Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, what's going on? Chip Close here. This is the Restaurant Strategy podcast. It's the summer, so we do this thing every summer. We do a 10 episode arc revolving around a theme. This year's theme is Crazy ideas. Crazy ideas for how we might want to evolve our restaurants. Here's my crazy idea for today. What if our restaurant was just a hollow open shell and all we did every night was offer a series of pop ups? Maybe we helped produce those pop ups. Or maybe we just acted more like a landlord and rented out our space to a series of pop ups. What would that look like from a business perspective? Let's get into that on today's episode of Restaurant Strategy.
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.
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is the Restaurant Strategy podcast. We do two episodes every single week. Ways to help you level up building more profitable restaurant, therefore a more sustainable business. You know, I run a coaching program, it's called the P3 Mastermind, where I work with owners and operators every single week to help them level up and increase the profitability of their restaurants. And I give talks, I write books. You find me here on the podcast. You find me on social media. I also host two in person events, two opportunities every single year to be in a room with me for multiple days. The next one is coming up. The P3 profitability summit. Happens in Fort Worth, Texas October 19th, 20th and 21st. That's 2025. We've got two different levels of tickets, either general admission tickets or VIP tickets. Both have incredible benefits. The event is nearly sold out. It sells out every single time we host this event. If you've never been to one of these event events, you have to get yourself to this event. You go to my website, chip close.com c h I p k l o s e dot com. You can click the button that says Summit and explore that whole experience. You watch a video that we shot last year when we did this event in St. Louis. You can also click the direct link that's in the show notes. It will take you right to the page so you can explore everything about the event again. General admission tickets available. VIP tickets available. This is an event you do not want to miss. Go find that link in the show notes.
AI you love to go out to eat. So as A guest. What's your biggest pet peeve when you're trying to choose a place to eat?
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Yeah, as the father of two children, I can't leave the house for less than $30 an hour.
My wife has celiac. So when we're going to make a a dining decision, I live and die by that menu. I'm in there researching what's available, what can my wife eat? What can we share? What do I get to eat off of her plate? Um, and so that menu is just a crucial part of all decision making for me as a consumer. It's why at Marquee, we focus so much on our menus, our menu integration, so that as operators, your menu that lives in your point of sale that you want customers to see is available and up to date everywhere.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: To learn more about Marquee, go to marquee.com m a r q I I.com to learn more about this and all of the incredible features they have.
Create a safer, more efficient kitchen and better protect your bottom line with restaurant technologies. Its total oil management solution helps minimize the dangers that come with traditional oil management, such as oil burns, spills, and slip and fall accidents. The end to end automated oil management system delivers filters, monitors, and recycles your cooking oil, taking one of the dirtiest jobs out of the kitchen and no upfront cost.
Control the kitchen chaos with restaurant technologies and make your kitchen safer while maximizing efficiency. Visit RTI Inc.com can email customer care at RTI Inc.com or call 888-796-4997 to get started.
All of those links will be in the show notes.
Okay, so we're in the middle of a 10 episode arc. We're talking all about crazy ideas. My crazy idea today is what if you had a shell of a restaurant that really just did a series of pop ups? And maybe you were one or a couple of these pop ups, but maybe you just acted like a landlord. What if you just rented out the space to visiting chefs? What if you had the bartenders, you had the servers, you had the cooks, and you just executed on a new menu. Maybe you would do this for a month at a time. So you had 12 different menus over the course of the year. Maybe you did this for a quarter at a.
So your restaurant changed quarterly. So for three months at a time, you focus on a certain restaurant. Maybe the chef brings in all of their staff. Maybe it's some combination of all this. Maybe another way to do it is you say, hey, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is this chef and Thursday, Friday, Saturday is this other chef, and Sunday is some third chef. Maybe your restaurant was just a neutral ground so that you could receive all this stuff, and is that a more productive model? Now, you'd have to do a lot of effort to market these changes, but what happens is you're creating scarcity because this is only available for a limited time and limited nights of the week. You also there create urgency. You can't wait. This thing's only here. It's here today, gone tomorrow, or it's here this month and then gone after that. So you have to get here now.
Maybe, maybe this is the way forward, maybe the way we've been doing it, where we conceive of a restaurant and we just try to run that restaurant forever and ever and ever, and then it dies a slow death, six years, eight years, 12 years into it. And maybe if you're lucky, you got a restaurant that stands the test of time, that lasts for 30 or 40 years, and really that says more about your landlord and the lease you signed a long time ago.
But there's gotta be, if not a better way, a different way. And I challenge you, I challenge all of us to rethink it, to rethink how we think about rent, whether we are the tenant or the landlord, to think of ourselves. I've talked about this a while back. Way back, in the beginning of this podcast, I talked about how we run businesses, not restaurants. You are business owners, not restaurant owners. If you are a restaurant owner, if I say, hey, you're a restaurant owner, you immediately apply all the things. You think about a restaurant owner. You think about other restaurant owners you've known. You think about all the restaurants you've ever been to, all the restaurants you've ever worked at. You don't think of yourself as a business owner. What happens is a business owner is always looking for opportunities. They're always looking for ways to serve an audience and a way to create demand for the things that they have, right? So it's either filling that demand or creating demand or some combination of the two. And when you say, I'm not a restaurant owner, I am a business owner, which all of you guys are, whether you acknowledge it or not.
When you say, I'm not a restaurant owner, I'm a business owner, you will begin thinking outside the box and finding alternative revenue streams. You will start rethinking the way you've been doing things forever and ever and ever. The way things have been done is not necessarily the way that they will be done in the future.
Again, the model of 100 years ago will not be the same as the model 100 years from now. That's inevitable. With the cost of goods increasing, with rent increasing, with the cost of labor increasing, it is inevitable that this industry will change. And we can either boo hoo that and say, well, I like restaurants. I get to come in with my family and eat a meal and clean. They clean up for me and I go home. I don't think that's gonna be a reality anymore. Certainly not at a price point that we've been used to.
When you look at all these chains that they're frozen food, you know, and all of that, I don't think there is as much, no pun intended, I don't think there's as much of an appetite for that moving forward. And we're watching in real time all these chains that were giants in the 90s and early 2000s, we're watching them struggle. Some of them are reinventing themselves, but a lot of them are struggling across the board.
I think people know more about health and wellness and food and the quality of food and the power of intelligently responsibly grown food in local and eating with the seasons, not eating asparagus in October. I think we're learning that. I think people are learning more.
When you know better, you do better.
Restaurants are changing. Food is getting more expensive, rent is getting more expensive, our labor is getting more expensive. And all that's good because we are a developed nation and to expect people to work for 213 an hour and be happy about it isn't necessarily a forever thing.
So here's my crazy idea for today.
What if we were just a series of pop ups, right? What if it wasn't just one restaurant that we conceived of and we tried to make work come hell or high water?
Doesn't a pop up sort of concept, doesn't that give you more flexibility, a way to stay nimble in a changing world? That's what we're talking about. The world is changing. The world has been changing for 10 years, supercharged over the last five years, since the pandemic. But make no mistake, it will continue to change in profound ways. And we have to be willing, we have to be strong enough, bold enough to think outside the box and do things differently. That's what this whole, that's what this whole arc is about.
Challenging you to reinvent, to reiterate, to continue to evolve the restaurant.
The bottom line is we do food service. We make food for people, people who don't know how to do it, don't like to do it, want someone else to do it.
That's what we do.
We do not serve restaurants. We are food service.
Being willing to change the model, to rethink the way we serve people food, I think is going to be the key to our success.
I think you are able to be more nimble than you realize and I would challenge all of you to start thinking about this. And man, even if you tried this idea out in a small way, maybe in the fall, every Sunday night you're working with a traveling chef and you bring in a series of pop ups. Every Sunday night in the fall, man, you could do that or maybe you plan for it for next January. January, February, March are pretty dead, especially on Sunday nights or Monday nights. So we're going to do special pop up events there. I'm not totally overhaul your entire restaurant, but these are ways to keep your restaurant relevant and fresh and new and to breathe new life into it. And that I think is what we're all looking for.
Again, you know, I hate this word, this term, razor thin profit margins. We have a business, we have resources, we have assets. It's our job to serve our people in new ways, in ways that they're asking for and in ways they can't yet tell.
Again, there's that famous quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, if I had given people what they want, I would have come up with a faster horse.
He thought beyond and he said they just want to get from here to there faster. They didn't know that that was a car. They thought the only way to do that was horse, a carriage, horse and buggy.
He gave them a better, more reliable, safer way to get from A to B.
People want to be served. They can't possibly know in what ways they need to be served. And that's what this crazy idea AR is all about. Again, one final reminder to go and get your tickets. At least check it out. The P3 profitability summit. This happens once a year. We sell it out every time we do it. Last year it was in St. Louis. If you go to the website, you can watch a video. You can see the crowd that came out. Again. We packed that silly. That room was packed with owners and operators all over the country who were ready to level up and increase the profitability of their restaurants. That event is highly tactical, actionable. It's a series of playbooks and scripts we teach you that you can implement in your restaurant to make an immediate impact on the profitability of your restaurant. There's a link in the show notes. You can click that and go explore. Tickets again. As of the time of this recording, less than 30 spots left. We've sold, I think 74 at this moment. If you want to be there, if you've never been there, you have to get there. If you want to be there, I want you to be there again. I appreciate you guys being here, listening to what I have to say. I hope, hope this sparks more ideas. Go out and be bold enough to think outside the box. I appreciate you very much and I will see you next time.
