[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, what's going on? Chip Close here, host of the restaurant Strategy podcast. We're in the middle of a 10 episode arc sharing crazy ideas, crazy ideas for you to implement in your restaurant. Why? Because I think we have to be bold enough to think outside the box. I think we have to be willing to iterate and evolve. The restaurant of 100 years from now will not look like the restaurant 100 years ago.
I think the model we mostly use has gone unchanged for a couple hundred years and I don't think it is sustainable. Over the course of these 10 episodes, I'm sharing a bunch of reasons why I think it's unsustainable, why we have to change. And over the course of these 10 episodes, I'm talking about a bunch of crazy ideas to get you to change things that I think you should think about. Today's crazy idea is, what if we came up another product, right? So the idea that we'd have a dining room and we bring everybody into the dining room and we give them a menu and we say, hey, this is what I'm prepared to make make for you today. What if we rethought that? What if we made it look a lot more like the Private Chef model?
[00:01:04] Speaker B: All of 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.
[00:01:29] Speaker C: Foreign.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. I am your host of this restaurant strategy podcast. We do two episodes every single week, all meant to help you level up, to build a more profitable and sustainable business. You know, I wrote a book. It's called the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. I give talks all over the country. I host a coaching program called the P3 Mastermind, where I work directly with owners and operators to help show them, teach them the systems to help them level up and be more profitable. I also host two live events every single year. The next one is coming up. I've talked a lot about this, but in case you haven't heard, the P3 Profitability Summit happens in Fort Worth, Texas, October 19th, 20th and 21st, 2025. We cap the event at 100. It sells out every single time. At the time of this recording, we have less than 30 tickets left. If you have never been to one of these events, you have to get there. It's two and a half days the general admission tickets get you into Monday and Tuesday Both days of education.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: 10 to 6 both days.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: It also gets you into the party on Monday night. So food, music, open bar. All of that is provided. All of that is included as part of your ticket price. If you buy the VIP ticket you get all of that plus catered lunch on Monday Tuesday so you get extra facetime with me and my team. Another chance to ask more questions. You also get a VIP welcome dinner on Sunday night. I promise you it's not going to be crappy. It's going to be a proper dinner where we sit down and connect and get to kick things off the right way. And then you are going to get a four week workshop. Four hour long sessions all about increasing check average. It's for you, yes. It's for your managers, yes. But mostly it is for your servers and your bartenders. A way to teach them all the things that you are going to learn in Texas and show them a way to implement them. I promise you it'll be a way to get them more money and you more money. All of that is included in the VIP ticket. Go to chip close.com C H I P K L O S E to learn more about the event. There is also a direct link in the show notes. Go check it out now.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: Are you tired of juggling schedules, tracking hours, worrying about HR compliance and dealing with all those last minute no shows? Well, it's time to say goodbye to the headaches and hello to Time Forge. Time Forge is a labor management solution designed for the fast paced world of restaurants with product offerings ranging from recruitment to to retention of your team members. With Time Forge, you can simplify employee scheduling with automated AI schedules based on sales, weather and other events. You can track attendance and labor costs in real time, keeping up with complex labor laws like Fair Work Week and meal penalties. You can recruit staff who live near your stores from our more than 11 million hourly job seekers. They have 11 million plus job seekers on their platform. You can pay employees their wages and tips on a daily basis after every shift. And you can communicate proactively with your staff using messaging, surveys and more. And that's not all. Time Forge integrates seamlessly with most POS systems, giving you full visibility into labor and sales performance and suggesting when you should staff up or staff down. Whether you manage one location or dozens, timeforge saves you money, time and stress so you can focus on what really matters, delivering exceptional service and growing your business. Thousands of restaurants trust Time Forge, so why not you Visit Time forge.com RestaurantStrategy today and see how Time Forge can help your team and your restaurant run like clockwork again. Time forged.com Restaurant strategy as always, that link is in the show notes Pop Menu has reimagined the restaurant. They're breaking the mold of the menu, taking the kitchen doors right off the hinges and serving up their most comprehensive technology solution yet. Pop Menu Max. It comes with the previous ingredients that we've talked about here on the podcast, right Websites designed with SEO marketing tools that help keep you top of mind with guests, and of course that patented interactive menu technology.
This new recipe brings automated phone answering to the table, third party online order aggregation, wait listing and more.
Pop Menu's phone answering technology, for example, has your ringing phones covered with AI. The simple questions that used to keep your phone line tied up will now be handled by the computer without having.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: To pull a staff member away from.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Your in person hospitality. So all those questions that people ask can be answered by the AI server, by the AI phone answering service. So no more missed reservations, no more people asking for your hours or if there's parking or if you've got a gluten free whatever.
Also no more missed revenue. And that's just the beginning. You have a passion for food. Pop Menu has a passion for technology. Together that's a recipe for restaurant success. And now even more digital ingredients are in their technology pantry. And Pop Menu is helping restaurants attract, engage, remarket and transact with their guests on a whole new level. Trust me, if you're a restaurant owner, you need to look at Pop Menu to take your business to the next level. For a limited time only, get a hundred dollars off your first month. Plus you get to lock in one flat unchanging monthly rate. Go to pop menu.com RestaurantStrategy to claim the offer. That's $100 off your first month by visiting p o p m e n u.com RestaurantStrategy as always, that link is in the show notes.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Okay, so we're talking about these crazy ideas which I don't think are that crazy. I think we have to be willing to think outside the box to again, to reiterate, to reinvent the this industry, this model. I think we have to be willing to evolve the model because the model we use has been around for, I don't know, 200, 250 years. But restaurants and all the other different models have been around for thousands of years.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: If you look back in ancient Persia.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: And ancient China and other ancient parts of the world, certainly across Europe, there are different ways that restaurants were run. If you go to Pompeii, right? So if anybody's been to Italy and gone to Pompeii, you visit the restaurants there, which look a lot like our quick service restaurants. They look like a deli. They were mainly soups and bre breads and things. But what happened is that they were for the poor, because the affluent, if you were sort of upper middle class or above, you had lunch at home every day and you had private chefs, personal chefs who would cook you their meals. So the only people, again, 2,000 years ago, in ancient, you know, Roman empire, in Pompeii, the only people who went out to restaurants were people who couldn't travel all the way home because maybe they lived on the outskirts of town and it was too far to travel from their work. So there were restaurants there meant to give sort of soups and breads and things like that. And again, you can go see the restaurants. They're amazing to see, especially if you're in the hospitality industry. But then you say, well, where did the affluent people? There were no sit down restaurants. And they said, no, those people could afford to get a ride home. Or those people worked in the home or close to home, they didn't have very far to travel. Or again, they lived in the center of town. Right? It's the same thing now. People got fancy townhouses and penthouses in the middle of the. Of Manhattan. And the people who are less well off travel in from the outer boroughs. Right? Certainly anybody in the restaurant industry knows in New York City what it means to work in Manhattan and live in the outer boroughs. I did that for 20 years.
So when you look at the way things are done, my crazy idea today is let's look at this private chef model. And what's really important here is that if we look at our business as a business, meaning a way to generate revenue, a way to make profit, and we look at our assets, meaning the resources that we have available to us, meaning we have chefs, we have cooks, we have servers, we have bartenders, we have bussers, we have dishwashers, we have managers. These are our resources. And we have tools, right? We have plates and pots and pans and sauces and recipes and all of that.
My whole idea is getting you to rethink the ways that we serve people. The easiest and most obvious example I can give is the pandemic. So before the pandemic, if you had a sit down restaurant, meaning the only way you made money was if people came in, had your Food paid you and left. Then you were absolutely screwed. In March of 2020, when the pandemic hit and dine in restaurants were shut down, everybody did the pivot. Everybody figured out how to do takeout and delivery. So even if you had a restaurant that didn't really do takeout and delivery, you figured out a way to do takeout and delivery. Yes, there were a small subset of restaurants that just completely closed their doors for those three months or six months. But most restaurants made the pivot. And I said I hated at the time. I hate at that word pivot, because I do what it is, it's an evolution. That's what these ten crazy ideas are. It's talking about how we evolve. And for me, it comes down to the way that we serve people. So when we look back to the pandemic, we serve people in a certain way because that's what they wanted. And when they could no longer have that, they still needed something. And so the smart restaurants just figured out a way to serve that new need.
I think what we have to be willing to do is to look for problems and solve those problems or to create demand for products that we can serve them. And I think a lot of restaurants leave a lot of money on the table. Yep. A lot of restaurants serve dinner in their dining rooms. Maybe they have a private dining room, maybe they do some catering. But most don't have other arms like private chef services.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: If I had a fine dining restaurant, it would be right there on my restaurant. Here's all the ways to experience this restaurant. You can dine with us. Here's the menu. We have a private dining room available. Here's the menu. We do off site catering and we do private in home chef services that maybe you just had a private dining chef, maybe you just had a private chef on staff there or a sous chef who doubled as this in home private chef. Somebody who was good with people, somebody who was dynamic, who was good in. In small group settings like that. Why would that not be a product you would sell so much? What we do is we have services to offer and successful business productize their services, productize the things that they can do. When you productize it, you can monetize it.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: It becomes a revenue stream.
Running a restaurant means juggling a lot. Staffing, inventory, customer service and finances. Sales tax has to be done. And while no one plans to miss a deadline or miscalculate a payment, mistakes happen.
When those happen, they can lead to penalties, fines, and yeah, added stress. That's why there's Davo by Avalara. Davo integrates with your point of sale system and automatically sets aside sales tax daily, giving you a clear view of your actual cash flow. Then, when it's time to file, Davo files and pays your sales tax on time in full, guaranteed. No more last minute scrambles or costly mistakes. Just seamless automation.
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[email protected] RestaurantStrategy I will add in here. This fits in perfectly with what we're about to talk about again. Davosalestax.com RestaurantStrategy and yes, that link is in the show notes.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: So if you've got a restaurant, an upscale restaurant, a fine dining restaurant, a casual restaurant, why would you not offer other ways to serve people? Because maybe some people can't travel. Maybe for certain things, people don't want to travel. Maybe people just want to be at home but have really great cocktails, really great food they want to be served and they're willing to pay a premium for that. And P.S. it's not about charging an arm and a leg. It's just charging what you need to charge to properly execute that. I'm telling you, it's easier than you think. That's my crazy idea. My crazy idea is why do we not do it? Why doesn't every upscale and fine dining restaurant offer this as a service? Because I promise you, your people, or at least a subset of your people, desperately want this. It is crazy to me, absolutely crazy that you would not do this. So while this might sound like a crazy idea, man, what if we did this?
[00:13:53] Speaker B: It's not. I think it's crazy.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Just like last episode with dynamic pricing. I think it's crazy we don't already do it. As we move forward, you have to look for different new ways to serve your people. The model is changing. The cost of goods are getting to the point where people are going to think twice about coming out on a Wednesday night with a family of five. It's just unsustainable. And when we can't fill our restaurants on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I promise it's going to get very, very difficult. Labor is getting such a where it is difficult to staff up. We've talked a lot about that, about changing the model, about how we schedule, about how we changing the model with how we actually staff and serve our people. This is another revenue stream to send a server and a bartender, or a server, a busser and a private chef out to somebody's home to cook for an eight table of eight or 10 people. That's not crazy to me. It's crazy that we don't do it already.
You have to be willing to think outside the box. My words, not gospel. These are not the only ideas, but these are the things that occur to me and so I'm sharing them with you again. These are 10 shorty episodes meant to get you thinking to stepping outside the box. Final reminder before I let you go that the P3 profitability summit is coming. It is nearly sold out. You learn more by clicking the link in the show notes. I appreciate you guys taking time out of your week to be here. Thank you very much and I will see you next time.
[00:15:15] Speaker C: Time.
Sam Sa Sam.
