Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] We know when it comes to marketing our restaurants, perhaps the most powerful tool at our disposal is word of mouth.
[00:00:08] I know that, you know that we talk about that a lot. But I spend a considerable amount of my time traveling the world giving talks, so giving speeches and keynotes to rooms filled with restaurant owners and operators. And I'll often ask people, when it comes to restaurant marketing, I said, if word of mouth is our most powerful tool, then why don't we have a strategy for it? Why does nobody have a plan for it? Now, I wrote a book called the Restaurant Marketing Mindset and I have a specific way of thinking about how we market our restaurants. And this is one area where I think I differ from a lot of other people. If word of mouth is so crucial, then we need to plan for it. We need to do things that will make that happen.
[00:00:48] Good food, good service is no longer enough. So if you want to know how to spark word of mouth, how to get people talking about you and your restaurant and why people should go to to you, see you and your restaurant, then that's what we're going to talk about. On today's episode, we're going to talk about how we spark word of mouth in our restaurants. Don't go anywhere.
[00:01:08] 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 foreign.
[00:01:39] Thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated to helping you build a more profitable and sustainable business. Every single episode, two episodes every week, I leverage my 25 years in the industry to help you build that more profitable and more sustainable business. I also have a group coaching program. It's called the P3 mastermind. We've grown this group from one group all the way up to four unique groups. Currently over 150 people enrolled in the program. We target consistent, predictable 20% returns. If you are stuck making single digit profit margins, it is worth A conversation. 30 minutes, absolutely free. The way you start that conversation is to grab time on the calendar. Visit restaurant strategypodcast.com schedule grab time in the calendar. You'll chat with me or someone from my team and let's figure out if you're a fit again. RestaurantStrategyPodcast.com Schedule let's see if it makes sense for you to talk about the P3 mastermind, my coaching program. As always, you'll find that link in the show notes, what's the food cost for your third best selling entree? You don't know? With Margin Edge, you could know instantly. Margin Edge is a complete restaurant management software that I like to recommend to all of the P3 members, all the clients I work with. Why? Because. Because it helps them improve profitability. With Margin Edge, you just get to snap pictures of your invoices as they come in and you get real time data in every area of your business. You can see plate costs in real time. You get daily P&LS. Your inventory count sheets are automatically updated. It saves you a ton of time and lets you make informed decisions. So I got a client, P3 member, gather brewing down outside of San Antonio. They started using Margin Edge a month after they joined my program and within one month of them bringing on Margin Edge, their food costs went from 38% to 28%. It was incredible savings. That's 10 points that drop straight to the bottom line. There's a reason I recommend Margin Edge to so many of the P3 members. It's because I know it works. If you're interested in learning more or you want to see how Gather brewing went from 38% to 28% food costs, head over to margin edge.com chip there's an incredible video there that talks about their story, talks about their journey with the Plat platform. Again, margin edge.com chip see a really great. See a really great story about the folks at. At Gather Brewing. Go do that now. Of course, that link is in the show, not.
[00:04:41] Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close and this is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated to helping you build a more profitable restaurant. Each week I leverage my 25 years in the industry to help you build that more profitable and sustainable business. I also work with owners and operators all over the all over the country through my P3 mastermind program. So this is a group coaching format. To date, We've got over 150 members enrolled in the program, spread across four different groups. Everyone has the same thing in common. They've been open for a while, so you gotta be open for at least a year. They're doing at least a million dollars in annual revenue. This program is really geared towards restaurants of a certain size. But every single person in the program struggles with profitability. They want to dial profits in specifically so they can target consistent, predictable 20% returns. If that sounds like you, you've been around for a while, you're doing a significant amount of revenue, but you struggle with profitability. Then I want you to get in touch. The way you start this conversation is go to our website restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule grab time on the calendar. You'll talk with either me or someone from my team to learn all about the program we run. You get to ask questions of us, we get to learn more about you and your restaurant and we see if you're a fit again. RestaurantStrategyPodcast.com Schedule that link is in the show notes.
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[00:06:55] Now today we're talking all about word of mouth, right? If the way word of mouth used to work, right, is that people come in, they've got great food, great service, of course, then they go tell people, tell their friends, their family, their colleagues at work. And yes, some of that might happen. But what I like to focus on with all of my owners and operators that I work with is the things, the areas where we have agency, the things we can do to make certain things happen. So yeah, people are going to come in, have a great time and tell other people about it, great. There's very little you can do to make that happen.
[00:07:26] But on the other side, there's a lot you can do to make people talk, right? Specifically by leveling up, by upgrading the experience itself. I talk a lot about Seth Godin. Seth Godin has been a great inspiration for me. He's a bestselling author, a keynote speaker, a marketing guru, and he talks a lot about the word remarkable. He wrote a book called Purple Cow, that for any restaurant owner out there who has not read it, Purple Cow, you can get it anywhere. You get your books, you can get it on Amazon. It is a book you'll read in about two days.
[00:08:01] It's mercifully short and packed with Great stories, great insights in that book. Really, the whole premise of it says people talk about things that are remarkable. Literally, remarkable means worthy of remark. If it's not remarkable, there's no reason to talk about it. And I think so many restaurants out there struggle because there's nothing to say about it. I always talk about my baby bagel place down the street. My bagel place is good, it's fine. But I'm never going to talk about it. Except when I turn on the microphone and talk about how I'm never going to talk about it. Right? I'm never going to talk about it. The name is unremarkable. What they do is unremarkable. The way they fulfill orders is unremarkable. There's nothing interesting, unique, or elevated about that experience. And when I say elevated, I don't mean fancy or expensive. I mean there's nothing worthy of mention when it comes to the food there or my experience with that brand.
[00:08:58] And I think when it comes to sushi places, Chinese restaurants, Greek places, pizza shops, for the most part, pizza is. Pizza is pizza, Sushi is sushi is sushi. Chinese food is Chinese food is Chinese food. Until it's not. And I mean this with the absolute, absolute utmost respect for all of you listening and everything you do, you can do better. You owe it to yourselves to be better than you were yesterday.
[00:09:26] The way you do that is by making a commitment to be remarkable, to put things on the menu that are remarkable.
[00:09:36] Again, remarkable, meaning worthy of remark.
[00:09:39] Later in the episode, I'm going to give you, I don't know, half a dozen, 10 different examples of this. And I can, and I can share thousands if you really needed me to. I'm going to highlight a handful that really illustrate my point.
[00:09:53] But when it comes to this area, when it comes to what I need you to do, what I need you to do is make a commitment. Number one, acknowledge that maybe what you do is unremarkable. It's undifferentiated from any of your competitors in the market.
[00:10:11] Right? Why would I come to you as opposed to anyone else?
[00:10:16] Maybe because you're more convenient. You're closer to my house, you're closer to the subway or it's cheaper.
[00:10:23] All of those are that commodity mindset. And we've talked about this before, right? The commodity mindset says, all things being equal, the consumer will then make their decision based on one of three criteria. Convenience, familiarity, or price. So which one's closest, which one's most famous, which one's cheapest?
[00:10:44] And I'M sorry, at the independent level, where I think we all play, we can never be the closest, the most famous or the cheapest.
[00:10:52] Because if we got a burger place, there's a Burger King, there's a McDonald's, there's an in N Out, there's a Shake Shack for most people that they can get you closer. And P.S. any of those brands are more famous than than yours.
[00:11:05] So there's a good chance that most of those places are closer and more famous and maybe even cheaper.
[00:11:12] But even if they're not cheaper, they're closer and more famous.
[00:11:16] And even if you are then the cheapest, you're cutting into your margins. So you have to do that much more business just to make a living, which is no way to make a living.
[00:11:27] The way to combat this is to create something remarkable, create something that doesn't exist, something that people are willing to pay a little bit extra for and go a little bit out of their way for.
[00:11:39] I hope that makes sense. I hope that resonates when I use the sushi example, is that I can pretty much go into any sushi place on in this country and find a rainbow roll. I can get a spicy tuna roll, I can get a yellow tail scallion roll, which is fine. Maybe we say those are staples and they should be on the menu. But what do you have that I can't get?
[00:11:59] Or what would happen if you said, yeah, we don't serve spicy tuna rolls because we don't believe in it, or we don't serve rainbow rolls because we don't like them?
[00:12:07] Well, suddenly you've got a perspective and somebody says, oh, what do you have that's great. What we do instead is this. I don't know what this is.
[00:12:15] You know your business better than I do. But my guess is there's a this that we can talk about.
[00:12:21] I very rarely go out and get sushi and I'm like, oh, yeah, man, they had a spicy tuna roll, they had a rainbow roll, they had a spider roll. Who cares?
[00:12:30] Every sushi place I've ever been to has all those things.
[00:12:34] What I talk about when I go out to a certain sushi restaurant is what they did differently, what they did that was unique, that was more interesting than anything else out there.
[00:12:46] We were at a sushi place, not a fancy sushi place, but when you ordered or while you were looking, they brought you over a little hand roll. Just a little something. It wasn't totally packed and stuffed, but it was a hand roll. Just a little something to get you to get you going. It was a gift. Now, obviously, I hope that gift was baked into the cost of goods sold for everything else they sold so that they know. They knew they'd recover that cost. But it was a gift. And it was like, oh, these hand rolls are really good. And then it got me thinking in new directions. I very rarely will go and get a hand roll, but I started looking at the hand rolls. I'll say, oh, man, it's really good. What else they have here?
[00:13:23] I love that, like, crunchy seaweed paper. All of that.
[00:13:26] Perfect. It was different. I've never been to a sushi place that greeted me with a free hand roll that was worth talking about. And I did. I talked about it to my friends. I'm talking to you about it now.
[00:13:40] There are so many ways for you to get out of this box.
[00:13:44] So my challenge to all of you is how can you do something that's different? And now you don't have to revolutionize everything.
[00:13:52] You can just have a signature or a couple signatures that you do. Perfect example is the sushi place. The example I gave right before the break, their sushi restaurant was pretty much just like everybody else, but they gave everybody a free hand roll when they sat down and got settled. You sat down, they got everybody with water, they made sure they had a menu, and then they brought you a free hand roll. It was lovely. It was awesome. And I'm still talking about it. And I talked about it with my friends and colleagues and family because it was different. It was outside the box. So let me just share with you really quickly a bunch of examples and I hope you Google all of these. So first one, I use this example all the time, but David Burke. David Burke is a famous chef based here in New York. Now he's got restaurants all over the world. He is famous for this bacon on a clothesline, right? So about 30 years ago, he came up with this plating of bacon, right? You've been to restaurants where they have bacon as an appetizer. So this is two sticks in the air with a piece of clothesline in between them. And then he literally took clothespins and held up three pieces of bacon. They were thick, double cut bacon, right? They were peppered. They were, you know, torched. And what happens is that below, then he puts pickles and then he clips a little bit of a little sprig of rosemary on the end and he tortures the rosemary. And so it goes to the dining room. And it's not bacon laying flat on a plate, but it's bacon vertical. It smells good because bacon smells awesome. The rosemary smells great. And what happens is the bacon drippings drip off the bacon and onto the pickles. So number one, the thing that makes bacon not so good is how greasy it gets and how it starts congealing. So here the drippings are falling off, and then if they're gonna go somewhere, let's not waste them, let's have them drip on a, on a pickle. Because then the bacon fat with the, with the bitter, you know, the vinegar from the pickle is a really great combination. And then they serve them with these little kitchen shears. So instead of eating a whole piece of bacon, you literally just hold the bottom and you clip off a little piece. So you clip off little bite sized pieces and everybody clips off a little bit. It is genius. It look, it tastes great, it smells great. It's an ingenious presentation. And the service flourish, meaning the kitchen shears make it awesome. What happens is that it goes to the dining room and people are like, whoa, what is that?
[00:16:00] Server explains it. And they say, whoa, we got to get one of those for the table. Or the server says, welcome to the restaurant, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Also, we're famous for this. I always recommend getting one of these for the center of the table. So everyone gets appetizers and they put that one in the center of the table. So it's upping, check average, right? As it goes to the dining room. Looks good, smells great. It gets itself ordered more simply because people see it.
[00:16:20] And then what happened is it's really unique. So people take pictures of it and they send it to people. Because when have you ever seen bacon on a clothesline? This dish has been around for 30 years, and I still talk to plenty of people who have never been to one of his restaurants or have never seen it before. And now it's been copied, it's been duplicated. Other people have stolen the idea, but David Burke is the one who really invented it, right?
[00:16:40] They go through the dining room, they get ordered, and then they get their photo taken. They go on the Internet. Go on the Internet and type in bacon on a clothesline. You will see thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures. That's what I mean. This is the new word of mouth. It's not like I tell you about it as I take photos and videos and I post them or I text you, rather than saying, whoa, you'll never believe we just had this dish, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just send a picture to my mom. I said, you Wouldn't believe this dish.
[00:17:03] That's it. David Burke's bacon on a clothesline so clearly encapsulates this thing that I'm talking about. Black Tap. Black Tap is a craft burger place with Kraft beers on tap. But they are famous for their milkshakes. They're called Crazy shakes. They're these giant milkshakes that have like candy and cake on the top of them. They're huge. And what happens is that everybody gets a burger and a beer, but not everybody gets a milkshake or not everybody gets dessert, especially after a rich, heavy meal of burgers and beer. And this place said, man, we're going to make sure that everybody gets something else that they wouldn't normally order. So everyone goes to Black Tap for the crazy shakes, and those are the ones that get filmed. Again, type in Black Tap crazy shakes or Black Tap milkshakes into Google. You will see thousands and thousands and thousands of photos. This is how they get themselves talked about, because the milkshakes are remarkable. There's a restaurant in Times Square called Carmine's. Carmine's is famous because they're a family style restaurant. They do not serve individual portions of anything. Everything is served for the family. So you can't go there with two people. It's really hard. You got to go with 4, 6, 8, 18, 25, because you get, you get an eggplant parmesan and that's enough for six people. You get a spaghetti and meatballs, and it's an ent platter. It's huge. And what happens is that people can't believe the size of the portions. And they take pictures of it and they post them and it becomes something to talk about. And you say, well, I went to this Italian restaurant right in Times Square, but man, they're crazy famous for. Because there's no individual portions. Everything's family style. It gets itself talked about.
[00:18:29] Right. On the flip side, Alinea. Alinea is a three Michelin star restaurant, Chicago. It's chef Grant Achatz. He's famous for, among other things, the table dessert. So dessert at the restaurant is constructed on the table and you're literally given spoons and you literally eat right off the table. And then as a little extra gift, they bring you these sugar balloons that are filled with helium. So at the end of this very expensive, very high end meal, people press their lips to it and just suck in the helium, goes through the sugar. And then everybody's talking silly in a helium voice, this high, squeaky voice. And then what happens is that once all the helium's gone. You can actually eat the outer edge of the balloon. It's like a little piece of candy. It's unique. And again, you type in Alinea helium balloons or sugar balloons, you will see thousands of pictures and videos of people being silly and stupid at the end of their very fancy meal. It's something that gets talked about. How do you talk about a meal as unique as Alinea? They gave people a way to get it out there to spread the word. It is remarkable, right?
[00:19:32] On a simpler level, this is Shellfish Towers, right? So my brother works at a restaurant in Los Angeles, and what they do is that if nobody's ordered a shellfish tower in the first 45 minutes, the manager just picks a table in the dining room and sends out a shellfish tower as a gift. Number one, it makes the people feel amazing. They're like, oh, my God, I can't believe you just did that. But also, the restaurant knows, after being in business, I don't know, 70, 80 years, that shellfish towers sell more. Shellfish towers. They look great. They obviously, everything on there tastes great. And when they go through the dining room, people are like, oh, man, that looks really good. We should get one of those. They know that them just being in the dining room and people are like, oh, I'm not the only one ordering them. Because if you don't see anyone with them, you're like, oh, it feels like an indulgence, because they're not che, Right? But when you see them out there, you're like, oh, yeah, let's get one, too. They look so great. That'll be a lot of fun.
[00:20:18] Again, I can give you a thousand more examples, but I won't. You can think this through, but you have to be remarkable. If you want people to talk about you, you have to give them something to talk about. You can manufacture, you can manicure. The conversation that happens about you and your restaurant, you just have to make it a priority. So if we want to talk about word of mouth, we want to talk about getting people to talk about us. You got to give them something to talk about. In my opinion, we just don't do it nearly enough. We don't do it well enough. That's it. That's what I want to talk to you guys about today. Appreciate you being here as always. I will see you next time.
