Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Tell me if you feel the same way. Our job, or at least oftentimes it feels like our job as a business owner, as a boss, is to get people to do what we need them to do, right? That means our staff, we need them to do what we want them to do, to show up on time in uniform to know their stuff, get their station ready to do what we need them to do. Likewise, we need diners to come and dine at our restaurant to give us money to experience the restaurant that we've put together for them, right? This has a lot to do with what marketing is all about. It has a lot to do with culture. And I want to talk about culture on the employee side, culture on the diner side. I promise they will all connect with something called behavior. It's all about changing consumer behavior. And I want to talk about what that means, how we do 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, a weekly show, two episodes every single week, all meant to help you level up building more profitable and sustainable business. I write books, I give talks, I host this podcast. I also run a coaching program. It's called the P3 mastermind. We have an incredible community. More than 150 people currently enrolled in the program. Over 300 people have already gone through the program. The bottom line is the program works. If you struggle with profitability, I can show you a way to make money from your restaurant. The best way to get started is to have a conversation. It's absolutely free. 30 minutes. We're going to get to know each other. Go to restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule again, absolutely free. Grab time on the calendar and let's just get to know each other. If you're a good fit for the program, we'll talk about what next steps look like. If you are not a good fit for the program, we'll still give you some actionable advice so you know what you should do next. And we'll set a plan to resume the conversation later. Again, restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule and as always, that link is in the show notes.
Avi, 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.
[00:02:34] 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 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.
[00:03:07] 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.
Okay, now, like I said at the top, a lot of times it feels like our job is to get people to do what we need them to do, right? And that is true as both a boss, right? With the employees that we. That we hire, and then also as a business owner with the consumers, the customers, the diners that we serve. And these have a lot to do with culture. I've been talking a lot about culture with my Mastermind members because they've got a lot of questions about culture, right? How do I get people to do what I want? How do I get my more customers to come in the door? How do I get them to come back?
Culture has everything to do with marketing. And marketing is really all about changing behavior. I want to start there, and I want to make sure that we understand and we all agree on that.
Marketing is about changing behavior. Culture is about changing behavior. Let me give you an example. When we market our restaurant, we are trying to take someone who. Who has never been to our restaurant and change their behavior in as much as they now become a customer, right? So they were never a customer. We changed their behavior, get them to do something different than what they've done in the past so that they are now our customer or they come from time to time, but we want them to come regularly. That's not part of their regular behavior. So we are trying to change their behavior.
It is the same thing as a boss, right?
It's the same thing with the people that we employ.
They always show up late. They don't do a thorough job. They don't memorize the menu descriptions. They're not good at completing their prep Sheet, whatever it is we need them to do. What we need them to do is change from what they are doing to what we need them to be doing. I hope we can agree on that. That so much of our job, so much of your job, I believe, is really about changing behavior, changing consumer behavior and changing employee behavior. And if we can get good at that, then we can get really good at running a profitable business.
Let's split these apart, let's walk it back, and let's talk about how culture, marketing, and behavior are all connected.
Again, the beginning. We have to agree on the fact that what we really want to do is change behavior.
Culture is not the things we say, but the things we do. I've talked about this in the past. When I build figure eights, I use. The best example I know is how to build a figure eight for a busser. So I spend a lot of time in fine dining restaurants, and oftentimes bussers are an entry level position in a fine dining restaurant. They are green, they don't know the industry.
Most of them have certainly are so young that they've never dined at a restaurant of a certain level. So how do I teach them the culture not only of fine dining, but of working within the restaurant? I teach them behavior. When I teach them a figure eight, I give them five things. I basically say, you do these five things on repeat. Keep them in your head like a monologue. You can't help but succeed at this job. And so when we give our bussers in a fine dining restaurant a figure eight, a way to understand their minute to minute over the course of the shift, we say bread, water, clear, reset, help.
You make sure everybody in your station is bread. Everybody in your station has water. If they need more bread, you replace the bread. If they need more water, you go fill up the water.
Clear. Meaning is there anything you can get off the table? Dead glassware, sugar packets, straws? Can we clear a course?
Can we clear the table to get ready to reset the table?
Number four is reset, right? Can we remark them for the next course? Can we bring them another iced tea? Can we reset the table for the next seating? And then once all that's done, we go see if anyone else needs help. So we see if our neighbor over here needs help. Neighbor over here needs help. If they need help at the service bar, back in the kitchen, up at the host stand.
Bread, water, clear. Reset, help. I'm not just teaching them all the ins and outs of how a successful restaurant operates.
I'm teaching that one person how to succeed in their job. If everybody in their station has bread and everybody has water, and anything that needs to be cleared is automatically cleared, and then they're automatically marked or reset.
And then we're always asking others if we can help them, right? We're baking teamwork into their behavior. 20% of their time, in fact, is spent asking other people if they need help.
Well, then I've groomed a certain behavior. I've established certain behaviors in a young busser.
It's the same thing with every single employee we have.
Whether that's how they succeed in the minute to minute over the course of their shift, or whether that's how do we succeed upon arrival, how do we succeed in the way we sell, we sell to the tables, et cetera.
I'm showing them through behavior. Let me give you another example. So sometimes I say, you know, my servers. I'll hear people say, you know, my servers are just order takers. They're not salespeople. I need them to sell. I need them to understand that they need to sell. And that's flawed thinking because I'm sure you have said, right, and this happened just this past week. And I said to the restaurant owner who said this to me, I said, that's not true. I'm sure you said that to your staff numerous times. He said, yeah, I say it every single week. I said, great. So they understand what you're telling them.
You know, that, hey, guys, you can't just be order takers. I need you to sell. And they're nodding along and they're saying, yes, yes, I know, I want to do that.
And maybe they're trying to do that.
But just like with the bussers and the figure eights, we need to model behavior. We need to build scripts.
If this, then that. That's a basic algorithm. If this happens, then we always do the following, right? When somebody says, oh, I'll take the filet mignon, you don't say, very good, thank you. And miss, what would you like? You don't. There's an automatic question that follows when somebody orders a steak, and we all know that.
I'll take the filet mignon. Absolutely. And how would you like that cooked? That's if. Then if somebody orders the steak, then we always ask how they like it to be cooked.
And so when it comes to sales, we have to do the same thing, right?
If somebody orders a martini, we always say, absolutely. And what type of vodka would you prefer? Grey goose, Belvedere, Ketel one, Tito's. We List off premium options because it makes for a really great martini. It also helps increase the check average.
We show them, we tell them what we need to do, we model the behavior, we give them the script, and we can come up with hundreds of those over the course of the restaurant. You figure out what the most important ones are, what the most important pieces are, and you teach them first and you hammer them home.
But you go on and on and on. You build scripts for your team. If there's behavior you need them to do, if there's something you need them to do, you need to be specific with the behavior that is required for that. And that is really, really important.
So if people need to show up on time in uniform, if they need to complete their side work at a certain way, if they need to look and do their prep sheets and set up their mis in the back, there's a specific way they do that, and you have to model that.
So I was talking earlier about this book, Good to Great, which I feel like I quote all the time. Jim Collins wrote it, I don't know, almost 25 years ago, it was published.
And one of the things he talks about is that a great leader, he calls him a level 5 leader, always looks in the mirror before they look out the window. So they always take ownership of the problem and say, hey, how is this my fault? How is this my responsibility? Or how can this be my responsibility?
Rather than me looking beyond and looking to a fixed blame.
What happens is that that becomes a very powerful position if we just say everything in the restaurant is our fault. Everything in the restaurant is our responsibility. And for many of the people listening to this podcast, or many of you out there, that that is true. You are restaurant owners, you are high level operators.
The buck has to stop somewhere. For most of you, the buck stops with you.
So it becomes really important to then put all these things together. Now, you can delegate to the people below you to do a lot of this stuff, but you're going to have to model behavior for them so that they can model behavior for the people that they manage.
Again, this whole conversation is about the connection between culture, marketing and behavior.
Everything, everything is about culture.
Seth Godin says the most important seven words in marketing have everything to do with culture. Those seven words are people like us do things like this.
People like us, right? The kind of people that work at this restaurant always show up on time, right? That's the things that we do. We always show up on time. We always know our menu descriptions. We always punch in five minutes early, we always are engaged at the meeting. People like us, people like the people who work here, do things like this. You define what we mean by us and you define the things that they do the this, right? Do things like this. You define that.
Culture has everything to do with behavior and marketing.
Marketing is really about culture. So if culture is about behavior, then marketing is about behavior, right? If A equals B and B equals C, then A must equal C.
So then when we come to marketing our restaurants, selling our restaurants to prospective diners really comes down to persuading people to change their behavior. Another great author, I love, Daniel Pink, wrote a book many, many years ago called To Sell is Human.
And he talks about how the human condition, right, being a human being really means selling. And selling really comes down to persuasion. The way he puts it, he says selling is really about moving someone from one place to another.
And I love that, right? Moving them from a place where they don't show up on time, getting them to a place where they always show up on time.
Taking them from where they didn't know about us and they were not a customer to now they know about us and they are a regular customer. We are moving people from one thing to another. And he takes it down to maybe its simplest, right? Which is the teenager who wants the keys to the car for the week, for the night, and goes to mom and dad and says, hey, can I get the keys?
And the teenager begins to make their case, to convince the parents to relinquish the keys so they can go out for the night and hang out with their friends. They're trying to persuade them, right? They're trying to buy the car keys not with cash, but with salient points, with a convincing argument through the powers of persuasion to sell is human. We are always trying to convince people to go on a date with us, to convince people to marry us, to take our job, to take a job at our restaurant, to do what we need them to do, to become a customer, to become a regular customer, to go tell people about us.
So much of our success hinges, I believe, on understanding this fact. Our job is to move someone from one place to another. Our job is to persuade them to change their behavior.
If we can understand that and we can understand what their current behavior is and make it easy for them to do the new behavior, well, then that's where we succeed. There's another great book called Atomic Habits. I think everybody in the world has read it. And if you've never read it, it's worth, I don't know it's worth a weekend of your time. You'll read it really, really quick. Get the audiobook. The audiobook's actually great.
You can listen to it over the course of a couple of commutes. But again, it talks about how do we make these things automatic. In the book, he's talking about how we make habits automatic for us, how we build new routines to change our own behavior. But a lot of the ideas, the points that he makes can be applied to the way we help groom behavior in our managers, in our line level, employees, in our customers, even in our partners, in our distributors, in the farms, the purveyors we work with.
Everything is about changing behavior.
So when we market, right, so we now move to the outward facing piece, to it, right? If internal marketing is about getting our team, our staff to do the things we need them to do, let's look external and say we need our diners or potential diners to do the things we need to do.
You have to first understand what they're already doing.
You got to find the people that would be most apt to switch to the new behavior. And you have to make it seem frictionless. Easy. Again, this is an idea in Atomic Habits. Make it easy, make it obvious, right?
Seth Godin again, always says a marketer loses when they try to convince someone of two things, right? So if I open a coffee shop and I go out on the street and I'm trying to, you know, find passersby, people who are walking by, I say, hey, excuse me, do you drink coffee in the morning?
And they say, no, I don't really like coffee. And I say, oh, well, listen, coffee is great in the morning, really wakes you up, smells great, tastes great. And when I convince you of that, I'd love to convince you to come to my coffee shop. It sounds foolish when we say it out loud, but that's what so many marketers do. It's better to find the people who believe what you believe because it'll be easier to convince them to take the action that you need them to take.
Everything about what we do has to do with changing behavior and making it very easy for people to do the behavior to take the action that you need them to take.
I can't stress this enough. It's absolutely crucial. Culture and behavior are very closely connected.
And marketing, marketing our jobs, marketing our restaurant to potential diners has everything to do with behavior. You figure out what people are already doing and you make it easy and obvious for them to do what you want them to do. What you need them to do.
If you can do that, if you can figure that out, you will change your business overnight.
