[00:00:00] We're talking about stories, right? So let me tell you a story. There are 52 weeks in a year, and I spend roughly 20 to 25 of those every single year on the road, sometimes with family, on vacation, but often alone, sometimes with clients, right? So I go to different towns, cities, markets I have never been to. And every time I travel, I dine out a lot. For breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. I go to the bar, I get takeout. I sit in the dining rooms. And over the last year, certainly more than I can remember ever before in recent memory, these meals are poor to mediocre at best. The food is flat. It looks just like food everywhere else. The service is glitchy. It is unwelcoming. It is inattentive. Our restaurants are not that good anymore. And I'm talking about casual restaurants that can, at the very least, provide great, convenient, quick food with warm, friendly service. I get none of it. And at the highest level, even if the food is exceptional, the hospitality is flat.
[00:00:57] It's sort of perfunctory. We got a problem in our restaurants, and I think this comes down to a lack of hospitality, a lack of willingness to actually be hospitable and make people feel welcome, make people feel important.
[00:01:11] I want to talk about how we can make people feel a little bit important. And I want to highlight. I really want to hammer home this idea that you may know a lot about a handful of your guests, but you don't know anything about the majority of your guests. I want to hammer that home, and I want to talk about how we fix it. 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.
[00:02:00] Hey, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. I am your host here of the Restaurant Strategy podcast. Two episodes every single week, all meant to help you level up and build a more profitable and therefore more sustainable business. I give talks, I write books. I have a membership site. It's called Restaurant Foundations. But the number one way I know how to help independent restaurant owners increase the profitability of their restaurants is through my group coaching program. It's called the P3 mastermind. And six months and we can get you to 20% profits. Sounds crazy, right? But it happens. We've gotten. We've put hundreds and hundreds of people through this program. Go to RSprophet.com if you don't believe me, go check their testimonials. You'll learn what we do there. If any of this sounds interesting, click Grab some time on the calendar and chat with me or someone from my team. Rsprophit.com I am dead serious about helping you make more money in the year ahead. Rsprofit.com as always, you'll find that link in the show not Notes Ajinomoto is your answer to every busy dinner rush spent deep in the weeds. When hungry customers walk through your door, they expect good food, right? Good food that tastes homemade. But making every dish from scratch can cut into your profits. Certainly what we're talking about today, especially with the cost of ingredients and yes, the cost of labor. That's where Ajinomoto Foods comes in. Ajinimoto has a huge catalog of fast, easy to prep frozen Asian products that taste and look homemade. That includes classics like fried rice dumplings and onion rings and new trendy fusion plates like kimchi chicken pot stickers. See, Choosing Ajinimoto is choosing over 100 years of proven expertise in the food service space. Choose to save time. Choose to save money in your busy kitchen without compromising on the quality your customers have come to expect. Learn more about
[email protected] and yes, you'll find that link in the show Notes so this is top of mind because I just got back from a weekend away. I was actually away with my family for a long weekend. We had a great time and we had firmly mediocre meals and we had casual meals, we had takeout meals. We had one super fancy high end meal and it was all just mediocre. Even the super high end fancy meal which had exceptional food, really creative and inventive and all that and really cool wine pairings. And we did the non alcoholic pairing which had, you know, different kombuchas and other things like that. It was otherwise totally flat because the hospitality was missing. And I think it has to do with this lack of willingness to get to know us. The feeling that we should be lucky to be in the room and the food is enough. But guess what? Even me. I've been in the industry for 25 years. My wife was in the industry for 13 years.
[00:04:54] The food is not enough. The beverage is not enough. Who cares? I mean obviously it's gotta be there.
[00:04:59] But beyond that, it's how you make me feel welcome.
[00:05:03] Do you surprise me?
[00:05:05] Do you make me feel excited to be there? And I think more and more this thing is being missing. People either aren't interested in doing it, don't know how to do it right, or they just simply forget to do it. Or worse, they think they're doing it without ever realizing that they're really not doing it.
[00:05:22] There has to be a focus on hospitality. You have to want to get to know the people in your. Your restaurant. And without that, I mean, what are we doing? So I was at this restaurant. There were probably 30 covers on this night that I was there. Small, fancy, high end. This is a James Beard nominee, was super excited to go there. And everybody was treated the same, which, which is fine, democratic, but at some point, somebody has to go to Google and figure out who's in your dining room, right? That, that, that I'm in your dining room now. Now, who am I? I don't matter. It doesn't matter.
[00:05:56] But understanding that I'm an industry person, not even that I'm a consultant, a coach, that I've got a podcast with, you know, tens of thousands of listeners every single week out there, forget that I'm in the industry. I'm one of you. That like, like some sort of solidarity, look me in the eye and say, hey, it's you. You're one of us. Good to have you here. That even that at its most basic level, which a simple Google search of the reservation book would have led them quickly to my name, and they would have confirmed it because my picture and my name is all over the Internet. And they would have confirmed it when I walked in, say, yep, that's the guy. And say, hey, I understand you're in the industry. I said, yeah, I am. We're so glad to have you here. We love when industry people come here because guess what? I'm sure they do love when industry people go there, but no one took the time. They cared so much about the food, about the decor, about the beverage program, that they missed the basic hospitality of making someone feel seen.
[00:06:55] They didn't make me feel seen. Certainly not my wife or our guest. And not my son. Talk about this a lot. So many of my stories earlier on just over the past few weeks have been about dining in Europe and how they make my son feel seen.
[00:07:08] You know, they. They ignore me, which is fine, but they make him feel seen. And here they didn't even make him feel seen.
[00:07:15] This happens way too often all over the place. We think that the great food and the great service is enough. Oh, you should be lucky to be here. It's a joke. It's not enough.
[00:07:25] There's A lot of places I could give my business, a lot of places where I can go get a great meal.
[00:07:30] What I want is to be seen, is to feel important, to be welcomed, to make sure that I'm enjoying my meal every single step of the way.
[00:07:40] Now, maybe they thought they were doing it, but I'm here to say that this particular restaurant wasn't.
[00:07:45] Just like any of the other places that we went over the weekend, didn't do it again. We were in a new city, new market. We had never been there.
[00:07:53] And most of the restaurants just fell flat. There was no manager presence. The service was vacant, was absent. Things were forgotten at almost every one of our meals.
[00:08:05] So we landed, we got off the plane, got to our hotel, went and ate downstairs. Took forever to get our food, forever to get our drinks. Our appetizers arrived before our cocktails did, right? They put gratuity on the check. Never told us. That was annoying, right? Just fine, I don't mind. I want people to be taken care of. But you gotta let people know, right?
[00:08:27] Later in the meal. Later in the weekend, we had a meal where our waitress forgot something on every single course, so we had to keep bothering people. Can you get our waitress with, we're still waiting on this item or that item or whatever. It got annoying. And then here went to this super fancy, high end James Beard nominee meal. And it was like, okay. Food was phenomenal, but the hospitality was lacking. There was no connection. Nobody looked me in the eye, shook my hand and said, hey, so glad to have you. Whether I'm in the industry or not, and I do happen to be in the industry, so a little bit of acknowledgment might have been nice, but no acknowledgement from my wife, who looked beautiful, or our guest who got dressed up for this meal, or my son, who is by far the youngest one in the dining room by, I don't know, 15, 20 years.
[00:09:14] Just acknowledgement. Whoa, cool. Glad to have you.
[00:09:18] I think it was problematic. So how do we fix it? Right, because that's the problem. And it's fresh in my mind because that just happened this past weekend. How do we fix it? I think we fix it, number one, by acknowledging that we don't know most of our people. And again, I talked about Will Goddard. Will talks about this all the time.
[00:09:34] At its core, our job is to make people feel important, which, luckily, is pretty easy, because everyone's important.
[00:09:41] Everyone is someone's son, daughter, mother, father, sister, brother, their best friend. Somebody is crucially important to someone else in the world. Everyone is important.
[00:09:54] Maybe not to you, but this person is important, and they are important to someone. So if we acknowledge that all people are important, then our job is to make sure they feel important, that they feel seen, as Will Godar says, and I totally agree with him.
[00:10:08] So how do we do that? Number one, we have to acknowledge that that is our job. Not to feed people. Of course we can feed people. You're great at what you do. You better be able to cook food well.
[00:10:22] But it goes beyond that, because if someone is going to pay this massive markup, it's not just going to be for creative flavors.
[00:10:29] Present it for an excruciatingly high price.
[00:10:33] And every restaurant you go to has a massive markup because they have to account for the labor, the rent, the utilities, the plates, the dishwasher, the. All of that. There's a massive markup on the food.
[00:10:45] Has to be.
[00:10:47] If we're gonna do that, we have to say it's gonna be. It has to be for something else. We have to get more than just great food and great beverage. We have to get more than beautiful surroundings.
[00:10:57] What is that? We have to make people feel seen the way. It was taught to me years ago, right. Besides just acknowledging that that is our job and making sure there's a willingness for us to do that.
[00:11:10] But it was taught to me years ago, and it was taught to me in an exercise as a challenge.
[00:11:15] But I had a consultant that was working on a project that I was helping to open, and he gave me a little moleskine notebook, right? Like a little notebook that can slide right into your lapel, right into your back pocket.
[00:11:26] He said, I dare you to touch every single table and find something about the. Find out some piece of information that you otherwise wouldn't have gotten unless you engaged with them in a meaningful conversation.
[00:11:42] PS Meaningful conversation is not going up to them and saying, hey, how's everyone doing? How are your entrees here? Everyone enjoying? Yeah, good, good, good. Great. And then walking away.
[00:11:52] That is a hollow table touch. That's a leftover from the 90s when corporate chains were getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and they had data that suggested two table touches from a manager over the course of the meal improves the guest satisfaction and will get us higher net promoter scores. All about the mps.
[00:12:13] Guess what? MPS does not pay your bills. It doesn't actually matter. Maybe at scale, when you got, you know, 1,000 locations, fine, you need some way to measure people's activity.
[00:12:23] But I'm talking about quality, not quantity.
[00:12:27] In fact, what I'M talking about is not getting to know everyone really, really well. I would like for you to learn something about everyone that tips you towards. But not everyone's going to be a regular. Not everyone is going to be someone you're going to build a relationship with. But how will you possibly know who you build a relationship with unless you get to know everybody meaningfully?
[00:12:49] Guess what? This is what you did in high school, this is what you did in college. This is what you do when you get to a new job. You get to know everybody in the office and you figure out who you get along with, who's going to help you, who you can help, who you're going to, you know, build a friendship with.
[00:13:04] You do it by acknowledging that this is part of your job as an owner, As a manager, certainly it's your job to engage meaningfully. And the way it was taught to me was to get a little moleskin notebook. It goes right in the lapel of your suit jacket or in your back pocket. I don't know, maybe you walk around in jeans and a T shirt, totally fine.
[00:13:23] But I dare you, just as I was dared, I dare you tonight in your dining room, to walk around the dining room and engage with meaningful conversation and get to know something about that person that you otherwise wouldn't have known unless you started the conversation.
[00:13:40] So get to know their name, get to know their wife's name, their kids names.
[00:13:45] Do they live in the area? Did they just move to the area? Have they lived here a while? What grade are the kids in? Do they play sports?
[00:13:52] What do they like to do?
[00:13:54] What do they do with their free time when they're not here? What do they do with their disposable income when they don't come out to your restaurant? Meaning what other restaurants do they like in town?
[00:14:04] What do they like to go for vacation?
[00:14:06] Where they go to school? What do they do for a living? There's so many ways to engage.
[00:14:11] If you want a cheat code on how to start these conversations, I would say look for people that have just ordered their meal and try to engage with them in that gap between when they order and when they get their appetizers. You don't have to fill that entire time. In fact, most of these conversations will be about 90 seconds to two minutes.
[00:14:27] Now, I'm talking about the ones that really go deep are no longer than about two minutes.
[00:14:32] So I think what you do is you go up to each table and say, hey, folks, I'm so sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to introduce myself My name is Chip. I'm one of the managers here.
[00:14:42] I did. I feel like I recognize you. Have you been here before?
[00:14:45] And they're either going to say yes or no.
[00:14:47] They say, yeah, we've been here before. So perfect. When was the last time you were here? How often do you guys come? I feel like I see you guys here often, right? And then they will say, oh, yeah, we're here all the time.
[00:14:57] They will confirm. Or they will say, no, I think we've only been here one time before. Like, oh, that's crazy. You just look so familiar. When was the last time you were here? And look, now you're 30 seconds in and you're off to the races. Oh, amazing. Where do you. Do you guys live in the area?
[00:15:11] Oh, cool, cool. Perfect. Again, my name's Chip. And then you introduce yourself, right? Then you got husband and wife and kids and all of that.
[00:15:19] Again, you really are off to the races.
[00:15:22] Somebody's going to be wearing a, you know, a sports jersey or a hat or a logo, a polo with a, you know, a country club or a resort, or somebody's wearing a T shirt that says, you know, like, Bar Harbor. And you make conversation that way.
[00:15:37] So when you find out if they've been here before, how often they've come, have we ever met? Do they live in the area? Have they been here a while? Are they new to the area?
[00:15:46] Then you look for logos.
[00:15:48] That's a way, you know, it's a shortcut to further conversation.
[00:15:54] There's so many ways you can engage. And again, the idea is. So sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to introduce myself. And then it's easy at the end of the conversation, when you feel it dying down, say, well, listen, I won't keep you from your conversation, but it's really nice to meet you. Let me know if there's anything at all you need, and I'll check back later. The meal, man, what a great introduction. It doesn't have to go longer. Most of these are about 30 to 60 seconds. But it's not just surface. It's not. How's everything here? Good, good, good. And walk away.
[00:16:21] It's, hey, have we met before?
[00:16:25] Do you live here? Do you like this place? Where else do you go to? Et cetera, et cetera. If you do that and you step away, the way it was challenged to me is you have a little Mleskin notebook and you go over to table one. You get to know them. You step away from table one, you write something in the notebook.
[00:16:39] You know, you know Jack and Susan. And the kids are Ellen and Aiden. Great, perfect daughter, just got into private school. Their dog is Spike. You know, they, like. They have a French bulldog. I have an English bulldog.
[00:16:56] You make conversation that way.
[00:16:59] They are, you know, Cleveland Guardian fans. Great. It goes in the book, and you do that at every single table. And then eventually the important stuff gets translated into your reservation software. So OpenTable or Resi or whatever it is you use. This way you get to know them. So when they come back in, you're like, oh, yeah, that's right. I've met them.
[00:17:18] So you go back in, you see, you remember their Guardians fans. Hey, man, rough season for the Guardians, right? Or, hey, great season for the Guardians. What do you think? Think their rotation's gonna be able to stand up the dog days of summer, you have a conversation, they got something to go on.
[00:17:32] Hey, I was thinking about you guys, because the Guardians are really on fire or whatever else it is. Hey, I was thinking about you guys. You wouldn't believe what my English bulldog did this past week. And let me show you a picture. And then guess what? They're going to whip out pictures of their French bulldog and bulldog families unite. You're going to have conversations. There's so many ways to engage with people, and this is just a good. Just a good skill in life. We are social beings. That's what human beings are. We are social.
[00:17:58] So when you make the commitment to do it, it'll make a difference at scale. When you do this with every table, every single night, translate those notes to the reservation book, and then review the reservation book every single night and see who's coming back, that you've got notes on, that you've made notes on again. They get fleshed out. Then you start realizing you'll realize that eventually, six months from now, your reservation will be made up of 70, 80% of people who have notes that you have left in the past. And at some point, you're going to wonder, man, am I just getting to know all our people or the people coming back?
[00:18:39] Or are the ones that are coming back are the ones that I've engaged with?
[00:18:42] And I'd make the case, as it was made to me, that the ones are the ones that are coming back are the ones that you've actually engaged with?
[00:18:50] A year from now, two years from now, it's going to be 100% your reservation book is going to be filled. In fact, when you come across a reservation that doesn't have any information in there, you're going to be like, Whoa. We got a live one. Fresh meat.
[00:19:04] People that you get to connect with. And here's the beauty. We're doing this because there's a business case for engaging, for being personal and being personable.
[00:19:14] But it's actually just our job.
[00:19:16] This is actually why we exist. Yes, we feed people, but people. People could go feed themselves for cheaper. They could go get food. They don't come to you for food. They come to you to feel taken care of, to feel important.
[00:19:31] As soon as you realize that, your entire business changes. And I don't care if you got a breakfast sandwich place. I don't care if you got a pizza joint. I don't care if you just do fried. Check it just. If you just do frightening, you just do whatever.
[00:19:46] I'm not talking about the important of the important.
[00:19:50] I'm talking about the casual of the casual. If you get to know people, you make people feel seen and important. It will change your business, and you won't feel it overnight.
[00:20:01] But six months later, you'll start looking at your dining room. You'll start looking at your reservation book, and you'll realize, holy crap, I know almost everyone in this room. But you have to make it your job to do it. Now, if you're an owner and you're listening to this, this is your job. And you have to instill this into your managers, because it's really their job, because they are an extension of you. If you're a restaurant manager listening to this, take it upon yourself.
[00:20:24] Just start doing this. You will become indispensable to not only the restaurant where you're working now, but every other restaurant that you go to, because people will get to know you. And when you go get a job somewhere else, you're going to bring all those people with you, because you make people feel seen.
[00:20:42] I'm telling you, this is how you get better jobs. This is how you get better salaries.
[00:20:47] If you're a server, you can do it. Anyone listening to this is trying to level up, make themselves better.
[00:20:55] This is how you make yourselves better.
[00:20:58] So again, the story I tell all the time is of this consultant that was brought in to consult on a project that I was opening.
[00:21:05] And not only to work with me, but all the other managers, all the rest of the team. And this is one thing he gave me. He gave me a Moleskine notebook, and he says, you don't know anything about anyone. Go find out stuff about everyone in this room. I challenge you to touch every single table. And it changed the way I approached my job. And Again, I was a maitre d for the majority of my career.
[00:21:23] Opening restaurants, running restaurants. My job was to get to know everybody, fill the seats, fill the, you know, the Tetris board, which was the dining room.
[00:21:34] Maximize the square footage, maximize the seats so you can maximize revenue. Big part of how I maximized revenue was get to know people, build friendships, engage with them, create those relationships. And as I did, opening after opening after opening, and guess what?
[00:21:51] I brought those people with me to the next place. The next place. The next place. The next place.
[00:21:55] Not giving you theoretical advice. I'm telling you what happened in my life.
[00:21:59] You want to change your restaurant. You want to change the finances in your restaurant. It begins by making friends, sticking out your hand, making people feel seen, introducing yourself and getting to know them.
[00:22:10] And guess what? It's free.
[00:22:12] This is marketing. That is free. This is actually at the heart of what your operation should be. So, yes, the food's got to be good. It's got to come out hot, it's got to come out on time. Yes, we got to get people everything they need. We have to process payments correctly. We have to hit all the steps of service.
[00:22:28] But more important than any of that is this engaging with our people and making them feel seen and recognized. So, again, top of mind. And I'm a bit sour about it because I just came back from this great weekend with mediocre meals.
[00:22:42] Mediocre mostly because all kinds of balls were dropped. And I just was never made to feel seen, was never acknowledged, not even as an industry person, but just as a human being. In the restaurant, the one restaurant, it was all the forgotten orders, I was not seen. I didn't matter. Certainly didn't matter enough to get my order right. And in the other places, food was great, beverage was great, and I just was not made to feel welcome in this room. Nobody was.
[00:23:12] Not my wife, my son, our guest. Not at all. And it's heartbreaking. It's a real shame.
[00:23:18] Luckily, I have a platform where I get to turn on the microphone a couple times a week and share some of this with you guys. And it's your opportunity to make a commitment to do better.
[00:23:30] So that's it, guys. Beyond this podcast, the number one way I know how to help restaurants is through my group coaching program. It's a mastermind. So restaurant owners from all over the country get together on a call every single week with the dedication of improving Now. It's not just getting on and complaining about your job. Far from it. It's. This is the problem. I have what should I do about it? You could do this. You could do this. You could do this. You could do this. Worked for me. This worked for me. Have you tried this?
[00:23:57] All of that is very focused on solving problems and improving operations. So you can make more, so ultimately you can work less. That's the point of the P3 mastermind. To help you generate consistent, predictable 20% returns. I promise you, it's possible. I've done it hundreds of times over. If you do what we show you to do, it will work. It can't not work, because, again, it's not theory, it's actually practical stuff that I was taught that I'm now teaching to you guys. RSProphit.com is where you go to start a conversation. You'll chat with me or someone from my team. We ask each other a bunch of questions to see if you're a good fit. As always, guys, I want to thank you for being. For being here, for making this show part of your week.
[00:24:38] I look forward to seeing you next time.
