving the goal, you scrap that and you find something else. So when we talk about the basics of marketing, here we go back to basics. That's what we need to agree on. A definition for marketing you now know. It's three questions. What's the product? Who is it for? And how do we reach them? Talk about the ABCDs of marketing. This, those first two questions, what's the product? And who is it for? You have to understand the ABCDs of marketing. That's the foundation you build the rest of your house on. And then when we go about building the rest of our house, right? When we go about building the rest of our marketing, when we do our marketing, we obviously have to understand how we do our marketing and I think you bring attention to it by focusing on just these three areas. What do you do to get new people in? What do you do to get people back? What do you do to get people talking? [00:19:10] That's the basics of marketing a restaurant successfully. We're going to cover the other half, the operations side, in just a minute after a word from another one of our sponsors. [00:19:20] Now, Running a restaurant is already a tough job. 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Then it sends a request to your bank to have your sales tax put into a secure holding account. This keeps your sales tax separate from your revenue and helps reduce potential confusion about available funds. You'll get a daily email from Davo by letting letting you know exactly how much sales tax was transferred when your sales tax is due. Davo automatically remits your sales tax to the appropriate authority on your behalf in full and on time. Is your restaurant in a state that does on time filing discounts? If it is, then Davo will automatically send this refund back to your bank. Don't let sales tax spoil your business. Stay on top of sales tax with automation from Davo by Avalara so you can spend less time in the back office and more time in the front of house. Learn [email protected] RestaurantStrategy and try Davo Free for the first month. Yes, you will find that link in the show Notes. [00:21:02] Now today we're going back to to basics. We're talking all about marketing and now we're going to dive into operations when we talk about the operations side of things. Because there there's a relationship between marketing and operations. I always say they're all of our problems are marketing problems. They just can't be solved with marketing. They have to be solved operationally. So let's talk about the operation specifically. We got to start by talking about finding a path to profitability. Let's get really clear here. A business exists to generate profit, right? We follow the old Milton Friedman, which I don't 100%, you know, subscribe to, but Milton Friedman said, right, the, the, the purpose of a firm, the purpose of a business is to increase shareholder value, meaning it needs to turn a profit. If your business doesn't turn a profit, it is a non profit and there are plenty of extraordinary charities out there in the world. I just don't think you set out to create one. You created the business so that it could provide for you and your family. And unfortunately what I find is that a lot of owners and operators end up spending their lives providing for their business rather than having their business provide for them. And so we got to change this. We've got to change the way that we go about building a business. Number one, we've got to make sure it's profitable. I'm tired of hearing about 10% profits being the promised land. 10% is not the promised land. Unless you're telling me you got an 18, 20, 25 million dollar restaurant, then fine, you can live on 7% profit. But I'm guessing that your business needs to make more than that. So the average business in this country makes about a million dollars a year. Somewhere between a million and a million point two which ends up being about a hundred thousand dollars, ends up being about a hundred thousand dollars a month. So if that sounds familiar, you're in good company. You the are of average American restaurant. The average independently owned American restaurant. Here's the deal. You need a path to profitability. You have to understand how much business you need to do and where you need to keep your costs in relation to that revenue level in order to turn a profit. All of my clients know that I push them to go for 20% profit because I think that's a successful business, right? If we can't make 20% profit, then I don't see a lot of point to be in business. Unless again, you're doing 10, 15, 20, 25 million dollars a year, then fine, 10% of 25 million is still a pretty good living. Go, go forth and enjoy and enjoy your returns. But for me, for the average restaurant that makes, you know, a million dollars a year to make $100,000 in profit doesn't, doesn't seem like A lot. [00:23:38] It's a good living, don't get me wrong. But if you've got to be there all the time, 60, 70 hour work weeks, every single week, and you got your, your spouse there, and you get your kids there, and your aunts and your uncles and your nephews and everybody's working there just to keep this thing afloat, I think something's broken. So I believe firmly that we need to build a business that can be profitable on paper so that it can be profitable in real life. One of the things I introduce all of my clients to is something called the 30, 30, 20 rule. I believe all your expenses should be tethered to a revenue number and it should be kept in proportion. [00:24:11] So the rough math works like this. 30% COGS, 30% labor and 20% for everything else, right? So everything you spend money on over the course of the month in your restaurant should go into one of three buckets and it should be tethered to a percentage. 30% cost of goods sold, 30% labor and 20% everything else. Now, prime cost, right? Labor plus cogs equals prime. I believe that has to be at 60%. [00:24:37] Some people believe it should be a 55%. If you can get it to 55%, great. All the best to you. I fully support that. But it's got to be at least at 60. [00:24:47] So if you've got, you live in a state that's very expensive labor wise, like California, maybe your labor can never get to 30. Maybe it's really got to be at 35 or 37 or 38, maybe work in fine dining. And so it's a people business where you've got tons of people on the floor. So maybe it's going to be at 35 or 37 or, or 38%, that's fine. But you have to make up for it in your cost of goods sold, meaning you've got a price and portion appropriately so that your cogs, right? If your labor is going to be a 38, your cogs got to be at 22 because 22 plus 38 equals 60. That's a good frame of reference. And again, everything else that you spend money on should be at about 20% of revenue. Now this goes back to rent and insurance and all your utilities, right? Rent's a big one that people get killed. [00:25:30] Killed with the number you often hear is 8%. We don't want rent to be any more than 8% of our total revenue. [00:25:37] And if you think about that, it's 8%. You got another 12% for your utilities, your insurance, your paper products, your marketing, your PR agency, all of that. There's a lot to spend money on in a restaurant, which is why you need that rent to be at about 8% of revenue. So when we talk about a path to profitability, you have to understand on paper how you make, let's say, 20%, whatever it is that you need to make, that's fine for me. I think it should be 20. I think you should know how you get there. Now, the way that most people do look at their p. L. Is they say the path to profitability is to make as much money as possible and to keep our expenses as low as possible. And so we can maximize what's left over at the end. The surplus. The surplus is profit. And while, yes, on paper, that is the recipe for profit, I don't think it ever works out that way. You've got to be more methodical, more intentional about how you do it. That's largely what I help people with in the mastermind that I run. If you need help getting intentional about it, about being more specific with it, then please set up a call with me. You know the address. RestaurantStrategyPodcast.com Schedule. You'll chat with me or somebody else from my team. They'll talk to you about your business. They'll talk to you about how the program works. But that specifically, basically something we focus on in that program. You could certainly do this on your own, but if you need some guidance, then please set up a call. [00:26:54] You need a path to profitability. You need to know on paper what your path is, how much revenue you need to make and where you need to. How you need to limit your expenses specifically to make a solid return. I use 20% because I think that's across other industries, not just ours. That's a good place to start. Not saying 40 or 50%, right? Just 20%. And I think if we challenge ourselves to think beyond 7, 8, 10%, beyond even 15%, I think it's really great. Also, I'd love for you to aim for 20, fall short and hit 16 or 17. I think it'll. I think it'll be awesome. I have plenty of clients that do that, that on their way to 20. They're falling a little bit short and they're hitting 16, but it's a way better than 8. So that's where we start our conversation. They're going back to basics. [00:27:40] Operationally, we have to really talk about path to profitability. Next, we got to talk about leadership. All problems in our restaurants are leadership problems. This is something that I coach on all the time. I say, let's assume it's our fault if we go forward with that mentality. We say, whatever's wrong in your restaurant, it's our fault. It's your fault. It's not your staff, right? So here's the thing. My staff is so lazy, they always show up late. Number one. My question is, why did you hire a lazy, lazy staff? Number two, why do you let people be lazy? Number three, why do people think that they can get away with this? Why do people think that they can show up late to your restaurant? They show up late because you let them show up late. And now I understand, especially when we're talking about people, it's been a crisis this last year. [00:28:24] People will quit in the drop of a hat. I understand that. [00:28:28] That's why we need true leadership. From the beginning. You have to understand why you exist. So my friend Sean Walsheff always talks about this. We gave a talk last year in Los Angeles together. We talked about finding your two whys. Two most important questions you can answer in your business are the two whys. Why do you exist? And why should anyone else care, right? So the first question, why should you? Why do you exist? Is pretty straightforward. Meaning, why do you do what you do? Why do you get out of bed every day? [00:28:56] The second question, of course, is, why should anyone care that that's how you spend your life, that that's why you get out of bed? And I think if you answer those two questions, and those really go hand in hand with some of the marketing conversations we held earlier in this conversation, I told you there's a relationship between marketing and operations. But why do you do what you do, right? Why do you exist, and why should anyone else care? Because most people don't care about your business. They don't care whether you're successful or not. They care whether they're successful or not. So if you can create a business that helps them be successful at whatever they need to be successful at, you will find success. This is my favorite quote of all time, is by a guy named Zig Ziglar. The late, great Zig Ziglar. He was a sales guru, public speaker. He wrote a million books. If you don't know Zig, it's worth looking at, looking into him. But he wrote this book, and he says he wrote this in one of his books. He wrote the the Art of Closing the Sale. [00:29:48] He put this quote, and he says, you can get anything in life. You want as long as you help enough other people get anything they want so you can get anything you want in life as long as you help enough other people get what they want in life. [00:30:04] I think it's a really great quote because it brings empathy to the table. It gets us thinking not about ourselves, but about other people. How can I help others as much as possible, and if I help enough other people by nature, they will give me more business. [00:30:19] They will provide for me and my family. That's true for me and my small business. And I promise you, it's true for you and your small business. If you can get people bagel, sandwich and a coffee while they dash off to make their train, you will be helping them succeed, right? If you give people a great place to have a, you know, pizza dinner on Friday night where they can celebrate with their family and just enjoy a quick win, you will be helping. You will help them succeed. You can help them succeed in whatever it is, in whatever kind of place you are and whoever you cater to. [00:30:47] But leadership is really about that. It's figuring out who are you here to help and how can you help as many people as possible. Now, here's the beauty part about being a leader is we help our staff and we help our customers. So we help our customers in very specific ways, and we help our staff in very specific ways. [00:31:05] Leadership is about understanding who you're helping and the ways in which you're helping them. And if you can get really clear on that, right? Really clear on your two why's, and really clear on the. On the help that you provide, the support you provide, the opportunities that you provide, I promise you, you will be successful, more successful than you've, than you've ever dreamed. So leadership begins with taking responsibility for looking in the mirror and saying, whatever's going wrong is my fault. It's also up to me to change it. There's no magic bullet, right? And here's the beauty part. When people come to me, right, Some of the problems are external, many of them are internal. [00:31:43] And hiring me, right? So coming into my coaching program, hiring me as a coach, working with me, is about me helping you solve the problem, right? [00:31:52] All I'm asking you to do is the same thing I ask all of my coaching clients to do. Take responsibility. Whatever's going wrong, it's your fault. Assume it's your fault. And of course, it's not all your fault. But if you assume responsibility for it, you will also assume responsibility for finding the solution. Because if you are the problem, then you are the only one who can solve it. I promise you taking that approach will change your business. [00:32:18] Finally. Then when we talk about operations and there's a ton we can talk about to get into the nuts and bolts, the nitty gritty. I'm just talking about big picture, huge things. You need to think in terms of systems and goals. Everything you do in the, in the, in your business is about systems and goals, about setting proper goals. And I always talk about the smart goal framework. SMART is an acronym. S, M A R T. It stands for specific, measurable, assignable, relevant and time bound. It basically says every goal you set should be a smart goal. It should be specific, it should be measurable, it should be assignable, right? So somebody's responsible for. [00:32:57] Should be relevant to the success of the business, and it should be time bound. There should be a D deadline on it. We're gonna do the following things to achieve the following goal within the following time frame, right? So now what are those things? What are those things that we do to achieve the goal? Well, that's the system, right? So we set goals, we set smart goals. Then we put a system in place to help us achieve our goal. A system is just a repeatable set of actions. We do the following things to try to achieve the following goal. At the end of the set time frame, we look back at to see whether the things that we did or the things that we tried to do ended up achieving the goal we set out to achieve. Again, specific, measurable, assignable, relevant and time bound. That's how we set goals. And then we put systems in place to try to achieve those goals. A system is a repeatable set of action. If it's repeatable, it's replicable. If it's replicable, it's scalable. Scalable, meaning you then scale. You can remove yourself from, from that action, from that activity. You can remove yourself from a certain part of the business or the business entirely. If it's a set of actions that need to be repeated, because you can write that down, you can manage people for that, you can teach people how to do what you need them to do that will allow you to open a second and a third and a fourth and a tenth restaurant. Because you can't possibly be in more than one place at once. [00:34:18] So if you're at this restaurant, who's at the other restaurant? You need to show the people, the other restaurant how to do what you are doing at this restaurant. [00:34:25] So you need to think in terms of systems and goals. And I know people talk about sops and all of this, etc, etc, it's only as deep as what are we trying to achieve? What do we do to achieve that goal? Meaning I'm trying to provide great service. That's the goal. We define what great service looks like and then we put a plan into place. So the way that we're going to provide great service is to hire well, is to train effectively, is to manage our team in a certain way, is to make sure they follow the set of the steps of service, right? A set of requirements that they do each and every time, and we manage quality by the following to all of that is part of the system that you put into place to help you achieve the goal of providing great service. You can do this for every aspect of your business and I promise you, it's another one of those things. If you think in terms of systems and goals, you will change your business. Last thing I wanted to say about this is that everybody who comes into my program, the Mastermind program, I run, I always tell them it's not therapy. It's not, it's group coaching, but it's not group therapy. [00:35:28] Everything is results oriented and I would urge you to do the same with your business. Whether you're going to join a mastermind program, whether you're going to work with a consultant or a coach, or whether, whether you're going to do this on your own, think in terms of what you need to happen and what you're going to do to make that thing happen, Right? Everything is about the result. I need to achieve 20% profits every single month. I'm going to do the following things to help me do that, to make sure I achieve that. And the things you do either work or they don't work. All of that is super important. So that's what this episode is all about. Going back to basics on both the marketing side and the operation side. As always, I appreciate you taking time out of your week to be here. One final, one final plug for the Mastermind program. If you're listening to this stuff and you're going, yeah, that sounds really good, I could use help, could use guidance. If you're on the fence. If you just want to learn more, if you're just curious, set up a call. It's 30 minutes, it's totally free and there's no pressure to join. [00:36:24] Visit restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule grab some time on the calendar. Set up a call with either me or one of the other coaches that I work with and we'll, we'll walk you through the program. We'll learn more about your business. We'll see if you're a good fit. And again, if you want to go on your own, use this episode as the framework, as the blueprint. This is everything I believe. Again, I appreciate you being here, and I will see you next time.