Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] It has never been as hard as it is right now to run a profitable restaurant. In fact, last year, the average independent restaurant in this country made just 4% profit. That was confirmed by three separate independent studies. And I think it's crazy. I'm on a mission to change that. I want to build a team and an army of independent restaurant owners who don't just have to deal with the 3, 4, 5% profits, don't just have to suffer through the 60, 70, 80 hour work weeks. Profitability is your key to freedom. It's what I care most about, helping independent operators and owners build insanely profitable restaurants. On today's episode, I want to share with you the 10 things I know about running profitable restaurants. I've been doing this for a very long time. I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of restaurant owners in my Mastermind program. I want to show you everything I know. That's what we're going to talk about on today's episode of Restaurant Strategy.
[00:00:53] 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.
[00:01:24] 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.
[00:01:33] Each week I leverage my 25 years in the industry to help you do just that. Building more profitable and sustainable business. I also work directly with owners and operators all over the world through my P3 mastermind program. It's a group coaching format where I get to work hand in hand, side by side with all kinds of incredible operators. I also run two in person events. Every January we run the P3 Marketing Summit and in July we run the P3 Profitability Summit. So this just in, tickets are now on sale. I've put the link in the show notes if you want to join us. The early Bird tickets are available now for just 3.97. At the end of May they go up to full price, which is 497, but for less than $400. If you buy right now, you get to join a group of just 100 people. We cap it at 100. Half the tickets have already sold. Because we opened up to our private members of the P3 mastermind, now we're opening it up to the general public, to the 13,000 plus people on my email list that goes out later this week and to all of you listeners of the show. If you want to be there, I want you to be in St. Louis, July 14th, 15th, 16th, a three day event. You got a welcome party on Sunday night. You've got educations, workshops, speaker sessions all day Monday, nine hours. I know it's too much, but it's going to be worth it all day, 9 to 6 on Monday. You got a big party Monday night, open bar, tons of food, great networking opportunities, chance to chat with me, my team, network with each other, other restaurant owners from all over the country. Then Tuesday again, another nine hours, nine to six, nine hours of sessions and then we do a food crawl all over the city. We pick, we pick and choose a bunch of really great restaurants all over the city. If you want to be there, I want you there. Use the link in the show notes to go grab your tickets before they're gone. Again, less than $400, 397 early bird tickets are available now through the end of the I hope you come join us.
[00:03:31] Now, of course, what we're talking about today, the 10 things I know about running Profitable restaurants, go hand in hand with that event. Again, the idea where I was always driving to in the program I built was that we would get together a couple times a year in person because I think the learnings are magnified. So this event that we're running is highly tactical, highly actionable. This episode is meant to cue you up for that, to give you a sense of what I think and really what we're going to talk about in greater detail at that event. So I hope that you take away some stuff and are able to put it into practice right away after today's episode. And I hope, if you feel so inclined, I hope this sparks you to get more, to go deeper, to dive deeper. That event is the way to do that. But today, on today's episode, we're Talking about the 10 things I know about running profitable restaurants. So if this sounds like you, right, you're running a busy restaurant, you've been around for a while and you're just not generating as much profit as you think. Meaning you're generating a lot of revenue but not dropping it to the bottom line, not able to put it in your checking account, then that's what this episode is all about. 10 things that I've learned, 10 things I know and believe in my, in my, in my gut about running a profitable restaurant. Here you go. Without further ado, number one, 20% profits are absolutely possible. The dirty little secret nobody tells you is a lot of the chains and groups are making well over 20%. I was raised in the industry with the expectation. With the understanding that 10% was the land of fairies and unicorns. It is not. You've got to be really smart with the way that you drive revenue and the way you manage your key expenses. And we'll talk about what we mean by key expenses. But 20% profits are absolutely possible. The way you target that. Right, right. Is with the P and L. Now, the P and L shows you your profit and your loss. Right. The revenue generated and the expenses that you accrued. And the secret recipe. Right, the recipe. The secret that a lot of people will tell you is that you got to make as much as you possibly can and minimize your expenses as much as you can. And whatever left is whatever left over that. That that surplus is your profit. And you maximize them by making as much and spending as little as you can. And unfortunately, that's just not how it works. So what I know about profitable restaurants is you have to target a specific number at the beginning of the period.
[00:05:52] You got to write that number down, right? This is the number that will be your distribution. You will take this draw for this number. So if you're. If you got a restaurant that generates $100,000 a month and you want to make 20%, that number is $20,000. And the key, what I know about running profitable restaurants is you have to think about that number the same way you think about rent. You wouldn't ever dream of not paying your landlord rent. And I want you to not even dream of not paying yourself. It's that important. I think I would dare say it's even more important.
[00:06:27] 20% profits are totally possible. Absolutely. But you have to think of it. You have to start with the end in mind. When you begin the period, you have to know how you want the period to end. That's the first thing I know.
[00:06:38] Number two. Second thing I know about running profitable restaurants is there are three moving targets in our business, which is what makes our business so hard.
[00:06:47] Revenue, cogs, and labor. Right. Those are our three moving targets. And in business, they say you've got to control the controllables. Well, for us, those are our controllables. You have to manage revenue, you have to manage cogs, you have to manage labor. Now, let's talk about what we mean by that. If you want to, again have a profitable restaurant, you have to generate as much revenue as possible. The way I know to do that is to make that controllable. You have more impact on that number than you realize. And let's talk about that. Let's talk about our controllables, right? Revenue is a controllable piece of our business. We can impact how many people come in and how much they spend when they come in, right? At the end of the day, ultimately the guest decides how much they spend. But we can influence, we can impact that number. And if you don't think that's true, you are absolutely wrong. And that's where you're sunk right out of the gate. The other one is cogs and labor. When it comes to cogs, we decide what we buy, how much we pay for that, how much we portion on a dish, and how much we charge for that dish.
[00:07:48] Ultimately, we get to say what those numbers are. And then finally, labor, right?
[00:07:54] We get to decide who we hire, how much we pay them per hour, and how many hours we schedule them.
[00:08:00] Those three are our controllables. And what I know is that that's why our business is so hard. And we are really bad at managing those. Most restaurants are really bad at managing those. And if you can wrap your hands around those, your whole business changes almost overnight. That's so much of the work we do in the P3 mastermind. That's a lot of what we. That's where we start. It's a lot of what we're going to talk about on the first day of the P3, the P3 profitability summit in St. Louis in July. But that's the second thing I know, number three. The third thing I know in the year 2024 about running a profitable restaurant is it's absolutely crucial to keep prime cost below 60%. Now, for those of you who don't know, when I say prime, prime cost is cogs plus labor, right? If you think back to what we just talked about, that's two thirds of our controllables. You need to keep those below 60%. So if that's COGS at 30%, labor at 30%, fine. COGS at 25%, labor at 35%, fine. Those two numbers can't add up to anything more than 60% if you want a fighting chance for running a profitable restaurant.
[00:09:09] The fourth thing, every restaurant needs multiple revenue streams in the year 2024. And this is what we learned the hard way through Covid, right? In the year 2024, we can't rely on just one revenue stream, meaning in person dining. Instead, we need in person dining. We need online ordering, takeout delivery, we need third party delivery, we need merchandise, we need private dining, off site catering, cooking classes, whatever it is, whatever your Mix of revenue streams. I promise you, you will not survive without at least three or four.
[00:09:46] So in the year 2024, the fourth thing I know about running profitable restaurants is that you need multiple revenue streams.
[00:09:54] Now to that end, the fifth thing I know is that catering and private dining is absolutely key to success in a post Covid world. And now understand, I know that it's even harder to find catering business in a post Covid world where so many people now work remote or hybrid.
[00:10:15] And yet businesses are trying to find a reason to get people into the office, right? My father in law, my father in law's office now does catering five days a week in the office. They do it to try to entice people to come in. If that is appealing to them. It's something that they offer and they offer it five days a week, every single week of the year.
[00:10:40] Catering and private dining is where you make money in bunches, not just two covers at a time, right? It's not filling the dining room with deuces, but it's getting a 20 top, a 50 top, a hundred top all at once. Catering and private dining is typically more profitable because you charge a premium, right? You are creating, you're crafting a menu specifically for this small group. You are, you're making it, serving it to them specifically. That's bespoke, that, that's a, that's a premium luxury thing. And you tack on a luxury surcharge basically when you do that, to sit in the private dining room of any restaurant should be 20 to 30% more than it costs to sit in the regular dining room. That's just a reality. And there are a bunch of reasons why that should be, but it just is. Now if you're charging less for your catering and private dining than you are for your regular dining, let this, let this be your first little. Let's this be your first little spark. Change that catering, right? Either off site or on site, and then private dining, right? A PDR is a crucial way to make money because you make money 10 at a time, 20 covers at a time, 50, 100 covers at a time. Instead of a deuce and a deuce and a deuce and a deuce, right? So those are the five things. So make sure you stick around to the end because I'm going to go back through the list 1 through 10 and give you something very actionable for every single thing and make sure you can put it into action. I promised you very tactical and very actionable. And I'm going to explain at the Very, very end how we're going to go even deeper at the P3 profitability summit in, in St. Louis in July. But those are the top five again. We got five more. Then I'm going to give you something actionable for everyone. I'm going to talk to you about how we're going to go even deeper in St. Louis. That's the whole path of this episode. Ready for number six?
[00:12:24] Number six.
[00:12:26] Top heavy payroll will absolutely kill you. Pre pandemic. We got into this place where we had a gm, an agm, a bar manager, a wine director, two sommeliers, you know, three floor managers, a maitre d, the on and on and on.
[00:12:41] Gone are those days. What we're building now are restaurants that look a lot more like they did in the 60s, 70s and 80s, right, with very minimal management team, which means you're going to have to ask more of your staff, your team and those individuals you have in management right now are going to be responsible for more. And they're going to be. They're going to be better at. They're going to have to be better at their job than they ever have. Top heavy payroll will absolutely kill you in the year 2024.
[00:13:10] Number seven. There's this conversation, right, about macro versus micro. When we talk about macro, macro is the big number, right? When we say, hey, how much revenue do you want to generate this month or this year? That's a big number. We say, hey, I want to generate 30 $300,000 in the month of. In the month of June.
[00:13:28] That's a big number for most servers to wrap their heads around, most managers to wrap their heads around. So while it's important to understand the macro number, you need to break that down to the micro level. So if you've got a target, let's say $300,000 over the course of the month, then you need to build a path to get there. What do you need to generate every single day to hit $300,000 now? 30 days, 300,000, right? We can all do the math. That's pretty easy. You need a certain amount of revenue, $10,000 every single day to hit the goal that you need to hit, right? But of course, you're not gonna make $10,000 on Tuesday and $10,000 on Saturday.
[00:14:09] On Tuesday, you're probably gonna make five or six. On Saturday you're probably gonna make 15 or 18, right? So it's not all even. So you need to set revenue targets every single day that I know now drop it down even further when we Talk about macro and micro. Let's go to the micro level. PPA per person average. You need to know how many covers you need to do every day to hit your goal and how much you need each cover to spend. And you need your servers and your managers to understand that that's the key unit, the smallest unit, the smallest unit of measurement. That's what they can be prepared for. Hey, listen, every cover you, you take care of tonight, I need to make sure it's at $55 per head, because that's what we're counting on. When your servers become aware of that, it's very easy to say, okay, four top $200. 200 divided by four. Oh, 50 bucks, man. How am I going to get more money? How am I going to squeeze more dollars out of this table? Maybe that's being on top of second beverage sales. Maybe that's being on, you know, really assertive with the way that you, you push desserts. You're really excited about it. After dinner, drinks, coffees. There's a way to get the ppa, the per person average, up throughout the meal. But the first thing is you have to understand what the goal is. So come up with your macro number, understand where you're going, but then also come up with your micro number and make sure you communicate that to your managers. And they're sufficiently and effectively communicating that to the servers and the bartenders, the ones who are actually on the front lines. Right. Your servers are your sellers, they are your salespeople. Make sure they understand what you need them to do. It's crucial. That's number seven.
[00:15:46] Number eight. Right. The eighth thing, when we're talking about what I know about running profitable restaurants, managers are there to manage the profitability of the restaurant. I want to be really clear. I've talked about this before, but I want to be really clear.
[00:16:00] Yes, they come in, they unlock the doors, they turn on the lights, they turn on the music. They do the side work sheets. They check in the staff. They deal with customer complaints. They do the voids and the comps. They do the bank drop. They lock up at the end of the night, turn out the lights. Yes, all of that stuff has to be done.
[00:16:18] But, God, that is only a fraction of what you actually need your managers to do. And actually, it's not even the most important part. Their job is to manage the profitability of the restaurant. When we talk about profitability, two sides, revenue and expenses. So they need to be driving towards a revenue goal. Right. We just talked about the macro versus micro so the managers need to be driving towards a goal. That's why it's so crucial to loop them in to make sure they understand what you expect of them.
[00:16:47] Right? And then they need to be managing the expenses. They need to understand what their budget is for ordering, right? Whether they're running the bar program. They need to know what they can spend and what they can't spend. Same thing. Your managers in the back of house, your chefs. They need to know what their budget is, what they can spend and what they can't spend. Be really clear with what success looks like for their role. And then the same thing with labor, right? They have to understand where you need them to hit.
[00:17:15] If we do that again, we're talking about these three moving targets. These. These controllables, revenue, cogs, and labor. If your managers can understand what they need to do, this is what success looks like. Meaning if you hit your targets, your revenue targets every single day, and you keep your ordering under budget and you keep your payroll under budget, we can't help but succeed. If you do that with your managers and you actually show them how to do this and show them what success looks like, and then hold them accountable, provide oversight. This is absolutely going to change your restaurant. I know it. That's so much of what I do with my. The members of my mastermind. It's so much of what I believe about running a profitable restaurant.
[00:17:59] Number nine. This is. This is so important. Can't be overstated.
[00:18:03] Education is key.
[00:18:05] You, the restaurant owner, you, the operator, must continue to level up.
[00:18:10] I don't care how you level up. Whether you watch YouTube videos, whether you listen to podcasts, read books, attend seminars, trade shows, listen to videos, and whatever it is, you need to continually be leveling up. Now, I know I'm preaching to the choir, because if you're listening to this podcast, you are already committed to leveling up. So kudos to you. What I'm telling you here is that you need to make that infectious. You need to infect your partners, your managers, your chef, your gm, everybody around you. You need to make sure they are just as committed to leveling up as you are. And I don't know how you do that. I've got ideas. We share ideas of the members in my mastermind. But it doesn't matter how you do it. It just matters that you do it. Education is key. You must continue to level up. Because guess what? This industry keeps evolving as the world keeps evolving. So the old ways no longer work. We got to find out what works now. The Only way you do that is by figuring out what other people are doing, and you try to get better at it.
[00:19:11] Now, finally, number 10, right? I said, this is the 10 things I know about running profitable restaurants. Number 10, your network is key.
[00:19:20] You must surround yourself with ambitious people. You must surround yourself with people who believe what you believe. Now, let me clarify what I just said, right? Your network. Your network is the. Is the group of professionals, the group of individuals you surround yourself with. Now, whether that's you, you know, zap off a couple of texts, you know, once a week, twice a week, whether you have a phone call every once in a while, whether you get together and have lunch once a week, whatever it is, you need a network. Now, I said ambitious people and people who believe what you believe. Ambitious, meaning people who believe that more is possible, that they're not just satisfied with where they're at, they're not satisfied with what they hear. People tell them what they hear the rest of the industry tell them. People who want to do better want to get more out of their business. That's how I define ambitious.
[00:20:14] And you need people who believe what you believe. I assume you believe at least some of what I believe. That's why you're listening to me.
[00:20:21] And we get along, and hopefully you get some value from episodes like this one. You got to go and infect others, and you got to figure out who else is out there that believes this, that believes the same thing we believe, right?
[00:20:34] This list, these 10 things I know about running a profitable restaurant. If you can go one by one and do something, something in the direction of all 10 of these, you have a wildly different restaurant in 30 days. I promise. I promise. Because I run this program, people come and join the group for a minimum of six months. Most of them stay on long after that, but they commit themselves to six months in the program.
[00:20:58] And at the end of even just 60 or 90 days, most of them have insanely different, wildly different restaurants.
[00:21:07] So now, I promised you that we'd go back through the 10, just as a recap, and I would give you something very actionable, something you can do right away today to take action on all of these 10. So let's do that. Ready one through 10, we'll take them again. Number one, I believe 20% profits are absolutely possible. If there's anything I can convince you to do is to start forecasting for your business and figure out, okay, if I'm going to do $100,000 and I want to make 20% profit, that's $20,000. And you lob the $20,000 right off the bat and you say, okay, well all my spending, all my expenses have to come to 20% or have to come to 80% of my revenue target.
[00:21:45] Target that number at the beginning of the period. Write it down, put it on a, you know, thumbtack it to the wall. You know, write it on your whiteboard. Whatever you need to do to make that real, as real as your rent number. Figure out what 20% is and then work backwards. Figure out what you have to do with your expenses to get there. That if you start doing that once a month, it will absolutely change your restaurant.
[00:22:07] Number two, right? Your three moving targets in your business, right? This is why it's so hard talked about revenue, cogs and labor. If you're gonna go ahead and do forecasts, then go ahead and build a budget. Now both of those things are challenging. There's a lot of different ways to do it. We are gonna go in deep, deep, deep down in St. Louis at that profitability summit. So if you don't know how to forecast. Forecast is about predicting the future. There are programs that can help you with it. Right Margin Edge has a piece that can help you with it. A lot of your POS systems, seven shifts, right Scheduling software, they really cool piece that will do this for you.
[00:22:41] You can google ways to build a regression. You can just take last year's number and add 5%. There's a million ways to do it.
[00:22:48] It's just key that you do it. And then you take that number and use that to generate budgets for the key areas of your business. If you do that, starting this month, your business changes.
[00:22:59] Number three, it's crucial to keep prime costs below 60%. All I'm asking you to do is go back through the last three P. Ls and figure out what your prime cost were. If you're not measuring this every single month, then this is your wake up call. I invite you to start measuring this right now. So go back last month, the month before and the month before that and figure out what your prime cost was. Prime cost is your cost of goods sold percentage plus your labor percentage. Labor is your salaries, your hourly wages, all your benefits, your payroll taxes, your payroll fees, all in find out what that number is. It's got to be 60% or below to make money. If it's anything higher than that, then you've got some work to do.
[00:23:40] Now number four, I said every restaurant needs multiple revenue streams. I want you. I'm not even going to tell you to go find make different revenue streams. Right now I just want you to take out a piece of paper and identify the current revenue streams. Now for most of you it's going to be in person dining and online ordering, you know, takeout and delivery through your website. Right? First party delivery and then third party delivery like Uber Eats and Doordash and all of those sites. Hopefully you do private dieting and or off site catering. Those are probably four revenue streams. If you could just identify those four and figure out the pie chart. The division of, you know, my hundred percent of my revenue, 70% comes from in person dining. Ten person, 10% comes from this, 5% comes from. You could just figure out what your revenue streams are and what the percentages are. You'll go a long way do that today.
[00:24:30] Number five, catering and PDR is absolutely key to the success in a post Covid world. Here's what I want you to do starting now. If you're not already doing this. Every time you have a catering gig, every time you have a private dining event, I want you to call them 24 hours later. It starts as a customer service call and ends as a sales call. You are calling to say, hey, I just wanted to follow up, make sure you enjoyed everything.
[00:24:54] Did you have everything you needed? Was there anything you didn't like?
[00:24:58] How was it? We'd love your feedback and hopefully say, oh my God, it was so great, Great, great, great, great. No complaints. And then you turn that into a sales call. Like I'm so excited to hear that. Listen, we'd love to feed you again. So do you have anything else coming up that we can, that we can serve you at? And then you wait for the answer. If you do that moving forward on every single party, if you're not already calling them 24 hours later, you do that and you use that script. It starts as customer service. I just want to check and make sure everything was okay. And then it turns into a sales call, right? Very, very important.
[00:25:30] Number six, top heavy payroll will absolutely kill you. I want you to look really honestly at the, at the management salaries that you have in your restaurant. And I want you to be really honest. I want you to understand what percentage of revenue it is at. So if you divide up your payroll into three areas, right? Your salaries, your front of house hourly, and your back of house hourly. I want you to figure out what percentage of sales each of those numbers is. And you're gonna learn a lot when you get to those numbers. When you find those numbers, you're gonna bring those numbers to St. Louis. And we're gonna tell you what to do with those numbers. But right now, your only actionable piece is to figure out what those numbers are.
[00:26:12] Your salaries, right, your management salaries are, what percentage of revenue every month. That's a crucial number to know.
[00:26:20] Number seven, macro versus micro. I want you to figure out what your check average is for lunch and what your check average is for dinner. Just figure that out where it is right now. You can't improve upon the number unless you know the number. Right now we're just figuring out a point A. The next we're going to figure out a point B. Point B is the goal. So currently we're at $55 per head. I really want to get to $62 a head. That's doable. But you gotta know where you're at now, so we know what we can do to get you up. For right now, the actionable piece is that if you don't know already, understand what your PPA is. Your per person average, on average. Each guest who walks through your restaurant for lunch spends X dollars. On average. Every guest who walks through the door for dinner spends Y dollars. That's crucial.
[00:27:06] Number eight, again, keeping this actionable, managers manage the profitability of the restaurant. They need clear goals and oversight. I want you to set daily revenue targets for them every single day. And I want you to give them a budget. So this goes back to number one and number two, right?
[00:27:22] Understand what your big number is. Break it down into smaller numbers, right? What you need them to generate every single day, make sure they are held accountable for hitting those numbers.
[00:27:33] And then give them clear budgets. Budgets for their ordering, budgets for their scheduling. That more than anything else, changes your business.
[00:27:41] Number nine, education is key. You must constantly level up. I want you to figure out some new podcast, some new book. I want you to watch a YouTube video. Ask somebody, hey, what's your favorite restaurant book? Hey, what's your favorite business book? Hey, what's your favorite business Podcast? What's your favorite restaurant podcast? Whatever it is, I don't care what it is, but commit yourself to leveling up. And if you want to go one step further, the way that you infect your team, do a book club or do a podcast club.
[00:28:08] Every week, spend just 20 minutes talking about a book, or once a month, spend 20 minutes so that your first manager meeting of every month is where you talk about the book that you all read together, or you talk about the podcast that you were all going to listen to and then report back podcast interviews what, an hour, hour and a half could be this podcast, it could be any of dozens of podcasts, it doesn't matter. But if there's something that resonated with you, make your team listen to it or read it and talk about it all together and then talk about how you apply it to your business.
[00:28:38] Again, education is key. Make curiosity cool.
[00:28:42] And finally, number 10, right? Again, keeping this actionable, your network is key. You must surround yourself with people who believe what you believe. Now, you can join a formal mastermind like the one I got. You can go to a trade show, you can go to an event, a conference, you know, restaurant association, you can go to something like that, right? You can come to the event that we're throwing in St. Louis. By all means, I hope you. I hope you do. If this sounds interesting to you, or you can even just call up 3, 4, 5 other restaurant owners in your market and say, hey, you know what? I'd love to get dinner just once, once a month, right? The first Tuesday of every month. Let's get together, let's have dinner and let's talk shop.
[00:29:20] Even that is a form of mastermind. It really doesn't matter how you do it, but I promise you, when you build a network who cares about the things you care about and believes what you believe, it changes your business.
[00:29:32] Do that right now. Buy a ticket to the event I'm running in St. Louis. Buy a ticket to a trade show that's coming up, or just set up a dinner, a standing dinner reservation, or just go get drinks or coffee, it really doesn't matter.
[00:29:45] Set it up with 3, 4, 5 people in your market, other restaurateurs, so you guys can talk shop, you can swap notes, you can help each other get better. I promise you there's less competition than you think. There's way more to be gained from the collaboration that comes.
[00:30:00] So Those are the 10 things that I know about running profitable restaurants as promised action items for each of those 10. Finally, again, the way we go deeper for these in person events, right, we run the one on marketing in January and then the one that's coming up in July in St. Louis, July 14th, 15th, 16th. It's focused on profitability, it's the operations event, and it's focused specifically on the three moving targets in our business, revenue, cogs and labor. How do you manage those three? And we are going to go really deep, right, really deep into how do you prop up an inbound and an outbound strategy for driving, catering and private dining business? How do you forecast how do you set budgets for your key, for your key areas of your, of your restaurant? How do you arrange, how are you supposed to arrange a P and L? What's the difference between, you know, cash basis accounting and accrual basis accounting? Right. How do we generate more top line revenue? How do we increase the profitability? Right. Guess, guess what, it's through second beverage sales. It's through dessert sales. How do we increase, you know, the, or decrease the table turn times? Right. How do we, how do we turn tables quicker and make more money per table? We're going to show you all of that and a lot more. How do you do inventory and make it make sense? How do you set up online ordering so that you get more first party orders than third party orders so you don't pay out those huge commissions?
[00:31:22] We've got experts who are going to take the stage along with me who are going to show you all the secrets. You're going to fill an entire notebook of very highly actionable tactical things. It builds on all the stuff, I believe, all the stuff that we talked about today. But we go deep. So you are going to leave that event knowing exactly the playbook, Right? It's a series of frameworks and playbooks. That's how we're building this thing. That's how we always build these events.
[00:31:48] Right. That's what that event's all about. So again, the P3 Profitability Summit happens in, in St. Louis, Missouri, July 14th, 15th and 16th. Right now, early bird tickets are available for 397. So less than $400. Get you into both parties. Two full days of education, all of that's covered. All you got to do is get yourself there, put yourself up. By the way, we've got a room block in this really cool hotel. We have a killer rate. If you book soon, there are still rooms available in the room block. Like I said, we've got about 40 of the of the hundred tickets already sold, so there's still room. We're going to open it up to our list of 13,000 restaurant owners later this week. So you get first dibs. If you want to be there, I want you to be there. Again, we talk about profitability. It's literally the only thing that matters in your business. I'm sick and tired of watching restaurant owners struggle with single digit profit margins. If you're ready to turn it around and ready to change it, I gave you 10 things, 10 very actionable things to put into practice right away. Even if you just do two or three of them, this week. You will thank me for it. And if you want to go one further, if you want to network, if you want to educate yourself in real time in the room with lots of other restaurant owners who are going through the same thing you are, then please come to the summit again. We only do two of these every year and we cap it at a hundred people. If you want to be there, I want you to be there. That's it for me. Again. My name is Chip Close. I'm the founder of Restaurant Strategy. I am your host. I appreciate you being here. As I say each and every week, you guys are amazing. You guys make this community what it is. Got any questions for me, you can always reach out. Chip close.com My name is spelled C-H I P K L O S E dot com. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for giving me your ear and I will see you next time.
